Dramafest 2008

I have a habit of using the blank white page on the inside of the back cover of most books to write notes on important page numbers, passages, and quotes.

This of course explains why the inside of the back cover of my copy of “Waiting for Godot” is completely unmarked.



Word of the day: Threnody – “a poem, speech, or song of lamentation, esp. for the dead; dirge; funeral song.” – dictionary.com

Example: “Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, is one of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the blah blah blah.” – The London Times

I might have written a different review, something closer to, “Waiting for Godot is a threnody for your hopes of the modern theater....”

As you are probably aware if you know anything at all about the play, it has no plot, which means it is supposed to be driven by “character” and “dialogue.” Unfortunately, both of these suck too.

So that, if you are ever assigned this play, you will know the entirety of its contents, here is an abridged version:

First lines: “Nothing to be done.” This is “Estragon’s” refrain (not that he is ever called this in the dialogue; nor is any character addressed by their actual name through the dialogue, so that an audience not reading the play would know who they are without having to look at a pamphlet, nor can you even say with certainty that there are different characters in the play).

Vladimir responds: “It’s too much for one man.”

Estragon tries to get his shoes off. “Help me,” he says.

Vladimir, being a jackass, asks, “It hurts?”

Estragon becomes angry, fed up with his unhelpful and unfriendly friend. “Hurts!” he cries. He wants to know if it hurts!”

Vladimir, being both a jackass and insecure, says, “No one ever suffers but you. I don’t count. I’d like to hear what you’d say if you had what I have.”

Estragon asks: “It hurts?”

Vladimir responds: “Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!”
[59 additional pages of this]

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move. Final curtain.

Oh, okay, fine, there are two other “characters” of “interest.” There’s Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is Lucky’s master, and Lucky is treated as less than a slave—as barely an inanimate object. Lucky has the best role in the play, being the only one to do ever do anything—dancing once for the entertainment of the others.

But seriously, that is the entire play. The cover lies. It is not a “tragicomedy in two acts.” It is “an hour of your life you won’t get back, divided by a curtain.”

Of course, the real trick of Waiting for Godot is that, in academic circles, it is yet another example of the thumb on the nose and the two winks. “Oh yes, of course,” you expect to hear from one student in the classroom. “I found the language beautiful and moving. Really, its phrases come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain.” The first thing to realize when you hear such a comment is: This of course is the professor’s way of knowing who the biggest suck-up in the class is; who has no actual interest in anything at all, but really wants an A, even at the cost of their soul. The second thing to know when you hear such a comment is that the speaker is plagiarizing the review from The London Times.

What distinguishes Waiting for Godot from other plays is that Beckett succeeds in making a play that has no plot whatsoever; this differs from the norm of plays of having next to no plot.

Take The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky. Gorky’s “masterpiece” has next to no plot. It does have more plot than Beckett, but not much more. The difference being that Maxim Gorky’s capacity to write, even in translation, comes through much more than Beckett.

Gorky is much more enjoyable to read than Beckett; yet, a problem emerges after reading it. Perhaps not immediately, but a few weeks later you might see it lying around and think: what was that about? You can maybe remember the physical act of reading it, where you read it (on a plane perhaps), yet… yet… who was in it? What happened?

Gorky himself overshadows his play. Born Alexey Maximovich Peshkov in 1868, says the timeline on the first page, Gorky changed his name (which means “The Bitter”) for the sake of his art. When he was 16 in 1884, he dreamed of setting up a Tolstoyan commune and was invited to become a police spy. “Studies the violin, tries to fall in love, fails at both.” At nineteen he tries to commit suicide and succeeds in damaging his left lung.

In 1889 he succeeds in falling in love with a married woman, Olga, and three years later runs away with her. By 1899 he had met Checkhov, who in turn introduced him to Tolstoy, who offends him. In 1902 he is exiled by the police to Arzamas and finishes The Lower Depths.

In 1905 is involved with Gapon in organizing the workers’ march on the Winter Palace. Two days after the ‘Bloody Sunday’ slaughter, he is arrested. He gets bailed out by a power-mad industrialist who wanted to buy the revolution.

Pursued by the police, he flees to Finland. Travels Europe for decades, sponged on by other exiles. In 1928, Stalin invites Gorky to return to Russia.



In 1934, his son is liquidated, and in 1936, Gorky himself dies for reasons never explained. By the end of the year, everyone who attended his funeral is also dead.

In other words, reading the timeline of the author’s life resulted in more fascination, learning, and interest, than the entirety of anything Beckett ever wrote.

Considering the life of Gorky easily upstages his own play, it only follows that the legacy of the play might be more interesting than the play itself.

Some of the censor’s demanded cuts for the play: “It is absolutely essential to change the policeman Medvediev into an ordinary retired soldier, since the participation of a custodian of the law in the escapades of the inmates of a doss house is inadmissible on the stage… Cuts are required in the speeches of the pilgrim—in particular his remarks concerning God, the after-life, deception, and so on…”

Checkhov admired the play, but “to others he gave the opinion that it would have been better treated as a short story and that he didn’t like Gorky behaving ‘like a priest’.”

Gorky himself saw his audience as a little too accepting of the façade some of his characters put on. Luka’s reception in particular bothered him. Although Luka likes to put himself out as an embodiment of brotherly love, he nonetheless provides no real support for his ostensible friends in the doss house.

Now, when you get right down to it, how do you summarize “The Lower Depths.” The truth is you don’t. The play is a string of character rants combined with horrid acts of violence that are as jarring as they are inexplicable. It is a melodrama, complete with twist ending. And as such, like most melodramas, it is often difficult to remember specific characters as individual entities.

Those who stand out in memory are those who are comical or dramatically unusual. Take Tartar, for instance, a ‘hook-man.’ His one line, “What law say okay kill in daytime?” pretty much made this play for me.

Second word of the day: samovar -- a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea. (dictionary.com)

As in:
“Kvashnia: Look what the brutes did! Scalded the girl’s legs with boiling water!
Nastya: Tipped the samovar over her.”

It is difficult to remember, particularly for me, with limited experience with Russian names, to remember one of the dozens of Russian characters in this play. So, unsurprisingly, it is “The Actor” who steals the show, as can be attested in this early exchange:

“Actor: One of these times they do you in, they’ll do you in for good.
Satin: And you are an imbecile.
Actor: Why?
Satin: Because you can’t be done in more than once.
Actor: (after a pause) I don’t understand. Why can’t you?”

And as for summarizing what the play is really about, I think one line by Bubnov gives a better idea than any critic:

“Conscience? Me? What for? I’m not rich.”

Fun fact: my translation includes the word “debilitution” which I can not find in any dictionary whatsoever. I can only assume they typo’d “debilitation.” Not Gorky’s fault, he didn’t translate it. It also includes the word “scyllaritdis” (She’s worse than a scyllaritdis) which I think they just made up.

Third word of the day: Loam – “a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.”

As in: “The little woman here’s dying, her lips are already tasting the loam.”

Luka’s anecdote in Act Three is also phenomenal, but this review is already all over the place and it’s probably time to move on.

As a closing remark, let me just say that for a play filled with long Russian names, all of the most memorable characters had names with exactly two syllables.

So far I have explored two experiments in “low plot” plays with two extremes of success—Beckett’s not-a-play play that I won’t bother naming again, and Gorky’s phenomenal but difficult to remember “The Lower Depths.”

Both shared one thing in common—articulating what exactly they are about was difficult and open to interpretation (well, maybe I’m being generous to “Waiting for Godot” here).

The polar opposite of this extreme, then, is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht is a curious figure because I read one of his critical essays, not even knowing he was a playwright, and then went on discover that he is a much, much better playwright than he is critical thinker.

I started with “The Life of Galileo.” This is not Brecht’s best work, and part of that is because it comes with his “introduction” to the play. You can just tell that Brecht was wearing a beret and smoking cigars the entire time he was writing this play and its introduction. Also, he was probably hungry.

You can instantly tell what this play is about, if not from the title and your background knowledge of Brecht (being among the “postmarxist crowd” of the first half of the twentieth century), then certainly by this line in the introduction:

“For the theatre it is important to understand that this play must lose a great part of its effect if its performance is directed chiefly against the Catholic Church.”

At that point, you can be damned certain that this play is without a doubt about Brecht’s disgust with the Catholic Church.

When Brecht talks about this version versus the original, Brecht says, “we had to make only a few alterations… Already in the original version the Church was portrayed as a secular authority, its ideology as, fundamentally, interchangeable with many others.” Uh huh. You can tell how much Brecht respects and understands a Church when he says that its “ideology” is a “secular authority” and is “fundamentally interchangeable with many others.” This sort of off-the-cuff dismissal and overgeneralization of “the Church” is something that almost exclusively can be directed to the Catholic Church. Few churches, after all, insist on their own universality quite as much as the Catholic Church does. And of course, there is the Catholic Church’s colorful (if overplayed and Eurocentric) history… which Brecht plays in to.

Finally, there is Brecht’s “postmodernism” which is the stuff that stage workers and producers loathe (after all, their whole job is to mix it up and keep it fresh for the audience). Brecht, however, insists on his first opening note, “The stage décor must not be such that the public believes itself to be in a room in mediaeval Italy or in the Vatican. The public must remain always clearly aware that it is in a theatre.”

At this point, you reach the actual text of the play. However, if you read the introduction, and you have even an inkling of the history of Galileo, there is going to be little surprise or drama in this play. The only question remains is: how well does Brecht pull it off?

The play starts with Galileo half-naked ordering his assistant, “Put the milk on the table. But don’t shut any of my books.”

Like many of the scenes in the play, if I was the director, I would probably cut it.

In deft fairness to the introduction, Brecht does try to make the play seem less about the Catholic church and more about authority. Much of Galileo’s early hatred falls along the lines of this remark from “The Curator” (one of the first of many almost completely unremarkable and nearly unnecessary characters):

“In those places people must not know how a stone falls, only what Aristotle writes on the subject. Eyes are just for reading.”

I think the epitome of Brecht’s sense of what constitutes a “subtle metaphor” comes when Galileo’s assistant and one of the boys from the court begin wrestling over two toy models of the solar system; the Ptolemaic and the Copernican.

The Ptolemaic falls to the floor and breaks as they wrestle.

In case you didn’t get it by actually watching it happen, later “The Theologian” looks down to the broken Ptolemaic model on the floor and says: “Something seems to have got broken here.”

Wink wink nudge nudge. Get it? That conceptual “model” of the universe is “broken”. Brecht is so clever I could just die.

However, perhaps Brecht’s literal-mindedness is not a bad thing, for if anything it is a sad case study in how literal-minded people can be. Barberini’s argument in Scene Seven that, “’The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to his place where he arose.’ So saith Ecclesiastes, the Preacher” comes after many of the most obnoxious arguments that Brecht presents. Nonetheless, it is one that echoes perhaps the most today. Some of the most beautiful poetry of the Bible can always be corrupted into becoming a mind-numbing headache should you try to interpret it literally and pretend that it is an accurate model for the physical characteristics of the universe. (Yummy, that sentence even after I edited to be shorter is still a mouthful.)

Of course, the insight of the play would be surely dwarfed under the hands of a “generous” director that did not cut certain paragraphs—or in some cases, entire scenes. Scene Eight has only the description “A conversation” whereas most of the other scenes have plot. Scene Eight is a five page wall of text—not dialogue, no one has ever, or will ever, seriously be able to talk so monotonously.

You might wonder why I would talk positively about Brecht and then being by describing “The Life of Galileo.” That’s because if I described “The Life of Galileo” first, my description of Brecht would be tragic. I prefer an upward journey, for after “The Life of Galileo” I moved on to the joy that is “The Threepenny Opera.”

Featuring: Mack The Knife



That’s right. The Prologue to The Threepenny Opera has classic covers by Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and Louis Armstrong.

Sure, the play has one of the worst dues ex machina’s I’ve ever read. Sure, the play has some of the most interchangeable characters ever—but Brecht makes it work; their interchangeability is of course the point. But you just can’t top Mack The Knife.

And of course, it helps that “Act One, Scene One” should be required reading for everyone in Berkeley—especially the bums.

I really don’t need to say too much more into The Threepenny Opera, other than to say “Read It!” It’s fantastic, and even the atrocious dues ex machine at the end can be forgiven when it serves a most beautiful function: to fully demonstrate the absolute absurdity of any attempts Brecht makes in the afterward for the “function of the theater” or to expunge his Marxist ideals. When Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera, he was having fun, and it shows.

My Animosity For Palahniuk's Fight Club

Palahniuk is a 21st century writer and a conundrum. Don’t try to compare Palahniuk to Dan Brown to a fan of Palahniuk; they might attack you with any nearby pointy object.

Yet, seeing as how I am not currently in the vicinity of any Palahniuk fan, I can easily make the comparison. Palahniuk and Dan Brown are authors that I think epitomize the 21st century novel.

The 21st century novel is a novel that could not have existed in any preceding epoch; and so it is with Palahniuk’s novels.

Palahniuk could not have met major success without the movie that was based on his novel, “Fight Club.” I don’t say this to diminish the value of the author, I say this to explain his success: Palahniuk writes in such a way that he’s treating the mind like a cinema. Fight Club was always meant to be a movie, and a clever one at that.

This style evolved out of the 20th century popular novelists and was directly successful in relation to new media formations, where the media formations of television, film, and eventually the Internet. When Stephen King write The Shining, and then was influenced in his writing by the Kubrick film The Shining, I think is actually probably one of the defining moments of this transformation. The alienation an author experiences when he sees his own work translated by another artist provoked the transformation, with visible results:

The novelist in the 21st century treats the novel more like a screenplay. Just as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” involves a script that cannot handle improvisation, where the dialogue’s intended effect is so interwoven with the very staging of the play, so is it that Palahniuk’s novel assumes the imagination of the jump cut, the flash frame. He interweaves flashback so prominently, and the stream of consciousness is so interwoven with discontinuities in space and time, that you almost get the impression that he is writing a novel because he did not have the technical skill and charisma to direct a feature film.

It’s unsurprising that so many modern novelists lack a critical appraisal by the academic field. Palahniuk tries to understand his own success and fails. Palahniuk thinks that his novel succeeds because it introduces a new means of social interaction. Modes of human interaction is necessary to any novel; that Palahniuk thinks his novel is revolutionary or successful because of this only demonstrates a modicum of ignorance.

Palahniuk is successful because his text is flashy. “Losing all hope was freedom,” the narrator says on page 22. The reader doesn’t really understand this, and yet they do; it seems to imply a deeper meaning yet the text does not—and can not—explore the deeper richness of what it might mean. It does not because to do so would be to break the flashy narrative. It can not because the sentiment is nonsensical bullshit.

Calling Palahniuk’s text bullshit isn’t really a jab. Another element (hardly the essence, but an element) of Palahniuk’s success is his humor. “Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on,” says the airport security task force guy on page 42. He’s the airport security task force guy because no one, narrator, author, nor audience, cares about the identity of this guy. He’s a Palahniuk character, thus meaning that as soon as you get him alone all he wants to do is tell you his dirty secret about sexual activity. Very hush hush.

“Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you,” comes the narrator on page 44, in probably the second most memorable line from the book (short of, of course, the ten rules of fight club itself). It’s memorable and poetic sounding because it has a resonance of Marxism but with a spin; a new commodity fetishism now directed toward the hipster IKEA shoppers of the 21st century. Of course this, as is every other sentiment in the novel, is never complicated, never explored. To do so would be to jeopardize the poverty of the novel, which is essential to its appeal. It is never complicated because if it were taken analogically, to reflect the actions that Tyler et al. perform in the rest of the novel, then they would realize how superficial either this sentiment is, or how superficial their lives are even after the protagonist’s apartment blows up. If it is true, that the things you own eventually own you, then what of the kiss-scar that Tyler demands his people apply to their bodies? What of the rules of fight club? What of the soap?

The novel takes this sense as true, and that is why the novel as much as anything is about Tyler owning the people around him. The novel’s main selling point, the real appeal (the real appeal that Palahniuk has incredible difficulty reproducing in his other works), is the illusion, the dream, the boy’s fantasy of owning the people around you—of being the boss, of wearing the pants (after all—no shirts, no shoes in fight club. Only pants.) Of being the big man in a place for men.

The reason the narrator cannot accept that he himself is Tyler is not because of the superficiality of a neural disease, but instead the superficiality of his own cowardice. The novel’s progress it the same as the progress of the protagonist in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. It is a buildingsroman of a young man trying to overcome his own cowardice; the main point being the overcoming of a desire for a superficial display of courage (such as a red wound/badge—exactly what the narrator spends so much time focusing when he discusses that wounded lip). The reason the novel and movie are successful (aside from Edward Norton and Brad Pitt… ahem) is not because of the rules (which Palahniuk admits were the driving force for the narrative), but because of the destruction of those rules. The appeal in the rising action of the novel is Palahniuk’s selling of a world where such a set of rules could possibly exist; that is the appeal. The resolution is the destruction of those rules, the point where something deeper might be experienced. Where maturity and courage might emerge.

On the other hand, this is disconnected from what the clever reader takes out of the text. The clever reader takes out the metaphorical landscape of the novel, which is the analogical framework presented whereby the everyday landscape of the protagonist’s world mirror and refract the metaphysical landscape of their emotions. This is the line by line, page by page work that has allowed Palahniuk to develop such a devoted fanbase online, and the real essence of what makes him a successful artist, and not just a complete hack.

When the narrator says, “I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food” on page 45, Palahniuk teaches the reader to understand the soul of the individual as based on the contents of their refrigerator. That is a line that helps to take the edge off the $14 cover price for a 217 page book that begins on page 11 and includes an afterward in the page count.

“My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise,” says the narrator on page 50. Once again, the analogical landscape is further expanded by the adjusting of the simile in the second sentence.

But the real drive of the novel will always be its flashiness. “The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing sex organs into Snow White.” Palahniuk doesn’t dare explain Snow White. This is a skillful use of the namedrop, because one doesn’t even have to have an awareness of Snow White, or have seen the movie—so long as the audience has some idea that Snow White is a children’s movie where sexual organs are unacceptable, the humor comes through. Yet, there is an even greater appreciation for it if the audience has seen Snow White—as Palahniuk almost certainly expects his audience to have—because, once again, in the movie the cackle is so much more pronounced if you can actually imagine a little kid in a movie theater watching Snow White at the wishing well, only for there to be a momentary flash of an engorged penis. The audience of the movie begins to cry, not knowing why. The audience of the novel laughs, being in on the joke.

As an aside, let me apologize for leaving the lengthy notes on Snow White up in the post below; just try to ignore them until I can convert them into some sort of coherent thoughts.

Notes on Snow White

There are three paradigms on naming in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1) Descriptive Naming based on Mannerisms and Personality – The Dwarfs (the country) àsome of these even being so abstract as to be “Doc”
2) Descriptive Naming based on Titles – The Queen and The Hunter (the court and castle), The Slave in the Magic Mirror
3) Descriptive Naming based on physical appearance – Snow White

The used to call me Snow White: women’s strategic use of humor by Regina Barreca

Penguin Books
New York, New York, USA
Copyright 1991

0 14 01.6835 4 (pbk.)

-No overt discussion of Snow White throughout the text.
-Cover also features three images of the Mona Lisa: 1st, the classic, 2nd, grinning closed mouth, 3rd laughing with mouth open
-“The image of the Good Girl was a product developed in a conspiracy among parents, the media, and advertising, with support from the church, educational and economic institutions, and the government in general.” – page 4. “Good Girls didn’t make trouble for anybody. They did what they were told, whether that was keeping their rooms clean, watching TV while they baby-sat on Saturday nights, or buying all the current Cover Girl merchandise… Good girls were taught to believe that everything would continue to be just fine, and that someone else was out there taking care of things.” – page 4
-(from page 14): Quote of Elayne Boosner: “Reagan was against sex education in the schools because he thought there was a connection between promiscuity and sex education--that kids did it because they learned about it. No way. I had four years of algebra and I never do math. These guys say they’re against abortion because birth is a miracle. Popcorn is a miracle, too, if you don’t know how it’s done.”
-Page 40, Barreca discusses Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. Their discussion of: “the literary convention that forces the good heroine to keep the bad woman locked away” & Jane Eyre.
-178: “Fay Weldon quotes this old joke: “Question: How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: That’s not funny!”

page 23: “Joanna Russ writes in her article ‘What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write’ about the ways in which, wh en the sex of the protagonists is changed, the plots no longer work, thus proving that the so-called universal plot depends heavily on the sex of the main character. In the supposedly universal plots we’ve all read in ‘great’ literature (that is, literature by men), changing the sex of the main character changes the paradigm so completely it becomes comic. Russ’s examples include the following: “1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West. 2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womahood by killing a bear. 3. A phosphorescently doomed poetess sponges off her husband and drinks herself to death, thus alienating the community of Philistines and businesswomen who would have continued to give her lecture dates. 4. A young man who unwisely puts his success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.”

Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Page 181 – “The mind is much more powerful than the prick – The mind doesn’t go down in two minutes.” Quote of Robin Tyler

Not in bibliography

Page 179: Barreca quotes Kate Clinton: “Men have used humor against women for so long—we know implicitly who is the butt of their jokes—that we do not trust humor. Masculine humor is deflective. It allos a denial of responsibility, the oh-I-was-just-kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the hard times, without ever having to do any of the hard work of change. Masculine humor is essentially not about change.”

Not in bibliography


Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire

Copyright 2003
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
ISBN 0-06-039384-X

“I am a girl who did no wrong
I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope
I am a rock whose hands have appetites
I am a hunter who cannot kill
I am a mercenary with the French disease
I am a girl who lived among stones
I am a woman who poisoned my enemies
I am a rock and my brothers are rocks
I am a cleric who trafficked in curses
I am a gooseboy or am I a goose
I am a girl who did little wrong
I am a a gooseboy or am I a boy
I am a farmer who stole something sacred
I am a monster who let the child go
I am a dog with an unlikely past
I am a hunter who followed the coffin
I am a girl who did something wrong
I am the other side of snow

I am a mirror a mirror am I

Mirror mirror on the wall
Who is the fairest one of all”

[last two lines in larger font]
[appears before page 1]

Moulding The Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France

Copyright 2007
Published by Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT USA
978-0-7546-6034-7

“Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White
Aresenic Consumption and Ghastly Complexions in The Law and the Lady (1875)”

-No overt reference to Snow White in that article?
-Final chapter
-“Like Bluebeard’s wives, Collins’s female characters experience male cruelty and strive to transform themselves to please men—even when the remedies are lethal. While the novel’s main secret lies in a dead woman’s toilet case among her comsetics, the deciphering of the enigma involves decoding the signs of femininity as so many incriminating clues paving the way for truth.” – page 159
-“


Feminist Fairy Tales by Barbara G. Walker
Copyright 1996
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY
ISBN 0-06-251320-6

-“Snow Night” – page 19

Page 19: “The wicked stepmother is ubiquitous in European fairy tales, whereas any father figure is usually given a good character. Snow White’s stepmother seems to have been vilified because (a) she resented being less beautiful than Snow White, and (b) she practiced witchcraft.
“One might suspect that female beauty was really a larger issue for men than for women, because male sexual response depends to a considerable degree on visual cues. Placing each “fair lady” (or anything else) somewhere on an arbitrary hierarchical scale seems to be a male idea. Women may recognize a thousand different types of beauty without having to make them compete.
“As for witchcraft, the last bastion of female spiritual power fell when the church declare its all-out war on witches, the name they gave to rural midwives, healers, herbalists, counselors, and village wisewomen, inheritors of the unraveling cloak of the pre-Christian priestess. A queen who was also a witch would have been a formidable figure, adding political influence to spiritual mana. Snow White’s stepmother therefore seems to me a porjection of male jealousies. As re-envisioned in this story, she may seem more true to life.”


Page 21: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess with skin white as snow and hair black as night, so she was called Snow Night.” (21)

“Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father remarried. Snow Night’s setpmother was a noted sorceress, and also famous for her beauty, of a more mature type than that of the young princess”

-Lord Hunter wants to improve his rank by marrying a royal princess.
-Snow Night escapes the Hunter by kicking him in the crotch

Page 22
“One evening he [the Lord Hunter] found the queen alone in here anteroom, consulting her magic mirror, wh ich always told the truth. He sat quietly while she asked the mirror several questions. Then, as she was turning away, he said, ‘I wonder if Your Majesty has ever asked the mirror who is the fairest lady in the land?’
“The queen smiled. ‘I know the answer it would give, huntsman. Snow Night is the fairest.’
“’Doesn’t that anger you?’
“’No, why should it?’
“’Surely Your Majesty’s great beauty has always been fairest in the land. Wouldn’t that make the princess a usurper and an upstart?’
….

Page 23
“’But don’t stepmothers always hate their stepdaughters?’
“That must be one of the ridiculous traditions about women invented by men.

Page 23
The Huntsman: “According to an old story, the royal stepmother sends another to act for her, such as her faithful huntsman. He is the one charged with killing the stepdaughter and bringing back her heart in a jeweled casket.”

Page 23
“The dwarves’ eyes sparkled like the gems, which dwarves love above everything else.”

Page 25
“As for Lord Hunter, his reason quite gone, he lived confined for the rest of his life as the dwarves’ prisoner. In later years eh sometimes passed the weary hours by writing stories. It is said that he wrote an entirely different version of the story you have just heard.”

--No magic occurs in the story, since the mirror is never actually asked a question
--The dwarves have a Queen of their own, with whom the Queen has diplomatic relations with
--Snow White does not live with nor care for the dwarves (never “learns what it means to become a woman”)
--Prince Charming does not kiss Snow White as she is never left unconscious
--



Moulding the female body in Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Copyright 2007
Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington VT
ISBN 978-0-7546-6034-7

“Consumer Culture in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels”

“’Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap… stay-laces of all colours’. – ‘Little Snow White’, the Brothers Grimm”

Page 5: “As Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s irresitible offer illustrates, what we generally learn as children through fairy tales is that all princesses are beautiful and may even try to improve their beauty. In fact, their beauty is their wealth—quite literally, since being beautiful enables them to win a prince and a fortune. Hence, what fairy tales foreground is the idea that femininity is closely linked to aestheticization, and that beauty is a feminine virtue which needs to be cultivated. Whether it be Psyche enticed by Proserpine’s beauty cream or Snow White lured by the wicked Queen’s gaudy stay-laces, these female characters all exemplify how much their own fate depends on their physical appearance, on their power to construct a self which matches male expectations.”

Page 95-96: “The deceptive nature of glass if ofeten visible when mirrors are used to purvey reflections on feminine representation. In Gubar and Gilbert’s feminist interpretation of Snow White, the magic looking-glass is a cultural weapon that enforces patriarchal sentences on women and locks them up in ‘crystal prisons.’ The Queen’s obsession with her own reflection suggests less the woman’s self-absorption and narcissism than it discloses the King’s appraising gaze. As Gubar and Gilbert posit, ‘His, surely, is the voice of the looking-glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—self evaluation.’ Yet, by producing two-dimensional images, the looking-glass also provides a significant means to investigate the relationship between femininity and/as (chimerical) representation.”

Talairach-Vielmas then compares to George MacDonald’s ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ about a woman “unable to choose her setting and unable to phrase her depair, the melancholy female reflection epitomizes objectification and subservience to the male order”

“Female Aestheticism and Criminalit in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale”

Wilkie Collins’s Armadale… Page 147: “… Armadale seems to expose the Victorian underworld of feminine construction, using the fairy tale Snow White and the figure of the narcissitic Queen to offer its readers an insight into the looking-glass of femininity.”

“As in the fairy tale, the mirror becomes the site which encapsulates treacherous female nature, inspiring Gwilt with new plots and reflecting woman as an actress staging the scenes of her life” (154).

155: “Ironically, the Queen’s anxiety over her own loss of physical attractiveness is displaced onto Snow White, her mirror image, with the murder plot reflecting Snow White’s ‘training’ in femininity before marriage. The very plots the Queen invents—especially the poisoned comb, the suffocating set of tight laces, and the poisoned apple cooked ina secret kitchen—all turn out to be feminine weapons in the aresenal of female cosmetics. Thus, the wicked actress, like a Madame Rachel who adds arsenic to her lotions, in fact merely reenacts the controlled male scripts she wanted to wipe off the surface of the glass: Snow White is crystallized by the glass coffin, murdered by her own aestheticization.”

155: “In Armadale, however, Gwilt does not seek to murder Snow White (that is, another version of herself). Unlike the Queen, she projects the sadistic voice of the mirror onto the two male protagonists and plots to kill the two Armadales. … Here, Gwilt intends to undermine the patriarchal ideology expressed by the voice in the mirror”


Politically correct bedtime stories by James Finn Garner.
Copyright 1994
Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, NY
ISBN: 0-02-542730

Page 43: Once there was a young princess who was not at all unpleasant to look at and had a temperament that many found to be more pleasant than most other people’s. Her nickname was Snow White, indicative of the discriminatory notions of associating pleasant or attractive qualities of light, and unpleasant or unattractive qualities with darkness.

44: The queen’s prized possession was a magic mirror that would answer truthfully any question asked it. Now, years of social conditioning in a male hierarchical dictatorship had left the queen very insecure about her own self-worth. Physical beauty was the one standard she cared about now, and she defined herself solely in regard to her personal apperance. So every morning the queen would ask her mirror:

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the fairest one of all?’

…

45 (response):
‘Alas, if worth be based on beauty,
Snow White has surpassed you, cutie.’

45: “But his [the woodsperson] connections to the earth and seasons had made him a kind soul, and he couldn’t bear to harm the girl. He told Snow White of the oppressive and unsisterly order of the queen and told her to run as deeply as she could into the forest”

---In this version, the dwarfs have a strong bond of brotherhood; 46: “She’ll disrupt our strong bond of brotherhood and create competition among us for her affections. I say we throw her int the river in a sack full of rocks.”

48: “Just like a woman,” grumbled one of the men under his breath, “get a man to do her dirty work.”

“’We are known as the Seven Towering Giants,” said the leader… “We are towering in spirit and so are giants among the men of the forest… To make ends meet, we also conduct retreats for men who need to get in touch with their primitive masculine identities”

“So what does that involve,” asked Snow White, “aside from drinking milk straight from the carton?” 48

50: “Meanwhile, back at the castle, the queen rejoiced at the thought that her rival in beauty had been eliminated. She puttered around her boudoir reading Glamour and Elle, and indulger herself with three whole pieces of chocolate without purging.”

Buying the apple: 51: “In protest against agribusiness conglomerates, she had a personal rule against buying food from middlepersons. But her heart went out to the economically marginalized woman, so she said yes.”

52: “ When Snow White handed over the money for the apple, you would have expected the queen to be gleeful that her plan for revenge was working. Instead, as she looked at Snow White’s fine complexion and slim, taut body, she felt alternating waves of envy and self-revulsion.”

à “You’re so young and beautiful,” sobbed the disguised queen, “and I’m horrible to look at and getting worse.”

“You shouldn’t say that. After all, beauty comes from inside a person.”

“I’ve been telling myself that for years,” said the queen, “and I still don’t believe it. How do you stay in such perfect shape?”

“Well, I meditate, work out in step aerobics three hours a day, and eat only half-portions of anything placed in front of me. Would you like me to show you?”

à53, “Oh yes, yes, please,” said the queen. So they started out with 30 minutes of simple hatha yoga meditation, then worked out on the step for another hour. As they relaxed afterward, Snow White cut her apple in half and gave a piece to the queen. Without thinking, the queen bit into it, and both of them fell into a deep sleep.”

54: “’You know,’ said the prince, ‘this might sound a little sick, but I trust you guys. I find that younger one attractive. Extremely attractive. Would you fellows mind… um.. waiting outside while I…?’”

leader of the dwarfs:…”Does Snow White make you feel like a man again?”

in regard to ‘having’ the Queen, the Prince says: “I don’t want to sound classist, but she’s not high enough caliber for me.”

End (56):

The Queen says: “From now on, I am going to dedicate my life to healing the rift between womyn to accept their natural body images and become whole again.”


Mirror Mirror, Copyrigh 2003 by Gregory Maguire; HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

ISBN 0-06-039384-X

Motefiore, the estate where the primary action takes place, is on top of a steep hill, looking down at the rest of the world.

5: “Like any child, she [Bianca/Snow White] looked out and across rather than in. She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged int erms of hills nad light.”

52: “The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eys, and she who centers herlsef in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction. Or heigh. Like a dwarf, for instance. Or a young child.”

53: “This is a lovely looking glass,” I [Lucrezia/Wicked Stepmother] said to Don Vicente. “It’s only as lovely as what it reflects,” he answered, though his courtliness was studied and heavy.

54: He [Don Vicente/absent father] didn’t look at me. He looked in the mirror instead. “Who is the fairest of all?” he whispered. Did he mean to compare the pair of us, the Lucrezia who stood in the mirror and the Lucrezia who stood before it? A mirrored image has no cologne to seduce; is purer for that. While I had dabbed mself with attar of Persian roses.

[cont] “My sister,” said Cesare at the door, in admiration. “Will you never learn to govern your clothing?”

110: [Lucrezia says]: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who among us is fairest of all?”

[cont] Bianca straightened up and listened, as if the mirror might answer. If it did, it was in a pitch too cerebral or too hushed for Bianca to hear. In any event, Cesare either mocked his sister or echoed the mirror’s answer when he said, “Well, it’s not you, sister. It’s that little mouse child, the daughter of our agent de Nevada. Doesn’t that just make your Borgia blood boil. What’ll you doa bout that?”

“…I’ll be damned if I see you casting glances at a child young enough to be your daughter.”

[..cont] “You’re jealous because she’s lovelier than you,” he said. “You always were a jealous type. I still adore you, Crezia. Come here. Come to Cesare.”

124: “Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.” @ Ranuccio

The dwarfs: 140: “The human mind—we have come to observe—tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will ikely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s migte. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.”

“Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a miror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. TH emenace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves. And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door.”

142: Bianca meant white.

143: The dwarf names: Blindeye, Gimpy, Tasteless, Bitter, Deaf-to-the-World, Heartless, MuteMuteMute.

Events (182-183): Lucrezia eats a slice of the apple; the “stone dog” eats a slice and then gives the rest to the dwarfs

185: “She [Lucrezia] had dismissed him [Vicente], and now faced the mirror. “I must see to my hair,” she spoke, almost to herself, in the way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him Maria Ines, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a waomn.”

188: In title chapter, “Mirror mirror,” Lucrezia asks the question again. This time it shows Bianca.

In the next chapter, “The return of the prodigal” (191), Bianca sees back at Lucrezia as Lucrezia sees her… she sees Lucrezia through a “circle of mist”

194: “ ‘I’ll make you a meal,’ she said. ‘Why not? I need things, though, things to cook with.’ She realized that though she’d eaten,---occasionally—the sight of that apple in Lucrezia Borgia’s lap had made her hungry as hell. Hungry not to eat, but to feed someone else.

Suddenly she became happy.”

197: She feeds the dwarfs the apple.

200: The dwarfs made the mirror.

219+: Lucrezia does not poison the comb and tempt Snow White with it; she assaults Snow White with the comb.

228: “She didn’t know if it was herself she was seeing. The reflection was imprecise, varnished with mist; but there was a woman’s face therein, and as its lips moved, so Bianca moved hers, as if under a spell. ‘Mirror, mirror,” she said, ‘What is to become of us?’”

228: dwarfs have vague similarities to the dwarfs from “Politically correct bedtime stories.”

236: “The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about. They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.”

247: “They were seven or eight or nine small men, bleeding obstinately toward some kind of humanity, stuck in a process of change that they could no longer vary. They might have used their mirror as an escape hatch, to ask it the single correct question, the only question a mirror ever cares about: not who did I used to be, nor who am I now, but who am I to become?—for the secret act of light that fires a mirror is this: A mirror’s image is always forward of the truth by an instant or so. While a question is formulating—Who is the fairest of us all, say, or How many crow’s feet can I pretend not to have today? or Is this the face of a murderer?—the mirror always knows the answer before the question is asked.

253: “I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.”


275: Ranuccio, the hunter, occompanies Bianca/Snow White back to Montefiore (her home), implying that she is her prince? (he also kisses her to wake her)

Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

“The passions simmer so faintly, you can hardly tell when its pilot light is on.” – NY Times Review of a production of Uncle Vanya in 1999.

Trivia: In an episode of Family Guy, Lois and Peter are attending a production of Uncle Vanya when Peter yells "For crying out loud, somebody throw a pie!"

There are several ways you may know of Anton Chekhov. You may have heard of “Chekhov’s Gun,” the idea that if a gun is introduced in a piece of literature, it must go off—an example Chekhov used in his writings as a more general rule to only introduce elemetns into a story that will be used later on.

As Wikipedia expands, “For example, a character may find a mysterious object that eventually becomes crucial to the plot, but at the time of finding the object, does not seem to be important.”

As Chekhov wrote: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." From S. Shchukin, Memoirs (1911)

Supposedly, one example of this is supposed to be Chekhov’s own “Uncle Vanya.” After all, a gun goes off. Admittedly, the gun is so irrevelant earlier on, that I actually can’t even find its existence in my notes. It’s a “pistol” one time and a “revolver” another, but neither of those words nor “gun” appear in any text search I do in project gutenberg’s english translation of the play before the gun actually appears in the play. But maybe I’m just blind.

You might get the impression that since Chekhov would have a rule like this, he might adhere to it. He does not. Most jarringly, there is a map of Africa in one scene that is totally out of place (even the text of the play says so), and furthermore is completely irrelevant to the play.

And there’s the further issue that Chekhov says that the gun must go off, not that someone must be shot by it. Hence the problem of Uncle Vanya, where at the end of the play nothing is reconciled because the villain of the plot triumphs, and the hero returns to his own life of drugery.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Uncle Vanya was not a wholly unsatisfying read. My translation (by Ann Dunnigan) is full of delicious words like “unprepossessing”, “samovar”, “indolent”, “sepulcher”, and others that you just don’t see nearly enough. And it does have some classic lines. For example:

“Elena [sic]: It’s a fine day today… not too hot.

[A pause]

Voinitsky: A fine day to hang oneself…”

I mean, come on, that’s just great.

Further, it would be far too much to say that “Uncle Vanya” has no plot. There are romances all over the place, missed opportunities, longing, etc. And finally the famous climax, where Uncle Vanya manages to avoid shooting his daughter in the face.

However, it’s still difficult to classify, since Chekhov was deliberately flying in the face of traditional Aristotilean narrative structures. It’s a tragicomedy, as most will put it, and I think this can best be explained by the comedic elements largely being a result of Schadenfreude on the part of the audience for the characters in the play, and perhaps possibly even for whatever poor sobs would bother to stage it.

Of course, Virginia Woolf, in traditional style, wants to blame the lack of entertainment that Chekhov presents as the fault of the reader. As she puts it:

“These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed—as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.”

What Virginia Woolf might have been more aware of, had she been alive and writing after the invention of television and hollywood and MTV and Blizzard Entertainment, is that when a play makes a reader question his or her “fitness as reader,” he may be perfectly fine with that, because it’s almost certainly easier to tune out reading like Chekhov and tune in to The Dark Knight or Metal Gear Solid 4.

That’s not a fair critique and not a fair comparison, but what the unfortunate truth is, is that Uncle Vanya is to The Dark Knight what The Three Sisters is to The Golden Compass. Look at the box office numbers and you’ll get my analogy here.

Some notes for remembering Uncle Vanya (difficult, considering how many characters are forgettable):

[nothing but spoilers for this section:]

The cast of Uncle Vanya with my notes.

Serebryakov, Aleksandr Vladimirovich - a retired professor. – “The bad guy.” In “The Three Sisters” a vaguely similar character is named “Andrei” and is also the first listed; and in “The Cherry Orchard” a not completely dissimilar character is named Andreyevna. Coincidence? I think not. Each is “the landowner”—and as seems to be a motif in Chekhov plays, Aleksandr is thinking about selling his estate. Little does he know that the estate is the last thing keeping Uncle Vanya from going over the deep end, and that his choice to sell it could cost him his life. (It doesn’t. No one dies. This is a family friendly production, bring the kids!)

Elena Andreyevna (or sometimes Yelena) - his young and beautiful second wife, 27 years old. – Elena is sort of like a MacGuffin. Everyone wants her, but she has the libido of a rock. Uncle Vanya wants her, but she really doesn’t want Uncle Vanya. Astroff also wants her, and her inability to reject him fast enough brings Uncle Vanya into a jealous madness that might cost Aleksandr his life. (But won’t. See above.)

Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonia) - his plain daughter by his first marriage. Mostly exists for Astroff to rant at. Largely forgettable.

Voinitskaya, Maria Vasilievna - the widow of a privy councillor, mother of the first wife of the professor. Totally irrelevant and utterly forgettable.

Voinitsky, Ivan Petrovitch ("Uncle Vanya") - Sonia's uncle, and Maria Vasilievna's son. His snide cynicism makes him the only character enjoyable to read and at all memorable.
Astroff, Michail Lvovich - a doctor. – Mr. Rantsalot. Will not shut up about the forest and the trees. Another motif in Chekhov is a doctor who has recently lost a patient and blames himself for it. Astroff is the token doctor in this play. (After all, Chekhov was a doctor, so he had to have some sort of doctor in the play.) Despite his ridiculous number of lines, Astroff is more a secondary antagonist and less of a sympathetic support character.

Telegin, Ilya Ilyitch - an impoverished landowner, also known as Waffles. Marina - an old nurse. Workman. All essentially forgettable.

I suggest just sparknoting or wikipediaing “The Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” because both of them I found too dreadful to actually review.

Words:

Unprepossessing: Not overtly impressive; unremarkable; nondescript.

Samovar: a metal urn, used esp. by Russians for heating water for making tea.

Indolent: having or showing a disposition to avoid exertion; slothful.

Sepulcher: a tomb, grave, or burial place.

The Red Badge of Courage

Introduction: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) tells about an American Civil War recruit named Henry Fleming who leaves his mother to join the Union army. Henry, called “the youth” through most of the novel, struggles throughout the novel against his own cowardice while trying to preserve his honor and survive the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Context: Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. Writing the novel around 1895, Crane had access to veterans of the war and other primary source documents, even though Crane himself lived first in New Jersey and later New York, and worked as a reporter of slum life in New York City.

About: The second sentence in the wikipedia entry for the novel is, “The story is about the meaning of courage.” To me, this is an excellent example of how to avoid getting caught up on the faults of wikipedia. There is no hyperlink at that sentence, or even paragraph, linking it to a critical article that would say “The story is about the meaning of courage.”

The Red Badge of Courage might very well be about “the meaning of courage,” but if it is, it is in an inclusive way, not exclusively. The best short description I could come up with of Crane’s novel I provided in the introduction.

In Place of an Introduction: I’ve often felt that one of the reasons I have always had a hard time liking The Great Gatsby was because I made the mistake of reading the introduction to the book. Despite what many of the people who write introductions to books seem to think, some people a) might actually like to be introduced to the book, and b) like reading books cover to cover, not slogging through a heap of steaming, shit-covered crticism that belongs in Hell.

My version comes with an introduction by Donald Gibson, professor at Rutgers at time of publication (my copy - 1996). Gibson makes no attempt to hide the fact that he’s aiming the book at middle and high school “required reading” students: “Every story has to be told by someone and from someone’s point of view,” Gibson tells us, leaving us astounded by his overwhelming capacities of observation, “Crane chooses to tell his story from what is called the third person limited point of view.” Wow, Mr. Gibson, tell me more! I’ve never heard of this breath-taking new concept, “the third person limited point of view.”

But even by those standards, Gibson’s introduction is offensively bad at several points. Introductions like Gibson’s are so bad that they actually leave a profound and personal impact on me: should I actually go to grad school if it means dealing with professors at universities who think this is good enough to be an introduction? Or on the other hand, should I instead endeavor even more to go to grad school, to make it my personal quest to make sure that introductions this bad are never published again?

I’m being hyperbolic, but I would like to discuss some of the ways that Gibson’s introduction fails, because I think it fails in ways that can be informative to some people working on papers and whatnot. But I want to emphasize that Gibson’s cumbersome introduction holds far more problems than I can possibly list here right now; indeed, my objections to it range from the first sentence of his introduction to the last.

For instance, Gibson hijacks his own introduction with a paragraph starting, “Given Crane’s inclination to question convention, it is no wonder that he was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Gibson spends no time after this linking Darwin and Crane directly, or explaining how Darwin’s specific ideas influenced specific parts of the work. Instead, he uses this page-long paragraph to link lead into an even more obtuse discussion of animals in the book. I can see how an argument might be made that Darwin’s work could be significant to understanding Crane—after all, Crane was raised by Methodist minister. But that sort of nuanced discussion has no place in an introduction, and Gibson’s discussion is anything but nuanced.

Further, Gibson has a habit of making tedious points, especially considering he’s supposed to be writing an introduction. For instance, Gibson tries to argue, “Crane’s language challenged the traditional distinction between the language of poetry and the language of literary prose.” Even if this point was worth making, I’m not even entirely sure that it’s true. Yes, Crane uses colloquial English for his dialogue, and that is remarkable, but language is always steeped in metaphor and other figurative language. Gibson makes as if there was some epic wall between poetry and prose with armed guards making sure nothing crossed between. To me, Gibson’s stance borders on lunacy.

To prove his point, Gibson points to a block quote at the end of Chapter 17 of Crane’s novel.

The block quote: “The forest still bore its burden of clamor. From off under the trees came the rolling clatter of the musketry. Each distant thicket seemed a strange porcupine with quills of flame. A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enamled sky.

Gibson’s gloss: “The personification of the forest, the reference to it as though it were a person, the highly colorful and original reference to gunfire as ‘rolling clatter,’ the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’ and describing the blue sky as ‘enameled,’ all reflect characteristics more commonly belonging to poetry than to prose.”

First of all, shame on Gibson for block quoting the book he’s introducing! More than that, Gibson’s entire interpretation is if not outright false at least clunky and poor scholarship.

“The personification of the forest,” Gibson says. Is the forest personified? “Burden” is not a word that presumes humanity. Consider this, the first entry at dictionary.com for “burden”: “that which is carried; load: a horse's burden of rider and pack.” In nautical usage, burden can refer to the carrying capacity of a ship. Although Gibson might say that the nautical usage is also personification, that still would not explain Gibson’s second clause where he says, “the reference to it as though it were a person.” I see no explicit reference to the forest as a person. I might agree that what seperates a burden from weight is the sense that it is “difficult to carry,” I nevertheless am left with the impression that Gibson doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Now, even if I agreed that referring to gunfire as “rolling clatter” was “highly colorful” and “original” [note: I don’t], it nevertheless makes me wonder why Gibson called it a “reference to.” Possibly because he didn’t know what to make of it. I am tempted to label it synesthesia (the figurative trope, not the neural condition). (Alternatively, you might argue it’s a dead or submerged metaphor—calling it a submerged metaphor might actually be a better description than synesthesia.) However, I would hardly describe it as revolutionary; “rolling thunder” as a phrase had been in use for, at bare minimum, decades before Crane’s work was published. (A speech by Frances Gage in 1851 includes the phrase, “her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder”. I suspect earlier examples can be found.)

Next Gibson mentions “the metaphors likening burning bushes to ‘porcupine[s] with quills of flame’”. There’s only one, no need for the plural. Further, is something even a metaphor if something (the burning bushes) “seems” to be something else (porcupines with quills of flame) as opposed to actually being them? What does it mean, from a figurative perspective, for something to seem to be something else? This has always bothered me. Of course the easy answer is to just accept it as a metaphor (since most figurative language is rooted in the concept of the metaphor). What is interesting about Crane’s method, what he does with the “seeming” here, is that it roots the metaphor under the guise of being a realistic, literal description rooted in Crane’s 3rd person POV. It is a metaphor, but it’s a metaphor to the character as well as the audience; thus, Crane underscores how central the metaphor is not only to the audience but also to the characters within the world he describes, giving them a richer psychological depth.

Gibson treats his audience as middle schoolers; no, wait, I might be detracting from the average middle schooler’s literary understanding. It might very well be that he’s aiming his introduction to 4th graders. I appreciate that presenting an introduction for a book that may very well be sold to young readers, but that still is far from justifying Gibson’s introduction.

Episodes and Techniques:

“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” I’m still wondering what formula Henry would use to try to pull off this mathematic equation.

Crane uses descriptive naming; the same essential method Disney uses in many of its motion features (taken to dramatic extremes in Snow White where the description of the character is regarded as their actual name). In Crane’s case (as it would be for many future American writers), he gives them single qualifiers. “the youth”, “his tall comrade”, etc.

"He had pictured red letters of curious revenge."

Stepping Back: Using Crane as a Learning Resource: Cane’s novel is problematic. The discussion of courage is central to the book, but even it is clouded by the fact that it discusses courage in the face of military action; yet, that military action is detatched from the domain of causality. The war in Crane’s novel is a spectacle.

What Crane explores is dwarfed by what Crane omits. The novel is about the American Civil War yet slavery is not discussed, nor mentioned at all. If Gibson makes one poignant comment, it’s this: “Neither the author nor any character in the book expresses attitudes about politics or about any social issues.” It might be argued that although the novel appears to be historical fiction, the civil war is a venue. In fact, that may very well be my main critique of the novel.

It comes across as sightseeing fiction. In part, this is an element of realism. Henry joins because he wants to win in combat. He wants prestige and glory. When combat is over, it is a nightmare that he has escaped from, or a sickness that he has recovered from. And as a result, he leaves wanting images of tranquil skies. He never really invested himself in understanding the larger context of the events he engaged himself in or the world around him.

Crane is argued to succeed because of the power of the images he evokes. Like the war he describes, Crane’s novel itself is a spectacle. Crane is not a theoretician; Crane is no Tolstoy. It’s as though he regards history as boring. This makes the novel difficult to teach, and quite frankly, difficult to become fully immersed in.
The positive side of Crane’s ambiguity about events and terrain is that it means he does not use proper nouns and official dates as crutches to avoid or ignore the need for prose description. Crane has to describe the conditions of roads that are travelled on. For one chapter, the major threat is not the enemy, but the risk of a soldier falling in the road and being crushed by the wagons behind him. This is realism, and it’s gripping—but it’s also a superficial problem, with little to be said about it.

I am a firm believer that approaching a text with the assumption or even impression that it’s a masterpiece is always a mistake. In a classroom setting, I get the impression that teachers feel compelled to defend novels as masterpieces; after all, they’ve devoted themselves to studying the text and therefore don’t want to appear to have wasted their time. Professors of science teach the periodic table because it is a useful tool; yet, combined with this truth, is the fact that they are aware that the periodic table may on any given day be revised due to a new element being discovered. The periodic table is always open to refinement and improvement.

One of the reasons the humanities are starving (and the humanities are starving) is the tendency among teachers and professors to defend as text as though it is flawless. Yet, the opposite problem can also be the case, often even more so. If a professor admits that they do not regard a work as flawless, or that they do not like a book, they become uninterested in it. They don’t engage with it on anywhere near the same level that they would otherwise.

I think that the difficulty of teaching Stephen Crane is easily and perfectly reversed if the teacher takes the time to differentiate the qualities that make good fiction good from the qualities that make other forms of writing effective.

I’m going to take it as an a priori fact that people learn by imitation. As such, people model their writing on their reading. The problem with assigning Crane as an author is that the reader might actually like him. If the reader has to turn around and write an essay, they might not realize that the best thing they can do is forget how Crane writes. This is particularly problematic because idiotic English professors like Gibson are so busy lauding how beautiful Crane’s language is.

Teaching Crane is a problematic task because Crane’s novel is not streamlined; it is meandering and episodic. Cowardice and fear are central to the novel, perhaps, and those subjects are easier to write about than anything else. But, beyond that, certain considerations have to be kept in mind: When Crane published his novel, there were many living veterans of the American Civil War. Crane’s audience, if they were not veterans themselves, may very well know a veteran. The American social consciousness was aware of the American Civil war. Those who did not participate might feel enchanted by Crane’s evocative description.

Today’s evocative description is often overpowered by the sight and sound of theater. Films about the American Civil war now dominate the public imagination of the civil war. I think it might be an interesting experiment to have a class read The Red Badge of Courage directly following Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Morrison’s text, the white man is nothing but evil. In Crane’s text, the black race is omitted. A civil war text published today without mention or awareness of slavery would be blasphemy.

Certainly there is no rule that anything with the Civil War must always and only discuss slavery. But, imagine as a teacher you give the following assignment to your class: Pretend you’re Stephen Crane trying to submit the novel to a publisher today. Why is now the time to publish this text? It would be a cruel test, because Crane’s text, despite being a “masterpiece,” would be self-published today just as Crane’s first novel was self-published in 1893.

The passive voice of the book, the awkward metaphors and synesthesia, and the unclear "purpose" of the book can make it a frustrating read. Link to the facebook group for hating the book: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2212989754

Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House"

Hook: Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is one of his most famous plays and arguably one of the most famous plays of the late 19th century. It follows the story of Nora, who is keeping a secret from her husband—she took out a loan that she has yet to pay back to pay for their last vacation, and in doing so committed a forgery from her father. During the 1870s in Norway, it was illegal for a woman to take out a loan without her husband or father’s permission. Things heat up when her husband, still in the dark about her secret, fires the banker who she took out the loan from (Nils Krogstad). Nils threatens to reveal Nora’s secret unless she gets him his job back… what can a woman do in a society dominated by men who see women not as people, but as dolls to be played with?

Context: My version is translated by Michael Meyer from the Norwegian and comes with an introduction from him. Meyer, in traditional form, writes an introduction that made me want to slam my forehead against a nearby table. Of course, as is his required punishment to the reader for daring to read the introduction before reading the play, he spoils the ending.

As with almost all introductions, Meyer’s serves better as an afterword. And as that, it gets the job done (which is more than can be said for giving it the title “introduction”). Meyer works hard to explain how Ibsen’s play is modeled on a real event, the main difference in the stories being the ending. (In real life, the “Nora” character goes to an asylum). But this connection is unclear until after the play is read. If Meyer were writing a good introduction, he’d say his thoughts outright:

Since A Doll’s House is based on an actual incident that Ibsen (for the most part) was aware of and witnessed parts of, the events in the story are given more credence and serve as a representative example of growing concerns people in the late 19th century (1870s) were feeling—feelings that contributed to the women’s rights movements that occurred worldwide. In this way, it serves as a testament to how imbalanced our social institutions and practices once were, and in some ways how far we have come.

But, unlike Meyer, I am far from arguing the point Meyer oh-so-poorly argues in his Foreword, that, “Yet today, when the social content of A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy o the People is no longer topical and interests us only as history, their power is, if anything, greater, because we can see their true theme more clearly; the need of every individual to discover the kind of person he or she really is, and to become that people.” I disagree with this sentiment in more than one way.

First of all, I am far from believing that the social content of A Doll’s House is no longer topical. I am willing to say that the obvious social content, i.e. the superficial “it is illegal for women to take out loans without the permission of their husbands” is no longer in place. However, to presume that that is the only social content of the play is superficial and naïve. The real social content is the nature of the marriage between Nora and her husband Torvald and of the representation of Mrs. Linde as an independent, working woman who (possibly despite Ibsen’s intentions) embodies the spirit that “anything a man can do, a woman can do too.”

Although the specific misogynistic banking practices are no more, the nature of marriage will be a topic presumably as long as the institution persists. At its worst, Ibsen’s play comes close to being an unusually dark episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” At its best, Ibsen’s play is one of the most thought-provoking discussions of marriage staged in the last three centuries.

Personal Thoughts: I actually didn’t like it all that much. The main conflict, Krogstad’s threatened revelation of Nora’s secret, gets wrapped up much too cleanly in the last act. It was borderline Deus Ex (but, admittedly, well done Deux Ex). And despite Ibsen’s modicum of hinting that Nora was thinking of leaving, I feel like Nora’s explosion at the ending comes a little too far out of left field to be satisfying dramatically. This play not only is Ibsen’s first major success, it feels like Ibsen’s first major success—with that lingering hint of amateurish plotting.

Yet, the plotting, breakages in character, and occasional awkward dialogue (which, hey, can be blamed on Meyer), although still relevant to a fruitful discussion of the role of A Doll’s House in the “canon of modernity,” nevertheless is overshadowed by my reaction to the ending. That’s the part that really interests me, because that’s the part of the story that made the play gain so much notice as a controversial play, and one of the reasons I find some of Meyer’s comments so off-center. The thing is, Nora’s decision at the end of A Doll’s House is still controversial.

This is a play that I don’t like, but I like disliking. And thus I am tempted not only to defend my dislike of the play, but also of the play’s position in canonicity simultaneously.

Teaching It:

[Encourage students to read the introduction after they finish reading the play.]

WARNING SPOILERS BELOW

Prompts, essay question or otherwise:

(The moral debate): Choose EITHER Nora’s decision to leave her children and Torvald at the end of the play OR Nora’s decision to hide the truth from Torvald for so long. In regard to your choice, defend your answer to this question: Did Nora do the right thing?

(For pre-law students): Was Nora justified in forging her father’s signature and breaking the law? Why or why not?

(The aesthetic debate): Nora argues that Torvald tries to treat her like a doll in the final scene. What exactly is Ibsen’s critique of this behavior? Define what it means to be a doll in Ibsen’s world so that if necessary, you could explain why one character is a doll and why another is not.

(For discussion): In the introduction, Meyer includes Ibsen’s “Notes for a Modern Tragedy.” In this there is the following line: “A mother in modern society, like certain insects, goes away and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race.” Does Ibsen’s simile that a mother in modern society is comparable to insets complicate the notion even further that Ibsen was a feminist writer? Further, does this imply that Ibsen regarded Nora as subhuman for her actions at the end of the play?

Vocabulary Words:

(From the quote by Gunnar Heiberg in the Introduction): Panoply

(From the prose description of the opening scene): Bric-a-brac

Alternate Ending:

Wikipedia has the text for the alternate ending. I’m amazed there exists a less satisfying ending than the original:

NORA ... Where we could make a real marriage out
of our lives together. Goodbye. [Begins to go.]
HELMER. Go then! [Seizes her arm.] But first you shall see
your children for the last time!
NORA. Let me go! I will not see them! I cannot!
HELMER [draws her over to the door, left]. You shall see
them. [Opens the door and says softly.] Look, there they
are asleep, peaceful and carefree. Tomorrow, when they
wake up and call for their mother, they will be -
motherless.
NORA [trembling]. Motherless...!
HELMER. As you once were.
NORA. Motherless! [Struggles with herself, lets her
travelling bag fall, and says.] Oh, this is a sin against
myself, but I cannot leave them. [Half sinks down by the door.]
HELMER [joyfully, but softly]. Nora!
[The curtain falls.]

Hello, how are you?

Hello, my name is Steven Holmes. This is a blog about reading, where we can share writing resources, tips, and discussion on that nebulous entity, "The English Canon." Enjoy!

So, this is following up on my project at http://stevendholmes.wordpress.com/2008/06/ . Whereas that site was mostly just a compilation of my notes on writing, this blog will actually be my responses to a new project I have undertaken.

I am a UC Berkeley English Literature and Rhetoric graduate considering going to grad school in English so I can continue teaching at the collegiate level, which I feel has been the richest and deepest experience I've encountered. In the process of doing so, however, I recently took a GRE prep test for English Literature and felt like there were a lot of books that "everyone has read" that I have not.

I hope you enjoy, thanks.