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MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Resonances_in_the_complex_k_plane.txt

PROFESSOR: So I want to go a little further to try to put resonances in a more intriguing footing. That you can play with and if you-- at some point interested. So let's think of discovering [INAUDIBLE] that we have. We had A s-- remember the scattered wave was A s e to the ikx [INAUDIBLE] that divided 2. And what was A s? Well, A s squared-- the sine square delta. So if you remember this was sine delta e to the i delta. So let's stick to that and try to write it in a funny way. Certainly, A s is becoming large near resonance, so let's think when A s becomes large. Well, in another way let's be a little creative about things, It's good sometimes not to be logical. So let's write this as sine delta-- I'll do it here-- sine delta over e to the minus i of delta . And that's sine delta over close delta minus i sine delta. That's all good. A s-- let me divide by sine delta both sides-- both numerator and denominator. So-- no divide it by cosine delta, so I'll have tan delta over 1 minus i tan delta. I divide it by cosine. You want A s large? You really want it large, choose tan delta-- equals to minus i. Sounds crazy, but it's not really crazy. The reason it sounds crazy and it's somewhat strange and not very logical is tan delta is a phase and the tangent of any phase is never an imaginary number. So then I would have think of delta itself as a complex number. And what would that mean. So things are weird. But it's certainly the fact that A s will become infinite-- not just large-- but infinite. A s will become infinite. And you say, wow, this doesn't make any sense. But maybe it makes sense in the following way. This is the line of real phase shifts. [INAUDIBLE] are real. And here is the world of complex phase shifts. These are the real phase shifts and there are the complex phase shifts. Maybe if the phase shift becomes infinite-- off the real axis-- it's just large on the real axis. So actually, if you wanted it to be very large you would have to get off the real axis. If this sounds vague, it is still vague. But in a minute we'll make it precise. So I suggest that we take this idea seriously-- that maybe this means something. And we can try to argue that by looking back at what resonances do. So what I will do is look with [INAUDIBLE] a resonance here-- tangent delta. So let's look at what A s does. We have it there. A s is tan delta-- well, tan delta-- we had it in the middle of blackboard is beta over alpha minus k, 1 minus i beta over alpha minus k, again. So that's how A s behaves in general. That's fine, there's no -- at this moment there's nothing crazy about this. Because this is something you all agreed, nobody complained about this formula. So A s is given by that formula-- that's also legal math, so far. So we'll have this. And then let's simplify it a little bit which is beta over alpha minus k minus i beta. So this still beta over alpha minus i beta minus k. So we usually would plot A s as a function of k. That's what we're trying to do, it's a function of k. And now here is the formula for A s as the function of k. And here is k. But let's be daring now and not say this is k, this is the complex k-plane. And yes, you work with real k, but that's because that has a direct physical interpretation. But maybe the complex plane has a more subtle physical interpretation and that's what they claim is happening here. This quantity becomes infinite near the resonance. Here was the resonance, what you call the resonance. But this becomes really infinite not at alpha-- for when k is equal to alpha, but when k is equal to alpha minus i beta. Beta was supposed to be small for a resonance. So here is minus i beta and here is this very unusual point. Where the scattering amplitude blows up. It has what is in complex variables-- if you've taken 1806 it's called a pole. In a complex variable when you have a denominator that vanishes linearly we call it a pole. Things blow up. So this carrying amplitude has a pole off the real axis. And interpretation is correct. At this point, this function becomes infinite. And what is happening on the real line that A s is becoming large is just the remnant of that infinity over here that is affecting the value of this point. So in the complex plane you understand the function a little better. You see why it's becoming big and you can see also with a little [INAUDIBLE] why the phases shifting very fast because you have this point. And that's called the resonance. And this is the mathematically precise way of searching for resonances. If you want to search for resonances what you should do is you have your formula for delta as a function of k. I mean, it's a complicated formula, but now try to solve the equation tan delta of this is equal to minus i because that's what guarantees that you have a pole that indeed it blows up at some value. That's where A s blows up which we see directly here-- it's this value. Alpha minus i beta, so alpha minus i beta is a pole of A s. And therefore, you must be happening when tangent of delta is equal to minus i. So you have a very complicated formula maybe for tangent of delta. But set it equal to minus i and asked mathematically to solve it. And a number will come-- k a equal 2.73 minus 0.003. And you will know-- oh, that's a resonance, it's off the axis. And the real part is the value of alpha. And since this is beta the closer to the axis -- if you find more-- the more resonant it is. And by the time it's far from the axis, some people call it the resonance-- some people say, no that not the resonance. It's a matter of taste. But there are important things which are these poles. So I will not give you exercises on that, but you may want to try it if you want to have some entertainment with these things. I want to say one more thing about this. And it's the reason why this viewpoint is interesting, as well. We already found that if we want to think of resonances more precisely. We can think of them as just an equation. You solve for the equation, so that it gives you the resonance. And this is the equation you must solve and you must admit complex k. But now you can say, look actually you have e is equal to h squared, k squared, over 2m. And we have real k's-- this is the physical scattering solutions, complex k's, also resonances. How about imaginary k's? If k is equal to i kappa-- kappa belonging to the real numbers-- then the energy becomes minus h squared, kappa squared, over 2m and its less than zero and it could represent bound states. So you'll be then discovering solutions of real k representing your waves. Now mathematically, you are led to resonances understood as poles in the scattering amplitutde we did here. We see that k's in the imaginary axis would represent bound states. So the complex k-plane is very rich. It has room for your scattering solutions, it has room for your resonance, it even has room for your bound states. They're all there. That's why it's a valuable extension. I have now proven for you that bound states correspond to poles. It's a simple calculation, and that I would assign it to you with a little bit of guidance. And you will see that also for the case of bound states, you get a pole in the scattering amplitude, and that will complete the interpretation of that. Now people go a little further, actually, and they invent poles in this part and they're called anti-bound states. And you'll say, what's that? If you have a bound state you match a solution to a pure decaying exponential for the [INAUDIBLE] region. In an anti-bound bound state you match your solution to a pure increasing exponential. A pure one. Does that have an interpretation? It actually does have interpretation. Some nuclear states are associated with anti-bound states. So the mathematical description-- the rich complex plane is ready for you if you just do scattering amplitude k, resonances-- complex k. Normal bound states, imaginary k-- positive. Anti-bounds is negative k. It's a nice start.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Stationary_states_key_equations.txt

PROFESSOR: We start with the stationary states. In fact, stationary states are going to keep us quite busy for probably a couple of weeks. Because it's a place where you get the intuition about solving Schrodinger's equation. So the stationary states are simple and useful solutions of the Schrodinger equation, very nice and simple. So what are they by definition? Well, we begin with a definition. And the intuition of a stationary state will follow. See the word stationary is not the same as static. Stationary is something that maybe it's kind of moving, but things don't change. Static is something that's just not moving. Stationary states have time dependence. It is very simple, as we will see. So, your definition of a stationary state has a factorized space and time dependencies. So this psi of x and t is a stationary state. If you can write it as a product of a function of time times a function of position. And now, I will try to be careful about this. Wave functions that have position and time will have this bar at the bottom. Wave functions that don't have x will not have it. If I slip on that, please let me know. So this is a stationary state, but a stationary state has factorized space and time dependencies and solves the Schrodinger equation-- the solution of Schrodinger's equation. So what we need to understand is what this factorized dependence tell us for the Schrodinger equation. So this stationary state has time dependence. But the thing that makes them stationary is that if you look at some observable, a Hermitian operator, and you say, OK, the state has time dependence, so maybe my observable will have time dependence. No. The observables don't have time dependence. That is the nice thing about stationary states. So, what we call time independent observables which are all observables that are familiar [INAUDIBLE]-- Hamiltonian, the momentum, the precision, the angular momentum. Time independent observables have no time dependence. And it kind of looks simple when you write it like that. Time independent means don't have time dependence. But you've seen that d dt of the expectation value of x is equal to p over m, or the sum of p over m, the velocity. And here it is-- a time independent observable that does have time dependence. So the observable is time independent, but expectation value have no time dependence in their expectation values. The time dependence comes from the state-- the state, the psi of x and t have time dependence, and sometimes it just doesn't drop out. But for stationary states, it will drop, as you will see. So, time independent observables have no time dependence in their expectation values. OK. So enough of saying things. And let's just get to them. So we look at the Schrodinger equation, i h-bar d dt of psi of x and t is equal to h-bar psi of x and t. And just to remind, this minus h squared over 2m d second d x squared plus V of x. And I will consider states that have just that at this moment. Otherwise, it's not so easy to get time-dependent-- to get stationary states. If you have a potential that has time dependence, we kind of do the nice thing that we're going to do. So we're going to look only at time independent potentials. So, V of x, like this, times psi of x and t. OK. So what we do next is to simply substitute the value of the wave function into the differential equation and see what we get. So on the left hand side, we will get i h-bar The psi of x goes out but you have d dt, Now a normal derivative of g of t. And now, this factor, H of psi acts on these two things. Imagine the function of time times the function of x sitting here. Well, the function of time can be moved out. So the function of time can be moved across the Hamiltonian operator. It doesn't do anything to it. So we'll have g of t times H-hat of the psi of x. This is H-hat. And because we had no time dependence in the potential, our assumption, this whole thing is a function of x. All right. Next step. Divide this whole equation by the total wave function. Divide by psi. Well, if you divide by psi, you cancel the middle psi here, and you get the 1 over g. So you get i h-bar 1 over g dg dt is equal-- on the right side, you cancel the g and you get a 1 over psi of x H-hat psi of x. And now you look at this equation. And this equation is saying something very strange. The left hand side is a function of time only. The right hand side is a function of space only. How can a function of time be equal to a function of space? The only way this can be is if both are not a function of what they were supposed to be. They're just numbers. Any function of time cannot be equal to a function of space, in generality. It just doesn't make sense. So each side must be equal to a constant, and it's the same constant. So each side, this is all equal to a constant. And we'll call the constant E. And this E has units of energy. E equal to be a real constant with units of energy. You can see the units because the Hamiltonian has units of energy. And whatever psi units it has-- whatever every unit psi has, they cancel. Here, whatever units g has, they cancel. And h-bar over time is units of energy, like in energies equal h-bar omega. So it has units of energy. The only thing that you may be could say, why real. Quantum mechanics loves complex numbers. So why don't we put the complex E? We'll see what trouble we get if you choose something that is complex. So here we go. It's a real quantity to be-- let's do it real for the time being. And let's solve the first equation. The left hand side, i h-bar dg dt is now equal to gE, or E, where E is a number and g is a function of time from where g of p is equal to constant E to the minus iEt over h-bar. Let's just check it works correctly. It's a first order differential equation. Just one function of integration. If you guess the answer, must be the answer. And that's the time dependence of a stationary state. It's exponential minus iEt over h-bar. What about the other equation? The other equation has become H psi of x equals E psi of x. Or, we should write at least once, minus h squared over 2m-- did I make a mistake? No, I didn't-- d second dx squared-- I got this normal derivatives here because this is just a function of x-- plus V of x psi is equal to E psi of x. This is the same equation that I'm boxing twice, because it's written in those two ways. And both ways are very important. And this is part of solving for stationary state. You've solved for g of t. The time dependence was easy to solve for, but the x dependence is complicated, in general. There, you have to do some work. You have to solve a differential equation. It's not that easy. So many people-- most people-- call this the time independent Schrodinger equation. So that's the time independent Schrodinger equation, where H psi equal E psi. And as you can imagine, solving this differential equation can be challenging, or sometimes very interesting because it may be that, as far as the first equation is concerned, of what we did here, we don't know what this number E is. But it may be that the only reasonable solutions that this equation has are for some values of E. The analogy with matrices should tell you that's probably what's going to happen. Because you remember eigenstates and eigenvalues of matrices are peculiar numbers. If you have a matrix, they're peculiar eigenvalues. So this equation is an eigenfunction equation. And it's possible that it has the solution for some particular values of the energy. Let me write the whole solution then. If you've solved these two things, the whole solution psi of x and t is now a constant times psi of x times e to the minus iEt over h-bar, where this psi of x solves this equation. So this is the stationary state. How about normalizing the stationary state? Can we do that? Well, if we try to normalize it-- psi star of x and t and psi of x and t dx, and you set this equal to 1. This should be the case, because this should be interesting solutions of the Schrodinger equation. We expect that we could do particles with them. And we can start wave packets or peculiar states with them. And let's see what we get here. Maybe I should know. I'm really [INAUDIBLE]. I'm going to erase that constant C here. Since we want to normalize this, we will think of this as a normalization of psi. When we try to normalize psi, we'll be normalizing middle psi, as you will see here. There's no need to put that constant there. So what do we get here? We get integral dx psi star of x and t, so you have psi of x star. And now you could say it's E to the iEt over h-bar. That's the complex conjugate. Now, on the other hand, suppose-- I'll do this this way. [INAUDIBLE] of this other term is psi of x into the minus iEt over h-bar. And now the good thing about this, you see this integral should be normalized to 1 to make sense. And it's a great thing that the time dependence drops out. And it would not have dropped out if the energy had not been real. If the energy was not real, I would have had to put here E start. And here I would have had E star minus E and some function of time. And how can a function of time be equal to 1? Would be a problem. We would not be able to normalize this wave function. So E must be real because otherwise we don't cancel this time dependence, which happily, when it cancels, it just tells you that the integral dx of psi star of x psi of x must be 1, which is a very nice thing. So in a stationary state, the normalization condition for a full time dependent stationary state is that the spacial part is normalized.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Reality_condition_in_Fourier_transforms.txt

PROFESSOR: We ask, is psi of x, 0 real? And I told you the answer is no. And how would I know that this is not real? Well, we can take the complex conjugate. And at the end of the day, this will boil down to some property of phi of k. You see, you have an expression phi of x in terms of phi of k. So it would not be surprising that the requirement that psi is real means something about phi of k. So let's just say, suppose psi is given by that, then psi x, 0 star, the complex conjugate would be 1 over square root of 2 pi integral phi of k star e to the minus ikx dk. I conjugated everything in that equation for psi of x and 0. Now, you want to compare this with psi of x and 0 to see if it's real. Or let's consider what is the condition that this be real. So I want to simplify here a little more. So what I'm going to do is going to change variables, by changing k to minus k. If you prefer to go a little more slowly, you could say you're going to change k prime-- you're going to be a new k, called k prime, equals to minus k. But it's possible to do it this way. Now, there's going to be a couple of changes. Wherever you see k, you're now going to see minus k-- so 1 over 2 pi integral phi of minus k. And I'll just put this star here, not so many parentheses-- e to the minus ikx becomes ikx. And the dk will go to minus dk, but the order of integration, that was from minus infinity to plus infinity, would switch. So those two signs cancel. So there's a sign from doing dk to minus dk, and 1 from the limit of integration-- so at the end of the day, you have dk, and you still have this-- minus infinity to infinity. And you can say, well, is this equal to-- or what is the condition of for psi to be real? Well, is this equal to 1 over 2 pi minus phi of k, e to the ikx dk-- is that-- question mark-- is that equal to it? That would mean that the psi of x, 0 is real, because this thing is just psi of x and 0. So this is a question mark-- this is a condition. So here you could say, exploring the reality condition-- condition-- when is a psi of x real? So what must be true is that these two terms must equal each other. So, in fact, this requires-- reality requires that 1 over square root of 2 pi integral from minus infinity to infinity phi of k minus phi star of minus k, e to the ikx dx is equal to 0. I brought the two terms to one side. Both are of the same type-- they're integrated against an e to the ikx. And therefore, we can combine them, and that's what must be true in order for the function to be real. And now you can say, so what is it? What's the answer? Well, this integral should vanish. Now, this integral should vanish-- it should vanish for all values of k. So actually, what you want to conclude is that this thing is identically 0. AUDIENCE: Excuse me, shouldn't that be dk and not dx? PROFESSOR: Yes, thank you. Thanks very much. So this property that this whole integral be equal to 0, you were tempted to conclude that it means that this thing is equal to 0. And that is correct-- that is a perfectly legal argument. And it basically-- if you want to express it more precisely, you could base it on the Fourier theorem, again. These two sets of equalities here are Fourier's theorem. And look what this is saying-- this is saying that this quantity has a 0 Fourier transform. Because how do you do the Fourier transform of a function of k? You multiply by e to the ikx and integrate. And therefore, this function has a 0 Fourier transform. So, but if a function has a 0 Fourier transform, the function must be 0. Because already this is 0, and the integral is 0-- 0. So this is absolutely rigorous. And therefore, you get the conclusion that phi of minus k star must be equal to phi of k, and that's the condition for reality. So if a phi of k satisfies this property, that psi of x will be real, and our phi of k doesn't satisfy this property, what do you see in this property? Basically, if you have phi that exists for some value of k, it should also exist for the value of minus k. And in fact, should be the complex conjugate of the other value. But here, you have some phis of k, and no phis at minus k. So the phi that we wrote above doesn't satisfy this condition. And therefore psi is not real, and it all makes sense. OK, so basically, if you were plotting not the absolute value, but the real part and the imaginary parts of psi, you would see some sort of funny waves. I think if you were plotting the real part, for example, you would see a wave like that. And if you were plotting the imaginary part, you'd presumably see some other wave like that. And the absolute value, it's much nicer and simpler.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Expectation_values_of_operators.txt

PROFESSOR: Expectation values of operators. So this is, in a sense, one of our first steps that we're going to take towards the interpretation of quantum mechanics. We've had already that the wave function tells you about probabilities. But that's not quite enough to have the full interpretation of what we're doing. So let's think of operators and expectation values that we can motivate. So for example, if you have a random variable q, that can take values-- so this could be a coin that can take values heads and tails. It could be a pair of dice that takes many values-- can take values in the set q1 up to qn with probabilities p1 up to pn, then in statistics, or 8044, you would say that this variable, this random variable has an expectation value. And the expectation value-- denoted by this angular symbols over here, left and right-- it's given by the sum over i, i equal 1 to n, of the possible values the random variable can take times the probabilities. It's a definition that makes sense. And it's thought to be, this expectation value is, the expected value, or average value, that you would obtain if you did the experiment of tossing the random variable many times. For each value of the random variable, you multiply by the probability. And that's the number you expect to get. So in a quantum system, we follow this analogy very closely. So what do we have in a quantum system? In the quantum system you have that psi star of x and t. The x is the probability that the particle is in x, x plus dx. So that's the probability that the particle is going to be found between x and x plus dx. The position of this particle is like a random variable. You never know where you are going to find it. But he has different probabilities to find it. So we could now define in complete analogy to here, the expectation value of the position operator, or the expectation value of the position, expectation value of x hat, or the position, and say, well, I'm going to do exactly what I have here. I will sum the products of the position times the probability for the position. So I have to do it as an integral. And in this integral, I have to multiply the position times the probability for the position. So the probability that the disc takes a value of x, basically all that is in the interval dx about x is this quantity. And that's the position that you get when you estimate this probability. So you must sum the values of the random variable times its probability. And that is taken in quantum mechanics to be a definition. We can define the expectation value of x by this quantity. And what does it mean experimentally? It means that in quantum mechanics, if you have a system represented by a wave function, you should build many copies of the system, 100 copies of the system. In all of these copies, you measure the position. And you make a table of the values that you measure the position. And you measure them at the same time in the 100 copies. There's an experimentalist on each one, and it measures the position of x. You construct the table, take the average, and that's what this quantity should be telling you. So this quantity, as you can see, may depend on time. But it does give you the interpretation of expected value coinciding with a system, now the quantum mechanical system, for which the position is not anymore a quantity that is well defined and it's always the same. It's a random variable, and each measurement can give you a different value of the position. Quantum mechanically, this is the expected value. And the interpretation is, again if you measure many times, that is the value, the average value, you will observe. But now we can do the same thing to understand expectation values. We can do it with the momentum. And this is a little more non-trivial. So we have also, just like we said here, that psi star psi dx is the probability that the particle is in there, you also have that phi of p squared. dp is the probability to find the particle with momentum in the range p p plus dp. So how do we define the expected value of the momentum? The expected value of the momentum would be given by, again, the sum of the random variable, which is the momentum, times the probability that you get that value. So this is it. It's very analogous to this expression. But it's now with momentum. Well, this is a pretty nice thing. But we can learn more about it by pushing the analogy more. And you could say, look, this is perfect. But it's all done in momentum space. What would happen if you would try to do this in position space? That is, you know how 5p is related to psi of x. So write everything in terms of x. I would like to see this formula in terms of x. It would be a very good thing to have. So let's try to do that. So we have to do a little bit of work here with integrals. So it's not so bad. p phi star of p phi of p dp. And for this one, you have to write it as an integral over some position. So let me call it over position x prime. This you will write this an integral over some position x. And then we're going to try to rewrite the whole thing in terms of coordinate space. So what do we have here? We have integral pdp. And the first phi star would be the integral over dx prime. We said there is the square root 2 pi h bar that we can't forget. 5p, it would have an e to the ip x prime over h bar, and a psi star of x prime. So I did conjugate this phi star of p. I may have it here. Yes, it's here. I conjugated it and did the integral over x prime. And now we have another one, integral vx over 2 pi h bar e to the minus ipx over h bar, and you have psi of x. Now there's a lot of integrals there, and let's try to get them simplified. So we're going to try to do first the p integral. So let's try to clean up everything in such a way that we have only p done first. So we'll have a 1 over 2 pi h bar from the two square roots. And I'll have the two integrals dx prime psi of x prime star the x psi of x. So again, as we said, these integrals we just wrote them out. They cannot be done. So our only hope is to simplify first the pdp integral. So here we would have integral of dp times p times e to the ipx prime over h bar. And e to the minus ipx over h bar. Now we need a little bit of-- probably if you were doing this, it would not be obvious what to do, unless you have some intuition of what the momentum operator used to be. The momentum operator used to be dvx, basically. Now this integral would be a delta function if the p was not here. But here is the p. So what I should try to do is get rid of that p in order to understand what we have. So here we'll do integral dp. And look, output here minus h bar over idvx. And leave everything here to the right, e to the ipx prime over h bar p to the minus ipx over h bar. I claim this is the same. Because this operator, h over iddx, well, it doesn't act on x prime. But it acts here. And when it does, it will produce just the factor of p that you have. Because the minus i and the minus i will cancel. The h bar will cancel. And the ddh will just bring down a p. So this is the way to have this work out quite nicely. Now this thing is inside the integral. But it could as well be outside the integral. It has nothing to do with dp. So I'll rewrite this again. I'll write it as dx prime psi of x prime star integral dx psi of x. And I'll put this here, minus h bar over iddx, in front of the integral. The 1 over 2 pi h bar here. Integral dp e to the ipx prime minus x over h bar. So I simply did a couple of things. I moved that 1 over 2 pi h to the right. And then I said this derivative could be outside the integral. Because it's an integral over p. It doesn't interfere with x derivative, so I took it out. Now the final two steps, we're almost there. The first step is to say, with this it's a ddx. And yes, this is a function of x and x prime. But I don't want to take that derivative. Because I'm going to complicate things. In fact, this is already looking like a delta function. There's a dp dp. And the h bars that actually would cancel. So this is a perfectly nice delta function. You can change variables. Do p equal u times h bar and see that actually the h bar doesn't matter. And this is just delta of x prime minus x. And in here, you could act on the delta function. But you could say, no, let me do integration by parts and act on this one. When you do integration by parts, you have to worry about the term at the boundary. But if your wave functions vanish sufficiently fast at infinity, there's no problem. So let's assume we're in that case. We will integrate by parts and then do the delta function. So what do we have here? I have integral dx prime psi star of x prime integral dx. And now I have, because of the sign of integration by parts, h over iddx of psi. And then we have the delta function of x minus x prime. It's probably better still to write the integral like this, dx h bar over iddx of psi times integral dx prime psi star of x prime delta of x minus x prime. And we're almost done, so that's good. We're almost done. We can do the integral over x prime. And it will elevate that wave function at x. So at the end of the day, what have we found? We found that p, the expectation value of p, equal integral of p phi of p squared dp is equal to-- we do this integral. So we have integral dx, I'll write it two times, h over i d psi dx of x and t and psi star of x and t. I'm not sure I carried that times. I didn't put the time anywhere. So maybe I shouldn't put it here yet. This is what we did. And might as well write it in the standard order, where the complex conjugate function appears first. This is what we found. So this is actually very neat. Let me put the time back everywhere you could put time. Because this is a time dependent thing. So p, expectation value is p phi of p and t squared dp is equal to integral dx psi star of x. And now we have, if you wish, p hat psi of x, where p hat is what we used to call the momentum operator. So look what has happened. We started with this expression for the expectation value of the momentum justified by the probabilistic interpretation of phi. And we were led to this expression, which is very similar to this one. You see, you have the psi star, the psi, and the x there. But here, the momentum appeared at this position, acting on the wave function psi, not on psi star. And that's the way, in quantum mechanics, people define expectation values of operators in general. So in general, for an operator q, we'll define the expectation value of q to be integral dx psi star of x and t q acting on the psi of x and t. So you will always do this of putting the operator to act on the second part of the wave function, on the second appearance of the wave function. Not on the psi star, but on the psi. We can do other examples of this and our final theorem. This is, of course, time dependent. So let me do one example and our final time dependence analysis of this quantity. So for example, if you would think of the kinetic operator example. Kinetic operator t is p squared over 2m is a kinetic operator. How would you compute its expectation value? Expectation value of the kinetic operator is what? Well, I could do the position space calculation, in which I think of the kinetic operator as an operator that acts in position space where the momentum is h bar over iddx. So then I would have integral dx psi star of x and t. And then I would have minus h squared over 2m d second dx squared of psi of x and t. So here I did exactly what I was supposed to do given this formula. But you could do another thing if you wished. You could say, look, I can work in momentum space. This is a momentums operator p. Just like I defined the expectation value of p, I could have the expectation value of p squared. So the other possibility is that you have t is equal to the integral dp of p squared over 2m times phi of p squared. This is the operator. And this is the probability. Or you could write it more elegantly perhaps. dp phi star of p t squared over 2m phi of p. These are just integrals of numbers. All these are numbers already. So in momentum space, it's easier to find the expectation value of the kinetic operator. In coordinate space, you have to do this. You might even say, look, this thing looks positive. Because it's p squared of the number squared. In the center here, it looks negative. But that's an illusion. The second derivative can be partially integrated. One of the two derivatives can be integrated to act on this one. So if you do partial integration by parts, you would have integral dx h squared over 2m. And then you would have d psi dx squared by integration by parts. And that's clearly positive as well. So it's similar to this.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Incident_packet_and_delay_for_reflection.txt

PROFESSOR: I'll begin by reviewing quickly what we did last time. We considered what are called finite range potentials, in which over a distance R, in the x-axis, there's a non-zero potential. So the potential is some v of x for x between capital R and 0, is equal to 0 for x larger than capital R, and it's infinity for x negative. So there's a wall at x equals 0. And there can be some potential, but this is called a finite range potential, because nothing happens after distance R. As usual, we considered scattering solutions, solutions that are unnormalizable with energies, h squared k squared over 2m, for a particle with mass m. And if we had no potential, we wrote the solution phi of x, the wave function, which was sine of kx. And we also wrote it as a superposition of an incoming wave. Now, an incoming wave in this set up is a wave that propagates from plus infinity towards 0. And a reflected wave is a wave that bounces back and propagates towards more positive x. So here we'll write this as minus e to the minus ikx over 2i, plus e to the ikx over 2i. This is the sine function rewritten in terms of exponential in such a way that here is the incoming wave. Remember the time dependence is minus iet over h bar. So this wave combined with a time is a wave that is moving towards the origin. This wave is moving outwards. Then we said that there would be, in general, with potential. With a potential, you would have a solution psi effects, which we wrote after some tinkering in the farm i delta sine of kx plus delta. And if you look at the part of the phase that has the minus ikx would have a minus delta and a delta here. So they would cancel. So this solution has the same incoming wave as the no potential solution. On the other hand here, you would have e to the 2i delta, e to the ikx over 2i, and this solution is only valid for x greater than R. You see, this is just a plane wave after all. There's nothing more than a plane wave and a phase shift. The phase shift, of course, doesn't make the solution any more complicated or subtle, but what it does is, by depending on the energy, this phase shift delta depends on the energy, and we're on k. Then, it produces interesting phenomena when you send in wave packets. So if we write psi, we usually write psi is equal to the phi plus psi s, where psi s is called the scattered wave. You see, the full wave that you get, for x greater than R, we would have to solve and work very carefully to figure out what is the wave function in the region 0 to R. But for x greater than R is simple, and for x greater than R the wave function psi is the free wave function, in the case of no potential, plus the scattered wave. Quick calculation with this, things [? give to ?] you the scatter wave is e to the i delta sine delta e to the ikx is an outgoing wave. And this coefficient is called the scattering amplitude. It's the amplitude of the scattered wave. This is a wave that is going out, and this is its amplitude. So it has something to do with the strength of the scattering, because if there was no scattering, the wave function would just behave like the no potential wave function. But due to the potential, there is an extra piece, and that represents an outgoing wave beyond what you get outgoing with a free no potential wave function. So it's the scattering amplitude, and therefore sometimes we are interested in as squared, which is just sine squared delta. Anyway, those are the things we did last time. And we can connect to some ideas that we were talking about in the past, having to do with time delays, by constructing a wave packet. That's what's usually done. Consider the process of time delay, which is a phenomenon that we've observed happens in several circumstances. If you have an incident wave, how do you construct an incident wave? Well, it has to be a superposition of e to the minus ikx, for sure. So we'll put the function in front, we'll integrate over k, and we'll go from 0 to infinity. I will actually add the time dependence as well. So let's do phi of x and t. Then, we would have e to the minus i, e of k, t over h bar, and this would be valid for x greater than R. Again, as a solution of the Schrodinger equation. You see, it's a free wave. There's nothing extra from what you know from the de Broglie waves we started a long time ago. So if this is your incident wave, you have to now realize that you have this equation over here telling you about the general solution of the Schrodinger equation. The general solution of the Schrodinger equation, in this simple region, the outside region, is of this form, and it depends on this delta that must be calculated. This is the incoming wave, this is the reflected wave, and this is a solution. So by superposition, I construct the reflected wave of x and t. So for each e to the minus ikx wave, I must put down one e to the ikx, but I must also put an e to the 2i delta of the energy, or delta of k. And I must put an extra minus sign, because these two have opposite signs, so I should put a minus 0 to infinity dk f of k. And we'll have the e to the minus i, e of k, e over h bar. And just for reference, f of k is some real function that picks at some value k naught. So you see, just like what we did in the case of the step potential, in which we had an incident wave, a reflected wave packet, a transmitted wave packet, the wave packets go along with the basic solution. The basic solution had coefficients A, B, and C, and you knew what B was in terms of A and C. Therefore, you constructed the incoming wave with A e to ikx, and then the reflected wave with B e to the minus ikx. The same thing we're doing here inspired by this solution, the psi affects we superpose many of those, and that's what we've done here. Now of course, we can do the stationary phase calculations that we've done several times to figure out how the peak of the wave packet moves. So a stationary phase at k equal k naught. As you remember, the only contribution can really come when k is near k naught, and at that point, you want the phase to be stationary as a function of k. I will not do here the computation again for psi incident. You've done this computation a few times already. For psi incident, you find the relation between x and t, and I will just write it. It's simple. You find that x is equal to minus h bar k naught over mt, or minus some v velocity, group velocity, times t. That is the condition for a peak to exist. The peak satisfies that equation, and this makes sense when t is negative. This solution for psi incident only makes sense for x positive if in fact x greater than R. So this solution needs x positive. So it needs t negative [? indeed. ?] This is a wave that is coming from plus infinity, x equal plus infinity, at time minus infinity, and it's going in with this velocity. For psi reflected, the derivative now has to take the derivative of delta, with respect to e, and then the derivative of e with respect to the energy. And the answer, in this case-- you've done this before-- it's v group times t minus 2 h bar delta prime of E. So yes, in the reflected wave, x grows as t grows and it's positive. t must now be positive, but in fact, if you would have a just x equal v group t, this would correspond to a particle that seems to start at the origin at time equals 0 and goes out. But this actually there is an extra term subtracted. So only for t greater than this number the particle begins to appear. So this is a delay, t minus some t naught, the packet gets delayed by this potential. Now, this delay can really get delayed. Sometimes it might even accelerated, but in general, the delay is given by this quantity So I'll write it here. The delay, delta t, is 2 h bar delta prime of E. And let's write it in a way that you can see maybe the units better and get a little intuition about what this computation gives. For that, let's differentiate this with respect to k, and then k with respect to energy. So v delta with respect to k, and dk with respect to energy. This is 2 over 1 over h bar dE with respect to k. I do a little rearrangement of this derivative is one function of one variable k and neither is a single relation. So you can just invert it. This is more dangerous when you have partial derivatives. This is not necessarily true but for this ordinary derivatives is true, and then you have this 2 to the left here. The h bar went all the way down, and I have d delta dk. And here, we recognize that this is 2, and this is nothing else than the group velocity we were talking before. The E, the energy, is h squared k squared over 2m. You differentiate, divide by h bar, and it gives you the group velocity hk naught over m. Because these derivatives all have to be evaluated at k naught. So this derivative is really evaluated at k naught. This is also evaluated at k naught. So this is the group velocity, d delta, dk, and finally, let me rewrite it in a slightly different way. I multiply by 1 over R. Why? Because d delta dk, k has units of 1 over length. So if I multiply by 1 over R, this will have no units. So I claim that one over R d delta dk is equal to delta t, and you'll have 2 over vg and R. So I did a few steps. I moved the 2 over vg down to the left, and I multiplied by 1 over R, and now we have a nice expression. This is the delay. Delta t is the delay, but you now have divided it by 2R divided by the velocity, which is the time it takes the particle with the group velocity to travel back and forth in the finite range potential. So that gives you an idea. So if you compute the time delay, again, it will have units of microseconds, and you may not know if that's little or much. But here, by computing this quantity, not exactly delta prime of v but this quantity. You get an [? insight, ?] because this is the delay divided by the free transit time. It's kind of a nice quantity. You're dividing your delay and comparing it with the time that it takes a particle, with a velocity that is coming in, to do the bouncing across the finite range potential.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

More_on_superposition_General_state_of_a_photon_and_spin_states.txt

We spoke about superposition, and we showed how, when you have two states that are superimposed, the resulting state that is built up doesn't have properties that are intermediate between the two states that you're superimposing. But rather, when you do a measurement, you obtain the result that you would sometimes-- you sometimes obtain the result that you would have with one of the states, and some other times with different probabilities, the result as if you had the other state. So it's a strange kind of way in which things are combined in quantum mechanics. So the next thing we have to say is a physical assumption that is made here. And it is that if you have a state and you superimpose it to itself, you haven't done anything. So the superposition of a state with itself has no physical import. So we can say this. A physical assumption superimposing a state to itself does not change the physics. So if I have a state, this is physically equivalent-- I'll write physically equivalent with this symbol-- to the state a plus a, which would be 2 times a. It's physically equivalent to the state minus a. It's physically equivalent to the state ia on anything. It's not equivalent to 0a, because that would be the zero state. So it's physically equivalent as long as you have a non-zero coefficient. All these states are supposed to be physically equivalent. And that will eventually mean that we sometimes choose a particular one in those collection of states that is one that is convenient to work with. And that will be called a normalized state, a state that satisfies other properties having to do with the norm squared of the state. That will come later. But it's important that the number that is multiplying the physical state of your system has no relevance. And you could say, well, why all of the sudden you tell us this. Could this be shown to be necessary? Or it's a physical assumption, so can we test it? Does it make some sense? And we can make some sense of this assumption at this level. And we do it with states of light. So remember, we spoke about photons hitting a polarizer. And we could speak of two independent kind of photons-- photons polarized along the x-axis and a photon polarized along the y-axis. And those are two quantum mechanical states. Now suppose I decide to superimpose those states to create the most general photon state. I would have an alpha, which is a number here, a complex number, and a beta there. And I would say, OK, here is my most general photon state. And how many parameters does this state have? It has two complex parameters, alpha and beta, and therefore, four real parameters. And then you think about polarization states, how many parameters they have. And as we'll review in a second, it's well known that photons-- their polarization state can be expressed with just two real parameters. So some counting is not going very well here. But here comes the help. If the overall coefficient here doesn't matter-- if I can change it, I can multiply everything by 1 over alpha, and therefore get that the state is just the same, physically equivalent to this state, beta over alpha photon y. So all the physics is contained in this state as well. And if all the physics is contained in that state, I must look how many parameters it has. It still looks like there's two numbers here, but only the ratio appears. So if you call beta over alpha, the number gamma is just one complex parameter. And therefore, thanks to this assumption, you now get that the most general photon polarization state has just one complex parameter, or just equivalently, two real parameters. And that is the correct number. Indeed, if you have a polarization, a wave that has some polarization, the most general polarization state of a wave is an elliptical polarization. You probably did study a lot about circular polarizations, or maybe you also heard about the elliptical one in which the electric field-- in a circular polarization, the electric field at any point traces a circle. But if you have an elliptical polarization, the electric field traces an ellipse. And that ellipse has an angle that is one parameter. And for an ellipse, the other-- the size doesn't matter. The size depends just on the magnitude of the electric field. It's not a parameter of the polarization of the wave. Since the size doesn't matter, it's the shape of the ellipse that matters. And that's characterized by the eccentricity or by the ratio a over b of the semi-major axis, so parameters, two parameters, and they are a over b and theta. So an elliptically polarized wave, which is the most general state of polarization of a wave, has two real parameters. And now, thanks to this physical assumption, we get this right. And this is important because that's something we're going to use all the time, that the overall factor in a wave function does not matter. So if we have superpositions, I want to emphasize one more thing about superpositions. And for that, I'm going to use spins. So what is spin? Spin is a property of elementary particles that says that actually, even if they're not rotating around some other particle, they have angular momentum. They have intrinsic angular momentum, as if they would be made of a tiny little ball that is spinning. I say as if because nobody has ever constructed a model of an elementary particle where you can really make it spin and calculate how it works. Somehow, this elementary particle has angular momentum is born. Even if it is a point particle, it has angular momentum, and it's spin. And spin is very quantum mechanical. And we can't quite understand it without it. So what happens is that you can measure the spin of a particle. And then if you measure it, you have to decide, however, since angular momentum is a vector, what direction you should use. And suppose you use the z direction to measure the spin of a particle. You may find that the particle has either spin up or the particle has spin down. Spin. And the spin is the direction of the angular momentum. And that's a funny thing that happens with most matter particles. These are spin 1/2 particles. The spin can be up or it can be down along the z direction that you measure. You measure it, and you never find it's 0 or a little bit. It's just either up with the full magnitude or down with the full magnitude. That is a spin 1/2 particle. And the state where it is up, we sometimes denote it with an arrow up and call it z because it's up along z. And this would be down, an arrow down along z. If those are possible quantum states, you could build a new quantum state by superposition which would be up along z plus down along z. Now, if I wish to normalize it, I would put the factor in front of this. I will not talk about normalizations at this moment. They're not so important. If you are faced with this quantum state-- so suppose you have an electron that is not in this state nor in this state, but is in this state, in a quantum superposition. So you go and you decide to try to measure it. Now, since you cannot predict what that electron is going to be doing-- we cannot predict things in quantum mechanics with certainty-- we, since we're going to do this experiment, avail ourselves of 1,000 copies of this electron, all of them in this peculiar quantum state. So you have the 1,000 copies, and you start measuring. And you decide to measure the spin in the z direction. And now what do you get? Well, we mentioned last time that you don't get an average, or since this is up and this is down, you get 0. You measure the first particle and you find it up. Measure the second, up, the third, up, the fourth, down, five, down. And then you get a series of measurements. At the end of the 1,000 particles, you find about 495 up and 505 down, about half and half. And if you did it with 10,000 particles, maybe it would be closer. Eventually, you'll find 50% in this state and find 50% in this state. And if you think this is strange, which you probably do, well, you could be justified. But here would come Einstein along and would say all this stuff of this superposition is not quite right. You had this 1,000 particles. But actually, those 1,000 particles, half of them were with a spin up and half of them were with a spin down. So here you have your 1,000 particles, your quantum state, this. But Einsten says, no, let's make an ensemble of 1,000 particles, 500 up, 500 down, and do the same experiment. And the result is going to be the same. So how do you know you really have this as opposed to somebody has given you 1,000 particles, 500 up, 500 down? How can you tell? And in fact, he would say even more-- whenever Einstein used the word realism to say if I measure a spin and I find it up, it's because before I measured it, the spin was up. It's almost like learning something about an object. If I look at this page and I find the color red, it's because before I looked at it, it was red. But then in quantum mechanics, that doesn't seem to be the case. The state is this mix. And it was this mix before you measured. And after you measure, it's this. So there is no such thing as you learn by doing one measurement what the state of the particle was. So we will not resolve Einstein's paradox completely here because we would have to learn more about spins, which you will do soon enough. But here's the catch that actually happens. If, instead of having an ensemble of quantum states, you would have an ensemble of those states that half of them are up and half of them are down, you could now decide to measure the spin of the particle along the x direction. You take these particles, and you measure along x. And what you will calculate with quantum mechanics later in this course-- if you measure along x, in this state, you will find all of them to be pointing along plus, up along x, all of them. While on this Einstein ensemble of 50% up and 50% down, you would find 50% up along x and 50% down along x. So there is an experiment that can tell the difference, but you have to look in another direction. And that experiment, of course, can be done. And it's a calculation that can be done, and you can decide whether these quantum states exist. And they really seem to exist.

MIT_804_Quantum_Physics_I_Spring_2016

Probability_current_and_current_conservation.txt

BARTON ZWIEBACH: After this long detour, you must think that one is just trying to avoid doing the real computation, so here comes, the real computation. The real computation is taking that right hand side on the top of the blackboard and trying to just calculate this right hand side. So back to the calculation. The calculation dN/dt is equal to this thing over there, integral dx i over h-bar. I'll still copy it here-- h psi-star psi minus psi-star h psi. OK. Well, let's do this. This whole quantity is d-rho/dt, and let's see how much it is. Well, you would have of the following-- i over h-bar h psi-star. Well, h in detail is over there, so I'll put it here. Minus h squared over 2m d second dx squared of psi-star. So I'm beginning h psi star-- that's from the first term in the Hamiltonian-- times psi. And then from the other term in the Hamiltonian is the potential, so it would be plus V of x and t psi-star psi. V of x and t times psi-star times psi. This other term would be minus psi-star h psi, so it's going to be opposite sign to here, so plus h squared over 2m psi-star d second dx squared psi, and then minus psi-star V of x and t psi. Here, there was a little thing that I probably should have said before is that the potential is real, that's why it didn't get complex conjugated here. H psi would have a term V psi and we just conjugate the psi. OK, this is not so bad. In particular, you see that these two terms cancel. So that's neat. And now, this becomes the following-- this d-rho/dt has become minus ih over 2m d second psi-star dx squared times psi minus psi-star d second psi dx squared. OK. That's what d-rho/dt is and that's the thing that should be 0 when you integrate-- it doesn't look like anything equal to 0, and that was pretty much to be expected. So what do we have to do with this? Well, we have to simplify it more, and what could save us is, and it's usually the same thing that saves you all the time when you want to show an integral vanishes, many times, what you show is that it is a total derivative. So remember, we're computing here d-rho/dt, which is all this thing circled here, and it's to be integrated over x. So if I could show this is a derivative with respect to x, the total x derivative, then the integral would go to the boundaries and I would have a chance to make it 0. So what do we have? That derivative is indeed at boundaries, so d-rho/dt is equal to minus i h-bar bar over 2m. And look, this can be written as d/dx of something and what is that something? It's d psi-star dx times psi minus psi-star d second psi-- no not d second-- d first psi dx. The nice thing that happens here is that if you act with this d/dx, you get the second derivative terms that you had in there. But you also get derivatives acting here on d psi and here on d psi-star, but those will cancel. So it's a very lucky circumstance, it had better happen, but this is a total derivative with respect to x. And that's just very a good deal. So we're going to rewrite it a little more. I'll write it as the following way-- this whole factor is h over 2im, that's with its sign, output the d/dx outside-- I'll put an extra minus sign, so I will flip the order of these two terms-- psi-star d psi dx minus psi d psi-star dx. OK. Well, in many ways, the most difficult part of the calculation is over and it's now a matter of giving proper names to things. Why do I say that? Because look, want to see the finish line? It's here. We've shown this whole integrand is d/dx of that right hand side. Therefore, when you do the integral, you will have to go to the boundary with that thing, so you just need to see what happens to these quantities as x goes to infinity. And as x goes to infinity, we said that psi must go to 0 from the beginning. And d psi dx must not blow up, so if psi goes to 0 and d psi dx doesn't blow up, this whole thing goes to 0 and dN/dt is equal to 0 and you're done. So you're done with the conditions that we mention that the wave function must satisfy these conditions. But let's clean up this, because we've actually discovered an important quantity over there that is going to play a role. So here you see that you have a complex number minus its complex conjugate. So this is like z minus z-star, which is equal to 2i I times the imaginary part of z. If you subtract from a complex number its complex conjugate, you get the imaginary part only survives, but it's twice of it. So from here, this whole thing is 2i times the imaginary part of psi-star d psi dx. So d-rho/dt is equal to minus d/dx of what? Of 2i times the imaginary part of that, cancels the 2i, you get h-bar over m imaginary part of psi-star d psi dx. And this quantity is going to be called the current density. So the current density, you say, why the current density? We'll see in a minute. But let's write it here because it'll be very important. J of x and t is h-bar over m imaginary part of psi-star d psi dx. So if this is called the current density, you would have an equation here d-rho/dt is equal to minus dJ/dx d/dx of J dx, or d-rho/dt plus dJ/dx is equal to 0. Now this is called current conservation. You've seen it before in electromagnetism and we'll review it here in a second as well. So look what has happened. You began with the introduction of a charged density, which was a probability density, but you were led now to the existence of a current. And you've seen that in three dimensions, more than in one dimension-- I think probably in one dimension it doesn't look that familiar to you, but let me make sure you will recognize it in a few seconds. So think units here first. Units. What are the units of the wave function? Well, the wave function, you integrate over x squared and it gives you 1. So the integral of psi squared dx is equal to 1, so this has units of length, this must have units of 1 over square root of length. And what are therefore the units of psi-star d/dx psi, which is part of the current formula ? Well, 1 of the square root of length-- 1 over square root of length is one over length and another 1 over length is 1 over length squared. OK. And then you have h-bar, which has units of mL squared over T. Probably done that before already. And therefore, h over m has units of L squared over T. So the current has units of h over m-- the units of current has units of h over m, which is L squared over T-- times units of this whole thing, which is 1 over L squared, so at the end, 1 over T. And this means just probability per unit time. That's the units of current. Probability has no units, so we're dealing probability, those are pure numbers, but this is probability per unit time. So probability per unit time.

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep6_Dividing.txt

welcome to the steps of baking series this is a 13 part video series in which we take a closer look at each individual step of the bread baking process from weighing out your ingredients to cooling your bread down after baking each of these steps is just as important as the next and this week we'll talk about dividing dividing your dough into smaller pieces marks the end of bulk fermentation now unless you are making only one loaf of bread you will have to take the step there are a few things to consider when dividing your dough what tools are used to divide it is it going to be sticky do I need to dust my table flour should I use scales or just eyeball it now generally when making bread you want to use as little extra flour as possible so if your dough is not sticky don't use any flour now if you're only cutting your dough into two pieces it's quite easy to eyeball it but anything more than two I would suggest using scales for the sake of consistency and different sized breads will take different cooking times speed is another thing to consider if you have to divide your dough in many pieces it will take along the time or else you're dividing you don't still fermenting also consider the stickiness in the dough so if you are working with a particularly sticky dough then make sure you use some flour dust your scales dust your scraper dust your dough and dust your hands if need be because sticky dough will really slow down your dividing those home bakers obviously we don't really need to worry about this too much because we're not usually handling large amounts of dough I'm sure you've seen me use this blue scraper it is an essential tool for baking it's great for mixing your dough helping you take your dough out of the bowl it's great for helping you shave loaves of bread and of course dividing it's definitely one of the most important tools that I use and I would find it quite difficult to make bread without it now let's talk a little bit about the best ways of dividing your dough even professional Baker's will not always be able to divide the dough into the desired size straight from one cut so more often than not we would cut out though places on our scales realize that it's too large or too small then we have to adjust the size either by cutting a piece off or adding a piece on the two most important things to note is that when you add a piece of dough and make sure you add it into the same side of the dough so that you can fold it into the dough when you are pre shaping later on we want to hide those little bits inside the dough and always try to cut the dough piece as close to the required size as possible you don't want a loaf made out of many little pieces of dough this series being about the steps of baking let's talk a little bit about when you actually skip some steps as I mentioned before if you are making one loaf of bread and you are skipping the dividing stage you will use the whole piece of dough for that one bread so you don't need to divide it right so if you were making one loaf of bread you would skip straight to the pre shaping stage and then to benchrest and final shape or in the example I'm showing you now making sure butter and in the case of a ciabatta you are skipping the free shaping step benchrest step and you're also skipping the final shaping step dividing your dough is the final step before the final fermentation so with this one step you are not only dividing also pre shaping and final shaping your dough and there are various steps that can be skipped in bread baking process depending on kind of bread you're baking totalization can be skipped folding can be skipped pre shaping can be skipped dividing of course and final shape and also scoring can be skipped in case of breads like ciabatta pizza focaccia so check out the full playlist and all the videos on the steps of baking and then the next episode we'll talk about pre shaping and as always if you have any questions or suggestions write them down in comments if you are new to this channel consider subscribing I post two videos a week on Wednesdays and Sundays I don't only do recipes I do bread baking principles like this video so if you want to learn more about baking we'll see some cool recipes subscribe thank you for watching and I'll see you the next one

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep13_Cooling.txt

hello friends welcome back to the steps of baking series this is a 13 part video series in which we take a closer look at each individual step of the bread baking process from weighing out your ingredients to cooling your bread down after baking each of these steps is just as important as the next and all of them will affect the end result and today is the final episode cooling yes something as simple as cooling your bread down after baking can have a major impact on eating quality so make sure that bread has been cooled down properly and the best way to cool down your bread is at room temperature on a cooling rack and if you don't have a cooling rack you can lean your breads against something because if it will touch a solid surface you'll tend to sweat on the bottom and that'll make you go soggy now ideally you want to cool your bread down to room temperature before cutting into it but you know self-control is a difficult thing when you have a freshly baked loaf of bread in front of you and i am definitely guilty of cutting into warm loaves it's cool you can do that just make sure it's not steaming hot right out the oven because the inside structure and the flavor of your bread is still developing whilst it's cooling down if you cut into a hot loaf you will see that it's gummy inside so always make sure you let your bread cool down before cutting into it now there are some breads that require a really long cooling process and it's not just because of cooling rye bread for instance should be left for 24 hours before cutting if you cut it too early the flavor will not be there and it'll be really gummy inside when it comes to crackers it goes without saying they need to be dry and crispy so you better let them cool down there are definitely plenty of breads which are best eaten warm like flatbreads they're best when they're still warm and soft or these korean cream cheese buns they're filled with cheese you want the cheese to be stretchy right same goes for naans khachapuri pizza and technically speaking bread starts staling as soon as it comes out of the oven and of course a flatbread will become stale a lot quicker than the whole loaf of bread and if you want to prevent staining and improve your breads keeping quality you should use a preference that's why sourdough breads and rye breads and breads made with polish or bigger they keep for longer and they don't go mouldy and contrary to popular belief you should never keep your bread in the fridge because in the fridge you'll stale even quicker than outside and that's cooling for you i hope you enjoyed the steps of baking series this is the final episode i will link the whole playlist at the end of this video thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep2_Autolyse.txt

welcome to the steps of baking series there's a 13 part video series in which I delve deeper into each of the steps of baking sometimes overlooked I'm not given the second thought each of these steps is just as important as the next and for every bread you bake you will take most if not all of these steps so this is step number two or Talese or authorization now you might not have ever heard of this and that is because most of the time especially home bakers would not take this step but let me explain what it is and the benefits of it now normal bread dough contains flour water yeast and salt authorization is the mixing of the flour and water leaving out the yeast and salt and any other ingredients and the reason for doing this is that it's beneficial for gluten development and for the hydration of the flour this is especially important in high hydration breads then whole wheat breads flour contains two proteins called glutenin and gliadin it is when you add water to the flour and hydrated when gluten is created from those two proteins you can hydrate your flour whilst you are kneading your dough but if we are talking about the high hydration dough which contains a lot of water it will take a lot longer to knead it and get the gluten development if you were not to take the step in hydrate your flour and the best part is this makes our lives super easy especially when making bread by hand because as the flour is hydrating the gluten they will develop without you putting in any effort and it's as simple as that just mix your flour and water to a soggy mess till there's no more dry flour left as you can see it's very sticky and tears very easily then cover it up leave its hydrate from 30 minutes up to a few hours using this technique also will help you don't expand in the oven because the structure of it will be more relaxed so let's have a look at what we have here just an hour ago I mixed the flour and water and we saw that there was no stretchiness would break part easily look at it now it is full of gluten and at this point we would add the yeast and salt and continue kneading about just to work in those ingredients but the best part is there will be a lot easier to do this and will take a lot less time this is a 70% hydration dough which would normally be quite sticky but because we hydrated the flour it was a really gluten development it's a lot easier to work with it doesn't stick to my hands it doesn't stick to the table and it will take me no more than five minutes to get sufficient gluten development before I can start proofing my dough and that's the auto lease as simple as that now I'll show you an example of making the same kind of dough same amount of water same amount of flour but instead of leaving it to hydrate we will try to work the dough straight from the get-go so just before I will mix it I'll place the straight on my table try to knead it and at this point there's no structure to the dough just tears easily and it sticks to everything working though like this will take a lot more effort will take a lot longer you will still get the result that you are looking for don't get me wrong but the auto lease method is just helping him that will make our life much more easier this is especially important when you're making wholemeal bread or whole wheat breads the flour is more coarse in texture thus it takes more time to hydrate and you will know this if you ever made bread using a large proportion of wholemeal flour try to knead it by hand or in the machine there'll be a lot more sticky and developing the gluten will take a lot longer and if we are talking about mixing dough in a mixer time is very important because if you have to mix your dough for a long time the temperature riser and that will have a detrimental effect on your dough another thing to note is that mixing an auto lease dough in a mixer will take a lot less time will be easier to over mix so we keep that in mind and that's the second step of baking I hope it will come in handy for your next bake click the link on the screen to learn about all the other steps of baking thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep_14_Storage.txt

hello friends and welcome back to the channel in this episode talk about bread storage a few of you requested this video so here it is so when it comes to storage the first thing you need to think about what kind of bread is it the bread made with a preference will last quite a long time a basic dough like this will go stale quite quickly croissants filled with butter may stay soft for longer flatbreads they need covering up right away stay pliable so hop on your favorite tea towel and they'll stay soft cheese filled breads like these they'll stay soft for a while but they're best eaten warm ciabattas they're really crusty so as time goes on they'll only get crustier but it starts going stale as soon as it comes out of the oven and the smaller your bread the quicker we'll stale japanese milk bread like this i'll stay soft for a while a cheese filled boat a georgian kachopuri this should be stored in your stomach right away if you got crackers cool them down completely and pop them in a jar and that goes for any kind of bread if you want to store it needs to be cooled down completely a rye bread is definitely bread that will stay fresh for a long time so all things considered here's a couple examples i have a sandwich loaf it's nice and soft now but it's not gonna stay like that for a long time so i can wrap this up in cling film if it's warm it'll start sweating it'll get moldy real quick so make sure it's completely cooled down so that's one way of storing your bread well let's say you don't want to use cling film it would be a bit more eco-friendly if you use a tupperware box with lid an airtight container will work perfectly for most breads or maybe you go too much and you want to freeze it so now what what you can do when you want to freeze it you can slice the bread beforehand then put it in a sealed box and freeze it this way you can just pull out portions out of the freezer and pop it in a toaster comes out really nice like that but when it comes to storing any bread the main things to remember are the size of the bread smaller it is the quicker it will go stale if it contains a lot of fat you'll stay soft for longer sourdough breads and breads made with pre-ferment will last the longest because of the acidity in them flatbreads should be wrapped up right away and if you want to freeze bread slice it beforehand because it would be quite difficult to slice off a piece of frozen loaf right here's another example if i have sweet buns like these they're quite small they're not gonna last long so i like to do is just cover them up with detail make sure you use the funkiest tea towel you got that will ensure your buns will stay fresh and here's a sourdough bread it's been fermented for a long time it's nice and acidic and i want it to stay crusty if i wrap this up in cling film it's not going to have that crust anymore so my preferred storage method for bread like this is a good old bread bin just chuck it in there leave it it will stay crusty will stay fresh but the best advice i can give for storing bread is don't store your bread bake smaller batches bake more often you should enjoy it whilst it's fresh so if you bake smaller batches you will always get the pleasure of eating fresh bread and get the fun of baking it the best storage place for your bread is inside your belly so check out my channel for delicious recipes thank you for watching i'll see in the next one

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep7_Preshaping.txt

welcome to the steps of baking series this is a 13 part video series in which we take a closer look at each of the steps of the bread baking process from weighing out your ingredients to cooling your bread down after baking each of these steps is just as important as the next and all of them affect the outcome so in this episode we'll talk about pre-shaping pre-shaping is the step taken after dividing the dough the main purpose of pre-shaping is to organize the random pieces of dough into more consistent shapes it also gives us the chance to hide any little stray pieces of dough that we ended up with when we were dividing it and pre-shaping the dough pieces will also make the final shaping a lot easier the next step after pre-shaping is bench rest and we will talk about this in the next video let's talk a little bit about how to pre-shape now most of the time you would pre-shape your dough pieces into rounds and it's very simple you take a piece of dough you flatten it out you fold the edges over the middle going around in a circle until you reach point where you started but depending on what kind of dough you are making you might want to pre-ship them differently in this example i'm making bagels so when appreciate my dough into tight cylinders fold the edges over each other then fold over the top and bottom and then tighten against the table because bagels need to be rolled out quite long this will give me a very good starting point if i had shaped them into rounds it'd be a lot more difficult to roll them out along now besides just organizing your dough or pre-shaping it into a certain shape the pre-shaping step can also be used to give the dough more strength this will be high hydration sourdough bread it's quite loose and runny and i can use this pre-shaping step to give the dough extra folds and extra strength and in this case i'm using a stitching method which is actually a final shaping method but it works really well in adding loads of layers into the dough and it really helps out with making the dough stand up so the tighter the shape the stronger the dough but you don't want to tighten it too much otherwise it may rip now let's look at this example of a braided loaf i'm making a hala bread and it will consist of three strands and because i will have to roll the strands out long i'm also using a similar technique to the bagel pre-shaping so by pre-shaping them into tight cylinders i'm already getting them kind of into the final shape now it's very important to note that the tighter you shape your dough the longer you will have to rest before its final shaping and you need to keep that in mind because time of resting adds to proofing time and if your dough is rising rapidly then you can't afford to rest it for too long otherwise it will overproof in this example my dough is quite puffed up already it's rising very quickly so i can't afford to rest it for very long otherwise a lower proof so i'm doing a very light pre-shape i'm not creating a lot of tension my main purpose here is to shape it into a ball so it's all the same shape that's it now there are a few steps in the baking process that can be skipped depending on what kind of dough you're making and pre-shaping can be skipped in the case of ciabatta for example as most of the time it will be divided into the desired shape straight after bulk fermentation and then left to proof for the final time before baking now if you are making only one loaf of bread or for instance for catcher in this case then pre-shaping is not always necessary you just pop it out on your tray leave it proof then you just stretch it out a little bit more just before baking and that would be it also if you are making a loaf of bread which does not require any more folds then you also might just go straight from bulk fermentation to final shaping and also it's worth noting about rye bread because there's not much gluten in this it doesn't require any more faults and the shaping is just done by collecting it into a ball so you'll be shaped and placed in a basket straight after mixing and the pre-shaping step would be obsolete and that's all about pre-shaping quite simple right if you have any questions or suggestions write them down in comments if you want to learn more about the steps of baking check the playlist at the end of this video if you are new to this channel consider subscribing i post two videos a week about bread and all things baking thank you for watching and i'll see in the next one

The_Steps_Of_Baking

Steps_of_Baking_Ep9_Shaping.txt

welcome to the steps to baking series this is a 13 part video series in which we take a closer look at each individual step of the bread baking process from weighing out your ingredients to cooling your bread down after baking each of these steps is just as important as the next and each of them will affect the end result and this week we'll talk about final shaping this is the step that comes after bench resting and will determine the final shape of your bread b round loaves oblong loaves baguettes focaccia ciabatta for gas pizza rolls buns flatbreads hachapuris stuffed breads braided loaves or soda bread it could be anything there's a technique for each of those like i said earlier each of the baking steps affects the next so how easily and how successfully your final shape will be will be directly determined by the fermentation the pre-shaping the interesting if your dough is super tough and you have not layer rest for long enough before taking this step it will be near impossible to shape properly and besides just struggling you might just end up tearing your dough and that'll be an imperfection shaping any kind of love is a kind of mastery in itself which i can honestly say i have a lot to learn about still they say that to shape a baguette properly you need to shape about a thousand of them and that probably goes for most breads but we're home bakers so we let things slide you know and if it doesn't end up looking amazing at least it will taste good right or we can always start with something easy like pita breads and only later move on to high hydration sourdough bread that needs to be stitched and shaped tightly so it doesn't fall flat when it's baking now my videos are mostly aimed at beginners so i have plenty of videos on my channel for basic dough like these pretzels start with something simple like this and once you feel more confident move on to something like this khachapuri which is a cheese filled bread it's like a georgian pizza it's absolutely delicious but whatever you do remember that practice makes perfect and don't worry if you mess something up most of the time you'll still probably have two or three pieces to practice on now here's an example of the simplest shaping that you can imagine soda bread you take the piece of dough you roll it into a bowl and that's your shape done or check out these sourdough biores similar to a bagel but the hole doesn't go right through and it's filled with delicious filling of onions and meat you can find recipes for all of these breads on my youtube channel where you'll find details on how exactly to shape them the main things to remember are after shaping you should cover your dough so it doesn't dry out during final fermentation when shaping your dough make sure it doesn't stick use adequate amount of flour but don't use too much because that'll make the dough slide around and impossible to shape if it's a wet and stretchy dough shape it tightly if it's so dry though don't shape it too tight if your dough is too tight you might have a hard time expanding in the oven in the next video we'll talk about final fermentation as always if you have any questions or suggestions write them down in comments and check out all the other videos in the steps of baking playlist thank you for watching and i'll see in the next one

Literature_Lectures

9_Jack_Kerouac_On_the_Road_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. I've put two quotations on the board for your consideration. The first is from Norman Mailer. This is from Advertisements for Myself. He says, "Jack Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty, and a sense of the novel." Of course, some people might apply those adjectives to Mailer himself, but that's what Mailer said. "On the Road"--this is from a critic named George Dardess; this is from a 1974 article about On the Road--"is a love story, not a travelogue and certainly not a call to revolution." So, I put these up here to sort of sit in the background of what I'm going to talk to you about today about the ultimate payoff for Kerouac's effort and the Beats' effort, more generally, to imagine a language that is the adequate analog to experience, a language that is itself a kind of experience, and further, that is an ecstatic, mystical kind of experience. Last time, in addition to introducing that idea of language to you, I conducted a reading of the first part of the novel where I suggested that Kerouac tells a story that is not so much about the escape from an American consumer culture of the postwar period as it is a story about the absolute immersion in a culture of consumption. So, what Sal Paradise consumes on the road extends from pie, as I demonstrated to you by the multiple references, the simple food that the body needs and wants; to girls, all the women that he tries to sleep with and that Dean tries to sleep with over the course of the novel; to money and the consumer goods that come with it in order to build a middle-class American life with his aunt in New York--remember he buys the icebox, the first electric icebox of their family, the first refrigerator of their family, when he comes back from his first road trip--to a kind of mystical access to America, a history of jazz. There's a whole set of mystical cultural artifacts that Sal Paradise and his friends consume over the course of this novel. So, I want to begin just by pointing to you, on page 297, a somewhat more complex example of what this looks like toward the end of the novel. This is at the bottom of that page. They're driving out of Mexico, Sal and Dean, and they meet indigenous people along the road. As we climbed the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. They hailed us desperately. We stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them. Moreover, they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. "Look at those eyes," breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus and they stared unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. "They"ve only recently learned to sell these crystals since the highway was built about ten years back. Up until that time this entire nation must have been silent." That's Dean. In this fantasy about the indigenous girls, what you see is a commitment to language and the activity of selling, buying and selling, entirely entwined with one another. So, the fantasy here is that it's selling and buying that produces in them a language that looks very much like the language that's frequently attributed to Dean: frantic and silly, almost silly. Remember, as the novel goes on and Dean gets more and more hyper, sort of "wigged out," his language becomes more and more frantic, and more and more actually silly. So this is here attributed to them. There are other fantasies at work here, obviously. One is that they are reading a kind of Christian essentialism into these people, into their eyes. They see the Virgin Mary, and they see Jesus. There is a whole mystical objectification of these people that's going on, that's allied to the religious strains of this novel, which I'm going to pick up again a little bit later on in my lecture today. So, this is a more complex and, sort of, dense example of how that consumer, that push to consume, that consumer sense drives and motivates the novel and plays out in what they see when they are on the road. In that passage that I read to you when they're in the mountains in Colorado drunk, yelling, they call themselves "mad, drunken Americans." Well, what does America mean in this novel? And what does it mean to be an American in this novel? So, that's the question I'd like to take up today first. Coming from Lolita, the vision of America in On the Road looks quite different. In Lolita the vision of America is minute; it's detailed; it's concrete. Remember, for example, the Komfee Kabins that Nabokov gives us as Lolita and Humbert tour around: the painful, luminous, tiny detail of all that they see on the road. Think to yourself. Do you see any of that kind of detail in this book? I see shaking heads. No. We really don't. What do we see instead? What America do we see? I'm going to look back to a passage I talked about in a different vein last time, on 26 and 27, just for one quick example. This is, remember, when he's hitched a ride in this truck, and it's a truck bed full of men who have hitched rides. And he's talking with Mississippi Gene. This is at the bottom of 26: There is something so indubitably reminiscent of Big Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene's demeanor that I said, "Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard somewhere?" And he said, "You mean that tall fellow with the big laugh?" "Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston, Louisiana." "That's right. Louisiana Slim he's sometimes called. Yes, Sir. I sure have met Big Slim. And he used to work in the east Texas oil fields?" "East Texas is right and now he's punching cows," and that was exactly right, and still I couldn't believe Gene could really have known Slim whom I have been looking for more or less for years. In this scene Big Slim Hazard is an American type, just as Mississippi Gene is himself. Their names tell you that they're almost cartoonishly American types. The fact that Mississippi Gene knows this vague person, Big Slim Hazard, gives you the feeling that America is a tiny community in which these types loom large, that anyone from anywhere--if he's the right kind of American--will know the other members of that American tribe of types. So, Mississippi Gene knows the America that Sal knows, and it's America populated by these larger-than-life figures. The very vagueness of the description: "You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?" How many people can we imagine who might fit that description? It's like telling your horoscope; if you're general enough, you're going to make a match. So, Sal is convinced--he wants to be convinced; he desperately wants to be convinced--that Mississippi Gene knows Big Slim Hazard. Let's look at another example on page 59. This is something else Sal wants. I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children--[That's Chad and Dean and the other Denver natives they have among them in their gang] and in the sunny cherry blossom morning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise, the whole gang, and Dean ragged and dirty, prowling by himself in his preoccupied frenzy. There is a nostalgia here, not for the past of the old West. It's important that Denver is in the West. The nostalgia here is not for the old West, but for the young West. The West in On the Road is an area of youth. It's always, in American lore, been an area of adventure and imagination, but this is well after the end of Manifest Destiny. There is no border in the West. So Sal has to reinvent one, and in some sense it's a border of time. It's a spring of youth that's inaccessible, somehow, to Sal, that these men he's with who are so exciting to him as their own kind of western American type, that they blossomed and grew in this particular place, and he wants to have been there with them. So, in a way, by longing to be where they were when they were children, by longing to inhabit that time, as well, he wants to become them. So, this is just one of the ways that Sal longs to assimilate them to himself. The other big way, of course, is through Dean's language, but this is another way. It's a vision of the West as a place of, generally, male youth. When he's back in New York--this is on page 125--his New York friends meet his road friends, and are delighted by them. This is one of his friends: "'Sal, where did you find these absolutely wonderful people? I've never seen anyone like them.' 'I found them in the West.'"So, there is that sense of the West as a source, and what he's going to do is take them back East. So, the West is a fountain of youthful energy that Sal continually draws back to the East, to New York. Sal is never really going to be gone from New York that long. He never really wants to leave, and one sign of it is that icebox, but the other sign of it is that he continually returns and takes these people with him. And part of the pleasure for him is to do that transaction, to enliven the old East with the young West. These are all stereotypes of America, but Sal really believes them and really inhabits them. Now look on 172. This is Sal in one of his major moments of vision. He's in New Orleans, and he's on Market Street. Oh, sorry. He's in San Francisco, and he's on Market Street. This is the middle of 172. I looked down Market Street. I didn't know whether it was that or Canal Street in New Orleans. It led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42^(nd) Street in New York leads to water and you never know where you are. I thought of Ed Dunkel's ghost on Times Square. I was delirious. I wanted to go back and leer at my strange Dickensian mother in the hash joint. I tingled all over from head to foot. It seemed I had a whole host of memories going back to 1750 in England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body. "No," that woman seemed to say with that terrified glance. "Don't come back and play your honest, hardworking mother. You are no longer like a son to me and like your father, my first husband, 'ere this kindly Greek took pity on me." The proprietor was a Greek with hairy arms. "You are no good, inclined to drunkenness and routs and final disgraceful robbery of the fruits of my 'umble labors in the haberdashery. Oh, Son. Did you not ever go on your knees and pray for deliverance from all your sins and scoundrel's acts? Lost boy, depart. Do not haunt my soul. I have done well forgetting you. Reopen no old wounds. Be as if you had never returned and looked in to me to see my laboring humilities, my few scrubbed pennies, hungry to grab, quick to deprive, sullen, unloved, mean-minded son of my flesh. Son! Son!" It made me want to think of the big Pop Vision in Graetna with Old Bull. And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on with a phantom dogging its own heels and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright mind essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. That language at the end there is pure Allen Ginsberg. So, that's that incantatory Beat mysticism. It's a mysticism of emptiness, in the end, but what fills that emptiness as we lead up to that moment is this fantasy of trans-historical existence, that he can somehow embody a whole human story across time. Where's that story coming from? Well, this is a Dickensian mother. It's Dickens in part, that stereotype of old London, of the urban working class, but it's not just Dickens. Moby Dick is here too. If you look at that litany of streets that lead down to the water, any of you who have read Moby Dick will recall that Ishmael talks at the beginning, before he gets on the Pequod, he talks about how streets that lead to water draw you inevitably, and he talks about all the streets in New York that end in water. And he has this long meditation on that aspect of city geography. Well, here is Sal having that meditation, too. So, what you see in this passage is not only a sort of mystical trans-historical fantasy, but a literary one. He's getting his mythology not just from the cupboard of stereotypes that are proper to American self-conception. He's looking back to literary stories, too, that he can assimilate into his experience and read through, experience through, so that every little thing he experiences, like this moment of abandonment. Dean has gone off with Camille; Marylou is off somewhere else; he's starved; he doesn't have any place to go. But it becomes a moment of vision, and it can be a moment of vision because he has these ways of layering over that experience with mythic and literary significance. Finally, on 147, we have another example of this, and it shows us something even a little different, or it pushes the point further. This is in New Orleans: There was a mythic wraith of fog--[this is the middle of that big paragraph] over the brown waters that night together with dark driftwoods and across the way New Orleans glowed orange bright with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly, fog-bound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, 'til you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night. The same Negroes plied the shovel and sang. Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deck hand. This made me think of Mississippi Gene too and as the river poured down from mid America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad, that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One. Strange to say, too, that night we crossed the ferry with Bull Lee a girl committed suicide off the deck either just before or just after us. We saw it in the paper the next day. Here you get a dream, not just of trans-historical time, the old Spanish ships that turn out just to be freighters from Sweden and Panama; you get another nod to Melville, Cereno ships (Benito Cereno is one of Melville's famous novels). "That everything I would ever know was One." The oneness that he is looking for is partly that oneness of mystical emptiness that we saw in the last passage. But here we get the sense of the racial oneness that comes out in some of the other parts of the novel: the Negroes plying the shovel and singing, another American type. But this is a type with which Sal longs to merge. And this is how--on 179 and 180--this is how he images a way out of himself. So this is on 179. So, I'm moving from the question of "What does America look like; what's the mythic vocabulary that Sal is using?" to, "How does he find his identity as an American?" So, first he makes America mythic, rather than specific (if we compare him back to Nabokov), and then he enters into that mythology through acts of identification. And here is one of the most important. At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad, red earth. I passed the Windsor Hotel where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the Depression '30s. As of yore, I looked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who looks like your father in places like Montana or you look for a friend's father where he is no more. At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching along the lights of 27^(th) and Welton in the Denver colored section wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. He goes on in this vein for that whole paragraph if you just skim down. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. Well, this is hugely stereotypical, hugely appropriative. Sal wants to take the entire life experience of a group of people and suck it into himself. Now, you want to ask yourself: What is the sadness that motivates this appropriation; why does he want to become the Negro? He says in another moment, "I was Mexican." He's always trying to be more exotic than himself, than simple Sal Paradise. Well, Baldwin had something to say about this. James Baldwin characterized this passage as "absolute nonsense, and offensive nonsense, at that. And yet, there is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin. And it is thin, thin because it It does not refer to reality, but to a dream." That's what it is: "It does not refer to reality, but to a dream." And he says of his own writing, "I had tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Negro, and no one had been able to listen. They wanted their romance." Well, I think that's a pretty clear-eyed view, and a clear indictment, of what Kerouac is doing through the character of Sal. Sal in this moment becomes so naïve, naïve of history, of actual lived history of his own country. But, as you've seen, the mythic quality of America has pushed all of that aside. So, it's not just the Komfee Kabins that we don't see; it's the whole history of slavery. And when he goes picking in the cotton fields, he imagines that he could be a slave. And then he makes some comments about how, well, he could never pick cotton fast enough; he's just not able to do it as black men are. So, it's motivated by a huge blindness about the racial history of the United States in any of its detail. That sense of the oneness, I think, points to why and how he makes that illusion, the oneness. He felt that it was all one. The oneness is elevated from this sense of appropriation, to a mystical level. So that oneness looks something like the Buddhism that Kerouac studied for a time; it looks like something more than the effort for Sal just to be something exotic. It looks like, by entering into that oneness, by adopting all these different identities, that Sal participates into some larger mystical body. But, what is that larger mystical body? We have been given one candidate: that it's America, that it's somehow America. And I want you to keep this in mind and make a note to yourself. Think about this vision of an American mystical oneness when you go to read Crying of Lot 49 'cause you're going to see something quite similar there. There's actually a wonderful episode in On the Road that is nearly a carbon copy of what you'll see later in Crying of Lot 49, where Dean looks down on Salt Lake City at night, and he looks at the pattern of the lights down below him. Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49 will sit up on a bluff overlooking San Narciso, and she'll look down at the pattern of light. And it's an important moment in that novel, a moment of religious revelation, but what's being revealed remains in Pynchon quite difficult to pin down. Here, it's equally vague. So, on 5, back to that question. What can motivate this kind of effort? On page 181 he says: There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment and white sorrows and all that. The old Negro man had a can of beer in his coat pocket which he proceeded to open and the old white man enviously eyed the can and groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can too. How I died. I walked away from there. [And then this wonderful transition] I went to see a rich girl I knew. In the morning she pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of her silk stocking and said, "You've been talking of a trip to Frisco. That being the case, take this and go have your fun." So all of my problems were solved. Sal needs the rich girl to keep his vision fueled, but the white sorrows are part of what it pays for. The rich girl provides him with---in a way--with these white sorrows; she funds them. You can have white sorrows, whatever those really are. You can have white sorrows if you have the hundred-dollar bill to send you off on one of these odysseys. You're not pinned down to a place working for a living. I'm not going to talk about jazz, and the way it figures, but I hope that you will have a chance to talk about that in section because that brings together several elements of what's important in the novel. I want to focus now on the sadness. I don't know if you noticed how often that adjective appears in the novel. Did any of you notice that? "Sadness… sadness…sad night." One of the saddest things, after Dean and Sal get into their only fight, really, is the uneaten food on Dean's plate, the sadness of the uneaten food. What's sad in this novel, I think, is the way the specificity of persons pushed back against that general collapse into mystical communing with one another. What's sad: Dean's wife, Camille, and their baby. It's sad. He abandons them, and she is left with them. All the women in Dean's life call him to the carpet and tell him of all his sins. That's a sad moment in the novel, a moment of difficulty, a moment of specificity also. What else is sad? It's sad when Dean leaves Sal feverish in Mexico. He's off. He has his girls to chase, his wife to go back to, to divorce, whichever one is which. He has all of these machinations to attend to. The friendship between the two, in the end, doesn't seem to mean very much, or, at least in that moment it doesn't seem to mean very much. If George Dardess is right that this is a love story, it's the love story between Sal and Dean. And I hope, as you are reading, you notice that chapter opening where once again Dean appears at the door when Sal shows up, and he's totally naked. I hope you noticed that. It's the third time that we see that so there is an eroticism between them. And there is this heartbreaking love that Sal has for Dean, and, if you track that through, the major turning points in the second two thirds of the novel are moments when Sal makes it clear to Dean that he actually cares about him. And I can point you to some of these pages. This is on 189. I'm not going to do them all, 'cause there is something else I want to show you today. This is after Dean has been, sort of, called to the carpet, and he says: The -[This is on 188] the thumb became the symbol of Dean's final development. He no longer cared about anything as before but now he also cared about everything in principle. That's such a great encapsulation of not caring about any specific thing, but still being incredibly invested. But this is mirrored by Sal's very specific investment in Dean, and this is on the bottom of the facing page, on 189: Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said. "Come to New York with me. I've got the money." I looked at him. My eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. So, he finally realizes that Sal actually has a specific love for him, not caring about him somehow in principle, which is the way of course that Dean cares. So, this is the sadness of the novel. It's this unrequited love; Dean is never capable of loving Sal in the same way that Sal loves Dean. And, at the very end, when Sal has to leave Dean on the street, I actually love how this works. He's in the back of a Cadillac. His friend, Remi, is taking him in a limousine to a concert, a Duke Ellington concert. Remi won't have Dean in the car, so the car drives on. Sal is with a new girlfriend, Laura, about--to whom he's told all about Dean. "Dean, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he bought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I had told everything about Dean, began almost to cry. "Oh, we shouldn't let him go like this. What'll we do?" Old Dean's gone I thought and out loud I said, "He'll be all right," and off he went to the sa--and off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over 3,000 miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway except to see me. In that moment Sal supplies the answer for why Dean came, "never knew why he had come anyway," and then Sal supplies "except to see me," and his own pain and tears are routed through Laura. It's Laura who cries at Dean's abandonment, while he maintains this composure, this masculine composure: "he'll be all right." But, the sadness here is surely Sal's. By the end, the language of experience--this is on 304--the language of experience that Dean represents is completely exhausted. This is how Dean talks at the very end: He couldn't talk anymore. He hopped and laughed. He stuttered and fluttered his hands and said, "Ah, ah, you must listen to, hear." We listened all ears, but he forgot what he wanted to say. "Really, listen. Ahem. Look. Dear Sal, sweet Laura. I've come, I've gone, but wait, ah, yes," and he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands. "Can't talk no more. You understand that it is, or might be, but listen." We all listened. He was listening to sounds in the night. "Yes," he whispered with awe. "But you see, no need to talk anymore and further." Dean's language has gone from this sort of quasi-academic gibberish of the beginning of the novel, to this completely fragmented, broken version of the "yes"s and "ah"s and "wow"s of those early, ecstatic days. So, Sal's language, by the end, has absorbed some of this, and yet gone on to honor a kind of coherence that Dean cannot inhabit anymore, or maybe that Dean never inhabited. So, the last sentence of the book, which I want to read to you--I think I have time--just because this is the language that Sal comes out of it with, or that Kerouac comes out with as, the payoff for opening language, in the ways that Dean's language of immediacy represents. So this is one sentence, page 307, the last paragraph. So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old, broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable, huge bulge over the West Coast and all that road going, all the people dreaming and the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry and tonight the stars will be out and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in and nobody, nobody knows what is going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty. So, he's blasted open the syntax of that sentence, piled clause upon clause upon clause, phrase on phrase, to include that whole road in the one sentence. So, if the dream of Kerouac's language is to pour experience into language and make language immediate, this sentence is a very fine example of the payoff. There is a kind of goofiness at the center of it, "God is Pooh Bear." What does that mean? God is just a toy? God is a children's story? But then there is that lyrical, elegiac, always sad sense of longing, and the excess of the end: "Dean Moriarty…Dean Moriarty's father…Dean Moriarty." You can't just say it once. You have to try to fill that void by saying it two times and by invoking his father a third time. So the excess and the longing are there, each trying to drive or satisfy the other. Now, if we have any doubts that On the Road is mythic in itself, I just want to show you quickly two things. In 2007, On the Road had its fiftieth anniversary of publication. It was written in 1951 and it was published in 1957 by Viking. So last year we were treated to these two books. One thing that fascinates me about them is that they are examples of how publishing houses rely on known names for making money. So, Viking has On the Road in their backlist, so they can make new copies. The pagination of this is exactly the same. All they did was bind; they made a retro cover, and they bound the original book review from the New York Times into the front. They just printed that in, and then they just reproduced the text again, so it becomes a sort of keepsake book. I'm not sure that a lot of people are going to read this book, but a lot of people might buy it as a keepsake. This is the original scroll version. This is like the sop to scholars. This is for the scholarly buyer. This is for people like me (or not like me). This is the original typescript put into pages, but, as I think I mentioned in my first lecture, Kerouac wrote the manuscript for On the Road on one long, 120-foot roll of paper. He just stuck it in the typewriter. No paragraphs, no nothing; he just went. So, this book reproduces that, just breaking it as the pages demand (instead of actually giving us a scroll, which would be pretty cool). But what else they do, is they lard it with scholarly articles. There are--let's see--three scholarly articles, and then there is a note on the editing of the text and there are suggestions for further reading. It makes it into a real literary object, sort of like a modernist text. And what I love here is that, apparently, at the very beginning of the scroll, Kerouac made a typo, and the editor says, "I read it. I let the typo stand." Here it is, the editor, Howard Cunnell: "Because it so beautifully suggests the sound of a car misfiring before starting up for a long journey, I have left uncorrected the manuscript's opening line, which is 'I met met Neal not long before my father died.'" There is the fantasy that the writing approximates the actual car trip, "met met." Oh, "it sounds like a car starting. I'm going to leave that in there." So, the editors just buy--completely buy--the text's own mythology and produce all this apparatus around it to help us believe it, too. Now, the last thing I want to show you is on a less skeptical note. If you ever doubt that the legend and the dream of On the Road is alive and is powerful in art, literary art and visual art, today, all you need to do is look at a very recent work of digital art. This is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which is a collaboration of an American man and a Korean woman who create online digital artworks. And this is one of them from 2002 called Dakota, and I think you will see immediately how and why it is related to On the Road. It's also related to Ezra Pound's Cantos, but I'm not going to burden you with that right now. What I want you to do is just think about this. It runs about six minutes, so I'm going to let that go now. All right. Okay. So, if you ever doubted that the dream of an immediate language that is somehow the correlate to jazz and experience, that's your dream living on. Okay.

Literature_Lectures

20_Philip_Roth_The_Human_Stain_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Today I'm going to talk about censorship in the United States since 1945, in the period that we're studying, and I'm going to connect that with The Human Stain and some of my general thoughts about Roth's work at the very end of lecture. So, I'll give you a little bit of history and then a little bit of meditation on Roth. I asked you, for today, to go around to the various bookstores in New Haven, choose one and go, and observe what you saw there. And in particular I asked you to think about what you are not seeing there. So, does anyone want to tell me what they saw on their little observation trip? What did you observe? Yes.Student: I went to Labyrinth, and they had a ton of history, historiography, cultural studies, all in the front, that seemed very deliberately diverse.Professor Amy Hungerford: Diverse in what way?Student: Diverse, culturally, as far as the history books that I looked at. They ranged anything from Germany during the Weimar Republic, to the history of tragedy, to death in the Atlantic slave trade, to all sorts of other things, though mainly European. What was not there, which I found interesting, which I looked for specifically, because I thought it might not be there, was Mein Kampf. Professor Amy Hungerford: Did you look back in the stacks too? Uh huh.Student: Yeah, I looked in the stacks. I didn't see it there, or in the library at all, so I guess they don't support Hitler, which I approve of.Professor Amy Hungerford: You approve of Mein Kampf not being in Labyrinth bookstore. Student: I approve of not supporting Hitler, I guess, Mein Kampf… Professor Amy Hungerford: Very good. Okay. What else? What else did people notice? What did you notice about the bookstore? Yes.Student: There is a table that has works by Yale graduates.Professor Amy Hungerford: Which bookstore did you go to?Student: Barnes and Noble. Yeah, so just clearly trying to sell to the market they know.Professor Amy Hungerford: By Yale graduates. But here's a question: not by Yale professors?Student: I'm not sure.Professor Amy Hungerford: It's a significant difference. What else did you notice? Yes. Local market. What else did you notice? Someone--Yes, Eli.Student: I guess that I really haven't thought about this this much, but how much of a decision it is to decide what kind of shelf the book goes in, like history versus philosophy, and I guess it's probably the publishers who do that, or, I don't know, but--Professor Amy Hungerford: Well, this is a really important question: where to shelve the book. Now, it's not just about categories, although it is partly about categories, what subject matter does a book belong to; it's also about what kind of shelf, physically. So those tables that we're thinking about in Labyrinth, with that array of literature, who chose that? Does anyone know who chose that literature to put on that table? I can tell you in a minute. One question is: who chose that? Now, those tables are in Barnes and Noble, too. So, you walk into the bookstore on the ground level, and there are all those tables, and the stacks go up really high. There are all these elaborate ways of getting books' covers to face you. Okay. Then there are all the stacks and shelves up on the upper level, and those books are interspersed with smaller displays. So, if you go up there, you'll begin to see some very interesting things. There's a little table, for example, up on the right. Maybe you noticed this, right as you come up the stairs in Barnes and Noble, and it's promoted as "urban literature." Well, in my experience, having seen it over the years, it's really just code for black writers, somehow, so it's all these books about the black history of New Haven, or whatever. So, you have these little tables around. Now, the big tables in front of Barnes and Noble, who chooses what goes on there? That space is bought and paid for by publishers, bought and paid for. It's part of the contract with the publisher to stock that book that it be displayed in certain ways. You know those nice discounts that you get, 20% off the New York Times bestseller books when they're in hardback? Those are possible at Barnes and Noble because of the huge buying power of that bookstore. So, they buy in huge volume. Now, a store like Labyrinth or its predecessor, Book Haven, wasn't able to have that kind of volume in sales, and so they couldn't negotiate with a publisher that sort of discount. So, that means that a smaller bookstore, because of its smaller buying power, can't provide a competitive price in a market where Barnes and Noble is right next door. Now, there were ways that independent bookstores try to compensate for that, especially in this market, by giving discounts to faculty members stocking their books at the bookstore. This is somewhat controversial, although it's Barnes and Noble that has tried to make it controversial by bringing it up with the university and saying, "Now, isn't this a kind of bribery?" But that's the way that a store like Labyrinth, or like Book Haven before it, was able to try to be price competitive among people it knew wanted to buy from them, those professors who stock their book at an independent bookstore. So, back to this question of who decides what's on the table: at Labyrinth I went in, and I said, "Who decides what's on this table?" And they said, "Oh, she's over there," and I went and talked to her and I said, "How do you decide what's on the table?" She said, "Well, you know, I had a good general education as a young person, and I kind of know who's who in the intellectual circles in Europe and in the United States. And so I browse the lists, and I talk to sales reps when they come in, and I read, and I look at what certain courses are stocking, and I see what people are reading on campus, and then I decide." That's really different from that space being bought and paid for by a publisher as part of a marketing agreement. Those tables are very powerful, for browsers, in shaping what browsers might possibly buy, or think about, when they come in to a bookstore. So, that space is particularly key to a bookstore's presence, culturally, in the community. And Sarah's point, about the Yale graduates on the bookshelf: that is a nod to Barnes and Noble's immediate context. So, there is that local marketing piece. But, think about this. There are just a few fiction buyers who work with publishers to decide what novels will end up in Barnes and Noble. So, writers, when they're thinking about, "can I sell my book?" instead of thinking, "I wonder if I can impress the owner of the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park in Chicago," --a very famous, huge, wonderful bookstore, not a chain--instead of saying, "I want to sell my book in Chicago. It's set there, and maybe it'll be appealing. I wonder if I can impress the owner of that bookstore," and having a strategy that addresses those kinds of individual circumstances in different spaces-- Powell's in Seattle, Labyrinth in New York--they have to say, "I wonder if I can impress the buy from Barnes and Noble." So, instead of many people making that decision about whether a novel is worthy of being promoted, it's one person. That person becomes extremely powerful in shaping what literary texts reach us, what comes to our attention through the bookstore. Now, have you ever wondered, as you're driving down the street, why there might be a Dunkin' Donuts here, and a Dunkin' Donuts just two blocks away? Have you ever noticed that? There are various stores that you'll see this: gas stations sometimes, fast food restaurants, sometimes Wal-Mart. Bookstores are another that you will sometimes see this. Why is that? Well, what they're doing is competing in an overwhelming way with another store in that market. Usually this happens when they're trying to drive another store out of business. So, they're a big enough chain, they can absorb losses from an unproductive second store to saturate a market, and then they can absorb the closing of that second store once the competitor has been driven out of business. So that's why that market saturation happens. It's not because they think it's going to be profitable, that there's another hundred-percent increase when they add that second store one block over. It's all about market saturation. It's getting it as close to a hundred percent as possible. So, those kinds of tactics are possible for chain stores, and they are not possible for independent bookstores. And this is how many independent bookstores have been taken off the map in our cities and in the suburbs. So, this is one way that censorship comes to us: not in that old-fashioned way of censorship laws, but in a new way, market censorship. This has always been part of how things work in a capitalist economy. It's true that in the past literary enterprises--be they selling books or writing books or publishing books--had to make a profit in order to stay afloat. But the way that profit was made has changed from the early twentieth century until this point, and I'm going to say more about that. So, just by going in to the bookstore, I want you to think about--the next time you go in, think about how things are being presented to you. Now, how many of you get most of the books you buy--not for classes…well, let's just ask this, blanket, and then I'll break it down--how many of you get most of the books you buy from a bookstore? Still quite a few of you. How many of you get them mostly over the internet? Okay, not a majority. Taking out classes, books you buy for pleasure, your own decision to buy them, how many of you are still buying those in bookstores? Okay, actually a lot of you. So, that really, even, tips the scale in favor of bookstores, so that's interesting to me. I wasn't sure what you would say. That suggests that bookstores are still powerful purveyors of culture; they still shape what you think about and what you read. It's browsing, or maybe that you've read about something, and you go looking for it, that brings you in to the bookstore. Censorship does have a legal history in this part of the century. And so now I want to just give you a little rundown of that. So, this is actually a title of a chapter of a book that I will be writing on the post-45 novel, and I'm going to have this as the last chapter of that book. The reason for that is that censorship and what I'm calling censure--that's the public outcry against literature, even not on legal grounds--is a way for the culture to speak back to the literary. So, I spend a lot of time in this class, and in my teaching in general, and in my writing, talking about what books say to us. But what do we say back to those books as a society? Well, censorship and its companion, censure, do a lot of that talking back. So, there are two sides of access to literature. I've just been talking a little bit about market constraints on what can be published and read, and now I'm going to talk a little bit about legal constraints. I'm going to get back to the market constraints in a little while. Since the early twentieth century, a lot of the legal constraints on publishing and distributing literature have eased. In the 1870s, the Comstock laws in the United States aimed to regulate the use of the mails for the dissemination of obscene materials. These laws were used in 1914 to indict Margaret Sanger for sending information about contraception across state lines, and she had to flee, and she left the country to protect herself. So, just the description of how contraception worked was a violation of the Comstock laws; so of course we're happily out of that moment. In 1933, for literature there was a major decision by Judge Woolsey declaring that James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene. Often censorship in literature would have to do with the import of literature into the United States. So, this is sort of on the same logic as the Comstock laws. The Comstock laws regulate the traveling of obscene literature across state lines. Customs regulations regulated obscenity coming in to the United States. Why is obscenity important? Well, obscenity is largely recognized by legal scholars as not being protected by the Fourteenth Amendment; it is not protected speech. So, that's why it was important for someone who wanted to keep Ulysses out of American hands to call it obscene. Now, it's very interesting to read what Woolsey says about Ulysses. It just shows you how the learned reading of literature comes to have a legal impact in the world. So, this is Woolsey on Joyce: Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success, to show how the screen of consciousness, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions, carries, as it were, on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also on a penumbral zone residual of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association, from the domain of the subconscious. He's talking about the stream-of-consciousness method of narration in Ulysses. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and the behavior of the character which he is describing, and I'm going to skip down. He goes on to detail more about Joyce's technique: "It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks, and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented." So, here, Woolsey takes a very serious view of Joyce's artistic project, and he takes as the mark of its success what he calls the loyalty of Joyce to that project, of showing exactly what characters think in their subconscious associations, as those rise into consciousness and into language. That principle is furthered in the United States in 1957 with a case called Roth. It's Roth v. United States, and in this case Woolsey's approach to the literary is enshrined in American law, affirmed as a precedent. So, according to the Roth case, something can be judged obscene only if it meets three conditions, and those are these: The books' descriptions of nudity or sex must go beyond the limits of taste established by community standards. So that phrase, "community standards," will become very important in later law, and I'll mention how in a minute. "It must not appeal to the interests of the average adult." So, you have to be really aberrant in order to meet this standard; it can't appeal to the interests of the average adult. That's what makes it obscene, so--I don't know--necrophilia, maybe that counts. And lastly--this is the kicker--it must have no redeeming social or literary value whatsoever. That means if you can prove just that one, you're safe. So, no matter what it is, even if it is necrophilia, if you can prove that it has literary value it cannot be obscene. And so this particular standard comes in to play when Allen Ginsberg's Howl goes on trial in--I think it's 1959--it goes on trial. Similarly, a customs case and a case about selling the book: it was bought at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and the poor sales clerk was indicted for selling it, and also the bookstore was indicted for importing it. It had been published in Europe. All they had to do in that trial, and it's very funny to read the transcript, is to prove that Ginsberg in Howl was doing anything remotely resembling literary work. And it's very funny to see people trying to argue that he was not. So, it's not enough to say that he uses the word "cock," for example, in that poem; that's not enough. And the prosecutor tries to make the case on the basis of individual words, and then you see them having these hilarious conversations about how individual words work in metaphors and how they mean different things. This standard really saves literature from any kind of continuing legal censorship. But, there are other ways of producing censorship; that "community standards" comes to be a problem in, for example, textbook design. So, there are these huge markets in public schools in Florida and Texas and California, and so textbook publishers have to appeal to the community standards of those huge, powerful markets, and that has an impact on what's available to school systems all over the country. So, there is a way that those community standards, while in the Roth case they're redeeming--they help to make the case against censorship, against a too-wide definition of obscenity--it does have an impact in other ways in the opposite direction. Since the 1990s, in the wake of these changes, libraries have become the primary place where legal cases are based. So, in 1982 the school board of Long Island, in Island Trees, Long Island, tries to remove, or actually does remove Black Boy, Slaughterhouse 5, and various other sort of books of the 1960s, mainly about politics, mostly has them removed from the school library. And a suit is brought against that school system for doing that. The decision in that case affirms that even though public school systems are within their rights in the context of the classroom to restrict what is on the syllabi of their teachers, that the school library represents what they call a "special environment." The special environment is a place of voluntary study; it is a place where the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be suspended. And as they say, sort of poetically, students do not leave their rights at the school door. And so school libraries can't be regulated in that way. But these things come up over and over, and what's interesting about that particular case is that the objection was that these books were anti-American. How far have we come since Black Boy had to be truncated? Not that far, in certain sectors of the country, in certain ways of thinking. Black Boy was cut in half because it didn't seem like a good reflection on America. It's still a problem for some books in being accepted and read. So, I began to talk about market constraints, and I want to just say a little bit more about that and how it affects the writing of literature and the publishing, even before you arrive at the bookstore. Traditional publishing has undergone a huge consolidation since the 1980s. So, there are large multinational corporations that have bought up publishers. The one signal example of this is when Bertelsmann, a German company, bought up Pantheon Books. This is written about in a book. Now I'm forgetting the name of it. It'll come to me. One of the Pantheon editors led a revolt when this happened. It became clear that Bertelsmann was going to impose a new standard of profitability on the lists in Pantheon's portfolio. So it used to be in old-time publishing, sort of mid century publishing and up to the 1980s, that the list, a literature list (and that's the list of books that any publisher publishes), the list should be profitable. That does not mean that every single item on that list will be profitable. So editors in the old-time mode could work with writers who they found to be difficult and interesting, path breaking, unusual, not catering to what was popular. They could work with writers and cultivate them and they knew that they were taking on a book--say it's a collection of short stories; these are notoriously hard to sell--they were taking on a book that was not going to make a profit. But then they would also take on The Joy of Cooking--or The Joy of Sex, since it's censorship day--and they knew that the profit from a popular book could help to carry and balance those less profitable books, or not-at-all-profitable books, that they had on the list. So, there was a management of lists that could be tilted to allow different kinds of books into the public domain. When publishers were taken over by multinational corporations that were very distant from the interaction between an editor and a writer, they looked at the numbers and they started to demand that every book have its profit-and-loss analysis and that a very strict regulation be followed in ensuring that all titles were going to make a profit. That's a very different standard, and it had a huge impact on what kind of latitude editors had in working with writers who they thought might be a little unusual or not so marketable. At the same time, agents began to have a role in the publishing business. In the 1950s, when editors were encouraging literary writers directly, they had a much more collaborative relationship with writers. But as profit became more important writers needed to turn to someone else who wasn't going to pressure them to follow the market, and agents came to have a role. Now, it's interesting. There is yet a third role that has just begun to emerge in this structure, and that is of the coach, the writing coach: so you can now pay big bucks, if you're a writer, to have someone who will call you up every week and say, "Hey, how's the book going? Let's talk about your ideas. Are you writing today?" It used to be that agents took that kind of active role. Well, agents are very busy now, with their clients selling movie rights and such things. Movie rights are where a lot of the profit in a book sale come from. So, agents began to be what the old-time editor was, and I think we have yet to see whether coaches become what agents used to be in turn. But, as profitability becomes more and more of an issue in selling a book to a publisher, there is an ever ongoing search for that person who will be the ally of the literary in this process.I've talked about the consolidation in book selling, the rise of the chains, and I've also talked about those financial relationships between book sellers and publishers, were space is bought. They also have incentives that publishers give, sometimes give money for readings to be held at a bookstore. So, sometimes those things are bought also, those kinds of events, promotional events. There is, of course, this whole context of the rise of the internet, and all kinds of competition from the film industry, other media. Market constraints are sometimes paradoxically produced by that overload that we get from the internet. So what that means is the culture is finding new arbiters. So, you have this huge volume of information and cultural offerings being given to you. In that welter of information we all look to some arbiter to tell us, "How do I sort this out?" Nobody has the time to read all the blogs and decide which one they're going to read regularly. So you might get a link from someone else's page, someone you are friends with, someone you admire, a writer you've seen elsewhere. You might read certain print publications and from there follow them in to the internet, into cyberspace. Most books now come with a web address somewhere on them. A lot of films do; most films do. This is still in a period of development. How profit gets connected up with those arbiters isn't yet very clear, so companies are experimenting with paying for placements, like when you do the Google search and there are certain Google-sponsored links at the top. That's like having the space in the front of your store bought and paid for. So you think that you're getting--or, I think we all know that those are sponsored links, now, but at the beginning people didn't really quite know that, so it looked like you were getting-- the product of a disinterested electronic search, but in fact you were getting a promotion. So the internet experiments with all kinds of both new and tried and true ways of using money to create prominence among the welter of information. Then there is another rising problem in question, and that is of intellectual property and access as books are digitized. So, I don't know if you have heard of the Google Book Project, and also all the digital libraries initiatives. There are various ones, but the Google Book Project is digitizing with a special technology. People think it's probably a robotic technology--it's kept secret--for scanning books that are in the public domain, and they've made agreements with lots of university libraries including Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, to digitize all the books that are beyond the copyright that are in their collections to make a huge digital library. And the dream is that this will be a sort of bonanza of access. It'll be searchable. It'll be--well, maybe--free. It'll be accessible all over the world. So, there is a dream here that's very noble. Publishers and writers' groups, unions, are very worried about copyright infringement, because Google has stepped over the line and is interested in pushing the envelope into scanning copyrighted material. So, what has started to happen is that individual publishers have made deals with Google to let Google digitize their list for a fee. But, see, now that money starts to come into this arrangement, it starts to look less like free access and more like an access that is, once again, shaped by these financial considerations. It's not at all clear how the nobility of the project and the financial context are going to work themselves out, and it's not at all clear yet what the general approach of educational institutions will be towards this. Yale has not signed onto this, for example, so some universities have; some haven't. These are huge, looming questions that will impact what we get to see as literature, how much access we have among the vast choices that the internet makes available to us. I want to just mention one more thing, and that's about internationalization. One thing that you didn't probably see at the bookstore is fiction in translation, contemporary fiction in translation, notoriously impossible to sell. There is a press called the New Press that was founded after some of the Pantheon editors left and they founded this nonprofit press. That is the only kind of fiction that the New Press publishes, contemporary fiction in translation, because they knew that only a nonprofit press could publish this. It will never sell. One of the objections to the Google Book Project is that the vast majority of its texts are in English, and it seems to present an English-centric vision of the world's knowledge, 'cause it does have pretensions to be the repository of the world's knowledge. In the reception of literature there are other forces, and here's when we start to move in to the realm of The Human Stain. In the 1990s, there was a very lively and often acrimonious debate in academia and among intellectual commentators about whether literature was the purveyor of ideology, political ideology. So, the question is, does literature have a message that it's trying to tell us? And one way to think about this is to think about English 125, major British poets, the picture of what the old-fashioned canon might look like. It's all white guys. I think there might be one woman that you can put on the syllabus in the Spring, a modern poet. You can probably teach Bishop. I think people do teach Bishop in the second term of English 125. Did those poets represent the communication of an ideology? Because a lot of contemporary fiction became the object of contention: along with these very traditional syllabi, are you going to include Toni Morrison on your syllabus? Well, this is no longer controversial. She's such an overwhelmingly powerful author, at this time, by the sheer quality of her work, but early in her career it would have been a question. One of the striking things, of course, about American fiction in the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, is the demographic really does change. Writers of color are much more prominent; there are many more points of view present in that canon. So, is literature sociological? Does it speak to society, or is it an aesthetic object, something that we should understand as part of the history of an art form? Do you have to choose between these two? And I cite here what became an incredibly important book. It's really a wonderful book by actually a Yale graduate, John Guillory. The title is Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published right at the height of the culture wars, of the canon wars. In it, he argues that in the mid twentieth century, literature was a kind of social elite good, and that the aesthetic, if it had an ideology, it was an ideology of bourgeois privilege. So, it wasn't that the content of particular poems would be communicating something about an elite bourgeois ideology, but rather that the very act of being in the institution where you would study such a thing (at Yale, in English 125) that was the repository of the elite power of these texts. So it had much more to do with institutions than it did about the content of any particular literary work. And it makes some very persuasive readings of canonical poems that demonstrate the undecidability of their ideology, or the way that they resist how they've been cast, how those poems have been cast by critics. There are also ways that novels were received and complained about that become part of this picture. So, we've talked about Black Boy. I mentioned how controversial Woman Warrior was because of its impurity as a Chinese text. Toni Morrison became a real advocate of writing by women of color, in particular, and also as a literary critic she mounted an argument about how whiteness functions as a central part of the traditional canon of literature. And she wrote Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in 1992, a very influential text. Internationally, we had the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie's persecution, the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini after the publication of The Satanic Verses, for its depiction of Islam. That kind of persecution becomes a feature of this more internationalized debate about what is okay to say, especially about religions, and then of course we have the Danish cartoon episode, with the cartoons of Muhammad that are now seemingly…it's resurgent. There is another question about a film about Muhammad's life, I believe it is. Then there is Roth's work, and here's where I just want to meditate for a minute on Roth. Philip Roth's work has been defined by these kinds of objections, that censure that I was talking about. He was very widely acclaimed in 1960 when Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award. Goodbye, Columbus is a set of stories mostly about young Jewish protagonists living in a Jewish context in Jewish communities in Newark or in New York. It included a story called "The Conversion of the Jews" in which a young boy (actually, well, a little older than young boy, maybe he's a teenager), Ozzie Freedman, becomes extremely agitated because all his questions to his family and to his rabbi about Christianity are dismissed; he finally comes to be punished for asking these kinds of questions. So, Ozzie stages his revolt by climbing to the top of the synagogue roof and threatening to jump off if his family, all the assembled students from his Hebrew school, and the rabbi, won't kneel down and pray to Jesus, which of course they do because he's about to jump off. This story was quite controversial, as you might imagine, so there was a taste of Roth's vexed relationship to Jewish community in that story. So, it was all about how a hidebound Jewish community was preventing and circumscribing the curiosity of a young American boy, and it really highlighted Ozzie's Americanness. And Roth has always emphasized that about himself: He's an American writer.Like Saul Bellow before him--Saul Bellow had been his mentor and teacher for a brief time at the University of Chicago--Bellow insisted on bringing into American literature the voice and sensibility of an immigrant Jewish family. Bellow was from a Russian Jewish family that immigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century. Bellow was told he would neve--because of his heritage, when he was at the University of Chicago--he was told he would never have the ear for language that would allow him to write beautifully, because of his linguistic background and because he was Jewish. Well, Bellow pioneered the way of bringing in a particularly Jewish and European notion of literature and a sensibility about the body that could enter American literature and change it from its either WASPish or southern genteel quality. And, certainly, this was a very powerful current, and Roth is the continuation of that current in American letters. Roth comes out in 1969 with Portnoy's Complaint. Portnoy is quite a novel. It's really all about masturbation. It's about Alex Portnoy jacking off in the bathroom to every possible provocative thought he can have, and it's told as if to Alex's psychiatrist in a sort of ranting, over-the-top style, very explicit. This got Roth into big trouble, partly because Alex lives in a very tight-knit Jewish family, and this enters into the whole story of his obsession with sex. Irving Howe, a very prominent Jewish literary critic, public intellectual, wrote a famous essay in 1972 called "Philip Roth Reconsidered." And he basically said that the adulation given to Roth was entirely inappropriate--he now saw on reflection, now that he had read Portnoy's Complaint--because Roth had an unfocused hostility towards the Jewish community. This enraged Roth. That rage fueled huge portions of his career. When, in The Human Stain, Roth has Coleman Silk say, "All of Western literature began with a quarrel, the wrath of Achilles," in a certain way he is describing his own origin as a writer. Now, if you'll go with me: Do you have just five minutes? I want to get to one last point. Roth, in case you haven't noticed, is a very misogynist writer. Did you notice? Hard to miss that. Why do I like Roth? In this context where writers are taken to task for their offensiveness on cultural grounds, on gender grounds, on the grounds of identification, how can you like someone who has this major flaw, who seems to see all women as sexual objects, who is unembarrassed about saying his writing is about a man's life, the life of men; it's not about the life of women? So, why do I like Roth? This has actually baffled me for years. Why doesn't it bother me? There are parts in The Human Stain that really are quite amazingly objectionable. My favorite is the gift of the molestation. Do you remember this when they are talking about Faunia, and how great she is in bed, and what she is like at breakfast afterwards, and they speculate, Coleman and Nathan, that maybe that was the gift of her having been molested? Well, molestation is never a gift. If there is anything that comes from living through a hard life, it is not the gift of the molestation, but the gift of the person who survived it. This is insane. Why do I still like Roth? Well, partly it's that, like no one else, he can take me into a voice, seamlessly draw me in. Some of his ranting voices are more or less convincing. Some are more or less caricatured; of course the women's are more caricatured than the men's. Nevertheless, he can take me in there, and the way his sentences work are really sometimes just astonishingly beautiful. There is a part of The Human Stain that I particularly like, and you'll get to it as you finish the novel for Monday, and that's when he's describing Coleman and Faunia at Tanglewood. So, just think about that when you read that, pause for a minute over that. I think what it is ultimately is that I'm very moved by two things in Roth's writing; that is the meditation on mortality and what goes along with that, I think: the focus on and the dignity of the body. There is a very Whitmanian sense to his understanding of sex and the body in all its complexity. I appreciate that. I am moved by that sense of the inaccessibility of the other person--this is from my lecture on Monday--the way you always get the other fellow's life somehow wrong. That speaks to me about the difference between my consciousness and anyone I encounter in the world. That to me is profound and moving. It reminds me that, for all Roth's linguistic energy and skill as a writer, there is still that great divide that language is trying to cross. And that's what I appreciate about literature in general, that it's that great attempt to cross that divide. I can overlook the misogyny for those things. Am I like Roth? Probably not, but that's why I like him. I read to see what I'm not, not to see what I am, and so Roth's very difference from me, his misogyny, is part of what allows me to feel that I am entering, however partially, however always in a compromised way, into the consciousness of another person through that beautiful, amazing medium of language. So, that's why I like Roth, and I would encourage you to think about your own responses to the books that we've read together, think about what it means about you as a reader that you respond in certain ways. So we'll pick this up on Monday; thank you for waiting.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_7A.txt

e well hello here we are again for British literature 2 and we're well into the 19th century now and uh today we're going to be taking up two of the Major Poets of the 19th century Tennison and Browning and first of all however I would like to give you an opportunity to ask any questions uh me about the paper assignment or any other kind of assignment that we have or have coming up in the course any questions questions questions questions no problems okay well good well that's wonderful everybody's making progress everybody's churning along with the research really getting into it having a great time with it uh enthralled with your subjects okay um remember that each class period I'm going to give those of you who are with me the opportunity to ask questions about the paper or any other uh assignment or thing that we're doing here in the class and for those of you who are taking the course at a distance you can also contact me or my instructional assistant by email or by telephone by looking at the email address and the telephone number which is in the course description okay and by the way if you if you lose that it's really not a problem you can just call the English Department and uh believe it or not they know me there and they can get contact with me and give me give me messages and uh I will uh call you back so um we are now going to approach one of the very Major Poets of the 19 Cy and one of the Major Poets in English literature period Alfred Lord Tennyson and we're going to be looking in particular this evening at his long poem in memoriam which actually consists of a series of shorter Lyric poems and I'm assuming that everybody knows what I mean by lyric by lyric poetry so everybody know what I'm talking what what is a lyric you know what a lyric is okay don't forget your yeah originally that's what a lyric was I mean lyrics were actually sung and they still are of course when they are put to music but lyric poetry does not necessarily get put to music and it typically is some kind of short poem or in this case it's really a series of shorter poems shorter lyrics in which there is a single speaker this is not dramatic poetry where you have several speakers and it's not narrative in the sense of telling a story as such and the lyric is typically the voice of one speaker who is expressing something very personal and usually something very personal that touches not only the speaker but hopefully us as well in a very emotional way which doesn't mean that it can't have some kind of intellectual theme or intellectual content and may not deal with a serious subject but that there typically is some kind of powerful emotional energy in the lyric okay in the case of Tennyson's in memoriam he worked on this long poem or collection of poems over a quite long period of time if we can go to the screen aha you're already ahead of me terrific over a quite long period of time as you can see from 1833 to 18 50 and I'm not going to ask you how many years that is I had an interesting experience in another class the other day in which I was asking the students how old a particular writer was when he wrote a the work that we were discussing in class at the time and the people had his his dates of birth and death and they also had the date when the poem was originally published and in this class of English pagers it was amazing we kept getting different answers to the question how old was the poet when he did this poem so uh so I'm not going to embarrass anybody here uh by asking that question but you'll notice that he began when he was pretty young right and uh he continued writing this poem uh for quite a number of years so uh the occasion of his beginning this poem was the death of his very very dear friend Arthur Henry how who is the ahh of the title in memoriam ahh and he and Tennyson had been very very very close friends as young students and as young men and then halum tragically died very young and uh Tennyson appears never completely to have recovered from it and he wrote his poem as a way of trying to deal with the terrible painful feelings of grief now we've talked about this before we've talked about other writers who have dealt with serious emotional difficulties including very painful experiences in their lives through poetry we talked about that uh in connection with Wordsworth remember we could even have gone back to Blake Blake had uh a lot of very difficult stretches in his life as well but certainly in the case of woodsworth when we're reading the Prelude we talked about that how he went through a terrible crisis at the time of uh his having to leave France his own country of England going to war against France his loved one being back over on the other side of the channel in France bearing their child he being cut off he having strong sympathies with the French and this causing a terrible crisis for him in his life now he eventually worked through that crisis and he did so he tells us largely through his poetry and we've talked about others last time uh I was talking about John Stewart Mill John Stewart Mill was another fellow who went through apparently a kind of psychological breakdown and remember what I said then you know people in the early 19th century did not have therapists that they could go through Psychiatry really had not been invented in anything like its modern form and the treatment of people who are mentally or emotionally disturbed was very very primitive and so if someone was suffering from the kinds of very severely painful feelings that a Tennison was he had limited options he could tried to work this out with friends he could perhaps go to a minister or or priest or Rabbi to uh to try to work work this out but uh the clergy was not any better trained really uh in dealing with psychological problems generally speaking than were other uh people who dealt with uh with health questions and so notice that he turns to his poetry and you know I can say I mean I think I've mentioned this here before that I worked in hospitals for a number of years and uh one of the people whom I worked for was a psychiatrist I wasn't a psychiatrist myself but I worked uh for a psychiatrist and uh as part of my assignment at one time and it's it's very interesting that one of the forms of therapy that people will be asked to engage in is to write to write you know to write journals to write poetry to write whatever it is that you want want to write that this becomes a way of coming to terms with yourself with your pain if if you are in pain with with critical problems and so also here with Alfred who became Lord Tennyson now this poem not only served him well in terms of his own personal rebirth eventual rebirth but also the writing of this poem served others as well as you probably know Queen Victoria was married to uh a a man who came to be known uh married to the queen of course as Prince Albert he was not King typically uh if the Queen of England marries the person whom she marries is referred to to as Prince so and so so he was Prince Albert the there's only been one exception that I know of in English History and that was the case of Mary at the end of the 17th century and then she lived until the early part of the 18th century died in 1714 and when she was married to William of Orange they were co- monarchs at least officially they were co- monarchs as William and Mary but other than that when a woman has been the reigning monarch in England her husband was designated as Prince so and so in this case it was Prince Albert Prince Albert was a very intelligent and very able person and while he originally came from uh Continental Europe and uh had had actually uh German Origins he really got into being uh of the the ruling group in England and was very civic-minded spent a lot of time doing research on uh the problems facing the English and actually had some quite intelligent ideas about policy not without some controversy because of course in the 19th century there was a lot of political controversy but Albert the Beloved husband of Victoria died when he was still relatively young I mean he wasn't like a kid but he was still relatively young and she was absolutely crushed and she never married again and she really stayed in mourning for the rest of her life and not not officially but for the rest of her life she mourned the passing of her husband and she is reported to have called in the middle of the night frequently enough for the servants in the castle she's the queen after all the servants in the castle to bring her a uh a candle a lit candle and a copy of inmemoriam and so she and along with apparently many many many others found great comfort in reading this poem in getting through similar problems of their own especially with the loss of dear loved ones eventually of course Queen Victoria made Tennyson an English Lord now there are some kinds of noble positions in the English system of nobility that are not hereditary so he was one of those people who was appointed as Lord and that's why he's referred to to his Alfred Lord Tennyson I mean his real name is simply Alfred Tennyson I mean his real name is his name before he became an English Lord uh and uh so uh but but this was not a lordship that would pass down to any of his heirs as the hereditary Lordships would so having said all of that let's begin to talk about the poem itself let's see where are we here okay let's talk first of all about Tennyson's Poetics that is to say the art of his poetry first of all this is an elegy an elegy a y an elogy is a classical genre that is to say a classical literary form in the literal sense it goes all the way back to the classical Greeks and Romans and you'll notice here I have a classical genre what does the word genre mean what does the word genre mean yeah type type it's a it's a type of poetry a kind of poetry what we might even call if we were going to use a biological metaphor a kind of species of poetry so it's a classical genre or form whose major instances in English among some of the greatest poets in the English language had been Cher's book of The Duchess which is a long elic poem apparently according to most charer Scholars written on the occasion of the death of a certain blanch who was the the wife of John of gaun the most powerful person in England in Cher's day and Cher's friend and Patron Milton's ldus which is one of Milton's most famous poems certainly not as well known especially to most students unless you're an English major and advanced English major and have maybe taken a course in Milton uh certainly not as well known as Paradise Lost Paradise regained and Samson agonises but nonetheless a very famous poem of Milton's and Shell's adonus Shell's adonus you remember shell of course whom we studied earlier he also uh wrote a long elegy called adonus and in each one of these poems and of course one might cite many others by Poets who are less well known in the tradition what will happen of course is the confrontation of the pain of grief in the celebration of the life of the person who is being treated in the elegy but finally the movement toward some kind of consolation some kind of consolation and the great model for that was in ancient Rome in late Antiquity boas's consolation of philosophy and what boethus argued was that ultimately in the most painful of circum cumstances what we must do is adjust our ways of thinking so that we can rise to some kind of philosophical view of life and of death such that it at least can become acceptable to us even if not completely comprehensible so consolation and we're going to look to see how Tennison Works towards consolation in the development of his poem The Lyric voice in Tennyson's case is singing a series of thematically and poetically connected poems thematically and poetically connected poems and as we shall see when we begin to look at the work as I've said already it's a series of Lyric poems but taken all together you will notice that there's an overall design overall structure and of course the Thematic continuities that run through all of the individual lyrics and help to bind them together will consist first of all of grief over the death of halum and the quest or search for consolation but along the way Tennison is going to have to face something that we're going to talk about tonight really in detail for the first time but which is going to become one of our most important themes from now on the growing crisis of faith in the 19 19th century which of course is a theme that continues well into the 20th century and no doubt now into the 21st century as well what do I mean by a crisis of Faith well look at it from the point of view of somebody who has just lost his very very dearest friend how does he make sense out of that can he fall back on his religious Faith or the religious faith uh which he has grown up with uh can he make sense out of this in terms of that religious Faith or does that religious Faith itself come into question as a result of his experience now we talked here before at least for a little while we talked about uh the problem of evil what philosophers and theologians call the problem of evil right and that is the question of how can in all good and all loving and all powerful God create a world in which manifestly there is so much evil in suffering I mean it's undeniable that there is evil in suffering right so how do you square that with a belief a traditional belief in a traditional God who is not only all knowing and all loving and all caring but also all powerful and we talked about that in connection with Blake right the uh the poem The Tiger Tiger Tiger Burning Bright in the forest of the night and so forth what immortal hand or I dare dare frame thy fearful symmetry because the tiger here is an image of not only great power but great potential for Destruction right so how could a Creator an all wise and all good and all powerful Creator have created such a beast so also on a much more ordinary level can we attempt to confront such issues in dealing with our own experiences the kind of experiences that everybody goes through right I mean if you get into adulthood and you have not lost someone whom you are close to you are very lucky and believe me you will not go too far uh without having to undergo that kind of experience so for Tennyson that throws him into a whole crisis of faith okay how could a good God allow something like this to happen okay now we've talked about a crisis of faith in the 19th century in other contexts haven't we we've talked about this in connection with one of our Victorian issues one of the issues that you can choose if you wish to study in your term paper uh it came up through science and the ways in which some 19th century scientists were contesting at least some of the literal readings of the Bible remember we talked about that in connection with lel's principles of geology and of course Darwin and his origin of the species and then even more so with the Descent of Man so that already there were people who were beginning to ask questions about the kinds of teachings that had come down in traditional religion so once again this is another manifestation of a kind of crisis of Faith now that doesn't mean that everybody was rolling around in the midst of a crisis of Faith but it does mean that some people were and in particular thoughtful and even intellectual people were okay the poetic continuities we have here of course the lyric voice itself we have a strong sense and we're going to be sampling parts of the poem in just a few minutes here that we are dealing with the same lyric voice as we go through all of the the individual lyrics of the long poem there is a commonality in the stanzaic pattern where we have quatrains quatrains or stanzas or groupings of lines in poetry that are four lines long and we also have certain recurring images recurring in the sense that they come up again and again and again in this long work images of birth of death of rebirth not surprisingly given the project of the poem and we have of course seasonal Cycles being used as structuring devices in the work especially the recurrent images of Christmas Christmas is a time not only of Celebration but Christmas is a time of the potential for birth or for rebirth okay because at least from a traditional Christian point of view what does Christmas signify I mean what Christmas signifies of course is the birth of Jesus and uh the birth of Jesus is not only a birth but it Al is also theologically following St Paul regarded as a rebirth for the whole Human family so this recurring image of Christmas then can serve to reinforce imagery of birth and of rebirth so let's go first of all to the prologue and you may want to follow along with me in your textbooks the prologue to in memorium and uh this is just right at the very beginning it's not called prologue as such but it's right at the very beginning immediately after the title of the work strong Son of God immortal love okay he starts right out with the invocation of religious belief strong Son of God immortal love whom we that have not seen thy face we who have not seen thy face by faith and faith alone Embrace believing where we cannot prove okay see here's the whole question of Faith Tennison after all is living and has been educated and is a thinking person in a time that has experienced the birth of what in Europe is called the enlightenment or in England and North America has often been called The Age of Reason and in the enlightenment or Age of Reason beginning in some parts of the West toward the end of the 17th century and certainly flourishing in the 18th century at least among educated classes Drew attention not only to science but also particularly to reason as the most important capacity that we humans have and that we should be using as our guides to know what is true and to distinguish what is true from what is false but what happens if you apply that to the realm of faith notice once again strong God strong Son of God immortal love whom we that have not seen thy face okay we have no empirical evidence by faith and faith alone Embrace believing where we cannot prove believing where we cannot prove notice what is assumed here is that there are conditions for proving something to be true that cannot be met in the arena of religious Faith okay thine are these orbs of light and shade thou mest life in man and brute thou mest death and lo thy foot is on the skull which thou Hast made like it or not God not only made us to live but God made us to die that's what Tennison is saying and that's what we have to come to terms with it's sort of like what job in a somewhat different way had to come to terms with because at the end of The Book of Job What God Says to job is you know after job has been wailing away saying you know hey God I'm a I'm a good guy you know I'm a decent guy why are you making me suffer so much and and finally God speaks to job and he says look I made the hippo and the crocodile you may not like that but that's the way it is that's the way it is and you're simply going to have to accept that okay so also here thou mest life in in man and brute thou mest death and low thy foot is on the skull which thou Hast made thou W thou Wilt not leave us in the dust remember of course the dust in the story of of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible right that God made man originally out of dust okay the the dry loose Earth okay and then he moistened it into a kind of clay with his own spitting into the the dry dust and then formed it the metaphor here being the clay that the sculptor forms into whatever form it is that the sculpture wants to create thou wil not leave us in the dust thou mest man he knows not why he being man okay and of course remember now I'm just going to say this one once but uh remember now that when uh people in the 19th century in the early 20th century are referring to man in a way like this or he or his or him they include women as well as men uh they had not yet uh snaap to the uh the the whole sense of uh of gender correctness that we have he thinks he was not made to die and thou Hast made him Thou Art just notice there's simply an affirmation of Faith here there's not a proof there's not a logical argument there's simply an affirmation of Faith thou seest human and divine the highest holiest manhood thou our Wills are ours we know not how our Wills are ours to make them thine we have free will this of course is one of the great questions in the history of religion do we have free will or do we not have Free Will has God foreordained you know what we do or are we free to make our own decisions about our own actions in our own lives our little systems our little systems of thought of religion of philosophy notice little systems little systems they have their day and cease to be you know philosophical systems come into existence they have a certain fad and then they pass out of existence again and that's happened over and over and over and over in the history of philosophy and sometimes they're revived at least for a time being they are but broken lights of thee you see our efforts to come up with philosophical systems are not only temporary but they are broken lights to shine on God and thou oh Lord art more than they we have but faith we cannot know for know knowledge is of things we see okay I mean he finally comes right out and says it doesn't he it was implicit earlier on but now he makes it explicit knowledge is of things we see and that of course was precisely what the modern Scientific Revolution was all about we accept it knowledge in this specialized sense of the term knowledge that which is based on Direct experience okay and yet and yet we trust it comes from thee a beam in darkness let it grow let it grow let knowledge grow from more to more but now notice he's Shifting the ground so that now knowledge is being broadened right to include the knowledge that God can give us by shining in our souls which is a traditional austinian notion by the way when I say augustinian I mean It ultimately derives from people like St Augustine who was one of the great early thinkers in the Christian church okay so um let knowledge grow from more to more but more of reverence in US dwell that mind and soul according well may make one music as before but vaster but vaster we are fools and slight we mock thee when we do not fear but help thy foolish ones to Bear help thy vain worlds to Bear thy light okay there's a Biblical uh saying by the way only the fool says in his heart there is no God okay famous quotation out of the Bible only the fool says in his heart there is no God okay that's the sort of thing that he's invoking here we're foolish we need to be taught forgive what seemed my sin in me what seemed my worth since I began for merit lives from man to man and not from Man O Lord to thee forgive my grief for one removed okay for one removed you have removed right this is his dear friend ham thy creature whom I found so fair I trust he lives in thee and there I find him worthier to be loved now notice this emphasis on love that we've had in line one and we're now having again this is really for Tennison going to be the key to the whole argument of his work as we'll see later on forgive these wild and wandering cries confusions of a wasted youth forgive them where they fail in truth and in thy wisdom make me wise okay forgive these wild and wandering cries okay you know I'm hurting I'm in pain and in thy wisdom make me wise okay let's move ahead I mean I know that looks like we're making a big big big jump but what I want to do is I want to direct your attention in some detail to particular portions of inmemoriam so let's look at lyrics 50 to uh 57 notice how in lyrics number 50 to 56 he is tor tormented by doubts tormented by doubts okay everybody catching up here's 50 be near me he's calling upon God be near me when my light is low when the blood creeps and the nerves prick and tingle and the heart is sick and all the wheels of being slow be near me when the sensuous frame that is to say the physical frame body of Senses right is racked with pangs that conquer trust racked with pangs that conquer trust see what he say saying here pangs pains that conquer trust conquer Faith outdo faith and Time and Time notice with the capital t a maniac scattering dust and life a fury slinging flame I mean this is definitely not a very positive way of looking at human life and experience be near me when my faith is dry when my faith is dry one of the longest Traditions among mystical writers mystical writers by the way Mystics are ones who claim to the rest of us that they have had some kind of epiphanic experiences some kind of special experiences where there was a breakthrough between them and the Divine and they directly experienced something of the Divine Blake by the way was a Mystic and Blake uh claimed that he did have some kind of visionary experiences like this you know and who's to doubt it you know uh you know this is obviously something which is beyond proof isn't it I mean that's what the person claims to have experienced okay but then the mystics will often talk about periods of spiritual dryness another metaphor there can be times when one is fertile ground for this kind of spiritual growth seeding and growth but there may be other times when one undergos a kind of spiritual drought and one experiences the absence of God the absence of God okay be near me when my faith is dry and Men the Flies of Latter spring that lay their eggs and sting and sing and weave the their Petty cells and die okay I mean look at look at what human beings are represented as here when his faith is dry that men are like the Flies the little insects in the latter part of spring who lay their eggs and sting the rest of us and they Buzz around singing in their own way and weave their Petty cells right like hives and so forth and they die okay how insignificant is that what we are is that what our lives and our deaths amount to be near me when I fade away to point the term of human strife and on the low dark verge of Life the Twilight of Eternal day okay um now let's jump up here to Lyric 54 oh yet we trust that somehow that somehow good will be the final goal of ill we trust notice once again we don't know in the sense of empirical knowledge but we trust that somehow in ways that we cannot really foresee and certainly not really comprehend good will be the final goal of ill not the immediate goal but the final goal of ill to pangs of nature sins of will defects of doubt and taints of blood that nothing walks with aimless feet that not one life shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void when God hath made the pile complete okay once everything is completed then everything will have its proper place and we will be able to see the essential goodness of the whole this is basically the same argument that Alexander Pope made in his essay on man for those of you who have studied Alexander Pope and I know some of you studied Pope with me in the first half of this course uh where he says that it's but the part we see and not the whole and that of course is our limitation that we can only see individual things happening in the world and we can't see the larger design but if we could see the larger design we would recognize that even those parts that we take in our limited way to be wrong or mistaken or even evil have their proper place in that greater design as designed by the great designer that nothing walks with aimless feet that not one life shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void when God hath made the pile complete that not a worm is CLO in vain Blake had a it's probably a reference it could be a reference anyway to a line in Blake that not a worm is cloven in vain that not a moth with vain desire is shriveled in a fruitless fire or but subserves another's gain behold we know not anything I can but trust that good shall fall at last far off at last to all and every winter change to Spring using that of course metaphorically so runs my dream but what am I an infant crying in the night an infant crying for the light and with no language but a cry what am I I see I'm just like a little baby here okay what do I know what can I understand the wish in 55 that of the living whole no life may fade beyond the grave the wish right maybe not the conviction at least not yet but the wish that of the living whole no life May Fail beyond the grave in other words fail to be beyond the grave okay in other words he's yearning for immortality not not just for himself he's yearning that his dear friend Helm still lives still lives in some other and better place the wish that of the living whole no life May Fail beyond the grave derives it not from what we have the likest God within the soul in other words what if the image of God is already within us and that that is what is inspiring in us this wish for immortality that also by the way is sounds very augustinian in certain ways are God a nature then it Strife or God a nature then it Strife as by the way some thought in the their seeming conflict between religion and science that nature lends such evil dreams be careful of the type she seems so careless of the single life the argument in evolutionary biology is that nature does not care about the individual but only about the species does that make sense that nature really cares not about the individual but about the the species so that you know you or I don't really matter in the larger scheme of things what does matter is that our species Prov strong enough and adaptable enough to survive that I considering everywhere her secret meaning in her deeds and finding that of 50 seeds she often brings but one to bear what's that all about why do so many people have to die why do so many children have to die why especially in the 19th century did so many babies have to die and so many young mothers die in childbirth before modern obstetrics came to be developed towards the end of the 19th century in the early part of the 20th century I falter where I firmly trod I'm now faltering in my faith where once I was firm and falling with my weight of cares upon the great world's altar stairs it's interesting the great world's altar stairs that slope through Darkness up to God one of the greatest of Mystics in the early modern period was uh John of the Cross who wrote a very famous work called The Dark Night of the Soul okay that it's only in darkness that encounters God by the way I stretch lame Hands of Faith and grope lame Hands of Faith not strong Hands of Faith but lame Hands of Faith and grope when we're groping in the dark we don't really know where we are and it may be dangerous right and gather dust and chaff and call to what I feel to what I I feel doesn't say what I know but what I feel is Lord of all and faintly Trust not just trust but faintly trust the larger hope faintly trust the larger hope and then in 56 so careful of the type but no from scarpet cliff and quarried stone she cries a thousand types are gone I care for nothing All Shall go this is nature now he's imagining nature speak from a thousand types and and uh from a thousand uh or excuse me from scarpet cliff and quarried stone when geologists look at different layers of sediment in uh say Cliff rocks and so forth or in sheared off mountains what they can frequently see are forms of life that no longer exist right a thousand types are gone I care for Nothing All Shall go thou makest thine appeal to me I bring to life I bring to death the spirit does but mean the breath I know no more in other words the spirit is not the spirit all that really means is breath goes back to something that I talked about in an earlier class that the the Latin word from which we derive the word Spirit literally means breath okay and to inspire and to expire literally means to breathe in and to breathe out what if it's only breath what if there is no Spirit that's what he's saying and he shall he man her last work who seemed so fair such Blended purpose in his eyes who rolled the P the psalm to wintry Skies who built him FS of fruitless prayer who trusted God was love indeed and love creation's final law what about man who who believed in all of those things though nature and this is one of the most famous lines in 19th century literature in any language it's quoted all the time read in tooth and Claw nature readed in tooth and Claw okay with raving shrieked against his Creed nature read in tooth and Claw what do we see in nature we see the constant competition for survival through competition for food through compet comption for mates through competition with enemies right uh of the same species or of other species nature everywhere read in tooth and Claw and that figure was picked up and often applied in the 19th and 20th centuries to evolutionary biological Theory that that's really the image we get in the survival of the of the fittest but what does that have to do with the god of love doesn't that contradict a traditional belief in a world which has been created by a god of love so this nature read in tooth and Claw is shrieking against man's Bel Who Loved who suffered countless ills who battled for the true with a capital T the just with the capital J be blown about the desert dust or sealed within the Iron Hills no more no more is there no more if that's true then it this is just all monstrous isn't it a monster then a dream a Discord dragons of the Prime that tear each other in their slime where mellow music matched with him a life is feudal then as frail oh for thy voice to soothe and bless what hope of answer or redress behind the veil behind the veil and that also is a very ancient metaphor of the truth being hidden behind a veil and what we can hope for is momentarily for the veil to be parted but then in 57 we see some movement or at least the beginnings of movement Beyond this doubt and toward some kind of consolation and peace peace Come Away the song of Woe Is after all an Earthly song an Earthly song peace Come Away we do him wrong to sing so wildly let us go come let us go your cheeks are pale but half my life I leave behind me thinks my friend is richly shrined but I shall pass my work will fail yet in these ears till hearing dies one set slow Bell will seem to toll the passing of the sweetest soul that ever looked with human eyes notice how he expresses this notion that you know even to the end of my days is till hearing dies you know there is a a theory that the last sense that people lose when they're dying is the sense of hearing it's the sense of hearing uh I don't I don't know how that could be demonstrated but you know there's certainly a a strong theory about that uh for example when a a friend and former colleague of mine passed away his family knew of course that he was dying and they surrounded the bed and they sang to him which is very interesting okay um I hear it now and or Andor Eternal greetings to the dead and a a a said ad ad forever more a as I'm sure the note tells you means hail hail in the sense of hello hello I'm here okay as in the uh the traditional prayer and hym in its Latin form a Maria okay Hail Mary this is what the the angel in the gospels uh well not the angel but the uh it's Elizabeth isn't it whom she visits Elizabeth whom she visits uh says hail full of grace and so forth okay a it okay so so there's at least the beginnings of some kind of movement well now let's see where this is going so flip over to Lyric number 78 here we have Christmas remember I said that we're going to have Christmas coming up periodically Christmas of course is asso iated with New Year and a yearning for a new spiritual life on the part of the poet again at Christmas did we weave the Holly round the Christmas Hearth by the way Holly is Evergreen right what's the symbolism of the Evergreen at Christmas time that would be eternal life right that's right it's eternal life uh that that even when everything else dies in the winter time right the flowers die the many of the uh the trees and the bushes and whatnot lose their leaves but there are evergreens right pine trees why do you think the Christmas tree is uh you know we cut down a tree we bring it into our house it's it's an evergreen right why do we use Holly why do we use mistletoe you know all of these things are Evergreen and they not only are signs of ongoing or as you put it eternal life but also signs of the promise of the return of life in general okay Holly round the uh the Christmas Hearth and the silent snow possessed the Earth and calmly fell our Christmas Eve the Ule clog sparkled Keen with frost no wing of wind the regions swept but over all things brooding slept the quiet sense of something lost the quiet sense of something lost yes it's a time of Celebration but also for him there's a sense still of something lost it would like to be able to share this time with his friend as in Winters Left Behind again our ancient games head place the mimic pictures breathing Grace and dance and song in hoodman blind who showed a token of distress so no single tear no Mark of pain or sorrow then can sorrow Wayne oh grief can grief be changed to less a last regret regret can die no mixed with all all this Mystic frame her deep relations are the same but with long use her tears are dry there is some kind of change taking place he's not very clear about what it is yet but there's some kind of change is taking place and in 82 I wage not any Feud with death for changes wrought on form and face no lower life than that Earth's Embrace May breed with him can fright my faith Eternal process moving on from state to state the spirit walks and these are but the shattered stalks or ruined crysalis of one nor blame I death because he bear the use of virtue out of Earth I know transplanted human worth Will Bloom to profit otherwhere for this alone on death I wreck the the or reek the Wrath that Garners in my heart he put our lives so far apart we cannot hear each other speak dip down upon the northern Shore oh sweet New Year delaying long thou dust expectant nature wrong decaying long delay no more what stays thee from the clouded noons thy sweetness from its proper place can trouble live with April days or sadness in the summer moons bring orcus bring the Fox Glove Spire The Little Speed Wells darling blue deep tulips dashed with fiery Dew laburnums dropping Wells of fire oh thou New Year delaying long delay us the sorrow in my blood that longs to burst a frozen bud and flood a fresher throat with song he he Longs for spring not just liter I mean yes literally spring but but not only literally spring but also metaphorically spring with some kind of of new growth and New Birth okay let's move over to Lyric number 93 here we have an extended meditation on death and he begins to wonder how it might be possible to hold what he calls communion with the dead is it possible actually not only to believe that there is some kind of life beyond death but there is is there some way in which one can reach Beyond to reach through the veil to touch the Dead Or Be Touched by the dead in 93 I shall not see thee dare I say no Spirit ever break the band that stays him from the native land where first he walked when clasped in clay okay clay again the ancient metaphor for the body all the way back to the Book of Genesis no visual shade of someone lost but he the spirit himself may come where all the nerve of sense is numb Spirit to Spirit Ghost to Ghost by the way ghost originally meant something different than what it means today uh originally it was a native English word meaning something like Spirit oh therefore from thy sightless range with gods in UNC conjectured Bliss oh from the distance of the abyss of tenfold complicated change descend and touch and enter here the wish too strong for words to name that in this blindness of the frame my ghost may feel that thine is near my ghost my spirit may feel that thine is near you see that somehow or another you are near me you Arthur Helen how pure at heart and sound in head with what divine affections bold should be the man whose thought thought would hold an hour's communion with the dead in vain shalt thou or any call the spirits from their golden day except like them thou too can say my spirit is at peace with all they haunt The Silence of the brass imaginations calm and fair the memory like a cloudless air the conscience is a sea at rest but when the heart is full of den and doubt beside the poor weights they can but listen at the gates and hear the household jar Within by night we lingered on the lawn for underfoot the herb was dry and genial warmth and or the sky the Silvery Haze of Summer drawn and calm that let the tapers burn unwavering not a cricket shur the brook alone far off was heard and on the board the fluttering NN and bats went round in fragrant skies and wheeled or lit the filmy shapes that haunt The Dusk with ir capes and Woolly breasts with be and beaded eyes while now we sang old songs that peeled from null to null where couched at ease the white kind glimmered in the trees laid their dark arms about the field and then those others one by one withdrew themselves from me and night and in the house light after light went out and I was all alone a hunger seized my heart a hunger seized my heart I read of that glad year which once had been in those fallen leaves which kept their green the noble letters of the dead and strangely on the silent broke the silent speaking words the silent speaking words a paradox right technically called an oximoron the silent speaking words and strange was Love's dumb cry defying change to test his worth and strangely spoke notice the opposition here between speaking and dumbness dumbness in the older sense of the inability to speak and strangely spoke the faith the Vigor bold to dwell on doubts that drive the coward back and Keen through wordy snares to track suggestion to her inmost cell so word by word and line by line the dead man touched me from the past and all at once it seemed at last the living Soul was flashed on mine and mine in this was wound and Whirled about Imperial Heights of thought and came on that which is and caught the Deep pulsations of the World eonian music measuring out the steps of time the shocks of chance the blows of death at length my trance was cancelled stricken through with doubt see what's happened he's he's gone into a kind of Trance in which he feels that he is experiencing this life and this energy from Beyond but then the trance was cancelled stricken through with doubt with doubt see his reasoning mind now Clicks in vague words but ah how hard to frame in matter molded forms of speech or even for intellect to reach through memory that which I became till now now the doubtful dusk the doubtful dusk revealed the NES once more where couched at ease the white kind glimmered and the trees laid their dark arms about the field The Dusk becomes a kind of metaphor for a loss of distinctness kind of loss of distinctness and sucked from out the distant Gloom a breeze began to tremble or the large leaves of the Sycamore and fluctuate all the still perfume and Gathering fresh leer overhead rocked the full foliaged Elms and swung the heavy folded Rose and flung the lies to and fro and said the dawn the Dawn and died away and east and west without a breath mixed their dim lights like life and death to broaden into boundless day well okay and so we move to Lyric number 104 and we're going to have Christmas coming again in the cycle of time the time draws near the birth of Christ the Moon is is hid the night is still a single Church below the hill is peeling folded in the midst a single peel of bells below that wakens at this hour of rest a single murmur in the breast that these are not the bells I know like stranger voices hear they sound in lands where not a memory stays Strays nor Landmark breathes of other days but all is new unhallowed ground tonight ungathered let us s leave this Laurel let this Holly stand we live within the stranger land and strangely Falls our Christmas Eve our father's dust is left alone and Silent under other snows there in due time the Wood bind blows The Violet comes but we are gone no more shall Wayward grief abuse the genial hour with mask and mind but change of pipe like growth of time has broke the bond of dying use let cares that petty Shadows cast by which our lives are chiefly proved a little spare the night I loved and hold it solemn to the past but let no footstep beat the floor nor bowl of wasle mantle warm for who could keep an ancient form through which the spirit breathes no more be neither song nor game nor Feast nor harp be touched nor flute be blown no dance no motion save alone what lightens in the Lucid east of rising Worlds by Yonder wood long sleeps the summer in the seed run out your measured arcs and blead the closing circle cycle rich in good and notice how different this is from the last Christmas we saw where yes there was calm but there was also that sense of loss that sense that his dear friend was no longer with him to share this wonderful time of the year but notice here how there's a shift in tone and things are turning in a much more positive way and we seeing something that began to BU bu earlier on the transition to another kind of state of mind and it's in that state of mind that he's going to find peace and ultimately to find consolation so let's continue after we take a short break

Literature_Lectures

19_Philip_Roth_The_Human_Stain.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Now, what's coming up? As I mentioned last week, on Wednesday I'm going to give my censorship lecture, and in preparation for that I would like you to go to a local bookstore, any one, and just observe how it's laid out, what you see, what your attention is called to, what your attention is not called to, and here's a difficult question: What isn't there? Think about that, and I'll talk a little bit about what isn't there on Wednesday. Also, in order to keep up, please try to read at least to page 202--that's the next chapter division in The Human Stain--so that you're on track to finish it--it's 361 pages--for next Monday. And so, next Monday, a week from today, I will give my second lecture on The Human Stain. And I will talk about The Human Stain a little bit on Wednesday, because some of what I have to say about censorship does pertain, so that's what's coming up. I hope you all thought about the Identity Plot as you read this novel. It's hard not to. When I gave that lecture, I suggested that when a genre gains a certain credence, a certain widespread use in the culture, it requires more and more innovations on it to make a fresh story out of it. It also gets us to the point where that set of conventions is available to writers in a new way, to be transcended in a new way. So, one thing that I want to ask about this novel is, does it transcend the genre? Does it do more than provide the certain dramas and satisfactions that we come to expect from a novel about identity? In this sense, because it is so deeply embedded in those kinds of narratives, Roth is taking a kind of risk here. He's playing it safe because he knows that this is a topic of interest, but he's taking a risk as an artist because he's working in very well-trodden territory. I suggested that, also, when a genre reaches a certain point of saturation, writers tend to change the subject. I didn't say this when we talked about Blood Meridian, but I think in part Blood Meridian is that kind of change of subject. So, this returns to the genre, and we want to ask what it's doing with the genre. Before I go in to my meditation on that question today, I just want to call your attention to another element that does relate back to Blood Meridian, and that's its status as a historical novel. This novel places itself with certain kinds of historical markers at the very opening. It was the summer of 1998, the summer of the Monica Lewinsky affair, the summer when Viagra takes off in the marketplace. Those are very contemporary historical markers. Now, think back to the way Blood Meridian opens with its historical markers. Do you remember this line? It's the father talking about the kid's birth. He says, "Night of your birth, '33. God, how the stars did fall." I think I've got that correct. What he's talking about is the Leonid meteor showers in 1833 that mark the night of the kid's birth. For all that McCarthy is interested in--and mining--the historical detail of the 1830s, '40s, '50s, that novel favors historical markers that seem like cosmic markers of time. So, contrast the stars falling in, yes, a historically specific meteor shower, but nevertheless in something that looks like a cosmic communication of meaning. Contrast that with the relatively mundane, debased historical markers that Roth chooses, Viagra, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. You want to ask yourself, what kind of history is each writer invoking? I want to suggest to you that if you press on the markers that Roth chooses, you will find something more than trivia, more than contemporary trivia, that Roth has in his sights an equally universal, trans-historical kind of truth in this novel, that's brought up by those little details of history. And that trans-historical history is the history of desire, of which both those things are indicative. I will say a lot more about desire and its relationship to the history of literature and to writing in this novel in my Monday lecture, but as you go on I would like you to think about how history functions as a set of contexts for the story that Roth tells you. Now I want to talk about identity. So, does this novel conform to the form of the Identity Plot? There are certain ways I think it does, and it does so in a very explicit way. Remember how I mentioned that tension in the Identity Plot is produced by the individual's relationship to the group and the way that's vexed. It isn't a very exciting Identity Plot if the protagonist just discovers that he or she is whatever categorizable identity and says, "Oh, good. I'll be that," and then goes on. The tension comes from feeling that either such an identification would be coercion, or that it comes with all kinds of attendant suffering. There are all kinds of tensions that are produced in making that not an easy identification, and you can see that very explicitly in this novel on page 108--106,108--when Coleman talks about being at Howard University, and along with that, the experience of being called a "nigger" for the first time. This is on the top of 106: Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about him, even to the kids in the dorm who had all sorts of new clothes, and money in their pockets, and in the summertime didn't hang around the hot streets at home, but went to camp, and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks, but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis and acted in plays. What the hell was a cotillion? Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids talking about? He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in his freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand, for all they knew that he didn't. He hated Howard from the day he arrived. Within a week he hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30^(th) Street station in Philadelphia for Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with that college. Right there in that sentence, in this little set of scenes about Howard and his experience in D.C., you see him at first being asked by his family to identify with a certain version of the black middle class, and then finding he is revolted by his own difference from that middle class. He feels like a black field hand, the darkest of the dark field hand, "for all they knew that he didn't," and on 108 we get it in very abstract terms. "You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we, another place that's just like that, the substitute for that."The problem of the Identity Plot is the problem of the "I" and the "we." Here is Coleman laying out exactly how he feels about that, and so what he's going to favor there, again on 108, is the raw "I," all the subtlety of being Silky Silk. So there you have encapsulated, in a very short amount of prose, a major form--narrative form, narrative dynamic--of the Identity Plot as a genre. On 144, you get another version of that, slightly more personalized to his family. This is another version of identity and what Coleman thinks about it. This is after we get the history of Coleman's family, his ancestors, and we're told that he is not the first to pass as white or to disappear from the black family in to which he was born: "Lost himself to all his people" was another way they, the family, put it. Ancestor worship, that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing. The idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment. So, this version of identity on 144, this vision of it, is identity as ancestor worship and imprisonment in that family, imprisonment in that way of thinking, a radical un-freedom. So, this is one version of identity, radically individual, rising out of the difference that you feel from the various "we" groups you are asked to join. But there are other versions of identity that are imagined here, and they track pretty clearly with scholarly ways of thinking about identity at this same time. So, in one sense identity is this radical individual humanist version that I've been tracing in the last few minutes. Another is that identity is a constantly changing performance, and we get that too in Coleman. You see it, again, right in the section about Howard on 109, and I want you to note the words that Roth chooses here, 109 in the middle: "He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose." "Play his skin any way he wanted." Now, remember that his father is a great devotee of Shakespeare and tries to communicate to his children, not only through their Shakespearian middle names, but through every verbal interaction he has with them, that the grandeur of the English language will somehow fill them and make them who they are, that this is the source of their dignity and their power. He takes that lesson and transforms it. It's about playing on the model of drama, but it's about playing color, and this is an artist's vocation, "color himself just as he chose." He's like a painter, in this sense, so this is identity as performance. There are many instances of this. On page 115,116, there is just a little description of Steena's dance for Coleman. I'm going to just read a little bit of it. All at once, with no prompting from him, seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet, she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after a little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song, prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song. There to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness, that big, white thing. "Someday he'll come along, the man I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love." The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending, to cover her shame. The history of jazz that's concentrated in to that tiny, little passage has been unpacked by a critic by the name of Jonathan Freedman. He does a whole history, which I can't produce here, of how Artie Shaw and various players played Gershwin, and used black musicians in their ensembles, and how this very dance, when Steena, here, we're told, in a way, inhabits most fully her whiteness, she does that by performing to a music that is radically hybrid, black and Jewish. So, Freedman argues that in this passage we get identity as a vision of absolute fluidity, absolute performance and fluidity, and that the whole history of American jazz stands behind that imagined state. It's the very difference between the hybrid music and the pure whiteness of Steena's body that creates what's so provocative to Coleman, the spectacle of whiteness in the context of hybridity. The father's obsession with the English language, though, has taught Coleman to categorize relentlessly. Do you remember this little detail? This is on page 93 when Coleman is describing or we're having described to us exactly how Coleman's father taught them to speak. This is on 93. Growing up they never said, "See the bow-wow." They didn't even say, "See the doggie." They said, "See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier." They learned things had classifications. They learned the power of naming precisely." The father, for all that he is imbuing them with the most elite version of a white literary tradition, Shakespeare, he is also teaching them relentlessly to see classification and categorizing. In Coleman this comes to mean something quite different, and you see it in this funny, little passing moment on 107, the very top of the page. This is talking about his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays, the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel. The son felt his father's majesty as never before, the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that as a college freshman away for barely a month.--[And then it quotes from Shakespeare.] The cocker spaniel: Why? Why choose that as what the little boy thinks of when he looks at that floppy volume? It's a moment when being trained to classify and to categorize causes him to see the source of that linguistic precision, the book of Shakespeare, in very demeaning terms, or reductive terms or--I'm not getting quite the precise word I want--in deflating terms. So that, instead of grandeur, the book of Shakespeare becomes the source for the names of dogs. And the way the child's imagination blends grandeur and the ordinary, I think, gives us Coleman, who can imagine the details of everyday life, the life he lives, as a grand play. Doc Chizner furthers this transformation of the father's lesson in this very crucial passage, that I'm going to talk more about later, when Coleman passes as white or Jewish for the first time. And that's when he's boxing for the pit coach: "If nothing comes up," Doc said [this is the bottom of 98] "you don't bring it up. You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk. That's enough. That's the deal." "You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk." This takes the question of categorization--are you colored? Are you not?--it negates it: you're neither one thing nor another, but then reinstates it in a different mode: you're Silky Silk. Make up a new category for yourself. So, Doc Chizner takes that transgressing use of precision that we see in the cocker spaniel metaphor in the child's imagination, and he shows Coleman how to apply that to living race in America, living his race in America. You are Silky Silk. You're not a race. You're a proper name, the irreducible singularity of a person. There is a third way of thinking about race, and that, of course, is as biology. That, too, is present in this novel. The body is relentlessly present, and I hope that you picked up on that. It's not hard to pick up on it. The very matter and specificity of the body is everywhere in this novel, and so I want to look back at 21 and 22. This is in that wonderful scene when Coleman dances with Nathan. So, we get a whole description of Coleman's body and what it is that Nathan sees in it, suddenly, now that he's shirtless on this hot summer night, and also now that he is no longer talking about the "spooks" business. This is 21. On display were the shoulders, arms and chest of a smallish man still trim and attractive, a belly no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that had gotten seriously out of hand, altogether the physique of someone who had seemed to have been a cunning and wily competitor at sports rather than an overpowering one. And all of this had previously been concealed from me, because he was always shirted, and also because of his having been so drastically consumed by his rage. What you see there is the revelation of certain things we will find out to be true about Coleman, that he was a cunning and wily competitor rather than an overpowering one, that he is still fit and virile, that he has himself in hand, nothing that had gotten out of hand, seriously out of hand. Coleman very much still has himself in hand. He is still the maker of himself, the presenter of himself to the world in a deliberate way. But then we go on, and there are some things that we see that perhaps tell us something different. Rather than the body revealing the truth about Coleman-- certain kinds of truth, not a racial truth, other kinds of truth--we see marks on his body that don't produce that knowledge. Also previously concealed was the small, Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the top of his right arm just at the shoulder joining, the words "U.S. Navy" inscribed between the hooklike arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid muscle, a tiny symbol if one were needed of all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography, a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be, at best, slightly wrong. What's revealed when Coleman is shirtless is the very sign that he cannot be known in any kind of complete way. It's the mark of a history on his body, that he was in the navy, a history we'll learn a little bit about, but not a lot, but for Nathan it is the mark of an irreducible difference between persons, that always there are details that are not accessible, circumstances of the other fellow's life. In this moment Nathan recognizes Coleman as a cipher, a sign that can be projected upon with meanings of his own. I would suggest to you that we don't see the full flowering of this until quite a bit later in the novel, but I think this is the first moment where, in Coleman revealing his body, he suggests to Nathan the possibilities of that body as a sign. So, he is no longer, in this moment, entirely "in hand" anymore. So, if his physique hasn't gotten out of hand, his circulation as a sign certainly has. In this case, he has now become a blank canvas for Nathan. Certainly, up until this moment at the beginning of the novel, what's most on the surface of the plot is how he has become the victim of rumor, how his self-presentation got completely out of hand, taken over by other people's erroneous readings of his words. So, if the body seems to be in his control, himself as a signifier is not. Here Nathan is invited into it, but in a very different way than the rumormongers who surround him at Athena College and in the town. So, the body is not going to be a place of revelation. Speech, as I've noted, is a problematic moment of revelation, but it can be that. And on 81,82, we see an example of that when his speech formally in the novel touches off what will be some of the most important revelatory passages in the novel. And this is when Nelson Primus, having berated Coleman and advised him in his clever, authoritative, arrogant way not to pursue anything against Lester Farley or Delphine Roux, has offended him and enraged him so much as to become the target of Coleman's rage. Coleman said, "I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug, fucking, lily-white face," and the question becomes why--and we see Nelson ask it the next page--why "white," why does "lily-white" become the insult that he hurls at Nelson? And formally, even though there's a little bit of an interlude here about Athena College and Coleman's rage, this is the moment when we launch into the tale of Coleman's childhood, and we learn for the first time what kind of family he comes from, and what the history of his passing has been, how he made that decision to abandon his family of birth. So, speech can be revealing, but only in those moments when it is out of Coleman's control. Here, in this moment, "lily-white" is inspired by his rage. He is out of control, in that sense, and of course, "lily white" is the term his brother, Walt, applies to him in a similar moment of anger, after Walt discovers that he has told his mother that he is essentially estranging himself permanently from the family in order to marry Iris. Walt says, "Don't ever show your lily-white face here again." So, he's reproducing Walt's language, and, from that, it indicates to Nelson Primus and for us, in the unfolding of the novel, that there is a mystery here to be told. And then we get the telling of that mystery. So, from that little word, all of this unfurls, and I would just note, just in passing, that this is quite a contrast to Delphine Roux. On 38 and 39, you can look at: Coleman is very surprised that she has made no effort to hide the identifying marks of her own handwriting. Delphine Roux--though her name suggests the Delphic, the oracular, the mysterious, the secret--Delphine is someone who cannot conceal herself. The very material of her language, of her writing, of her letters, puts her identity on the page to be read, and it seems as if she hasn't even tried to conceal it. So, Delphine's lack of depth, her lack of complexity as a character, her basic despicableness is summed up in that inability to conceal herself, whereas Coleman only reveals himself in moments when he is unguarded, or when he has become, not a person in control of his own representation of himself, but rather a sign at large among other representers (Nathan, Delphine, other people). Secrecy, then, is at the very heart of what identity means in this novel, and now I want to get to this crucial passage on page 100. For me, this is where we learn really what identity means in this novel. So, he says he wants to be in this fight with--in front of the Pitt coach--with Ray Robinson. It wasn't just that [This is on 99.] It wasn't just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more than when he'd boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he'd ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets, the secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think, with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves, but that wasn't where the power was, or the pleasure either. The power and the pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counter-confessional in the same way you were a counter-puncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. That's why he liked shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag, for the secrecy of it. And I'm going to skip down a little bit. He talks about concentrating, and how the secrecy is produced by the concentration, or is related to the concentration on the one thing that you're doing. Whatever is to be mastered, he becomes that thing. He could do that in biology, and he could do it in the dash, and he could do it in boxing, and not only did nothing external make any difference; neither did anything internal. That little example right there: He could do it in biology, on a biology exam he could focus exclusively on that thing, become that thing, in the dash, in boxing in the ring, but why choose that example? Why not mathematics? Why not chemistry? Well, here again, it's Roth's craft coming through. Roth chose that because what Coleman does is precisely to overcome biology. It's the biology of who his parents are, of who their parents are. That biology, the biology of American race, is what he takes hold of and transforms. It becomes his secret. Biology becomes his secret, not as an academic subject, but as a lived experience. Boxing is the sport of concealment for him, thinking ahead, observing his opponent, watching how slow the punch is: All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth. For all Coleman's training in the English language from his father, his mode of revelation, his mode of communication, is not verbal. It is somehow physical, as a physical performance, as a damaging physical performance. That term "counter-confessional," being--the pleasure and the power were in--being counter-confessional in the same way you were a counter-puncher, in not telling--this is quite a remarkable term for Roth to use. The history of Roth's writing from the very first story collection, Goodbye, Columbus published in 1960, through the many, many novels in the next five decades, that trajectory, which I'm going to talk a little bit about on Wednesday, is defined by the confessional quality of many of these works.So, Roth is widely known for drawing on his own life in his fiction, and for making Nathan Zuckerman track his biography in significant ways. And, in this novel, it happens to be true that Philip Roth went through prostate cancer surgery and now lives up in the Berkshires and has been very secluded up there and very productive writing novels in the last ten years. So, in this novel already, anybody who knows even those basic facts knows that Roth himself as a writer is confessional, in some sense of the word. One question we might want to ask is: is he counter-confessional the way that Coleman is, the way that you can be a counter-puncher, and what would it mean to be that? Why does it matter? In fact, does it matter? And then, why does it matter, if it does, that his novels track his life? This is a long-term question for anyone who thinks about Roth's writing, and I will get more to it in my second lecture on The Human Stain next Monday, but it's something to think about. But let me pause, again, on that rhetorical question. "Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret?" There are two ways of reading that last question. "Who he really was was entirely his secret." If we read that, "who he really was" as a colored guy from East Orange, then we'll see it as that being his secret. But you can read it, you can parse that grammar, a different way. "Who he really was was his secret." Could it be because who he really was was "his secret," secrecy as the essence of identity? It doesn't matter what's in that hidden box. It doesn't mean that we have to fill it in. It doesn't mean, even, that it can be known. And you think back to the way the anchor on his arm, the tattoo on his arm, reminds Nathan of how little you can ever know about the other fellow. The very fact of the person's other-ness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about them, and that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another. This returns the meditation on identity to a universalist, humanist version of what identity would be. It's simply private consciousness. Private consciousness is what defines us as persons, and then, radiating out from that, all the things that one can do with a private consciousness, which then encompasses these other modes of identifying that the novel rehearses, and then critiques or sometimes endorses, plays with, jumbles, juggles. We have a private consciousness. You can decide to decide. This is something that Coleman does on a number of occasions, and it's a phrase that Roth repeats when he's deciding to decide to be done with the spooks business, deciding to decide not to be worried about Lester Farley. You have the power to form your self-presentation. You have the power to make your identity an artistic performance. That's what private consciousness does for you, but it does a couple other things, too, and I want to track those, or suggest them just briefly before I end today, in one sense by following the theme of difference, and in the other sense by following the word "secrecy" in the novel. First, on the question of pure difference, on 47, in that wonderful scene of Faunia with the cows, this is Nathan reflecting on the desire that he sees enacted there. And again, remember, Coleman is not primarily a man of words, but a man of being, and he has just stood in silence with Nathan watching Faunia milk the cows. It was enough to be able to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing whatsoever in common, all the while remembering how they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything about them that was irreconcilable, the human discrepancies that produced all the power. It was enough to feel the thrill of leading a double life. And what this passage, the sentences above, emphasize, is that Faunia is a woman of thirty-four, a "wordless illiterate," and that Coleman is a man replete with the vocabularies of two ancient tongues, as well as his own native tongue. So, the very difference between them, this time limned in terms of education and language, vocabulary, literacy, here it's that difference that is invoked as the engine of desire. So, if desire is always that looking towards the other thing, the thing that you are not, the thing that you do not have, the thing that is absent from you: that's the definition of desire. You can't have desire if you already have the thing. Desire is that force that's always reaching toward something that is separate from you. Difference between human beings is just that, in this scene, just the engine of desire. So, here, for all the meditations on race, the social construction of race, race as performance, race as essence, race as biology, race as secret, it's secret that gets to that over-arching concern with desire in the novel. And this is a moment where I think Roth is transcending the genre. He's taking the dramas of the Identity Plot, and he's driving them to an extreme and pushing them over in to another subject matter. So, in this sense, identity as secrecy pushes us over in to the subject matter of desire and mortality, which is at the heart of Roth's writing from beginning to end. Now, I will not say that identity is not also a subject matter he's working with from beginning to end of his career. That's definitely true, and I'll say more about that on Wednesday when I talk about the shape of his career. But especially as Roth moves later in his career these questions of desire and mortality take the upper hand. Now, the last thing I want to do, just very quickly, is point to page 44, another use of that word "secret," the very top of the page. The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions. The trick of living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing, the encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance, this is quoting Hawthorne again, the communications of a solitary mind with itself. The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased. Now, one question I, myself, as a reader have struggled with about this novel is whether Roth imagines that Nathan's state, when he describes it that way, is a false one or a weak one, one to be rejected. Is it a withdrawal from life? I think that last sentence, "The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne," gives us the answer that I'm content with. And that is: yes, it's a withdrawal from life if you don't understand Hawthorne as a person, as someone with whom you can become entangled. It's the very act of thinking of a literary forebear as a person rather than a text that allows this to be a productive state, one that Nathan will be drawn out of by Coleman, but yet one that the novel does not reject. It's when Coleman becomes for Nathan a character, the person becomes this living representation, that he is drawn out of his solitude. So, in a way, it's not even Coleman the person that draws him out, but his world when he encounters Coleman and his story, when he sees Coleman's body during that dance as a cipher, as the sign of all that you can't know about the other fellow. When he sees that about Coleman, that's when he comes out of one productive state of communing with the brilliant dead and comes in to the world of Coleman who will be dead very, very shortly. So, on Monday next I will talk about that relationship between desire and the literary, between persons and characters, between life and novel. Think about those things as you read.

Literature_Lectures

5_The_Idea_of_the_Autonomous_Artwork.txt

Prof: Okay. Moving then as quickly as possible into our subject matter for today, we begin a series of lectures on various aspects of twentieth-century formalism-- a big word. At the end of our run through the varieties of twentieth-century formalism, I hope it doesn't seem quite as big and that its many meanings-- yet a finite number of meanings--have been made clear to you. That is to say, what we're taking up this week, is as much really the history of criticism as literary theory. You remember in the first lecture I said there's a difference between the history of criticism and theory of literature, one difference being that the history of criticism has a great deal to do with literary evaluation: that is to say, why do we care about literature and how can we find means of saying that it's good or not good? This is an aspect of thought concerning literature that tends to fall out of literary theory but not out of the materials that we are reading this week. You can see that when Wimsatt and Beardsley talk about the "success" of the poem, they understand the whole critical enterprise, including its theoretical underpinnings-- the question of what is a poem, the question of how should we best read it-- to be still geared toward literary evaluation. That makes the subject matter that we'll be discussing this week, as I say, as much a part of the history of criticism as it is of literary theory. We're going to be reading it with a theoretical spin. That is to say, we're going to focus on the question of what a poem is and the question, "What criteria should we invoke in order to read it for the best and correctly?" But there are other ways of approaching this material. In any case, then, Wimsatt. Beardsley by the way was actually a philosopher who taught at Temple University, a good friend of his. In the book in which the essay "The Intentional Fallacy" appeared, a book called The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt collaborated with Monroe Beardsley on three essays, and this is one of them. So we try to remember to say "Wimsatt and Beardsley" even though it is Wimsatt who taught at Yale. That in itself needn't be significant except that the New Critics, the school of critics to which he belonged, have always been identified with Yale and indeed consolidated here a kind of teaching method and attitude toward literature which constituted the first wave-- the first of two waves--of involvement in literary theory which amounts to the Yale English and comparative literature departments' claims to fame. Many of those figures who belong to the New Critics did much of their important work before they arrived at Yale. Others never were at Yale, and yet at the same time it's a movement closely associated with this institution. When I arrived at Yale, Wimsatt was still teaching, Cleanth Brooks was still teaching, and so I feel a kind of personal continuity with these figures and understand, as we all will more fully later on, the way in which the style, and emphasis on the style, of close reading that evolved within the New Criticism meaningfully and importantly left its mark on much subsequent criticism and theory that hasn't in fact always acknowledged the New Criticism perhaps to the extent that it might have. Much of this should be reserved for next time when I talk about Cleanth Brooks and return to the whole subject of the New Criticism and the way in which it's viewed historically-- so much of it can be reserved for next time. But what I do want to say now is this. If it weren't for the New Critics, none of you probably would have been able to sit patiently through any of your middle or high school English classes. When Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published a book called Understanding Poetry, first published in 1939 and then subsequently reissued again and again and again as it swept the country, suddenly schoolteachers had a way of keeping kids in the classroom for fifty minutes. Close reading, the idea that you could take a text and do things with it-- that the interpretation of a text wasn't just a matter of saying, "Oh, yes, it's about this and isn't it beautiful?"-- reciting the text, emoting over it, enthusing about it, and then looking around for something else to say-- it was no longer a question of doing that. It was a question of constructing an elaborate formal edifice to which everybody could contribute. Students got excited about it. They saw certain patterns or certain ways of elaborating patterns that the teachers were talking about and, lo and behold, the fifty minutes was over and everybody had had a pretty good time. This had never happened in an English class before. > > Seriously, you're English majors because of the New Criticism--I admit, especially if you went to private school. This way of teaching did not perhaps quite so much for a variety of reasons permeate public school literature teaching, but it was simply, as a result of Understanding Poetry, the way to go. It took time. If you had more than fifty minutes, you could actually make ample use of it. T.S. Eliot, who was in many ways associated with the New Criticism, one of its intellectual forebears, nevertheless took a somewhat dim view of it and called it "lemon squeezer criticism." What this meant is it takes time. You've got to squeeze absolutely everything out of it, and so it was ideal from the standpoint of teaching and was, it seems to me, also wonderfully galvanizing intellectually because it really did make people think: "look how intricate what I thought was simple turns out to be." The New Criticism, incontestably and without rival, created an atmosphere in which it was okay to notice that things were a little more difficult than they'd been supposed to be. This in itself was extraordinarily useful and constructive, not just for subsequent literary theory, I think, but for the way in which English teaching actually can help people think better. All of this the New Criticism had a great deal to do with-- and when I talk next time about the way in which it's been vilified for the last > forty or fifty years, naturally I will have this in the back of my mind. So in any case, where did this preoccupation with form-- because we're beginning to think about the way in which theory can preoccupy itself with form-- where does it come from? Well, needless to say, I'm about to say it goes back to the beginning. When Plato writes his Republic and devotes Book Ten, as I'm sure most of you know, to an argument in effect banishing the poets from the ideal republic, part of the argument is that poets are terrible imitators. They imitate reality as badly as they possibly can. They are three times removed from the ideal forms of objects in reality. They're a hopeless mess. They get everything wrong. They think that a stick refracted in the water is therefore a crooked stick. They are subject to every conceivable kind of illusion, not to be trusted, and Socrates calls them liars. Okay. Now when Aristotle writes his Poetics he does so-- and this is true and rewards scrutiny if one thinks carefully about the Poetics-- he does so very consciously in refutation of Plato's arguments in the Republic, and perhaps the keystone of this refutation is simply this: Plato says poets imitate badly. Aristotle says this is a category mistake because poets don't imitate reality. Poets don't imitate, says Aristotle, things as they are. They imitate things as they should be. In other words, the business of poets is to organize, to bring form to bear, on the messiness of reality and, in so doing, to construct not an alternate reality in the sense that it has nothing to do with the real world-- that is to say, it doesn't mention anything in the real world, or it somehow or other invents human beings made out of chocolate or something like that-- instead, it idealizes the elements existing in the real world such that its object is something other than reality as such. This is really the origin of formalism. Aristotle is considered the ancestor of the varying sorts of thought about form, and it's this move, this move that he makes in the Poetics, that engenders this possibility. Now turning to your sheet, in the early, early modern period the poet and courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, wrote an elegant, really wonderfully written defense of poetry, in one edition called The Apology for Poesie. In this edition he, while actually a fervent admirer of Plato, nevertheless develops this idea of Aristotle with remarkable rhetorical ingenuity and I think very impressively lays out the case that Aristotle first makes, here in the first passage on your sheet. Sidney's talking about the various kinds of discourse: divinity, hymnody, science, philosophy, history-- in other words, all the ways in which you can contribute to human betterment and human welfare. He says in the case of all but one of them, each discourse is a "serving science." That is to say, it is subservient to the natural world; its importance is that it refers to that world. The first sentence of your passage: "There is no art but one delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object." This by the way-- although what they serve is not exactly a work of nature-- is why even that which is incontestably better than secular poetry, in other words hymnody, and also divine knowledge or theology-- even these fields, which are the supreme fields, are also serving sciences. They are subservient to an idea that they have to express, which is the idea of God, right, and God is real. There's no sense that we're making God up in this kind of discourse. Sidney is a devoutly religious person and there's no semblance of doubt in his attitude, and yet he is saying something very special about the poet who is somewhere in between divinity and the other sorts of discourse with which poetry is traditionally in rivalry: science, philosophy and history. And he says this is what's unique about poetry. Only the poet disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [subjection, in other words, to things as they are], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature.... He nothing affirms and therefore never lieth. In other words, Plato is wrong. The poet is not a liar because he's not talking about anything that's verifiable or falsifiable. He is simply talking about the parameters of the world he has brought into being. Sidney thinks of it as a kind of magic. He invokes, for example, the science of astrology. The poet, he says, ranges freely within the zodiac of his own wit. He also invokes the pseudoscience of alchemy when he says that the poet inhabits a brazen world, and of this--"brazen" means brass-- of this brazen world, he makes a golden world. In other words, poetry is transformational. In representing not things as they are but things as they should be, it transforms reality. All right. So this is an argument which in outline, once again, justifies the idea of literature as form, as that which brings form to bear on the chaos and messiness of the real. Now I don't mean to say things just stood still as Sidney said they were until you get to Kant. A great deal happens, but one aspect of Kant's famous "Copernican revolution" in the history of philosophy is his ideas about aesthetics and the beautiful and about the special faculty that he believes has to do with and mediates our aesthetic understanding of things, a faculty which he calls "the judgment"; so that in The Critique of Judgment of 1790, he outlines a philosophy of the beautiful and of the means whereby "the judgment" makes judgments of the beautiful. He does a great deal else in it, but I'm isolating this strand, which is what's relevant to what we're talking about. In many ways Kant, without knowing anything about Sidney, nevertheless follows from Sidney particularly in this, as you'll see. I'm going to look sort of with some care at these passages so all will become clear, but particularly in this: Sidney--and I didn't exactly quote the passage in which Sidney does this but I urged you to believe that he does-- Sidney actually ranks poetry somewhere between divinity and the other sciences. In other words, poetry is not the supreme thing that a person can do. Sidney believed this so much in fact that when he knew himself to be dying, having been mortally wounded in a battle, he ordered that all of his own poems be burned. From the standpoint of a devout person, he had no doubt that poetry was inferior to divinity. Now in a way that's what Kant's saying, too. In the passages you'll read, you'll see that the point is not that art and the judgment of the beautiful is the supreme thing that humanity can be engaged with. The point is only that it has a special characteristic that nothing else has. That's the point that this whole tradition is trying to make. This is the way Kant puts it, turning first to the second passage: The pleasant and the good both have a reference to the faculty of desire [The pleasant is the way in which our appetency, our sensuous faculty--which Kant calls "the understanding," by the way-- understands things. Things are either pleasant or unpleasant. The good, on the contrary, is the way in which our cognitive and moral faculty-- which Kant calls "the reason"-- understands things. Things are either to be approved of or not to be approved of, but in each case, as Kant argues, they have a reference to the faculty of desire-- I want, I don't want, I approve, I disapprove], and they bring with them the former [that is to say, the pleasant], a satisfaction pathologically conditioned; the latter a pure, practical, purposeful satisfaction which is determined not merely by the representation of the object [that is to say, by the fact that the represented object exists for me, right] but also by the represented connection of the subject with the existence of the object [in other words, by the way in which I want it or don't want it, approve of it or don't approve of it]. My subjective wishes, in other words, determine my attitude toward it, whereas what Kant is saying is that my attitude toward that which simply stands before us as what is neither pleasant nor good, but is rather something else, doesn't exist for me. It exists in and for itself. The next passage: "Taste is the faculty of the judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction." In other words, yeah, I still like it or don't like it, but my liking has nothing to do either with desire or with approval-- moral, political, or however the case may be. I just like it or I just don't like it according to principles that can be understood as arising from the faculty of judgment and not from the faculty of the understanding, which is appetitive, and the faculty of reason, which is moral. So with that said, perhaps just to add to that, the fourth passage: "Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object so far as it is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose." You say, "Whoa, what is this?" > > Kant makes a distinction between the purposive and the purposeful. What is the distinction? The purposeful is the purpose of the object in practical terms. What can it do? What can it do for me? How does it go to work in the world? What is its function among other objects? What bearing does it have on--in particular--my life? But the purposiveness of the object is the way in which it is sufficient unto itself. It has its own purpose, which is not a purpose that has any bearing necessarily on anything else. It has, in other words, an internal coherence. It has a dynamism of parts that is strictly with reference to its own existence. It is a form. It is a form and that form, because we can see it has structure and because we can see it has organization and complexity, is purposive. That is to say, it manifests its self-sufficiency. So that's Kant's famous distinction between the purposive, which is the organization of an aesthetic object, and the purposeful, which is the organization of any object insofar as it goes to work in the world or for us. An aesthetic object can be purposeful; that is to say we can view it as purposeful. I see a naked body, which the art historians call a nude. Let's say I don't accept that it's merely a nude. I want it or I disapprove of it and, lo and behold, it's no longer aesthetic. I'll come back to that in a moment, but I hope you can see that that is a distinction between the purposive and the purposeful. Now just in order to reprise these important distinctions, I want to turn to a passage in Samuel Coleridge who is, at least on this occasion, a disciple of Kant and is, I think, usefully paraphrasing the arguments of Kant that we have just been engaged in. This is the fifth passage on your sheet: The beautiful [says Coleridge] is at once distinguished both from the agreeable which is beneath it [and notice the sort of stationing of the beautiful as Sidney stations it between what's beneath it and what's above it]-- from the agreeable which is beneath it and from the good which is above it, for both these necessarily have an interest attached to them. Both act on the will and excite a desire for the actual existence of the image or idea contemplated, while the sense of beauty rests gratified in the mere contemplation or intuition regardless whether it be a fictitious Apollo or a real Antinous. In other words, the judgment of beauty does not depend on the existence of the object for its satisfaction. Now Oscar Wilde, ever the wag and a person who generated more good literary theory in ways that didn't seem like literary theory at all, perhaps, in the entire history of thinking about the subject, says in the famous series of aphorisms which constitute his "Preface" to The Picture of Dorian Gray-- he concludes this series of aphorisms by winking at us and saying, "All art is quite useless." I hope that after reading these passages and enduring the explication of them that you've just heard you can immediately see what Wilde means by saying all art is quite useless. He's appropriating a term of opprobrium in the utilitarian tradition-- oh, my goodness, that something would be useless, right?–he's appropriating a term of opprobrium and pointing out that it is an extraordinarily unique thing about art that it's useless; in other words, that it appeals to no merely appetitive or other form of subjective interest. We don't have to have an "interest" in it in the sense of owning part of a company. We don't have to have an interest in it in order to appreciate it. In other words, we can be objective about it. We can distance ourselves from our subjective wants and needs and likes and dislikes, and we can coexist with it in a happy and constructive way that is good for both of us, because if we recognize that there are things in the world which have intrinsic value and importance and what we call beauty, and yet are not the things that we covet or wish to banish, we recognize in ourselves the capacity for disinterestedness. We recognize in ourselves a virtue which is considered to be the cornerstone of many systems of moral understanding. To realize that we're not interested in everything and merely because we're interested take a view of things, but that there are things that we don't have to have that kind of interest in and can nevertheless recognize as self-sufficient and valuable, is important. Wilde's suggestion, but I think also Kant's suggestion before him, is important for our recognition of our own value. By the same token, all this harping on the autonomy of art-- that is to say, the self-sufficiency of art, the way in which it's not dependent on anything, or as Sidney says, the way in which it's not a serving science existing merely to represent things other than itself, right?--the way in which this is possible for art is, as also our own capacity to be disinterested is, a way of acknowledging that freedom exists: that I am free, that things are free from my instrumental interest in them, so that in general what's implicit in this view of art and this view of human judgment, and what makes it so important in the history of thought, is that once again--and this is not the first time we've brought this up in these lectures and won't be the last-- it's a way of recognizing that in addition to all the other things that we are, some of them wonderful, we are also free. There is in us at least an element that is free, independent, serving nothing, autonomous. This idea of our freedom, and by implication of the freedom of other things, from our instrumental interests is what sustains the formalist tradition, and against various kinds of criticism and objection that we'll be taking up in turn as the case arises, sustains and keeps bringing back into the history of thought on these subjects the notion that form simply for its own sake-- as the notorious Aestheticism movement at the end of the nineteenth century put it-- is valuable. All right. Now John Crowe Ransom, who was never at Yale but is nevertheless one of the founders or first members of a self-identified school of figures who called themselves the New Critics, published a book called The New Criticism, and that's > where the term "the New Critics" comes from. You may have noticed in your Wimsatt essay that there is a footnote to somebody named Joel Spingarn who wrote an essay called "The New Criticism" in 1924. Not to worry. That has nothing to do with the New Criticism. That just means criticism which is recent, > a different matter altogether. By the same token, there is the work of Roland Barthes and some of his contemporaries-- Poulet, whom I mentioned, Jean Starobinski and others-- that was called in the French press La Nouvelle Critique. That, too then is an instance of the New Criticism being used as a term, but that too has nothing to do with our subject. The New Critics, the American New Critics as they are sometimes identified, were a school--and I use that term advisedly because they are self-identified as a group-- a school of people who evolved this idea of the independent status-- Ransom calls it a "discrete ontological object"-- of the work of art and the means whereby it can be appreciated as independent in all of its complexity. Our first foray into the thinking of this school will be our reading of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy," which I'll get to in a minute; but, simply as a reprise, take a look at the two passages from Ransom which complete what's on your sheet and which, I think you can see, create a link between the sort of thinking you've encountered in reading "The Intentional Fallacy" and the tradition that I've been trying to describe. Passage seven ought to be completely transparent to you now because it is simply a paraphrase of the passages I have given you from Kant and Coleridge: "The experience [says Ransom] called beauty is beyond the powerful ethical will precisely as it is beyond the animal passion. Indeed, these last two are competitive and coordinate." In other words, what they have in common with each other, ethical will and animal passion, is that they're both grounded in interest. Right? That's the point of Sir Kenneth Clark's word, "the nude." > For the naked human being, as viewed both by the appetites and by moral reason, as a common term from the standpoint both of what Kant calls "the understanding" and from what Kant calls "the reason," the expression "naked body" is just fine; but if we do believe there is another category, the aesthetic, viewed by an independent faculty called "the judgment," we need another word for what we're looking at-- modern painters like Philip Pearlstein and Lucian Freud would strongly disagree, but in a way that's the point. When we're looking at a painting of a naked body we don't say, "Oh, that's a naked body." We say, "That's a nyewd," and that distinction is what, as it were, bears out the implicit way, the semiconscious way, in which all of us acknowledge there to be a category that we call the aesthetic judgment. On the other hand, a lot of people think it's all hokum, and in fact the predominant view in the twentieth century has been that there's no such thing as disinterestedness, that whatever we are looking at we have an interest in and form views of, and that this Kantian moment of dispassionate or disinterested contemplation is what the early twentieth-century critic I.A. Richards called a "phantom aesthetic state." The predominant view is of this kind of--but, just to do it justice in passing, there is a certain sense, is there not? in which we suddenly find ourselves, without meaning to and without being simply victims of any sort of cultural tyranny, standing in front of something, clasping our hands, tilting our head and feeling somehow or another different from the way we feel when we typically look at things. And that, too, is an intuitive way of saying, "Yeah, however rigorously we can define it or defend it, something like this does seem to go on in our minds at certain kinds of moments of experience." We just feel differently looking at a certain work of art or a certain landscape, let's say, than we feel looking at other sorts of things. Maybe we don't know why. Maybe we doubt that the difference is absolute in the way that Kant wants to insist it is. Nevertheless, we have in tendency feelings of this kind and we should acknowledge them because again, at least in terms of a weak understanding of these positions, it does tend to justify them. At least it explains to us why people can have had such thoughts. Okay. Wimsatt--I keep saying Wimsatt. Again it's Wimsatt and Beardsley, but I already explained how that is. Wimsatt right off the bat attacks what he calls "the Romantic understanding of literature." Now what does he mean by Romantic? It's the attitude which supposes that a "poem," and that's Wimsatt's privileged word which I'll try to explain, that a poem is an expression-- that is to say, is the expression of some passion or profound genius working its way into a form, but that the important thing is the expression. This much, by the way, Wimsatt has in common with Gadamer, because Gadamer doesn't talk much about authors either, and Gadamer is interested in what he calls meaning, the subject matter, die Sache. Right? He's not interested in your sort of expression of that meaning or my expression of that meaning. He's interested in the way in which a reader can come to terms with a meaning conveyed by a text, and that much, as I say, despite the profoundly different nature of their projects, Wimsatt and Gadamer have in common. So a poem is not an expression but an independent object with a self-contained meaning, and if this meaning is not self-evident to the attentive reader then we don't judge the poem a success. This is where evaluation comes in. The success or failure of a poem depends on the realization of meaning. It doesn't depend on our going to the archive, finding out what the author said in his letters about it, finding out what he told his friends, or what he told the newspapers. It doesn't involve any of that. If the meaning is not clear in the poem, we judge the poem a failure. We don't refer--we have no reason to refer, if we respect the autonomy of the poem as such, we don't refer--we don't appeal to an authorial intention. Hence, on page 811, the left-hand column, about a third of the way down: "… [T]he design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art…" It follows from this that even a short poem, even a short lyric poem--and here you could see Wimsatt "following" Foucault, though obviously not following but anticipating Foucault, and again they have nothing to do with each other, but there is this overlap--even a short poem doesn't really have an author. It has a "speaker," a figure speaking in the poem, that needs to be understood dramatically, that is to say as though the poem were one of Browning's or T.S. Eliot's dramatic monologues--in other words, so that the speaker of any poem on Wimsatt's view is a speaker endowed with a certain character, a certain viewpoint, a certain argument to be put forward, and our concern about the speaker has to be a concern within the poem about the way in which this character is elaborated, and not reinforced, somehow, by biographical reference to that which is not the speaker but the author standing back there somewhere behind the poem. Now why focus on the "poem"? Notice that we never hear about literature. We never even hear about "poetry." The object of attention for an analysis of this kind is the poem. Well, the poem is, as John Donne puts it, a little world made cunningly. It's a microcosm. It is a distillation or quintessence. It is a model in other words for the way in which literature can be understood as world-making-- not a representation, again, of things as they are but of things as they should be; whereby "things as they should be" is not necessarily an ideal but rather that which is formal, that which is organized, and that which has a coherence and makes sense self-sufficiently and within itself. That's why the poem, the lyric poem, is privileged among the forms of literary discourse in the New Criticism. All literature is by implication a "poem," > but the poem is the privileged site of analysis whereby this broader statement can be made to seem reasonable, hence the emphasis on the poem. The absence of the Romantic word "poetry" is therefore not insignificant. Poetry is that which just sort of spills out of me. It's the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. (Never mind that.) The New Criticism isn't interested in spontaneous overflows of powerful feelings. Wimsatt has his little joke about drinking a pint of beer, taking a walk. So the New Criticism just isn't interested in those sorts of spontaneous overflow. Sorry. > I won't go there. > But in any case, he goes on. He goes on to say, "All right. If we're focused on the work of art in and of itself, on the poem, we obviously in thinking about what it means need to come to terms with three kinds of evidence." That is to say, some things have a bearing on what it means and some things don't. What does have a bearing is language-- that is to say, words in the public domain which all of us share and which we can study in order to come to terms with the exact meaning of the poem. A certain word--this is, of course, what kept you in your high school classes for so long--a certain word has five or six different meanings. The New Criticism delights in showing how all five or six of those meanings do have some bearing on the meaning of the poem. That's all legitimate evidence. That is what one uses to build up the structure of the interpretation of the poem. What is not relevant is what I've mentioned already: what the author said about the poem in letters to friends, to newspapers and so on. That has no relevance. Then Wimsatt acknowledges that there's a sort of messy third category of evidence which has to do with language and is therefore legitimate to a point, but also has to do with the author's idiosyncrasies-- that is to say, the way that author in particular used language, certain coterie words, or simply a private misunderstanding of certain words. You've got to know when you're reading Whitman what he means by "camerado." It's not exactly > what the rest of us typically mean when we--well, we don't use that word exactly, but it's > > what we typically mean when we speak of comrades or comradeship. In other words, the word is loaded in ways that-- Wimsatt would probably acknowledge-- need to be taken into account if we're going to understand what Whitman is up to. Now this is very tricky, and he spends the rest of his essay talking about the murky boundaries between types of evidence, type of evidence number two which is out of play and type of evidence number three which may be in play but has to be dealt with in a gingerly and careful way. But I'm more interested, actually, in a footnote which arises from this argument about the idiosyncratic nature of language as a particular author may use it because the footnote says, you know what? That's just one consideration we bring to bear on the function of language in a poem. This footnote, number eleven at the bottom of page 814 over to 815, is just about as devastating and counterintuitive a pronouncement as is made anywhere in our entire syllabus, the most earth-shattering pronouncement that anybody could ever possibly make in the New Criticism. Well, look at this footnote: And the history of words after a poem is written may contribute meanings which if relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention. That is bold. The great creator raised his plastic arm, right? Everybody knows Akenside didn't mean polymers, but now we're all into cyberborgs and we take all of this very seriously. In a way it's a tribute to the great creator and also an acknowledgement of the fact that the great creator lives in the Eternal Moment. He's not subject to history. The great creator knew in the eighteenth century that some day plastic would mean polymer, right? Obviously that's one of the divine attributes. Therefore, if the great creator chooses to raise his prosthetic limb, that is simply a way of understanding what it is like to be everything, omnipotent and omniscient in the Eternal Moment. In other words, if you take Wimsatt's eleventh footnote seriously, that is a perfectly legitimate way not to ironically undermine Akenside's line but actually to reinforce it and to give it a kind of formal richness which it does not otherwise have. I realize that I'm out of time, and so I'll begin the next lecture by talking about a poem of Yeats called "Lapis Lazuli" written in 1935, in which he talks about the way in which people who build up things that have been destroyed are always "gay." And of course, if we invoke intention, Yeats doesn't mean that they're always gay in our sense. He is using the English translation of the German word froehlich from Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Yeats is an astute and careful reader of Nietzsche and in some ways is elaborating on what Nietzsche says in that book in his poem "Lapis Lazuli." At the beginning of the next lecture we will do the same thing with the word "gay" that we've just done with the word "plastic" and then we will go ahead and consider the essay of Cleanth Brooks and other aspects of the New Criticism.

Literature_Lectures

1_Introduction.txt

Prof: I thought I'd begin today--this > is, by the way, the regular practice. This is as close as I get to bulleted Power Point. It's all there. I ought to have got through those topics by the end of the lecture. If I don't, not to worry. I'll pick up wherever the dotted line emerges in the subsequent lecture. In any case, I thought I'd begin today by making a few remarks about the title of our course because it has some big words in it: "theory" and "literature," but also "introduction." I think it's worth saying a word or two about the word "introduction" as well. Now the word theory has a very complicated etymological history that I won't trouble you with. The trouble with the etymology of theory and the way in which the word has been used traditionally is that sometimes it actually means practice, and then at other historical periods it means something very different from practice, something typically from which practice is derived. Well, that's the sense of theory that I like to work with, and I would pause over it by saying that after all, there is a difference and practice and we shouldn't too quickly, at least, confuse the terms. There's a difference between theory and methodology. Yes, it's probably fair enough to say that methodology is applied theory, but there's a great danger in supposing that every aspect of theory has an immediate application. Theory is very often a purely speculative undertaking. It's an hypothesis about something, the exact nature of which one needn't necessarily have in view. It's a supposition that whatever the object of theory might be, theory itself must--owing to whatever intellectual constraints one can imagine-- be of such and such a form. At this level of abstraction, plainly there isn't all that much incentive to apply thinking of that kind, but on the other hand undoubtedly theory does exist for the most part to be applied. Very frequently, courses of this kind have a text-- Lycidas, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a short story--and then once in a while the disquisition of the lecture will pause, the text will be produced, and whatever theory has recently been talked about will be applied to the text; so that you'll get a postcolonial reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner-- something, by the way, which is absolutely fascinating and important to do-- and so on through the course. Now I suppose it's my reluctance to get into the intricacies of questions having to do with applied theory that makes me prefer to keep it simple. Our text is a story for toddlers called Tony the Tow Truck. I've decided not to pass it out today because, after all, I want to get it into the right hands! You can't read it unless you take the course!--and so I'm going to wait a little bit. > We won't come back to it at least for the moment, but you see that it's mercifully short, and as time passes we will do some rather interesting tricks with it. We will revert, as others revert to Lycidas, to Tony the Tow Truck for the purpose of introducing questions of applied theory. Now this choice may suggest a certain condescension both toward theory and toward literary text, which is not at all intended. It's much more a question of reminding you that if you can do it with this, you can do it with anything; but also of reminding you that, after all, reading--reading just anything--is a complex and potentially almost unlimited activity. That's one of the good things that theory teaches us and that I hope to be able to get across in the course of our varied approaches to Tony the Tow Truck. Now theory resembles philosophy perhaps in this: that it asks fundamental questions and also at times builds systems. That is to say, theory has certain ambitions to a totalization of what can be thought that resembles or rivals philosophy. But theory differs from philosophy-- and this is something that I'm going to be coming back to persistingly in the second half of this lecture and many times hereafter: theory differs from most philosophy in that it involves a certain-- this is by no means self-evident, and "Why should this be?" is one of the questions we're going to be asking--it involves a certain skepticism. There seems to be a doubt, a variety of doubts, about the foundations of what we can think and the basis of our opinions, that pervades theory, and is seen somehow or another to characterize its history. Not all theory that we read in this course is skeptical. Some of the most powerful and profound thought that's been devoted to the subject of the theory of literature is positive in its intentions and in its views, but by and large you will happily or unhappily come to terms with the fact that much of what you're going to be reading this semester is undergirded, or perhaps I should say undermined, by this persisting skepticism. It's crucial, as I say, and I'm going to be coming back to it, but it's just a point I want to make in passing about the nature of theory now. Turning to the word literature, this is not theory of relativity, theory of music, or theory of government. This is a course in theory of literature, and theory of literature shares in common with other kinds of theory the need for definition. That is to say, maybe the most central and, for me, possibly the most fascinating question theory asks is--well, what is literature? How do we know it when we see it? How can we define it? Much of what we'll be reading takes up the question "What is literature?" and provides us with fascinating and always--for the moment, I think--enticing definitions. There are definitions based on form, circularity, symmetry, economy of form, lack of economy of form, and repetition. There are definitions based on psychological complexity, psychological balance, psychological harmony, sometimes psychological imbalance and disharmony, and there are also definitions which insist that somehow there is an epistemological difference between literature and other kinds of utterance. Whereas most utterances purport to be saying something true about the actual state of things in the world, literary utterance is under no such obligation, the argument goes, and ought properly to be understood as fiction-- making it up as opposed to referring. All right. Now all of these definitions have had currency. We'll be going over them again and finding them, I hope, more fascinating as we learn more about them; but at the same time, even as I rattle off this list of possibilities, probably you felt in yourself an upsurge of skepticism. You say, "My goodness. I can easily find exceptions to all of those rules. It's ridiculous to think that literature could be defined in any one of those ways or even in a combination of all of them. Literature is many things, a many-splendored thing," you say to yourself, "and it simply cannot be confined or trapped within a definition of that kind." Well and good, properly ecumenical of you, but at the same time it gives rise to a sense that possibly after all, literature just isn't anything at all: in other words, that literature may not be susceptible of definition, of any one definition, but it is rather-- and this is the so-called neo-pragmatist argument-- but it is rather whatever you think it is or more precisely whatever your interpretive community says that it is. This isn't really a big problem. It's kind of unsettling because we like to know what things are, but at the same time it's not really a big problem because as long as we know about the fact that a certain notion of literature exists in certain communities, we can begin to do very interesting work precisely with that idea. We can say there's a great deal to learn about what people think literature is and we can develop very interesting kinds of thinking about the variety of ways in which these ideas are expressed. And so it's not, perhaps, crippling if this is the conclusion we reach, but at the same time it's not the only possible conclusion. The possibility of definition persists. Definition is important to us, and we're certainly not going to give it short shrift in this course. We're going to make every effort to define literature as carefully as we can. Now in addition to defining literature, literary theory also asks questions obviously not unrelated but which open up the field somewhat. What causes literature and what are the effects of literature? In a way, there's a subset of questions that arises from those, and as to causes these are, of course, what we'll be taking up next time: the question "What is an author?" That is to say, if something causes literature, there must be some sort of authority behind it and therefore we find ourselves asking, "What is an author?" By the same token, if literature has effects, it must have effects on someone, and this gives rise to the equally interesting and vexing question, "What is a reader?" Literary theory is very much involved with questions of that kind, and organizing those questions is basically what rationalizes the structure of our syllabus. You'll notice that we move in the syllabus-- after a couple of introductory talks that I'll mention in a minute-- we move from the idea that literature is in some sense caused by language to the idea that literature is in some sense caused by the human psyche, to the idea that literature is in some sense caused by social, economic, and historical forces. There are corollaries for those ideas in terms of the kinds of effects that literature has and what we might imagine ourselves to conclude from them. Finally, literary theory asks one other important question-- it asks many, but this is the way at least I'm organizing it for today-- it asks one other important question, the one with which we will actually begin: not so much "What is a reader?" but "How does reading get done?" That is to say, how do we form the conclusion that we are interpreting something adequately, that we have a basis for the kind of reading that we're doing? What is the reading experience like? How do we meet the text face-to-face? How do we put ourselves in touch with the text which may after all in a variety of ways be remote from us? These are the questions that are asked by what's called hermeneutics, a difficult word that we will be taking up next week. It has to do with the god Hermes who conveyed language to man, who was in a certain sense, among many other functions, the god of communication, and hermeneutics is, after all, obviously about communication. So hermeneutics will be our first topic, and it attempts to answer the last question that I've mentioned which is raised by theory of literature. All right. Now let me pause quickly over the word introduction. I first started teaching this course in the late 1970s and 80s when literary theory was a thing absolutely of the moment. As I told the teaching fellows, I had a colleague in those days who looked at me enviously and said he wished he had the black leather concession at the door. Theory was both hot and cool, and it was something about which, following from that, one had not just opinions but very, very strong opinions. In other words, the teaching fellows I had in those days--who knows? They may rise up against me in the same way this semester-- but the teaching fellows I had in those days said, "You can't teach an introduction. You can't teach a survey. You can't say, 'If it's Tuesday, it must be Foucault. If it's Thursday, it must be Lacan.' You can't approach theory that way. Theory is important and it's important to know what you believe," in other words, what the basis of all other possible theory is."I am a feminist. I'm a Lacanian. I am a student of Paul de Man. I believe that these are the foundational moments of theorizing and that if you're going to teach anything like a survey, you've got to derive the rest of it from whatever the moment I happen to subscribe to might be." That's the way it felt to teach theory in those days. It was awkward teaching an introduction and probably for that reason > while I was teaching Lit 300, which was then called Lit Y, Paul de Man was teaching Lit Z. He was teaching a lecture course nearby, not at the same time, which was interpretation as practiced by the School of de Man. That was Lit Z, and it did indeed imply every other form of theory, and it was extremely rigorous and interesting, but it wasn't a survey. It took for granted, in other words, that everything else would derive from the fundamental idea; but it didn't for a minute think that a whole series of fundamental ideas could share space, could be a kind of smorgasbord that you could mix and match in a kind of happy-go-lucky, eclectic way, which perhaps we will be seeming to do from time to time in our introductory course. Well, does one feel any nostalgia now for the coolness and heat of this moment? Yes and no. It was fascinating to be--as Wordsworth says, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive"-- to be around in those days, but at the same time I think it's rather advantageous for us too to be still "in theory." That is to say we still have views. We still have to recognize that what we think derives from this or that understanding of theory and these or those theoretical principles. We have to understand the way in which what we do and say, what we write in our papers and articles, is grounded in theoretical premises which, if we don't come to terms with them, we will simply naively reproduce without being fully aware of how we're using them and how, indeed, they are using us. So it is as crucial as ever to understand theory. In addition, we have the vantage point of, I suppose, what we can now call history. Some of what we'll be studying is no longer practiced as that which is the absolutely necessary central path to methodology. Some of what we're studying has had its moment of flourishing, has remained influential as a paradigm that shapes other paradigms, but is not itself, perhaps, today the sole paradigm-- which gives us the opportunity of historical perspective, so that from time to time during the course of the course, I'll be trying to say something about why certain theoretical issues and ideas pushed themselves into prominence at certain historical moments, and that too then can become part of our enterprise. So an introduction is not only valuable for those of us who simply wish to acquire knowledge. It's also valuable, I think, in lending an additional perspective to the topic of theory and to an understanding about how theory is, on the one hand and perhaps in a certain sense, now an historical topic and is, on the other hand, something that we're very much engaged in and still committed to: so all that then by way of rationale for teaching an introduction to theory. All right. Now the question, "How does literary theory relate to the history of criticism?" That is a course that I like to teach, too; usually I teach Plato to T.S. Eliot or Plato to I.A. Richards or some other important figure in the early twentieth century. It's a course which is absolutely fascinating in all sorts of ways, and it has one very important thing in common with literary theory: that is to say, literary criticism is, too, perpetually concerned with the definition of literature. Many of the issues that I raised in talking about defining literature are as relevant for literary criticism as they are for literary theory, and yet we all instinctively know that these are two very different enterprises. Literary theory loses something that literary criticism just takes for granted. Literary theory is not concerned with issues of evaluation, and it's not really concerned with concomitant issues of appreciation. Literary theory just takes those for granted as part of the sense experience, as one might say, of any reader and prefers, rather, to dwell on questions of description, analysis and speculation, as I've said. So that's what's lost in theory, but what's new in theory? Here I come to the topic which will occupy most of my attention for the remainder of the lecture. What's new in theory is the element of skepticism that literary criticism by and large-- which is usually affirming a canon of some sort-- doesn't reflect. Literary theory, as I say, is skeptical about the foundations of its subject matter and also, in many cases, about the foundations of what it itself is doing. So the question is: how on earth did this come about? It's an historical question, as I say, and I want to devote the rest of the lecture to it. Why should doubt about the veridical or truth-affirming possibilities of interpretation be so widespread in the twentieth century? Now here is a big glop of intellectual history. I think the sort of skepticism I mean arises from what one might call and what often is called modernity-- not to be confused with Modernism, an early twentieth-century phenomenon, but the history of modern thought as it usually derives from the generation of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Notice something about all of those figures: Shakespeare is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy. Cervantes is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy--we're pretty sure of that, but he certainly isn't. He takes it for granted that he is the most rational and systematic of all thinkers and raises questions about-- since we all take ourselves to be rational too-- raises questions about just how we know ourselves not to be paranoid delusives like Don Quixote. So that can be unsettling when we think of this as happening at a certain contemporaneous moment in the history of thought. Now Descartes, you remember, in his Meditations begins by asking a series of questions about how we can know anything, and one of the skeptical questions he asks is, "Well, might I not be crazy?" In other words, Descartes is still thinking along these same lines. He says, "Well, maybe I've been seized by an evil genius of some kind or maybe I'm just crazy." Now why--and here is the question--why do we get this nervousness about the relationship between what I know and how I know it arising at this moment? Well, I think it's characterized at least in part by what Descartes goes on to say in his Meditations. Descartes settles the matter--perhaps somewhat sweeping the question of whether he is crazy under the rug because I'm still not sure he answers that question-- but he settles the matter famously by saying, "I think. Therefore, I am," and furthermore, as a concomitant, "I think, therefore, all the things that I'm thinking about can be understood to exist as well." Now the Cartesian Revolution establishes something that is absolutely crucial for what we call the Enlightenment of the next hundred, hundred and fifty years--in other words, the idea that there is a distance between the mind and the things that it thinks about, but that this distance is a good thing. In other words, if you look too closely at a picture or if you stand too far away from it you don't see it clearly-- it's out of focus--but if you achieve just the right distance from it, it comes into focus. The idea of scientific objectivity, the idea that motivates the creation of the great Encyclopedia by the figures of the French Enlightenment-- this idea all arises out of the idea that there is a certain appropriate objective distance between the perceiver and the perceived. Gradually, however, the idea that this distance is not too great begins to erode so that in 1796 Kant, who isn't exactly enlisted on the side of the skeptics by most of his serious students, nevertheless does say something equally famous as that which Descartes said and a good deal more disturbing: "We cannot know the thing in itself." Now as I said, Kant erected such an incredibly magnificent scaffolding around the thing in itself-- that is to say, the variety of ways in which although we can't know it, we can sort of triangulate it and come to terms with it obliquely-- that it seems churlish to enlist him on the side of the skeptics, but at the same time there's a sense of a danger in the distance between subject and object that begins to emerge in thinking of this kind. Now by 1807, Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind is saying that in recent history and in recent developments of consciousness something unfortunate has set in. We have "unhappy consciousness," unhappy consciousness which is the result of estrangement, or Verfremdung, and which drives us too far away from the thing that we're looking at. We are no longer certain at all of what we're looking at, and consciousness, therefore, feels alienated. All right. So you can already begin to see a development in intellectual history that perhaps opens the way to a certain skepticism. But the crucial thing hasn't yet happened, because after all, in all of these accounts, even that of Hegel, there is no doubt about the authority of consciousness to think what it thinks. It may not clearly think about things, about objects, but it has a kind of legitimate basis that generates the sort of thinking that it does. But then--and here is where I want you to look at the passages that I've handed out. Here's where three great figures--there are others but these are considered the seminal figures-- begin to raise questions which complicate the whole issue of consciousness. Their argument is that it's not just that consciousness doesn't clearly understand what it's looking at and is therefore alienated from it. It's also that consciousness is alienated from its own underpinnings, that it doesn't have any clear sense of where it's coming from any more than what it's looking at: in other words, that consciousness is not only estranged from the world but that it is in and of itself inauthentic. So just quickly look at these passages. Marx, in the famous argument about commodity fetishism in Kapital, is comparing the way in which we take the product of human labor and turn it into a commodity by saying that it has objective value, by saying that we know what its value is in and of itself. He compares that with religion. The argument is: well, God is a product of human labor. In other words, it's not a completely supercilious argument, sort of "God is brought into being the same way objects that we make use of are brought into being." God is a product of human labor, but then we turn around and we say God exists independently and has value objectively. Marx's argument is that the two forms of belief, belief in the objective value of the commodity and belief in God, are the same. Now whether or not any of this is true, believe me, is neither here nor there. The point that Marx is making is that consciousness, that is to say the way in which we believe things, is determined by factors outside its control-- that is to say in the case of Marx's arguments, social, historical and economic factors that determine what we think and which in general we call "ideology"; that is to say, ideology is driven by factors beyond the ken of the person who thinks ideologically. So you see the problem for consciousness now is not just a single problem. It's twofold: its inauthentic relationship with the things it looks at and also its inauthentic relationship with its own underpinnings. The argument is exactly the same for Nietzsche, only he shifts the ground of attack. For Nietzsche, the underpinnings of consciousness which make the operations of consciousness inauthentic are the nature of language itself. That is to say that when we think we're telling the truth we're actually using worn-out figures of speech. "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified," etc., etc., etc., "and are now no longer of account as coins but are debased." Now that word "now" > is very important. It suggests that Nietzsche does somehow believe that there's a privileged moment in the history of language when perhaps language is a truth serum, when it is capable of telling the truth, but language has now simply become a question of worn-out figures, all of which dictates what we believe to be true. I speak in a figurative way about the relationship between the earth and the sky, and I believe that there's a sky god. I move from speech to belief because I simply don't believe that I'm using figures of speech. All of this is implied in Nietzsche's argument. In other words, language, the nature of language, and the way language is received by us, in turn determines what we can do with it, which is to say it determines what we think, so that for Nietzsche the distortion of truth-- that is to say the distortion of the power to observe in consciousness-- has as its underlying cause language, the state of language, the status of language. Freud finally argues for exactly the same relationship between consciousness-- that is to say, what I think I am thinking from minute to minute-- and the unconscious, which perpetually in one way or another unsettles what I'm thinking and saying from minute to minute. You know that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud reminded us that the Freudian slip isn't something that happens just sometimes-- and nobody knows this better than an ad libbing lecturer-- ;it's something that happens all the time. The Freudian slip is something that one lives with simply as a phenomenon of the slippage of consciousness under the influence of the unconscious. Now in the passage I gave you, Freud says a very interesting thing, which is that after all, we have absolutely no objective evidence that the unconscious exists. If I could see the unconscious, it'd be conscious. Right. The unconscious, Freud is saying, is something that we have to infer from the way consciousness operates. We've got to infer something. We've got to figure out somehow how it is that consciousness is never completely uninhibited, never completely does and says what it wants to say. So the spin on consciousness for Freud is the unconscious. Now someone who didn't fully believe Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, a very important modern philosopher in the hermeneutic tradition named Paul Ricoeur, famously said in the fourth passage on your sheet that these great precursors of modern thought-- and particularly, I would immediately add, of modern literary theory--together dominate a "school of suspicion." There is in other words in Ricoeur's view a hermeneutics of suspicion, and "skepticism" or "suspicion" is a word that can also be appropriated perhaps more rigorously for philosophy as negativity. That is to say, whatever seems manifest or obvious or patent in what we are looking at is undermined for this kind of mind by a negation which is counterintuitive: that is to say, which would seem not just to qualify what we understand ourselves to be looking at but to undermine it altogether. And these tendencies in the way in which Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received have been tremendously influential. When we read Foucault's "What is an Author?" next time we'll return to this question of how Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received and what we should make of that in view of Foucault's idea that-- well, not that there's no such thing as an author but that it's rather dangerous to believe that there are authors. So if it's dangerous to believe that there are authors, what about Marx, Nietzsche and Freud? Foucault confronts this question in "What is an Author?" and gives us some interesting results of his thinking. For us, the aftermath even precisely of the passages I have just quoted, but certainly of the oeuvre of the three authors I have quoted from, can to a large degree be understood as accounting for our topic-- the phenomenon of literary theory as we study it. In other words, literary theory, because of the influence of these figures, is to a considerable degree a hermeneutics of suspicion recognized as such both by its proponents and famously-- I think this is perhaps what is historically remote for you-- by its enemies. During the same period when I was first teaching this course, a veritable six-foot shelf of diatribes against literary theory was being written in the public sphere. You can take or leave literary theory, fine, but the idea that there would be such an incredible outcry against it was one of the most fascinating results of it. That is to say for many, many, many people literary theory had something to do with the end of civilization as we know it. That's one of the things that seems rather strange to us today from an historical perspective: that the undermining of foundational knowledge which seemed to be part and parcel of so much that went on in literary theory was seen as the central crucial threat to rationality emanating from the academy and was attacked in those terms in, as I say, at least six feet of lively polemics. All of that is the legacy of literary theory, and as I say, it arises in part from the element of skepticism that I thought it best to emphasize today. Now I think that one thing Ricoeur leaves out, and something that we can anticipate as becoming more and more important for literary theory and other kinds of theory in the twenty-first century, is Darwin. That is to say, it strikes me that Darwin could very easily be considered a fourth hermeneut of suspicion. Of course, Darwin was not interested in suspicion but he was certainly the founder of ways of thinking about consciousness that are determined, socio-biologically determined: determined in the realm of cognitive science, determined as artificial intelligence, and so on. All of this is Darwinian thinking and, I think, increasingly will be central in importance in the twenty-first century. What will alter the shape of literary theory as it was known and studied in the twentieth century is, I think, an increasing emphasis on cognitive science and socio-biological approaches both to literature and to interpretive processes that will derive from Darwin in the same way that strands of thinking of the twentieth century derive from the three figures that I've mentioned. But what all this gives rise to--and this brings me finally to the passages which you have on both sides of your sheet and which I don't want to take up today but just to preview-- the passages from Henry James' Ambassadors from 1903, and from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard from 1904. In other words, I am at pains to remind you that this is a specific historical moment in which, in a variety of ways, in each case the speaker argues that consciousness-- that is to say, the feeling of being alive and being someone acting in the world-- no longer involves agency: the feeling that somehow to be conscious has become to be a puppet, that there is a limitation on what we can do, imposed by the idea that consciousness is determined in ways that we cannot control and cannot get the better of, so that Strether in The Ambassadors and Yepihodov in The Cherry Orchard speak for a point of view which is a kind of partially well-informed gloom and doom that could be understood to anticipate texts that are much better informed, that we will be considering but nevertheless are especially important as an aspect of their historical moment. I want to begin the next lecture by taking up those passages. Please do bring them, and I will also be passing around Tony the Tow Truck and I'll give you a brief description of what the little children's book actually looks like, and then we will plunge in to the question "What is an author?" So I'll see you on Thursday.

Literature_Lectures

14_Maxine_Hong_Kingston_The_Woman_Warrior.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: It is the seventh week of term, and in this class, if you have kept up, you have read nine novels in seven weeks. So, if you kept up, I want you, right now, to pat yourself on the back. Oh, I don't see a lot of patting. Okay: if you just missed one novel. Okay. I don't want to look. Do your patting later. Let me say that you have broken the back of the course, not to use too violent a metaphor. It's the seventh week. We have six weeks left. In those six weeks we have five--count them--five novels. That's it, and one of them you get to choose. So, instead of doing two novels in a week, you'll have a week and a half for one novel. This is a much more humane pace. Why are you laughing? It's not funny. You also, of course, have Spring Break. If you use Spring Break wisely, read, in a somewhat leisurely way, in Myrtle Beach, as you're relaxing on the beach, Blood Meridian--excellent beach novel--you'll be in great shape. You'll be riding high through the rest of the term, easy-peasy, okay. Why did I do that to you these last three weeks? Why did I do that? Well, one reason, as I said at the beginning of class, at the beginning of the term, is that I did not want you to be crushed after Spring Break. I wanted you to be crushed now, so it'll be better later. But there's another reason. So, why didn't I just drop one of those novels? Well, my lecture today is, in part, an answer to that question. A syllabus is not a parade. It's not a succession of novels that passes by, and we wave, and we catch whatever candy or beads they throw at us, and then we go home at the end of the day with sore feet from standing too long. It's not like that. A syllabus, at least in this kind of class and with me teaching it, is an argument. It's an argument about a whole historical period. It's an argument about a chunk of literary-historical history. It's an argument about the evolution of an art form in a particular place and time. In order to preserve that quality of a syllabus, you have to read quite a bit. Reading quite a bit means that you can begin to see the lineaments of larger trends and movements in that historical period. It allows you to amass enough evidence to build an intellectual understanding of what's going on in this period. If I had dropped a novel, there are certain kinds of arguments I would not have been able to make, and the argument that I'm going to make for you today would not be as compelling as I hope it will be. So, as in the Franny and Zooey lecture, I tried to demonstrate for you in a very self-conscious way how literary scholars make local arguments that take into account an entire novel, its major features, and use the evidence of detail at the level of text to support those kinds of claims. Today I'm going to make a much broader argument of the kind that literary scholars are often interested in making. I'm going to make an argument about a major trend in this period, and to do that I will use evidence, and I'm going to call on you to help me put together the evidence for broader claims that cross novels. An argument of this kind has a different quality from those more local arguments about individual novels that I've made each week. It's different in the sense that I want, and most literary scholars want, such arguments not to be totally counterintuitive in the way that you can sometimes take pleasure in making a reading of a local novel counterintuitive. For the big arguments, you want to be able to account for what is obvious about the period, but perhaps has not been justified as an analysis of the period. So, you want a sense of inevitability, that this argument you're making explains all kinds of things that people have always noticed about that period. In the same way that, when I lectured on Franny and Zooey, I asked you what was obvious to you about the novel and then my argument went around and spoke back to those things at different points. So this general argument aims to speak to those obvious parts, but it speaks more strongly to those obvious perceptions, and so I'm launching into a different kind of argument. What I want to talk to you about today is a particular narrative form and convention, and I'm calling it the Identity Plot. Certainly, I am not the first scholar to think about identity as a form of narrative in this period, and it's precisely because I am not the first that I can give it this sort of name. There is so much work that's been done excavating how identity works in the novel in this period that it has become something we know a lot about. What hasn't been said before is that it has this particular name, and I use this name because, for me, the Identity Plot, which I will explain in a few moments, fulfills much the same function in fiction of this period as the Marriage Plot did for the Victorian novel. So, any of you who have taken the Victorian novel class, Professor Yeazell's course, or have studied or just read a lot of Jane Austen novels, Dickens novels and so on, you will know what the Marriage Plot is. The Marriage Plot is that engine of storytelling that makes novels hang on a structure of a couple and the question of whether they will get together or not. Now, there are all kinds of stages in that development, the development of that narrative. Are the couples from the same social class? Are they from geographically contiguous places? Do they have personalities that match? Do their parents agree? Are they related to each other secretly (always a problem)? There are all kinds of things that can go wrong for a couple trying to get together, and the Victorian novel was very good at generating narrative from all those kinds of complications. Then, there are different kinds of outcomes that you can have in the novel governed by the Marriage Plot. One is the comedy. That's when you get married at the end, the couple gets married. Then there's the tragedy: They don't, and they should have, and we all know it. So, Pride and Prejudice would be an example of the former kind; Anna Karenina perhaps an example of the latter kind, even though that's a novel really about adultery. It totally depends on the conventions of the Marriage Plot. The Identity Plot works in much the same way.So, what is the Identity Plot? I am going to give you an unusual sight in my class now, and that is Power Point. I think I'm sort of surprised and delighted by this myself, so we'll see how it works. So, if you're taking notes, which I encourage you to do, you will find there are bolded words that you can copy down. The Identity Plot: Narrative Form in Post-1945 Fiction. Isn't that snazzy? Okay. (Oops. I've already made my first technological mistake. There we go.) Six elements of the Identity Plot. Make sure you capitalize "Identity" and "Plot," please, and also give me credit in the footnote of your notes for that phrase. The narrative of the Identity Plot novel revolves around the question of how to define and understand a character's identity (big surprise there). And, number 2: the character needs to be a member of the minority within a larger society. I am not going to ask you to volunteer examples of these, because it's just too obvious that our last three or four novels each feature one of these characteristics, or all of them. The third one is absolutely crucial to the development of the Identity Plot, and that is that the character is also at odds with the minority group of which he or she is a part. This is important, because without it, the Identity Plot gets really boring. It doesn't have a lot of complication. If all you have to do is realize, as you're going about your life, "wow, I am a member of X or Y group. Great. I know who I am now. Done." that is a really short story, actually, and it's not a good short story, either. There is just not enough resistance to the evolution of the plot, so it's really important. The drama of the Identity Plot depends upon this. Furthermore, the character in question needs to be conflicted about his or her difference from the majority and about his or her difference from the minority group. Can anyone think of an example of this? Can anyone think of an example? Yes, Eli.Student: Woman Warrior.Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely, yeah. So in case you didn't hear Eli, Woman Warrior is a great example of this. Maxine (that's what I'll call her when I'm talking about the character Maxine Hong Kingston) Maxine feels alienated from Chinese culture because of the misogyny she perceives in that culture, but she also turns to Chinese culture as a way to identify herself and to give her a positive self-image, as in that story of the woman warrior (which I actually didn't ask you to read, but there are other examples in the stories that I did ask you to read, chapters that I did ask you to read, to give her that sense of grounding as a person). Other examples. How about in The Bluest Eye? Yes. Student: Franny and Zooey.Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. I think Franny and Zooey really does fit this model. Yes. There are lots of different ways of conceiving what it means to have a minority group at work in these novels, and I think Franny and Zooey definitely imagines a minority group as the Glass family. They're big enough to be a group. There are lots of children, so you get that sense that they're a clan; they're sort of a tribe of themselves. They have this peculiar quality, their intellectual sort of complexity, and also their artistic gifts, especially their gifts in language. And there is a conflict between Franny and Zooey, and Zooey is really held out as the custodian of the Glass family identity, so it's he who instructs Franny and brings her finally back in to the fold, and that's an example of the comic ending. Other examples from other novels. Can anyone do this for Bluest Eye? How might Pecola be an example of this? Okay. Let me do it. Pecola goes up to the whores' apartment and finds there a kind of love and acceptance from those women that does not judge her for her ugliness, that surrounds her with a rich verbal culture as well as a culture of affection. It is a group that has seceded from the black community itself but still maintains a certain tie. Remember the prostitutes' admiration for the good Christian woman. That ties them to the prevailing norms of the black community. So, Pecola finds an ideal black community within that small apartment, but she is alienated from that positive black self-image that she sees in those women by her desire to identify with white beauty, to have blue eyes, and so that's how she would embody this. Frieda is also an example of this, Frieda and Claudia. So, actually, if we take the example of Claudia, Claudia wants to be like, remember the girl they called Meringue Pie, the light-skinned girl? She wants to be like her, but at the same time she recognizes a certain insipid quality to this girl. She doesn't have the kind of strength that Claudia and Frieda, with the addition of Pecola, have as a little group that doesn't pass judgment on their own blackness. So that, again, between Claudia, Frieda and Pecola there is another small idealized black community, but Claudia is somewhat conflicted, both about her membership in that little group, and her difference from the influx of white blood into that community, and white aesthetic into that community. So, she echoes, in a less dramatic way, the same kinds of conflicts that you see in Pecola. The fourth quality of the Identity Plot is that authenticity and origin are always at stake in the character's quest for personal identity, even when those things are absent. So, in the Woman Warrior, we have an excellent example of this, in the beginning of the last chapter that I asked you to read, after she tells the whole story of Moon Orchid and Brave Orchid going to find Moon Orchid's Chinese husband and confronting him with Moon Orchid's status as the first wife. After you get this whole richly imagined story full of dialog, the next chapter begins: What my brother actually said was "I drove Mom and second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt's husband who got the other wife." "Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?" "Nothing much. Mom did all the talking." "What did she say?" "She said he'd better take them to lunch at least." "Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?" "I didn't go. The other wife didn't either. He motioned not to tell." "I would have told. If I was his wife I would have told. I would have gone to lunch and kept my ears open." "Oh, you know they don't talk when they eat." "What else did Mom say?" "I don't remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come." "There must have been more. Didn't Aunt get in one nasty word? She must have said something." "No. I don't think she said anything. I don't remember her saying one thing." In fact, it wasn't me my brother told about going to Los Angeles. One of my sisters told me what he had told her. The layers of inauthenticity in the origin of this story are deep. There is no sense that the story we have just been told in great detail has any basis in fact, and yet this is a book that is patently autobiographical. It plays up the inauthenticity and the unreliability of this voice. We know that we cannot trust the details of what is given to us, and yet the narrative tries to seduce us with them, tries to persuade us by their very dramatic quality, and their detail, and by the way these stories embody the voices of their characters, that these are real stories. So, the voice in Kingston that purports to be a source of identity formation--she's going to write herself into being--is an inauthentic voice. Now there was a controversy about Maxine Hong Kingston. Actually, it's been going on for many decades. It goes on today. There is a scholar of Chinese American literature named Frank Chin. He's also a novelist himself. He has accused Kingston and a few other writers, in the starkest terms, of being fakes and of being against Chinese culture and of being puppets of white culture. Kingston's use of Chinese literature has come under particular attack from Chin, and this happened in one of its incarnations or one of its iterations of this feud between the two. It actually happened at a conference, face to face, and I know you must think that academic conferences are always a thrill a minute. It's not really usual that they are, but I guess in this case it was. So, Frank Chin, I guess, shouted her off the stage. I don't know all the details, but it was very exciting, I'm sure. Nevertheless, the argument is serious. It's an argument about authenticity, the authenticity of Kingston's use of Chinese literature. So, imagine someone saying to John Barth, "Wait a minute. You changed the story of The Odyssey. You're a fake." That's essentially what Frank Chin says to Maxine Hong Kingston. It has a kind of traction to a certain audience, because the purity of an origin of that kind matters, if you think that that's where authenticity of an identity resides. So, if it's a cultural identity at stake, the authenticity seems to matter in a different way. Now, Barth can give us a different kind of example of this. Authenticity: Is Menelaus' voice in The Menelaiad really his own? Is there some being left over that's apart from that voice? He says, "My voice diddles on." Well, who's the "my"? Is he just reducible to that voice? Is he Proteus? Is Proteus him? Has his identity been lost in his wrestling with that changing god? The question of authenticity haunts Menelaus. It haunts Ambrose when he is in the throes of passion and he feels alienated from himself. "This is passion. I am experiencing it." That's a kind of inauthenticity. He can't be grounded in the origin of identity that we think of as the body. So, a lot of these novels make a problem out of authenticity. When it doesn't seem like a problem, a novel is making a certain kind of claim about identity right off the bat, and that's that authenticity doesn't matter. But in the context of the Identity Plot you know that it's on the radar screen even if it isn't something that is in the novel itself; it's there by its negative. Finally, there are comic versions and tragic versions of the Identity Plot, just as there are of the Marriage Plot. So, the comic version gives us characters that come to peace with their identity. My favorite example of this is actually a novel we're not reading in this course, although I could have added it, couldn't I? I could have done ten novels in the first seven weeks. I won't ask you to read it. It's Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven. In this novel, this is the most extreme example I know. I can't remember the full details, now, but in that novel there is a native American woman. There is a native American child who's adopted, forcibly, in the forcible adoptions, by a white family. I think this is how the story goes. And, eventually, after the Indian family tries to get that child back, it is discovered that the adoptive mother was, in fact, a member of that tribe by a very diluted blood line. And the adoptive mother marries the child's full-blood grandfather: perfect, perfect comic ending for an Identity Plot novel. I would say that The Bluest Eye is our tragic version of this, where Pecola will never be at peace. She is in fact deranged by her conflicted relationship to identity. Now, here is where we need a distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction. Now, I could get in to lots of trouble for these claims. They're fairly broad, and ideally I would want to give them more nuance, but I think it's useful to think about this distinction. Incarnations of these kinds of narrative conventions that we think of as literary use those structures of narrative as something to play off of or something to inhabit while they do a whole bunch of other things. Think of the ways that Humbert and Nabokov use the conventions of Romantic language to make us believe that Humbert really loves Lolita. There is something operatic about the extremity of the situation we're given, the extremity of the use of those conventions in Lolita. Well, in this case some of our Identity Plot novels use that plot to say something about language, about literary history, about tradition. Some of them simply give us aesthetic pleasure, like the pleasure that we can get from watching Barth use words, make them funny, be clever with them. So, they may deliver an artistic satisfaction that has nothing to do with the Identity Plot itself. Then there are incarnations of it that don't reflect on any of those aesthetic issues, don't reflect on the history of the literary tradition, don't engage questions about language, that deliver instead conventional, predictable satisfactions of the genre, and these we would call genre fiction. And, if you recall, Nabokov talks a little bit about pornography as genre fiction that gives you that predictable mechanical frisson of pleasure at the predictable place, and he describes Lolita as rejecting the convention of pornography. You can think about his description as applying also to the Identity Plot, that sometimes it functions, and I think the Kingsolver novel really is a good example of this, where there are predictable pleasures of the child being enveloped by a loving family after all the complications of her identity, finally it can all be resolved, or there's a kind of pleasure in that feeling that it could never be resolved, that tragic feeling. So, there's genre fiction that can end that way too. So, other examples of genre fiction: of course, the detective novel is another. My argument today is not to say that this is the only convention that our novels are working with. The detective genre is present in Crying of Lot 49. That's something that you can think about productively when you think about Oedipa's search for knowledge and clues. There is a way that Pynchon is playing off that convention as well. To make the distinction is not to reject one for the other, so literary fiction and genre fiction are both part of what literary scholars use to make especially these kinds of broad-scale arguments. So, it's not really enough, if you want to argue about a whole period of literary history, to only skim off the very most literary works. Your argument doesn't have a lot of historical purchase if you do that. If your ambition is to talk about more narrowly the evolution of an art form, that's a very legitimate move to make, to skim off just those literary examples, but if your ambition is to say something through your discussion of literature about culture, about politics, about any other set of issues, philosophical, historical questions, you want to be able to demonstrate that the things you're seeing in literary fiction have a wider purchase and have grabbed hold of the imagination of a larger set of people than the people who read high literary novels. So, you can make different kinds of claims depending on what combination of these kinds of examples you use. The Identity Plot obviously has infinite variations. I mentioned just a few to get you thinking about them. The character seems to be a member of the majority group. This is actually, in one sense, Franny and Zooey's case, as you mentioned. It seems like they are much more in a majority. They're white; they are from an upper-class section of New York; they're distinguished by their family's intellectualism. Similarly, Ambrose could be said to be in the majority group, and certainly by the definition of someone like Morrison or Kingston, that fiction--they're members of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, the members of Ambrose's family. But, if you recall, in Ambrose His Mark the family is eccentric. They, too, are marked by their difference from the churches in town, the independence of their thinking, the skill with which they carve; they have artistic skills. The character does not seem to be conflicted about his membership in the minority group. This can happen. Where do you get the drama, then? Well, sometimes you get the drama from the efforts of the majority group against that piece. Will that person betray their group or not? So, that's where the narrative tension can come, if you see this variation. The character resists the whole idea of having an identity that's stable. You might think of Kingston as an example of this, although I think you can argue it both ways. Certainly, she's not going to think you can have an identity that stays still. All those self-revisions, even just from that little passage that I read about where her story comes from, that's a suggestion that she's committed to an identity that's changeable. As this period moves on towards the end of the twentieth century, that variation is much more common; it gets more and more common. The critique of identity in theory, in the world of literary theory--think of the work of Judith Butler for example in the late '80s and stretching into the present--very influential on undermining the idea that you could have a stable identity at all. And that's where that term "essentialism," identity essentialism, comes from. That's a very negative idea by now, by this point, but in the 1970s, and I would argue that in Morrison's work, you see still a commitment to the idea that you can really be in a peaceful way African American, and that that's a stable, grounded identity, or even that you can be white as a stable, grounded identity. So, I think some writers earlier in the period persist in that idea, even while most have gone to the sense that identity is not stable. There may be multiple characters whose identities are at stake in the novel, and some subplots might end up as tragedies, some as comedy. You can have a variation with fiction based on fact. We've seen that both in Richard Wright, and now in Kingston. It raises the stakes of the fiction, and it suggests its purchase on the real to write a fiction that is sort of autobiography, based partly in fact or mostly in fact. It suggests that what's going on in the fiction is actually very close to what we live, and that's a kind of claim for fiction in and of itself. And this is an example, this last one: Identity is not based on race or ethnicity. When we think about identity, we usually think of race or ethnicity but sometimes minority status is going to be claimed or identity is going to be claimed on religious or philosophical grounds or just on the grounds of personality difference, someone who's strange. Salinger is sort of fond of this. Catcher in the Rye is an example, I think, of this, where Holden Caulfield is at odds with his world because he just sees things really differently. One of the kinds of claims that you have to be prepared to make, if you're making these broad period-based claims, is that your claim is specific to your particular time period. Now, you have to define your time period. I am dealing with post World War II American literature, somewhat arbitrary cutoff for some scholars. I think there are reasons to think that it is a real cutoff, having to do mostly with the changes in the American cultural mass market in the years after World War II. There are Identity Plots all over in the history of literature. So, the plot of mistaken identity is a staple of Renaissance comedy. Think of Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. Secret identity is a staple of Gothic fiction. This happens a lot in Dickens, other kinds of Victorian fiction. Artistic identity. Think of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's novel about the artistic formation of a person. That's especially important to Modernism. And you could also say that Woman Warrior is an example of that version of artistic self-creation. Racial identity. There is a wonderful book called Our America by Walter Benn Michaels. He argues very persuasively that there are whole ranges of genre fiction in the 1920s that are working out the logic of race, of a nativist logic of race in the early twentieth century, that these novels are governed by that logic. So, you have to be prepared to explain how your feature is different from other incarnations in the history of literature. My contention is that the Identity Plot, as I am describing it, becomes a preoccupation of both literary and genre varieties of writing in this period, so that suggests its scope, that it's not just the concern of a few writers; it's the concern of lots of writers. It's different in the degree of its presence. So, while Walter Benn Michaels argues very persuasively for the racial logic of popular Westerns, for example, or for its relevance to Willa Cather's work, it doesn't sit at the center of the plots of those novels in the same way. He can tease out the logic, but it's not because that logic is what the whole novel's drama hangs on. Some of the drama hangs on that, but in the novels I am talking about in this period, it has risen to the level of formula such that you can hang the whole plot on that structure, and it's recognizable, immediately recognizable. So, that's what I mean when I say in the next bullet point that it achieves a kind of solidity of formulaic structure. And finally I want to argue, as I have been doing in passing in the last few lectures, that these novels are working very closely with things that are happening in the culture in general: so, that tension between activism and personal growth in the 1960s as modes of social action, the question about whether you can intervene in politics through culture, is everywhere in the 1960s. And you can see it come to a head in the 1990s with the culture wars, when both liberals and conservatives begin to fight over, especially over, the syllabi of courses like this. So, if you think that it's worth fighting a political fight over the syllabus that we all read, you are already committed to a cultural politics. So, the end point of this is a very widespread argument in the 1990s about where politics happens, and that argument revolves around novels that feature the Identity Plot 'cause those are the kinds of novels that people thought of as either advancing or resisting the hegemony of a white Western tradition that was oppressive to minority people. By the way, this final incarnation of the Identity Plot is going to be very important to us when we read The Human Stain. That novel is deeply embedded in that final iteration of it. How else do you know it's a dominant convention? Well, it has an end. This is another way you can locate its historical specificity. So, it has its limits, and you can see it coming to its end when you see more elaborate embellishment and variation on that formula, that writers of ambition have to push it further and further. Even writers of the genre fiction versions have to address an audience looking for the familiar pleasure, but with just enough difference. You can think of those Hollywood chase scenes. They all look so much alike, but the new ones always have to have just that little bit more interesting special effect, or that much more dramatic car flying off some high parapet. Same thing with any narrative formula. And there comes a time when writers of ambition simply change the subject. And I'm going to argue that even though Roth is still thinking in these terms, the other novelists that we're reading--starting next week and into the end of the semester--are beginning to change the subject. So one subject that comes up very powerfully in those novels is the subject of history. It's not unrelated to identity, but it is distinctly different. And so, in Cormac McCarthy for example, there is a palpable engagement with history. And in Edward P. Jones, in a novel that really seems like a classic outgrowth of the Identity Plot novels, especially of Toni Morrison, is really much more about the terror of history than it is about the dramas of identity. So, we will see how that subject gets changed. When we read the Woman Warrior we might feel that it is very, very conventional because it does so much of what I have just described that the Identity Plot does. I think, in a way, that would be shortchanging it. Some novels look dated or look formulaic because they have been incredibly successful, and I think The Bluest Eye and Woman Warrior are examples of those kinds of novels. Woman Warrior, and this is one of Frank Chin's quarrels with it, is widely, widely taught. I always think hard about including it on my syllabus. Sometimes that's a reason to include it on a syllabus, as evidence in an ongoing, unfolding argument; sometimes it isn't. In this case I have decided pretty securely that it is; it belongs here as a piece of evidence in this unfolding argument about what's happening in the historical period. Woman Warrior is widely taught. It is one of the foremost examples of this kind of identity writing. It has some literary satisfactions. Some of those stories are really compelling. She's very good at limning a character. She's wonderful at reproducing the dialog. She reflects on the quality of writing. She is self-conscious about the construction of her narrative. And so, we can see an artist telling the story of her own coming to being as an artist in the way she tells these stories. There's all kinds of things you can close read in here. I'm going to run out of time. Let me just show you one thing. This is at the very end at 207. This is when she is told the story about her grandmother taking the family to the opera, and how bandits tend to rob the houses that have been abandoned while families are at the opera. Instead, in this case, the bandits attack the audience. In the experience the family's all broken up in the attack: By daybreak, when my grandmother and mother made their way home, the entire family was home safe, proved to my grandmother that our family was immune to harm as long as they went to plays. They went to many plays after that. The grandmother's logic is completely twisted here. It's turned upside down. It doesn't make any sense. They got attacked when they went to the play, so they go to plays in order to stay safe because they happened to survive that attack. The reason why we're given that logic is that this book is full of stories about insanity. And remember, from the story about Moon Orchid, insanity in this story is defined as telling one story over and over again, insisting on the same story. She becomes paranoid, essentially a paranoid schizophrenic. That means that sanity, healthiness, is found in multiplicity, illogic. It's a kind of contradictory claim about the status of sanity and storytelling. So, the illogic of this little moment at the very end of the book reaches back to all those other examples of illogic and insanity that we see throughout: classic new critical technique for building the meaning of a certain trope across the writing. The other thing, also, of course, to think about, is the fact that this takes place around plays, that it's art that's held out as being the lucky thing. It's art that's at the center, and this of course, especially the play, reaches back to Maxine's descriptions of her childhood drawings where she painted page after page after page of black, worrying her teachers, but for the young Maxine what she saw in a black page was the curtains of a theater ready to open, endless possibility. So, it's that very appreciation of the play, of the dramatic, shared by the grandmother, repeated even in this inarticulate artistic creation of the child that builds the sense of artistic identity as an inherited one. So, I'm not going to go on with this, but I just show you that little passage and suggest some of the ways that it's built up over the course of the book to show you that Kingston's novel or autobiography--even though it fulfills the convention so completely that it looks like genre fiction--if you locate it in 1976 when it was first published, it's not at the end of a long line of these; it's at the beginning. So, it is one of the first popular books to bring together Barth's insights with those of the identity politics beginning in the '60s. So, Morrison and Kingston, both, are some of the first to take modernist self-consciousness about writing and combine it with this interest in identity. So, that's why I think it sort of doesn't do her justice to see this as genre fiction, as too predictable, because it was one of the early versions of it. So, next week we're going to start reading Housekeeping--just hold on one sec--and I want you to think about whether Housekeeping fits the Identity Plot model, and, if it does, how it does, and if it doesn't, how it doesn't. That Identity Plot model was very influential in its early reception, so I want you to think about how that worked. Thank you.

Literature_Lectures

1_Introductions.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: This is "American Novel Since 1945." Welcome. I am Amy Hungerford. Today I am going to do a couple of things. In the first half of class, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the class and introduce some of the questions that we will think about over the term if you stay in this course. In the second half of class, I will introduce to you and start telling the first story of the term, and that's about Richard Wright's Black Boy, which is our first reading of the term. In between those two parts, I will ask that anyone who is shopping the class and would like to leave at that time do so then. I would be grateful if you would wait until that point if at all you possibly can. It just makes the whole thing work a little easier and it prevents that drop in the pit of my stomach when I see half of the class leave. So I will indicate when that moment is. Come on. Make yourself comfortable on the floor if you can. My goal in this course is to allow you or to invite you to read some of the most compelling novels written in the last little over a half century. This includes a whole range of thematic concerns. So when I look down at my list of novels--which I have not brought with me (I trust you can find it on the web; I didn't want to kill trees by making enough of these for all of you)--when I look down at my list of books and I think about what these books are about, I see war. I see war, all the way from the Trojan War, to the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, all the way up to the Vietnam War. I see love, in all kinds of guises: be they criminal as in Lolita, pedophiliac love; be they sort of ideational romantic, John Barth; be they campus love, that's The Human Stain, Philip Roth; all kinds and forms of sex and love, and then there is politics interweaving with all those things. There are questions of identity and race. There is a nervous breakdown that actually happens right here in New Haven in one of these novels. That's in Franny and Zooey. I see women who give up on housekeeping altogether and let their house go to ruin and become vagrants. I see suicide. I see slavery. All these things you can read about in these novels, but reading these novels is not just about reading about those things. It's also going to be the process of watching an artistic form unfold over a very exciting period of time. In the second half of the twentieth century and up now into the twenty-first century, writers were thinking very hard about what to do stylistically with all the innovations that come in that powerful period known as modernism. So one of the things we're going to think about together in the course is what happens to all those innovations. Are they abandoned? Are they embellished? Are they stretched? Are they rejected? What happens to those resources that the great modernist writers endowed language with so powerfully earlier in the century? So there are formal questions that we will take up time and again. There are questions that intersect between the form and the content in every single novel that we read. Now perhaps those of you who like to read fiction, and especially who like to read fiction from this period, will look down at that syllabus and you'll say, "Well, where is?" "Where is Don DeLillo?" "Where is John Updike?" My answer for the question--"Why these writers?"-- my answer for the question is the course. It's an answer that unfolds over these fourteen weeks of the term. Thirteen? Thirteen. The short answer is that I think these writers best represent all the different threads, all the different forces in the American Novel Since 1945. There are lots of other writers we could include, including those two that I named, that would equally illustrate some of the threads that I've got on the syllabus now, but these are the ones for various practical and more substantive reasons that I have chosen. Now you do have an opportunity--this class does--that my class has never had before, and that is to nominate your own novel for the last one that we read, one of your choice. Now I have done this in a sophomore seminar, and I did it in a graduate seminar. I invited my students to present some choices to the class, and then the class voted on them. It was incredibly successful. In the undergraduate course--it was a small seminar--I had groups of students proposing two novels actually for the end of the syllabus, and the exercise gets you to think very hard about what you think this period is all about. It's not just about what's fun to read, although it is that too. It's about thinking what would make the right ending to this intellectual trajectory, this intellectual narrative that we're going to move through this term: what would make the right ending. So it has a sort of intellectual purpose to it. But I will tell you, the students I had in that seminar did amazing things to push their choice of novel. One group nominated Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. There was a huge art installation that I walked into on that day of class. It covered the ceiling and the walls and the floors. They had done original photography for it. It was really spectacular. There was a theatrical skit for Dave Eggers' How We Are Hungry. There was campaign literature, pamphlets and so on. So people were very creative with it, and it was really lots of fun. And for me it's fun because I may not know the novel that you end up picking, and so it is a kind of challenge for me to take a novel that you've chosen and come to grips with it myself. It may be one that I know. Now let me just say in a technical way: if you decide to volunteer to nominate a novel, you'll get no extra credit. It'll do nothing for your grade. But you will get glory, whatever glory there is to be had at the front of this room. Maybe that's miniscule, but maybe it's going to be fun for you, especially if you have a sort of theatrical bent, or if you like getting up in front of people, or if you're just really, really passionate about a novel that you want everyone to read. So that's something that we will do, and I will tell you more about at mid semester. So that's the piece of the syllabus that I can't tell you about. I don't know what that dream we're going to dream together is when we read that novel. I don't know what that'll be. I want to just go over the requirements of the course that really are required, not the optional piece, just so that you understand what my purpose is pedagogically. This course is very much open to English majors and to non English majors. It's essentially a reading course. That's what I want you to take away from this: the knowledge of these novels. I want you to read them. I want you to think about them. I want you to talk about them. But I don't expect you to become an English major in order to do that if you're not already one. However, if you do happen to be an English or a literature major or someone who's just very serious about reading at that level, you will find plenty to chew on here. Not all of the novels aspire to or have as their purpose that kind of difficulty that sometimes English majors really want. They want to have to work incredibly hard at the formal level. Some of the novels have that, but not all of them. The challenge for you is to figure out: well, what do we do with those novels? What is the aim of a novel that isn't all about formal innovation? What are those novels doing? Is it just inappropriate to call them literature? Should we think about them in a different way? How should we integrate that kind of novel with novels that have more formal ambitions? So the paper length-- there are two papers required, and there is a final exam--the paper length is designed to be quite large. It's two five-to-eight-page papers. Now a five-page paper is very different from an eight-page paper if you're actually thinking about the words you choose and how you write it. If you just sort of the night before scribble, scribble, scribble until you're done, maybe there's not that much difference between a five- and an eight-page paper except editing. But substantively, if you're using every sentence in that paper, you can write a lot more in an eight-page paper, if you've used every sentence to say something substantive to move an argument along, than you can in the five-page. That's for those people who really want to push themselves and want to advance a really significant piece of thinking about a novel. Now I will also say that a five-page paper written well can trump an eight-page paper written poorly any day of the week. So you don't have to write long papers, but what I'm saying is: the room is there for you to stretch out if you want to do that. The final exam: you should do well if you read, and if you come to lecture, and if you attend section. The process of doing those three things will have allowed you to already have thought quite a bit about these novels. You should remember them. I think they are quite memorable. They are quite distinct from each other, and you should be able to manage with that final exam without undue difficulty. I will say that the reading load is heavy. I have made some adjustments every year. I'm trying to deal with the fact that there are so many novels I love written between, say, 1985 and the present that are over 400 pages apiece. So what do you do with those on a syllabus? Well, I guess it's the problem that people who teach the eighteenth-century novel always have, or the Victorian novel: the Victorian novel like the triple-decker, the three-volume novel. At least I don't have those. But what I've done is to excerpt some of the texts earlier in the term--and actually there's a slightly heavier reading before break than there used to be-- so that it's a little bit lighter after break, when we're doing those long novels. Okay. Last thing: This course, as you may have noticed from our friends behind us, is being filmed as part of the Yale Open Courses Initiative. It is an initiative funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This is one of eight courses being offered this year that are being videotaped. They will be made available free to the public via the internet, so this is a way of allowing the world to benefit from what we all do at Yale. That said, what we try to do--what I will try to do, and what I hope you will try to do--is to forget about them. It's sometimes hard for me, but I trust that you will be able to do that. So forget about that. The point is not to cater to that camera, but to do what we do, and to show the world what it is that we do. Now I like to ask questions in lecture. I really am just not a fan of the sort of zone-out model of lecture audition. So I will ask you questions. The only annoying thing I will have to do is to repeat your answers. So I hope you will not object to that, because you don't have microphones on you, and it's very cumbersome to get them back to you, so we're not going to mike you so that your answers can be heard. All right. Any questions so far about what I've said? Okay. Now I want to talk about the handout. Those of you who don't have it: there are a couple more up front here. There should be the rest of a stack over here. Oh, no. These are my notes. Are we out? Yeah, there are a couple more, and if you don't have one you can share. What I have here for us to look at together today are two little texts. I'm going to read parts of them to you, and together I think they give you the sort of snapshot I want you to have of where literature stands, where reading stands, at the middle of the twentieth century. The first one is an advertisement for the Random House edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, and this appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1934. So I'm going to read just parts, and I'm going to skip around a little bit and stop and start: How to enjoy James Joyce's great novel, Ulysses. For those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it because they fear that it is obscure, the publishers offer this simple clue as to what the critical fuss is all about. Ulysses is no harder to understand than any other great classic. It is essentially a story and can be enjoyed as such. Do not let the critics confuse you. Ulysses is not difficult to read, and it richly rewards each reader in wisdom and pleasure. So thrilling an adventure into the soul and mind and heart of man has never before been charted. This is your opportunity to begin the exploration of one of the greatest novels of our time. What I want you to notice first of all is the kind of reader that's being invoked here for that modernist classic Ulysses. It is not the fussing critic. Now if you read down, if you sort of skim down, you'll see that kind of language applied to critics. They seem fretful. They seem interested in obscure knowledge. That's how this advertisement represents critics, even though it also invokes critics to describe what's powerful about the novel. So there's a sort of two-faced representation of the critic. But the important one, I think, is that dismissal of the critic. The point of this advertisement is to make you feel like you don't have to know what the critic knows in order to read this novel. What you need is something like strength or bravery. Listen to that language: "For those who are already engrossed in the reading of Ulysses, as well as for those who hesitate to begin it." The people already engrossed are the strong ones, and "you can be that!," this advertisement wants to say. You can be the strong reader. That hesitation--"those who hesitate to begin it"--it's a kind of feminized, mincing approach to the novel. It's sort of like those fussy critics. So this advertisement tells you that the great classic of modernism is something you stride into like a man, but you don't have to be a particularly extraordinary man to do so. "This monumental novel about 20 hours in the life of an average man can be read and appreciated like any other great novel once its framework and form are visualized, just as we can enjoy Hamlet without solving all the problems which agitate the critics and scholars." There's that agitation that I was talking about. "The average man": this advertisement wants you to see Ulysses as a story about a man you can identify with. So you don't have to be a critic; you have to be strong; but you know what? You can be the average man, because this is a story about the average man. "With a plot furnished by Homer, against a setting by Dante, and with characters motivated by Shakespeare, Ulysses is really not as difficult to comprehend as critics like to pretend." This is like saying "dress by Prada, shoes by Ferragamo." It's as if there are brands--Dante, Shakespeare, Homer--that are identifiable. They're familiar,and-- what's more--they carry with it that sense of cultural capital. So what do I mean by cultural capital? It's that knowledge that makes you one of the elite of your world. It's also that knowledge that an educated, sort of belletristic reader of The Saturday Review of Literature would be very, very familiar with. So in a sense it tells you this work of art is of a piece with what you already know; it's familiar in those ways, and you shouldn't be afraid of it. At the same time it's part and parcel of that elite body of knowledge, so again there is this kind of two-facedness to the advertisement. It's both Everyman, and it's the elite, who will best read this book. Now I want to contrast that with what we see from Nabokov in this essay, Good Readers and Good Writers. This is from 1950. Now the part of the essay just prior to this explains that he gave this little quiz that you see to some college students when he was giving a lecture. So this is what he asked them to do: Select four answers to the question 'What should a reader be to be a good reader?' "The reader should belong to a book club." "The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine." "The reader should concentrate on the social, economic angle." "The reader should prefer a story with action and dialog to one with none." "The reader should have seen the book in a movie." "The reader should be a budding author." "The reader should have imagination." "The reader should have memory." "The reader should have a dictionary." "The reader should have some artistic sense." And Nabokov says: The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social, economic and historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is the one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary and some artistic sense, which sense I propose to develop in myself and others whenever I have the chance. There are at least two varieties of imagination in the reader's case, so let us see which of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew, or again the reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past, or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. What a crime! How many of you are guilty of this kind of reading, ever? Okay. Nabokov, be gone. But he wants to get at something here, and I think it's helpful to put it next to that advertisement for Ulysses. He wants you to think about reading on his terms. His terms are very much informed by a modernist sensibility of what literature is all about--and I'm going to say more about what that is when I lecture on Lolita--but it's very much in contrast with that Ulysses ad. "Don't identify. It's not about you. It's about something else." Well, what is it about? So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established I think is an artistic, harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness, while at the same time we keenly enjoy--enjoy with tears and shivers--the interweave of a given masterpiece.To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. (Some of you might think that after Lolita.) But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to contribute his imagination, and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. If there is a balance of power between the writer and the reader in this little vignette, the power really I think finally resides with the writer. It is the writer whose world the reader is here asked to get clear. You are asked to use your imagination to enter a world made by the writer, a world of imagination, and so it's the writer who directs you in that way. You are not asked to imagine a place you knew, something from your history, something from your knowledge of yourself. It is not about finding the average man--which you are--also in the novel, there staring back at you. It's about finding some other dream world. Maybe it's a nightmare world. So, for Nabokov, he wants to imagine a kind of literary encounter that's very much separate from those other things he talks about: other media; the movies; having seen the book in the movie; from the life that we all lead when we work and when we go to school; the social, economic angle. He wants to read it as apart from the emotions, although he wants to enlist those emotions in a very specific way. Remember those "tears and shivers." Those have to be the tears and shivers of impersonality. That word, "impersonality"--made famous by T.S. Eliot who advocated impersonality as the ultimate stance of the artist--that is the stance from which all great art should proceed. So Nabokov imbues that state of impersonality with certain kinds of emotion and then asks the reader to be as impersonal as that modernist artist also must be. So what I think we get from these two little readings today is a sense of where literature finds itself at a kind of crossroads. What kind of reader are writers in this period looking for, and what do they want from that reader? To what context do they address themselves? Is it a social context? Is it a literary one? Is it a psychological one? Is it a philosophical one? Is it a political one? What should the novel strive to do? What can novels do in the world? What is the role of the imagination? How does that factor into what the reader lives in daily reality? What is the status of identification? Is that the primary model of readership? Is that what makes people want to read? Is that what should make people want to read? These are some of the questions that these two readings raise, and they are questions that we will return to over and over throughout the term. Now, I'm going to stop there. I've gone on longer than I expected. I'm going to let shoppers leave, and then, in a very short time, I'm going to pick up again and talk about Richard Wright. So anyone who wants to leave now please do so. And please sign in, by the way, guys, before you leave. The sheets are coming around. You can sign in right there. Oh, there are sign-in sheets there. Thanks. Those are my notes. Yeah. Don't take those. Right here. Oh, the syllabus? Oh. Oh. Let's see. Do I have any more? No, it's not. Hey, KC. KC, can I borrow your handout? Can he have it? I'll give you another one. Okay. I'm going to start even though it's still in flux here 'cause I don't want to lose my time. Ooh, that's bad. Whoa. I'm stepping over you. I'm so sorry. Thank you. All right. That was dramatic, wasn't it? Okay. All right. Now, we've talked about the imagination. Now I want you to use it. Imagine that you are a writer. That's all you've ever wanted to be. You're at a very happy time in your life. You just wrote a really successful novel. Everyone loved it. It was unlike anything that had been written before. It was very well received. You decided, "for my next project I am going to write about my life." You've had a hard life, by the way. You've had a hard life. That hard life, you think, is really what made you into the writer you are. It's what allowed you to speak so powerfully to people in your first novel, and you've always wanted to write an autobiography. So that's what you do; that's what you take up as your next project. So you write the story of your life. It's nearly 400 pages long. It gets a really nice reception at a very good publisher. It's in page proofs. Everything's going great. You're thrilled. And then someone says to you, "You know…." Imagine this is Oprah. Oprah gets page proofs of your novel. She's thinking about putting it on her book club, and--if any of you know anything about contemporary literature--getting on Oprah's Book Club makes your sales for the next 20 years. It's huge. There is no more powerful marketing force in contemporary fiction than Oprah's Book Club. It even does wonders for Tolstoy when Tolstoy gets on Oprah's Book Club (not by a séance). So you get on Oprah's Book Club. Oprah asks for the proofs for your novel. She takes them. She says, "This is great, but you know what? I think--that last hundred pages--you should get rid of it." And you think about it, and you say yes, and it comes out in that form. And there you are, and, for the next 40 years, no one ever sees the novel that you wrote, or the autobiography that you wrote originally. It's still only two thirds of what you ever wrote it to be. Well, this is what happened to Richard Wright. This is pretty much exactly what happened to Richard Wright in 1944. So he had published Native Son in 1940 to great acclaim, a very successful novel. In 1944, he completed Black Boy, then called American Hunger, and he had placed it with Harper and Brothers Publishing Company in New York, and they were very happy with it. It had a first part called "Southern Night" and a second part called "The Horror and the Glory." "Southern Night" was about his experience growing up in Mississippi. So he was born in 1908 in Mississippi, and in 1927--I think it's '27; let me get my date right--in 1927 he moved to Chicago, moved north. And in the 1940s he moved to Paris, and he died there in 1960. So his was a progression out of a very poor, Southern childhood, from a black family led by a single mother, to the circles in which Gertrude Stein moved in Paris. So this is a long trajectory. Well, Black Boy, or American Hunger, as it was then called, covered the part in Mississippi, and then the beginnings of his life in Chicago. Now the part about his life in Chicago was the part that was finally cut from the novel--I'm going to keep doing this, call it the novel versus the autobiography, and I'll explain why I make that mistake a little later--it was cut from the autobiography. Now he had this in page proofs with Harper and Brothers, and Harper and Brothers sent the page proofs out to various writers for blurbs and also sent it to the Book of the Month Club Editorial Board. The Book of the Month Club was a mail-order book club that started in 1926, and it became an incredibly powerful engine for selling books, just as Oprah's Book Club is today. In 1926, it had about 4700 members. Just three years later it had 110,000 members: 110,000 subscribers in 1929. By the '40s and '50s, it was incredibly powerful. So what we have is this marketing juggernaut getting interested in Wright's autobiography. So they take it up, and the board decides that they only like the "Southern Night" part. They don't want any of the part of the story of his life in Chicago, and that's what he finally agrees to. So in the summer of 1944 he embarks on this correspondence with a woman named Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was one of the editorial board of the Book of the Month Club, and they go back and forth trying to figure out how he will revise the ending to "Southern Night" so that it sounds like the end of a book rather than the end of a section of a longer book. Now for Wednesday I am going to ask you to go online to the Beinecke Digital Archive and read those letters. We hold them here. They are not published anywhere, so this is kind of fun. This is one of the special things about being at Yale. We have those letters. You can go and touch them. You can read them online, and I want you to read those in addition to reading the sections that I have indicated. You can see what happens when Wright starts coming up against these demands on his manuscript, and I will project them during class too so that we can talk about them. Wright's manuscript was therefore very much under pressure as a literary object--and it really was a literary object. I think we can make the mistake, thinking about autobiography, that it's somehow not literary. But in fact it's very literary, and part of what makes it literary is the fact that you have to choose what scenes go into that narrative. You can't just write every single thing that happened in your life. You have to choose. Well, critics took it fairly straightforwardly as the account of a life and in that sense, taking it that way, some of them were a little disappointed with what they held in their hands. For one thing, it seemed exaggerated to some people. So the first scene, as we will discover in Black Boy, is when Richard, young Richard--I think he was 6--burns down the family house playing with matches underneath the curtains, and his mother finds him where he has hidden under the burning house and flogs him until he is unconscious, and he's sick for a good, long time after that. Okay. Critics were like "I don't think so. That doesn't seem right." A mother flog her son until he's unconscious didn't seem too credible. As time went on there were other kinds of complaints, these about accuracy. So, for instance, his mother in the book is represented as being uneducated. Well, in fact she was a schoolteacher. Now there is a difference between scholars on how long she was a schoolteacher. Some say she was a sort of long-term successful schoolteacher. Others said, "Well, she only taught school for a couple of months." So this was not--didn't seem to be--accurate. Then there was another scene in the autobiography, where Richard, who is the valedictorian of his high school class, writes his valedictory speech, gives it as required to the principal beforehand, the principal demands certain kinds of changes, and Richard refuses. Well, apparently Richard in real life did not refuse to make those changes. And imagine, in a book that then undergoes this publishing history that I have described, this is kind of a symbolic scene. This is a scene of whether you as a writer compromise yourself in the face of authority that resists what you want to say. So in the book it's a very important scene. It's the moment when Richard really finds his voice and it gives him the strength eventually to leave the South. But in real life apparently he did cave. Then there came to be questions about whether the scenes, the stories in the book, actually did happen to him. So there is this story about his Uncle Hoskins who takes his horse and cart with Richard in the back and drives it into the middle of the Mississippi River as a kind of practical joke on Richard. Well, apparently this is not something that happened to Richard Wright. This is something that happened to Ralph Ellison. Where these stories come from began to be a problem. So what is autobiography? What is this genre that Wright is working with? It raised these kinds of questions on the one hand. But then there was another kind of question, and that was coming from the other side. This is what William Faulkner wrote to Wright upon reading Black Boy. He said: The good, lasting stuff comes out of one's individual imagination, and sensitivity to, and comprehension of, the sufferings of Everyman--Any Man--not out of the memory of one's own grief. I hope you will keep on saying it, but I hope you will say it as an artist, as in Native Son. So Faulkner's objection is on the other side. It's not fictional enough. To write about your life and to pretend that you're communicating the memory of what happened to you--your grief, your private grief--doesn't contain that universalizing move that fiction, by its very essence, contains. And you see that (you can remember back to that conception of literature we see in the advertisement for Ulysses) it's about everyman, that greatness in literature comes from its ability to speak to some archetypal Everyman, Any Man, and Faulkner capitalizes those words in his letter as if they really are types. Well, Wright himself described that difficulty of writing his autobiography, and these are the terms he used: I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that, even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself, for there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You'll find that there are many things you don't want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself an awed wonder haunts you, and yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you've done it makes you know that. And even though in that little passage he suggests that it's a struggle to be truthful, a struggle to be accurate, a struggle not to dress up your feelings with some sort of embellishment, he at other times says that, well, some of the stories did come from other people, some of the stories he included did come from other people's experiences, not from his own life, and that this is allowed and allowable because what he aimed to do was produce a generic life of a black boy living in the South. And from the titles we know he considered for this book, none of them make that claim "The Life of Richard Wright." None of them say that. It's always Black Boy, American Hunger. These are not person- specific. These implicitly make a claim to the generality--at the national scale, or in the racial sense--the representativeness of this life. And, indeed, what more powerful testimony to the power of narration is there, the power of a story, to say that you heard a story and it became as if part of your experience, that you heard Ralph Ellison tell that story, and somehow you began to live it yourself? So what we see in the publishing history of Black Boy and also in its reception brings us back to those questions that I was raising at the beginning of class. What is the relationship between writing and the world? What's the relationship between the writer and the reader? What's the relationship between fiction and what we all experience as the real world? Our course over the term will come back to this question over and over again, and it will also come back to the generic question of autobiography. Even so experimental a book as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is totally absorbed in the problem of what it would mean to write about yourself. It's a persistent problem partly because it always raises these issues of fictionality versus truthfulness, of honesty versus embellishment. It also raises the question of how a self is made. If we look forward to the end of the term when we read The Human Stain, which is about a man, Coleman Silk, who tries to and succeeds in passing as Jewish. He's a black man, and he passes for his whole life as Jewish, and in doing so rejects his family. In a way, what Coleman does is write his autobiography, a fictional autobiography, in the very process of living it. So Roth imagines lived life as fictional in the same register as a novel, or as truthful--dubiously so, perhaps--in the same register as an autobiography. So these are questions that will come back to us. This is part of what I find so compelling about fiction and literature in general in this period. And this is why I study it; this is why I teach it: because that interface--between the imagination and the world, between literary art and trying to tell the truth about something, between form and content--those contacts are very, very close, and they're very compelling, I think, in part, because other media are so powerfully on the rise in this period. Literature has to figure out where to stake its claim. What can literature say that nothing else can? How can it address us in a way that is compelling in a way that nothing else is? Can we make those kinds of claims for literature? The writers on the syllabus consistently try to imagine a way to make those claims, make those claims for the primacy and the importance of what they do. And I think that--in addition to being able simply to understand the literature of your moment, to understand the literary world in which writers, probably among you sitting right here, that world in which you will bring forth your next novel, what that world looks like--you can understand that world, but also you can understand how art confronts the world in a much more general sense. That's what's exciting, and that's what I invite you to think about with me in the course. So I'll stop there, and hopefully I'll see some of you on Wednesday.

Literature_Lectures

5_Vladimir_Nabokov_Lolita.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Last time I finished up my lectures on Wise Blood by trying to draw together three different ways of reading the novel into one interpretative framework, and what I ultimately argued was that the New Critical formal unity of the novel that is epitomized, I think (in a somewhat, perhaps, heavy-handed way), in Chapter 7 of the novel--that's book-ended by the symbol of the blinding white cloud--that it's that unity, in a sense, that replaces the bodily unities that are always blown apart in O'Connor's fiction. And, in a certain way, what you see is a fiction that is personified in that way, that it takes on the qualities and the values of the person, and for O'Connor that means the person understood in a religious framework as something with transcendent meaning and transcendent value and, indeed, a transcendent life. There is a very different image of the personified word in Lolita, and I'm going to refer now to an essay, a 1992 essay, by the British novelist Martin Amis. He compares the prose style in Lolita with a muscle-bound man, a man whose body is bulked up purely for aesthetic reasons, for only the purpose of looking a certain way, that the bodybuilder is not that person who's going to go out and use their muscles to do some job. It is simply there to be looked at, to be oiled up and presented and displayed. That's how Amos describes the prose style of Lolita. So, I want you to keep that image in your mind. The question of the relationship between the person and the aesthetic in Lolita is going to be at the heart of my overarching argument about the novel. Today, you're not going to see much of that. What I want to do today--since we have three lectures on Lolita--what I want to do today is simply to begin to open the text for you: to give you some ways of reading it; to alert you to certain kinds of questions; to ask you some overarching questions; and also to just get you thinking and into the texture of the novel. First, I want to ask you though, what do you think of this so far? I just want to hear from you. What are you responses? Who really hates this novel so far? Anybody? Yes. Okay. Why do you hate this novel? Student: I guess it's because of the fact that he's doing something that's really not good, and it almost seems like he's trivializing it.Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. What about it trivializes that crime?Student: I guess it's just that there's no moral lens that we're looking at it through. It's just his view of the world. Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Okay. So, Humbert's lack of a moral vocabulary to understand what he's doing makes it seems like it's trivialized. Okay. Other thoughts on this? Who else is really put off by this subject matter? Even if you like the novel, who else is really put off by this? Yes.Student: I agree with her. It's disturbing how much we identify with Humbert, how we're made to see the world through his eyes, and we kind of-- even I--grew to like him a lot. At least, the way he's presented, he's a very likable character. And then, it's kind of like the things that he does are kind of on the side, when you think about it in a very….The whole telling of the story is not objective at all, and when you think of it in an objective sort of way, it's a completely different story.Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. So, you're suggestion is that what's so disturbing about this is that we actually like this guy; we actually come to like Humbert. How many of you-- now, I asked you this question about O'Connor's characters--would you like to sit down to dinner with any of them? Would you like to sit down to dinner with Humbert? (And I would say this knowing that all of us are outside the nymphet age range.) So, given that, who would like to sit down with Humbert and why? Okay. Yes, you. Why?Student: Well, simply because I would argue that Humbert in fact does have a moral vocabulary and tells us how terrible the things he's doing are. And yet, you like him anyway, and I think that's the power of the novel, and that's why I think he's such a character.Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Do you think that Humbert really believes that his actions are terrible? Do you believe him when he says, "Oh, I was so ashamed. I was so awful." Do you believe him?Student: No. Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh, you don't. Okay. All right. Does anyone believe him? Yes.Student: Well, sometimes he brings up these classic figures that, he argues, would have the same interest. He mentions Virgil and Dante, and it seems like the desperation of bringing up such grand figures makes me think that he does have doubts.Professor Amy Hungerford: About what he's doing. Uh huh. Uh huh. So, the authority of the canon that he invokes to defend himself in fact suggests perhaps that he has some doubts? Yes.Student: That's interesting. I took those same references the exact opposite way, 'cause I thought that essentially he's referring to the temporality of our moral structure, and how it's just this arbitrary code which our society has decided upon. And, at one point in time, he laments the end of the old Latin world and the B.C. world, when people could have these child slaves.Professor Amy Hungerford: Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, this evidence is very possible to see in diametrically opposed ways, and you're certainly not the first two students that I've seen have those two different reactions to the same thing. What else does this novel bring out in you: what other thoughts, what other responses? Does anyone absolutely love this novel? Okay. Lots of you. Good. Why? Who wants to tell me why? Yes.Student: The beauty of the language and symmetry, the sentence structure, the word choice: I guess going away from the theme, more of just the language.Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Okay. The language, yeah, absolutely. Student: Even more about the language: it's not just that it's beautiful. It sort of draws attention to the power of words, because you've tried to ask us whether or not we find him sympathetic, and I think in this book we're sort of reminded of how words can make us feel things and make us believe things that are repugnant to us, and sort of mask--it sort of takes the mask off literature and shows us the way we are convinced.Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. "Takes the mask off literature." I actually want to change that around, if I might, and play with that, because that's a really useful image for us: "takes the mask off literature and reminds us how we come to be sympathetic or how we come to think something." Think back to Richard Wright, who wants words to disappear, to be completely transparent and to leave you just with your response. In a certain way, I would want to flip your image around. It's as if Nabokov allows us to see the mask of literature, to actually see it there palpably doing its work, so we can become self-aware of how we respond. But, how many of you didn't experience it as understanding why you were having that response to Humbert, but just having it? Were any of you sort of experiencing this more like Wright wants us to experience literature, to just have the response? Anyone really seduced? Yes.Student: Well, I found that, while I might have found the prose more or less relentless…it was very difficult to escape into my own reaction, and I was more or less in his head. Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes. Do we ever escape from his head? You're saying that you don't- you didn't feel like you ever could, in the world of this prose. This is going to be an important question for us as we think about what happens to Lolita over the course of the novel. Do we ever escape from the subjectivity of Humbert? Is there any way to access the subjectivity of Lolita herself? So, this is one question you want to ask yourself. And, if there are moments when something like Nabokov's voice or point of view shades into Humbert's, what are those moments, if you think there are some? What are the moments when that subjectivity, the sort of prison of that subjectivity, wavers? Where do you see those? I'll leave that as a question for you. Well, let me give you a little bit of background. It's very helpful for me, as I address you, to think about what you're seeing in the text, and that helps me to think about what I want to say to you. So, before I get in to that, let me just give you some background. Some of you probably know a little bit about Nabokov's life. He was born in 1899, and his life, to me, is fascinating because he was one of the last generation raised in the old aristocratic chateau life of Russia. And it wasn't just a Russian aristocracy; it was really a very cosmopolitan European aristocracy. He lived in the summers on a country estate outside St. Petersburg, in a beautiful chateau. And his uncle owned the chateau down the road, and actually left it to him when he was a very young man. So, he actually owned for a short time this huge chateau, and other relatives and friends lived in estates surrounding theirs. It had huge parks as part of its land, where he first learned to hunt butterflies and mount them. And he became a serious lepidopterist as he grew older, and was very early in his life passionate about collecting and classifying butterflies. In the winters he lived in the city in a beautiful town house in St. Petersburg, and he attended school only later in his life. When he was young, as was the custom, he had tutors. So he had a French tutor who lived with the family for a long time. He had Russian and English tutors that came in succession; he had drawing masters and so on, to cover the range of education thought to be appropriate to a young man of his station. His father was a democrat in czarist Russia, and he was quite a reformer. At the time that the Bolsheviks took over in 1919, there was a brief window of time prior to the family's flight. The family left Russia in 1919. So, the revolution, I think, starts in 1917. And things are quite complex in those early days, so there's more than one anti-czarist factor. And his father was a democrat but not a Bolshevik; so, he was anti-czarist, but he was not a Bolshevik. His father wrote for revolutionary newspapers, and he continued to write and publish a newspaper even as an émigré. He was assassinated in 1922 in Europe on account of his publishing activities. Nabokov was very, very fond of his parents. He has these luminous, luminous essays about his life as a child in this sort of perfectly intact aristocratic world, and in that picture his mother and father loom very large and in a very fond light. Nearly invisible are his siblings. He had two brothers and two sisters, and it's amazing, when you read his memoirs, how invisible they are. This is one thing I find striking about those memoirs, but it's an interesting thing to ponder as we think about Lolita. It's the image of a person who is profoundly--at least in his representation of himself--profoundly occupied with what's going on in his own mind. His parents were very much absent from his growing-up life. He spent a lot of time with his nannies and tutors and nurses when he was younger. His parents would travel, and his father was often away in the city on political business when they were in the country. So his parents loomed large: but not so much as physical figures, people he would interact with in a daily sense, but almost as icons, or as figures of the imagination, for him. The real people he was, sort of, with--certainly his brother, Sergey, who he was educated with (his sisters were educated in a different way and were somewhat younger than him)--even Sergey is sort of invisible to him. He wrote literature in Russian, novels in Russian, when he was in Europe. And then, when he moved to the United States, he began to write in English, and took America as his adopted land and English as his adopted language. English was a native language, in a certain way, because English was spoken in his household all the time, and he was trained by an English governess as a young child. So, it's a language that goes deep in his upbringing. It's not really analogous--well, I'm not going to get in to that--it's not analogous to, say, Conrad, who is Polish and learned English. And you can see the marks in Conrad's fiction of his having learned English and then, it comes across as a sort of clotted style in Conrad. Some of the difficulty of Conrad's style is the difficulty of writing in this acquired language. Nabokov has none of that.So, what I want to do now is, with that background in mind, I want to take this up and just open up the first few pages. And I urge you not to neglect the foreword by John Ray Jr., so I hope you read it, the little italicized foreword. And I want to focus especially on pages 4 and 5. Now, a foreword is of course supposed to suggest how you should read the text that's coming. And so, if we take it on in that role, let's see what we see. I'm going to read a little bit of this. This is on page 4 and 5: For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the real people beyond the true story, a few details may be given, as received from Mr. Windmuller of Ramsdale, who desires his identity suppressed, so that the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, Louise, is by now a college sophomore. Mona Dahl is a student in Paris. Rita has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbed giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas day in 1952 in Graystar, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. Vivian Darkbloom has written a biography, My Cue, to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk. First, let me point you to this notation about Mrs. Richard F. Schiller. I'm not going to tell you who that is, but I want you to figure it out. Okay? So make a note in your notebook. By the end of the novel, I would like you to know who this is. Vivian Darkbloom: if you take those letters, you can spell Vladimir Nabokov. Vivian Darkbloom is one of Nabokov's palindromic versions of his name. He inserts these even in his autobiography, by the way. He attributes certain things to Vivian Darkbloom and other kinds of characters of such names. So, here, you can't avoid the sense that, even though this is attributed to John Ray, in fact there is some other voice here, and it's a voice that can't help but drop the name of Vladimir Nabokov into the prose. So, right away, in this moment of layered narratives, a framed narrative around another narrative, there is a sort of instability in the layers. Where is Nabokov here? There is also the question of what kind of reader we are that this preface brings up and sort of puts in front of us. Are we the kind of reader who is interested in the real persons? Well, it gives the story that's to follow that sense of being true, because it suggests its fictionality as a thin veneer and that the real is something that we can know about. And I would suggest to you that we can connect this with Humbert's moment of wondering what happens to the little girls whose images he is excited by. This is on page 21, the beginning of chapter 6: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later in this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect. Could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her, and she never knew it. All right, but would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was and remains a source of great and terrible wonder. Both Humbert and John Ray suggest that the tissue between the fictional, between the imagination and the real, is very light: that it can be pierced somehow, that one can affect the other. And I want to point you to a kind of language that also permeates between the preface and the story proper. And this is on page 5; this is the middle paragraph: This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that 'offensive' is frequently a synonym for 'unusual,' and a great work of art is, of course, always original and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify HH. No doubt he is horrible. He is abject. He is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery, perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author. Do you see that word "throbs"? "A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession." "Throbs" is a word that Nabokov brings out over and over again, in multiple contexts, always connected somehow with this novel. So, I'm going to ask you to read the afterword, "On a Book Entitled Lolita." When you read that, you'll notice that the word "throbs" comes back. The first impulse to write this novel is described as a throb. The throb is of course undeniably associated with Humbert's rising desire in that physical way, and there is that emotionalized version of that, the throbbing heart of romantic cliché. It comes back and forth in his memoirs too. In Speak, Memory that word appears. It's interesting. As the essays move chronologically--they were written over a period of time--as the essays that were written near Lolita come into the book, that word appears, also, describing various things. It's as if that word really embodies the feel of this novel, and so, like "Vivian Darkbloom," that word suggests the permeability--not just of fiction and the real--but of these narrative layers. Where is Nabokov? And I think he's there in that throb. Now, I want to ask a question that we're going to need to think about, and addresses the response of--actually--the two of you sitting up front here, when I was asking you how you responded to it. Can we have a moral response to this novel? And what would that look like? Well, John Ray asks us to, and I want to just read part of that language of morality that he uses. I'm going to start on 4, and then I'm going to skip down to the bottom of 5: Viewed simply as a novel, Lolita deals with situations and emotions that would remain exasperatingly vague to the reader, had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous evasions. True: not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work. Indeed, the robust Philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call aphrodisiac [And then he makes reference to the court case in which Ulysses was ruled not to be obscene in 1933], one would have to forego the publication of Lolita altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of sensuous existence of their own are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim. The learned may counter by asserting that HH's impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube, that at least 12% of American adult males (a conservative estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann, verbal communication) enjoy yearly in one way or another the special experience of HH that HH describes as such despair, that, had our demented diarist gone in the fateful summer of 1947 to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster, but then, neither would there have been this book. In this part, he suggests the possibility of the tale ending in a moral tale, a moral apotheosis. But that's grounded, also, or hedged around by the sense of psychiatry offering other ways of understanding what we think of as deviance. But this is hard to take seriously for a number of reasons, not least the Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann who is referred to here. It is, of course, Dr. "White Blackman," and it's referring to the Kinsey Report, the famous Kinsey Report on the sexual habits of Americans. It came out in the 1950s. Dr. Black Whiteman: it suggests that these are matters of the heart that have been reduced to a black-and-white set of statistics, and you feel the absurdity of that 12%, that number, appearing in that sentence right here. And I'm just going to skip down to the bottom of 5 now: As a case history, Lolita will become no doubt a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art it transcends its expiatory aspects, and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader. For, in this poignant personal study, there lurks a general lesson: the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac. These are not only vivid characters in a unique story. They warn us of dangerous trends. They point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us--parents, social workers, educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. Well, aren't those ringing words from John Ray? Nabokov ensures that the very idea of taking a moral lesson from this novel is unavailable to us because it's already been ridiculed. He not only makes us see the psychiatric evasion of morality as ridiculous, as banal, as reductive, reductive to the black and white; he ensures, too, that the language of morality is the language of cliché. The status of cliché in this novel is one with which we're going to have to struggle, and I want to move in that direction, now, by turning to our first hearing of Humbert's voice. What can we say about Humbert's style? If John Ray's style is full of certain kinds of clichés that we can classify in the ways that I have just done, what about Humbert's style? Where does it come from, and why is it so enchanting? So, let's just begin with that first chapter, the tiny chapter, Chapter 1. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth: Lo-li-ta." The first thing he does is make us feel words in our bodies, and especially in the mouth and in the tongue, in that very sensuous way. So, that's the first thing that his style does for us: it makes us align ourselves--in the way that some of you were talking about earlier--not just to identify our minds with the point of view of this particular person, this particular character, but actually to move your body, and to feel something bodily that he wants you to feel, to share that sensuous experience with him. It's just the first little temptation. He wants to draw us into the "special experience" that he documents in his story: She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did. Indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved one summer a certain initial girlchild in a princedom by the sea. Oh, when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs--the misinformed simple noble-winged seraphs--envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. I'm seduced. Are you? He's feeding us questions. This is another thing to notice. He's not just making us experience Lolita's name the way he does; he's assuming that there are certain kinds of questions that we will ask. "Did she have a precursor?" Why is this the first question that you would ask? If someone was telling you this story, is that the first question you would ask? So did she have a precursor? No, probably not. Okay. Why? Why does he want to plant this question with us? Well, he's working towards something that he will also in some ways backhandedly discredit. He's counting on us to analyze him in somewhat Freudian terms. So, even though he will make a habit later on of playing with psychiatrists--staying at clinics extra weeks just to bother the newcomers by giving them made-up dreams and primal scenes to read and interpret--even though he's going to do that, he's still manipulating us, because he knows how deeply those kinds of exculpatory narratives run with his audience. So, she had a precursor. So what? Does that make any difference? Does that make any difference to how we're to judge him? And we are the judges: "ladies and gentlemen of the jury." We are, in a way, invited to judge, even though he's begging us not to at every moment. So, it's a choice on Nabokov's part to foreground the question of judgment from moment one, and then for him to invoke multiple kinds of exculpatory narratives. He's planting them in there for us to find. "Oh, when?" In childhood. By safely locating that precursor in his own childhood when, as he says, he was her equal, where there was no crime, only a kind of infantile passion that nobody would blame him for, he invites us to think of Humbert as somehow still retaining a kind of innocent purity, that that passion itself is the innocent purity that flames at the heart of childhood. Then we get these allusions, and if you have the annotated Lolita or if you already know Poe, Annabel Lee is a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and "the princedom by the sea" is a feature of it. And so, I'm going to read this to you, and there's a reason why I want to read the whole thing. So, it'll just take a minute, but here we go. This is Annabel Lee: It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,But we loved with a love that was more than love-- I and my Annabel Lee-- With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsman came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me:Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of a cloud, chilling And killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we-- Of many far wiser than we-- And neither the angels in heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea-- In her tomb by the side of the sea. So, that's the whole poem. Humbert is drawing on a nineteenth-century Romantic tradition that still has a certain power. You can hear that incantatory voice of Poe's speaker in the poem making this doomed love into something aesthetic, but it's also a kind of cliché. If John Ray works with the clichés of psychiatry and of social work and, in a way, of politics--progressive politics--"bring up a better generation for the future"-- Humbert has truck with the clichés of the literary. So, his is a vocabulary of very high-born clichés. It's interesting. When you read Speak, Memory, Nabokov's autobiography, he talks about his own experiments with this kind of poetry when he was young and especially when he was beginning to fall in love with girls that he would meet around St. Petersburg. He represents them as overheated attempts at literature, as dripping with a kind of excess, romantic excess, as essentially unable to do more than repeat a tradition. What Humbert has found, and I guess Nabokov has given him, in the Poe, is not only that kind of overheated Romantic poetic referent; he's also chosen, of course, someone who married a very, very young bride. So, Poe, I think at the age of about twenty or twenty one, married his fourteen-year-old cousin. So, for that reason Poe becomes a kind of model, and he's the model in both ways: both as a pedophile and as someone who imagined himself and his young love fully clothed in the language of romance. So, it's a kind of fairy tale. Now the fairy tale language that is invoked here, "the princedom by the sea," is brought back for us vividly in the scene where Humbert first sees Lolita. This is on page 39. So, he's walking through the house. The "Haze woman" is giving him his tour of the house: I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery. "The piazza," sang out my leader, and then without the least warning a blue sea wave swelled under my heart, and from a mat in a pool of sun half naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark sunglasses. It was the same child, the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky, supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes but not from the gaze of young memory the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day and, as if I were the fairy tale nurse of some little princess lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds, I recognized the tiny, dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight, the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk, I saw again her lovely in-drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts that last mad, immortal day behind the Roches Rose. The twenty-five years I have lived since then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished. This is a remarkable passage to me. He occupies in this passage every subject position of the fairy tale: the nurse, the hounds and the king. He's the nurse recognizing the beloved child. He's the king after her, and the hounds really after her. At the same time, I think we feel the freshness of this prose, and we feel the humor of it, the self-parody. So, even though he is counting on us to be seduced by the romantic language, that incantatory trance of Annabel Lee, there is a certain way in which it's refreshed for us, like when he says, "The twenty-five years I have lived since then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished." That is not from the fairy tale. That's his own voice. One thing that Nabokov does--and I think this is related to the way words like "throb" and the layers of fiction and reality, how these things permeate into different texts and different layers of the story--he always mixes originality with cliché. He mixes the bad with the good. He has a real disdain for the black and the white, that sense of simplicity. And so, you're going to find--even at moments where I think we're meant to understand Humbert's prose as overwrought, that muscle-bound man that Amis talks about--you're also going to find in those passages, while you're being just brought to the sense of parody, just to the edge of what you can tolerate in that vein, you're going to get a sharp sentence; you're going to get a sharp piece of very original prose style. This is part of Nabokov's talent, is to manipulate you. This is another way of manipulating you, is to make you see the cliché and then to draw back from it to something that surprises you. So, this is part of the strategy. And then watch what happens to the prose style and the difference in tone: I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child, her eyes blinking over those stern, dark spectacles, the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches, while I passed by her in my adult disguise, a great, big, handsome hunk of movieland manhood, the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later of course she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that "princedom by the sea" in my tortured past. And I think there's a reason why there are quotations around that princedom by the sea and why it's Poe: a fatal consequence--not just of his early love for Annabel Lee--but a consequence of the poetry. This is another kind of defense: "the poetry made me do it." It's the romance that's being offered in the poetry that lends his life its course. So, here the rationales for his guilt, and our forgiveness of it, begin to multiply. Now, I want to draw back from just being immersed in those details of the text for a minute to suggest to you that this question of morality is something that Nabokov deliberately courts. When Nabokov was an exile in Europe, he spent a lot of time composing chess problems. These are setups of pieces on the chess board that have particular solutions. And they're very complex, and they have a kind of aesthetic form to them. And he would aim for certain kinds of elegance in them. He never wanted to have an alternate solution. He always wanted to have a single kind of solution. There are certain themes in chess that refer to different kinds of strategic movements that he would bring out through these little arrangements, and he would spend inordinate amounts of time organizing them. Let me read to you how he describes the action of setting one of these things up: It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between white and black, but between the composer and the hypothetical solver. Just as in a first-rate work of fiction, the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world. So that a great part of the problem's value is due to the number of tries, delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind: from the charting of dangerous seas, to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients--rocks and carbon, and blind throbbings. Lolita is, I think, for Nabokov, a kind of chess problem. The chess problem is: how can Nabokov make us identify with a pedophile? How can he produce, from these debased ingredients, what Lionel Trilling called it--and you have this blurb on your back cover-- "the greatest love story of our time"? That's a question for you: is it the greatest love story of our time? Was Lionel Trilling--a great mid-century literary critic--was he seduced by Humbert? What would it mean to be the greatest love story of our time? But certainly Nabokov has in mind the rhetoric of love stories, the shape of love stories, and he's using those, with all the skill he can muster, to try to make us enter in to the ecstasy that he describes at the heart of this kind of logical problem, the setting up of this logical problem. So, in a way we are the solvers of this problem for him; we are the other half that completes the aesthetic experience; we are there to participate in it with him. And, on the handout that I have given you the world of imagination and of the aesthetic is very much on the surface of this text. And you can see it in lots of ways, too, just in that little bit of the first chapter that I read to you, that sense of fancy: "a fancy prose style." So, you want to think of "fancy" not just as a sort of effeminate ornamentation, but as that older-fashioned sense of the word: "the fancy," the imagination. So, imagination is a privileged realm for Nabokov, and it is a realm that always has about it that golden glow. And as you read Lolita, try to notice how much light imagery there is. For Nabokov, sunlight, goldenness--all those midges, the golden midges, the downy golden hair on Lolita's limbs, her tawny skin--all of that goldenness is very much of a piece with the world of imagination. So, it's as if imagination makes everything glitter, and its color is that of the most aesthetic of metals, of gold. So, keep these things in mind as you read, and in the next couple of lectures you'll see more of the development of argument about the book, but I hope this gets you started.

Literature_Lectures

25_Students_Choice_Novel_Jonathan_Safran_Foer_Everything_is_Illuminated_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: The exercise of inviting you to choose our last novel, as I think I explained in the very first class of this term, is an exercise in thinking together about what defines a period of literature. So, for all the other books in the syllabus, I came with my rationale for why I included them, and for this book, I'm invited again to think about whether I would, if I were teaching this again, and you had not chosen it. So, today I want to reflect on that, and it will lead directly into my analysis of what the Holocaust is doing in this novel, and then I will have some parting words for you to conclude the course. When I think about books to include, I have four categories that I think about. One is books that are somehow representative. So, the books in this course that fit that bill, you might think of the ones that feature the Identity Plot. As I argued in that lecture at mid semester, the Identity Plot is a reigning narrative structure in this period, and some of the books in our syllabus culminating in The Human Stain-- and I think this book, too, could be included in that group--all are representative of different versions of that narrative structure. So: representative. Innovative: I include works on the syllabus that I consider innovative in the form of the novel, in the genre of the novel, or for their subject matter. Somehow they think about something in a way that I haven't known anything else to think about before. I think Lolita fits this model very well, and in its own way The Bluest Eye, at that time in the 1970s, took up a subject that had also been neglected and was innovative in its subject matter. Is a book widely read? Well, this book certainly meets that criterion, and some of our other books do, as well. Lolita is one; The Human Stain is another, The Woman Warrior, pretty much any Morrison novel you can choose: there are lots of books that fit this criteria. And usually what I'm aiming for is a book that will be both widely read and something else on my list, so that it covers more than one base. And finally, and this is the most evanescent category, is it somehow excellent or important in some other way? Generally, for me this is an aesthetic category. So, is it an excellent example of writing? is it an excellent example of narrative art? is it important in what it thinks about somehow philosophically, topically, in a way that nothing else quite can match? I talked to you on Monday a little bit about Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitions for this novel and his ambitions, in general, as he expresses them in interviews. I think, when I consider this novel, I know that this is where Foer's interest truly lies. I'm sure he wants to be widely read. I'm sure he wants to be innovative, and that's probably connected with the excellence or importance that he's aiming at. He probably doesn't want to be representative. Most writers want to be singular rather than representative. But this is where the investment really is, and it's in that category that, I think, we find his use of the Holocaust. It's in the effort to be important, to be writing about something important in this novel, that the Holocaust comes to have such a place in it, or that he chooses a story that has the Holocaust at its center. Now, I myself am reserving judgment on the excellence or importance of this novel, but I will say that it is certainly representative of two things. One is a version of the Identity Plot. It is a novel of a young person, two young people, coming to seek out their past and somehow gain from that search some sense of themselves; so, it is a version of the Identity Plot. It is also representative of late modernist formal characteristics; so, this is clever in the way that John Barth is clever with language. It is funny in the way that Pynchon and Barth are, just drawing from our syllabus. It makes some of the kinds of moves that The Woman Warrior makes. So, it is representative in that way. I do not think it innovates formally. There's nothing I see here, formally, that I have not seen elsewhere and before. So, for me, it doesn't quite meet that criteria, but "representative" and "widely read," certainly. Now, there is a way in which I think it could be understood as innovative, and my sort of kernel for thinking about this is on 185. This is in that harrowing scene where the woman they think of as Augustine has told them the story of the murder of the Jews of Trachimbrod, and then afterwards the grandfather confesses to his complicit conduct with that murder. And Alex, as he's translating for Jonathan his grandfather's words, he says in the middle of 185: You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I repeated them I felt like I was making them new again. That phrase, "making them new again," is loaded for any ambitious writer coming after modernism. "Make it new" was the dictum that Ezra Pound held out as defining literature that could matter formally, aesthetically, innovatively; so, to make it new in writing is very closely allied with the project of modernism, a formal project. To use that phrase in this emotionally loaded moment suggests two things. One is, it draws on a whole history of discourse about genocide, and particularly about the Holocaust, that could be encompassed under the banner of trauma theory. Now, some of you may have encountered trauma theory. It's a sort of mix of psychoanalysis and literary criticism that has been powerful in the past couple of decades. Its power is waning, I think, although there is a new interest in Sociology in trauma, now. In the former literary critical version of it, trauma theorists argued that to tell the story again, to tell the story of a trauma again, was to re-experience it. This was a way of understanding representation as human experience, as actual experience unmediated, and the special thing about trauma was that it was the only kind of experience--this is what most trauma theorists argued--that it was really the only kind of experience that had this quality to it, this peculiar quality to it, that it remained real in the sense of remaining experience and not becoming language, somehow. This was a way of imagining language, also, conversely, as being experience. And, for some trauma theorists, this analysis of language spread out to other kinds of language, so that any language could be understood as in some sense traumatic, and this is a far reach of it. Much of this work, I have to say, was done at Yale by two scholars, Cathy Carruth and Shoshana Feldman. Both have now left the institution, but Yale was very well known for trauma theory. It had its applications in Holocaust Studies, in particular in the building of the Fortunoff Archive of testimony which is housed here, I think in Sterling. The effort to make videotapes of survivors' testimonies was, in part, of course, a historical effort to get that knowledge secure before that generation passed away, to gather as much as could be known of the human experience of the Holocaust. But there was a reason, I think, that it was video. There was a great desire among people who wrote and thought about and studied the Holocaust to have that immediacy that video was thought to give; so, rather than have transcribed testimonies, or written testimonies, you get to see the actual face and expression of the person telling that story. This is something that scholars have--since the founding of the archive--have spent a lot of time thinking about and theorizing. In the course of that theorizing, the word "witness" has come to have a very specific and powerful meaning. The interviewer was to think of herself or himself as--not a questioner or as an interviewer in the way that we would usually understand that role--but rather as a witness to that person's story, a witness in the sense of a judicial witness, someone who would be in a court to affirm that something had, indeed, happened. There was a sense that validation was needed, in the context of gathering this evidence. Witnessing was theorized in a much more complex way by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, a psychiatrist who is--I think Dori Laub is still in New Haven. I think he's still at Yale. But, together they wrote a book called Testimony that had a lot to say about exactly how the witness functions in relation to the person who is testifying. And I think you can see the mark of all of this thought about how the Holocaust is received in the present, stamping Foer's work. So, you see it, in part, in that little sentence that I just read to you, and saying it again it was "making it new." It's as if it's a moment in which trauma is transmitted through language, and is imagined to be transmitted in an unmediated way; so, the repetition that we experience as readers, all of these horrible things are said twice, because we see Alex translating them, and that's dramatized for us by the device of Alex as translator. So, its debt to modernism, or the way it has its eye on modernism behind it, is closely allied to this understanding of language and its relationship to trauma. Now, by the time Jonathan Safran Foer is writing this book, not only has Holocaust Studies established this whole body of thought about language, but there are also many examples of what you might call the American Holocaust Novel, and the one I'm going to use in my lecture today, to think about in relation to this, is Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. How many of you have read it? Okay. Good, a bunch of you. For those of you who haven't, it's the story of a character named Art Spiegleman, and you'll recognize that device of course from Foer. Art Spiegleman is a cartoonist writing a book about his father's experiences in the Holocaust and in concentration camps. He goes through the novel alternating between scenes of Art interviewing his father, Vladek, and then it sinks in to Vladek's story, and there are lots of extended scenes where we just see Vladek escaping from camps and making his way through them and so on, doing all the things that he did to finally escape with his wife, Anja. We find out fairly early in the first volume of Maus--it's a two-volume graphic novel--that Art's mother killed herself well after she arrived in America as an immigrant, having escaped, and we see her in an inserted cartoon in a different style in the bathtub. She slit her wrists in the bathtub. What's striking about that graphic novel--It's extremely smart in its meditation on the relationship between a son and his father and the relationship between growing up in America and surviving the Holocaust--but what's really striking is its meditation on the problem of Art's insignificance. How can his childhood and his child's problems--being bullied at school or whatever it is--how can those compete with his father's experience of having survived the Holocaust by his own wits and by luck? That dramatic story is impossible for the son to match, and so there are certain ways--I have argued in print--certain ways that Art appropriates his father's story and imagines himself as a survivor. So, it's a way of transmitting the trauma of the Holocaust from one generation to another. And there are lots of graphic devices and linguistic tricks that Spiegelman uses to effect this, and I won't go into that detail, now, but it's something that I've argued at length. What makes Everything is Illuminated different and, I would argue, innovative is that it, for me, represents the third-generation effort to recover the Holocaust. So, by the time Foer is writing, these stories have been told, not only by Spiegelman (His books came out in 1987 and 1991, or '86 and '91, the two volumes of Maus, so, well before Foer wrote this, when Foer is just a child). That was not the only book on the experience of the Holocaust. Those would include Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, a very famous example, a little later a European writer, a German writer living in England, W. G. Sebald wrote Austerlitz, had a very similar structure of a child of the Kindertransport, someone who had been taken from Prague to England along with all of the other children, Jewish children of his neighborhood, to save them. He discovers this as his own past, and he tries to go back and find the traces of his parents in the concentration camps. And finally he finds a snippet of film from one of the concentration camps where his mother was--his mother was a singer--and he slows it down further and further and further just to try to glimpse her face. This is a story of the hunt for the beloved parent and for the ground of a child's identity. This story has been told many times by the time Foer is writing this novel. In addition, most of these prior versions in fiction, and some in memoir, have to do with the first-generation American experience. So, Foer finds himself belated in two ways: one, because the story of the Holocaust and of finding out that secret has already been told; and two, because he's not second generation. He's not the child of a survivor but the grandchild of a survivor. So, what do you do to make that story your own? If you are committed to its centrality to who you are, how do you make that into an unmediated kind of experience? One way that that's done, both in second-generation stories and I think in this third-generation story, is by playing off of and excavating the Jewish cultural veneration for memory. So in Jewish tradition memory of parents, of the dead, of past events, is at the heart of religious practice, but also of secular versions of religious practice. This novel is full of those secular versions of religious practice, and it explicitly talks about children's relation to the memory of their parents. This is on 268. Oops. I got my page wrong there. Sorry, 260. He's describing here the itch to remember that the novel imagines as particularly Jewish: But children had it worst of all. For although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents, strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness. So, you can imagine this story of Jonathan going back to find the woman who helped his grandfather escape as an effort to tie that string to something concrete. The fact that he never can really find that woman suggests that, already internalized here, is something that Holocaust literature coming before this has been intent on examining and questioning, which is: can you ever have that unmediated relation to the past; can you ever tie memory back to the event in a way that feels like it's a real connection? So, here there is a fairly easy, if also wistful or elegiac, admission that you can't ever really tie that string up. This is why the hunt is never going to be successful in the novel; we will never tie up all those little details. It's meant to be that way, because at this late date it's clear that's the only way it could be, and that's not innovative. It's simply where the genre is right now. However, this novel is loath to part with the drama that earlier stories made from the recovery narrative. So, for Jonathan, the mystery is not what happened to his grandparents during the Holocaust. That's the classic question. The parents won't talk about what happened. The child wants to know. The child knows there's something back there, and the hunt is to find out exactly what happened, and usually it's hidden either because the parent left a prior child, lost a prior child, or somehow felt guilty about surviving, either because of explicit acts where they were forced to sacrifice someone in their family in order to escape or in order to help someone else in their family escape; they were forced to choose. And we see that choice thematized in the Holocaust sections of this novel. So, there is that hiddenness of the Holocaust experience. That's not what's hidden in this novel. That history is not what Jonathan doesn't know. He knows his grandmother survived the Holocaust. That's not a mystery. The mystery is: who helped her? Who helped his grandfather? Sorry. It's the grandfather. Who helped his grandfather to escape? That's the mystery. Augustine is the mystery woman. The photograph represents that missing or hidden knowledge. That this drops out of the picture of the novel relatively painlessly--he'll never find her--is, I think, the mark of how the story of hiding something that's hidden gets displaced onto Alex. So, what I see here is the transfer of the story of the hidden past from the hidden past of the victim's side of the Holocaust to the hidden past of the perpetrator's side. This is a displacement of that narrative onto the perpetrators; so, now it's Alex who is looking to find the secret buried in the dysfunctionality of his family. Now it's Alex who finds, in speaking to his grandfather, some explanation for why his father is such a tyrant. And the same logic of memory and genealogy that you see in the way Jewish families are talked about in their relation to memory and history between generations, that is reproduced as the father says, "You are responsible for your son," the father is responsible for the son, somehow the father is reflected in the son. So, the choice that Alex's grandfather made--to point out his friend, Herschel, as a Jew and to thus give him up to the murderous Nazis--this is somehow played out in the dysfunctionality of the family in the present, in the terrible rages and drunkenness of the father. It's interesting to me that this novel is about making the relationship between grandchildren and grandparents as immediate as possible, and so I think it's really interesting that we have Alex disowning his father. "You are not my father," he says at the end of the novel as he throws his father out of the house, essentially. It's a way of getting the second generation out of the way and hopping into that space, so you can see it in the second- and third-generation structure. You swipe the parents out of the way, and you hop into their place, as immediately descended from the people who experienced these events. A problem for Americans writing about the Holocaust is that, even if you immigrated here as a survivor, this is not the land of those events, and so I think this gives us some insight into the use of the European setting. Europe is where the important history happened. That's why a novel trying to be important in these terms has to be set there. So, if you set out looking for an important subject matter, you need that historical grounding, and it's not in America; it's in Europe. On 117, you can see very clearly how the story of Augustine and Alex picks up the trope of witnessing, and it's of course accomplished through Alex's butchered English. This is on 117, where he holds the photograph out to Augustine and he says: "Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?" She examined it for several moments. "No." I do not know why but I inquired again. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?" "No," she said again, though the second no did not seem like a parrot but a different variety of no. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?" I inquired, and this time I held it very proximal to her face like Grandfather held it to his face. "No," she said again, and this seemed like a third variety of no. I put the photograph in her hands. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, but in her no I was certain that I could hear "Please persevere; inquire me again." So I did. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" She moved her thumbs over the faces as if she were attempting to erase them. "No." "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, and she put the photograph on her lap. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" I inquired. "No," she said, still examining it but only from the angles of her eyes. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No." She was humming again with more volume. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, "no." I saw a tear descend to her white dress. It too would dry and leave a mark. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" I inquired, and I felt cruel, I felt like an awful person, but I was certain that I was performing the right thing. "No," she said, "I have not. They all look like strangers." I periled everything. "Has anyone in this photograph ever witnessed you?" Another tear descended. "I have been waiting for you for so long." Here that effort, through witness, to come to an unmediated connection with the past and with the violence of the Holocaust, it's acted out. It is, as Alex said, performed by that almost liturgical repetition of the question and the answer, and the way that Augustine's body gets closer and closer to the photograph; she touches the faces; she finally merges herself and the photograph by letting her tears fall on it. So, the question is: have you ever witnessed for these people? She has not, yet, because no one has come to hear her witness, and I'm reminded, then, of the structure of those survivor testimonies on video, where a witness is required in order for the story to be told. And so, Augustine, now, she has not witnessed, because she did not have a witness. Now she has her witnesses, and she will witness to them. And so Alex comes to be undone by what he finds about himself, what he finds out about his grandfather and his family. In the second-generation story, often it is the family of the second generation, the child of the survivor, who is undone by what they find out about their parent. So here, again, the structure of the narrative is transferred to the perpetrator's side. And who is lying in the bath with their wrists cut? Not the survivor but the perpetrator. So, you get that image from Maus transferred into the perpetrator's family. What I find quite remarkable about the formal techniques of this novel is how they finally reflect on that transfer of the narrative from the Holocaust literature to the perpetrator's story, and if you look on 160 we can begin to see how this works. If you'll recall, they are sitting in the silence and darkness together peeling corn for Augustine, and Alex takes Jonathan's diary and opens it and he says on 159: This is what I read. He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. "What?" he asked. "What?" And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, "Say it to my face, not to the floor," and Sasha said, "You are not my father." So, in this scene Alex begins to understand that Jonathan is using him as a character, and moreover that Jonathan has penetrated right into the most intimate and painful part of his family life, his relationship with his father, and is fictionalizing that. And of course if you turn to the end, I hope you recognize this, on 274. This is, in fact, this passage from his diary, what we are given as the letter from the grandfather to Jonathan, and there it is. This is what happened. He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. "What?" And so it goes, on to the end of that paragraph, and you can see culminating, as in the diary, with "Say it to my face, not to the floor," and Sasha said, "You are not my father." What are we to make of this? So, this is a bit of postmodern cleverness, if you will, raising questions as have been raised in The Human Stain about who exactly is writing this account, whether it's Coleman or Nathan in that novel, how it is that Nathan knows what Coleman thinks, how he knows all that happened, all that he says he knows that happened in Coleman's life. Well, here at the very end of the novel, when Foer brings out this passage that has been provided much earlier in Jonathan's notebook, we are led to question the authorship of all the letters in the book. Now of course we know it's a novel, we know it's all written by Jonathan Safran Foer, but in the logic of the novel its self-awareness now verges towards this question. It's not just the reader who's meant to question this, but the novel asks us directly to question it. So, what does it mean that Jonathan is revealed to be the author of this letter? Well, there are a couple ways of looking at it. There are those passages in the Book of Antecedents--remember the Jewish book of memory that the Trachimbroders write over time--some of those entries are prophetic. They tell the future, and we're given an excerpt from that book that describes the disaster, and so we know that something like prescience is a quality of Jewish writing, imagined in this way as a kind of religious practice. So, either we can understand Jonathan as carrying on that tradition, that what he writes in his diary is similarly proleptic, it looks towards the future and transcribes the future, or we can see it as constructing the future itself. So, we can see it either as imagining what will inevitably happen, or as making the future out of those words. I think we're meant to feel both resonances to this formal trick, or this formal device, but the resonance of control, of making it happen, leads us to I think quite an interesting place, and leads me to wonder whether this is not a novel of revenge. To transpose the story of a survivor of the Holocaust who later, much later in their life, finally comes to terms with that terror and commits suicide, to transpose that well-worn story, well-known story, into the perpetrator's life and family is a way of giving back to the complicit the pain of the victims. So, I think this is quite interesting. Even though there are so many moments where that sense of fault is mitigated: "would you not do the same?" That question gets asked: Who would do differently? How would you decide what to do? We're given examples of Lista's father, who won't spit on the Torah even though he is not a religious man and watches as his entire family is killed and then finally spits so that he can be killed too. We're given all kinds of morally ambiguous, impossible situations, situations really where moral machinery isn't appropriate or possible to think through. But still, there is that sense that a controlling author has scripted this future for this particular family in the present. So, that makes it quite interesting to me, and I just want to look on 262 at another way that transposing the story outside of the Jewish community radiates out in this novel, and maybe mitigates that suggestion of a revenge plot, and this is on 262 when suddenly the first-person plural appears. I don't know if you noticed it when you were reading. I found it quite striking. This is talking about the people of the shtetl in their last months of life. "They waited to die. And we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same." They ask that question implicitly, "Would you do anything differently? Would you go about your normal life? What would you do?" And he says, "We would do the same," but he also says, "We do do the same," as if mortality, the fact of mortality, the fact that we all are, all of us, waiting to die--and in the meantime not thinking about that inevitable end, going about our daily life with joy and play and all the range of human experience and emotion--he says that that is analogous to what these people were doing, even though their end looked so different from the one that Jonathan Safran Foer, the character in this novel, expects to have for himself. So, the Holocaust story and the reflection that it causes back on the activities of life radiates out in a universalist sense. It doesn't just impose its narrative on a new set of participants in the Holocaust, that of the perpetrators or those who are complicit, but it radiates out to all people past and present. So, it becomes a quality of the human condition. This is a softening move I think. It suggests the tragedy involved in all sides of this story, the tragedy of the simple man trying to save his wife and child and in doing so becoming complicit to the murder of his friend. So we see that moral complexity, and it feels like tragedy because of these softening moves. Now, I want to stop there and say that it's in this innovation, this change to an established narrative about genocide and its relation to literature and writing, that I find this to be an innovative novel, and if I were teaching a course, which I used to teach regularly, on genocide in literature, I would probably be very happy to end with this novel. For that line of analysis of this period, it's very appropriate as an innovative ending. I think, though, in this novel, it is partly there as a way of taking on something really hard. So, I talked a little bit on Monday about the quality of this novel as a campus novel, as the product of a young person, and I was joking with you a little bit about the bar being set high for the achievements one can pull off by the age of twenty-two. I want to use that fact about Foer--that this is a first novel, that it's especially an overtly ambitious novel--to reflect on something that's closer to life, and this is I think something that I've earned because literature is about its address to life. After all, that's why we read it, because it strikes us as a comment on things that are important to us. If we read that's one reason why we read. So I want to use that question of ambition, also, to address something that comes up in the advising that I do here for students year in and year out, and to get at that question I want to read you something, as a good postmodernist, from the nineteenth century. This is from Walden, Henry David Thoreau's Walden. So we have read a lot of books together. This little part I'm going to read to you from Walden comes after Thoreau has talked about the pleasures and the virtues of reading, and then this is in a section called "Sounds." The last section was called "Reading." This section is called "Sounds." I did not read books the first summer. I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat on my sunny doorway from sunrise 'til noon wrapped in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house until the sun falling in at my west window or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I hope that your summer will have a lot of time like that. I hope that that time might also have latitude for reading, and that reading will be not only what you have been now trained to do, which is reading that is informed--if it's contemporary novels you're reading--informed about where these writers come from, what kinds of projects they might be busy with, what kinds of questions they might be responding to, but also that it will give you time to enter into and pretend with Nabokov--and remember back to the beginning of the course--to pretend with Nabokov that you can climb a mountain of the imagination and meet a reader there and forget all the kinds of context that I've been teaching you to pay attention to. Because it's in that meeting in the imagination that I think literature can most powerfully speak to you. So, I hope you will go and have that kind of summer.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_6B.txt

Yeah right here okay yeah good good good good okay so we are back now from our break now all lively and ready to go okay chapter eight at the beginning of chapter eight we have the narrator telling us let us strike the keynote again before pursuing the tomb when she was half a dozen years younger Louisa had been overheard to begin a conversation with her brother one day by saying Tom I wonder upon which mr. Gradgrind who was the person overhearing stepped forth into the light and said Louisa never wonder herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mass mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections these are older terms for the emotions never wonder by means of addition subtraction multiplication and division settle everything somehow and never wonder bring to me says muchow compiled yonder baby just able to walk and I will engage that it shall never wonder well okay and then we go along and we have the people referred to as babies or simply as body number one body number two and so forth as elsewhere they're referred to simply as the hands the hands not as human beings but as you know girl number twenty body number two the hands and so forth notice that what Dickens is getting at is that the system itself is dehumanizing and we have for example the paradox of the library and this is still in Chapter eight so there was a librarian coke down to which general access was easy mr. gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library see that it's one thing to give people a library but then you have to worry about what they're actually going to read a point where on Little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up saying it was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wandering in wondering I mean reading would get them to thinking into wondering stimulating their imaginations they wondered about human nature human passions human hopes and fears the struggles triumphs and defeats the cares and joys and sorrows the lives and deaths of common men and women they sometimes after 15 hours work sat down to read near fables about men and women more or less like themselves and about children more or less like their own they took the foe to their bosoms instead of Euclid and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by cocker we have a footnote in my text that cocker was the author of a treatise on arithmetic at the time and I guess Dickens is simply assuming that you will know who Goldsmith was and those of you who took the the first half of this course with me probably will remember who Goldsmith was Goldsmith was a poet also a dramatist and essayist and so forth who's in other words he was a litter we figure mr. gradgrind was forever working in print and out of print at this eccentric some and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product well okay we move on to chapter 9 and who now lives in the bounderby's household comes home and she admits to making quite a number of mistakes in mr. matoaka milds school but what's ironic here is that each one of her supposed mistakes as she begins to describe them constitutes part of and all together they constitute a critique of political economy as it was then being understood now by political economy what people mean particularly in the 19th century though the term has been revived in our time to some extent but certainly in the 19th century what they meant was the kind of thing that you found in Adam Smith now Adam Smith was the founder of classical economics but in the history of economics is called classical economics which is basically the theoretical as well as practical foundation for traditional capitalist economics and it happens that Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy and he was convinced that human nature is dominated by the desire to fulfill oneself without necessary reference to other people and is each of us strives to achieve his or her own fulfillment we may come into competition with one another but that competition is precisely what produces the kind of motivation or the engine of the capitalist system that each of us guided by his or her own self-interest even if bumping up against the self-interest of other people will in that very competition push ahead The Wealth of Nations and that in a nutshell is what Adam Smith's the wealth of nations originally published in 1775 was about and educated people not only in the late 18th century but throughout the 19th century and even beyond were well schooled in the thought of Adam Smith now when Dickens is undertaking here is not really a critique of capitalism per se but of capitalism uncontrolled uncontrolled what he wants to do is to soften the system to give the system a heart okay so as she recounts her quote mistakes in school is really giving us a kind of naive but in many ways ironically penetrating critique of political economy as it was understood at that time we have her coming forth and because you know she's a very spontaneous person talking about new she's very spontaneous and very emotional person and so she unburdens herself about her life to Louisa and about her life with her father in particular and we have here something in Louisa like what I said before we took our break we found in gradgrind when he decided to take into his household here louisa responds to her and responds to her with sympathy response to her with feeling and so we begin to see some little hints of the development of an emotional life a real emotional life in louisa as well as potentially in her father and much of what's going to be happening in the plot to come is the gradual development of that kind of emotional life and therefore the ability to make genuine human contact with other people not simply in the cold calculating way of the utilitarianism we saw at the beginning chapter 10 here we have Stephen Blackpool who obviously is going to become a very important character in the novel the woman with whom he is having a relationship which is not really a romantic relationship and certainly not a sexual relationship and the so-called terrible woman let's go through each of these Stephen Blackpool is one of the ordinary workers he is married but his wife ran off on him and hasn't been seen for a long time in the meantime he has met and become friends with Rachel who also works in the factory and they sometimes walk home together after work and they share a kind of friendship with one another now as it happens we learn later on they've actually fallen in love with one another but in their time and place they can't really have a love affair because that would go against all of the the mores and morality of their time in place and because remember he's married and then at one point his wife returns and she is the terrible woman she is a drunk she squanders whatever money she can get her hands on she is unfaithful to him and there's even a very strong suggestion that she has become a prostitute and so now here she is and what's he to do well of course he must take her in and care for her even though she's in a very very bad way and it falls to Rachel really to help to nurse this terrible woman so that she serves a very important function in the pot see if she didn't exist then why couldn't Steven and Rachel just get together and they could get married and at least they'd have that much happiness in their lives there otherwise drab and dreary lives but they can't because of her and we're going to see how she creates even further complications for the pot in just a moment in Chapter 11 we have an example of the paternalism of the system paternalism in the bad sense of paternalism not any possible good sense paternalism means what what does the word itself mean well yeah it comes from the Latin word pot error for father yeah that's right but paternalism that goes farther than just having a father or being a father it's treating other people in a kind of condescending way as if they were small children okay now Stephen goes to Bounderby for advice about his marriage so notice that this paternalistic relationship works both ways in one sense Stephen having been treated by the system as a child even though he's obviously a mature man but having been treated as a child has internalized some of that sense of himself as a child dependent in this case on his father for guidance the father in this case not being his real father but the factory owner and big banker who Huff's and puffs and struts himself around town as a kind of father of the community so Stephen goes to Bounderby for advice about his marriage and what does Bounderby do that defends the institutions of the status quo especially the institution of marriage and of the court system and of the court system and of the system of law which he interprets in the most rigid possible way so that it excludes the rights in this case of Stephen Blackpool all Stephen wants is to get out of what clearly is a disastrous and ruinous marriage tries to get it dies from Bounderby and all Bounderby does is give him lectures about how everything is as it should be and Stephen should not rock the boat Stephen should simply accept his locked in the world now it was not easy to get a divorce in Victorian England it was possible but it wasn't easy and it generally was regarded as a kind of public scandal when people got divorced and even often enough the newspapers would get involved because usually the only ground that was admitted into the courts for as grounds for divorce was adultery and adultery would have to either be admitted to buy one or the other party or would have to be proved and therein lay the difficulty of course because in the efforts to prove the grounds of adultery you know you'd have a public scandal in which obviously other people and other families could become involved this would be sensational in the yellow journalism of the time you know the kind of popular pulp magazines and newspapers of the time and Stephen comes to realize that even if a divorce were popular possible for him he could only get it if he were a wealthy person if he had money and the power and influence that would go along with money but as a poor man he will never be able to be free of his wife and therefore he will never really be able to enjoy the kind of happiness or even make the kinds of life decisions that people who are better placed than he can do well then we have in chapter 12 the old woman coming in she's going to become important in the plot also she's introduced here and she's going to pop up from time to time again in the pot and then she is going to resolve an important element of the pot in the end of the novel over against her is young woman Rachel and she is still young remember that Stephen well he's not an old man sin his 40s he looks a lot older than he is partly because of the work that he's been forced to do which has ground him down physically and spiritually but also because of the severe distress of being married to the terrible woman in Rachel's case she is still very much a young woman and you know as his life and his energy and has verve and of course this is part of the reason why Stephen is not only attracted to her but he's very much devoted to her and as we get to know her better in the novel we come to recognize how good and decent a person she is in chapter 13 we have rachel's compassion for Stephens wife so that she even serves when she doesn't have to work as a nurse for Stephens wife who is as I said earlier in a very very bad way and then one evening Rachel exhausted dozes off for a couple of minutes and when she wakes up what does she see she sees Stephens wife reaching for some bottle of some kind of liquid and we don't really have a description of it except apparently it's poisonous or at least it would be poisonous if she drank the whole bottle down and so she's about to do that she's about to commit suicide and what does Rachel do it's very interesting she dives over and stops the woman from drinking from the bottle and therefore she saves her from suicide now this is a very important point in the pot what if she hadn't you see her and Stephens problem would have been solved I mean after all she's not killing the woman what if she had simply SAT there and let the woman commits suicide she then would have been out of the way the two of them could get married and they could have at least some kind of chance for happiness in their lives but she doesn't and that whole scene is set up in such a way not to tell us about Stephens wife but to tell us something about Rachel and about her essential goodness in chapter 14 we have a shift notice we're shifting back and forth we've got two groups of characters going on we've got the middle to upper middle class people the Gradgrind's and the Bounderby household and then we've got the working class people the Stephens the Rachel's and then eventually other working people as well well and also the circus people because while they're not working in in factories there they're essentially working class people so now we're back with the middle to upper middle class people and we have gradgrind expressing his disappointment with just doesn't get it from his point of view and so he's conveying his sense of disappointment to her now eventually he's going to be won over by but that's something still far ahead in the pot along the way he recognizes that Louisa has now become a young woman she's no longer just a girl and time is passing you know you can actually pop the passage of time in the novel so Louisa now is a couple of years older than she was in the beginning of the novel and she certainly from his point of view is not simply physically a woman but that means to him that she has now become eligible for marriage and that he may begin to think about the possibility of her getting married and even of looking for a suitable husband for her and towards the end of that chapter continuing this whole marriage theme or marriage ability theme we have Tom Louise's brother asking her Louisa to marry Bounderby for his sake see because what he wants is he wants a good cushy job with Bounderby in the bank and he wants to have a weigh-in with Bounderby so that he can rise in that in the bank business okay and what better way than to have his sister Mary Bounderby so then he becomes the brother-in-law of his boss okay in Chapter 15 gradgrind gives bounderby's proposal to Louisa but when he does this it's all with facts facts facts facts about marriage facts about age relations between the people who are getting married and so on and so on and so on now one of the things of course that we obviously cannot ignore is how old do you suppose we're not told exactly but I would old would you say roughly he is now just gruffly he's not old old but you know he's considerably older than she and he any ideas it's probably later the older than late 40s because he was in his late 40s at the beginning of the novel and time has passed so he's probably around fifty or early 50s okay which certainly is not old but compared to her see she's probably still in her teens so there's a considerable disparity in age here which is going to be one of the complicating factor in their relationship now you know it probably seldom happens that to people when they marry are exactly the same age so there's always or very generally will be some age difference how much is a lot well these things are relative you know but certainly when you get up to ten years between them said oh well well I don't know people might debate about that fifteen years I don't know I mean I've known couples where there was 15 years between them and they were very very happy 20 25 now we're up to 30 30 plus years between them and that's undeniably a large age difference okay so here you've got this very young woman and this middle-aged man who she does not love and doesn't even really have feelings of affection for and you will remember that earlier on when he kissed her on the cheek her brother thought that she was going to rub her skin off when she took out her handkerchief and she's rubbing away in her cheek to try to remove the kiss from her cheek she really doesn't like this guy well but she becomes resigned her father wants it her father's pushing her backed up with all of his facts and rational calculations she has been educated in her father's system so that it up to a point in right she's going to be persuaded by his system and she's got her brother who is also coaxing her to marry Bounderby of course for his own reasons his own selfish reasons looks at her and clearly is expressing a kind of fellow feeling toward her but that puts off Louisa Louisa has not yet developed emotionally enough to be able to respond to at this point she will later on but not yet remember now that we're talking about children who have been brought up according to the system that we saw at the very beginning of the novel and which really hangs over this whole novel in a way so that here are children who were never really allowed to develop fully as human beings that only one side of them was developed there's nothing wrong with the vote with developing people's rational abilities their intellects their abilities in mathematics and science and business and so forth those are all good things but notice this is to the exclusion of anything to do with imagination with feeling with wondering okay chapter 16 Bounderby announces his wedding plans to mrs. sparsit and of course mrs. sparsit is going to be really really really distressed by this because what it's going to mean is that she's going to be moved out of her privileged place in the household even out of the household itself and reinstalled in an apartment over the bank which is very much a step down for her socially and also fundamentally alters her relationship with mr. under be so she's going to try to exercise her wiles to get back at the Gradgrind's who's young girl now well young woman has married her mr. bounderby well then we have a description of the wedding in the honeymoon as models of efficiency and utility no that's this is very interesting because notice they go off for their honeymoon to where anybody remember where they go they go off to lyon in france so you think oh what a wonderful idea you know a romantic honeymoon you go off to france you know have wonderful time wandering around in the in the countryside drinking wine eating wonderful food maybe you know going to the art galleries in the cities and so on what a wonderful honeymoon well except for Bounderby what Bounderby wants to do and in fact does do is to go to the French factories to find out how they treat their workers what levels of efficiency they have reached in their factories so he turns the honeymoon really into a business trip well well well okay so let's sum up some of the things that we have seen in book one book one has been called sewing and here we have sewing the major themes and conflicts sewing the major themes and conflicts first of all education which consists of fact reason and utility total practicality versus the world of the circus make-believe fancy or really pretty much any kind of amusement secondly we have the theme of industrialism and untempered capitalism creating physical social and moral degradation especially for the poor but not just for the poor also for the people who are the captains of industry to take Carlisle's term because the leaders of the system are themselves part of the system now notice that I'm using the term untempered capitalism because once again this is not a critique of capitalism per se it's a critique of capitalism without a heart capitalism without a heart so that Dickens doesn't want to do away with business or with business people but simply to bring about a kind of conversion of business and business people and their way of doing business so that they recognize their fellow humanity with other people and especially the people who work for them and with them the kind of thing that you do have happened in the the Christmas Carol right when Scrooge actually does at the end come to a kind of conversion and he goes out to buy the what is it the the Christmas goose for for bob cratchit and his family and wants to send them presents and wants to you know give Bob Cratchit arrays and not make it work on the holiday okay this is this is the system now developing a heart in effect and that's not the same thing is doing way with the system entirely but simply reforming it okay we've talked about bounderby's social darwinism and lack of compassion for the working poor there are even passages here I don't want to take the time just to go through one passage and another another another we've already been doing a good deal of that where what does bound to be think the working poor really want we're not talking about indigent poor either we're talking about the working poor what does he think they want why he thinks that they all want venison and fine liquors and liquors and wines and so forth they want to live high on the hog you see that's what they all want and they would be spoiled and they wouldn't have earned it they wouldn't have earned it that's the most important thing they are not worthy of these things because they have not had the strength of character the strength of determination to prove themselves worthy of wealth and power and of course notice then how he treats poor Stephen when Stephen comes to him had in hand to try to get some helpful advice and maybe even some tangible help we've also talked about the affectation and pretense of Bounderby and mrs. Sparsit said 0 4 against notice how Dickens builds his whole novel around the series of contrasts over against the genuine honesty and goodness of Stephen and of course as we have noted Rachel Louisa we have also seen especially toward the end of book 1 as trapped by her father's education because she's no nothing else and so when he presents to her all of his arguments based on facts and calculations that's the way she has been talked to think as well and so she finds his arguments war or less convincing and even acceptable and she's also trapped by her brother's manipulative love and the reason why I put quotes around love is that you know clearly this is not a genuine kind of love which would be genuinely concerned about her as the person whom he would claim to love but you know he's really a complicated figure in the sense that he's not totally bad I'm he does some really bad things in the novel but he's really a weakling he's really very weak and so notice that he's led into manipulating her as part of his weakness well then let's go to book two if book one was sewing sewing the seeds of the novel as it were that book too is going to be reaping reaping or what happened as a result of the sewing in book one well we're going to see Bitzer now back on the scene and grown up into exactly the kind of person you would think he would grow up to after we saw him in the schoolroom in the first chapter in the the second chapter and so--but sir who is nothing but a conniving little creature teams up with mrs. sparsit because both of them want to get at the grand grinds and both of them want to get at the grad grinds through tom they're not going to be able to attack directly louisa but they can attack tom james harthouse comes in these kind of a dandy it's kind of a dandy he plays tom for a fool and attempts to seduce louisa remember he takes Tom to his rooms and they've not only been drinking but he also gives Tom something to smoke and we don't really know quite what it is it has never explained to us but it seems like something that has a narcotic effect because when Tom does come out into the street from from heart houses rooms comes out onto the streets it's not simply that it's misty it's that he's in a fog his head is in a fog he's unclear about where he is or what's going on I mean after all this is the town that he grew up in and it's not a large town ok so all of this we can infer that Hart House has given him something or other that may have drugged him or at least had some kind of narcotic effect on him it was not real common but it wasn't totally uncommon for people to take opium or some kind of opiate concoction as or for medicinal purposes and it was actually relatively relatively common laudanum was one of the one of the principal ways in which that was done but but there were other kinds of medicinal preparations that were laced with opium and there were people who already had been experimenting with smoking the the opium and it sort of seems like something like that is going on even though you can't quite prove it because we don't have any concrete evidence of it and then in the narrative but in any event harthouse really plays tom for a fool because he sees Tom as a way of getting at louisa and remember the tongue is vulnerable in part because he's in debt now he's he's got all kinds of debts now and we're going to learn a little bit later on that he's been stealing from the bank right and sooner or later the the shortages are going to be discovered and they could be traced back to him and after all how many people would be positioned in the bag we're not talking about a huge bank here after I end up Chase Manhattan or you know one of the great banks of the world we're talking about a small town bank so how many people in the bank would be positioned in such a way that they could even get at the money in the way Tom chem well heart house is going to help or Elise claims that he's going to help Tom out with his financial difficulties but what he really wants is to befriend tom so that Tom will be his way of getting to Louisa because if Louisa truly loves her brother Tom then she can't help but really have strong affection if not love for someone who has become a close friend and even a benefactor to her brother so Louisa is in a very vulnerable position she is vulnerable as bounderby's wife he runs everything he never consults her about anything she doesn't seem to have any role whatsoever in making any decisions in the household and she now is the target of mrs. sparsit it was a formidable adversary also we're going to get back to the other class of people I'm talking about socio-economic class of people now slack bridge in the Union slack bridge is the guy who comes in as not only a labor organizer but he won't use a would be leader of the union movement in the town and from Dickens point of view he's simply trying to manipulate the working people for his own selfish benefit that he's not really trying to help the working people through the Union but simply to get what he can out of them and Stephen of course honest guy that he is will speak up to his fellow workers and even to sock bridge and what slack bridge does is he gets the workers to ostracize Stephen treat him as an outsider treat him as a complete outsider now notice here's poor Stephen he has a terrible marriage he can't get out of it his wife by the way has now gotten better and she's taken off again he can't marry Rachel and given the sense of conscience that he has about these matters and that rachel has about these matters they can't simply have some kind of a love affair and he's been simply sent packing by Bounderby when he tried to get bounderby's advice and maybe some help from him and now he's even being ostracized by his own fellow workers and Stephens honest loyalty to his fellow workers you see is the other side of that they are ostracizing him but he wants to remain loyal to and when Bounderby calls him in for the second time I mean the first time Stephen was initiating the meeting between them and now Bounderby is initiating the meeting and what does not everyone know he wants to know what the workers are up to but of course Stephen is loyal to his fellow workers and he says well you have only yourself to blame in effect when these are not its exact words there are people who are not being paid a living wage who have to live in the most deplorable conditions who have to work in even worse conditions what do you expect from the workers certainly why would you expect them to be happy and contented and cheerful workers well Bounderby simply bullies him in response and then fires him so here's for Steven what's he going to do and again it's a small town and the town is dominated by Bounderby to a very large extent he not only owns the factory but he also owns the bank and we're just even going to get a job what's he going to do how is he going to stay alive so in chapter 6 of book too excuse me we come to a turning point in the pot it happens in chapter 6 is right at the exact middle of the novel and so therefore it's appropriate perhaps that it would turn out to be the turning point in the plot Steven prepares to leave again he really has little choice and then there's Rachel and of course there's the pathos not only of their relationship but now Steven being ostracized fired and forced to leave and then we have the old woman coming in again we find out from her herself by the way that her name is mrs. pegler but this is the old woman whom we had seen earlier on in book 1 and I said you know she's going to come back later on and she's going to be one of the agents of the plot and of the resolution of the plot and at different times she will express her admiration for Bounderby and for his success well okay then Louisa actually meets Stephen one of the hands is it were and she meets him personally she actually gets to talk and she's never met and actually talked to one of these people before it would appear at any rate and she actually talks with him and she realizes that she's dealing not simply with someone who is body one or body to or body three or simply one of the hands not a human being but valued only for what he can do on an assembly line with his hands and she responds to him as a genuine human being with genuinely human feelings herself notice how she is beginning to grow emotionally and in the growth of her emotional life she's becoming a fuller human being and she tries to give him some money and he won't accept the money that she offers but he he'll accept a couple of pounds but only a couple of pounds and so Louisa tries to get Rachel on her side to talk Steven into taking more money and rachel says the last thing I would do is to try to come between Steve and his conscience if this is a matter of his conscience that this is a matter of his principle then I'm not going to ask him to compromise his principal and one of the things that we're learning is that the poorer people can often be much more honorable truly honorable than the people who are much better off financially and are much higher on the social scale that there is true honor in Steven there's true honor in Rachel there's true honor in there's a kind of true honor among the circus people as we will see a little bit later on okay in the meantime we have Tom developing a scheme to implicate Steven now you know I mentioned earlier that that Tom's hand has been in the till as we sometimes say and he's been you know gradually lifting some funds from the bank and he's got to have a scapegoat well Stephen is a perfect scapegoat he's now an outcast he's been rejected by everybody he's been thrown out of his group of workers and friends he's been fired by his boss he's being forced to leave the town completely and if his leaving the town coincides with suspicion being thrown on him that he has stolen money from the bank then it can be imputed to him that the reason why the real reason why he's leaving the town is he's fleeing the law and his leaving the town then becomes not something that one might sympathize with him for but would become evidence of his guilt ok so what does Tom do he says hey you know I want you to hang around the bank you know several late afternoons and evenings just hang around the bank you know and i'll come to you but you know hang around the bag well of course this is sparsit now has been installed upstairs in an apartment over the bag to oversee what's going on she's a kind of spy for for mr. bounderby and so is bit sir bitzer is also an employed spy in the bank to spy on the other people working in the bank and report back to mr. bounderby which of course once again tells us what kind of a guy bitzer is in chapters I don't know why I don't have an S on the end of chapter their chapters 10 through 12 this is still in book two we have mrs. sparsit's staircase as she calls it this is a moral staircase in which she envisions people either going up or going down the staircase going up to greater success and honor going down to dishonour even degradation and she sees Louisa whom she hates she seems Louisa spending a fair amount of time and more and more time actually with remember harthouse was out to try to seduce Louisa with Harthouse there's totally cynical about this all he wants to do is to seduce her simply to make a quote conquest of this young woman this attractive young he doesn't really care about her and mrs. Sparsit sees Louisa as going down on her moral staircase and down and down and down well Louisa finally goes through a kind of crisis which is really a whole emotional crisis and even a kind of psychological collapse but that becomes the beginning of her rebirth sometimes it is out of such a collapse then it becomes possible to begin one's life in a whole new way that's the kind of thing that John Stuart Mill talks about in his autobiography remember what I said about mill the the younger mill John Stuart Mill the author whom I mentioned last time when we're talking about what the Victorians called the woman question he's the author of a very important treatise arguing for equality for women in the 19th century you know I mean we talked about Mary Wollstonecraft making a brilliant argument or a set of arguments for equal treatment and equal opportunities for women and of course the leaders of that kind of feminist movement were generally women very very bright and articulate and determined women but there were also men of conscience who joined them in John Stuart Mill was one but in his autobiography to go back to what I was saying earlier about him in his autobiography he talks about the kind of upbringing he had which was exactly what gradgrind the token child and Bounderby had been fostering that's the way John Stuart Mill was weird and he went through a terrible crisis in his life as a young adult with psychological collapse and he says that how he worked his way out of it at a time when the weren't therapists you could go to and you couldn't go to the psychiatrist you know in the town or some kind of counselor they just didn't exist and so what he did was he did something like what Wordsworth did remember when Wordsworth went through a similar kind of crisis though for different reasons and he said that he found in poetry words were said he found in poetry a kind of spiritual renewal but not only helped him come out of his crisis but come out of it as a fuller and a better human being so also with mill john stuart mill says that it was through his discovery of poetry especially romantic poetry that he was able gradually to work his way out of his crisis because what he was able to do was to develop a whole other side of his personality which had been squashed in effect by his upbringing and he has a very famous section in his autobiography where he talks about Bentham and Coleridge as presenting to opposite forces and oppositional forces in the 19th century so Louise's crisis is going to actually turn out to be something very good because she is now going to reject everything that has been imprisoning her so we move to book three garnering we had selling we had reaping and now we have garnering what you get is a result of your sewing and you're reaping we have Louise's transformation not the least of the action she now takes is she leaves Bounderby that took a lot of courage I mean women didn't just up and leave their husbands it's not that it never happened but notice how that was censured earlier when we had Stephens wife up and left him right now I realized that Stephens wife is a far different person in character than Louisa but the point I'm getting at is that the social mores of the time were generally intolerant of a woman leaving her husband now it's true they don't have children so that doesn't become a complicating factor but she does leave her husband and she goes to live with her father and mother presumably but her mother really doesn't figure very largely in the story that in the Gradgrind family it is the father who really dominates though Louisa now is coming into her own and so notice that Bounderby insists that she come back but insist that she come back on his terms and his terms alone he doesn't go to her and say I love you what can I do or how can we work this out how can we how can we have a real marriage if this has not been a real marriage he simply insists that she return on his terms and his terms alone and even since sets a deadline and says if she has not returned by noon to morrow then I'm simply sending having all her stuff packed up and have it sent to the gradgrind household so at five minutes after noon the next day that's exactly what he does and he and mrs. sparsit then resumed the relationship that they had before well okay Louisa now having come back her father's gone wait a minute wait a minute what's going on here and she says the problem is that everything has been wrong and I now have finally realized that there was something fundamentally wrong in the way I was educated and in the way I was reared of course guess what kind of a crisis this creates now for a mr. Gradgrind her father and it doesn't happen immediately but he gradually comes around to understanding then sympathizing and finally agreeing with her point of view that he has been wrong once again not that there's something wrong with developing the intellectual abilities of children or educating them in the kinds of information that they need to know but at the expense of that whole other rich part of their lives there are emotional lives their lives of imagination their lives of wandering their lives of loving and enjoying well okay and as her father is transformed by her having been transformed notice now she really takes a position of leadership in the family so that the family is no longer the same kind of holistic entity that it was earlier on and of course her father is now responding to her as an equal as an equal heart house and Bounderby both alienate themselves from her in order to quote save face heart house leaves and he's very cynical about this because remember he never really cared about her he just wanted to make the conquest of seduction Bounderby of course also now is going to distance himself from Louisa he's not going to see her he's not going to have anything to do with her he's going to bring mrs. sparsit back so that he can live as a bachelor even though technically they're still married that is to say Louise in here still married and this also is a way of him establishing that he doesn't care it doesn't matter to him he has not been affected he's not suffered he certainly not destroyed by her having left him life is going on as it ever has for Bounderby well then mrs. Sparsit however is exposed and that becomes very interesting because we find out among other things that she really has not come from the kind of aristocratic background that she has always claimed to have come from and the whole fiction of her narrative about herself is proved to be false and of course with this Bounderby is not really going to want to ever continue Stephen is accused of robbing the bank in posters that Bounderby has made up and displayed all over the town in the meantime Stephen of course is as far away as he could get until he fell down a mineshaft the people in the locale of the mineshaft are afraid as they say to go near it because it's such a dangerous place and Stephen is down there for a long time he looks up through the shaft and he can see a star and that's the one thing that he can focus on that gives some kind of sense to his to his life and what he realizes is about to be his death and he equates the star with the Star of Bethlehem and here again you have a very different kind of religious view then we did earlier on when we heard about the 18 churches in the town once again it's a small town you know why would they need 18 churches but these 18 churches all appear at least according to the authorial narrator to have the single goal of trying to keep the working class poor people in line so that they can't have any even the most innocent forms of enjoyment that said over against the very simple kind of religious piety that we find in Steven at the end Rachel now is here you know they've found out where and has got off to and this is also partly with the help of the circus people as it turns out and so they find him down in the mine shaft and the local people help and they get him up out of there but of course he is dying he looks up at his star and he's being carried away on a litter or stretcher with Rachel holding his hand he passes away so that's the pathetic side of the story and I mean pathetic in the in the classical sense the greek word for emotion especially very powerful and very powerfully affecting emotions is pathos so in that sense we have something which is truly a kind of pathos arousing situation okay sends tom off to slurries circus to escape to escape and so now he's dressed up in costume so that people will not recognize him for who or what he is because he's had to escape you know once it had been proved that Steven after all really hadn't been the criminal who had robbed the bank and it came to be known that tom was the one what does do she tries to help him to escape by sending him off to slurry circus why does she do that why does she do that well first of all you know Bounderby hasn't really lost anything in terms of you know anything really secondly she really has a kind of loyalty to the grand grind family because remember it was mr. Gradgrind and of course his family who took her in when her father abandoned her as a child so she still feels that strong sense of loyalty to the gradgrind family so in the conclusion we come full circle in the pop we have slurries philosophy of life being outlined for us in much greater detail than earlier on in which slurry who's not an educated man but he's obviously very thoughtful and very intelligent and in his own way very articulate slurry has really a very admirable philosophy of life and how there should be balanced in human life and it's that balance that's been lost in the Gradgrind's earlier on and so slurry wants to repay Gradgrind's earlier kindness to when he took he Gradgrind took sissie in so slurry is going to help Tom now to get away we have the overcoming of Bitzer and all that that represents in terms of not just bit sir but the bit sirs of the world the bit sirs of the world who cared about nothing and certainly not about anybody except for themselves and by any kind of manipulation seek only for themselves mrs. Pegler exposes Bounderby not only is mrs. sparsit exposed but now Bounderby is exposed he wasn't in rags to begin with I mean there's no rags to riches narrative if he was never pour in the first place she it turns out was actually his mother she never abandoned him he grew up in very comfortable and loving circumstances in a comfortable and loving household and family and so of course he's proved to be a wire a pretender and hypocrite so we have then at the end the moral touch-tones touchdowns being the the ways in which you test the moral values in the work the positive tests of morality stephen rachel slurry and mrs. Pegler even these are good people louisa and Gradgrind are converts and that's very important even if you don't start out as a Steven or a you can convert you can change but we also have the negative touchstones Bounderby heart hose Tom Bitzer and mrs. sparsit these are the ones who in Toms case is simply week but with the other people they are cold and manipulative so we come to the end of the novel and isn't it wonderful okay you

Literature_Lectures

18_Cormac_McCarthy_Blood_Meridian_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Starting on page 312, here is the little detail. This is the kid after he has left the Glanton Gang. They've been routed by the Yumas, and now he is on his own. He traveled about--[This is the middle of the page.] He traveled about from place to place. He did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated with a certain deference as one who had got on to terms with life beyond what his years could account for. By now he'd come by a horse and a revolver, the rudiments of an outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a Bible that he'd found at the mining camps and he carried this book with him, no word of which he could read. In his dark and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher, but he was no witness to them, neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. It's that detail of the Bible that interests me here. He had a Bible he'd found at the mining camps, carried this book with him, "no word of which he could read." Why does the kid carry a Bible, when he is illiterate, and why does it appear at this moment in the narrative? These are the questions I want to try and answer. I want to account for this little detail through an argument that will pick up the points I made about allusion on Monday and integrate those into a different kind of argument. What does this Bible signify at this moment? The kid, I would guess to most of you, seemed like, at this point, he had become somewhat different. Is that right? Did you feel that, by this point, when he leaves the Glanton Gang, he's matured in some way? Did you feel that? Yes? No? Yes. Maybe. If you didn't, you swam against McCarthy's own prose. Remember that at a certain point late in the novel he is no longer called the kid; he is called the man. I'm sure most of you caught that. What this says to us is that McCarthy has built the structure of the narrative along the familiar line of the Bildungsroman, the novel of a boy growing into a man. It's hard to miss this when that's the character's only name, and it changes in the middle. This is a fairly obvious gesture towards that very well-known narrative structure. There are other indicators, though, that suggest a transformation of the kid, or some sort of complexity to the kid, that might be belied by the way the narrative is conducted. Remember that difference I pointed out on Monday between Melville and McCarthy, between the interiority you get through Ishmael as a narrator, the complexity of him as a character, and the flatness of the kid. You don't have an Ishmael character whose mind you can see into. We don't see into the minds of these people very often. If the Bible signifies, as it seems to do to the people who see him and take him to be some kind of preacher, to have some kind of wisdom, if it suggests a development, what kind of development is it? The judge is the person who gives us something to go on in this respect, and if you look on page 299 we can see what that is. The judge and the kid are at odds in the desert after the rout of the gang, and the kid is hiding with a loaded gun. And the judge is hunting him, and he keeps calling out to the kid. "The priest has led you to this boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you've not the heart of a common assassin. I have passed before your gun sights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself? No assassin," called the judge, "and no partisan either. There is a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know you alone were mutinous, you alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen." The judge sets the kid apart from himself and from the gang. In this moment, especially, we feel that the kid has some kind of moral superiority, some kind of resistance to the violence that has been dominating the novel up until this time. You can see it, also, in a late example of the judge. He says, on 307, when he meets up with the kid much later when the kid is in prison (This is on 307, about two thirds of the way down): "Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that was?" "It was you," whispered the kid. "You were the one." [And then I'm going to skip down a little bit.] "Our animosities were formed and waiting before we two met, yet even so you could have changed it all." The judge, here again, singles out the kid as having somehow betrayed the gang, and he suggests that--this is on the prior page--he has lied to the authorities. But he suggests that the kid had actually conspired with the Yumas to make it possible for the Glanton Gang to be decimated, that he had given them information and allowed them to ambush the group. He suggests that the kid was actively working against the gang in this scene. Is this true? Is the kid somehow special? Does he stand apart from the gang? This is a question I want you to ponder. Now, one very distinguished reader of this novel, Harold Bloom, has called the kid a hero. There is a preface to the Modern Library Edition of this novel where Bloom argues that the kid is the hero against the heroic evil of the judge. And remember, in my discussion of Milton's role as a source of allusion in this novel, what Milton's Satan brings with him into this novel is that sense of heroic evil. Bloom sees the kid as the heroic good--flawed maybe, maybe a little bit modest--but yet still the heroic good. And Bloom actually makes a mistake that I think is quite indicative of a mistake in reading. That's he capitalizes "the kid." He makes "kid" like a proper name, capital K, Kid. You never see it that way in the novel. Is the kid a hero? Is there moral development? I want, now, to see whether there's any case to be made for this, and to do that I'm going to track the kid through the middle of the novel. There are about 75 pages in the exact center of the novel where the kid does not appear very often. This is also a structure that pertains in Moby-Dick, so this is again something that he has partly borrowed from Melville. When the kid does appear, let's see what he does. This is during the time, by the way, when they're just massacring anyone who is breathing on the desert plain. Any peaceful tribe they come across, they will skin anyone whose hair looks like it could be an Indian scalp. Let's look first at 157. This is the first place where the kid is noted to appear in this section. This is McGill emerging from the burned encampment. McGill came out of the crackling fires and stood staring bleakly at the scene about. He had been skewered through with a lance and he held the stalk of it before him. It was fashioned from a sotol stalk and the point of an old cavalry sword bound to the haft curved out from the small of his back. The kid waded out of the water and approached him and the Mexican sat down carefully on the sand. "Get away from him," said Glanton. McGill turned to look at Glanton and as he did so Glanton leveled his pistol and shot him through the head. It looks like the kid is approaching him as a kind of act of mercy. Here is a man skewered through with a brutal weapon, and the kid approaches him. Glanton's response is simply to kill him, seeing him as more of a burden to the gang than anything else, but the kid approaches. Here, you do see a difference between the kid and Glanton, at least in their approach to McGill. 162, a somewhat similar case when Davy Brown has an arrow through his leg. Brown has asked someone to help him push it through so he can then extract the arrow, and everybody has refused. This is on 161. "Boys," said Brown, "I'd doctorfy it myself but I can't get no straight grip." The judge looked up at him and smiled. "Will you do us Holden?" "No, Davy, I won't, but I tell you what I will do." "What's that?" "I'll write a policy on your life against every mishap save the noose." "Damn you, then." So, they're just kind of playing with him, and laughing at him as he suffers. "Then finally the kid rose. 'I'll try her,' he said. 'Good lad,' said Brown." And they go through the process of pushing the arrow through, and the priest chides him after this is all done. When the kid returned to his own blanket, the ex-priest leaned to him and hissed at his ear, "Fool," he said. "God will not love ye forever." The kid turned to look at him. "Don't you know he'd have took you with him? He'd have took you, boy, like a bride to the altar." I think what he means there is that David Brown would have killed him, would have killed the kid if he had had the chance, somehow, in his moment of pain. So, the kid does look, again, he looks quite merciful, in this passage. We see him on 169 at dinner with the governor of Chiapas, Angel Trias. This is on 169. This is a very brief mention. "The kid in the first starched collar he'd ever owned and the first cravat sat mute as a tailor's dummy at that board." The ex-priest has sort of indicated with his eyes to note that the judge and Trias are conversing in some unknown language, a language that none of them know, and it's as if to say--that look is as if to say, "See there. He has a kind of mystical evil about him. He speaks even in these other languages that no one can understand. He's an otherworldly figure," the ex-priest seems to be saying just with his eyes. The kid is just like a dummy here. He is just a blank. On 173, this is the passage I noted on Monday where Toadvine and the kid are grumbling against the judge and Glanton because of their penchant for massacring peaceful Indians and Toadvine puts the pistol to the judge's head. There is a parallel moment in the desert after the rout of the gang when the kid does not kill the judge; the kid has his chance and he also does not kill the judge. So, this is another appearance of the kid. They're talking together. And, I won't read it, but you can look at it if you like. That's on 173. 178, the kid instigates a bar fight. This is towards the middle of the page. They're all assembled in a bar. The kid addressed the table in his wretched Spanish and demanded which among those sullen inebriates had spoken an insult. Before any could own it, the first of the funeral rockets exploded in the street as told and the entire company of Americans made for the door. And this begins the chaos that will eventuate in piles of bodies in this cantina as the Americans leave. And then on 204, this is about the time that the kid returns to the narrative. This is with Shelby. Remember, they've drawn lots to see who will conduct the mercy killing. "Of the wounded men two were Delawares and one a Mexican. The fourth was Dick Shelby and he alone sat watching the preparations for departure," and the kid draws the arrow, but he does not kill Shelby. He lets Shelby die in the desert. These moments look like a kind of mercy, but I'm going to argue that they are not, in fact, instances of mercy, that in the end they are not accountable for by any kind of moral calculus, that they resist that kind of evaluation. Why? Because every time the kid shows mercy, he shows mercy to one of his own gang and we know what the gang goes on to do. Right? They simply go on killing more people. So, the allegiance that he seems to show with suffering, the mercy, is so selective that it can't be called such, and it's a kind of trick of McCarthy's narrative to allow us to see the suffering of these men in this kind of detail, while the suffering of all the people they kill goes by pretty quickly. You do see infants being bashed together, or you see people run through with lances. You see people's heads hacked off; you see many scalpings. But there's never a moment when that's really focused on, that we really see it and are asked to feel for that suffering person. It's spectacular violence, in that literal way that we know that word "spectacle." There is no moral development. Why do we think that there should be? I pointed out two reasons. One is that the judge points out, or argues that, or advances the rhetoric that, the kid is different from all the others. That's one reason we think that. The other reason is that he transformed from "kid" to "man," and that old narrative of Bildungsroman suggests the acquisition of wisdom. And we associate wisdom with moral complexity, moral sophistication, moral depth. These are things we bring to the novel out of our immersion in a cultural tradition of such stories. There are other reasons, though, and I'm going to go to page 143 now. This is the parable of the traveler. You'll recall that this is a story that the judge tells as a kind of instructive story to the men as they're sitting around. And the story is that there's a traveler passing through a wild part of the mountains, and he is accosted by a man who lives there. The harness marker who lives there invites the stranger in, and then tries to get money off him and then finally the traveler gives him a lecture on morality. In the end, as the traveler leaves, the harness maker accosts him again, and kills him and buries his bones. The wife discovers this and cares for the bones of the traveler. The son of the harness maker becomes himself a killer of men. So, it's a little story that we get here. The story seems to be about a contention between good and evil, between the harness maker who is a wild and chaotic force: he lives in the woods; he dresses up as an Indian to perpetuate his crimes, and he takes advantage of innocent victims. The traveler is possessed of moral knowledge. He can give a coherent moral speech, and he is not unwilling to exhort the harness maker towards a better life. It seems to be all about moral contention, and the point of the story, from the judge's point of view, is to show that evil is an inheritance. So, the son of the harness maker becomes a killer of men, too, but that the lack of a father (The traveler, we find out, had fathered a child who was as yet unborn, and so that child when born is, as the judge says, "euchered of his patrimony." This is on the bottom of 145: "All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain.") the absent father takes on this quality of being a perfect model that the son can never attain. He never learns that this man was a human being, and therefore that he could never be the kind of ideal he can be as a dead man. So, his point is that that child's life is, as he says, "broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way." What this ending of the story doesn't tell us is that the descendants of the traveler, of the innocent victim, actually also become killers of men. And we discover this at the very end of the novel, when the man makes his last kill, and this is on 323. Remember the scene? The man is camped out outside the village, and this group of bone pickers, or sort of migrants in the desert come up to him, and they're curious about the scapular of ears he wears. I said on Monday that this belonged to Toadvine. I was mistaken. It belongs to Davy Brown; it belonged to David Brown. So, he's wearing Brown's scapular of ears, and the travelers are curious about this. And one boy in particular won't believe him about their origin, and taunts him and sort of calls him a liar. The group backs away. That night, that young man comes back with his gun and he says on 322: "I know'd you'd be hid out," the boy called. He [now "the man"] pushed back the blanket and rolled onto his stomach and cocked the pistol and leveled it at the sky where the clustered stars were burning for eternity. He centered the foresight in the milled groove of the frame strap and holding the piece so he swung it through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape of the visitor. "I'm right here," he said. The boy swung with the rifle and fired. "You wouldn't have lived anyway," the man said. And they come up, the boy's family or his companions in the dawn, to get his body and they say, top of 323: "I know'd we'd bury him on this prairie. They come out here from Kentucky, Mister, this tyke and his brother, his mama and daddy both dead. His granddaddy was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog." So, that little sentence tells us this is a descendant of the traveler from the judge's story. That's who was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog. The brother who's been killed by the kid, now the man, tried to kill the kid. So, we know that he has become a killer of men with that same taste for mindless violence that broods in the kid at the very start of the novel, and his younger brother, about twelve, inherits the dead boy's gun. So, we see that inheritance, yet, of violence, continuing. So, what appears to be a parable, what's told to the group of men by the judge in the form of a parable-- invoking the parables of the Bible which have spiritual, moral lessons to them or can have spiritual, moral lessons to them--that discourse is not, in the end, a discourse that will divide killers of men from people who are not the killers of men. It does not help us to divide up the world between evil and good. It does not track along those lines that the judge's story about the kid, that the kid is his nemesis, that the kid is the counterforce to his evil. It does not track along those lines, and in fact, the whole novel renders the idea of a moral machinery moot, and you can see that, a little bit, too, in the epigraphs. I won't stop on those right now. The epigraphs to the novel suggest, also, the futility of a moral discourse. I argued on Monday that there were two threads of tradition, or inheritance, or influence that McCarthy is drawing on: one historical--and I noted Sam Chamberlain's source material from his account of his life with the Glanton Gang--and then that whole train of literary allusions that I unearthed for you. The historical is made moot in this wonderful little passage from the judge. If the moral is made moot in all these ways that I am discussing, the historical is dismissed quite quickly, 330. He says: "Men's memories" [This is the very last line of the page.] "Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not." Think about that claim, in the context of a historical novel: "The past that was differs little from the past that was not." You can read "the past that was not" as the fictive past, the imagined past. This claim is that the true past has no significant distinction from the fictive past, that men's memories are no source of truth about the past. In this little line McCarthy says to us, "That historical record that I was quite careful to invoke, that I was quite careful to follow in some places, from which I got lots of detail that I used in my novel: forget about that. My novel stands on an equal plane of authority. It gives me a platform to make equally valid claims of truth about history and about the world." This is a kind of grandiloquent argument for fiction as opposed to history. On 309, we have another interesting look back to the material that I was talking about on Monday. This is when the kid is dreaming about the judge while he's undergoing surgery for the arrow wound in his leg. In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great, shambling, mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. What does that mean, "There was no system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go"? What I did on Monday was excavate some of the origins of the judge as a figure in Ahab, in Milton's Satan. This tells us--in the voice of the narrator, this time--that you can't reduce his character to those origins, that to excavate the allusions, or to note the literary tradition out of which such characters arise, does nothing to reduce the singularity of McCarthy's artistic creation. Even finding that eerily similar description of Judge Holden in Sam Chamberlain's account, McCarthy seems to be saying to us, doesn't reduce him to some understandable character. That claim for the judge's preeminence as a character is brought home to us at the very end when the novel switches to the present tense and makes these remarkable claims for the judge. And this is when they are dancing after the kid has been killed in some horrific manner of which we're not told. And here is the judge dancing, and you get the refrain that "He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die." He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat. And he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. The judge himself is a figure for the artist. He's a music maker. He's a performer, a dancer, in this passage, but the assertion is that he will last forever. And the only way, I think, to understand that, is to see him as a literary character. Very self-consciously in this moment, that like Milton's Satan, he's a character that will live in the tradition, that will never die out in the imagination of readers. It's a remarkably ambitious claim to make for your own character. But when you read it with that passage I just read, about the impossibility of dividing him back into his origins, you begin to see McCarthy's literary ambition, and that is to add to the tradition in a significant way. McCarthy says about writing novels that it's not worth doing--you cannot write a good book--unless it's about life and death. He dismisses, for example, Proust and Henry James as important writers on this ground, because they're not writing novels about life and death. I would argue that McCarthy needs his novel to be about life and death because he is looking for the sound and the feel of literary authority. In these passages, I'm suggesting that it's a literary authority coming out of a Miltonic tradition, perhaps out of the tradition of great American novels like Moby Dick, but it goes much deeper than that, and this is where I get to my original little detail of the Bible, the illiterate kid holding the Bible. 248, we get a discussion among the men of the Bible in the context of a discussion of war. This is what is said about it. This is Irving, or, actually, first Black Jackson and then Irving. "The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword," said the black. The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. "What right man would have it any other way?" he said. "The good book does indeed count war an evil," said Irving. "Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it." I would argue that this is a description of McCarthy's own book, except there is one thing that's different. The good book does, indeed, count war an evil. McCarthy's novel does not fail in making us see war as evil, because we're confronted over and over again with these scenes of violence, over and over again with its gratuitous nature. We feel the waste when that last young boy is killed by the man. We feel the waste of his life. We feel the tragedy in discovering that the sons of the harness maker and the sons of the traveler both come to the same end and become killers of men. We see that evil and, like the Bible, there is many a bloody tale within it. It does not count war an evil, because it has not allowed a moral machinery to have a place in this universe or in the logic of the novel. What it holds out instead is the feeling of morality, the feeling that you could have a rhetoric that would divide the kid from the judge in a meaningful way, that would divide killers of men from not killers of men, that would divide the good from the evil, that would divide the peaceful from the warlike, even that would divide history from fiction, if there's something moral about the truth of history. Why does McCarthy use the pattern and the sound of biblical language throughout the novel? I think this is why. Robert Alter--who, if you've studied the Bible in any college course, you've probably at least come to know his work--he is a great translator of the Old Testament, and he came out recently with a version--I think it was in 2004--which he titles The Five Books of Moses. It's the Pentateuch, and it's retranslated in a very startling style. It's trying to honor the syntax of the Hebrew, which is paratactic, which means that it's strung together with "ands" rather than subordinated the way that Latinate languages are subordinated. So, the King James Bible has, in the English tradition, been the prestigious literary translation of the Bible. Alter, in 2004, tries to make the modern equivalent of the King James Bible. And, in the introduction to that translation, he says that what he's trying to do is to take the innovations of writers like Stein, Faulkner, and--the only one from the late twentieth century he mentions--McCarthy, to make a Bible that is true to the Hebrew syntax. This citation from Alter, this foremost scholar on the Bible and biblical translation, suggests just how successful McCarthy has been in persuading the ear that he is writing something like scripture. He has persuaded Alter's ear that this book is the equivalent of Hebrew prose. He is so successful in doing that, that he can make these gigantic claims. And I would point you back to the beginning of the novel, the citation of his father, the only line we get really about the kid's father: "His father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink. He quotes from poets whose names are now lost." It's as if McCarthy is telling us, "I'm erasing all that past that I'm invoking from the Bible on up, from the Bible to The Iliad, to Milton, to Wordsworth, to Melville. I'm invoking it all, but forget all those names. Remember just one: the judge or, better yet, McCarthy. That's the one that you can remember." So, McCarthy gives us the feel of scripture, and yet he erases all that could be the content of scripture. That's why I am interested in the Bible in the hand of an illiterate kid. What is the Bible in the hand of an illiterate kid but the symbol of that kind of narrative, the symbol that there can be an authoritative narrative about the nature of the world, about all of history, about its meaning, about its structure, a book that can compel its readers, that can speak to life and death in the most ultimate way, but because it's in the hand of an illiterate person it cannot be read? So, what McCarthy is saying to us in that tiny detail, is that the Bible is important as an artifact, as a literary artifact, proof that such narratives can exist. And McCarthy sets out to produce one, and, in keeping with the illiterateness of the kid, one that has no moral content at all, has only made claims about the material of the universe and not the spiritual quality of the universe, and that persuades entirely by the sound of rhetoric and the structures that are familiar to us from the narratives of our tradition. That's the ambition of the novel. I'm actually right on time, so I will stop there.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_7_Israel_in_Egypt_Moses_and_the_Beginning_of_Yahwism_Genesis_37_Exodus_4.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: We were talking last time about the mysterious episode by the Yabbok River, when Jacob undergoes a change in name, and I mentioned the fact that in the biblical view, the name of something somehow encapsulates its very essence. Knowing the name of something gives one power and control over that thing. Many commentators have observed that the change in name accompanies a change in character, a change of essence in Israel. So some have noted, one scholar in particular has noted that the struggle with the angel is the final purging of the unsavory qualities of character that marked Jacob's past career. And although Jacob appears to be something of an anti-hero--he actually literally limps into the Promised Land alone--Jacob is a new and honest man. We see this immediately in his reunion with Esau. He greets his former rival and enemy with these words--this is in Genesis 33:10-11: "'If you would do me this favor, accept for me this gift, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God, and you have received me favorably. Please accept my present, which has been brought to you, for God has favored me, and I have plenty.' And when he urged him, he accepted." With Jacob, who is now Israel, God seems perhaps to finally have found the working relationship with humans that he has been seeking since their creation. God learned immediately after creating this unique being, that he will exercise his free will against God. God saw that he had to limit the life span of humans, or risk creating an enemy that was nearly equal to him. So he casts the humans out of the Garden, blocks access to the tree of life. But humans continue their violent and evil ways, and in desperation, God wipes them out, and starts again. This second creation proves to be not much better. They forget God, they turn to idolatry. God has promised at this point, however, not to destroy all humankind again, so he experiments with a single individual of faith. Abraham's faith withstands many a trial. He is obedient to God in a way that no one has been up to this point in the narrative, but perhaps ultimately the model of blind obedience is rejected, too. When Abraham prepares to slaughter his own son, perhaps God sees that blind faith can be as destructive and evil as disobedience, so God relinquishes his demand for blind obedience: he stops Abraham himself. The only relationship that will work with humans is perhaps one in which there is a balance between unchecked independence and blind obedience, and God seems to find that relationship with Jacob. And the metaphor for that relationship is a metaphor of struggle, or wrestling. Remember Yisrael means "one who wrestles, who struggles with God." God and humans lock in an eternal struggle, neither prevailing, yet both forever changed by their encounter with one another. Now the rest of Genesis relates the story of Joseph and his brothers, the 12 sons of Jacob. It's one of the most magnificent psychological dramas in the Bible. The story is intensely human. We don't have a lot of supernatural interference in this story. It focuses very much on the family relationships, on the jealousies, very little reference to a divine perspective. It's like a little novella. Scholars are divided over the authenticity of the Egyptian elements in the story. You will read radically diverse things. Some point to the presence of Egyptian names, and customs, and religious beliefs and laws as a sign of some historical memory being preserved in these stories. Others point to all the problems: the anachronisms, the general lack of specificity as a sign that these are composed quite late. The art of dream interpretation places a very important role in this story, and dream interpretation was a developed science, particularly in Egypt, and the other parts of Mesopotamia, but the Egyptians were known in the ancient world as dream interpreters. Joseph is also known for his ability to interpret dreams, but the biblical narrator, the monotheizing biblical narrator, is very concerned to describe him as reporting what God reveals to him, rather than relying on some kind of occult science of interpretation. Now Joseph's brothers are jealous of Jacob's partiality to Joseph, and they conspire to be rid of him. But at the last moment, his brother Judah convinces the brothers that, if instead of killing him, they sell him, they can profit a little for their troubles. So Joseph is sold ultimately ends up in the household of Pharaoh in Egypt, and his adventures there prove his meritorious character. He rises to a position of great power when he correctly interprets some dreams regarding an impending famine, and with Joseph as the governor of the country, in control of the grain supply, Egypt successfully weathers seven years of famine. Now, this famine, which strikes Canaan as well, drives Joseph's brothers to Egypt in search of food, and Joseph doesn't reveal himself to his brothers. He puts them to the test. He wants to know if they are the same men who so callously broke their father's heart by selling Joseph, his father's favorite, so many years ago. In the climatic moment in the story, Joseph demands that his frightened brothers leave Benjamin--the other son of Rachel, the other son of the beloved wife--leave Benjamin as a pledge in Egypt. And Joseph knows that it would decimate his father Jacob to lose Rachel's only remaining son, but he's testing his brothers to see whether they have reformed since the day that they sold him into slavery. And indeed Judah, the one who had figured so prominently in the sale of Joseph, that had crushed his father, Judah steps forward and offers himself instead of Benjamin: he says: It would kill my father now to lose Benjamin, the last son of his beloved wife, Rachel. So the brothers, having proven their new integrity--Joseph weeps, he reveals his identity in a very moving scene, and ultimately the family is relocated to, and reunited in Egypt, where they live peacefully and prosperously for some generations. That's the basic outline of the story of Joseph and his brothers, but one of the important themes of these stories is the theme of God's providence. The writer wants to represent Jacob's sons, their petty jealousies, their murderous conspiracy, Joseph himself, all as the unwitting instruments of a larger divine plan. In fact, Joseph says to his brothers in Genesis 50:20, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today." Joseph's betrayal by his brothers, his decent into Egypt, set the stage, not only for the reformation of his brothers' characters, which is an important part of the story, but for the descent of all of the Israelites into Egypt, so as to survive widespread famine. So yet another threat to the promise is overcome: threat of famine is overcome by the relocation to Egypt. Significantly, God says to Jacob in Genesis 46:4, "I Myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I Myself will also bring you back." So, in short, there seems to be a plan afoot. The writer wants to represent God going down there, and he will bring them back. Israel's descent to Egypt sets the stage for the rise of a pharaoh who, the text says, didn't know Joseph and all that he had done for Egypt. And this new pharaoh will enslave the Israelites, and so embitter their lives, that their cry will rise up to heaven--the same cry from the generation of the flood, the same cry from Sodom and Gomorrah. And thus begins the book of Exodus, which will lead us from Egypt to Sinai. Most of the narrative account in Genesis 12 to 50--with the exception of the Joseph story, actually--but most of Genesis 12 through 50 is assigned by scholars to the J source, and certain themes emerge in the J narrative. The first is, that while God's promise is sure, the manner and the timing of its fulfillment is quite unpredictable. The land never belongs to the patriarchs to whom it was promised. Their descendants will take possession of it, but only after tremendous struggle. In other ways God's methods are curious. Why does he go against the traditional Ancient Near Eastern practice of primogeniture, inheritance by the first born? He chooses Jacob, a liar and a cheat in his early life, over the elder Esau. Why does he choose young Joseph, who's an arrogant spoiled brat? He provokes his brothers with his delusions of grandeur. Compare the law of primogeniture that's listed in Deuteronomy 21:15-17: "If a man has two wives, one loved, and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him sons, but the first-born is the son of the unloved one-- / when he wills his property to his sons, he may not treat as first-born the son of the loved one in disregard of the son of the unloved one who is older." And yet isn't this what happens to Ishmael? Isn't this what happens to Esau? Isn't this what happens to all of Joseph's brothers who are born before him? And there's no explanation in the text. Yet despite the false starts, and the trials, and the years of famine, and the childlessness, and the infertility, the seed of Abraham survives, and the promise is reiterated: "I will go down myself with you to Egypt, and I myself will also bring you back." So ultimately, the J source would appear to assert God does control history, all tends towards his purpose. The book of Exodus is really the sequel, then, to the book of Genesis. Despite God's promise of land and blessing, things don't look so good at the end of Genesis. The book closes with the Israelites residing in Egypt. They've managed to procure no more than a burial plot in the Promised Land. Even God has left his land, descending with the Israelites into Egypt, so the promises and their fulfillment seem quite remote. The book of Exodus will relate the beginning of the process by which the promises will be fulfilled. I've just charted the structure very briefly for you , so you can get your footing in the book of Exodus. The first fifteen chapters tell the story of Israel in Egypt: the rise of a new Pharaoh who didn't know Joseph; the oppression of the Israelites; their enslavement in a state labor force; the killing of all first born Hebrew males; the birth, the early life, the call of Moses; the struggle for freedom, Moses will plead with the Pharaoh to let his people go and worship their god in the wilderness; and then the final liberation, when God does something at the Reed Sea--we'll talk about that later--so that the Israelites can pass, leaving the heavy Egyptian chariotry to flounder in the mud. We have about two-and-a-half chapters, 15:22 until chapter 18, that recounts, then, the journey towards Sinai. This is a journey that's filled with complaints. The people complain they're going to starve, and God responds with quail, and manna, and water. Chapters 19 to 24 are very, very important chapters that contain the theophany, the self-revelation of God to the Israelites, and the covenant that's concluded at Sinai. We'll be talking more about that next time. Chapters 25 to 40 contain, beside the unfortunate incident with the golden calf which is in Exodus 32, the rest of this unit from 25 to 40, is God's instruction on how to build or erect the tabernacle, and then an account of the Israelites actually constructing, erecting the tabernacle. Source critical scholars believe that J supplies the main narrative of this unit in Exodus. It's supplemented by excerpts from E, and then the addition of considerable legal and ritual and genealogical material from P. Now, the historical value of the Exodus story has fascinated scholars, but also lay people, for generations. Could the Exodus really have happened? And if so, when? And does it matter? And is there any evidence for this story, for example, in external sources, outside the Bible? Well, no, there isn't any direct evidence outside the Bible, but let's start at the beginning. We do have a victory hymn, a victory hymn that's inscribed on a stele--that's a slab of stone--which was erected in the year 1204 BCE. It was erected by a pharaoh, Pharaoh Merneptah. So the stele of Merneptah dates to about 1204, and in this victory hymn he's boasting of his victory over various groups in Canaan, and one of the groups he claims to have defeated is Israel. Now, this is a fabulously important inscription, because it's the earliest known reference outside the Bible to any person or entity that is mentioned in the Bible, and it suggests that a people known as Israel was indeed in the land of Canaan by the end of the thirteenth century BCE. Whether they arrived there after an exodus from Egypt is not of course indicated. The source doesn't tell us that, and in fact there's really no archeological evidence of a group, a large group, entering the land of Canaan at this time. There's a steady cultural continuum, not evidence of destruction as we would expect for a big invasion. We'll talk more about that when we get to the book of Joshua. But nevertheless, let's just go with this for a minute, and if we suppose that it took about a generation to enter the land--so you see, I've done the math on the side here. I suppose I should have done subtractions, since we're talking BCE, but if we put 20 years in for actually arriving and settling in the land, that takes us to about 1225; and if we assume 40 years of wandering in the desert, or wandering from Egypt, that takes us to about 1265 as a date for the Exodus. Well, in 1265, the Eighteenth Dynasty's most illustrious pharaoh occupied the throne, Ramses II--who in fact was pharaoh for, what, 70 years, or something…most of the thirteenth century--and he's very famous for his building projects. Now, according to the biblical record, the Hebrews were set to work on urban building projects in the Delta region, at the north part of the Nile--the delta region of the Nile in the cities of Pithom and Ramses. The Bible states that Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, so if we add that, then that would put their descent into Egypt--Joseph, the other sons of Jacob--around the year 1700. Well, there's a certain appeal to that scenario, because in the 1720s, Egypt was invaded and conquered by a Semitic people known as the Hyksos. They established a dynasty of Semitic rulers. They were centered in the north of Egypt, in the area known as Goshen, so it's possible that the pharaohs of the Hyksos dynasty might have favored other Semites: they might have allowed them to enter in times of famine, and to dwell in the land of Goshen, which the Bible says--the Israelites lived in the land of Goshen. That Joseph, a Semitic foreigner, could be elevated to an important post, the post of governor, is a little less surprising, if we suppose there was a Semitic regime. In the sixteenth century, the native Egyptians, who were smarting and smoldering under the humiliating foreign rule of the Hyksos, finally succeeded in rising up and driving them out, and reestablishing a native Egyptian dynasty. So some scholars have speculated that that's the historic reality behind the statement in Exodus 1:18, that a new pharaoh, who knew nothing of Joseph and what he had done for Egypt, began to oppress the Hebrews. The feeling is that the establishment of a new native Egyptian dynasty might have led to the enslavement of any remaining Semites or Semitic outsiders, and that would include, of course, the Hebrews. So in all probability, anyone who was associated with the hated occupying regime would be treated poorly. It all seems to fit. Well, there's a problem with this theory. The Bible itself contains very contradictory statements regarding the length of the Israelites' stay in Egypt. So Exodus 6:16-20 says that the Israelites were there for only four generations, maybe 80 years, from Levi to Moses--Levi was the great grandfather of Moses--so only four generations--which would mean an arrival in Egypt a long time after the Hyksos, not 430 years; and we don't even know whether migration occurred in the Hyksos period, so what we have really is only a hypothesis. The 430 years number is also something of an ideal number. It places the Exodus 480 years before Solomon's building of the Temple: 480 is a multiple of 12, and the Bible really likes multiples of 12, so it is an ideal number. It's the kind of number that crops up a lot in biblical chronologies, which makes it suspect for other sorts of reasons, as well. So the Hyksos theory is one that got people very excited for a while, but is really not well supported. Still, there's some very interesting circumstantial evidence for Semites engaged in building projects in the thirteenth century, however and whenever they might have gotten to Egypt. We do know, archaeologically, that the fortified city of Pi-Ramses, very much like Pithom Ramses, was rebuilt in the early thirteenth century on the site of the old Hyksos capital. There was a capital Avaris. They had moved the capital up to the Delta region. It had fallen into decay. Now, in the thirteenth century, this is being rebuilt, and that's in the area of Goshen. So the city was being reoccupied in the time of the pharaoh Ramses, Ramses II, in the thirteenth century. We do know that Egyptian officials allowed hungry nomads to enter the Delta region for food: we have records, written records of this. We also know that Semitic slaves are well attested in Egypt at this time, the end of the thirteenth century: we also have records of that. We know of a people called the Hapiru or 'Apiru. They don't seem to be an ethnic group so much as a marginalized social class, but some have suggested a connection with the word "Hebrew." We know that they worked on the building of the capital city of Ramses II. Other scholars deny that there would be any connection with "Hebrew." The debates are endless. One thirteenth-century Egyptian papyrus describes Egypt's tight control of her border areas, and another reports some Egyptian officials pursuing some runaway slaves. Obviously this happened from time to time, escaping into the desert. The Exodus story also contains many Egyptian elements. The names Moses, Aaron, Pinhas…these are all Egyptian names. "Moses" is simply this part of Ramses: Tutmosis, Ramses, this is Egyptian for "born of," born of the God Ra. And even Moses is an Egyptian name. So none of this, of course, corroborates the specific details of the biblical story. There's no Egyptian record of the biblical Moses, no record of plagues, no record of a defeat of Pharaoh's army. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, and some scholars think that that lends plausibility to a story of slaves working on building projects who escape from Egypt at this time, and if there's any historical basis to the Exodus, then the most plausible time, the most plausible backdrop would be the thirteenth century BCE. Some scholars assume there's a historical memory behind the elaborate and dramatic story of a miraculous redemption by God. Why would you invent a hero, a national hero who's entirely Egyptian and has an Egyptian name? Why would you invent a myth of origins in which your ancestors are slaves? Nevertheless, as I emphasized earlier in the patriarchal stories, in the end we're dealing here with sacred history. We're dealing with a highly embellished and theologically interpreted myth of origins for a nation. So much more important than historical verifiability is the conviction of the ancient Israelites who received and venerated these traditions, and developed them, and embellished them, that God had once acted on their behalf, rescuing them from bondage, binding them to himself in an eternal covenant. A little bit about the outline of the story, and then we're going to finally have an introduction between God and Moses, which will I think bring us back to some of the conversations we had at the beginning of the course. So let me first say a little bit about the story line, and some of the themes at the beginning of Exodus, the first six or seven chapters. According to the text, the Israelites have multiplied, they've filled the land of Goshen that had been given to them during Joseph's tenure in office, and this new pharaoh who feared them--he didn't know Joseph, he feared the foreign presence--he rose and he attempted to curb their growth. He pressed all of the adult males into slavery. The text says "harsh labor at mortar and brick," but the text says, "the more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out," so Pharaoh resorts to more drastic measures. He decrees the murder of all newborn Israelite males at the hands of Egyptian midwives. He's thwarted by these midwives. They say: Oh, these ladies are too quick; we get there too late, they've already given birth by the time we arrive. They allow the male infants to live. So the pharaoh enlists all of the people to annihilate the Israelites by drowning all newborn males in the Nile River. This leads then to the account of the birth of Moses, and his exposure to the Nile River. He is born into a Levite family. The Levites will be priests in Israel, so he's born to a priestly family. He's hidden away for three months, and then he's placed in a wicker basket, which is lined with bitumen, a tar, and set among the bulrushes at the edge of the Nile River. Pharaoh's daughter will eventually discover him. His own mother will volunteer to be his nurse, and Pharaoh's daughter will eventually adopt him and name his Moses: again, this is an Egyptian name. The etymology given in the biblical text is invented. A lot of scholars have noted that this story is full of irony. The rescue of Moses, who will foil Pharaoh, is affected by the daughter of that pharaoh, and Moses grows up and is sheltered right in the pharaoh's own palace. Further, the significance of Moses is hinted at through literary allusions in the narrative of his birth, his infancy. The basket in which he is placed is called an ark: the Hebrew word is tevah. This word is used precisely twice in the entire Hebrew Bible. It's not the same word that's used for Ark of the Covenant, by the way: the Ark of the Covenant, the word is aron. This word for ark, tevah, occurs exactly twice: here, and in the story of Noah's ark. Noah's ark is a tevah. Scholars have always been quick to point out that in both cases, this ark, this tevah, is in the words of one scholar "the instrument of salvation through perilous waters", waters that threaten to capsize it, and so blot out God's hopes and plans for his creatures. Moreover, the basket is placed among the reeds--the Hebrew word for reeds is suph--and that's a hint or an allusion to the fact that Moses will lead the Israelites through the "Reed Sea," the Yam Suph. It's not the Red Sea, it's the Reed Sea, but we'll talk about that later also. This legendary birth story has important parallels in Ancient Near Eastern and other literature. It's very common to find stories of the extraordinary events that surround the birth of someone who will later become great: Cyrus of Persia, Oedipus, Jesus, and so on. Many scholars have pointed out that this story in particular is paralleled by the birth story of a great Akkadian king, Sargon, from about 2300 BCE, Sargon of Akkad. Strikingly similar story to Moses. placed in a basket lined with tar, put in the river, and so on. It underscores the degree to which this story is part of a literary genre, part of a literary convention, how much the Exodus story itself is very much a literary story. Nothing is said of Moses' childhood, but we learn of his awareness of his Israelite identity, or his identification with the Hebrews, in the following passage: this is in Exodus 2:11-15: Some time after that, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen. He turned this way and that, and, seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, he found two Hebrews fighting, and so he said to the offender, "Why do you strike your fellow?" He retorted, "Who made you chief and ruler over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Moses was frightened and thought: Then the matter is known! When Pharaoh learned of the matter, he sought to kill Moses; but Moses fled from Pharaoh. He arrived in the land of Midian, and sat down beside a well. So coming to the aid of an oppressed kinsman, Moses kills an Egyptian, and he has to flee to the territory of Midian. There at the well, again he acts to defend the defenseless. This is a key to his character; these two episodes are the two that we're given of Moses' life. So continuing verses 16 and 17 in Exodus 2: "Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock; but shepherds came and drove them off. Moses rose to their defense, and he watered their flock." So again, this is a key to Moses' character, aiding the defenseless. Moses will later marry Zipporah, one of these women, and live as a shepherd in Midian for about 40 years. Now, the situation of the Israelites in Egypt, the text says, remains bitter. Exodus 2:23-24: "The Israelites were groaning under the bondage, and cried out; and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. God heard their moaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob." One day in the wilderness at a place called Horeb, also Sinai, where there's a mountain, Moses sees a flame in a bush that doesn't consume the flame, and then he hears a voice. And the voice says, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," and Moses hides his face in fear, but God continues. He has a job for Moses: "I have marked well the plight of my people in Egypt, and have heeded their outcry because of the taskmaster; yes, I am mindful of their sufferings. And I've come down to rescue them from the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the region of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Now the cry of the Israelites has reached me. Moreover I have seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free my people, the Israelites, from Egypt." [Exodus 3:7-10] Moses demurs: Who me? Why not my big brother Aaron, he's a much better public speaker? This is the line that he takes: I'm slow of tongue. But as we've already seen in Genesis, God chooses whom he chooses, and his reasons aren't always fathomed. Moses says: May I say who sent me? He asks for God's name. The Israelites will want to know who has sent me, and God replies with a sentence, "Ehyeh asher ehyeh." This is a first person sentence that can be translated, "I am who I am," or perhaps, "I will be who I will be," or perhaps, "I cause to be what I cause to be." We really don't know, but it has something to do with "being." So he asks who God is, God says, "I am who am I am" or "I will cause to be what I will cause to be." So Moses, wisely enough, converts that into a third-person formula: okay, he will be who he will be, he is who he is, "Yahweh asher Yahweh." God's answer to the question of his name is this sentence, and Moses converts it from a first-person to a third-person sentence: he will be who he will be; he is who he is; he will cause to be, I think most people think now, what he will cause to be, and that sentence gets shortened to "Yahweh." This is the Bible's explanation for the name Yahweh, and as the personal name of God, some have argued that the name Yahweh expresses the quality of being, an active, dynamic being. This God is one who brings things into being, whether it's a cosmos from chaos, or now a new nation from a band of runaway slaves. But it could well be that this is simply God's way of not answering Moses' question. We've seen how the Bible feels about revealing names, and the divine being who struggled and wrestled with Jacob sure didn't want to give him his name. So I've often wondered if we're to read this differently: Who am I? I am who I am, and never you mind. There are certain important and unique features of this burning bush dialogue. First God identifies himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and as numerous commentators have pointed out, in so doing, the biblical writer is trying to establish an unbroken historic continuity between the present revelation to Moses, and the revelations and promises that are received by Israel's forefathers, the patriarchs. And yet, paradoxically, the very assertion of continuity only serves to underscore a fundamental discontinuity, because even as God asserts that he is the God of the patriarchs, he reveals to Moses a new name, Yahweh, so that Yahwism, and the Yahweh cult, can be said to begin only with Moses. Now, as we've seen, the biblical sources differ on this point. According to the J source, in Genesis 4:26, the earliest humans worshiped Yahweh as Yahweh. The name was always known. J wants to assert a direct continuity between the God of the patriarchs, and the God of the Exodus. The P and E sources tell it a little differently. Exodus 6:2-4, a very important passage, is assigned to P, and here God says, "I am. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name." Now, this contradicts the J source, and many scholars have suggested that P and E preserve a memory of a time when Israel worshipped the Canaanite god, El. P and E wish to claim that the God who covenanted with the patriarchs is the God of the Exodus, but now with a new name. They also, like J, want to assert a continuity, but in doing so, they do it in a way that really ultimately draws attention to the fundamental discontinuity, the sense of a new beginning. To understand that new beginning, we need to look at the differences between patriarchal religion, and the new Yahwism. There's a list on your handout, so I hope everyone got a copy of the handout. If you didn't, perhaps you can raise your hand, and if the TFs have any left -- you'll want to take a look at these differences between patriarchal religion and Mosaic Yahwism, and this is going to help us. This list is based on information that's supplied by many scholars. I've relied very much on Michael Coogan, but others as well. Look first at the sheet that gives you the titles of God, and you'll see that in the patriarchal traditions--so we're talking about Genesis primarily; I've thrown in some other texts also, but focusing for a moment on the patriarchal traditions of Genesis--God is six times called El Shaddai. Other names are El 'Elyon, and El Olam, El Ro'i, El Beyt El. You can see the translations of these: the everlasting God, God most high, the God of seeing, the God of the house of God, and so on. El is the name of the chief God in the Canaanite pantheon. Flip over to the other side of your handout, where I discuss an important set of texts that were discovered at a place called Ras Shamra. Ras Shamra was ancient Ugarit. In 1928, a peasant in Syria discovered a tomb at Ras Shamra, which was subsequently excavated by the French, and it was found to contain a library of tablets that were written in a language very, very close to biblical Hebrew. It's clear that Hebrew is simply a Canaanite dialect--in fact, I remember reading one scholar who said if you go back far enough, you'd be really hard pressed to tell the difference between Canaanite and Hebrew--and in these texts we read of the exploits of the gods of Canaanite religion. These gods include the sky god, El, I've listed here, the father of the various gods and humans. El has a wife, Asherah: she's listed third on your paper, a mother goddess; their daughter, Anat, who is a goddess of love and war. She's quite fierce. And then their son, Baal, who is a storm god. He's depicted in mythological literature as defeating both the chaotic sea god, Yam, and the god of death, Mot. There are striking resemblances between the biblical gods of the Patriarchs and the Canaanite god El. El is the head of a council of gods. He is said to have a long white beard. He dwells on a mountaintop in a tent. His epithets include "Father of all creatures," "Bull," "King." He's also described as the protector of patriarchs, patriarchal figures, "a God of the father of the clan," it says in the text. He guides them. He protects them. He promises them descendants. Many biblical passages depict God exactly this way, as the head of a council of divine beings. He's occasionally described with some of the epithets that are associated with El. He's referred to as the father of all creatures. There are poetic passages in which he is referred to as "Bull." Also certainly as "King." And in the patriarchal narratives, God refers to himself as the God of the Father. "I am the God of the father," the same way El is referred to. He guides and protects the patriarchs. He makes promises of progeny to Abraham and his heirs. He also is associated with a mountaintop, Sinai, and gives instructions for the building of a tabernacle, a tent-like structure, in which he will dwell. Many personal and place names in the patriarchal narratives are compounds in which one element is El. Israel, Ishmael, Beth-el. El is the God of the Patriarchs. By contrast, after the time of Moses, Israelite names start to be formed using Yah, or Yahu, as part of the name Yahweh: Elijah in Hebrew is Eliyahu. So you start to have theophorics, names that use a name of a deity, which are using forms of Yahu instead of El. There are other descriptions in the Bible of God, which are much more reminiscent, however, of the storm god, Baal. According to Canaanite mythology, Baal defeated El, and assumed his position at a certain point as the head of the Canaanite pantheon, so there was a switch in Canaanite mythology, from El to Baal becoming supreme. Like Baal, Yahweh is said to ride on the clouds: we have a poetic passage in which that's the case. His revelations are accompanied by thunderstorms, earthquakes: Baal is the god of the storm. There are poetic fragments also that allude to Yahweh's victory over water foes, and that is a motif that's associated with Baal, who does battle with the Yam, with the sea. And finally, also associated with Israel's God, we have Ancient Near Eastern holy war traditions. God is depicted as a warrior, who leads his host, the Lord of hosts in battle. He's armed with spear and bow and arrows. The worship practices of ancient Israel and Judah clearly resemble what we know of Canaanite and Ancient Near Eastern worship practices. Canaanite religious ritual took place in small temples that housed cultic statues. There were stone pillars, perhaps symbols of the gods, or memorials to the dead. There were altars for animal sacrifices, cereal, liquid sacrifices. Similarly, Israel's gods, or Israel's God, was worshiped at various high places: they're referred to as elevated or high places. They were shrines with little altars, maybe cultic pillars, and wooden poles: the word for a wooden pole that's used in the Bible is asherah. These shrines may have been associated with some kind of contact with ancestors, some kind of cult of the dead. Now, worship at these local altars and high places would come to be banned: Deuteronomy is going to polemicize against this. Deuteronomy will insist that all worship must occur in one central sanctuary and these outlying areas, and their asherot are to be destroyed. It will decree the destruction of all of these altars and high places. The patriarchal stories are clearly not the work of the Deuteronomist, and these stories must have had very longstanding traditional authority if they were adopted without serious modification by the Deuteronomist redactor-- some modification, but not serious. So what is going on here? What are we to make of the incredible similarity of Israel's deity and cult to those of her neighbors? How are we to understand the rise of Israel's God, Israel's religion? Well, so far we've had two models that have been thrown out to you: the kind of classic evolutionary model. From polytheism's worship of many gods there's a natural evolution to henotheism's elevation of one god to a supreme position. One comes to be favored and then eventually becomes so important, the others really fall away, and you have the denial of all gods but the one. We saw Kaufman in the 1930s reacted against this. He argued that monotheism and polytheism are so radically distinct that one could not possibly have evolved from the other. Surely there's an element of truth in both models. The evolutionary model is, I think, responding to, and picking up on, the fact that in many respects, Yahweh resembles the gods of Israel's neighbors. To be blunt, the patriarchs seem to have worshiped the Canaanite God, El. The problem with the evolutionary model is that it doesn't account for those aspects of the biblical text that show a clear polemical relationship between Israel's religion and that of her neighbors. Now, we saw when we read Genesis 1, that there was something going on there, there's a polemic going on. There are strata within the Bible that are clearly polemicizing against a certain kind of mythological presentation of the deity. By contrast, Kaufman's revolutionary model focuses almost exclusively on the dissimilarities and the polemical relationship between Yahwism and Canaanite polytheism. the revolutionary model also fails because it doesn't acknowledge the many, many areas of contact, similarity, and even identity. So a third way has emerged in the last 20 years, or 15 years or so, and it's one that seeks to avoid this dichotomy between polytheism and monotheism. Instead of viewing Israelite religion as an evolution from and a refinement--just this natural process of refinement--of Canaanite religion, or as a radical break with and polemic against Canaanite religion, we have some biblical scholars--Mark S. Smith is among them, and Steven Geller--who examine the cultural and ideological negotiations that gave rise to Israelite monotheism. What do I mean? Mark Smith specifically describes the origin and development of Israelite religion as a process of what he calls convergence and differentiation. He writes, "Convergence involved the coalescence of various deities, and/or some of their features into the figure of Yahweh". There's a period of convergence and blending of the deities. By contrast, he describes differentiation as a process whereby Israel came to reject its Canaanite roots, and create a separate identity. At some point there was a desire to separate, and in that process of identity formation, a polemic began to develop that created Yahweh in a distinct way, differentiated from the Canaanite deities. So let's consider Smith's convergence first. The Canaanite roots of Israel's ancestors are clear. The Hebrew language itself is essentially Canaanite, a Canaanite dialect. The Canaanite god El was, from the biblical text, the God of Israel's earliest ancestors. Through a process of convergence, he argues: the God Yahweh was the god that we think originally came from a region further south, Sinai, Edom, somewhere further south--but this god, through a process of convergence and cultural mixing, began to take on the characteristics of other deities, first El, and then Baal, or sort of simultaneously El and Baal. Later, certain aspects of this convergence would be polemicized against, and rejected as a Yahweh-only party sought to differentiate itself from those that it would now label as other, and call Canaanites, as distinct from Israelites. Smith's model of convergence and then differentiation, has great explanatory power. It explains the deep similarity of Israel's deity and the deities of her neighbors, but it also explains the vehement biblical polemic against Canaanite religion, and Baal worship in particular, which we will come to see. It reminds one of sibling rivalry. Siblings who obviously share a tremendous amount, and can be extraordinarily similar are precisely the siblings who can struggle and wrestle the most to differentiate themselves from one another. Smith's model of convergence and differentiation also avoids unhelpful dichotomies. Israel is either like or unlike her neighbors--that's not helpful. It helps us understand Israel's God as the end product of familiar cultural processes, processes of convergence--we see convergences of cultures all the time--and differentiation. Differentiations of culture happen all the time as well. When and why, you may ask, did this differentiation occur? When and why did some Israelites adopt a Yahweh-only position, and seek to differentiate what they would call a pure Yahwism from the cult of Baal, for example? The debate over that question is fierce, and it's one we're going to leave for another day. We will come back, as we continue moving through the biblical text, and we will address that question. But to sum up, it's clear that the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are not strict Yahwists, as we will come to understand that term. The P and the E sources preserve this insight; and they preserve it in their insistence that the Patriarchs worshiped God as El, but at the time of the Exodus, God revealed himself as Yahweh. There's an interesting passage in the book of Joshua, Joshua 24:14-15. Joshua was the successor to Moses. He presents the Israelites with the following choice: "Now therefore revere the Lord," using the word Yahweh, "revere Yahweh, and serve him with undivided loyalty. Put away the gods that your forefathers served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt"--put away the gods your forefathers served beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt--"and serve Yahweh. / Choose this day which ones you are going to serve, but I in my household will serve Yahweh," serve the Lord. Only later would a Yahweh-only party polemicize against and seek to suppress certain… what came to be seen as undesirable elements of Israelite-Judean religion, and these elements would be labeled Canaanite, as a part of a process of Israelite differentiation. But what appears in the Bible as a battle between Israelites, pure Yahwists, and Canaanites, pure polytheists, is indeed better understood as a civil war between Yahweh-only Israelites, and Israelites who are participating in the cult of their ancestors.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_22_The_Restoration_1_and_2_Chronicles_Ezra_and_Nehemiah.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: Last time we started looking at the psalms and a number of different genres or forms in which the psalms appear. We were just looking at a psalm last time which seems to explicitly reject the Deuteronomistic interpretation of the national history and the national tragedy, depicting Israel as innocent, and rebuking God for his inaction. There's another psalm in this genre that I'd like to read from. This is Psalm 44, selective passages: "…In God we glory at all times, and praise Your name unceasingly. Yet You have rejected and disgraced us; You do not go with our armies. …You let them devour us like sheep; You disperse us among the nations. You sell Your people for no fortune, You set no high price on them… All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten You, or been false to Your covenant." [Very different from what the prophets have been screaming!] "Our hearts have not gone astray, nor have our feet swerved from Your path, though You cast us, crushed, to where the sea monster is, and covered us over with deepest darkness. If we forgot the name of our God and spread forth our hands to a foreign god, God would surely search it out, for He knows the secrets of the heart. It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Rouse Yourself; why do you sleep, O Lord? Awaken, do not reject us forever! Why do You hide Your face, ignoring our affliction and distress? We lie prostrate in the dust; our body clings to the ground. Arise and help us, redeem us, as befits Your faithfulness." So here's a psalm full of anger that contains an explicit denial of the rhetorically inflamed charges against Israel that we read in many of the prophetic books. We have not forgotten You, we haven't been false to Your covenant, our hearts haven't gone astray, we haven't swerved from Your path. Why are You behaving this way? This astonishing protestation of innocence that accuses God of sleeping on the job is reminiscent of Job. In a way, the two conflicting viewpoints that we see running through a lot of this literature--one in which: there is suffering, therefore there must be sin, Israel has sinned horribly: and the other: there is inexplicable suffering, we haven't done anything that would deserve this, anything at all--it really is reminiscent of Job. It seems to give us these two perspectives on Job's suffering as an individual. We see that now played out on the level of the nation. What we have here is a view that is asserting God's negligence rather than Israel's guilt. Then you can contrast psalms like 44, the one I've just read, and 74, which I read at the end of the last lecture, with Psalms 78 and 106. These psalms belong to the category of hymns, and some people call this category 'hymns in celebration of divine action in Israel's history'--the sort of historical reviews that praise God for all he has done for Israel; and they toe the Deuteronomistic line in their recapitulation of Israel's history. From the Creation, from the Exodus and on to the conquest of the Promised Land, they stress Israel's utter indebtedness to God. God has patiently endured Israel's constant faithlessness. So when you juxtapose these two types of psalms, they're just remarkably different. He performed marvels in the site of their fathers, in the land of Egypt, the plain of Zoan. He split the sea and took them through it; He made the waters stand like a wall. It continues: "…He split rocks in the wilderness"--so it's a recounting of all the marvelous things that God has done, But they went on sinning against Him, defying the most high in the parched land. To test God was in their mind when they demanded food for themselves. They spoke against God, saying, "Can God spread a feast in the wilderness? True, He struck the rock and waters flowed, streams gushed forth; but can He provide bread? Can He supply His people with meat? It's interesting that this is in the third person; they did all these terrible sinful things. The psalm that I just read previously that protests Israel's innocence is in the first person. We have not strayed at all. We've been completely faithful to you, why are you treating us this way? So God's faithful actions, Israel's faithless responses are featured in the psalm that I just read and also in 106. They toe the Deuteronomistic line, and again we see this clear attempt to explain Israel's tragic end. Here again the tendency is to blame Israel and to justify God at all costs. We move on now to the genre of psalms. Actually, these are two genres that I'm putting together, the genres of blessing and cursing. Obviously they're rather antithetical. But first of all, psalms of blessing are psalms that invoke God to bless the righteous. It might be the nation Israel or it might be the righteous within the nation, and to punish or afflict the wicked, and again, that can be enemy nations or it can be the wicked within Israel and other nations. And sometimes these psalms can be quite shocking in their violence and in their fury. Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon"--very rarely people read all the way to the end of that particular psalm. It's very poignant at the beginning, but at the very end it calls for vengeance on the Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem, verses 8 and 9, "Fair Babylon, you predator, / a blessing on him who repays you in kind / what you have inflicted on us; a blessing on him who seizes your babies / and dashes them against the rocks!" Psalm 109 contains this very lengthy list of terrible afflictions that the psalmist is asking God to smite his foes with (that was a poorly constructed sentence!), that the psalmist is asking God to, I don't want to say bestow, but inflict upon his foe. Verses 8 and 10: "May his days be few, may another take over his position. May his children be orphans, / his wife a widow"--that's a nice way of saying "may he die." May his children wander from their hovels, begging in search of [bread]. ...May he be clothed in a curse like a garment, may it enter his body like water, his bones like oil. Let it be like the cloak he wraps around him, like the belt he always wears. May the Lord thus repay my accusers, all those who speak evil against me. So again, it's hardly the simple piety that we often associate with the Book of Psalms. The last category I just want to briefly mention is a category of psalms that have a reflective or meditative tone. These are psalms of wisdom, psalms in praise of instruction or Torah and meditation. They are somewhat proverbial in nature, many of them will begin with the sort of stock phrase, "Happy is the man who…" so we see that in Psalm 128: Happy are all who fear the Lord, who follow His ways. You shall enjoy the fruit of your labors; you shall be happy and shall prosper. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons, like olive saplings around your table. So shall the man who fears the Lord be blessed." Or "reveres the Lord" – [that] is the sense of "fear" there. Many psalms we've seen seem to presuppose worship in the temple, and can even have that antiphonal character, the call and response, or call and echo character. But there are three that, instead, have this theme of meditating upon or delighting in the Torah; that's Psalm 1, Psalm 19, and Psalm 119 (conveniently enough!). 119 is the longest psalm because it's written in acrostic form. There are different stanzas, a different stanza for each letter of the alphabet (22 letters) and there are eight lines in each stanza, all eight lines beginning with that letter of the alphabet, so it's a very, very long psalm. The psalm represents Torah as an object of study and devotion. Studying Torah makes one wise and happy: Psalm 19, verses 8 through 11, The teaching of the Lord is perfect, renewing life; the decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise; The precepts of the Lord are just, rejoicing the heart; the instruction of the Lord is lucid, making the eyes light up. The fear (or reverence) of the Lord is pure, abiding forever; the judgments of the Lord are true, righteous altogether, more desirable than gold, than much fine gold; sweeter than honey, than drippings of the comb. So this elevation of Torah reflects the shift that begins or starts to occur in the Second Temple Period, the late Second Temple Period, in which Torah is of growing importance. In about two minutes we're going to start to talk about this period and the importance and centrality of Torah--its centrality in terms of study --and the study of Torah as a form of worship. So there are many different ways to categorize and classify the psalms. Many individual psalms seem to combine units that belong to different categories. So, for example, you have Psalm 22 which opens as a lament, "My God, My God why have You forsaken me?" That's the well-known RSV translation, and then it changes to a hymn of praise. It concludes with this--it goes on into a kind of confident triumph. At least one psalm, Psalm 68, really defies any kind of rigid categorization, so we can't be too strict in trying to impose these forms. They are helpful guides to the interpretation of the Psalms, but again, we can't be too rigid about it. But from the sampling that we've seen it should be apparent that the Psalms are a microcosm of the religious insights and convictions of ancient Israelites. Perhaps because so many of them lack historical specificity--some of them are quite historical; some of them in fact recount Israel's history in order to praise God, but many of them, very, very many of them lack any real historical specificity, and that is probably the reason that the Psalms have become a great source for personal spirituality in Western civilization. Some of them were composed perhaps as many as 3000 years ago, and yet, they can be inspiring or they can feel relevant to contemporary readers. They can provide an opportunity to confess one's failings or to proclaim good intentions, or to rail against misfortune, or to cry out against injustice, or to request assistance, or to affirm trust in divine providence, or to simply express emotions of praise and joy, and wonder at creation, or reflect on human finitude in the face of divine infinitude. I mentioned briefly the centrality of Torah--actually no--let me finish talking about Psalms and also move onto another major poetic work then we'll come back to talk about the Restoration period. Another poetic book within the anthology of the Hebrew Bible is the little work known as the Song of Songs. And for many people this is perhaps the most surprising book to be included in the Hebrew canon. It's a beautiful and very erotic love song that celebrates human sexuality and physical passion. The opening line seems to be a late superscription that attributes the book to Solomon, and it seems more likely however that these sensuous love lyrics are post-exilic. The attribution to Solomon was probably fueled by the fact that in 1 Kings 4, we read that Solomon--or there's a tradition there that Solomon uttered 3,000 Proverbs and 1,005 songs. So it seems natural to attribute this song to Israel's most prolific composer of songs and proverbs, according to tradition. The speaker in the poem alternates, most often it is a woman. She seems to be addressing her beloved. Sometimes she addresses other women, the daughters of Jerusalem. At times the speaker is a man, but he's not identified as Solomon. Solomon's name is mentioned about six times, but Solomon is not said to be one of the speakers and for the most part the main speaker is female. There's a pastoral setting for the book. The two young lovers express their passion through and amid the beauties of nature. There are frequent references to gardens, and vineyards, and fruit, and flowers, and perfumes, and doves, and flocks of goats, and shorn ewes. There are very vivid descriptions of the physical beauty of the lovers. They are described in highly erotic passages. Translations of the Song of Songs vary tremendously as you might imagine, so I'm going to read one little section from the translation by someone named Walsh, C.E. Walsh, which I think captures the tremendous eroticism in some of the passages of Song of Songs: I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen, my lover is knocking. "Open to me my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew…" My lover thrusts his hand into the hole, and my insides yearned for him, I arose to open to my lover, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my lover, but he was gone. [Walsh 2006,111-12] These poems are very unique. They give expression to the erotic feelings of a woman and, as I say, translations will vary tremendously. According to Jewish tradition, the ancient Rabbis debated over whether or not the Song of Songs should be included in the canon. And it was Rabbi Akiva, a late first- early second-century sage, whose view prevailed. He declared "the whole world was only created, so to speak, for the day on which the Song of Songs would be given to it. Why? Because all the writings are Holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." But for some religious authorities over the centuries, the candid descriptions of passionate love proved to be too much, and so the explicit content of the book (which contains no reference to God, by the way; God is not mentioned anywhere in the Song of Songs, so it seems to have been a completely secular poem originally)--the explicit content of the book has at times been interpreted away. So not only do we have translations that tone down a great deal of the eroticism, but we also have a tradition of interpretation that interprets away a lot of the explicit content of the text. So we have trends within Jewish tradition that read the book as a metaphor or an expression of God's love for his chosen people, Israel. Christians have allegorized the song, seeing it as an expression of Christ's love for his bride who is the spiritual church. And I think some--I think all of the sections will be dealing with the Song of Songs this week, so you should have an interesting time looking at some of the interpretations of this text. Now I want to move on a little bit more to the historical background of some of the books that we'll be looking at in today's lecture and then also the last couple of lectures. We left the Israelites in exile in Babylon. And in 539 BCE the Babylonian Empire was itself defeated by the Persians under the leadership of Cyrus--Cyrus of Persia. In 539 he manages to establish the largest empire that's been seen in the Ancient Near East to date. It stretches from Egypt all the way north up to Asia Minor which is modern-day Turkey, and all the way over to Eastern Iran; a huge empire. Unlike other ancient empires, the Persian Empire espoused a policy of cultural and religious independence for its conquered subjects. The famous Cyrus Cylinder--this is a nine inch long fired clay cylinder and it's covered in cuneiform writing--it tells of Cyrus' conquest of Babylon. The conquest is described as being at the command of Babylon's god, Marduk, so obviously the Babylonians' god Marduk wanted "our Cyrus of Persia" to be able to come in and conquer this nation. It tells of his conquest and it tells of Cyrus' policy of allowing captives to return to their homelands and to rebuild their temples and worship their gods. This is consistent; this archaeological find is consistent with the picture that's presented in the Bible. According to the biblical text we'll be discussing soon, Cyrus in 538 gave the Judean exiles permission to return to Jerusalem and reconstruct their temple. The exiles did return; many of the exiles returned. They returned to what was now a Persian province: it's the province of Yehud; I don't think I wrote that up there. Yehud is the name now of Judea and Yehud is where we're going to get the word Jew. Yehudi is the word Jew; one who belongs to the province of Yehud. So many of the exiles returned to this now-Persian province Yehud, and they exercised a fair degree of self determination. Now, periodization of Jewish history tends to center on these events, so the period from 586 to 538 or so--that's known as exilic period. Most scholars maintain that the traditions of the priestly source, the traditions of the Deuteronomistic source had pretty well reached their final form in those years. Obviously, older traditions go into the composition of those corpora, but they reach their final form for the most part in that period. So the post-exilic period following is also known as the Persian period, at first, but of course the Persians won't rule for long. Alexander's going to come marching through the Ancient Near East, so after the Persians we'll have the Hellenistic Period. But the period after the exile is referred to as the Persian period, the period of the Restoration, the post-exilic period. It's also called the Second Temple Period because by about 520 they will have reconstructed the temple; so it's not inaccurate really to refer to this time as the Second Temple Period. The second temple will stand until 70, the year 70 of the Common Era. So the period, of course, before the exile we think of as the First Temple Period (the temple is destroyed in 586), so the first temple period or pre-exilic period. Now, the books of First and Second Chronicles provide a second account of the history of Israel. Genesis all the way through 2 Kings has given us one long account. FirstChronicles actually begins with Adam and it does go through--1 and 2 Chronicles do go up to the Babylonian exile. They echo a good deal of what we find in the Books of Samuel and Kings, but they have more of a priestly bias and they eliminate a lot of material that sheds a poor light on Israel's kings. So, for example, you won't find the story of David and Bathsheba when you're reading the Chronicles account of the reign of David. So Chronicles is already an interpretation. It's an inner-biblical interpretation. It is the Bible interpreting itself. A later strand of tradition reflecting on earlier strands of tradition and re-presenting that material in a particular light. The Chronicler is less interested in David's political genius, for example; it doesn't go into his strategy and his political accomplishments nearly so much as it does go into his role in establishing Jerusalem as a religious capital, in planning a temple, in organizing the music for temple worship. These are the interests of the Chronicler. The Book of 2 Chronicles concludes with the decree of Cyrus, permitting the Jewish captives to return to their homeland and build their temple. We have a second, fuller version of this decree, which as I said, seems to be consistent with what we know of Persian policies--the policy of tolerating and even encouraging local religious cults. So that fuller version appears in Ezra. I'm going to read first from 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 36:22-23, And in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, when the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah was fulfilled, the Lord roused the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his realm by word of mouth and in writing, as follows: "Thus said King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and has charged me with building Him a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Any one of you of all of His people, the Lord His God be with him and let him go up. Then in Ezra there is an addition. Ezra 1:3 and 4, …let Him go up to Jerusalem that is in Judah, and build the House of the Lord God of Israel, the God that is in Jerusalem; and all who stay behind, wherever he may be living, let the people of his place assist him with silver, gold, goods, and livestock, besides the freewill offering to the House of God that is in Jerusalem. Notice that the decree at the very beginning in Chronicles--in the 2 Chronicles version--the decree is said to fulfill the word of the prophet Jeremiah. Now, you remember that Jeremiah prophesied that the Babylonian exile would last 70 years; he wrote a letter, he said settle down, this is going to last a while, plant plants and build homes. So he had prophesied 70 years for an exile. Well, from the time of the first departure of exiles in 597, maybe to the return in 538,61 years--it's close. If you look from the destruction of the first temple perhaps in 586 to the completion of the second somewhere between 520,515, we're not really sure, that's about 70 years. Either way, it seems that in the eyes of the Chronicler it was close enough. This seems to have been a fulfillment of Jeremiah's prediction. That it would be about 70 years before they would return. So the books of Ezra and Nehemiah give an account of the return of the Babylonian exiles in the late sixth and fifth century. And Ezra and Nehemiah were regarded as a unit; those two books were regarded as a unit in the Hebrew Bible, until the Middle Ages. They may in fact have formed part of a larger historical work; Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles. Ezra, and to a lesser degree, Nehemiah seem to have a good deal in common with Chronicles, and therefore may derive from the same author. So sometimes in secondary literature you will see references to the Chronicler, which refers to the hypothetical author of 1 and 2Chronicles and Ezra and possibly Nehemiah. The chapters report the initial return of the exiles, the rebuilding of the temple, the career of Ezra, and the career of Nehemiah. All four of the books were probably edited in the late fifth century BCE, maybe close to the fourth century--that's our best guess--when Judah was a small province still within the massive Persian Empire. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah, however, contain conflicting information about the return, about the restoration, and as a result our knowledge of the timing of various events is quite poor. It's really not clear who returned first to help rebuild Jerusalem, whether it was Ezra a priest, or Nehemiah a scribe. He was a Persian--;: not a scribe, he was a governor. Ezra was a priest and scribe, Nehemiah was a Persian appointed governor of Judah. And even though the Chronicler dates events according to the year of the reign of the Persian king, the king is Artaxerxes, and unfortunately there are two kings named Artaxerxes in the fifth century and there's one in the fourth, so it's extremely difficult to figure out when these events happened. So keeping in mind that even the experts cannot agree at all on the sequence of events, we are simply going to look at the career of Ezra, the career of Nehemiah. I'm not going to claim priority for either of them. Because the events are not presented in chronological order, even in the books, I'm going to skip fairly freely around, back and forth between the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. So the Book of Ezra opens with Cyrus' decree, which we've heard, and then provides a long list of the exiles who returned to Judah after 538. They're led by Sheshbazzar; and then among the exiles he says there was Yeshua who was a priest and Zerubbavel. Zerubbavel was a grandson of King Jehoiakim who was the last Davidic king who had been kept in house arrest in Babylon. He had been among the exiles in 597, he eventually had been released from house arrest in Babylon, so now his grandson Zerubbavel, a Davidide, was returning to Jerusalem, and you can imagine that this would have stirred hope in the hearts of many. Chapter 3 of Ezra describes the sacrifices offered on a rebuilt altar and the beginning of the process of rebuilding the temple, probably around 521 or so: When the builders had laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, priests in their vestments with trumpets, and Levites sons of Asaph with cymbals were stationed to give praise to the Lord, as King David of Israel had ordained. They sang songs extolling and praising the Lord, "For He is good, His steadfast love for Israel is eternal." All the people raised a great shout extolling the Lord because the foundation of the House of the Lord had been laid. Many of the priests and Levites and chiefs of the clans, the old men who had seen the first house [=the first temple], wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this house. Many others shouted joyously at the top of their voices. The people could not distinguish the shouts of joy from the people's weeping, for the people raised a great shout, the sound of which could be heard from afar. So the older generations who remember the magnificence of the first temple of Solomon shed tears. The younger people are shouting for joy at the establishment of a new temple. But the building doesn't proceed smoothly and that's due largely to the hostilities of the surrounding communities. These surrounding communities are referred to adversaries, adversaries of Judah and Benjamin. In chapters 4,5, and 6 these Samaritans in many cases, offer to assist in the project of reconstruction. Their offer is rejected, and as a result the Samaritans, insulted, persuade the Persians that this is a bad idea. Rebuilding a potentially rebellious city is a bad idea, and the Persians listen to them and they order the rebuilding stopped. There are two prophets then, Haggai and Zechariah. So these are prophets now of the post-exilic period. As we go through our periodization of prophets you'll want to add this fourth category, post-exilic prophets. They urge the continuation of the building. A Persian official objects, the Jews appeal to the new Persian Emperor Darius. And they ask him to search through the court records, look for the original authorization by Cyrus--we have been authorized to do this. According to the text, Cyrus' edict is found. Darius agrees not only to enforce it, but to honor his obligation to supply money for the rebuilding. This is under Persian imperial sponsorship, and he will honor the obligation to supply money for the rebuilding and to procure sacrifices as well. The temple is finally dedicated, we think, about 515 BCE and a Passover celebration is celebrated in the sanctuary. There are other social tensions in the Restoration community, specifically friction between those who had remained behind in Judea during the exilic period and the returning exiles, who although they were few in number, enjoyed imperial support. These self-styled children of the exile, they refer to themselves as sons of the exiled or children of the exile they refer to the local people--the local Judeans--as "peoples of the land." This is a derogatory term that seems to cast aspersions on their very status as Jews. They're like the other nations or peoples of the land. They seem to be classifying even Judeans in that category of "other." As we will soon see, some radically different views of Jewish identity are going to emerge during this period. So that's the initial Restoration, the process by which the temple was rebuilt. Let's jump now to (we think) somewhere in the mid-fifth century perhaps. Nehemiah--he's a Jewish subject of Persia--he's the official cup bearer to the Persian Emperor Artaxerxes in the court at Susa. This is a position that probably entailed his being a eunuch. The Book of Nehemiah opens with a description of Nehemiah's grief. He hears these reports of the terrible conditions of his people in Jerusalem sometime around the mid-fifth century and, weeping, he asks for the consent of the emperor to go to Jerusalem and to help rebuild the city. So Nehemiah travels to Jerusalem, we think about 445 BCE, and he undertakes the refortifications of the city. And he meets with opposition. There's some internal opposition. There's a female prophetess, Noadiah, in Nehemiah 6:14, who seems to be opposed to this. There's some external opposition as well from Israel's neighbors: the Samaritans, the Ammonites, some Arabs. They resent this reconstruction and they see the reconstruction of the city's defensive walls as an affront to Persian rule. But Nehemiah continues; he gives his workmen weapons so that they can protect themselves against enemy attack and the walls around the city are completed in record time. These refortifications help to establish Jerusalem as an urban center, and eventually Nehemiah is appointed governor of Judah, under Persian domination. The text says that he institutes various reforms: economic reforms, social reforms. He seems to be trying to improve the situation of the poor, and establish public order. We think that the governorship of Nehemiah overlapped to some degree with the mission of Ezra, and Ezra's activities are reported in both the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Some scholars believe that they didn't overlap, that that's an illusion created by our sources. But chapter 7 of the book of Ezra introduces Ezra. He's a Babylonian Jew, he comes from a priestly family, but he's also described as a scribe who is expert in the Torah of Moses. In verse 10 of chapter 7 it's said that Ezra had dedicated himself to study the teaching of the Lord so as to observe it and to teach the laws and rules to Israel. So Ezra is commissioned by the Persian Emperor in a letter, the text of which is represented or reproduced in chapter 7:12-26. The Emperor commissions him to travel to Jerusalem, to supervise the temple, and to assess how well Mosaic standards are being implemented in the Judean province. He's charged with appointing scribes and judges to administer civil and moral order. He has the backing of the Persian empire to institute Mosaic Law as the standard and norm for the community in Jerusalem. This is standard operating procedure for the Persians--to find loyal subjects to regulate their own local cults according to ancestral traditions and Ezra's work needs to be understood in that light. Chapter 7:: "For you are commissioned by the king and his seven advisors to regulate Judah and Jerusalem according to the law of your God, which is in your care,...And you, Ezra, by the divine wisdom you possess, appoint magistrates and judges to judge all the people of the province of Beyond the River" [Cis-Jordan] [See Note 1] "who know the laws of your God, and to teach those who do not know them. Let anyone who does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king be punished with dispatch," [so he has powers of enforcement] "whether by death, corporal punishment, confiscation of possessions, or imprisonment." In addition, Ezra is appointed to bring treasures of silver and gold to the temple. The text says that Ezra brings with him a copy of the Mosaic Torah in order to regulate and unify Jewish life in the Restoration community, and together Ezra and Nehemiah bring about a revival. Ezra's reforms are aimed at strengthening the religious identity of the Judahites. He wants to revitalize morale and he also wants to prevent the decline of Mosaic standards and to prevent the decline of biblical monotheism. His two most important acts are the dissolution of foreign marriages (this is a first) and his renewal of the covenant. I'll say a little bit first about the dissolution of foreign marriages. Ezra is said to have been distressed when he arrived to discover that many of the returned exiles had married with, we think, non-Israelite women. It's not clear. Sometimes "peoples of the land" might refer to Judeans who had remained behind but who themselves had perhaps become lax, in Ezra's eyes, in their observance of Mosaic standards. But they had married women who seemed to follow pagan practices perhaps. Chapters 9 and 10 describe his efforts to reverse this trend. He begs God to forgive the people for this violation of his law, and then at a great assembly, he calls upon all the people to divorce their foreign spouses. Now, this isn't in fact Pentateuchal law plainly read. The prohibition of marriage with any foreigner is a great innovation on Ezra's part, and it's one that, as we shall see, was not universally accepted at all. The high incidence of intermarriage is perhaps indicated by the fact that it took several months to identify all those who had intermarried and to send away their spouses and their children. Even priests were among those who didn't view intermarriage per se as a violation of the covenant. In the next two lectures we'll see other perspectives on this question of integration of foreign groups within the community. So I raise it as an issue now: we're going to see many different attitudes as we move through the last section of the Bible. The text of Ezra's prayer before God is a fascinating presentation of Ezra's interpretation of Israel's history and prior texts, and again, constitutes yet another response to the calamity that had befallen the nation; but also constitutes another example of inner-biblical interpretation: later levels, or layers within the biblical text turning to older traditions and interpreting them, or reinterpreting them. So listen to how Ezra understands biblical tradition and listen to how he interprets Israel's history. This is from Ezra 9, he's praying to God before the assembled people. From the time of our fathers to this very day we have been deep in guilt. Because of our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been handed over to foreign kings, to the sword, to captivity, to pillage, and to humiliation, as is now the case. But now, for a short while, there has been a reprieve from the Lord our God, who has granted us a surviving remnant... remember the prophetic idea of a remnant that would survive? ...and given us a stake in His Holy place; our God has restored the luster to our eyes and furnished us with a little sustenance in our bondage… Now, what can we say in the face of this, O our God, for we have forsaken Your commandments, which You gave us through Your servants, the prophets when You said, here he's quoting the Bible; 'The land that you are about to possess is a land unclean through the uncleanness of the peoples of the land, through their abhorrent practices with which they, in their impurity, have filled it from one end to the other. Now then, do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or let their daughters marry your sons; do nothing for their well being or advantage, then you will be strong and enjoy the bounty of the land and bequeath it to your children forever.' So he's quoting earlier tradition. After all that has happened to us because of our evil deeds and our deep guilt--though You, our God, have been forbearing, [punishing us] less than our iniquity [deserves] in that You have granted us such a remnant as this-- shall we once again violate Your commandments by intermarrying with these people who follow such abhorrent practices? Will You not rage against us till we are destroyed without remnant or survivor? So Ezra's argument is, first of all, following the Deuteronomistic line. History reflects God's judgment. Israel's tragic fate is because of her sins, and indeed, she's been given a mercy and a reprieve. She hasn't been punished as fully as she deserves. He also follows the prophetic line that this remnant has been saved and now restored. So the covenant hasn't been completely abrogated. But notice his identification of the sin for which Israel was punished. Israel has mixed--and this is the language that he uses elsewhere--Israel has mixed holy seed with common seed through marital unions with the peoples of the land, meaning foreigners certainly, but possibly also some of these Judeans who had remained in the land during the exile and who seem to have adopted some of the customs of their neighbors. And if history is any guide, he's warning, the community is placing itself at great risk by intermarrying again with those who will lead them into the worship of other gods and the performance of abhorrent practices. Surely he says, this time God will not be so merciful as to spare even a remnant. So learn from history. We sinned once by intermarrying, that was the sin for which we have been exiled. If we do the same thing again, this time we will be punished without any hope of a remnant. So his interpretation of Mosaic prescriptions about marriage is an expansive one. The Torah does prohibit intermarriage with the native Canaanites at the time of the conquest, the rationale being that they would lead Israelites into abhorrent pagan practices, child sacrifices, and so on. But of course it's actually not a completely--there is actually a legal provision for how to go about marrying a captive Canaanite woman; so it's not a completely unqualified prohibition to begin with. The Torah then also prohibits intermarriage with certain, very specific foreigners, Moabites and Ammonites, specifically because of their cruel treatment of the Israelites during their trek from Egypt to the Promised Land. Egyptians are prohibited only to the third generation. But there's no prohibition against marriage with other foreigners--a Phoenician, an Arab--so long as they enter into the covenant of Yahweh, as long as they don't lead the Israelite partner into the worship of other gods. The rationale for intermarriage prohibitions in the Pentateuch are always behavioral, they're always moral. If this person will lead you astray to abhorrent practices that is prohibited. But marriage into the group is not prohibited. Indeed, Israel's kings married foreign women regularly. Many of the kings of Israel were themselves offspring of these foreign women. They were still fully Israelite. Israelite identity passed through the male line. But Ezra who is protective of Israel's religious identity, is zealous for the Lord, is wary of God's wrath--he's interpreting and promulgating these prohibitions in such a way as to create a general ban on intermarriage of any kind. Israel mustn't make the same mistake twice. Israelite identity is now made contingent in Ezra's view on the status of both the mother and the father. One is only an Israelite if one has both an Israelite mother and an Israelite father. Both must be of the "holy seed." This is a phrase which is being coined now in Ezra's time and is now serving as a rationale for the ban on intermarriage. It's not that a person is prohibited because they will lead you astray to the worship of other gods. That's something that can be corrected if the person in fact enters into the religious community of Israel. The rationale is that they just simply are not of holy seed and there's nothing that you can do to change that, so this becomes a permanent and universal ban. So that's the first very important thing that Ezra tries to do: the dissolution of marriage with foreign spouses and to establish a blanket universal ban on intermarriage, to make Israelite identity dependent on the native Israelite status of both mother and father. His second deed is the renewal of the Mosaic Covenant. This act is reported in Nehemiah 8. There's an extended public reading of the Torah of Moses and that's followed then by a renewal of the Mosaic Covenant: When the seventh month arrived--the Israelites being [settled] in their towns--the entire people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the scroll of the Teaching of Moses with which the Lord had charged Israel. On the first day of the seventh month, Ezra the priest brought the Teaching before the congregation, men and women and all who could listen with understanding. He read from it, facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Teaching. Ezra the scribe stood upon a wooden tower made for the purpose…Ezra opened the scroll in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people; as he opened it, all the people stood up. Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God and all the people answered, "Amen, Amen," with hands upraised… and the Levites explained the Teaching to the people, while the people stood in their places. They read from the scroll of the teaching of God, translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading. Apparently the assembled people no longer understood the classical Hebrew of the Bible, if it was formulated in that. What he was actually--what is this scroll? This is the first time now that we're hearing about the Torah as a scroll and being read to people. So this is historically quite fascinating. But the people don't seem to be able to understand it. Ezra and his assistants are probably translating it into Aramaic which is now the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, giving the sense of the text perhaps as it's being read. We really can't be certain what it is that Ezra was presenting as the Torah of Moses. It may have been the Pentateuch basically in the form that we now have it. Both D and P are very strongly reflected in Ezra. He quotes from them, he refers to them, and then interprets and applies them in new and interesting ways. In any event, this Torah was to become the basis and the standard--with a lot of good heavy Persian imperial support--for the Jewish community from that time forward. And at a festival celebration a few weeks later there was an additional public teaching of the law and a recital of Israel's history that once again laid special emphasis on Israel's obligations, what she owed to Yahweh. The recitation of that history is found in Nehemiah 9, and again as an interpretation of the calamities that Israel had faced; it's consistent with the earlier prayer of Ezra that I read. God has withheld nothing from Israel, yet Israel has defied God, rebelled against Him, killed the prophets who had urged them to turn back to the covenant; and God tolerated Israel's sin as long as he possibly could but finally he had to punish her. But even so, in His great compassion God didn't abandon Israel completely. Verse 33 of this prayer then turns and addresses God, "Surely you are in the right with respect to all that has come upon us, for You have acted faithfully and we have been wicked." So again, this justification of God and blaming of the Israelites for all that has befallen them and learning a lesson for that in the future--no intermarriage. All of this is but a prelude then to the people's reaffirmation and renewed commitment to the covenant, and it's spelled out in great detail in Nehemiah 10. Chapter 10 opens, "In view of all this, we make this pledge and put it in writing," and then there follows a list of all the officials: the Levites, the priests, the heads of the people. And it says that all of these officials and leaders in conjunction join with the people, verse 30 and 31, they: … join with their noble brothers, and take an oath with sanctions to follow the Teaching of God, given through Moses the servant of God, and to observe carefully all the commandments of the Lord our Lord, His rules and laws. Namely: We will not give our daughters in marriage to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons. So we then read the various obligations that the people are committing themselves to, and these include observance of the Sabbath day and the Sabbath year as well as supplying the needs of and the upkeep of the temple. But it's surely significant that the ban on intermarriage and the observance of the Sabbath top the list. We are going to commit ourselves again to God's teaching, his rules and laws; namely: we won't intermarry and we'll observe the Sabbath! So these are singled out at the top of the list, as central covenantal obligations. Chapter 13 describes Nehemiah's efforts to see that the people live up to this pledge. And he scurries around Jerusalem--he's enforcing the cessation of work on the Sabbath, he's persuading individuals to give up their foreign wives. Ezra and Nehemiah were zealous in their promotion of the renewed covenant, and in their view, the centerpiece of the covenant was the ban on intermarriage and the observance of the Sabbath. It is interesting that these two phenomena, in addition to circumcision, will emerge as the three identifying features of a Jew in the ancient world when you look at external literature: they are a circumcised people, there's one day of the week that they don't work, and they don't marry outside their group. Those are the kinds of themes that you start to see in writings of ancient Greeks and so on when they talk about this people. Ezra and Nehemiah's reforms can be seen as a direct response to the events of Israel's history. What's happened before just cannot be allowed to happen again. And they view the tragic history as a cautionary tale. It's calling upon the people to make the necessary changes to avoid a repeat disaster. There's only one way to guarantee that Israel will never again be destroyed. She has to live up to the covenant she failed to honor in the past. She has to rededicate herself to the covenant and this time she has to be single-minded in her devotion to God, because history has shown that God will punish faithlessness and betrayal. Israel can't be led astray by the beliefs and practices of her neighbors, and so a strict policy of separation has to be enforced if Israel's going to finally be cured of the desire for idols. Again, it's interesting that in Jewish tradition--the Jewish tradition is that the flirtation with idolatry, which had plagued Israel in the First Temple Period, ceased to exist in the Second Temple Period. So again, this is another area in which Jews earned for themselves a reputation in antiquity. They have a reputation for their strict monotheism, their scrupulous avoidance of foreign gods. They will not bow down to another god. There is this people that doesn't intermarry, they don't work one day a week, and they won't bow down to our kings or to other gods; these are the kinds of things you find in writings in this period. So Ezra and Nehemiah, backed by Persian imperial authority, help to create and preserve--not just preserve--create and preserve, a national and religious identity for Jews at a precarious time. Their reforms were not universally welcomed. Already, even in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah which give a very sympathetic account of their work, obviously, we can see rumblings and discontent. There are other works that are going to express opposition to the separatism of Ezra and Nehemiah. Isaiah 56:1-7, an interesting passage, it states quite explicitly that foreigners who have joined themselves to God are welcome. They are welcome in the temple; they are welcome even to minister before God. There is a good deal of historical evidence for the assimilation of foreigners within the Jewish community going on all the time. Non-Jews became Jews, they married Jews. We know of one family, the Tobiad family, quite influential--they were originally an Ammonite family. Now, that is a group that is explicitly prohibited from entering the congregation in Deuteronomy! But this is a family that adopted Jewish identity, became fully assimilated. So clearly there's great difference of opinion on this matter. In the last two lectures we're going to be focusing a lot on the diversity of approaches to the whole question of Israelite or Jewish identity, and the relationship to the Gentile world. So, although under Ezra, the Torah became the official and authoritative norm for Israel, although under Ezra Judaism took the decisive step towards becoming a religion of Scripture, based on the scriptural text. This did not in itself result in a single uniform set of practices or beliefs. Adopting the Torah as a communal norm simply meant that practices and beliefs were deemed to be authentic, to the degree that they accorded with the sense of Scripture--and interpretation of Scripture varied dramatically. So that widely divergent groups now, in the Persian period and as we move into the Hellenistic period, widely divergent groups will claim biblical warrant for their specific practices and beliefs. So in short, Ezra may have unified Israel around a common text, but he didn't unify them around a common interpretation of that text. Alright, when we come back we'll be looking at about four more books, all of which set up very interesting and different views on some of these basic questions.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_8_Exodus_From_Egypt_to_Sinai_Exodus_524_32_Numbers.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: So following the theophany at the burning bush, Moses returns to Egypt, and he initiates what will become ultimately a battle of wills between Pharaoh and God. The story in Exodus has high drama, and lots of folkloric elements, including this contest between Moses and Aaron on the one hand, and the magicians of Egypt on the other hand. This kind of contest is a very common literary device. It's a kind of "our boys are better than your boys" device. The Egyptian magicians who are initially able to mimic some of the plagues that are brought on by God--they are quickly bested, and Yahweh's defeat of the magicians is tantamount to the defeat of the gods of Egypt. There are ten plagues. These include a pollution of the Nile, swarms of frogs, lice, insects, affliction of livestock, boils that afflict humans and animals, lightning and hail, locusts, total darkness, and all of this climaxes in the death of the firstborn males of Egypt in one night. And source critics looking at this material discern numerous, diverse sources that are interwoven throughout. These sources preserve different traditions on the number and the nature of the plagues, as well as the principal actors in the drama: God, Moses, Aaron. So according to the source critical analysis, no source contains ten plagues. J has eight and E has three, and P has five, and some of them are the same as one another, and some of them are different, and so on. Some of them are unique to one source, some are not, but ultimately, the claim is that these have all been merged, and have left us then with an overall total of ten. This may in fact be true. Nevertheless, as much as we like to engage sometimes in this kind of analysis about the sources that have gone into the composition of the text, it's also always important to keep your eye on the final form of the text as we've received it. Literary analysis that is sensitive to the larger contours of the account will reveal the artistic hand of the final editor. I have charted this at the top of the board here. Some scholars have noticed that the plagues are organized in three sets of three. There are literary links that connect them and make it clear that these are three sets of three, followed by the climactic tenth plague--and again, three and ten are ideal numbers in our biblical texts. Each set of three shares certain structural and literary features. So in each set, the first and second plague are forewarned--that's what the FW is on the side--whereas the third plague is not. So a warning, a warning, and then a third plague; a warning, a warning, and then a third plague; a warning, a warning, and then a third plague. In each set, the first plague is accompanied by a notation of the time in the morning. It's also introduced by God's speech, when God says, "Present yourself before Pharaoh," and to do this in the morning. So each of the first plagues in the sets of three is introduced this way. Now the second plague in each set of three is introduced with the divine instruction, "Go to Pharaoh." The third plague in each set has no forewarning and no introduction. So this sort of structural repetition creates a crescendo that leads then to the final and most devastating plague, which is the slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn sons. The slaughter may be understood as measure for measure punishment for the Egyptians' earlier killing of Hebrew infants, but it's represented in the biblical text as retaliation for Egypt's treatment of Israel, and Israel is referred to as the firstborn son of Yahweh. So in Exodus 4:22, Yahweh tells Moses to say to Pharaoh, "Thus says the Lord, 'Israel is my firstborn son. I have said to you, "Let my son go, that he may worship Me," yet you refuse to let him go. Now I will slay your firstborn son.'" So it's seen as retaliation. In this last plague, God or his angel of death passes over Egypt at midnight, slaying every Egyptian firstborn male. Moses orders each Israelite to perform a ritual action, and this action will protect them from the slaughter. The ritual consists of two parts. Each family is told to sacrifice a lamb. The lamb will then be eaten as a family meal, and its blood will be smeared on the doorposts to mark the house so the angel of death knows to pass over that house, --and the pun works in Hebrew, as well as English, which is kind of handy. In addition, each family is to eat unleavened bread. So according to Exodus, this Passover ritual was established on Israel's last night of slavery while the angel of death passed over the dwellings that were marked with blood. The story attests to a phenomenon that's long been observed by biblical commentators and scholars, and that is the Israelite historicization of preexisting ritual practices. In other words, what we probably have here are two older, separate, springtime rituals. One would be characteristic of semi-nomadic pastoralists: the sacrifice of the first lamb born in the spring to the deity in order to procure favor and continued blessing on the flocks for the spring. The other would be characteristic of agriculturalists: it would be an offering of the very first barley that would be harvested in the spring. It would be quickly ground into flour and used before it even has time to ferment, to quickly offer something to the deity, again, to procure favor for the rest of the crop. It's supposed by many that Israel was formed from the merger, or the merging of diverse groups, including farmers and shepherds in Canaan. The rituals of these older groups were retained and then linked to the story of the enslavement and liberation of the Hebrews. So you have older nature festivals and observances that have been historicized. They're associated now with events in the life of the new nation, rather than being grounded in the cycles of nature. This may in fact be then part of the process of differentiation from the practices of Israel's neighbors, who would have celebrated these springtime rituals. So now the blood of the sacrificial lamb is said to have protected the Hebrews from the angel of death, and the bread now is said to have been eaten, consumed in unleavened form, because the Hebrews left Egypt in such a hurry. They had no time to allow the dough to rise. Historicization; and we'll see this historicization of rituals recurring again and again. And following the last plague, Pharaoh finally allows the Israelites to go into the desert to worship their God, but he quickly changes his mind, and he sends his infantry and his chariots in hot pursuit of the Israelites, and they soon find themselves trapped between the Egyptians and something referred to as Yam Suph, meaning Reed Sea. It isn't the Red Sea. That's a mistranslation that occurred very, very early on, so it's led to the notion that they were at the Gulf of Aqaba, or somewhere near the actual big ocean water. Some of the Israelites despair, and they want to surrender. "Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying let us be, we will serve the Egyptians, for it's better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness." But Moses rallies them, and then in the moment of crisis, God intervenes on Israel's behalf. Once again, source critics see in the account of the parting of the Reed Sea, in Exodus 14 and 15, three different versions of the event that have been interwoven. I have to stress, though, that scholars differ very much on where the seams in the text are, what parts of the story belong to J, or E, or P, so you'll read very, very different accounts. There's some consensus, but a lot of disagreement. One thing that most people do in fact agree on is that the oldest account of the event is a poetic fragment that's found in Exodus 15, verses one to 12, in particular. This is often referred to as the Song of the Sea, and here the image is one of sinking and drowning in the Sea of Reeds. You have a wind that blasts from God's nostrils, the waters stand straight like a wall, and at a second blast, the sea then covers the Egyptians, and they sink like a stone in the majestic waters. The hymn doesn't anywhere refer to people crossing over on dry land. It seems to depict a storm at sea, almost as if the Egyptians are in boats, and a big wind makes a giant wave, and another wind then makes it crash down on them. So they're swamped by these roiling waters. But the name Yam Suph, Reed Sea, implies a more marsh-like setting, rather than the open sea. John Collins, who is a professor here at the Divinity School, points out that this image--particularly in poetic passages--this image of sinking in deep waters, occurs often in Hebrew poetry. It occurs particularly in the book of Psalms, where it's a metaphor for distress. In Psalm 69, the Psalmist asks God to save him, for "waters have come up to my neck. / I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me". But a few verses later it's clear that the poet isn't really drowning: this is a metaphor for his difficult situation. "More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause. Many are those who would destroy me, my enemies who accuse me falsely." So Collins suggests that the poem in Exodus 15 is celebrating and preserving a historical memory of an escape from or a defeat of Pharaoh, and that the drowning image is used metaphorically, as it is elsewhere in Hebrew poetry to describe the Egyptians' humiliation and defeat. Later writers take this poetic image and fill out the allusion to drowning in this ancient song, and compose the prose accounts in Exodus 14, in which the metaphor is literalized. According to these prose accounts now, Pharaoh's army was literally drowned in water. But even in the prose accounts in Exodus 14, we can see a composite of two intertwined versions. In the material that's usually associated with P, Moses is depicted as stretching out his staff, first to divide the waters, which stand like a wall so that the Israelites can cross over on dry land; and then, he holds out his staff to bring the waters crashing down on the Egyptians. But according to one little section--this is just verses 24 and 25 in Exodus 14; some attribute this to J--it seems that the Egyptians were stymied by their own chariots. The image we get there is that the Israelites are working their way through the marsh on foot, and the Egyptians' chariot wheels can't make it through the marsh. They get stuck in the mud, and this forces them to give up the chase. So, the final narrative that emerges from this long process of transmission: perhaps a core image of escape on foot, where chariots are bogged, a poem that describes the defeat in metaphorical terms using a drowning and sinking image, and then prose elaboration on these previous traditions that have a very dramatic element of the sea being parted and crashing down on the Egyptians. A long process of transmission, interweaving, literary embellishment has gone into the creation of this account in Exodus 14 and 15. But the story as it stands reiterates a motif that we've seen before: that of the threatened destruction of God's creation, or God's people, by chaotic waters, and of divine salvation from that threat. What's interesting about the Song of the Sea, this poetic fragment in Exodus 15, is that here the Hebrews adopt the language of Canaanite myth and apply it to Yahweh. If you still have that sheet that was handed out before, listing different epithets for Baal, and listing epithets for Yahweh, it would be handy to have that, or to take a look at it later again, because the description of Yahweh is that of a storm god in Exodus 15. He heaps up the waters with a blast of wind, like a storm at sea, and this is reminiscent of the Canaanite storm god Baal, as you see on your handout. Baal is said to ride on the clouds, he's a storm god, and he's accompanied by wind and rain. At the beginning of the rainy season, Baal opens a slit, or makes a slit in the clouds, and thunders and shakes the Earth. In one important legend that we have from the Canaanite texts, the Ugaritic texts, he defeats an adversary who's known as Prince Sea, or Judge River. After he vanquishes this watery foe, he is acclaimed the king of the gods, and the king of men, and he is housed in a home, not a tent as El was. El was housed in a tent, but now this Baal is housed in a permanent structure, a home that is on top of a mountain, and is built of cedar. Now, ancient Hebrew descriptions of Yahweh employ very similar language in the poetic passage here in Exodus 15, but also in other poetic passages. So, for example, Psalm 68:5, "Extol him who rides the clouds, the Lord is his name," Yahweh is his name. So "Extol him who rides the clouds, Yahweh is his name," as if to say not Baal. So Yahweh is described like Baal, as riding on the clouds. Psalm 29 also employs the language of a storm god. "The voice of the Lord is over the waters. The God of glory thunders, the Lord, over the mighty waters." Some scholars think this actually was originally a psalm about Baal that was simply adopted and referred to Yahweh. Images of God engaged in a battle with some kind of watery foe also appear in the Psalms. Psalm 74: "O, God, my king from of old, who brings deliverance throughout the land; it was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;" and so on. Judges 5 is also another ancient song fragment in verses four to five. It uses the same kind of imagery. Now, Michael Coogan, who's a very important biblical scholar and an expert in the Canaanite texts, the Ugaritic materials, has made some intriguing observations in connection with the biblical representation of Yahweh in terms that are so reminiscent of the storm god, Baal . He notes that Baal was the key figure in a change, a change in the religion of Canaan, that happened somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and that is also the traditional time for what we think of as the Exodus and the introduction of Yahwism, or the differentiation of Yahwism. At this time, somewhere in this period, there was a transfer of power in the Canaanite pantheon from the older gods to younger gods. The older god El, the sky god, was replaced by the younger storm god, Baal, and he was replaced by virtue of his defeat of Prince Sea, or whoever this watery foe is. So El is replaced by Baal after a defeat of some watery foe. Coogan notes that about the same time, there seems to have been a similar change in many of the world's traditions, or many of the traditions of the region. We have a younger storm god who usurps power from an older god by virtue of a victory over a water god. Remember Enuma Elish, which we read at the very beginning of the semester. You have the young storm god, Marduk, who defeats Tiamat, the watery ferocious deep monster, and does so by blasting a wind into her, and so establishes his claim to rule, instead of the old sky god, Anu. In India, the storm god Indra about this time assumes the place of a previous god, Dyaus. In Greece, Zeus, who is associated with a storm, thunder--lightening bolts you think of in the hands of Zeus--he replaces Kronos, who had been the head of the pantheon. And so here in Exodus, we find that just as the nation of Israel is coming into existence, just as the Israelites are making the transition from a nomadic existence to a more settled way of life ultimately in their own land, there seems to be a collective memory of a similar change in her religion. Like the storm gods in the myths of Israel's neighbors, Yahweh heaps up the waters with a blast of wind. He wins a stunning victory, he establishes himself as the god of the Israelites in place of El, who was worshipped by Israel's patriarchs, remember. And like the Canaanite god, Baal, Yahweh, as we will see as we continue to read the text, will eventually want a house for himself atop a mountain, Mount Zion, and it will be lined with cedar. There are of course, important ways in which Israel's use of the storm god motif diverges from that of other Ancient Near Eastern stories. The most important is that Yahweh's battle is a historic battle, rather than a mythic battle. The sea is not Yahweh's opponent, nor is Yahweh's enemy another god. Yahweh is doing battle here with a human foe, the Egyptian pharaoh and his army. The sea is a weapon deployed. It's a weapon in the divine arsenal, and it's deployed on behalf of Israel, but, again, Yahweh is depicted by the biblical writer as transcending nature, using forces of nature for a historical purpose, acting in history to deliver his people, and create a new nation, Israel. So just as in Genesis 1, the universe is created when the wind of God parts the primeval waters, so in Exodus 14 and 15, a new nation is created when the wind of God parts the waters of the Reed Sea. But to describe what was understood to be a historic event, a one time event, not a recurring mythical event, but a historic event, the ancient Israelites employed language and images drawn naturally from the traditions and myths of their broader cultural context, or I should say, that were the cultural context in which they themselves existed, while at the same time differentiating themselves to some degree. Now, as has long been noted, the Exodus event became the paradigm of God's salvation of his people, and when I say salvation, I don't mean that in the later Christian sense of personal salvation from sin. That's a notion that's anachronistically read back into the Hebrew Bible. It's not there. Salvation in the Hebrew Bible does not refer to an individual's deliverance from a sinful nature. This is not a concept we find in the Hebrew Bible. It refers instead, to the concrete, collective, communal salvation from national suffering and oppression, particularly in the form of foreign rule or enslavement. When biblical writers speak of Yahweh as Israel's redeemer and savior, they are referring to Yahweh's physical deliverance of the nation from the hands of her foes. We're going to see this increasingly as we move to the prophetic material. So the exodus is a paradigm for salvation, but it would be a mistake, I think, to view the Exodus as the climax of the preceding narrative. We've gotten to this point now: we had this big dramatic scene at the Reed Sea, but the physical redemption of the Israelites is not in fact the end of our story. It's a dramatic way-station in a story that's going to reach its climax in the covenant that will be concluded at Sinai, and as many sensitive readers of the Bible have noted, the road from Egypt leads not to the other side of the Reed Sea, but on to Sinai. God's redemption of the Israelites is a redemption for a purpose, a purpose that doesn't become clear until we get to Sinai, for at Sinai the Israelites will become God's people, bound by a covenant. And so the story continues. In the third month, after the Exodus, the Israelites arrive at the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamp at the mountain where Moses was first called by God, the text says. The covenant concluded at Sinai is referred to as the Mosaic covenant. So this is now our third covenant that we have encountered; we will have one more coming. And the Mosaic covenant differs radically from the Noahide and the Abrahamic or patriarchal covenants that we've already seen, because here God makes no promises beyond being the patron or protector of Israel; and also, in this covenant, he sets terms that require obedience to a variety of laws and commandments. So the Mosaic covenant is neither unilateral--this is now a bilateral covenant, mutual, reciprocal obligations--nor is it unconditional like the other two. It is conditional. So this is our first bilateral, conditional covenant. If Israel doesn't fulfill her obligations by obeying God's Torah, his instructions, and living in accordance with his will, as expressed in the laws and instructions, then God will not fulfill his obligation of protection and blessing towards Israel. Now, the biblical scholar Jon Levenson, here, maintains that historical critical scholarship has been unkind to biblical Israel, because of a pervasive bias between the two main foci of the religion of ancient Israel. Those are (1) the Torah, or the law-- understood as the law--not a great translation, I prefer instruction, but Torah, taken to mean the law on the one hand; and, (2) the temple on the other. He says that, on the one hand, negative stereotypes rooted in Paul's condemnation of Mosaic law as a deadening curse from which belief in Jesus offers liberation--that account colors scholarly accounts of the giving of the Torah. On the other hand, a Protestant distaste for priest-centered cultic ritual colors scholarly accounts of the temple, and its meaning for ancient Israelites. These biases are so much embedded in our culture, he says, they permeate the work of even secular scholars of the Bible, so that a negative view of the law affects interpretation of the book of Exodus. Scholars tend to place great emphasis on the deliverance from Egypt as the high point in the Exodus narrative, rather than the more natural literary climax, which is the conclusion of the covenant at Mount Sinai, and the delivery of the Torah. So Levenson, in his book Sinai and Zion, tries to correct this prejudicial treatment. He says he seeks to give the two central institutions of Torah on the one hand, and Temple on the other, a fair hearing. So in his book, Sinai and Zion, Levenson explores what he calls the two great mountain traditions that express these central concepts: the tradition of Mount Sinai--that's where Israel received the Torah, and entered into this defining covenantal relationship with God--and then on the other hand, the tradition of Mount Zion. Zion will be the future site of the nation's holy temple in Jerusalem. Mount Zion is in Jerusalem, it's the Temple Mount today where the mosque now is. Today, we'll consider Levenson's analysis of the Sinai tradition as an entrée into the Israelite concept of the Torah, and the covenant bond, its meaning and its implications. Levenson stresses the importance of the covenant formulary. There are Ancient Near Eastern parallels to the Sinai covenant of the Bible--especially Hittite treaties that date 1500 to 1200, or so; also Assyrian treaties in about the eighth century, but they are in many ways continuous with what you find in the Hittite treaties--treaties between a suzerain and vassal. Remember we talked about two types of treaties: suzerainty treaties and parity treaties. Parity treaties between equals, but suzerainty treaties are between a suzerain, who has a position obviously of power and authority, and a vassal. He details the following six elements, which I hope you can all see , especially in the Hittite treaties. They're not all found in every treaty, but they're often enough found that we can speak of these six elements. First there is a preamble. That's found in every one. The suzerain identifies himself. Second of all, there's generally an account of the historical circumstances that are leading to the treaty: so some kind of historical prologue. Then we usually have some sort of set of stipulations and requirements, upon the vassal generally. Fourth, there's generally some arrangement, either for the publication of the treaty, or its deposition, its safe-keeping in some sort of shrine. There is generally a concluding invocation of witnesses, usually the gods are invoked as witnesses to a binding oath, some kind of covenantal oath that brings the treaty into effect, and it's witnessed by gods. Lastly, there will be very often a list of blessings for the party who obeys, and curses for the party that violates the pact. The curses are particularly emphasized in the Assyrian treaties. Levenson then identifies many of these elements in Yahweh's very first speech to Moses. Moses and the Israelites arrive at Sinai, in Exodus 19, and God says the following in verses 3b to 8: The Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, "Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob and declare to the children of Israel: 'You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to Me. Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words that you shall speak to the children of Israel." Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered as one, saying, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do!" And Moses brought back the people's words to the Lord. So Levenson, who draws actually on long-standing work by other scholars, and earlier in the twentieth century even, Levenson finds several of the main elements of the Hittite suzerainty treaties in this speech. So verse 4, "You've seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles' wings," is the historical prologue. That's the reason that we're in the situation we're in now, and making this covenant. Verse 5 contains God's stipulations. It's a very general condition--"If you obey my laws." Basically, keep my covenant, obey me faithfully, that's the conditional. That's going to be filled out and articulated at great length in the subsequent chapters when all the laws they have to obey are spelled out. The second half of verse 5 and 6 gives the reward: God is conferring on the Israelites this elevated status of royalty, of priesthood; "You'll be to me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." In verse 8, the people solemnly undertake to fulfill the terms of the covenant, so we have at least three of the steps that we find in the Hittite treaties, as well. If we take a broader view of the full biblical account of Israel's covenant with God, all six elements can be identified in the biblical narrative. They're scattered throughout the text, however. We have the preamble, and the historical background to the covenant in God's summary introduction to the people in Exodus 20: "I am Yahweh who brought you out of the land of Egypt." It sums it all up: introduction, who I am, and why we are historically connected. So this fact of God's bringing Israel out of Egypt, presumably establishes God's claim to sovereignty. The terms of the treaty are then stipulated at great length in the instructions that are found in Exodus chapter 20 through chapter 23. Moses reads the book of the covenant--it's called the Scroll of the Covenant--publicly: this is said in Exodus 24:7. In Deuteronomy we read that it will be deposited for safekeeping in a special ark. The Israelites vow that they'll obey Exodus 24:3, also 7b. The covenant is then sealed by a formal ritual. In this case it's a sacrifice in Exodus 24:8. In a monotheistic system you can't really call upon other gods to be witnesses to the sealing of the oath, so we have heaven and earth being invoked as witnesses--Deuteronomy 4:26; Deuteronomy 30:19; 31:28--heaven and earth, the idea being perhaps the inhabitants thereof should witness. As for blessings and curses, we have a long list of each found in Leviticus 26, and Deuteronomy 28, also interesting reading. Some of these curses, particularly the ones in Deuteronomy bear a very striking resemblance to curses in an Assyrian treaty that we have that dates to about 677 BCE the Assyrian king Esarhaddon--and many of the curses are really almost word for word. So while no one passage contains all of the elements of the Hittite treaty form, there are enough of them scattered around to suggest it as a model, as well as its later instantiation in Assyrian culture. So what's the meaning of this? Why does it matter that Israel understands its relationship with God, and uses the covenant as a vehicle for expressing its relationship with God, the vehicle of the suzerainty treaty? According to Levenson, the use of a suzerainty treaty as a model for Israel's relationship to Yahweh, expresses several key ideas. It captures several key ideas. First, the historical prologue that's so central to the suzerainty treaty, grounds the obligations of Israel to Yahweh in the history of his acts on her behalf. So it's grounded in a historical moment, and we'll come back to this and what that might mean about her perception of God. Second, the historical prologue bridges the gap between generations. Israel's past and present and future generations form a collective entity, Israel, that collectively assents to the covenant. And even today, at Passover ceremonies everywhere, Jews are reminded to see themselves, they're reminded of the obligation to see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt, and personally covenanted with God. The historical prologue, thirdly, explains why Israel accepts her place in the suzerain-vassal relationship. Israel's acceptance of a relationship with God doesn't stem from mystical introspection, or philosophical speculation, Levenson says. Instead the Israelites are affirming their identity and their relationship with God by telling a story, a story whose moral can only be that God is reliable. Israel can rely on God, just as a vassal can rely on his suzerain. The goal is not, Levenson says, ultimately the affirmation of God's suzerainty in a purely verbal sense. The point is not mere verbal acclaim of God as suzerain. Levenson points out that the affirmation of God's suzerainty is rendered in the form of obedience to commandments, not mere verbal acclamation. Observance of God's commandments is, as Levenson puts it, the teleological end of history. Why is that important? Unless we recognize that the road from Egypt leads inextricably to Sinai, that the story of national liberation issues in and is subordinate to, is ultimately subordinate to, the obligation to God's covenantal stipulations and observance of his laws, then we run the risk of doing what has been done for some centuries now: of reading Exodus as first and foremost a story of a miraculous delivery, rather than the story of a relationship, which is expressed through obligations to the observance of specific laws, commandments, and instructions. The suzerain-vassal model has further implications. Levenson and other scholars, point many of these out. Just as the Ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties specified that vassals of a suzerain are to treat other vassals of the suzerain well, Israelites are bound to one another then as vassals of the same suzerain, and are to treat one another well. So covenant in Israel becomes the basis of social ethics. It's the reason that God gives instructions regarding the treatment of one's fellow Israelites. So the suzerain-vassal relationship grounds the social ethic within Israel. Also, just as a vassal cannot serve two suzerains--that's pretty explicit in all the treaties, you owe exclusive service to your suzerain--so the covenant with God entails the notion of Israel's exclusive service of Yahweh. The assertion is not that there is no other god, but that Israel will have no other god before Yahweh. The jealousy of the suzerain is the motivation for prohibitions against certain intimate contacts with non-Yahweh peoples, because these alliances will end up entailing recognition of the gods of these peoples. The covenant with Yahweh will also, we shall see soon, preclude alliances with other human competitors. If Israel serves a divine king, she can't, for example, serve a human king, and that's an idea that will express itself in biblical texts, as we'll see, that are clearly opposed to the creation of a monarchy in Israel. Not everyone was onboard with the idea that Israel should be ruled by a king. So there are texts that will object to the creation of the monarchy of King Saul, and King David, and so on. There are also texts that are going to object to alliances with any foreign king, or subservience to any foreign king, whether it's Egypt or Assyria or Babylonia. So subservience to a human king, native or foreign, is in these texts considered a rejection of the divine kingship, which is the ideal--the exclusive kingship of Yahweh--and it's seen as a breach of the covenant. Now, Ancient Near Eastern suzerainty models also speak repeatedly of the vassal's love for the suzerain. Vassal so-and-so will love the Assyrian lord so-and-so, and that's an element that is not absent at all in the biblical texts that deal with the covenant bond. The Israelites promise to serve and to love Yahweh. That's an additional theme that's associated regularly with the covenant. It's one that we'll take up in greater detail, though, when we get to the book of Deuteronomy, where it is stressed to a greater degree than it is in Exodus, but for now, we can accept Levenson's claim that Sinai represents an intersection of law and love, because of the use of the suzerainty model. So the covenant concept is critical to the Bible's portrayal and understanding of the relationship between God and Israel. The entire history of Israel, as portrayed by biblical writers, is going to be governed by this one outstanding reality of covenant. Israel's fortunes will be seen to ride on the degree of its faithfulness to this covenant. The book of Exodus closes, with the construction of the sanctuary, and when the sanctuary is completed, the text says the presence of the Lord filled the tabernacle. This is a sign of divine approval. The long section where we have the receipt of the instructions for the building of the temple, and then we have an actual account of those instructions being fulfilled, not the temple, tabernacle, excuse me: it's just a tent structure at this stage--so receiving the instructions and then the actual construction of the tabernacle, that extends from Exodus 25 to the end of the book, Exodus 40; but it's interrupted in Exodus 32 by the account of the Israelites' apostasy with the golden calf, which is a great and very ambiguous story. The moment of Israel's greatest glory is to be the moment of her greatest shame. As Moses receives God's covenant on Mount Sinai--he's there at the top of Sinai communing with God-- the Israelites who are encamped at the foot of the mountain grow restless, and rebellious, and they demand of Aaron a god, because they don't know what's become of "this fellow Moses." They say: what about this guy, Moses? They use a very colloquial kind of term to dismiss him. So Aaron, feeling the heat, makes a golden calf, and the people bow down to it, and someone declares, "This is your God, oh Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." Well, an enraged God tells Moses: You know what's going on down there? And he tells him to descend from the mountain. The people are sinning, they've already gone astray, and he says: I'm through. I want to destroy the nation, and I'm going to start a new nation again from you, Moses. Moses manages to placate God momentarily, and then he turns around to face the people. He comes down from the mountain, he approaches the camp, he's stunned by what he sees. He's carrying the tablets, the instructions, and then he smashes them at the foot of the mountain in fury. He manages to halt the activities. He punishes the perpetrators, he has a few choice words for Aaron. This temporary alienation from God is ultimately repaired through Moses' intense prayer and intercession. It actually takes several chapters to reach a resolution, and God pouts for quite a while, but a renewal of the covenant does occur, and another set of stone tablets is given, and according to one rabbinic text the broken tablets, as well as the new tablets, are both placed in the ark. And this embarrassing episode is just the beginning of a sequence of embarrassing events that will occur as the Israelites move from Egypt towards the land that's been promised to them. Most of these episodes will occur in the book of Numbers, and they involve the rebellion of the people in some way, generally God's fury in reaction to that rebellion, Moses' intervention usually on behalf of the people, and God's appeasement. The book of Numbers recounts the itinerary of the Israelites throughout the 40 years of their wanderings and encampments around the sacred tabernacle. The tabernacle always moves in the center of the tribes, and they're positioned in certain specific positions around the tabernacle as they move. They stay at Sinai for a year, I believe, in the text, before they begin their movement, and Numbers contains some law, and much narrative material. The material tells of God's provision for the people in the desert, but it also tells of the Israelites' constant complaining, and rebellion. The Israelites rebel against Moses and God, and they long for Egypt. There are several times when God threatens to exterminate them, but Moses manages to dissuade him. In Numbers 14, for example, when the Israelites complain again, God is determined to destroy them, and Moses intervenes, and the intervention leads to a compromise. God swears that none of the adults who witnessed the Exodus -- with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, who did not join in the rebellion -- none of the adults who witnessed the Exodus would see the fulfillment of God's salvation, and enter the Promised Land. This means the Israelites will have to wander for 40 years in the desert until all of those who left Egypt as adults pass away, leaving a new generation that hasn't really tasted slavery, to enter the land and form a new nation. The book of Numbers, I think, is most remarkable for the relationship that it describes between Moses and God. I love reading these particular stories, and just hearing the dialogue between them, and imagining it, because the two of them alternate in losing patience with the Israelites, and wishing to throw them over. But each time the one convinces the other to be forbearing. The relationship between Moses and God is a very intimate one, very much like a husband and wife, who are working together as partners and parenting a difficult child. They're partners in the preparation of Israel for their new life, readying Israel for life in God's land as a nation, as a people. I'm going to just give you two examples of the way Moses and God act as a check upon each other. The first excerpt is from Numbers 14, and it shows Moses' ability to placate the wrath of God. Now, in this story, the Israelites express great fear. They've just heard a report from a reconnaissance team that scoped out the land, and they come back and say: Oh, boy, you know, it looks really bad--and that they think that the chances of conquering the Promised Land are very, very slim. The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night. All the Israelites railed against Moses and Aaron. "If only we had died in the land of Egypt," the whole community shouted at them, "or if only we might die in this wilderness! Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!" And they said to one another, "Let us head back for Egypt." … the Presence of the Lord appeared in the Tent of Meeting to all the Israelites. And the Lord said to Moses, "How long will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst? I will strike them with pestilence and disown them, and I will make of you a nation far more numerous than they!" But Moses said to the Lord, "When the Egyptians, from whose midst You brought up this people in Your might, hear the news, they will tell it to the inhabitants of that land…. If then You slay this people to a man, the nations who have heard Your fame will say, 'It must be because the Lord was powerless to bring that people into the land He had promised them on oath that He slaughtered them in the wilderness.' Therefore, I pray, let my Lord's forbearance be… abounding in kindness; forgiving iniquity and transgression…. Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt." And the Lord said, "I pardon, as you have asked…." So note God's offer to start all over again with Moses. This is a pattern with this god, you know--create, gets upset, a flood wipes them out, let's start again, oh, still not too good, let's choose one person, Abraham, see how that goes; oh, disappointed, let's go with Moses--so this is a bit of a pattern. But Moses refuses to accept the offer, and instead he defends the Israelites, and he averts their destruction. He appeals primarily to God's vanity: What will the neighbors think if you destroy them? They'll think you couldn't fulfill your promise. They'll think you're not the universal God of history. But the roles are reversed in the following passage, and this is where the text blows hot and cold. In fact, there's a rabbinic image, there's a rabbinic tradition that talks about this period of time, and has God and Moses talking, and God says: Listen, between the two of us, whenever I blow hot, you blow cold, or when I pour hot water, you pour cold, and when you pour hot, I'll pour cold, and together we'll muddle through, and get through here. The Israelites won't be wiped out. But in this next passage, which is Numbers 11, Moses is the one who is impatient with the Israelites' constant complaints and lack of faith, and he's ready to throw in the towel. I'll just read this last passage. The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, 'If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt Okay, we were slaves, but the food was free, you know? I just love that line. We used to eat this fish free in Egypt. …the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look at!' … Moses heard the people weeping, every clan apart, each person at the entrance of his tent. The Lord was very angry, and Moses was distressed. And Moses said to the Lord, "Why have You dealt ill with Your servant [me], and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant,' to the land that You have promised on oath to their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people, when they whine before me and say, 'Give us meat to eat!' I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!" Then the Lord said to Moses, "Gather for Me seventy of Israel's elders of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you. I will come down and speak with you there, and I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone. So again, hot and cold. And in many ways, Moses sets the paradigm for the classical prophet. He performs this double duty. He chastises and upbraids the Israelites for their rebellion and failures. When he's turning and facing the people, he's on their case. But at the same time, he consoles the people when they fear they've driven God away irreparably, and when he turns to face God, he defends the people before God. He pleads for mercy when they do in fact deserve punishment--and he knows they deserve punishment. He even says as much, but please have mercy. At times he expresses his frustration with the difficulty of his task, and resentment that it's been assigned to him. But we'll consider the character and the role of Moses in much greater detail when we reach the book of Deuteronomy next Monday. For the coming week, I would like you to please pay particular attention: we're dealing with two topics that will be, I think perhaps for some of you, a little different, new, alien. We're going to be dealing with biblical law on Monday, and biblical ritual, purity text, holiness, temple, on Wednesday. These are worlds apart from many of the things we know, so please, there's a lot of textual reading to do for Monday and Wednesday. Please do it carefully, and I might even hand out a little bit of a study guide to help you with that.

Literature_Lectures

24_Students_Choice_Novel_Jonathan_Safran_Foer_Everything_is_Illuminated.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. So, today we're going to talk about Everything is Illuminated, and Eli has actually agreed to stand next to me for the whole lecture and translate my lecture into Ukrainian dialect. Thank you, Eli. I'll call you up in a minute. For anyone visiting the class today, what we are doing is talking about Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. This book was chosen by the class as the last book on the syllabus, and Eli here gave a wonderful presentation, reading from it in a very funny Ukrainian accent, and I think that's why everybody chose it. God knows if there would be another reason. No. Just kidding. Now, when you meet a new novel, there are various things you need to do after you've decided whether you like it or not, that is, if you're either a professor in an English class having to teach it, or you are a student having to talk about it or write about in your papers. Beyond that, even beyond vocational necessity, there is the desire, I hope, that many people have, to understand how new work fits into the body of existing literature. And, especially, I think that's the case when an author is as openly ambitious as Jonathan Safran Foer is. It is very clear, the minute you open this up and you start reading, that Foer is aiming at a conversation with literature that has preceded him. It's also clear from his interviews, and I was particularly struck by something he said in an interview about his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is about 9/11. And, I'll say a little bit more about that novel, which I haven't read but I've read enough reviews of it to know a few facts about it which I think are relevant to this novel. He said about it…he was asked by an interviewer, "Well, doesn't it seem risky to take on 9/11 as a subject?" And he said, "Well, what seems risky to me is not taking on the important subjects of your time. That seems like the risk for a writer." And he says in another place, "You have to justify the fact that you're sitting alone in a room writing all day. What you do has to be somehow world changing." So, for a twenty-something-year-old writer, this is a heavy task. And I think you can feel the heaviness of it in the novel, partly in its formal ambition, and partly in the subjects that it takes on. It doesn't take on 9/11, but it does take on the Holocaust. So, I will have a whole argument about that aspect of the novel and how it fits in to literature of the post-45 period, because--lucky you--I happen to have written a book on this that came out in 2003, about genocide in literature. So, this is actually a perfect novel for me to lecture on in that respect. When you first meet a novel of this kind, with these ambitions, there are certain things that you do, and for me those things include noticing just about everything I possibly can about the novel and then thinking about what other things that I've read seem to be speaking to it, or it seems to be speaking to those things. Now, I promised that I would not conduct this entire lecture in Q&A, but I did not promise that I wouldn't ask any questions, so here goes. What novel seemed related to this novel, from our syllabus, to you? Well, you can go outside our syllabus. That's okay. Did you have another idea? Yes.Student: Marquez"s One Hundred Years of SolitudeProfessor Amy Hungerford: Yes. That's certainly in dialog with this novel, yes, and Foer talks about that as a novel that really was important to him. Okay. What else? What from our syllabus seems to be related to this novel? You've never seen anything like this before? Yes.Student: Lolita? Professor Amy Hungerford: Lolita. Why? What in Lolita?Student: [inaudible]Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes, some of that humor. Yes. What else? What else from our syllabus? Yes.Student: --Oh, I was going to extrapolate on Lolita.Professoer Amy Hungerford: Yes. Sure.Student: …experimenting with speaking through the voice of a character. Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Absolutely yeah, inhabiting a voice that seems very foreign. Yeah. To the writer. Yes. What else? Yes.Student: Barth?Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes.Professor Amy Hungerford: And what was it about Barth that you think Foer learned from?Student: I think kind of writing about writing. Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yep, definitely. What else? Roth? Did anyone not see Roth in this novel? Okay. Roth is certainly here. Pynchon is very strongly here, if you think about the episodes in Crying of Lot 49 with the Paranoids, all those funny jokes and their songs. Foer learned a lot from Pynchon, and certainly even more from Pynchon's other novel, Gravity's Rainbow, I think, particularly, than from Crying of Lot 49, which doesn't--because of its length-- doesn't quite go to the operatic, playful lengths that a longer Pynchon novel can go to. Pynchon is also very interested in the eighteenth century, and so that interest is something that Foer shares, in this novel. Foer is someone who learned a lot from the group of writers that we would call "postmodernist" and that I would call "late modernist." He learned to be very self-conscious about his language and to make that evident on the surface of the novel. He also learned, though, from Toni Morrison. (Come on in.) He learned from Toni Morrison. In particular, I think, he learned the value of time travel in a novel. This was something that I brought up with respect to Edward P. Jones, as well, but it's certainly here, and there is one very, very clear reference to Morrison. This is on page 51, when he's talking about the name of the shtetl and how it was called. Now, my Ukrainian is not very "premium," so I will butcher this name. "Of course no one in Sofiowka called it Sofiowka. Until it had such a disagreeable official name, no one felt the need to call it anything, but now that there was an offense that the shtetl should be called that shithead's namesake, the citizens had a name not to go by. Some even called the shtetl Not Sofiowka and would continue to even after the new name was chosen."In Song of Solomon, written in 1979, I think, Toni Morrison has a street that's called Not Doctor Street, because it was given an official name at odds with what the black community called it. And so, they had called it Doctor Street. The town christened it something else, I think Main Street or something, and so then they called it Not Doctor Street. So this little, teeny piece is lifted directly from Morrison. You can see her footprints on here in that sense. Toni Morrison was, of course, a teacher at Princeton when Foer was there. I don't know if he took courses with her. He certainly studied with Joyce Carol Oates, but Morrison was around and I'm sure he has read that novel. It would be surprising to me if he has not. So, the other thing that he takes from Morrison is that sense of collective history, that history is something passed down in oral tradition in an intensely verbal culture. So, the Jewish shtetl culture that Foer imagines, and the black community that Morrison imagines, are both intensely verbal cultures. Now, the Jewish community of Foer's novel is also intensely literary, in the sense of literate. They write everything down, also, so that's a slight difference between Morrison's vision and Foer's. I want to go in to some detail about what I think Foer has learned from Roth, because Roth is the person I see most strongly behind his writing. We didn't see the playful, metafictional side of Roth very much in The Human Stain. Roth's work is straddling both sides of that line, between realism and very hyper-metafictionality. So, some of his novels have alternate endings. He has several novels that feature Philip Roth. So, Foer takes the conceit of naming a character after himself directly from Roth. So, there are ways that he is, on the surface, citing Roth, but there is a more profound way that he is working in Roth's terrain, and that is in the terrain of desire. So, thinking back to Roth's first novel, Portnoy's Complaint, which is all about masturbation, Alex Portnoy's masturbation, we see that he's taken the name Alex, Alexander Portnoy. Alex appears in this novel as well, and then we have Safran, who is this sort of love machine. So, he is a double of Alex Portnoy, with a difference, though; so, instead of masturbation, it's sex with the needy, essentially, sex with the love starved, virgins, older women, widows, etc. So, the immediate difference that Foer is pointing to, is the difference between something like solipsism or narcissism, desire as the fuel for that narcissism, versus desire as the fuel for community and connection. This is not without trouble, though. And it's the trouble that interests me, and that I think he takes from Roth: and that's the impossibility of ever actually making that connection, of it ever finally coming home. And you see that in the story of Safran, just in the fact that--by the time he finally gets married, and finally has a proper orgasm--what he falls in love with, at that moment, is not his wife, but the baby that he is engendering in that moment (and of course it's a baby that doesn't even exist yet). So, the very absence at the heart of desire, the blankness or the impossibility, is demonstrated even in those moments of overwhelming connection. And, I think it's telling that Foer imagines sexual energy as light, rather than some other kind of phenomenon. So, "Everything is Illuminated"; remember, there is that image of the world being lit up by people making love, that it actually generates light that you can see from space. It's not a concrete engendering act, even when it is. It creates something else, and that something else seems to be related to knowledge; how can you know your past? This is a problem in the novel, and it's a feature of the quest element. And I'll say more about that in my second lecture on the novel, but I think it has to do with a vague understanding that is imagined to illuminate the world as a result of desire's fulfillment, or almost fulfillment. But that theme of sex and desire is abstracted into lots of other forms. And the couple that I want to look at--one is sort of religious. This is on 140. Here, we're learning about the veneration of Brod's husband, the Kolker, who is then bronzed and made into a statue in the town after he dies, still with the saw blade embedded in his head. This is at the bottom of 140. Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation, and more and more in their belief. The unmarried women kissed the Dial's battered lips although they were not faithful to their god, but to the kiss. They were kissing themselves. And when the bridegrooms knelt, it was not the god they believed in. It was the kneel, not the god's bronzed knees, but their own bruised ones. This little moment of reflection on religious ritual, or quasi-religious ritual, is related to some things that I want to say about the role of Judaism in my next lecture. But, as a practice, it is a practice of negativity, of acknowledging the impossibility of connection to that god and the impossibility of fulfillment from that god. But, nevertheless, it is committed to the fulfillment of the effort to make that connection. So, it's belief in belief. And, in fact, the book that I'm writing right now is all about belief in belief, and so this confirms my sense that this is an important way of imagining how belief works in the current moment. You believe in the act of belief. So, that's one kind of negativity. Then there is a visual image that we get over and over again, and that's of the hole, the empty hole. There are a couple of examples here, on 135. This is after Brod and the Kolker have separated themselves with a wall because the Kolker keeps beating her up. He's deranged in part--part sane, part deranged--by his saw-blade embedded in his head. And so they have this hole between them through which they can communicate, but the wall protects Brod from his rages so he won't beat her up. They lived [This is on 135.] They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time it felt precious, not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing but like the last breath of a drowning victim. So, here we're offered two versions of negativity. One is all of the words that had come to mean nothing, and the other is this physical emptiness, the hole. So, the words that mean nothing are an emptiness that is frustrating, a blockage, but the emptiness that is the space, the visual space, comes to be a space of imagination, that gets filled with imagination. So, they see each other from a distance for the first time, and are overwhelmed by the connection that can then be formed between them. So, it's the very absence of the physical presence, one's distance from it, that becomes the fulfillment for this couple. So, I hope you can see the structural similarity, or the logical similarity, between believing and belief. And we're told of Brod, remember, also, on page 83, that she was constitutionally unable to love anyone. This is at the top of 83. When she said, "Father, I love you," she was neither naïve nor dishonest, but the opposite. She was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things, willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life. So, if this is the lie, that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things, the truth is that our love for our love is greater than our love for actual things or actual persons. It's the same structure as the belief in belief. Of course, that story of Brod and her father telling each other stories--both about their love for each other, and, in her father's case, Yankel's case, about her mother, her fictional mother, who he says died before she was old enough to remember her--all of the stories that Yankel makes up become the fullness of his life with Brod. So, they replace the loss of his first wife who abandoned him. And so, this gives fiction a very powerful brief in the world. This is not unlike the structure that I was pointing out in The Human Stain, where the blankness of Coleman and Faunia allows Nathan to re-inhabit life by imagining onto them all the dynamics of their desire, all of the facts of their life, all of the details of their biography. So, likewise, Foer uses blankness as a way of pumping up the power of fiction. It plays this role despite the threat it will always pose to fiction that you get here, or on that little passage I just quoted before, about the nothingness of words. So, the nothingness that gives fiction its blank space to inhabit, also can seep into and infect words as in the repetition of a word like "Malkovich." It is an infection that bothered critics about this novel. They felt that the postmodern play of the novel was essentially trivial, because these kinds of play had been conducted in novels thirty years, forty years before (and many more than that if you count Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century, but took powerful hold in American fiction in the '60s). They felt that Foer was simply taking out those tools and deploying them again, but not for any new sort of payoff. So, some critics were frustrated with this. Now, this brings me to a second kind of context that I would bring to this novel, or I do bring to this novel as I think about it. In 2001, Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections won the National Book Award. The Corrections attempted to make a marriage between the postmodern novel, as he understood it, the novel filled with those kinds of verbal play. And Franzen modeled his novel on William Gaddis' novel The Recognitions, which is about an art forgery. It's about 900 pages of incredibly experimental prose. It's extremely hard to read. But for Franzen that novel had enough in it of character development and human investment to go along with its verbal playfulness that it made him want to keep reading it. So, in homage to that novel, he called his novel The Corrections and tried to give us a story where the verbal play would not drain the sentiment from the novel. So, he described it as the social novel coming to meet the postmodern novel. He announced this to great fanfare in an essay, and of course the novel then became famous. And he became infamous when he was invited by Oprah to go on Oprah's Book Club with The Corrections, and he refused. It was quite a scandal in the literary world. And then he tried to go back on it and say, "Oh, okay, Oprah. I really wasn't being a snob. I'll come on your show," but then she said "No. Sorry. We're scheduled for that week now." It was really a mistake on Franzen's part, but it also demonstrated his own ambivalence about the very project he had set out to accomplish, which is to make a novel that people really want to read, that has some sentimental purchase on you, that has characters you could care about, as well as being extremely ambitious in this way, in this formal way. Now that novel, the way it tried to get sentiment and verbal play to line up, was in part by making one of the central characters an Alzheimer's patient. So, it's about a family, a midwestern family, and the two parents get extended treatment in the novel, as do the three children, grown children, in the family. And the father has Alzheimer's, and so there's a very Pynchon-esque scene, when his, actually, his shit starts talking to him, and this is taken right out of Gravity's Rainbow. There's a scene very similar to this in Gravity's Rainbow. So, Franzen tried to make that poignant by making it something that the modernists tried to do, which is the representation of the actual workings of the human mind in a daily situation. And the terror of it, for that character, I thought, when I read the novel, came across quite powerfully. So, for me, in part, it worked. Foer is doing something that is related. He is trying to have both sentiment and formal play. How many of you felt for these characters? How many of you felt that they were really inaccessible to you, flat, unemotionally interesting to you? Okay. Just one. So, I think he succeeded, probably, to a greater degree, if you read the critics (and you can read that in this incredibly bulked-up blurb section in the packaging of this novel). A lot of critics did really like this novel, and I think that's why, that for most readers, he did succeed. Now, I have things to say about that, but in a minute. I want to say that there is another kind of context that I think you could attend to productively, and that is the quality of this novel as a campus novel. Now, that's probably not exactly what you were thinking of when you read this novel. It's a campus novel because it was written on a campus, and it's also a campus novel because it is in part a coming of age novel about someone who goes from needing a lot of help with his writing to kind of writing on his own. So, what you see is the displacement of a narrative that looks very much like Foer's development, or you would imagine the development of a writer in a writing program at Princeton over time, at first needing suggestions from a mentor. And, a lot of the way that we come to know the character Jonathan Safran Foer in the beginning, through Alex's letters, has to do with things that he has said to Alex about how to write, suggestions he's made. So, Jonathan Safran Foer remains as a sort of shadowy presence for much of this novel, but we see his wise sayings to Alex about writing. It's an interesting inversion of the situation that the author was in fact in. He was in the class, taking the class, not teaching the class, when he was an undergraduate, and this was written when he was…I think it was published when he was twenty one. The bar is not high. Don't worry. No. I'm just kidding. The bar is very high. Let me say that. The bar is very high, but don't worry. Life is long. You have plenty of time. This is not just about Jonathan Safran Foer, the man, and his particular biography of being a student in the writing program at Princeton. It is also about an institutional history of writing in the second half of the twentieth century. If you remember, way back when, when I lectured on Flannery O'Connor, I mentioned to you a critic named Mark McGurl at UCLA who is writing a book called The Program Era (or has written it, and I think it should be out very soon, called The Program Era). And it's an analysis of how writing programs leave their mark on the fiction of the last fifty years, because what's particularly striking and new about writing in this period is that a lot of it happens on campuses, and a lot of authors are writing for campus audiences.So, Foer's novel is a version of that kind of fiction, and we can read it that way, I think, quite easily. It fits in that story that Mark McGurl tells about the development of this period. So, just as when I read it, I see that notation about belief in belief and the love of love, and it fits in to a story that I'm telling about the evolution of religion in literature in this period, so you can ally it to other arguments that are made about the period, too, and that help you to see why certain things might be in the novel and what kind of work they do there. And finally, there is a last context that I saw pointed out. I think it was in the review in The Nation, and that's of trips of Americans to post-communist Europe and post-communist Russia. Apparently, there is a whole spate of novels that came out right about the same time, where Americans, almost invariably young men, went to the former Soviet republics and had coming-of-age experiences. So, this certainly fits that genre. I don't personally have a lot to say about that. I think it's interesting to see it as being aligned with a group of novels that do that. It doesn't, for me, provide any particular insight, but that's not because it's- because it wouldn't. It just happens that that didn't strike a chord with me, or lead me to other points of analysis. This is another point that I want you to take away from my engagement with this novel. That is, that no matter what context can be brought to it, you as a reader bring your own particular one, your own particular set of knowledge, your own particular training, your own life experience. So, we're getting to the end of the course, and, in a way, you have now the opportunity to approach these novels, any new novel that's written, with several kinds of stories about the period in your mind, because now you have read--I hope you have read--many novels in this period, and you can see where the connections are. So, you're starting to draw those. You'll need to do that on the exam, but far more importantly, I hope that you will continue to do it when you read on your own outside of class. A lot of you are seniors. You may not have a lot of time after you leave school to read novels. When you do, I hope it will be part of your pleasure to approach them with a sense of empowerment, that you can know where they fit in the history of the art form they're engaging, apart from your own pleasure in reading them, which will I'm sure be the primary reason you'd pick up a novel to read it, but there is that other intellectual pleasure that you now can have. I want to encourage you to feel that you can do that. It doesn't mean that it will always produce insight for you. So, I have been thinking about this novel for approximately two weeks. Most novels that I lecture to you about, I have been thinking about for at least two years. Your insights over time change, and you notice different things. And it's nice to allow time for that, and that's the value of rereading in a few years what you read before as a student. So, I hope you'll maybe return to some of these novels, as well. Now, that was my little digression about after-college reading, or outside-of-the-class reading, but let me return to this question of sentiment. Foer wants it both ways, and one of the ways he has it both ways is by internalizing in the novel a reader figure who is our double. There are actually three doubles for us, at least. One is Alex, who is reading Jonathan's story as he sends it to him. Embedding a critical reader within the novel, as we have seen with Barth and in Pynchon (where Oedipa was that double), allows a certain set of metafictional tricks. One of the most reliable functions for that internalized reader is to cue you, me, the actual human readers, to notice or feel certain things, or (if you are Nabokov) to be misled in certain ways. Think of the prologue from John Ray Jr. which misleads us in reading that novel. He's our double, but he's there to trick us. I don't think that Alex is here to trick us. And, just to note how he cues us, let's look on 142 and 3. This is one of the letters where Alex is less busy with self-presentation by this point in the novel, and he is really responding to what Jonathan has sent him. This is in the middle of 143. Those things that you wrote in your letter about your grandmother made me remember how you told me on Augustine's steps about when you would sit under her dress, and how that presented you safety and peace. I must confess that I became melancholy then and still am melancholy. I was also very moved--is this how you use it?--by what you wrote about how impossible it must have been for your grandmother to be a mother without a husband. It is amazing, yes, how your grandfather survived so much only to die when he came to America. It is as if, after surviving so much, there was no longer a reason to survive. When you wrote about the early death of your grandfather, it helped me to understand in some manners the melancholy that Grandfather has felt since Grandmother died, and not only because they both died from cancer. I do not know your mother of course, but I know you and I can tell you that your grandfather would have been so so proud. It is my hope that I will be a person that Grandmother would have been so so proud of. We're being cued to be moved, to be moved by the story in these particular ways, to take his reflections on his grandmother, which are indeed very lovely, and to be moved by them. But one reservation I guess I have about the success of this move is just its boldness, I guess. I'm being told that I should be moved by these passages. There are also moments when we get reflections that seem like they would never stand if they were not embedded in Alex's voice, and this is on 68-69. This is Alex talking about how he came upon Little Igor, his brother, crying. I knew why he was a little less than crying. I knew very well and I wanted to go to him and tell him that I had a little less than cried too, just like him, and that no matter how much it seemed like he would never grow up to be a premium person like me, with many girls and so many famous places to go, he would. He would be exactly like me, and look at me, Little Igor. The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned. [And then I'm going to skip down. So, he starts to laugh then at his brother and he is not quite sure why he is laughing.] I attempted to rise so that I could walk to my room, but I was afraid that it would be too difficult to control my laughing. I remained there for many, many minutes. My brother persevered to a little less than cry, which made my silent laughing even more. I am able to understand now that it was the same laugh I had in the restaurant in Lutsk, the laugh that had the same darkness as Grandfather's laugh and the hero's laugh. I ask leniency for writing this. Perhaps I will remove it before I post this part to you. I am sorry. As for Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, she did not eat her piece of the potato. Those reflections on laughing and crying: I think they might sound quite maudlin if they were not in Alex's voice, that a writer needs to judge very carefully whether to reflect in those direct ways about big themes like laughter and crying or how you hate. So, these are the topics that will be a pitfall for any new writer sitting down to say, "I am going to write about love." I used to teach creative writing, and one of the exercises that I did was, I would sit my students down and I would say, "Okay. We're going to have a little in-class writing today. Here are some topics that I want you to write about just for ten minutes," and I would give them "love," "your childhood"--what else--"death." I can't remember what else. And so, then, they would very earnestly do it and then I would say, "Okay. Now I want you to take your paper and I want you to underline every single cliché that you wrote," and they would come up with papers full of clichés. And it was a little exercise just to get them to understand that choosing a topic can get you into trouble if you choose a very abstract, big, important question. Of course we want books that move us and tell us about death and love and separation and desire, but how do you get there, and how do you talk about those things? So, I think that Foer has taken a risk of a sort, here. He can do it because it's in Alex's voice. Is the distance achieved, the self-distancing achieved, by inhabiting a foreign voice, with its little funny jokes that come up because of its incorrect usages? Is that enough to prevent sentimentality, rather than sentiment? Is it powerful enough language, in the abstract, that it moves us as a discourse on laughter and loving? Is the detail of Little Igor and Alex's love for him enough? Now, remember we know nothing about Igor as a character, his brother as a character. Do we feel that the relationship between the two is earned for us as readers? Maybe we do. Sometimes I did. Other times I didn't. So this is something that I'm still thinking about. Does it succeed at what Franzen, too, was trying to do, which is to infuse intellectual word play with human resonance? Does it succeed? If you look at the dedication to the novel, I think you learn something too. This is under the acknowledgments. Did any of you read this? These are the acknowledgments. "At least once every day since I met her, I have felt blessed to know Nicole Aragi. She inspires me not only to try to write more ambitiously, but to smile more widely and have a fuller, better heart. I am so, so grateful,"--and you hear that "so, so" again from the passage I just read--"and it is my pleasure and honor to think of the wonderful people at Houghton Mifflin as family," so on and so on, "whose advice in literature and life seems always to boil down to "feel more," which is always the best advice." So, feeling is very much on the surface of the effort here. What would it mean to read this as a sentimental novel? Does the playful treatment of shtetl life disable our connection with those characters? One of the things that I think succeeds wonderfully about this novel is Brod as a character. I think you do want her to have a good life, as Alex does, and you feel the tragedy of the life she gets. And, I think you get that payoff because she is developed; she has time to develop, in the course of the story. So, for all its time travel back and forth, for all its playfulness, for all the jokes and riffs, Brod has time to develop, especially in relation to her father and in relation to the Kolker, her husband, and we learn things that make her more complex over time. And so, when we finally learn what she asked the Kolker to do after she was raped and before she agreed to be his wife, when we learn that--and I won't reveal it 'cause I don't know if you're all there yet--it gives us a much more complex version of what she is as a person, of who she is as a person. So, I think he earns it, with Brod. That, to me, is a kind of achievement, because of the role that riffing plays in the development of that story. Riffing on Jewish behavior in a novel by a Jewish writer is certainly well-trodden ground. Roth has been treading that ground for many decades. I think what Foer does, that Roth didn't do, is fully identify with the community in a convincing way, while he's doing it, and this is related to what I will say about his use of the Holocaust in my next lecture. I am going to stop there, and I hope you will be sure to finish the novel by Wednesday.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_2_The_Hebrew_Bible_in_Its_Ancient_Near_Eastern_Setting_Biblical_Religion_in_Context.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: I mentioned in the opening lecture that this course is going to examine the biblical corpus from a variety of different viewpoints and take a variety of approaches, historical, literary, religious, cultural. And today we are going to begin our appraisal of the first portion of the Bible as the product of a religious and cultural revolution. The Bible is the product of minds that were exposed to and influenced by and reacting to the ideas and cultures of their day. And as I suggested in the opening lecture, comparative study of the literature of the Ancient Near East and the Bible reveals the shared cultural and literary heritage at the same time that it reveals great differences between the two. In the literature of the Bible some members of Israelite society--probably a cultural religious and literary elite--broke radically with the prevailing norms of the day. They mounted a critique of prevailing norms. The persons responsible for the final editing and shaping of the Bible, somewhere from the seventh to the fifth or fourth century BCE--we're not totally sure and we'll talk more about that--those final editors were members of this group. And they had a specific worldview and they imposed that worldview on the older traditions and stories that are found in the Bible. That radical new worldview in the Bible was monotheism. But why, you might ask, should the idea of one God instead of many be so radical? What is so different? What's different about having one God, from having a pantheon of gods headed by a superior god? What is so new and revolutionary about monotheism? Well according to one school of thought there isn't anything particularly revolutionary about monotheism; and the classical account of the rise of monotheism, that has prevailed for a very long time, runs as follows, and I have a little flow chart here to illustrate it for you. The argument goes that in every society there's a natural progression: a natural progression from polytheism, which is the belief in many gods--usually these are personifications of natural forces--to henotheism--"heno," equals one, god--or monolatry, which is really the worship of one god as supreme over other gods, so not denying the existence of the other gods, ascribing reality to them, but isolating one as a supreme god, and onto monotheism, where essentially one believes only in the reality of one god. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this progression was viewed as an advance, which is not very surprising because the whole theory was put forward by scholars who were basically western monotheists. And these scholars maintained that certain elements of biblical religion represented pure religion, religion evolved to its highest form, no longer tainted by pagan and polytheistic elements of Canaanite religion generally. So applying an evolutionary model to religion carried with it a very clear value judgment. Polytheism was understood as clearly inferior and primitive. Monolatry was an improvement. It was getting better. It was getting closer. But monotheism was judged to be the best and purest form of religion. And at first the great archeological discoveries that I talked about last time in the nineteenth century seemed to support this claim--that Israelite monotheism had evolved from Ancient Near Eastern polytheism. Cuneiform tablets that were inscribed with the great literature of Mesopotamian civilizations were uncovered and when they were deciphered they shed astonishing light on biblical religion. And these discoveries led to a kind of "parallelomania"--that's how it's referred to in the literature. Scholars delighted in pointing out all of the parallels in theme and language and plot and structure between biblical stories and Ancient Near Eastern stories. So more than a thousand years before the Israelite legend of Noah and the ark you have Mesopotamians telling the stories Ziusudra, or in some versions Utnapishtim who also survived a great flood by building an ark on the instruction of a deity, and the flood destroys all life, and he sends out birds to scout out the dry land, and so on. So with parallels like these, it was argued, it was clear that the religion of the Israelites was not so different from the religions of their polytheistic or pagan neighbors. They also had a creation story. They had a flood story. They did animal sacrifices. They observed purity taboos. Israelite religion was another Ancient Near Eastern religion and they differed from their neighbors only over the number of gods they worshiped: one or many. It was just a more refined, more highly evolved, version of Ancient Near Eastern religion. Well, this view, this evolutionary view, or evolutionary model, was challenged by man a named Yehezkel Kaufmann in the 1930's. And Kaufman argued that monotheism does not and cannot evolve from polytheism because the two are based on radically divergent worldviews, radically divergent intuitions about reality. And in a multivolume work which was later translated and abridged, and you've got a selection of reading from the translated abridgment, so it's translated by Moshe Greenburg, an abridged version of his massive work The Religion of Israel Kaufman asserted that the monotheism of Israel wasn't, it couldn't be, the natural outgrowth of the polytheism of an earlier age. It was a radical break with it. It was a total cultural and religious discontinuity. It was a polemic against polytheism and the pagan worldview. That's implicit, he says, throughout the biblical text. It's been said that Kaufman replaces the evolutionary model with a revolutionary model. This was a revolution not an evolution. Now one advantage of Kaufman's model is that we can avoid some of the pejorative evaluations of polytheism as primitive, as necessarily earlier and primitive and inferior. We're simply positing the existence of two distinct orientations, two divergent worldviews. They each have their explanatory merits and they each have their specific problems and difficulties. It's not to say that Kaufman wasn't clearly judgmental but at least the potential is there for us to understand these as two distinct systems, each again, as I say, with its explanatory merits. But as we'll see some of the things that monotheism solves only invite other sorts of problems that it has to wrestle with throughout its long life. Now in Kaufman's view the similarities, therefore, between the Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern religion and cultures that everyone was so busily finding and celebrating, these were in the end similarities in form and external structure, appearance. They weren't essential similarities. They differed in content. Sure they both have animal sacrifice. Sure they both have ritual purity laws. Sure they share certain stories and legends. But these have been adopted by the Israelites and transformed, transformed into vehicles that convey the basic ideas of the monotheistic worldview. So a similarity in form doesn't mean a similarity in function; and in this, Kaufman is anticipating arguments made by anthropologists. The ritual cult of the Israelites may look like that of their neighbors but it functioned very differently; its purpose was drastically different from that of Israel's neighbors. The Israelites like their neighbors may have set up a king over themselves. But Israelite monarchy differed from Canaanite monarchy in significant ways because of their monotheism. These are all things we will test and explore. So the meaning and function of Israel's cult, of Israel's king, of its creation stories or any of its other narratives--they derive from the place of those items within the larger cultural framework or worldview of Israel and that larger framework or worldview is one of basic monotheism. So let's turn then to Kaufman's description of the fundamental distinction between the polytheistic worldview and the revolutionary monotheistic worldview that took root in Israel. And I am going to be rehearsing and then critiquing the arguments that are in that hundred-page reading that I assigned for you this week. This is the only time something like this will happen in the course. And I do that because these ideas are so fundamental and we are going to be wrestling with them throughout the course, so it's important to me that you absorb this stuff right from the beginning and think about it and be critical of it and engage it. Kaufman's ideas are very important. They're also overstated in some ways and that's why we're going to be wrestling with some of these ideas throughout the course. So, let's begin with Kaufman's characterization of what he calls pagan religion--that's the term that he uses. The fundamental idea of pagan religion, he says, and I quote, is "the idea that there exists a realm of being prior to the gods and above them, upon which they gods] depend, and whose decrees," even "they must obey" --the metadivine realm. This is the realm of supreme and ultimate power and it transcends the deities. The deity or the deities emerge from and are therefore subject to the laws of the metadivine realm, the forces and powers of the metadivine realm. And the nature of this realm will vary from pagan tradition to pagan tradition. It might be water. It might be darkness. It might be spirit. Or in ancient Greek religion, a more sort of philosophical polytheism, it might be fate. Even the gods are subject to the decrees of fate; they have no control over that. Kaufman asserts, therefore, this belief. Once you posit a primordial realm, some realm that is beside or beyond the gods, that's independent of them and primary, you have automatically limited the gods. So what I've done is I've spelled out here for you, consequences, logical consequences of positing a metadivine realm. Once you have a metadivine realm all of these things are going to follow. The gods are going to be limited. They are not the source of all. They are bound by, they're subservient to, this metadivine realm. There can therefore, be no notion of a supreme divine will, an absolute or sovereign divine will. The will of any one god ultimately can be countered by the decrees of the primordial realm and the will of all the gods can be thwarted by the decrees of the primordial realm. The will of any one god can be thwarted by perhaps another god. So the gods are limited in power. They're also limited in their wisdom: that falls under this as well. They're not going to be all-knowing or all-wise because of the existence of this realm that's beyond them and which is in many ways mysterious to them as well. It's unpredictable to them too. It's not in their control or in their power. Individual gods might be very wise; they might be wise in particular crafts. There might be a god of healing, very very wise in healing, or a god of some other craft or area of knowledge. But they possess wisdom as an attribute, not as an essential characteristic. Kaufman asserts that mythology is basic to pagan religions. Mythologies are the lives or tales of the lives of gods, tales of the lives of the gods. In pagan religions the gods are born, and they live lives very similar to human lives but on a grand scale and then they die. They might be reborn too. Pagan religions contain theogonies, birth of a god, "theogony", accounts of the births of gods. Now this impersonal primordial realm, Kaufman declares, contains the seeds of all beings. Very often in these creations stories there is some sense of some realm from which life begins to emerge usually beginning with gods. So these cosmogonies and theogonies will describe the generation of sexually differentiated divine beings; also the generation of the natural world; also the generation of human beings and animals: in other words, this is the primordial womb for all that is--divine, human and natural. It is the source of everything mundane and divine. What that means, Kaufman asserts, is that in pagan religion there's very often a fluid boundary between the divine, the human, and the natural worlds. They blur into one another because they all emerge ultimately from the same primordial world stuff. These distinctions between them are soft. We see this in the fact that the gods are very often associated with natural powerful forces, right? The sky is a god; the fire is a god; fertility--a natural process--is a god. So there's no real distinction between the worship of gods and the worship of nature. Second, he says, because humans also emerge ultimately from this primordial realm there's a confusion of the boundary between the divine and the human that's common, he says--he chooses the word "confusion"--that's common in pagan religion. And so we often have in pagan religions unions between divine beings and human beings. Kaufman argues, and I quote, that "the continuity the divine and human realm is the basis of the pagan belief in apotheosis" [Kaufman 1972, 36]--humans becoming gods; perhaps after death for example becoming immortal, or very often kings when they ascend to the throne become gods. Whatever power the gods have, Kaufman says, is not due to the fact that their will is absolute or their spirit is absolute. The realm that transcends the gods, this metadivine realm, is that which has ultimate power and the stuff of which it is made is what has ultimate power. So power is materially conceived. It inheres in certain things, in certain substances, particularly substances or materials that are deeply connected to whatever this primordial world stuff is. So if it's blood, then blood that courses through the veins of living creatures is seen to have some deep and powerful connection with the metadivine realm and that is where power resides. If it is water, then water will be viewed as particularly materially powerful in that particular system. So gods have power only insofar as they are connected with that primordial world "stuff," a technical term that I use throughout this lecture! That means that magic is possible in such a system. Because power is materially conceived--in other words, since it is believed to inhere in certain natural substances that resemble or are connected to the primordial world stuff that's the source of all power--then magic is possible by manipulating those material substances in certain ways. It might be clay. It might be water. It might be blood. Then whatever is believed to hold the power of this primordial life force, humans can tap into, and influence the activities of the metadivine realm. So through manipulation, magical manipulation of certain substances, they can harness, Kaufman says, they can harness these forces, these independent self-operating forces. And so the human magician is really a technician and he can make these forces come to bear on even the gods, to coerce the gods to do his will and so on. So magic in a pagan system, Kaufman claims, is a way of getting around the gods, circumventing the capricious will of the gods and demons. His magic is directed at the metadivine realm, trying to tap into its powers. It's not directed at the gods. It's trying to tap into the ultimate source of power to use that power to influence the gods in a particular way or protect oneself against the gods. Similarly, divination. Divination is an attempt to discern the future that, once again, heads right to the source of power. It's not directed at the gods, unless you're hoping to use them as a medium through which to get access to the metadivine realm, but ultimately most divination is aimed at tapping the secrets of the metadivine realm and not the gods. Discerning the will of the gods is really of little use, because even their will can be thwarted or overthrown by other gods or by the decrees of the metadivine realm. The pagan cult, Kaufman claims, is a system of rites. Now I use the word "cult" and every year people look at me and say "what is cult? I don't even understand what that means." We'll learn more about "cult," but it refers to a system of rites, okay? A system of rites, and we'll be looking at the Israelite cult later. So the pagan cult, he says, is a system of rites that involves a manipulation of substances--again, blood, animal flesh, human flesh, precious metals and so on--that are believed to have some kind of inherent power, again, because of their connection to whatever the primordial world stuff may be in that tradition. So according to Kaufman there's always an element of magic in the pagan cult. It's seeking through these rituals and manipulations of certain substances to, again, let loose certain powers, set into motion certain forces, that will coerce a god to be propitiated, for example, or calmed or to act favorably or to vindicate the devotees, and so on. Some of those cultic acts might be defensive or protective so that the god cannot harm the worshiper. Many of the cultic festivals are keyed in to mythology, the stories of the lives of the gods. Many of the cultic festivals will be reenactments of events in the life of the god: a battle that the god had…the death of the god. Usually in the winter, cultic rituals will reenact the death of the god and then, in spring, the rising or resurrection of the god. These are all reenactment festivals that occur very often. And it's believed that by reenacting these festivals in this cultic way, one brings magical powers into play and can in fact ensure and maintain the reemergence of life in the spring. So it's essential for the maintenance, preservation of the world. One final and very important point, and we're going to wrestle with this quite a bit during the year: Kaufman claims, again, in the polytheistic worldview, the primordial realm contains the seeds of all being: everything is generated from that realm, good and bad. So just as there are good gods who might protect human beings there are also evil gods who seek to destroy both humans and other gods. Death and disease are consigned to the realm of these evil demons or these impure evil spirits, but they are siblings with the good gods. Human beings are basically powerless, he says, in the continual cosmic struggle between the good gods and the evil demons, unless they can utilize magic, divination, tap into the powers of the metadivine realm, circumvent the gods who might be making their lives rather miserable. But what's important is that Kaufman insists that in the pagan view evil is an antonomous demonic realm. It is as primary and real as the realm of the holy or good gods. Evil is a metaphysical reality. It is built into the structure of the universe. That's the way the universe was made. The primordial stuff that spawned all that is, spawned it good and bad and exactly as it is, and it's there and it's real. Salvation, he says, is the concern of humans. The gods aren't interested in human salvation from the capricious forces and powers in the world because they're trying to save themselves. You know, the good gods are being attacked by the evil gods; the powers and decrees of the metadivine realm are hassling them as well as anybody else. So they can't be worried about humans; they're worried about themselves. Salvation is attained through magic or gnostic means--gnosticism refers to knowledge of secrets that can in some way liberate one from the regular rules--and so as long as one can somehow circumvent the gods, tie oneself into the powers of the metadivine realm to be beyond the reach of the demons and the capricious gods who make life on earth a misery, that is the path for salvation. So, Kaufman says that the pagan worldview is one of an amoral universe somewhere around here…there we go. Amoral universe. Not a moral universe; not an immoral universe; but an amoral universe. It is morally neutral. There are gods who are legislators and guardians of social order and justice. But their laws aren't absolute: they can be leveled by the decrees of this supreme metadivine realm. And since the knowledge and wisdom of each god is limited, morality can be defined as what a particular god likes or desires and that may be different from what another god likes or desires. And there's no absolute morality then. And it's that picture of the universe, Kaufman wants to argue, that is challenged by the monotheistic revolution. Again he sees this as a revolution of ancient Israel. So according to Kaufman the fundamental idea of ancient Israelite writing, which receives no systematic formulation but permeates the entire Bible in his view, is a radically new idea of a god who is himself the source of all being--not subject to a metadivine realm. There's no transcendent cosmic order or power. He does not emerge from some preexisting realm and therefore he is free of all of the limitations of myth and magic--we'll go through these one by one--but a God whose will is absolute and sovereign. All right? So what then are the implications of the elimination of this metadivine realm? Just as these points flowed logically from positing a metadivine realm, what flows logically from eliminating a metadivine realm and positing simply a god that does not emerge from any preexisting power or order or realm? Well, first of all there's no theogony or mythology in the Bible. God isn't born from some primordial womb; he doesn't have a life story. There's no realm that is primary to him or prior to him and there is no realm that is the source of his power and wisdom. So in the opening chapters of Genesis, God simply is. He doesn't grow, he doesn't age, he doesn't mature, he doesn't have in the Bible a female consort. God doesn't die. So in the Hebrew Bible, Kaufman claims, for the first time in history we meet an unlimited God who is timeless and ageless and nonphysical and eternal. That means that this God transcends nature. Which means we're going to get rid of number three as well, right? As the sovereign of all realms, God isn't by nature bound to any particular realm. He's not identifiable as a force of nature or identified with a force of nature. Nature certainly becomes the stage of God's expression of his will. He expresses his will and purpose through forces of nature in the Bible. But nature isn't God himself. He's not identified . He's wholly other. He isn't kin to humans in any way either. So there is no blurring, no soft boundary between humans and the divine, according to Kaufman, in the Bible. There's no apotheosis in the Bible. No life after death in the Bible either. Did you know that? Have to wait a few centuries for that idea to come along, but certainly not in the Hebrew Bible: people live 70 years and that's it. So there's no process by which humans become gods and certainly no process of the reverse as well. Magic in the Hebrew Bible is represented as useless. It's pointless. There's no metadivine realm to tap into. Power doesn't inhere in any stuff in the natural world. So the world is sort of de-divinized. Demythologized. Power isn't understood as a material thing or something that inheres in material substances. God can't be manipulated or coerced by charms or words or rituals. They have no power and cannot be used in that way, and so magic is sin. Magic is sin or rebellion against God because it's predicated on a whole mistaken notion of God having limited power. There are magical conceptions throughout the Bible--you're going to run into them. But interestingly enough the editors of the stories in which they appear will very often hammer home the conclusion that actually what happened happened, because God willed it to happen. The event occurred because God wanted it to occur. It didn't occur independently of his will or by virtue of some power that's inherent in the magician's artifices. So Kaufman argues that magic in the Bible is recast as a witness to God's sovereignty, God's power. And they're stripped--magical actions are stripped--of their autonomous potency. Again, they're serving as vehicles then for the manifestation of the will of God. Divination is also unassimilable to the monotheistic idea, according to Kaufman, because it also presupposes the existence of some metadivine realm, some source of power, knowledge or information that transcends God. And again, it's an attempt to reveal God's secrets in an ungodly way, predicated on a mistake. It is permitted to make inquiries of God through oracular devices but God only conveys information at his own will. There's no ritual or incantation, Kaufman says, or material substance that can coerce a revelation from God. So, we will see things that look like magic and divination and oracles and dreams and prophecy in the pagan world and in ancient Israel. But Kaufman says the similarity is a similarity in form only. And it's a superficial, formal, external similarity. Each of these phenomena he says is transformed by the basic Israelite idea of one supreme transcendent God whose will is absolute and all of these things relate to the direct word and will of God. They aren't recourse to a separate science or lore or body of knowledge or interpretive craft that calls upon forces or powers that transcend God or are independent of God. By the same token the cult, Kaufman says, has no automatic or material power. It's not just sort of a place where certain kinds of magical coercive acts happen. The cult isn't designed to service the material needs of God, either. It doesn't affect his life and vitality by enacting certain rituals: you don't ensure that God doesn't die and so on. No events in God's life are celebrated--the festivals that are carried out in the cultic context. So the mythological rationales for cult that you find amongst Israel's neighbors are replaced, and they're replaced very often by historical rationales. This action is done to commemorate such and such event in the history of the nation. So pagan festivals in Israel, Kaufman says, are historicized, commemorating events in the life of the people and not in the story of the god's life since we have no mythology. But we are going to be spending a fair amount of time talking actually about the meaning and the function of Israel's purity laws and cultic laws in a later lecture. Now since God is himself the transcendent source of all being and since he is good, in a monotheistic system there are no evil agents that constitute a realm that opposes God as an equal rival. No divine evil agents. Again, in the pagan worldview the primordial womb spawns all sorts of beings, all kinds of divinities, good and evil that are in equal strength. They're sort of locked in this cosmic struggle. But in the Israelite worldview, if God is the source of all being, then they're can't be a realm of supernatural beings that do battle with him. There's no room for a divine antagonist of the one supreme God, which is leading us down here to this point: that sin and evil are demythologized in the Hebrew Bible. And that's very interesting. It's going to lead to a lot of interesting things. It's also going to create a really huge problem for monotheistic thought they're going to struggle with for centuries and actually still do struggle with today. But again, in the pagan worldview, sin is understood very often as the work of a demon or an evil god that might possess a person, might have to be exorcised from that person by means of magic. If you tap into some of these substances then you can use the magical, the powers in those substances, to coerce the demon to be expelled from the person's body. These are things that are very common in polytheistic and pagan practices. But in Israel we have no metadivine realm to spawn these evil beings, these various gods. So Israelite religion did not conceive of sin as caused by an independent evil power that exists out there in the universe and is defying the will of God. Instead evil comes about as a result of the clash of the will of God and the will of humans who happen to have the freedom to rebel. There's nothing inherently supernatural about sin. It's not a force or a power built into the universe. Kaufman is claiming therefore that in Israel evil is transferred from the metaphysical realm (built into the physical structure of the universe) to the moral realm. I've put it up here for you. Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality. It doesn't have a concrete independent existence. And that means that human beings and only human beings are the potential source of evil in the world. Responsibility for evil lies in the hands of human beings. In the Hebrew Bible, no one will ever say the devil made me do it. There is no devil in the Hebrew Bible. That's also the invention of a much later age. And that is an important and critical ethical revolution. Evil is a moral and not a metaphysical reality . You had a. Student: What about the serpent in the Garden of Eden? Professor Christine Hayes: Great. That's what you get to talk about. Wonderful question. Well what about when Eve is tempted by the serpent? Who is the serpent? What is he doing? What's going on? What is Kaufman claiming? Okay. That's exactly the kind of stuff that should be popping into your head----What about...what about?--okay, and in section, you're going to be discussing exactly that story. Okay? And that's one of those texts... and in a minute if I haven't at the end of a lecture, ask again if I haven't kind of gotten to part of an answer to your question. Okay? But again, this emphasis on evil as a moral choice--think of Genesis 4, where God warns Cain, who's filled with anger and jealousy and is thinking about doing all kinds of horrible things to his brother, and God says, "Sin couches at the door; / Its urge is toward you, / Yet you can be its master". This is a question of moral choice. Final point then is...and we're not going to talk about salvation right now...but we're going to talk about the fact that the only supreme law is the will of God, because God is a creator God rather than a created God. He's imposed order, an order upon the cosmos. And so the pagan picture of an amoral universe of just competing powers, good and evil, Kaufman says, is transformed into a picture of a moral cosmos. The highest law is the will of God and that imposes a morality upon the structure of the universe. So in sum, Kaufman's argument is this: Israel conceived of the divine in an entirely new way. Israel's God differed from the pagan gods in his essential nature. The pagan gods were natural gods. They were very often associated with blind forces of nature with no intrinsic moral character, he says. And the god of Israel was understood to transcend nature and his will was not only absolute, it was absolutely good and moral. A lot of people say, well in a way didn't we just rename the metadivine realm God? No. Because the difference here is that it's posited not only that this God is the only power but that he is only good. And that was not the case with the metadivine realm. Right? That was morally neutral. But there's a moral claim that's being made by the writers of the Hebrew Bible about this supreme power, this God. God is depicted as just, compassionate. Morality therefore is perceived as conforming to the will of God. And there are absolute standards then of justice and reverence for life. Now Kaufman says God is demythologized, but even though he's demythologized he's not rendered completely impersonal. He's spoken of anthropomorphically, so that we can capture his interaction with human beings. This is the only way, Kaufman says, you can write in any meaningful sense about the interaction between God and humanity. So he has to be anthropomorphized. But the interaction between God and humans, he says, happens not through nature but through history. God is not known through natural manifestations. He's known by his action in the world in historical time and his relationship with a historical people. I just want to read you a few sentences from an article Kaufman wrote, a different one from the one that you read. But it sums up his idea that there's an abyss that separates monotheism and polytheism and he says that it would be a mistake to think that the difference between the two is arithmetic--that a polytheistic tradition in which there are ten gods is a lot more like monotheism than a polytheistic tradition in which there are 40 gods, because as you get smaller in number it gets closer to being monotheistic. He says the pagan idea, and I quote, "does not approach Israelite monotheism as it diminishes the number of its gods. The Israelite conception of God's unity entails His sovereign transcendence over all." That's the real issue. "It rejects the pagan idea of a realm beyond the deity, the source of mythology and magic. The affirmation that the will of God is supreme and absolutely free is a new and non-pagan category of thought". That's in an article in the Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People. And he goes on again to say that this affirmation isn't stated dogmatically anywhere but it pervades Israelite creativity, biblical texts. He also asserts that the idea kind of developed over time, but that basically there was a fundamental revolution and break, and then within that there was some development of some of the latent potential of that idea. So, which is it, which is part of the question that came from over here,? You have on the one hand the claim that Israelite religion is essentially continuous with Ancient Near Eastern polytheism. It's merely limiting the number of gods worshipped to one, but it houses that God in a temple. It offers him sacrifices and so on. And then on the other hand we have Kaufman's claim that Israelite religion is a radical break from the religions of the Ancient Near Eastern. Well, the value of Kaufman's work, I think, lies in the insight that monotheism and polytheism in the abstract--now I'm not sure they exist anywhere in the world--but in the abstract are predicated on divergent intuitions as systems. They do seem to describe very different worlds. And therefore as a system, the difference between Israel's God and the gods of Israel's neighbors was not merely quantitative. It was qualitative. There's a qualitative difference here. However when you read his work it's clear that he often has to force his evidence and force it rather badly. And it's simply a fact, that practices and ideas that are not strictly or even strongly monotheistic do appear in the Bible. So perhaps those scholars who stress the continuity between Israel and her environment are right after all. And this impasse I think can be resolved to a large degree when we realize that we have to make a distinction between--well let's do it this way first. We're going to talk about a distinction between the actual--I hate to say that as if I can somehow show you a snapshot of what people did 3,000 years ago--but between the actual religious practices and beliefs of the actual inhabitants of Israel and Judah, we're going to call that Israelite-Judean religion: what somebody back in the year 900 BCE might have done when they went to the temple; and what they might have thought they were doing when they went to the temple, because I'm not sure it was necessarily what the author of the Book of Deuteronomy says they were doing when they go to the temple; so there's a difference between what actual people, the inhabitants of Israel and Judah, did--we'll call that Israelite Judean religion--and the religion that's promoted, or the worldview, I prefer that term, that's being promoted by the later writers and editors of biblical stories who are telling the story of these people--we'll call that biblical religion, the religion or the worldview that we can see emerging from many biblical texts. That distinction is found in an article in your Jewish Study Bible, an article by Steven Geller (Geller 2004,2021-2040). You're going to be reading that later on in the course. But be aware of that distinction and that article. What second millennium Hebrews and early first millennium Israelites or Judeans, Judahites, actually believed or did is not always retrievable, in fact probably not retrievable, to us. We have some clues. But in all likelihood Hebrews of an older time, the patriarchal period, the second millennium BCE--they probably weren't markedly different from many of their polytheistic neighbors. Archaeology would suggest that. In some ways that's true. We do find evidence in the Bible as well as in the archaeological record, of popular practices that are not strictly monotheistic. The worship of little household idols, local fertility deities, for example. Most scholars conjecture that ancient Israelite-Judean religion, the practices of the people in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the first millennium BCE, was maybe monolatrist. They might have promoted the worship of one God, Yahweh, without denying the existence of other gods and still kept their little idols and fertility gods or engaged in various syncretistic practices. It was probably monolatrist rather than monotheistic, really asserting the reality of only one God. Moreover our evidence suggests that Yahweh was in many respects very similar to many of the gods of Canaanite religion. And we'll be talking about some of those at the appropriate time. But continuities with Canaanite and Ancient Near Eastern religions are apparent in the worship practices and the cult objects of ancient Israel and Judah as they're described in the biblical stories and as we find them in archaeological discoveries. The Hebrew Bible also contains sources that exhibit features of what Kaufman has described as contemporary polytheisms. In Genesis 6--I mean, the text you pointed out is a good one but even better, go look at Genesis 6 where you have these nephilim, these divine beings who descend to earth and they mate with female humans. That's a real fluid boundary between the divine and human realms, if you ask me. But it only happens there, in one spot. In many passages too Yahweh is represented as presiding over a counsel of gods. Certainly in the Psalms we have these sort of poetic and metaphoric descriptions where God is, "Okay guys, what do you think?" presiding--or he's one of them, actually. In one Psalm--it's great--he's one of the gods and he says, "You know, you guys don't know what you're doing. Let me take over." And he stands up in the council and takes over. And there are other passages in the Bible too that assume the existence of other gods worshipped by other nations. So there's certainly stuff like that in there you have to think about. Now nevertheless, the most strongly monotheistic sources of the Bible do posit a God that is qualitatively different from the gods that populated the mythology of Israel's neighbors and probably also Israelite- Judean religion. In these sources the Israelites' deity is clearly the source of all being. He doesn't emerge from a preexisting realm. He has no divine siblings. His will is absolute. His will is sovereign. He's not affected by magical coercion. And biblical monotheism, biblical religion, assumes that this God is inherently good. He's just. He's compassionate. And human morality is conformity to his will. Because certain texts of the Bible posit this absolutely good God who places absolute moral demands on humankind, biblical monotheism is often referred to as ethical monotheism, so it's a term that you'll see quite a bit: ethical monotheism. Beginning perhaps as early as the eighth century and continuing for several centuries, literate and decidedly monotheistic circles within Israelite society put a monotheistic framework on the ancient stories and traditions of the nation. They molded them into a foundation myth that would shape Israelite and Jewish self-identity and understanding in a profound way. They projected their monotheism onto an earlier time, onto the nation's most ancient ancestors. Israelite monotheism is represented in the Bible as beginning with Abraham. Historically speaking it most likely began much later, and probably as a minority movement that grew to prominence over centuries. But that later monotheism is projected back over Israel's history by the final editors of the Bible. And that creates the impression of the biblical religion that Kaufman describes so well. But the biblical text itself, the biblical record, is very conflicted, and that's part of the fun of reading it. And you will see the biblical record pointing to two different and conflicting realities. You will find religious practices and views that aren't strictly monotheistic and you'll find later religious practices and views that are. And the later sources, which we might best call biblical religion, are breaking therefore not only with Ancient Near Eastern practices but also with Israelite-Judean practices, with other elements within their own society. So biblical religion as Kaufman describes it, isn't, I think, just a revolution of Israel against the nations. I think it's also a civil war of Israel against itself. And that's an aspect that is really not entertained by Kaufman. And I think it's an important one for us to entertain so that we can allow the biblical text to speak to us in all its polyphony. And not try to force it all into one model: "Well, I know this is monotheistic text so, gosh, I'd better come up with an explanation of Genesis 6 that works with monotheism," You're going be freed of having to do that; you're going to be freed of having to do that. Let the text be contradictory and inconsistent and difficult. Let it be difficult. Don't homogenize it all. So the differences between the god of the monotheizing sources of the Bible and the gods of surrounding Mesopotamian literature and older Israelite ideas, perhaps, they're apparent from the very first chapters of Genesis. That's a creation story in Genesis 1, we're going to see, a creation story that's added to the Pentateuch, Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy. This creation story is added to the Pentateuch probably in one of the last rounds of editing, probably sixth century perhaps, we don't really know. But Genesis 1 is a very strongly monotheistic opening to the primeval myths that are then contained in the next ten chapters of Genesis. So next time we're going to start with a close reading and examination of Genesis 1 through 4. We're going to read these stories with an eye to Israel's adaptation of Near Eastern motifs and themes to sort of monotheize those motifs and themes and express a new conception of God and the world and humankind.

Literature_Lectures

2_Richard_Wright_Black_Boy.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: I just want to recap what I talked about last time very briefly. I made the point in the first lecture that American literature in the middle of the twentieth century is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between the writer and the reader, between imagination and lived experience, between fiction and truth, between the reader and the text, that these are very vexed and contested interfaces at this period. I also made the argument that at this moment literary art is struggling with what to do with the legacy of modernism in the early century, but there's another strain from the early century that matters--and matters particularly to Richard Wright--and that is the American strain of naturalism: writers like Theodore Dreiser. Wright is writing very much in the vein of those writers. So even though he's very closely connected to the legacy of avant-garde modernism, he's also connected to a social realist strain, the naturalist strain. Those are two slightly different things which I won't go in to right now. He's connected to both those strains as well as the modernist strain. So what I want to do today is look closely first at the selections from Black Boy that I asked you to read and to look at those as a text and to ask ourselves what we can learn about what kind of story it is. And I said about that problem: Is it autobiography? Is it fiction? What's it trying to do? What kind of reader does it want? I suggested that there was a critical response to those issues that was somewhat negative, and I want to sort of remind you of that just by reading you a little bit from W. E. B. Du Bois's review of Black Boy when it came out. I think this sums up nicely what I was trying to communicate last time. He says, "This book tells a harsh and forbidding story and makes one wonder just exactly what its relation to truth is. The title, 'A Record of Childhood and Youth' "--that was the subtitle--"makes one first think that the story is autobiographical. It probably is at least in part, but mainly it is probably intended to be fiction or fictionalized biography. At any rate, the reader must regard it as creative writing rather than simply a record of life." So that's W. E. B. Du Bois, and I'm going to take his advice and now begin to read this book with you as creative writing. So let's see what it says to us when we look at it that way. I'm going to read passages quite a bit today, since some of you may not have been able to get the RIS packet in time, it being shopping period. So I'm going to read passages, and I hope you'll jump around with me if you have the text in your hand. In general, you should always bring the book to class. This is on page 267. This is from that second half of the book that was not published originally, but I want to point to it first of all in raising the question: What did we lose in understanding this as a literary object when the second half of the book. You can come in and sit down if you want; there's some space down here. What did we lose in our understanding of it as a literary object when the second half was not published? There are some seats here too.On 267, this is in one of these parenthetical passages where the narrator is commenting on what he's just given account of in his experience. "Slowly I began to forge in the depths of my mind"--this is the very top of the page--"a mechanism that repressed all the dreams and desires that the Chicago streets, the newspapers, the movies were evoking in me. I was going through a second childhood. A new sense of the limit of the possible was being born in me." What Wright gives us here is an account of the two parts of this story that says this is an account of not one childhood, but two. So one thing that readers lost, when they lost the second half of this book, is the sense that maturing, the process of maturing, was more than just the process of leaving the South. That has a typical Bildungsroman structure, the structure of a story about a boy who goes out from his home and sort of becomes a man through his travels. If you just have the first half, you think that that development is accomplished when Richard decides to leave the South. But what he tells us very early in part two is that no, it takes two childhoods for a black man to make that journey. So what is that journey, then, that required two childhoods to accomplish, a childhood in the South and then a childhood in the North? So now I want to turn to the beginning of the book on page 7. I'm also going to do some summarizing of these scenes for people who haven't read. Make yourselves as comfortable as you can. As I mentioned last time, in the first scene of this book the child Richard burns down his family's house playing with matches underneath the curtains. He goes and hides under the house, afraid of the beating his mother will give him, and indeed when his mother finally finds him he is beaten unconscious, and he is feverish and sick for a long time afterward. And what I want to read to you is this passage on page 7: I was lost in a fog of fear. A doctor was called--I was afterwards told--and he ordered that I be kept abed, that I be kept quiet, that my very life depended upon it. My body seemed on fire and I could not sleep. Packs of ice were put on my forehead to keep down the fever. Whenever I tried to sleep I would see huge, wobbly, white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me. Later, as I grew worse, I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes open and I was gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horrible liquid. Day and night I begged my mother and father to take the bags away, pointing to them, shaking with terror because no one saw them but me. Exhaustion would make me drift toward sleep and then I would scream until I was wide awake again. I was afraid to sleep. Time finally bore me away from the dangerous bags and I got well. But for a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me. Why start with this scene? I said last time that part of the art of autobiography is choosing. What do you choose out of your life? Where do you begin? Where do you end? What do you put next to what? Why does Wright choose this scene? It's very dramatic, so it has that going for it. It's a hook. I would suggest that this little passage I just read to you tells us, in part, why. It's a moment when a child realizes that the person who gave him life can revoke it. His mother, who gave him life, can take that life away from him. It's a profound sense of jeopardy--physical, mortal jeopardy--and I want to point to those "huge, wobbly, white bags, like the full udders of cows." One of the wonderful things you can see in the Beinecke's Richard Wright Archives is the draft copies of Black Boy. Wright revised this image in those drafts. It was at one time white faces, not white bags: white faces. This to me is a fascinating revision. First of all, it suggests of course that he was giving language to something, making a specific image out of something, that didn't quite have that specific content in his experience as a child. But that revision is also away from a sense that this jeopardy is represented by a racial face, the symbolic face of black oppression, the white face that is always cruelly set against the black boy of this account. He revises it away from that to the more generalized, fundamental, but also very personal figure of the mother and the maternal. So the white bags, this is an image of the breast. We have this fear of the horrible white liquid, as if milk were going to drown him. So the threat embodied by the mother who will beat her own son unconscious is embodied in that fevered vision of the bags like the full udders of cows. So this novel, this autobiography, begins with the sense that this boy is in danger from practically the moment he comes into the world, the moment he comes into consciousness. Then I want to note the transition that happens at the very bottom of this page after he says, "I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me." Then we move into something that I call a catalog. There are three of these in the first half. It's a list of sensations or perceptions that don't have a particular narrative structure, exactly. They are just a sort of compilation of experience: Each event spoke with a cryptic tone, and the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon. There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came to my cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning. There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi from the verdant bluffs of Natchez. I'm going to stop there. There's a lot you can say about these catalogs, and when I used to teach the whole of this text over a course of two days, I would spend a lot of time--and, if you want to, it's worth and it repays the time that you could spend--rereading these and thinking about the exact language: for instance, here at the very top of page 8, when he talks about the "dreaming waters" of the Mississippi River. What you have there is a moment when the perception of the child becomes the perception of the world imbued with imagination. So the river is not dreaming; it's Richard who is dreaming. So this is in part a catalog that represents the awakening of sensuality, the awakening of the body to its environment, to his environment. But also, there is this sense of imagination, and you get that in the dreaming waters; you get that in the sense of travel or the image of the road that you can see in the green and red vegetables stretching away in their rows to the bright horizon. There is that sense of space, of expansiveness, the possibility of travel. Why put this next to, right after, that very dramatic scene? Why is this the moment to enter into that meditation? Well, I think it's because it's embodying an oscillation--that will come back in this text--between radical jeopardy and deprivation and the compensation of sensuality, emotion and imagination. These two oscillate back and forth so the moment of deprivation is often then balanced by a moment of imagination. And so what I'm going to do is just now run through the next two or three scenes and talk about why they're set next to each other. So the next one we have, just on page 9--these come quite rapidly here--is the day his mother tells him that they're going to Memphis on a boat called the Kate Adams. He says: My eagerness thereafter made the days seem endless. Each night I went to bed hoping that the next morning would be the day of departure. "How big is the boat?" I asked my mother. "As big as a mountain," she said. "Has it got a whistle?" "Yes." "Does the whistle blow?" "Yes." "When?" "When the captain wants it to blow." "Why do they call it the Kate Adams?" "Because that's the boat's name." "What color is the boat?" "White." "How long will we be on the boat?" "All day and all night." "Will we sleep on the boat?" "Yes. When we get sleepy we'll sleep. Now hush." For days I had dreamed about a huge, white boat floating on a vast body of water, but when my mother took me down to the levee on the day of leaving, I saw a tiny, dirty boat that was not at all like the boat I had imagined. If in the catalog imagination is awakened, this is what it can then do for Richard. It can endow his daily experience with a kind of romance. But of course this is a poor, black child growing up in the South, and his expectations, what his mind can imagine, is always going to be greater than what the world can deliver. So if the landscape invites him to grow as an imaginative person, the social world he lives in, this episode signals to us immediately, will never live up to that imagination. There is a sense of powerlessness that arises from the repeated oscillation that you start to see even set up in these first three little vignettes, and the problem of powerlessness is first located not centrally in that social world. I don't think we're meant to understand that the young Richard, when he discovers that the Kate Adams is a dirty, little boat and not this romantic vision of a ship he had hoped for, that the young Richard thinks to himself, "This is because I am a poor, black boy growing up in the South." It's simply an experience of disappointment. The sense of powerlessness, the most profound sense of powerlessness, suggested already by the first episode where his mother almost takes back the life she gave him, is rooted in the family. And we get such a dramatic vision of that in the next episode that follows, the episode of the kitten. So for those of you who haven't read, Richard's father works nights and sleeps during the day, and during the day the children therefore have to be very quiet. There is a cat outside the apartment building that starts to meow and the boys are interested in it. The father yells at them, says, "Make that cat shut up," and they can't. He says, "Make it shut up. I don't care. Kill it if you have to. Kill that cat." Richard at this point already hates his father. His father will abandon the family quite soon after this episode. For Richard, he is mostly this kind of presence: a cavailing, angry, abusive presence. His resentment over his powerlessness within the family seethes in this moment, and he thinks of a way to get back at his father. "I'll take his words literally; I will kill the cat," he thinks, and so he does. He hangs the cat. Richard's mother finds out when his brother tells on him, and the father cannot punish him. He has taken the father's words literally when they were not meant literally, but in doing so--in relying on his father's words, in a sense, to protect him, even as he subverts them--he escapes the punishment that would otherwise so naturally and habitually follow. So Richard's first exertion of agency in this book is through the agency of words, in this case in asserting an interpretation of the words at odds with their intended meaning. It's as if Richard takes those words, and he makes them his own, takes them from his father and gains a different kind of strength from them, a strength he can then use to get back at his father. This is the first instance in which Richard will do what he later describes Mencken doing, using words as weapons. His discovery of Mencken using words as weapons in a political sense is a very powerful moment for him in his intellectual development. In this case it's a much more visceral kind of development. It's the understanding that he can make things happen in the world; he can defend himself against his father's punishment through the use of words. But I want to note that his mother takes a different approach. If his father resigns himself to Richard's subterfuge, his mother does not, and this is on page 12. He says: I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I had taken his words literally. He could not punish me now without risking his authority. I was happy because I had at last found a way to throw my criticism of him into his face. I had made him feel that if he whipped me for killing the kitten I would never give serious weight to his words again. I had made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me. But my mother, being more imaginative, retaliated with an assault upon my sensibilities that crushed me with the moral horror involved in taking a life. And I want to just flip over to 13, about the same place on the page. She's confronted him with having knowingly taken the father's words the wrong way: "You stop that lying. You knew what he meant." "I didn't," I bawled. She shoved a tiny spade into my hands. "Go out there, dig a hole, and bury that kitten." I stumbled out in to the black night sobbing, my legs wobbly from fear. Though I knew that I had killed the kitten, my mother's words had made it live again in my mind. What would that kitten do to me when I touched it? Would it claw at my eyes? As I groped toward the dead kitten, my mother lingered behind me unseen in the dark, her disembodied voice egging me on. The mother has her own way of using words for power, and she does it by making the kitten live again in his imagination. It's as if she is writing fiction there in that scene. She is representing this kitten that he's killed so that it comes back to haunt him. So, once again, there is that immediate oscillation. The moment Richard gains some power from the use of words, his mother takes it back by exerting that power herself, taking that power away from him. There is a kind of drum beat of thematic material as these scenes pile up. The drum beat is all about language. Yes, this is a book about the privations of growing up in the South poor and black, but it is very much, very consciously, a book about the development of someone who attends to language. So in these early scenes it's all about power. But it's actually not even quite so easy or so simple as these early scenes that I've just discussed might make out. Language has powers that are entirely unpredictable, that can't be harnessed in precisely that deliberate way: by making a decision to take someone's words in the wrong way, or by telling a story to make a moral point, as the mother does. So think about the scene where Richard gets drinks in the saloon as a child. Patrons pay him and give him drinks to go up and repeat their words to other people in the bar. Usually this happens between men and women, so a man will give Richard a drink and pay him a few pennies to go to a woman in the bar and repeat certain things that he has trained Richard to say. In doing this, the patrons titter; everybody sort of has fun with this. Richard has no idea what he is saying. He's simply repeating the sounds of the words that are given to him. Through this process he becomes addicted to alcohol at a very young age, but at the same time he learns something about language. It has mysterious powers. It has capacities to make things happen in the world that he doesn't know how to control. When he finally emerges from this time of being a young drunkard--his mother sort of locks him up in the house and makes sure he can't get out and then takes him to work with her and so on, so that he loses that taste for alcohol--in the text what you have right next to that is the beginning of his insatiable questions. He starts to just torture his mother with a thousand questions about everything in the world. The addiction to alcohol is in a sense replaced by an addiction to knowledge. The experience of having language speak through him and do things that he doesn't understand makes him want to acquire again that agency that he experienced when he took his father's words literally. This theme comes back in the scene where his grandmother is washing him. Do you remember this scene? His grandmother is washing him and his brother in the tub, and she's washing his butt, and he says to her, "When you're finished, kiss back there." And whew! She's flying off the roof with anger, chasing him around the house trying to whip him with a wet towel, so on and so forth: a very dramatic scene again of powerlessness within the family, of being the victim of violence within the family. But in this case it's a response produced in the negative register similar to the responses produced in the saloon. He says something, and he doesn't really know where those words come from. He doesn't really know what made his granny so angry about those words. He doesn't understand the words that he's used, but boy! Did they produce a response! So there is this sense in which the story of a developing writer is the story of someone learning--even before they learn how to control language fully--that language has these capacities. Well, there is another element, though, to the kind of language that Richard is describing learning, and that is the racial element. He is learning a racialized language. And here I want to look at page--let's see--page 79, actually first on 47, just in passing quickly. You know what? I'm looking at my watch. We don't have time. We'll go straight to 79. On page 79 we get an account of a conversation between Richard and his friends and it's annotated with interpretative asides. So I'm going to start in the middle of this: The crowd laughs long and loud. [This is in the middle of the page.] "Man, them white folks oughta catch you and send you to a zoo and keep you for the next war!" Throwing the subject in to a wider field. "Then when that fighting starts, they oughta feed you on buttermilk and black-eyed peas and let you break wind!" The subject is accepted and extended. "You'd win the war with a new kind of poison gas!" A shouted climax. There is high laughter that simmers down slowly. "Maybe poison gas is something good to have." The subject of white folks is associationally swept into the orbit of talk. "Yeah, if they have a race riot round here, I'm gonna kill all the white folks with my poison." Bitter pride. Gleeful laughter. Then silence, each waiting for the other to contribute something. "Them white folks sure scared of us, though." Sober statement of an old problem. What we see here is a doubled voice. This is a moment when the narrative voice begins to split in a very conscious way. So what you have is the account of Richard and his friends talking in the past, and you have the present narrator's parsing of how this language relates to topics that impinge upon their very context, the racial realities of the South. So what you see here is a narrator who has learned to do that parsing. Some of these terms that he uses are literary--climax, the creation of suspense--so he's tracking this as if it were the development of a narrative. But he's also suggesting how humor is used to broach topics that are impossible to talk about in more direct ways, or that feel dangerous to these boys to approach in more direct ways.So there is a kind of grammar of race that this boy is learning while he experiences language in all these other more visceral, family-oriented ways. There is this social context of race relations whose grammar he is also learning, and I would just remind you of the passage where he starts to ask his mother about whether his granny is white or not. There's a long conversation, and she gets very frustrated with him. She doesn't really want to answer that question. She is a woman who looks very white but is categorized as black in that system of the South. And so Richard is learning a grammar of race even while he tries to work out how to use language as a source of power in his family. The split voice, the development of what you could say is that racial double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois talks about, that double consciousness of the racial reality, is manifested in that split in the narrative. In "The Horror and the Glory," the second half of the book as originally written, that voice becomes the parenthetical. It takes another development altogether. So if you look in certain passages--Let's see. On 272 and 273--actually, I'm going to start on 271. This is where Richard is talking about the waitresses, the white waitresses he works with in the restaurant in Chicago. This is what he says about them about three quarters of the way down the page: During my lunch hour, which I spent on a bench in a nearby park, the waitresses would come and sit beside me talking at random, laughing, joking, smoking cigarettes. I learned about their tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply, their sex problems, their husbands. They were an eager, restless, talkative, ignorant bunch, but casually kind and impersonal for all that. They knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove instinctively to avoid all passion. That commentary that you get right in the scene--not in the parenthetical--it's as if the voice of Richard remembering the early parts of his childhood, the voice that can parse a conversation, is then part of what gets remembered as part of the scene. When Richard is with those waitresses, he's reflecting on these things as he experiences them. But there is a second kind of development, and this gets to that second childhood he invokes that happens to him when he goes to Chicago. There is a social analysis that he begins to be able to advance partly due to his reading in Marxism, in sociology. Wright was very interested in the sociology of the 1930s and '40s. He read a lot in that vein. He was very interested in economics, and he wanted to understand how the social structures of capitalism and the economic structures of capitalism impinged upon the way personalities were formed. And that's why he's interested in the emotions of these waitresses. And in fact the question of emotion bears directly on his sense of what books are for. There is a remarkable moment on page 280 where he talks about his aspiration as a writer. And this is remarkable for how different it is from someone like Nabokov or John Barth or many of our other writers on the syllabus: If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with the sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living. That's remarkable for a writer to say, "I want to write so that my words disappear." He doesn't want us to see the art of his sentences. He wants us to feel, and it is in fact feeling, that he credits to novels, that allows him to imagine that he himself could have a different life. And he talks about this if you look at the published ending on 413 that we find in the notes, when this second half wasn't there, when he asks, "How dare I consider my feelings superior to the gross environment that sought to claim me?" He states the problem of living in the South as a problem of feeling, that he needed to claim and consider his own feelings. He says: It had only been through books, at best no more than vicarious cultural transfusions, that I had managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. My belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from my abiding conviction of their ultimate value. [And I'm just going to skip down.] . It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had invoked in me vague glimpses of life's possibilities. Reading for him is a way of accessing feeling, and that's the kind of reading that he wants from us, from the people who read his book. The kind of feeling that he wants us to have is sort of stated in that alternate ending, but "The Horror and the Glory" shows how that kind of feeling enters in to a much larger cultural analysis. That piece of it, which is gone when the second half disappears, that piece of it is what he tries to communicate in a very condensed way. And I want now to show you some of those letters that I mentioned. (Andrew, can you get the screen and the lights? I am switching gears pretty quickly here 'cause we don't have a lot of time.) As I explained last time, it was the Book of the Month Club that caused him to make this change in his account. And what I have in front of you right now is the second page of the first letter that Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote to Wright, where she first raises the problem that she sees in the ending as he has revised it. Now the shame here is that she's talking about a version of the ending you see in that note on 413 in our edition. She is talking about an early draft of that ending, and it's not in the Beinecke. I don't know where it is. I don't know where the drafts that accompanied these correspondences are. Now it's just possible that they're in that big archive somewhere, and I just haven't found them yet. So if any of you want to be an archive sleuth and find them, great. I looked and I can't find them. Sometimes when correspondence is saved you run into these kinds of problems, so we have to guess a little bit at what she was looking at. What I want to point out to you is this part of her letter, the third paragraph here, where she says, "My idea is this." In the first part of the letter, she has made some sentence-level suggestions for the end of the book, and now she embarks very tentatively on her major suggestion: "My idea is this. You ask a question all of your many readers have asked themselves about you with an eagerness full of anxious hope. What was it that always made me feel that way? What was it that made me conscious of possibilities? From where had I caught a sense of freedom?" And if you've read the ending in the notes, you'll remember those passages where he asks that question. And his answer in that published version is, "From books." But this is what she is thinking: We too ask ourselves that question, "we" meaning those Americans who, following the example of their parents and grandparents, have done what they could to lighten this dark stain of racial discrimination in our nation. What we have hoped, faintly hoped, was that those efforts of men of good will have somewhat availed, a little, enough so that those suffering from racial injustice might catch a passing glimpse of the fact that they are rooted in those American principles so mocked and degraded by the practices of racial discrimination. In what else could they be rooted? That they exist is a proof that American ideals are not the tawdry pretenses they are so often accused of being. [And then I'm going to skip down to the bottom of the next paragraph.]. To keep that conception in regard to decent race relations alive and growing has been the aspiration of generation after generation in many an American family, judging by my own and by those I know. To receive in the closing pages of your book one word of recognition for this aspiration, if it were possible for you to give such recognition honestly, would hearten all who believe in American ideals. This is quite striking. Imagine that you are Richard Wright, and you've grown up with the life that he describes in this book. Now you've read some of it. And you're being asked to suggest in the closing pages of the autobiography--which is closing where you did not want it to close, in the middle of your book, not at the end of your book--you're being asked to essentially thank the good, liberal white people who have been working on behalf of the end of racial discrimination. Well, Wright finds this an extremely difficult request to respond to. And you can track it here in his response. I'm going to read from here so I can actually see it. "Your more general"-- He says, "Okay. I'll respond to those sentence-level things." Your more general suggestion was much harder to deal with. I fully understand the value of what you are driving at, but frankly, the narrative as it now stands simply will not support a more general or hopeful conclusion. The Negro who flees the South is really a refugee. He is so pinched and straightened in his environment that his leaving is more an avoidance than an embrace. For me, it has been my reading of fiction--far removed from political considerations--that evoked in me a sense of personal freedom or the possibilities of escaping the South. I added a paragraph to the body of the epilogue expanding this notion. And I take that to be the paragraph where he talks about what fiction has done for him specifically. Canfield Fisher is not satisfied with this. She comes back at the problem. This is at the bottom of the letter: I gather that you cannot bring yourself to use even once the word "American" in speaking of "the tinge of warmth which came from an unseen light," such a beautiful, sensitive phrase. Some of the novels and stories you read were, it is probable, laid in your own country of America. Hence, some of the characters in books through whom you had glimpsed life's possibilities were fellow Americans of yours. These unseen lights which shone through them upon your faith were reflections of American efforts to live up to an idea. Those characters could have been no other than products of American tradition. However dimly that light came through to you, suffering so acutely from the rough denial of the very existence of American ideals, part of it must have come through American delineation of American characters. Now keep in mind this is 1944. This is the summer of 1944. America is just joining the war effort in Europe. This is a fight against fascism. That's the way that it was presented to the American public: a fight against Nazi Germany. And in later letters in this series between her and Richard, and also in the review (the little sort of summary that she wrote up for the Book of the Month Club newsletter), she invokes the Nazis specifically as a comparison to the kind of oppression that Richard was trying to escape in the South. So this is caught up in a moment of patriotism where American freedom is being held up very much as the ideal, that thing that we fight for when we go to Europe to fight. And so to have Richard present this picture of America that doesn't ring the changes of that patriotism comes to be a problem in her mind. Now when Black Boy was published there was a war bond advertisement on the back cover of the book. It really was just, even as a physical object, all bound up with the politics of its moment. Richard's response to this--we just have two seconds, and I want to show it to you. I love these pieces because you can just see him struggling on the page. (Sorry.) This is his first attempt at writing back to her. See all the scribbles? This was hard for him. There are two other drafts. If you go and look at them, it's quite interesting. He's trying extremely hard to make an answer, and what he ends up doing is bringing that knowledge that he built up in Chicago, the knowledge that he gets from reading economics and sociology and Marxism. He gives an analysis of industrial capitalism. That's the kind of framework he uses to try to get her to understand what it would mean to be a Negro in the South, how isolated he was culturally, how impossible it is to see something like an ideal America of freedom and justice from that subject position. In the end, the compromise is that he notes several writers including Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. And I just want to have you compare the catalog of writers on 413 that he mentions. They are Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, H.L. Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis: all American writers. Compare that with the catalog that he gives of his reading on 249, and you'll see what's being elided. This is the top of 249. So certainly we have Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, but then we have Dostoevsky, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac. You get the point. This is a very cosmopolitan reading list. What Canfield Fisher asks him to present is a totally nationalistic one. My point in sum, what I want you to take away from this, is to see how an account of a life is struggling against forces outside of itself--publishing forces, the forces of politics, of war, of an editor--how a writer is struggling to make his account faithful to his own artistic vision, his own social vision, against those forces, and how those forces have an impact--try as he might, have an impact--on what the text looks like when we hold it in our hands. Black Boy or American Hunger is a dramatic example, and--thanks to the Beinecke and to the scholarship that's been done on it by the editor who brought this whole text out in the 1990s, Arnold Rampersad--thanks to that work we get to see it up close; we get to see what that back-and-forth looks like. We'll have another version of this when we think about Lolita, which in your edition has an essay at the end called "On a Novel Entitled Lolita." That's only there because someone tried to censor that book. It's another example of how the world comes to impinge on and change our reading experience. It's something that we will come back to and explore more in the next class.

Literature_Lectures

21_Philip_Roth_The_Human_Stain_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. So, today I'm going to give my second and final lecture on The Human Stain. My first lecture focused on identity, and my final argument about the novel in relation to the question of identity is that the first half of the novel comes down on the definition of identity through secrecy, that what makes you who you are--anyway what makes Coleman the person he is--is his secrecy. "Who he really was was his secret." So, I did that little reading of that phrase. Today I want to talk about what happens in the second half of the novel to the question of secrecy, and how that relates, then, into the question of desire and narrative. So, that's where I'm going today. If you'll recall, on page 47 (and I don't think we need to turn to this), desire is said to be generated by the human discrepancies, the difference between Faunia, with her illiterate vocabulary, and Coleman, with the vocabularies of two ancient languages and his language of English. So, discrepancy, difference, is understood as the engine of desire. So, this shouldn't be surprising, when you think about what desire is. Many psychological theories of desire agree on one thing, and that is that desire is reaching towards a lack. Desire is generated by lack, so you can think of difference as one version of what it means to lack. What you are not, you then desire; what you have not, you then desire. So, you don't desire that thing which you already have. So, it's just a simple structure of desire that I want you to keep in mind. Now, I want to note, in the second half of the novel, something that you probably noticed. At the beginning of Chapter 4, we are plunged back in to Nathan's first-person voice. So, that "I" of Nathan comes back very strongly at the very beginning of that chapter. We haven't seen it for a while. We've been embedded in Faunia and Les and Delphine and Coleman, inside all their minds, using that technique of free indirect discourse, where the narrative voice just, sort of, seamlessly allows you to look at the world through that character's eyes and in that character's mind. So, that technique is highlighted as a technique in Chapter 4 when we are reminded so suddenly that this is all being written by Nathan, that the illusion of these characters' voices is just that; it's an illusion. The second half of the novel, then, sets up the source of the story--how does Nathan know all that he knows to give us that story--sets up the problem of that source, and then it finally answers it in the person of Ernestine Silk. Ernestine, Coleman's sister, answers some of those basic questions about Coleman's background, first of all revealing his racial secret simply by her presence at the funeral and her resemblance to his daughter, Lisa. So, her body is a kind of revelation to Nathan, and then she fills in some details that we can see recapitulate material that has come in an imaginative form, different imaginative form, earlier in the novel. So, I would note (and I will come back to this point), Ernestine is kind of a stock character. There are some characters in this novel--Delphine, to some extent Les, and Ernestine-- who are stereotypes of one kind or another. There are various ways of thinking about this problem in Roth's fiction, but the critical way of thinking about is that his fiction is uneven, that he cannot somehow truly inhabit the complexity of some kinds of characters. And he has said about his own work that he writes novels about the lives of men, very clearly masculine fiction, so that should come as a surprise to none of you. So, that's one way of understanding the sort of clichéd quality of characters like Ernestine. I'm going to offer a slightly different way of understanding that by the end of the lecture, so be looking for that. But, for now, I just want to focus on the structure of the second half of the novel, setting up the problem of knowledge and then producing a part of an answer to it. But, even though you have that partial answer, there is still a residue of fictionality within the logic of the novel. Of course, it's all fiction. But, within the logic of the novel, we know that there is a lot that Nathan is making up. So, Ernestine's story doesn't get you Steena dancing at the end of Coleman's bed, for instance, a very important scene in Nathan's construction of Coleman. So, there are scenes like that, that are purely the product of Nathan's imagination. You have the final spasm of this kind of imagining when Nathan stands at Coleman's grave and asks him to speak to him one last time and tell him the story of telling Faunia his racial secret. So, you have that last scene where we enter fully in to the minds and voices of those characters. One question that you want to ask, here, is how we should understand this move. Is there something, perhaps, duplicitous about the way Nathan suggests he's related to this enterprise of imagining? We're told on page 337, right before that graveside scene, that it was Ernestine's speaking to him that caused him to be seized by his story. This is in the middle of the page: "I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and then and there I began this book." So, we get an account of its start. So, he's "seized" by the story. It puts him in a position much like he is at the very beginning of the told story that you've just arrived at the end of, when Coleman shows up at his door demanding that he write the story of the unjust dismissal from Athena College. So, there are two moments when Nathan claims to be seized by Coleman and his story. It puts Nathan in a very passive position. It suggests that he's not the active party here, that somehow he has been drawn into this enterprise, into this narrative, maybe against his will. I think you can see this as duplicitous, so I want to look a little bit at how this is duplicitous, and this is where desire comes back into the braid of my argument. There is a sentence on page 164 I want to direct your attention to. Desire, that urge to inhabit or fill the lack of whatever it is, has a structural relation to language in Roth's work. So, desire has a structural relation to language. And I think there is no better example of it--and there's perhaps no better example of Roth's ecstatic sentence structure--than this sentence on 164, and I will read the whole of it. It starts "The kid." You see it about a quarter of the way down, halfway through a line, "The kid." This is about Faunia. The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction, and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth. Wow. That's quite a grammar. What you see in that sentence is language trying to embody desire by its very excess. It's acting out, formally, just how far Coleman has to reach from where he was, to arrive at Faunia as his object of love and desire. And you see that missing lack is thematized in the middle of this sentence: "because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction." She embodies everything he isn't--and the grammar of that sentence relentlessly tries to fill in, to reach towards who she is. And that's why I think it's--it's a repeated noun phrase; that's the grammar of his sentence, a repeated noun phrase. So, you just have piles of descriptions of Faunia, and--now let me see if there is, no--there is no verb. This is a sentence fragment. People, this is a sentence fragment. You can't find a verb for the subject. So, it's quite a remarkable feat of grammar, and it embodies the formal quality of language as desire. But, it's more than just at the level of grammar, or at the structural level of language, that desire and language coincide. It's also there in the way sex is imagined as anti-metaphorical, if you look on page 203. This is when Faunia is dancing for Coleman, and she insists, when Coleman wants it to mean something--I guess she is just about to dance for him--when he wants their sex to mean something, she says, "No. It's just what it is." "He said to her, 'This is more than sex' and flatly she replied, 'No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex all by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else.' " What Coleman's urge is, is to use language to make sex into something other than it is, to make meaning out of it. That's a fundamentally linguistic enterprise. By insisting that it can't be made into something else, it puts sex not so much outside of language, as it elevates sex to the equal of language. So, just as the grammar of the sentence reaches out to fill that lack, sex does that, too. But it doesn't require the resources of language to be successful, so you don't need the language. Really, all you need is sex to produce that human connection that desire seeks. So, it elevates sex. Sex is the analog to writing in other ways, too. On page 37, Nathan talks about sex as "the mania to repeat the act," and he also talks about the language tasks that go along with it. This is on the top of 37, when he is talking about why he withdrew from life: I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egotism, the resilience or the toughness or the shrewdness or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings. So, sex always comes along with those meanings, and Nathan could not separate out the two in the way that Coleman succeeds in doing with Faunia, in finding an illiterate woman. I think it's her illiteracy, in a sense, that enables the separation of sex from language. But that "mania to repeat the act" looks a lot, actually, like Roth's writing. Roth is an extremely repetitious writer, across his novels. His novels often engage the same kinds of characters, sometimes the same character: lots of Nathan Zuckerman novels. Even the ones that are not Nathan Zuckerman novels look like Nathan Zuckerman novels. You usually have someone who looks like Nathan. The women often look the same. They often rant in similar ways. So, there is something about Roth's writing that is close to that mania to repeat the act; so, there you get that parallelism again. So, the distance between one person and another is crossed by language and by sex in two equal tracks. But it's also crossed, in this novel, by the imagination. And this is where the entering into Coleman's story comes into play. Now, you will have noticed, at a few jarring points, that suddenly you'll be in free indirect discourse, in the third person, and suddenly the "I" of that character appears. And there's an example on 165. This is Faunia, at the bottom of the page. She is thinking about the crow. That crow's voice. She remembers it at all hours day or night, awake, sleeping or insomniac. Had a strange voice, not like the voice of other crows, probably because it hadn't been raised with other crows. Right after the fire I used to go and visit. You see that "I" coming very suddenly there. So, why does it appear? Well, this is a moment when Nathan, as the writer, takes an unusual liberty, makes an unusual claim on us as readers, by entering directly into the first person of this character, violating what has been the formal habit of the novel, up until that moment, or the formal habit of that scene. It happens on a few occasions. So, he becomes the eye of Faunia. Now, you might say that this is just to emphasize the imaginative work that's required for Nathan to tell this story. But I want to suggest that there is a structural relationship between Nathan and Faunia that we have to attend to, and to excavate this I want to go back to that first dance scene, on page 27, with Coleman and Nathan. This is when they start to talk about sex. And this is Nathan's reflection: "The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he's telling you something about the two of you." It's quite a remarkable statement. Its homoeroticism should not be lost on you. He's telling Nathan about sex with Faunia, but how Nathan hears it, is that it's about him and Coleman.Now, I don't mean to say that it literally becomes about the fantasy of sex between--literal sex between--Coleman and Nathan. But, I will point out a couple of things. One is that Nathan, if you recall, has been rendered impotent by his surgery. So, his only relation, in that physical way, to Coleman, is not really as a man as such. I think he's imagined to be unmanned in this scene. So, then you get, on page 43, an even fuller description of this. He's talking, Coleman is talking, again, about Faunia, and Nathan is very much responding in the conversation. We were enjoying ourselves, now, and I realized that in my effort to distract him from his rampaging pique by arguing for the primacy of his pleasure, I had given a boost to his feeling for me, and I exposed mine for him. I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, over-involved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to. But ever since he had banged on my door the day after Iris's death and proposed that I write Spooks for him, I had, without figuring or planning on it, fallen in to a serious friendship with Coleman Silk. The language of courtship and of gushing, of that overeagerness, suggests a crush. It reinforces the homoerotic charge of their dance, and the way Nathan observes his virile body as they dance together. And it gives it that emotional dimension. So, we're told of Coleman, in another spot in this basic scene, that he's contaminated by desire alone. Nathan, if he is seized by Coleman's story, as we're told at the end of the book, is contaminated, too, by that story, and by desire for Coleman. So, just as that stepping over into the first person from free indirect third-person discourse, stepping over in to the "I" of his character, represents crossing a certain kind of boundary, so does the erotic charge that is given to his relationship with Coleman. Now, there are a couple ways of thinking about that homoerotic structure. One is through the work of a critic named Eve Sedgwick, and if you've taken any women's and gender studies courses, or studied feminist interpretations or queer interpretations of literature, she should be a familiar name. She wrote a famous book called Between Men, and her argument is that, in a lot of--I think her subject was Victorian fiction--in a lot of Victorian fiction, the homoerotic or the homosocial bond between men is channeled through a woman, and the perfect example of that, in this novel, is when Coleman and Nathan go to the dairy farm to watch Faunia. So, it's as if, by both watching Faunia together, through her their desire for one another is channeled. So, they're able to experience desire together, and it's safely not for each other because Faunia is right there as a mediating point of the triangle. But I think we can say some other things about the structure, too, and not just that it's there. Essentially, Sedgwick's theory allows us to see how it works, to see that it's there. But then, we want to ask, why? And this is related to another feature of the text that you might have noticed, and that is the repeated reference to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Did you notice that? It comes back. Tadzio and Aschenbach are the two characters from Mann's Death in Venice. This is a mid-twentieth-century German novelist. This is a small novel, a little novella. It's about an older man named Aschenbach who goes to Venice for a vacation. And he's a scholar and a writer, and he goes to Venice, and he suddenly finds himself transfixed by a beautiful young boy that he sees at the hotel. And he spends the novel chasing Tadzio, the boy, all around the city and trying to get close to him. And the mother realizes, the mother of Tadzio realizes there is this sort of lecherous man coming after her boy and warns him, Tadzio, to stay away from Aschenbach. In the end Aschenbach is taken with, I think it's tuberculosis or some disease--I can't remember what the disease is--and he dies in Venice. This passion for the boy is described, and this is the part that Roth quotes in this novel, as "a late adventure of the feelings." So, in those quotations Roth is directing us to think about the lateness of that desire as its characteristic quality. It's an older man suddenly waylaid by an unexpected surge of passion. Now, what I find interesting about that is that Roth could have chosen any number of romantic stories to characterize this. Humbert would be one: a late adventurer of the feeling, an older man, younger woman. Why does he take a homoerotic structure? Why does he choose this story, a story of same-sex desire, rather than a heterosexual desire? Why is this the model that he chooses? So, I would suggest it's important that the novel is called Death in Venice, that Aschenbach dies. There is something about homoerotic desire--and this is a characteristic of fiction that features it over the centuries--that it seems deadly. Somehow it's deadly. It's imagined as being deadly. Of course, this is a product of its unconventionality in older times, the fear that a heterosexual person, or a person who conceives themselves as heterosexual, might experience if they are taken by a homoerotic urge. So, there's somehow that death gets wound into stories of homoerotic desire, and The Human Stain is no different. I just want to point out a couple of examples. You can see it in the difference between the way Nathan describes his decision to dance with Coleman and the way Faunia describes hers. This is Faunia on 226. This is just right in the middle of the page. She's playing with her hair and thinking that her hair is like seaweed, a great trickling sweep of seaweed saturated with brine, and what's it cost her anyway? What's the big deal? Plunge in, pour forth. If this is what he wants, abduct the man and snare him. It won't be the first one. That's Faunia, sort of thinking, why not? Why not dance as he's asking me? Why not? What's the big deal? What does it cost her? Contrast that with, on 25 and 26, the way Nathan thinks. "What the hell?" I thought, "We'll both be dead soon enough." And so, I got up and there on the porch, Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot together. And, if you look on 26, you get another description where death comes back up as a reason. Maybe why it didn't even cross my mind to laugh and let him, if he wanted to, dance around the porch by himself, just laugh and enjoy myself watching him, maybe why I gave him my hand and let him place his arm around my back and push me dreamily around that old bluestone floor, was because I had been there that day when her corpse was still warm--[that's Iris' corpse] and seen what he'd looked like. The corpse pops up in the middle of this reflection on why he's dancing. So, two times in the space of a page, death accompanies his decision to dance with Coleman. So, why then is homoerotic desire such a threat, a threat in this way? Well, one structural reason could be that homoerotic desire threatens to collapse the engine of desire, which is difference. The novel has set up difference being the engine of desire. So, if it's desire for the same--understood as gender, the important sameness being gender--then it looks like a self-canceling desire, a desire that can't sustain itself, somehow, or that lacks that fundamental structure of difference that the whole novel seeks to set up. If desire is the engine of the sentence, as well as the engine of the narrative, as well as the engine of human connection in the novel, its collapse is a great threat, not just to human connection, to human life, but to writing. So, this is one way to understand the problem, and it goes back to speak to my point about inhabiting, or being a parasite upon, Coleman's story. Nathan inhabits the "I," and finally begins to conflate himself with Coleman, or with Coleman's lovers, and we get various versions of this. So, while Faunia and Coleman dance, he replaces--let's see--he replaces Les. So, while they're dancing in the cottage--Do you remember this scene? I can't find my page number in my notes right now -- while they are dancing in Coleman's house privately--this is after Coleman stops seeing Nathan--he's outside in his car lurking on the road. The only other person who does that is Les Farley. So, he comes to be in the position of Faunia's other lover. Okay. So, that's one way he enters into his characters, as he starts to occupy, structurally, the same spot as they do, but it actually gets much more complicated. This is on 326, in Ernestine's conversation, in her scene. She is very helpful to say: "Well, then" [because Nathan has said, "I've been trying to figure out Coleman"] "Well, then," she says, "you are now an honorary member of the Silk family." So, there he is, taken right into the Silk family, so he starts to replace Coleman after Coleman's death. At the very end, as he's getting into the car to drive down to New Jersey for dinner with the Silks, he says--let's see--"Like Steena Paulsson before me," he was going to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. He becomes Steena in that passage. He becomes Faunia when he dances with Coleman. He leeches into all the aspects of Coleman's life. So, it's not just inhabiting imaginatively, but there are these structural ways that he comes to double Coleman and also to double his lovers. It's by virtue of a blankness that Nathan sees in Coleman and in Faunia that he can pull this off, and this is very noticeable in my favorite scene of the novel, the Tanglewood scene, which I think is quite beautiful. This is on 209,210. He's writing about music, here, and the feeling that all the people in the audience were going to be swept away by death. That's sort of the overwhelming sense of mortality in the beginning of the, in the middle of the page, there, and he says: And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing, in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth. I would suggest that it's precisely that "lacking nothing" that makes it deathly, because if you lack nothing, there is no desire. So, it's the very stasis of the day and the solidity of that music that brings him into this mood. And then Bronfman appears, the pianist, and you get this wonderful description of what he does, how he attacks the piano and banishes death with his contention with the piano. And it should remind you of all that's said about life being an argument. Remember, I mentioned last time Coleman saying that all Western literature begins with a fight, with an argument between Achilles and Agamemnon, Coleman's fight with the college, Coleman's fight against the racial contract drawn up for him at birth, Nathan's contention in the world of desire which he then withdraws from. He implants in his own narrative of his thoughts what Coleman will later say. This is on 211. Coleman says, "I was telling Faunia that he took ten years at least out of that piano." Nathan had said on the previous page that they "would have to throw that thing out after Bronfman's finished with it." He plants in the narrative the shared thought, asserting that somehow Coleman's mind is Nathan's mind; that collapse is written right into the realist assumption of the novel. We, sort of, read along in those passages thinking, "oh, let's take this at face value, oh, yes, they're thinking the same thing." But, of course, it's Nathan who plants that; it's Nathan who's making it up. We don't know how honest Nathan is. So, he claims to have the same thoughts. It's the blankness. He describes--Nathan--Faunia and Coleman as a pair of blanks, and it's precisely that blankness that allows Nathan to inhabit Coleman. This is, in fact, a quality that he finally attributes to the, as he says, "negroes," in the photograph of Coleman's family. And this is on 337, the very bottom of 336. "They were pale but they were Negroes. How could you tell they were Negroes? By little more than that they had nothing to hide." This is quite an astonishing sentence. If identity is, in its ideal form, secrecy, if you have nothing to hide, then you don't have an identity. There are two things, two implications that flow from that. One is that racial secrecy is really the only kind of secrecy that matters, because being Negro is the only thing that one would hide. It also means that these people are just as blank as Faunia and Coleman; so there is a somewhat pernicious racial simplification going on, here. It's somewhat related to the simplification of thinking that homoerotics is the desire for the same. What both of these logics leave out is that point that is insisted upon, actually, earlier in the novel, which is that the other fellow always has a life you can't know, that it's simply the otherness of any individual person that keeps you from knowing more than you can see on the surface. It's the otherness, not the racial otherness, necessarily, but just the otherness. So, in these last pages, otherness gets collapsed back into racial otherness, and I think perhaps this is why Ernestine emerges as a stereotyped character. He is folding an analysis of identity back into racial stereotype, an analysis of identity as blank. They have no interiority. One question that you could ask is whether this constitutes a critique of Nathan. Is Nathan being brought to task for stealing the story of Coleman Silk? Is this making passing, racial passing, into the ultimate form of identity, that to be interesting as a character you've got to be passing? Is it indicting Nathan? Is it suggesting that Nathan really does desire Coleman? These are all kinds of questions that you can think about. One thing, I think, it does do, though, is highlight the constructedness of the narrative, across the board. Coleman says about his Spooks narrative that he could not do the creative remove that the pros do because the creative remove, he says, "It's still the raw thing." It's a bad book because it's still the raw thing. He has no self-distancing. So, what the critique of Nathan does, the implicit critique of Nathan, does is distance us from him, to some degree. It allows us to see him as an unreliable narrator. It also, I think, models Roth's own relation to Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan Zuckerman is the creative remove, is the medium of the creative remove, that Roth requires in order to write about his own life. Most of the Nathan Zuckerman novels draw very heavily on Roth's life, and in fact at one point Roth writes an autobiographical nonfiction book called The Facts. And it's all, mostly, about complaining, about the response to Portnoy's Complaint, and also caviling against his ex-wife, a very happy habit that Roth has. At the end of The Facts there is a letter to Roth from Nathan Zuckerman where he says, "You idiot. Why are you doing autobiography? This is not your style. Facts: it's just not your thing. Forget it. It's terrible. Don't publish this. Go back to what you do best, which is making stuff up." Roth has played with this dynamic between autobiography and fiction throughout his career. And I think the threat, the deathly threat, of the collapse that's figured in the homoerotic element of this novel is the threat of--it sort of doubles the threat of--Roth collapsing into Nathan Zuckerman. And, in another sense, it doubles the threat of writing really only about men, that what's weak about the novel is the way that it inhabits the subjectivities of women especially. Delphine Roux is just a caricature, really, and in many small ways Faunia is a caricature, too. I've talked about Ernestine. Les can be seen as a caricature. So, it's not something exclusive to his female characters, but it does suggest, as I mentioned a little while back in the lecture, a certain kind of limit to Roth's project. So, I will finish by saying Roth is an extremely important writer in this period because of the very complexity with which he makes the texture of his novels speak to the question of fiction's relationship to life, writing's relation to life, and the relationship between the writer and what he or she writes, the writer and the work. These are questions that vex writers in this period. We have seen many writers in this syllabus who worry about these things: Barth, Morrison, so many of them, Maxine Hong Kingston. Roth does it in a way that nobody else particularly does. He's also widely admired. When The New York Times had this feature a few years ago--I think it was 2004--on the best novels of the last twenty-five years, and they polled about 125 public intellectuals, writers, professors of literature, reviewers, and asked what is the one best novel. They asked--they made it hard. They said, "What's the one best novel of the last twenty-five years?" Well, number one was Beloved, number two was Blood Meridian, but if you added up all the Roth novels together that people chose, Roth was the winner. So, he's highly regarded, although there is split opinion, as you can see, there, about which of his novels is really the best one. So, I will say to you that we're tracking, in what we're reading, writers who are making an enormous impact on what American fiction looks like in the latter part of the twentieth century. It's very interesting to me to see the very ambivalences that are at the heart of this fiction. Now, I'll stop there for Roth. Let me just say, as we go into Edward P. Jones, the novel that I don't have on the syllabus is Beloved. It's always a novel that I hope that you've read. I used to teach it routinely, but it's fun to shake it up and put some different things on, knowing that a lot of you will have read it. When you read Edward P. Jones, if you have read Beloved I'd like you think hard about the relationship between those two writers and the two novels. If you haven't read Beloved, I urge you: just go to Wikipedia, and just get a plot summary, or open it up, even better. I won't ask you to read it on the side, extra, although I would love to. Find out a little bit about it, just so that you have it in your head as you begin to read. Okay. Thank you.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_5_Critical_Approaches_to_the_Bible_Introduction_to_Genesis_1250.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: We were talking last time about evidence of the use of different sources in the biblical text, and I mentioned Richard Simon, who was the first to argue that perhaps Moses wasn't the author of the entire Torah. In the mid-eighteenth century a fellow named Jean Astruc first noticed the use of the name Yahweh in certain stories and passages, and the name Elohim in others. And on this basis he came, and others came, to identify what have come to be known as the J and E sources. J being pronounced "y" in German, as a "Y," so Yahweh is spelt with a "J". So the J and the E sources. Now Astruc actually happened to maintain the idea of Mosaic authorship. He argued the Moses was drawing from two separate long documents, which he identified as J and E. They used different names for God, and he was drawing on those in his composition of the Torah. But in the next century his work would be expanded by Germans who identified other sources that made up the Pentateuch especially, the first five books of the Bible especially. And in 1878 we have the classic statement of biblical source theory published by Julius Wellhausen. He wrote a work called The History of Israel, and he presented what is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. Now you've read a little bit about this in your source readings, but it's the hypothesis that the historical or narrative sections of the Bible--Genesis and stretching on really through 2 Kings--is comprised of four identifiable source documents that have been woven together in some way. And he argued that these documents date to different periods and reflect very different interests and concerns. These four prior documents, he says, were woven together by somebody or some group of somebodies to form the narrative core of the Bible. Wellhausen argued that these sources therefore do not tell us about the times or situations they purport to describe, so much as they tell us about the beliefs and practices of Israelites in the period in which they were composed. This is going to be an important claim; this is an important predicate of the documentary hypothesis. So although the sources claim to talk about events from creation, actually, forward, Wellhausen says, no, they really can only be used to tell us about the beliefs and religion of Israel from the tenth century, which is when he thinks the oldest was written, and forward. Now his work created a sensation. It undermined of course traditional claims about the authorship of God and the work of Moses. It's still disputed by conservative groups and Roman Catholic authorities, although Roman Catholic scholars certainly teach it and adopt it. The four sources that were identified by Wellhausen are, as I said, the J source and the E source, but also P, the priestly source, and D, which is primarily the book of Deuteronomy. Now as I said the first two sources are named because of the names of God that they employ, but it goes a little deeper then that. According to J, the knowledge of the proper or personal name, if you will, of God, Yahweh, begins with the first human, with the adam. So already in Genesis 4, adam seems to know this name and refer to God by this name. If we look at other sources such as P and even E, Yahweh's name is not known to humankind until he chooses to reveal it to Moses, and this happens in the time of the Exodus. So in Exodus 6:2-3, which is assigned by source critics to the P source, the Priestly source, God appears to Moses and he tells Moses then that he is Yahweh. He says, "I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," the patriarchs before you, "as El Shaddai, but I did not make myself known to them by name, Yahweh." So the P source has a different sort of theology, if you will, of God's name, or the revelation of God's name. And the same sort of thing happens in Exodus 3:13-16, and that's assigned to the E source. So once you've identified rough blocks of material according to not just the name of the deity but also their assumptions about when humankind knows the name of the deity, then you can analyze these blocks or chunks of text and begin to identify certain characteristic features: their style, the terminology they use. Source critics were able to come up with a list of what they believed were the main characteristics of the various sources. So the main characteristics of the J source, which begins with the second creation story, so the J source picks up in Genesis 2:4, second half of verse 4 are: (1) that it uses a personal name Yahweh for God from the time of creation, and that will be in your Bibles as "Lord"; (2) It describes God very anthropomorphically. It's the J source that has God shut the door of the ark after Noah. It's the J source that has God smelling the sacrifice after the Flood, the sacrifice that Noah offers. It's in the J source that God eats with Abraham and bargains with him. It's in the J source that God meets with Moses in this mysterious passage and tries to kill him one night; (3) J has a very vivid and concrete earthy style; and, (4) It uses the name Mount Sinai to refer to the place where the Israelites with Moses will conclude the covenant with God. As for the date? Well source critics felt that a clue to the dating of the J source could be found in the passage in which God promises a grant of national land to the Israelites. The boundaries of the land are given there as the River of Egypt, the Nile, and the Euphrates. It was argued by some that those were basically the borders of the Kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon. Think of 1000 as your date for David, that's basically when the monarchy begins. So the beginning of the tenth century. The argument is that under David and Solomon the empire reached that boundary and so clearly this is a writer from the tenth century who's seeking to justify Israel's possession of its kingdom from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates; it's presenting that kingdom as a fulfillment of a promise of land that God made to Israel's ancient ancestors. For that reason source critics thought J must date to about the tenth century and to the time of perhaps King Solomon. It also seems to reflect the interests of the south. Remember, we talked about the fact briefly that at a certain point in Israel's history there is a division upon the death of Solomon in the late tenth century. The kingdom divides into a northern kingdom now called Israel and a southern smaller kingdom called Judah. And the southern interests seem to be reflected in the J document. So source critics decided this is a Judean document from the tenth century. The E source, which source critics say begins around Genesis 15 is really the most fragmentary. It seems to have been used to supplement the J source rather than being used in a larger form. So sometimes it seems very difficult to isolate, and there's a lot of debate over this, but the E source's characteristics are that (1) it uses Elohim, again it's a plural form of the word god or gods, but when it's used with a singular verb it refers to the God of Israel; (2) it has a much less anthropomorphic view of God; (3) God is more remote. There aren't the direct face-to-face revelations in the E source; most communications from the divine are indirect. They'll be through messengers or dreams and; (4) there's also an emphasis on prophets and prophecy in the E source. Miriam, Moses--they're both referred to as prophets in the E source; (5) The style is more abstract, a little less picturesque, and; (6) the E source uses a different name for the mountain where the covenant was concluded. It uses the name Horeb. So you will sometimes see as you are reading the text, they will sometimes refer to Horeb instead of Mount Sinai, or you'll see the two names used interchangeably. And it's been the theory of scholars that that's because it comes from a different source. The E source seems to be concerned primarily with the northern tribes, therefore the northern kingdom. And so source theorists decided that it was most likely composed in the northern kingdoms about the ninth century. And then, according to this hypothesis, the J and E sources were combined, primarily J with E being used to supplement it, probably somewhere in the eight century, late eighth century; and that was the backbone of the Pentateuchal narrative. It covers the early history of humankind, of Israel's early ancestors known as the patriarchs and matriarchs. Their stories are told in Genesis. It contained the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt in the book of Exodus, and the stories of the wandering in the wilderness that are found in the book of Numbers. The anonymous scribe or editor who combined these sources didn't care to remove any redundant material or contradictory material, as we've already seen. Now there are two other sources according to classical source theory, and these are D and P. D, which is the Deuteronomic source, is essentially the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy differs from the narrative sources. This is a book of speeches. The book purports to be three speeches delivered by Moses as the Israelites are poised on the east side of the Jordan River… I'm not good with directions; I had to stop and think… the east side of the Jordan River, about to enter the Promised Land. But according to the source theorists it clearly reflects the interests of settled agrarian life. It doesn't reflect the interests of people who have been wandering around nomadically. It has laws that deal with settled agrarian life. The main characteristic of D, however, which assisted source theorists in fixing its date, is the following: D is the one source in the Bible that clearly insists that one central sanctuary only is acceptable to Yahweh. God cannot be worshiped at makeshift altars. God cannot be worshipped through sacrifices at some local sanctuary; all sacrifices must be offered in the one central sanctuary where "he will cause his name to dwell." It doesn't actually ever say Jerusalem, which is why Samaritans think that it's at Mount Gerizim and that they have the correct temple and that they're authorized to offer sacrifices. They got it wrong when they thought it was Jerusalem; Samaritans think that that is where God caused his name to dwell. So Jerusalem is not actually mentioned in Deuteronomy, that's a later reading, but the place where God will cause his name to dwell, and only at the temple there, can there be sacrifices. This is a very different perspective from other biblical books. So you're going to see in the stories of the patriarchs that they're wandering all around the land and they're offering sacrifices. There are other books too where it's clear that there are local shrines, local sanctuaries, local priests who are offering sacrifices for people throughout the land. But Deuteronomy insists: one central sanctuary. All of the outlying alters and sacred places must be destroyed. Now centralization of the cult was a key part of the religious reform of a king of Judah in 622. I've marked a couple of dates on the timeline up here: 722 is the fall of the Northern Kingdom, 622 a reform by King Josiah in Judah . We read about this in one of the historical narratives where the temple's being refurbished. A book is found that says one central sanctuary. King Josiah says: What have we been doing? Get rid of the outlying altars, everything has to be centralized here. So that reform, Josiah's reform has caused many scholars to associate Deuteronomy, the centralizing book or source, with the late-seventh century, around this time in Judah. The trouble is D seems to reflect a lot of northern traditions, the interests of tribes who are in the north. Well the Northern Kingdom was destroyed in 722; so this is the theory: source critics conclude that D is an old source that was originally composed in the north in the eighth century. When the northern kingdom fell, when the Assyrians conquered and many Israelites would have fled to the southern kingdom, Deuteronomy or the D source was brought to Jerusalem, stored in the temple where a hundred years later it was discovered and its centralization was put into force by King Josiah. P is the Priestly source, and that is found mostly in the books of Leviticus and the non-narrative portions of Numbers. Now the major characteristics of P, the Priestly source, are (1) a great concern with religious institutions, with the sacrificial system, with the Sabbath, with holidays, with rituals like circumcision, the Passover, dietary restrictions (the laws of kashrut) the system of ritual purity and impurity, and also holiness, ethical holiness and cultic or ritual holiness. P does have some narrative, and you've read some of it: Genesis 1, the first creation account, is attributed to P. It's orderly, it's systematized, the god is extraordinarily abstract. Because in the P source another characteristic is that; (2) God is transcendent, and even perhaps remote, much more so than in J, for example. Generally in the P source, God is concealed and revealed only in his kavod. This is a word that's often translated as "glory," but what it refers to actually is a light-filled cloud. God seems to be the burning fire inside this light-filled cloud. He travels before the Israelites in that form, leading them through the wilderness and so on. That seems to be in the P source. P is also; (3) interested in covenants, in censuses, in genealogies. All of those sections very often that link stories, are attributed to the P source. And because P elements often serve that kind of function as a bridge between stories, or very often P sources seem to introduce a story or conclude a story, the source critics felt that priestly writers were probably responsible for the final editing of the Bible, bringing together J and E and D and adding their materials and finally editing the work. Now, Wellhausen dated the priestly source to the exilic period, the period after the fall of the Southern Kingdom in 586 when the Babylonians have taken many of the Judeans into exile in Babylon. So the narrative parts of P, J and E are continuous parallel accounts of the history of the world, if you will, from creation until the death of Moses. Source critics believe that they have a uniform style, uniform vocabulary, uniform set of themes, and chronological framework. So according to Wellhausen, and I sort of schematized it chronologically for you up here, the priestly school drew together all of this older material, added some of its own editorial material--bridges, introductions, conclusions--inserted the large priestly documents of Leviticus and Numbers, and so the Torah--and they did this sitting in exile in Babylon--and so the Torah is really the result of five centuries of religious and literary activity. And this of course is a very, very different portrait from traditional claims about the authorship of the Pentateuch by one man, Moses, in approximately the fourteenth century BCE. There are different terms that we use to describe the modern, critical study of the Bible in the late nineteenth century as I've just described it. One term is literary criticism, because it proceeds by closely analyzing the literary features of the text: the terminology, the style, the motifs. But because the goal of this literary critical school was to identify specific sources, isolate sources, we also refer to it as source criticism. You'll see those terms used interchangeably in your literature. Today literary criticism has a slightly different connotation from what it was in the nineteenth century, so people prefer the term source criticism. But you should know both are used. However, the purpose of identifying and isolating these sources was not just to say, "Look at that, there are these different sources." The purpose was to ascertain as far as possible their relative dates to one another, and to therefore enable the work of historical reconstruction to proceed: primarily a reconstruction of the history of the religion of Israel, and the historical situation of the authors of the different sources. Therefore literary criticism is not only called source criticism. It's also called historical criticism, because its ultimate goal and purpose was not just to isolate the sources, but to arrange them according to relative dates as far as they might be ascertained, and then to chart changes in Israel's religion. You have a very readable introduction to some of this in Norman Habel's little work. Another excellent work which is not on your syllabus that is also critical of Wellhausen and some of the biases in his work, is found in a little work called Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman, which has a great cover because it says "Who Wrote the Bible? Richard Friedman," [audience laughter]. So to sum up: the documentary hypothesis is an effort to explain the contradictions, the doublets, anachronisms and so on in the Bible by means of hypothetical source documents. So the theory posits hypothetical sources, traditions and documents to explain the current shape of the Torah the way we have it, to account for some of these phenomena that we find. As a next step the sources are assigned relative dates, not absolute dates, relative dates, and then they're analyzed to reveal the different stages of Israel's religious history. And so source criticism is also known as historical criticism because it's a tool for getting at the history, not just at the text, but ultimately a history of Israelite religion. That is how it has been used. Now Wellhausen's work is subtle and it's quite brilliant, but it certainly reflects biases of nineteenth- century German scholarship, which believed strongly in the superiority of Christianity over Judaism. In his writings Wellhausen has some things to say about Judaism that are none too flattering. He describes Judaism at the end of the biblical period as a dead tree, twisted and perverted. He especially harbored a distaste for things cultic: priests, cult, ritual, in keeping with what was going on in Germany at the time, and the Protestant movement and so on. And these sorts of biases are very apparent in his work, and very apparent in his dating of the sources, and in his description of the evolutionary stages of Israel's religion. So for example, source critics before Wellhausen all thought that P, the priestly material, was some of the oldest material in the Bible, that it was an early source. But Wellhausen said no, it must be a late source, because priestly, cultic, ritual material--that's clearly a degenerate stage of religion that shows a sort of guilt-ridden behaviorism. It's not true of spiritual religion, so clearly that's the latest stage of Israelite religion when it had died and was waiting to be reborn in new form with the arrival of someone in the first century. Clearly his dating of P owes a great deal to his biases and religious ideology. He saw the priestly material as having to come from the -exilic age, post 586, and this is one of Wellhausen's most controversial points that's still hotly debated today, and we're going to return to this debate when we actually take a look at Leviticus and Numbers. At that time we'll be able to see what's at stake in the whole question of the dating of the priestly material. The historical critical method, and the documentary hypothesis in particular, are not inherently biased, I want to make that point very strongly. They are simply analytical tools: look at the text and its features and draw some conclusions based on what you're finding. They are simply analytical tools. They're not inherently biased. They can be applied fairly to the text, and they're extraordinarily useful. It's just that some of the earlier practitioners of these methods did have ideological axes to grind, and we need to be aware of that. The documentary hypothesis works fairly well when you have parallel accounts. It works a little bit less well when the accounts are interwoven because sometimes picking apart the sources can become dry and mechanical, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Some of the people who have carried this method to its extreme will go through and almost word for word--this is J, this is E, the next word is P… it's quite remarkable how certain they feel that they can break things down almost on a word-to-word basis as if an editor sat there with scissors and paste, cutting out word for word, and putting them together. It sometimes can reach heights of absurdity, and it can really destroy the power of a magnificent story, sometimes, when you carve it up into pieces that on their own don't really make all that much sense. It needs to be remembered that the documentary hypothesis is only a hypothesis. An important and a useful one, and I certainly have used it myself. But none of the sources posited by critical scholars has been found independently: we have no copy of J, we have no copy of E, we have no copy of P by itself or D by itself. So these reconstructions are based on guesses. Some of them are excellent, excellent guesses, very well supported by evidence, but some of them are not. Some of the criteria invoked for separating the sources are truly arbitrary, and extraordinarily subjective. They are sometimes based on all sorts of unfounded assumption about the way texts were composed in antiquity, and the more that we learn about how texts in antiquity were composed, we realize that it's perhaps not unusual for a text to use two different terms for the same thing within one story, since we find texts in the sixteenth, seventeenth century BCE on one tablet using two different terms to connote the same thing. So the criteria that are invoked for separating sources often ignore the literary conventions of antiquity, and the more that we learn about that the better able we are to understand the way the biblical text was composed. Repetition isn't always a sign of dual sources; it often servers a rhetorical function. Variant terms aren't always a sign of dual sources; they may have a literary or aesthetic function. So most biblical scholars today do accept some version of Wellhausen's theory--yes, we feel the Bible is composed of different sources. We don't always have tremendous confidence, though, in some of the finer details and conclusions of his work and the work of other scholars who followed after him. Some doubt the existence of E altogether--it is so fragmentary and so isolated. Others defend the antiquity of P --we'll be coming back to that. Others argue that everything is post-exilic, everything's after the fifth century. It was written in the fourth, third century in the Persian period. None of it comes from an older period. Scandinavian scholars, they're not enthusiastic about source criticism at all. The whole Copenhagen School of Bible scholarship prefers--many of them prefer--to see the Bible as basically an oral narrative that just grew through accretion over time. So I did assign readings in the documentary hypothesis--it's extraordinarily important--but you do need to understand that it is one hypothesis, a major and controlling hypothesis out there, but it's not without criticism. Moreover, while it's a very important and worthwhile project to analyze the component sources and examine their specific concerns and contribution, and you'll see that I'm a very great fan of P, we must remember that whatever sources were woven together, they were woven together with great skill and care by a final redactor, or redactors, who wanted them to be read as a unity, and surely that must mean something. It must mean they can be read as a unity and that that's a challenge that's been issued to us. So the Bible can be read both analytically and synthetically. We need to combine an awareness of origins, not gloss over the problems and the contradictions and say, "Well, we can resolve it by coming up with some strange scenario that makes both things work." Be aware that there are problems, contradictions, these derive from different sources, but also be sensitive to the artistry of the final composition. What does it mean that both of these elements have been retained here side by side? What is the phrase? The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So keep that awareness. And in the last 20 years or so, source criticism--actually 30 years or so--source criticism in the conventional sense of the analysis of documentary sources has been supplemented by other new and exciting methodologies in the study of the Bible, and we'll see some of those. I've also included as optional reading for you sometimes, a couple of articles that analyze biblical stories. They are written by someone who thinks that documentary hypothesis just doesn't really help us out much at all, and she gives some wonderful, coherent readings of stories that argue this scene here or this contradiction here isn't a sign of a different source; it serves this literary purpose, that literary purpose. And I put those in subversively for you to have a look at in your own time. They're brilliantly written and they give you insight into the various ways in which we can read the text. But many of the alternative methodologies for studying the text do assume sources, in some broad sense even if not all the details of Wellhausen's theory, so it's clear that a great deal of biblical scholarship owes its accomplishments and its theories to the work that was done by the source critics of the nineteenth century. I want to flip back to text for a moment before I return to talk about a whole contradictory set of methodologies, or methodologies that pull in another direction. But first I want to get us up to the patriarchs and matriarchs where we're going to be starting off on Monday. We have just had a flood, and then we move into Genesis 10; and Genesis 10 contains a genealogical table of nations. In this table, peoples of various lands are portrayed as having descended from a common source, a common ancestor, Noah, through his three sons, Japheth, Ham and Shem. Shem: Shemites, Semites. Shemites are said to descend from Noah's son, Shem. The biblical text at this point is understanding humanity as basically sharing a common root united by a common language. The story that follows in Genesis 11 can be understood then as an etiological tale, a tale that comes to explain something, and this tale is coming to explain the diversification of language: when we look around we see that in fact people don't seem to be that united and are in fact divided by their languages and so on. So how are we to account for the diversification of languages, the spread of different ethnic linguistic groups throughout the lands of the earth if we all come from one common creative moment, one common ancestor? Genesis 11 explains that. The story is therefore going to act as a bridge between the first section of Genesis which has a universal scale, a universal scope, and what happens in Genesis beginning in Chapter 12, where we're going to focus in on one ethnic, linguistic group and one land. This story serves as the bridge, first of all explaining how it is that a united humanity speaking a common language even becomes diversified linguistically and ethnically, to then focus in on one group and one land. Babel, pronounced "bavel" in Hebrew, is Babylon. The tower in the story of the Tower of Babel is identified by scholars as a very famous tower, a ziggurat, a ziggurat to Marduk in Babylon. The Bible's hostility to Babylon--after all it's going to be the Babylonians who are going to destroy them in 586--but the Bible's hostility to Babylon and its imperialism is clear. This story has a satirical tone. The word Babel, Bavel, means Gate of the God, but it's the basis for a wonderful pun in Hebrew, which also actually happens to work in English. Babble nonsensical speaking, confusion of language. And I think there's obviously some onomatopoeic quality to "Babel" that makes it have that kind of a meaning both in English and a similar word in Hebrew. So this word can also with a little bit of punning mean confusion, or confused language. So this mighty tower that was obviously the pride of Babylon in the ancient world is represented by the biblical storywriter as the occasion for the confusion of human language. The construction of Marduk's ziggurat is represented as displeasing to God. Why? There are very many possible interpretations and our commentaries are full of them. Some interpreters view the tower builders as seeking to elevate themselves to storm heaven by building a tower with its top in the sky. Others see the builders as defying God's direct order. Remember, God said, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth," spread out and fill the earth. But these people are said to come together, they congregate in one place, and instead of spreading out they're trying to rise high. There seems to be a real defiance of God's design for humanity, and so God frustrates their plan for self-monumentalizing, and he scatters them over the face of the earth. He makes it more difficult for them to do this again by confusing their tongues. Once again there's a very steep learning curve for this God. He has to keep adjusting things depending on what it is that humans are doing. So now he's got to confuse their languages. Some interpreters see this story as representing a rejection of civilization or certain aspects of civilization. Monumental architecture, empire building, these are always things that are looked upon with suspicion for most of the biblical sources and biblical writers. Those sorts of ambitions are viewed negatively. They lead to human self-aggrandizement. They are indicative of an arrogant sort of self-reliance--that the prophets will certainly rail against--and in some sense a forgetting of God. So this is a time in which humans spread out, lose their unity, and this is also a time really when they turn to the worship of other gods. The first 11 chapters of Genesis then have given us a cosmic, universal setting for the history of Israel. Those first chapters cover 2500 years if you go through and add up the chronologies. The rest of Genesis, Genesis 12 through 50, will cover just four generations: the generations of the patriarchs and the matriarchs. They will be Abraham and Sarah; their son Isaac, his wife Rebekah; their son Jacob, his two wives Rachel and Leah, I am leaving out other wives; but finally their children, 12 sons and one daughter. So God's focus has shifted dramatically, the text's focus has shifted dramatically. Why? When you get to the end of Genesis 11 you feel that God has been rather shut out. Things aren't going well. Although God created the earth as an intrinsically good paradise, he created humans in his image, he provided for them, humans to this point have put their moral freedom pretty much to poor use. Many scholars, Kaufman, Sarna and others, say that one of the differences then between these myths of Israel and the mythologies of their neighbors is that in Ancient Near Eastern mythologies you have the struggle of good and evil cosmic powers. In the myths of the Bible this is replaced by a struggle between the will of God and rebellious humans. So these myths are telling also of a struggle, but it's on a different plane. Adam and Eve, Cain, the generation of the flood, the builders of the tower of Babel--God has been continually spurned or thwarted by these characters. So he's withdrawing his focus, and is going to choose to reveal himself to one small group, as if to say, "Okay, I can't reach everybody, let me see if I can just find one person, one party, and start from there and build out." And so in Genesis 12 which begins the second stage of the Bible's historical narrative, we read that God calls to Abram to leave the land of his fathers and travel to a land which God will show him, beginning a whole new stage of the biblical narrative, and we'll sense that there's a very different feeling when you get to Genesis 12. When you read that material, it will feel different to you. And because of that we need to talk a little bit more about ways to read the biblical text, methods of criticism and so on. In preparation for looking at the biblical narrative material that deals specifically with the Israelites, we need to think of some, or learn about some, of the other critical methodologies that are used in biblical scholarship, and for a moment we're going to the adopt the role of historian. I'm going to ask you to think like historians--whatever that might mean--now and as we move into next week and look at Genesis 12 through 50. The source critical method that we talked about today focuses on the hypothetical period of the compilation of the text, the compilation of the four sources into the Torah. But later scholars began to ask, "Well, what about the pre-history of those sources? What were the sources' sources?" Why should that be important? Remember that the source critics claimed and concluded that J, E, P and D were written from the tenth to the sixth centuries, and the implication, well actually not just the implication, the strong assertion of many of them was that despite the fact that they purport to tell of events prior to 1000, in fact they're just not at all reliable for those periods. They were written centuries after the fact, we really can't know anything about Israel, Israel's religion, Israel's history, religious history before the tenth century. That was a very dissatisfying conclusion to many people, because the writers of J, E, P and D probably didn't sit down at typewriters and just invent their documents out of whole cloth. It doesn't seem that that's the way these materials would have been composed. They didn't invent, probably, all of these cultic rules and ritual practices all of a sudden. It seems likely that they were drawing on older traditions themselves: older stories, older customs, older laws, ritual practices. Scholars in the next wave of biblical scholarship began to ask a different set of questions; they became interested in asking: what materials did the compiler or the compilers of J or E or P draw on in the composition of those sources? Did they use more ancient materials, and if so can we figure out what they were? Do they contain reliable traditions for an earlier stage? And if so, then maybe we do have access after all to information regarding Israelite history prior to the year 1000. Suddenly you see an analytical approach to the Bible that's going to pull in the exact opposite direction from the classical source theory. One of the leading scholars to take up this question was Hermann Gunkel, whose name is at the top over there. Gunkel had a great knowledge of the oral literature of other cultures, other nations, and that led him to ask: Can we perhaps analyze these four literary source documents and figure out the pre-literary stages of their development? What went into their compilation and composition? He found support for this idea within the Bible itself because at times the Bible seems to name earlier sources quite explicitly. We don't have records of those sources anymore, but they seem to be named in the Bible. In Numbers 21:14 there's a little poetic excerpt that gives the boundaries between Moab and the Amorites, and it's quoted and it says it's from the Book of the Wars of the Lord. It's quoted as if this is a source that the person is drawing on and using in the composition of his text, and it's quoted in a way that makes it sound as if the source should be familiar to the reader. We also have mention of something called the Book of Yashar in Joshua, that's also quoted, in Joshua 10:13. Or in 2 Samuel 1:18, we have David lamenting, a very beautiful lament over the death of Saul and his beloved Jonathan. It seems to actually be an epic song that recounts acts of Israel's heroes. He's reciting that now as he laments over the death of these two, and so it seems to be an earlier source that's been put into the story of David and his lament. So it seems reasonable in light of the practices of other people, other ancient cultures and literatures as well as some contemporary literatures, and it seems reasonable in light of the explicit citation of sources in the biblical text to suppose that in fact the four primary documents are themselves compilations from other source materials, or drawing on written or oral materials from an even earlier period. Gunkel began to focus on small little units. He was interested in small units within the four primary documents, and he identified genres or forms, what he called forms. The German word is a Gattung, Gattungen, forms. He would identify these small units, and that gave rise to the name of this approach, which is form criticism. He believed that what he was doing was identifying older, pre-literary forms that had been taken up and incorporated by the literary sources, by J, E, P and D. Examples of the kind of form, or Gattung, that he would identify are things like a hymn, a proverb--we often have biblical texts quoting proverbs that seem to be folk sayings--laws, rituals, folk stories of a particular type, poems, legends, songs, fragments of mythology. So for example he says of Genesis 6:1-4, a passage that you've read: When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. The Lord said, "My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years." It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim [these giants of some kind] appeared on earth--when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring [these giants, these Nephilim]. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. That's just stuck in there, in Genesis 6:1-4. This is an older fragment of a mythology or a legend which is put into place here. It's explaining the origin of heroes and great men of renown in the old days. He also says that there are etiological stories. We've talked about those--legends that give the origin of a name, or a ritual, or an institution. There are different types of etiological stories. He says there are ethnological legends that will give you the story accounting for the origin of a particular people: so the Moabites for example, and the Ammonites--not a flattering story at all following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Obviously the Israelites didn't care for those people very much and gave them a pretty nasty origin. We also have etymological legends, because they're explaining the name of something. It's given this particular name because of an etymomological connection with some event earlier. So all of these things, he argues, are probably older existing traditions that have been taken up and adapted by the biblical writer, and they may preserve some historical reminiscence. More importantly, more important then the actual events that they might be reporting, is the fact that behind each of these is some sort of function. Each one of these did some sort of cultural work, it had some function or setting in life. That's what we can discover when we isolate these forms: this setting in life. That helps us learn something about ancient Israelite society or culture way before the tenth century. That's Gunkel's claim. So form criticism wasn't content with just identifying these various types of material, these various genres; it asked what was their function? What was their Sitz im Leben? What was their situation in life, their cultural context? What does it tell us that we have a large number of liturgical texts? What does it tell us that we have a large number of texts that seem to point to some sort of judicial context? What does it tell us that we have a great deal of proverbs, or wisdom material in certain parts of the Bible that we might date to a certain time? What does this tell us about society and what people were doing? Growing out of form criticism is tradition criticism. This is a type of criticism that focuses on the transmission of traditional material through various stages, oral stages and literary stages, until it reaches its present form in the text. Now you can imagine as a story is told and then it's retold, it is obviously changed and adapted. Tradition criticism looks at that. Looking at Ancient Near Eastern parallels is very helpful. You can see how some of those motifs and themes were changed in the process of being transmitted within Israelite culture and society, and again, to serve some sort of cultural function, or purpose. So the present text of the Pentateuch obviously rests on a very, very long period of transmission, both oral recitation and transmission, very much like the Greek classics, Homer's classics, the Odyssey, the Iliad: they also had a long history of oral recitation and transmission, and were transformed along the way. Tradition criticism likes to look at the way people receive traditional material, rework it in creative ways and then adapt it to their own purposes and contexts and transmit it. Sometimes that process is reflected in the Bible itself. Traditions in one part of the Bible will be picked up in a later part of the Bible, and written rather differently with a different point of view. So Deuteronomy, for example, recounts events that we've also read about in Exodus, and sometimes the differences are startling. Sometimes there are completely new emphases and the story can come out to be a very, very different story. 1 and 2 Chronicles are a retelling and a reworking of much of the material from Genesis through 2 Kings, and it cleans up a lot of the embarrassing moments. It presses its own themes in retelling those stories. Early laws are subject to reinterpretation. Ezekiel comes along and does some interesting things with some of the legal material that we find in Leviticus. This is all the kind of thing that tradition criticism looks at. Tradition criticism wants to uncover the changes that occur in the transmission of traditional material. It's already happening--we can see it--within the Bible, and the assumption therefore is that it happens before the material even gets into the Bible. Perhaps we can figure some of that out, and it's a process that also aids in historical reconstruction. So you can see after classic source criticism, which came along and leveled people's interest in anything before the tenth century, and said: all we have are these written accounts that reflect the biases of the people at the time who wrote them, you then have the rise of types of scholarship that say: we're not satisfied with that. That's not really how literature works. People don't sit down and invent things out of whole cloth, particularly material of this type. It clearly has a history, they're clearly drawing on sources and maybe we can use analytical tools to figure out something about the period that you might think would be lost to history. So these types of criticism are emphasizing the real life historical setting of the materials that are in the biblical sources, their relationship to the wider culture, and that's something that earlier source criticism didn't care too much about. All of these analytical modes of studying the Bible--by analytical I mean sitting down and analyzing the features, the literary features of the text, and drawing conclusions from them--all of these modes of examining the Bible--most of them developed by German scholars--can be contrasted with the North American tradition of scholarship which emphasized the correlation of biblical and archaeological data. I've written the name Albright; William F. Albright, was a leading scholar at the American school of biblical studies, and he was an expert in the fields of Palestinian archaeology and Assyriology. He focused on illustrating the Bible with the Ancient Near Eastern sources that at that time were newly coming to light-- archaeological findings; and his argument was--and it's an argument that's to a large degree not accepted anymore but--his argument at the time was that archaeology supported the basic historicity of biblical tradition. There are some definite problems, however, with viewing the Bible as history. There are certainly problems with chronology: it's hard to pin down dates for a lot of things. Many of the events are given more then one date. A lot of the numbers...the Bible tends to use ideal numbers; it tends to use fives and multiples of five, or multiples of five plus seven. You have ten generations from Adam to Noah. You have ten generations from Noah to Abram. These things begin to raise suspicions. We have suspicious repetitions of events, things that happened to two or more of the patriarchs: twice Abraham goes into foreign territory and tries to pass his wife off as his sister. Isaac does the same thing. Are these three versions of one basic tradition that got assigned to different patriarchs? Are we supposed to think of these as representing three separate historical incidents? What's the likelihood of these things happening? Is that historically reasonable? So there are lots of reasons to feel that biblical chronologies of the patriarchal period are not accurate historical records: I use that phrase with some timidity. But in the twentieth century scholars of Albright's school argued that many of the traditions in the book of Genesis contained authentic reflections of the historical period they claimed to deal with. And they cited a number of considerations. We'll take those up on Monday, but I would like you--as you read Genesis 12 and forward and think about that material--I'd like you to ask yourself: Is this historical writing? By what criteria do I judge historical writing? What do I think historical writing is? What makes some writing historical? What makes other writing fictional? Where do we get these genres from? Why is so important to us to figure out what this is? Think about some of those issues, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we turn to the texts in Genesis 12.

Literature_Lectures

26_Reflections_Who_Doesnt_Hate_Theory_Now.txt

Prof: Well, last time we saved theory from the clutches of Knapp and Michaels, and we did so by saying that there really is a difference between language and speech. That's a claim that I want to continue investigating in today's concluding lecture, but in the meantime when I say we saved theory, you may well be asking by this time, "Well, okay, so you saved it, but for what? Why?" We began to suggest last time that in a certain sense, especially in view of neo-pragmatists' claims about the agency of language and speech-- understood to be one and the same thing-- in view of claims of this kind, do we have to conclude that theory is impractical? That is, that it can't have anything to do with pragmatist objectives? That, too, is something I want to worry a little bit about today. Why do we bother to save literary theory? Well, it has something to do plainly with communication. Speech, as we said last time, is unquestionably for--that is to say we have made it for--communication. So the old, frankly incredibly tired question, "How well do we communicate with each other?" is unfortunately, in a way, not irrelevant to what we're trying to get at here. I want to say a couple of things about what the French during the existentialist period called la manque de la communication. In a way, they're not really connected. First of all, I want to say that we actually communicate rather well. Congratulations to us, in other words! I think that many of the conventional ways in which people worry about whether or not we can understand each other-- many of those ways of thinking about the problem are actually exaggerated. My own feeling is that perhaps a good deal of the time we understand each other all too well, and > that it might be better, in a way, if we didn't have quite such an acute sense of where each of us are coming from. It probably would improve human relations rather than otherwise, and this may have something to do with what I take to be a certain measure of bad faith in the ways in which we try to get together and raise each other's consciousness. Our supposition is that the whole problem is that we don't communicate well enough, and we don't understand each other's subject positions well enough. As I say, I'm not completely convinced of that, so there's a certain sense in which I say, "Hey, speech is great. It's doing just fine. Don't worry. We're communicating perfectly well, possibly too well." So why on earth should theory come along and say, "Well, there's sort of a problem with communication"? The problem is this nagging entity called language which keeps poking up through the communication process, getting in its way, impeding communication, as the Russian formalists suggested-- all for the better, as they saw it-- that language does. Why should it matter? What's at stake? As Knapp and Michaels might say, what's at stake in calling attention to the way in which language does impede communication? In other words, we communicate fine, but what we really mean in saying that is, we communicate fine for everyday purposes. Speech has a rough and ready efficacy, and anybody who denies that, as I say, is simply exaggerating problems that may exist on grounds other than difficulty of communication. So speech is really fine up to a point. Part of the function of theory is precisely to interrogate the degree to which speech in an unimpeded way communicates and the level of accuracy and detail at which speech can ever be expected to communicate. These are the sorts of questions that we might expect theory to ask, and if you say, "Well, I'm still not very convinced that that's an important aspect of one's intellectual life," I don't blame you. I hope to have convinced you over the next forty-five minutes or so that it's pretty important in a variety of ways and that it's worth keeping in mind. In the meantime, just to start on this issue tentatively, we can understand theory--and of course, we began the semester by defining it, by trying to distinguish between theory and philosophy; theory and methodology; perhaps even those sorts of approaches to literature that Knapp and Michaels call "poetics"; maybe even to distinguish between theory and hermeneutics, because after all, the whole drive and function of hermeneutics is to discover meaning. There is a certain sense, as we have come sadly to realize, in which theory is more interested in the way in which meaning is impeded, so it may be--as we suggested, as I say, at the beginning of the course--that as to theory, if we're to get comfortable with it at all, we have to keep in mind that it's not philosophy. That is to say, even though you're good at theory and you understand the purpose of theory, you can still be a system builder. That is to say, you can still have a sense of explaining the totality of things that philosophy needs if it's going to function as philosophy or as philosophy properly should. You can still, as Knapp and Michaels say, engage empirically with questions of literary data summarized in such a way as to amount to what we call "poetics." You can do all these things, and you don't really have to feel as though theory is somehow or another standing on the sidelines sort of shaking its fist at you and wagging its finger. Theory doesn't have to be understood as a watchdog. At least in my opinion, and not everyone agrees with me, theory really lets us go our own way and simply reminds us that there are certain limits or reservations that need to be kept in mind, that one is perhaps wisest to keep in mind, as we think through problems of interpretation and meaning. So theory I would define as--and I've used this word "negation" a lot-- I would define theory as a negative movement of thought mapping the ways in which it is legitimate-- as opposed to the ways in which I have suggested it's perhaps not legitimate-- but mapping the ways in which it is legitimate to be suspicious of communication. Theory is an antithetical counterforce to that which is commonly supposed to be true, posited as true, and--here of course one comes to the point-- spoken as true: enounced, articulated, spoken as true. So if that's the case, why the fuss about language? Why do we so quickly narrow the issue down to language? What I said last time about language and the relationship between language and speech may have seemed unconvincing to you because it was so narrow. I want to broaden today, considerably broaden, the sense of what I mean by "language." It seems to me that theory encourages a measure of suspicion about the efficacy of speech, that which is spoken as true, in three ways. Last time I mentioned one, but now let me emphasize three. The first and the one I did mention last time is the way in which language obtrudes itself as sound. In other words, if we think of the efficiency or functionality of speech as a medium of communication, we're forced to ask ourselves, even as we engage in speech, how and why it is that speech is so much burdened in ways that are of no use whatsoever to us for the most part. Sometimes they are of use. One of the pre-freshmen asked me last time, "Well, isn't sound a reinforcement of meaning?" I told you when we did the New Criticism that all of you had done the New Criticism in high school. That's the way you learned literary interpretation. Well, this was a perfect embodiment of a bright person coming out of high school saying, "Interpretation just is the New Criticism and I've been taught that sound reinforces sense. That's what it says in Perrine's handbook about understanding poetry. Sound reinforces sense." Well, it often does, of course, and on those occasions we can revel in the complexity of an intentional meaning or intentional structure that is augmented by the way in which sound patterns are used. At the same time, as the Russian formalists discovered, working through materials that weren't perhaps so much materials like John Donne's "The Canonization" or texts of the kind that lent themselves, to a degree, readily to the New Criticism; but rather alliterative verse, folklore and folk verse in the Russian tradition, verse embodying proverbs--what they noticed in studying these materials is that there is simply no way of grasping a semantic purpose, a purpose having to do with meaning, in the sound elements that are involved. I think that as we recognize the way in which there is a strange pull in our spontaneous speaking toward repetitiousness of sound, it's not just that we all speak iambic pentameter without knowing it-- which, by the way, is by and large and true. It's not just that. It's that there is an extraordinary amount of alliteration and rhythmic determination in what we say. Jakobson has an interesting point in "Linguistics and Poetics" about that moment when we're nearby and an accident takes place or something like that. He says in effect, "You could call a person in a situation like that anything, but we call that person an innocent bystander, and the reason we do so is metric." A person is an innocent bystander not because that expression has any particular meaning or semantic valence as over against other expressions but because it's catchy, because it sort of sticks in our mind, perhaps for mnemotechnical reasons, as catchy. Eisenhower won the election against Stevenson because "I like Ike" is a more efficient sort of way of engaging with the repetition of sound than "Madly for Adlai." Jakobson doesn't go into that, but I think an interesting political analysis could be made of, as I say, the greater efficacy of "I like Ike." All of these functions of sound or, I should say, appearances of sound in speech are what an economist might call irrational. They're there, they're doing a job, but it's not really a job of anything that we could call communication. The job they're doing is sort of free spirited on the part of language. It's just there in an arbitrary relation with the semantic pattern of speech. So much then for sound, but it's not only that. If it were only that, if literary theory were only about the first two or three years' worth of research performed by the Russian formalists, we probably wouldn't be having an introductory survey course in the subject. Speech is impeded by language in two other ways. First of all-- second of all, I should say, I suppose--speech is disturbed by the way in which language produces in what's being said an uncontrollable semantic drift. That's what I want to call it. In other words, the language of an utterance is crafted to say some particular thing. Actually, it was Saussure, in a work of his that's less known than the Course in General Linguistics, who published a monograph on the way in which you can find acronyms of various kinds buried or embedded in Latin verse. In other words, there is meaning within meaning which can't possibly have been planted there and yet, miraculously enough, you can find there. You can recite a well-known poem--the one that we took up last time because it was the example given in Knapp and Michaels' "Against Theory"-- you can recite a poem while reading this: [referring to what is written on the chalkboard: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seem'd a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd 'round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees. Now you can see that to write the poem in this way is to perform an exercise which is essentially what Joyce is doing in Finnegan's Wake. As a matter of fact, as I transcribed the poem out of my notes [gestures to board]-- as you can see, I transcribed it--I kept saying to myself, "You know what? This could be in Finnegan's Wake." I was actually quite pleased with myself, as you can imagine. > Notice that I have used all words. There's nothing in these eight lines which is not a word. I have certainly engaged in a certain amount of anachronism, but I have also used punctuation, and I have worked out ways in which this discourse makes sense. I could have just left it at nonsense-- like Lewis Carroll's "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe…"-- which is another way in which language is affected by uncontrollable semantic drift. The point of Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense verse is that we all think we know what it means: "'Twas blusterous and the slimy toads did leap and frolic in the waves." We think that it means something like that, but semantic drift--which is what Lewis Carroll deliberately introduces to it-- prevents us from in any secure way drawing any conclusions about that. I, of course, am making no claims for this transcription of Wordsworth's "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" at all, but maybe this can show us the ways in which there is semantic drift. Let's say that you were a person not really, as Stanley Fish would put it, in the interpretive community to which all the rest of us belong, and you don't really know what a poem is. Somebody recites in your presence what I just recited to you. Well, if you were quick at writing and you transcribed the thing, you might very well produce something like that [points to board]. In other words, it wouldn't just spontaneously occur to you that what Wordsworth wrote was what you were hearing, and that's because the kind of semantic drift that I'm talking about really is inescapably present in any utterance that we make. The utterance is not often mistaken because we're really actually good at understanding context. That's one of the reasons why the so-called problem of communication isn't as great as people sometimes claim it is. We're really good at understanding context. Hence, we're not likely to go badly wrong, but certainly there are occasions on which we go badly wrong. As we all know, that's the irritating thing about spell check. You put on spell check, you write your term paper, you don't bother to edit it, and you turn it in. It's full of howlers because, of course, the language is full of homonyms, and spell check always gives the wrong word. You're in the soup, frankly because, of course, your teacher is just kind of slapping his knee and guffawing while reading it. > In short, don't use spell check, but spell check is > a phenomenon that shows you the way in which semantic drift permeates language. But it's not just that either. There's a third way in which language impedes speech. Saussure never says this in so many words, but this is definitely what he means by langue. Remember I said that language, langue, is a virtual entity because we could never actually encounter it written down in any codified form. Yes, it is: the dictionary, the lexicon, right? But that's only part of it. So far, notice that we've only been talking about the lexicon when we talk about semantic drift, but in addition to the lexicon, language, langue, is a set of rules--rules of grammar and syntax, rules by means of which, and only by means of which, speech can make sense. In other words, language has this sort of bearing on the choices that we can make while producing speech. Unfortunately those rules can be a little bit slippery. When we talked about the innocuous expression "It is raining" as an illustration of Jakobson's six sets of the message, just as an example, we were brought up short by the meta-lingual function of "It is raining." We suddenly asked ourselves, "What on earth is ‘it'?" In other words, there is a kind of grammatical and syntactical permissibility, obviously, in the expression "It is raining," but at the same time we really have no idea. It can lead us in strange directions, this "it": Jupiter Pluvius, God, the cosmos, the clouds. Some of it is plausible but none of it is definite. We realize that "it" is a kind of placeholder in the sentence that is not doing its job and, believe me, it's not just in English. As I said before, it's a phenomenon that you can find in any language, even in the expression "It is raining"-- il pleut, es regnet, and so on. In all of those expressions, "it" is not doing its job, so that's another way in which, if we lean on a speech, we have to realize that we're in the presence of what the economists again would call irrationality. That has to do with the way in which predication works in language. As I said before, an assertion, a statement of truth-- an assertion of any kind is the utterance of a metaphor, because the deep structure of any assertion is that A is B. That is an assertion by definition; but--"A is B," and of course when that construction is grammatical-- in other words, when it makes what the grammarians call a copula-- when the construction is grammatical, well, that's fine because we understand that the relationship between A and B is not a relationship that's insistently one of identity; that a connection is being made--a connection which de Man, for example, would call metonymic--in predication. The problem is that any sentence which declares that A is B metonymically-- that is to say, as a grammatical proposition-- is at the same time, if we simply look at the sentence for what it is, which is a metaphor, an insistence that A is B in the sense that A is A-- is a metaphor, in other words which doesn't stand on all fours. No metaphor does. It has an element of what's called catachresis in it, and therefore in a certain sense, as we read the sentence, necessarily undermines the sentence's grammatical structure. This is the point that de Man is making in "Semiology and Rhetoric," that there is a perpetual tension in any utterance between grammar and rhetoric. There is no utterance that's not grammatical, there's no utterance that's not rhetorical, but unfortunately grammar and rhetoric are always rather openly or subtly at odds with each other, just in the way that metaphor and predication really have to be at odds with each other. In other words, there isn't a sentence in which the rules of grammar and syntax are not subtly interfering with what you might call the rules of rhetoric-- the ways in which tropes, in other words, deploy themselves, ways which can be distilled in an understanding of what we call metaphor. So every sentence, as I say, is shadowed not just by the vagaries of sound, not just by semantic drift, but by the incompatibility of grammar and rhetoric, and all of that is implicit in what Saussure and his tradition call language. Those are the ways, in other words, in which language, if I can put it this way, speaks through speech, the ways in which anything that we say on any occasion is shadowed by another voice. We've understood this in social terms as Bakhtinian polyglossia. We have understood this in psychoanalytic terms as the discourse of the otherness of the unconscious. We have understood this in purely linguistic terms as language, but we can, I think, metaphorically speaking, understand it now as well as a kind of speech. Language is an unintentional speech. Language is just that speech which, we recognize--having gone through the sort of analysis that I've been attempting--is not governed by intention. Keep in mind: nobody--no theorist, nobody in his right mind--would ever try to resist the claim that speech is intentional, that we intend what we say. That's the way in which Knapp and Michaels are right and give us a bracing reminder about things where our skepticism is misplaced. The idea that speech is somehow not intended--what could that mean? Speech just is intention, but I've been trying to argue that there is a speech, the "speech of language," which is unintentional, which is just there. It can't be factored out. It can be bracketed, but it can't be set aside as though it were not there. It will always come back. It will always confront us at some point if we take the arts of interpretation seriously enough-- if, in other words, we really do bring some pressure to bear on the things that people say: not just a pragmatic pressure, which I think works just fine for most of us, but a pressure that goes beyond the pragmatic and notices what's really in a sentence, what's really in anybody's utterance. Language speaks through speech partly as its origin. In other words, the way language gets into something that you or I might say is a reminder to us that what we say comes from someplace. It has an origin and its origin is precisely language. Language keeps saying, "Oh, oh, here I am," your origin, right? The birth of what you're doing, in other words, way back before you discovered that language was useful for something. Remember what we said about that last time: you have to discover that fire is useful for cooking. Fire is not "for" cooking. A cave is not for dwelling. A prehensile thumb is not for grasping. You have to discover the ways in which this is the case. Language is there in what we say to remind us that it wasn't always the case, to remind us that it's just the origin of a history of conscious expression during the course of which we began the never-ending process of trying to master language. That's, of course, what it is to be a writer. You try to wrestle language into submission. That's the ambition of all of us, whether we're writing the great American novel or revising a term paper. We're wrestling language into submission, and we all know it's not easy. I'm just trying to explain some of the reasons why it's not easy. So language speaks through us as the origin of speech, but it also speaks as the death of speech. It speaks, in other words, as the moment in which the purposeful agency of speech is finally called into question, in a certain sense undermined. I think it's appropriate, I think it's fair, to call language--again metaphorically-- the epitaph of speech, the way in which in any given speech the end of its own agency is inscribed even as that agency is going forward. Now I want to test this example and also show you a little bit more about the way semantic drift-- but even more than that about the way the perilous relationship between grammar and syntax and rhetoric works. I want to actually try out on you a couple of epitaphs. If language is the epitaph of speech, why not talk for a little bit about epitaphs? Now my favorite epitaph by far: probably-- well, we won't speculate about where such an epitaph might be found, but if and when you come across it walking through a cemetery, it'll probably elicit a chuckle. On the gravestone it says, "I told you I was sick." > Now this is a very interesting expression for a number of reasons. For one thing, and one should pause over this, one can infer speakers speaking efficaciously, not just one but many. There's plenty of precedent for this in Emily Dickinson and in other writers. The most obvious speaker is the dead person speaking from the grave: "there I was, sitting in the corner all those years telling you I had a headache. You never listened to me" and so on. That is the most obvious identification of a speaker, but of course the speaker could be somebody else, and I'm not introducing a measure of skepticism in saying this. When we posit an intention, we just decide which of these speakers it is. The speaker could be an apologetic relative, someone acknowledging that they hadn't listened, but with a sense of humor, and so putting in the voice of the dead person the complaint, "I told you I was sick" as a form of apology: "Yes, I know you did, and unfortunately I had to go to the grocery store." > That, too, can be the speaker. Well, on the other hand, it could be someone simply moralizing over the grave, which is a frequent habit of the eighteenth century-- one of my periods, so I'm familiar with it. It could be a philosopher--right?--saying, "Well, this is the human condition, > as I kept telling you. I published thirteen books, the whole purport of which was 'I am sick.' I'm Dostoevsky's Underground Man. I am a sick man. I am a very sick man. Well, let it get worse." It could be in this mode that a philosopher is moralizing over the grave, or again it could be a cultural critic. It could be someone in a kind of an allegorical mood inscribing on the gravestone the death of culture. Civilization has been in a bad way for a long time and here finally it lies. The way to communicate this would then be, "I told you I was sick: civilization has ways of letting us know that all is not well with it: we didn't pay any attention, and here is the result." I would say that all of those ways of reading the epitaph are consistent with hermeneutics. They are consistent with the way in which we can try to come to terms with the intention of a speaker; but suppose we say that "language" must be obtruding itself in this utterance like any other. What would that be? You see, that isn't just a question of sound. It isn't even a question of semantic drift, in this case. It's a question of our suddenly coming to understand the sentence in a way that perhaps no individual speaker would want to give it. It's an allegory, precisely, cleverly introduced by language, about the inefficacy of speech. That's just the problem with speech, isn't it? "Again and again and again I tell you something and you don't listen"-- that's the problem with being a lecturer, > that sort of "I told you I was sick and you--" "Oh, well. He's just joking." So it is--according to the allegory introduced by language at the expense of speech--with speech in general. It's an allegory about the limits of communication because that's, after all, what the speaker--insofar as there is a speaker inscribing this expression on the gravestone-- is concerned about. This person sitting in the corner, complaining bitterly about nobody ever listening to her or to him, is actually an allegorist telling us that that's the way speech is. Speech, in other words, has its limits. In a sense then, when I say language is the epitaph of speech, we realize that if we understand this utterance as an allegory, it is precisely speech that's lying here-- the end, as I suggested, of speech's powers of communication as announced or declared by language. Well, let's try another one: "Here lies John Doe," probably the Ur-epitaph. Supply your own name: "Here lies John Doe." Well, let's not even pause over the speaker there. Let's get immediately to the problems posed by language. In the first place, John Doe obviously does not lie precisely "here," right? In fact, if you think about it, it's altogether possible that John Doe could be absolutely anywhere except precisely "here," because where the sentence is we know John Doe not to be. He could be anyplace else, as I say. So any epitaph is therefore a self-declared cenotaph, an inscription on a place where the body isn't, which of course tells us a lot, too, about the arbitrary nature of language. Language does not hook on to the real world. It doesn't hook on to the body. The one place where language is not is on the body. The one place where language is not is on things. Speech is on things. Speech can be inscribed on a piece of rock. So "Here lies John Doe," except not here, anyplace but here--which is why, of course, the interest of the word "lies" is so interesting. > The utterance is a lie, but it's not John Doe who lies. Poor John Doe is just lying someplace. John Doe is not lying, right? It's language > that's making speech lie, and it's doing it on any number of levels, as we've seen. It's a funny thing about epitaphs, and this has been noted by certain authors writing in the tradition of what we loosely call "deconstruction": the epitaph is a particularly fruitful locus for the study of the ways in which language challenges, undermines, and displaces speech, and as I say, these two examples show more or less the way that works. So speech lies everywhere except here-- I don't mean here!--speech lies because it can never stop being language, and therefore we can never really possibly mean exactly what we say. We can mean what we say, but we can't mean exactly what we say. That's probably the most commonsensical way of putting the matter. When Stanley Cavell poses the question in the title of one of his books, Must We Mean What We Say? > he is actually offering us the possibility that maybe that's not the be all and end all of speaking, > that the speech-act situation is more complicated than that. Sure, we all have it at heart as an objective to mean what we say, but at the same time in speaking we are performing, we're acting, as the neo-pragmatist would suggest, and we're doing all kinds of things besides meaning. That really needs to be taken into account, even in understanding what speech can do, let alone in understanding what speech can't do. So it's plausible to say that yes, we can mean what we say; but it's a question--indeed, it's a very insistent question--whether we can mean exactly what we say. Now you ask--you must ask, because after all it's been our constant guide-- you ask, "Does language speak in Tony the Tow Truck?" I know this has been on your mind, and so of course we have to address it. I think there are a few interesting things to be said about that. I spoke earlier in the semester about the parade on the vertical axis, of that vertical axis, called "I." As you read the text, there it is, > sort of out of Lacan, out of Lacanian feminism, however you look: the phallogocenter right there, I. But now I is never the first word spoken by an infant. That's another lesson of Lacan. I is what you have to learn how to be-- maybe to put it in Judith Butler's terms-- so that I, insofar as it is this incredible upright pillar starting one sentence after another in Tony the Tow Truck, is a promise of, precisely, agency: the promise of the kind of identity which stands upright, which is a successful simulacrum of what is seen in the mirror, and which then develops into what Freud called, referring to the way in which infants begin to get their way in the world, "his majesty the ego." So the I has that function, but as I've said, it's a story about friendship, and the I disappears. This, too, I think, can be communicated as relevant to the infant in ways that at the functional level of language can't really be called speech. For example, the friendship exists between Bumpy [pron. BUM-py] and Tony [pron.TO-ny], uh-oh: long before the baby says "I," it says "uh-oh," and that "uh-oh" resonates in the friendship of Bumpy and Tony. Why "uh-oh?" Because Tony is stuck and Tony's natural response to being stuck would be, "Uh-oh." Along comes Bumpy and--"uh-oh"--not only recognizes the problem but takes care of the problem. Now on the other hand, the problem of self, the problem that's caught up in this vertical I, comes into focus for the infant as the awareness of otherness or that which is alien. That which is irreducible to the self begins to come into focus, and a way of expressing this is to say, "e-e-e-e," which is perhaps in some way or another a mask or a simulacrum of "he-he-he-he." I think it's for that reason that the two antagonists of the story, the unassimilable others who do not help, are called Speedy [pron. SPEE-dee] and Neato [pron. NEE-to]. In other words, that sense of otherness-- of that which is intractable, that which cannot be reduced effectively to self-- is I think articulated in "e-e-e." In other words, what the infant speaks is not speech, is it? It's language. If you want to hear language in speech, just listen to a baby. That's why nonsense verse has such appeal to young children. They're still hearing language. It's a way of putting Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode." They're still hearing the mighty waters rolling evermore. They're hearing "ohm" where we're all hearing speech. As I say, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The history of the human species is a history of coming to terms with speech, mastering speech--or, I should say, perhaps, mastering language. Well, so it is in the individual. The individual who is hard wired--isn't he?--for language must somehow or another wrestle that hard wiring in to what we call speech. So the first thing we hear in an infant, and maybe what is most predominant in stories for toddlers and in nonsense verse, is language, which you don't reduce semantically, you don't parse it semantically. Sure, I've just interpreted it into a kind of meaning, but it's a meaning which comes simply from the observation of feelings and noticing what children actually say on actual occasions, which can't really be called speech but is rather a kind of experimentation with language dragging itself toward speech. It's not anything that one would ever really confuse with speech, yet partly an imitation of what is heard in the adult world. That's where you get "uh-oh." But when the adult occasionally says, "Uh-oh," there's nothing like the investment in it that there is in the child for whom it is very often the first articulate sound. It is the encounter with otherness and the attempt to master otherness, as in Freud's story of fort/da, that this "uh-oh" seems to be expressing. All right. So much for Tony. I'd just like to confuse--I'd like to conclude with three theses. Well, you have to speak very carefully or language obtrudes. I had to say very carefully "three theses," right? And of course I made a mistake just before. I didn't want to say "confuse," did I? > Notice that "confuse" was not just anything getting in the way of communication. It was precisely what I did not want to say > --precisely. I could have said anything else, but I said "confuse." That is the Freudian slip that I've been talking about. Well, anyway, > three theses about language. First, it never makes sense. Language does not make sense. It's arbitrary. It is a system of arbitrary signs that are not natural signs. You make sense, not language. You make sense by invoking an intention-- that is to say, by having an intention-- and wrestling language into speech: that is, commandeering language for your purposes. Language doesn't make sense; you make sense. Language in itself, secondly, says nothing about reality just because it is a system, a code, a system of arbitrary signs. I want to put it two different ways to show you what's going on. You come to terms, as we say, with reality. That is to say, you find the words for reality as you grasp it. Another way to put it is you figure it out. In other words, you come to understand what language is, "I figured it out," but of course in rhetorical theory, "figure" is precisely a figure of speech. You bring to bear figures just as you come to terms. You bring to bear figures on reality. You figure it out. Finally, to adapt an expression with which you're probably familiar, I'll conclude simply by saying that the road to reality is paved with your intentions, be they good or bad. Thank you very much.

Literature_Lectures

11_John_Barth_Lost_in_the_Funhouse.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Let me ask you a question first about John Barth and the stories that I asked you to read. Which of them was your favorite? Some cackling I hear. None of them? Which of them was your favorite?Student: "Night-Sea Journey." Professor Amy Hungerford: "Night-Sea Journey." Why?Student: I thought it was the profoundest joke I'd ever read.Professor Amy Hungerford: Ah ha. Yes. Okay. Very good. Yes. 'The profoundest joke she has ever heard." Who else? Your favorite story. Yes.Student: "Lost in the Funhouse."Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Why is that?Student: I really liked the tricks that Barth played with vocabulary.Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Yes. Okay. What else? Other favorites? Did anyone have "Ambrose His Mark" as a favorite? Only one--two of you. That's extremely surprising. Why was "Ambrose His Mark" not your favorite? What did you not like about it? Anyone? Yes.Student: I actually thought it was hard to understand, just what was happening, the action part of the story. It might have been that I read it too quickly. Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Harder than "Menelaiad" to understand?Student: No.Professor Amy Hungerford: No. Oh. Okay. Anyone else on "Ambrose His Mark"? Comments? When I ask this question, typically, especially when I've had students read the whole thing, "Ambrose His Mark" is almost always the favorite story. And the reason for that, I think, is that it is a technically perfect short story. It has wit; it has developed characters; it has a coherent narrative. Even if it has some difficulties, that's probably more due to things like dialect. There's a German immigrant dialect that some of the characters speak. It's full of little tropes, little consistencies, little images, the bees, even the word play, "skep" and "skeptical." There are words that mirror some of the major themes of that story about naming. Barth, by offering us a perfect short story in that story, is demonstrating what traditional structures of narrative have always offered us. And the fact that it's not your favorite…maybe we're at a watershed moment, that even traditional narrative can just…you guys are so well beyond that seduction. Maybe it's Lolita that we read. Maybe it's that you got so seduced by Lolita, or you were so well trained to be skeptical of narrative seduction, that now nothing can faze you, nothing can seduce you. Maybe that's it. Give yourself that credit. John Barth is a teacher, through and through. He actually taught at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins, for over thirty years, in the writing program. And I once got from him a handout that he would give to his fiction classes, and it had on it all the traditional tricks and structures of the short story form. It was three or four pages single-spaced, typed: things like, "if there are five pistols hanging on the wall, by the end of the story, they all have to go off," these totally structural observations about how to write a piece of short fiction. It's so appropriate: in my various moves in my life, I lost this piece of paper, and I have never been able to find it. And I've tried to be in touch with him about it, and I couldn't get it from him either. So, this is one of the sad things about teaching Barth for me. He was such a teacher. I think this story collection is very much a teaching of us about narrative. I'm sorry that I can't now produce that, as your teacher, for you. I want to do something that might seem odd as I begin. Does this shock anyone? Do you have a visceral sense, "oh, don't do that"? If you do, you were probably taught, like me: "never, never damage a book." Getting in trouble: in our house if you damaged a book you were in big trouble. Okay. So, what I'm doing is, I'm taking the mobius strip from the beginning, and I am matching the letters here, capital A--let's see how does it go--capital A overlaps with small A, capital B overlaps with small B, tape it together. Okay. There we go. "Once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time." Okay. So, you get the point. Why does Barth put this in the front of his story? Well, I think there are several reasons, and I'm going to name about three of them. One is that language is material. I think we have a visceral response, sometimes, when you cut a book, because somehow we don't want to be reminded that a story is in a material container. But he invites us to do this to his story. So, that's the first point: It's material. The second point is that narrative has a form, and that it can be constructed, built. It's like a craft. I had my little tape and my little scissors, my little project, my craft project. So, stories are a craft. They get built of the material of language. Last point: form is both endless and closed. It is both repetitious and endlessly filled with possibility. Because, when you read this in its mobius strip form, you're repeating a beginning over and over and over again, it gives you that feeling of possibility, but it's also boring. This is not an interesting story. It doesn't tell us anything. John Barth runs a certain kind of risk in this story collection, and it's the risk of difficulty. If I had had you read the whole thing, you would see even more the kind of risk he's running. Some of the stories are self-consciously, boringly metafictional. They sound like all those stories we have about somebody writing a story about themselves, about themselves writing a story who is also writing a story about themselves writing a story. It's very boring. There's no kind of life in it. It's all about that endless regress. So, Barth is taking a risk that this little craft project emphasizes and that the stories in the book act out. Why is it worth it to him to take that risk? What's he trying to teach us about narrative and about language that makes it worth this risk? Now, let me just make the last point I want to make about this, and that's that because language is material, it has form, it has both closedness and possibility, it's susceptible to the workings of craft, it's also unpredictable. What's going to happen to that now? Who's going to find it? It's going to sit there. It's going to blow from place to place. Again, in other stories that I didn't have you read, the theme of the message in the bottle returns over and over again. The sense that language is material means that it can be separate from people and have a kind of life of its own. Now, one question for us is: is the life of its own that Barth dreams of for language similar to that life of its own that Nabokov dreamed of for his language? So, that's a question I want you to keep in your mind. Is this the same dream, or is it somehow different? So, I'm going to leave that there. And maybe some--I don't know--some chemistry class will show up in here, and someone will wonder what that is, and Barth will have done his work, or we will have done Barth's work for him. Now, let me ask you another question. Who is the narrator of "Night-Sea Journey"? Student: A sperm?Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. A sperm. Did everyone get that? No. Okay. The narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" is a sperm. Now, why have a story with a sperm as a narrator? Well, I think there are a couple of points, a couple of reasons why Barth wants to do that, and actually related to your initial point about why you liked this, that it was-- how did you say that?--it was the most--Student: Profound joke--Professor Amy Hungerford: Profound joke. It is a parody of all the meanings of life that philosophy has offered up to us over the ages, so it kind of runs through them in the voice of our narrator sperm's pal, who is now gone and dead before him. So, we get a kind of wisdom in a parodic form. There are other points, however, and if you look on page 4 we can see just a little example of one of them. This sperm has gained quite a vocabulary, and it includes this line: "I have seen the best swimmers of my generation go under." Now, where is that from? Of course it's from Howl: "I have seen the best minds of my generation…." The point of making a sperm who quotes not only Allen Ginsberg, but also hosts of other prior literary texts, is the point that the tradition precedes the individual speaker. The individual speaker believes that he has an original voice. He believes he's speaking in his own voice, but, lo and behold, his words are not his own. So, just as this is a redaction and a compression of all the various meanings of life that Western philosophy has offered up, it is also a demonstration of how literary tropes, literary language, little packaged bits of literature, quotations, allusions, lard the language that is available to this creature. His final reflections on page 12 suggest his ambition as a speaker, and it looks a lot like a modernist ambition. The bottom of page 12: What has fetched me across this dreadful sea is a single hope, gift of my poor dead comrade: that You may be stronger-willed than I, and that by sheer force of concentration I may transmit to You, along with Your official Heritage, a private legacy of awful recollection and negative resolve. Mad as it may be, my dream is that some unimaginable embodiment of myself (or myself plus Her if that's how it must be) will come to find itself expressing, in however garbled or radical a translation, some reflection of these reflections. It's a dream of changing the tradition, of having that individual voice added to the tradition, to have it become part of the official heritage and yet at odds with it, casting a different light back. This is precisely that modernist dream specifically articulated by T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the contribution of the individual adds to and changes the tradition in one swoop. Is this going to be Barth's ambition, too? This is a question for us, again, that I want to, kind of, keep up on the shelf in your mind. In some way it's a parody of that modernist effort, when it comes in the voice of a sperm, because this whole story is a parody. So, you have to ask that question and be somewhat skeptical. For all that Barth looks like, he embodies that traditional modernist ambition of difficulty, of working with tradition and so on. He looks like a classic late modernist, but is he, really? This is the question. "Ambrose His Mark" purports to be the story of the birth of that being when the sperm from "Night-Sea Journey" is united with the egg. So, this is Ambrose's conception that we see the preamble to. And in "Ambrose His Mark," if you look on page 19, you will see that Ambrose has, in some sense, inherited some aspect of that sperm's remarkable linguistic facility. He says: "All that winter…." This is the middle of the page: All that winter, as I grew in mother's womb, grandfather fretted with his scheme [to get Willie Erdmann's bees]; when the spring's first bees appeared on our pussy willows, on our alder catkins, he was off with Hector and Konrad, saucepan and cheesecloth. Their researches led them through fresh-marsh, through pine-woods, over stile and under trestle--but never a bee-tree they discovered, only swampy impasses or the hives of some part-time apiarist. He's narrating in great detail what happened while he was in the womb. Where does this knowledge come from? It's as if his knowledge of his own conception, his own birth, his own babyhood, is a natural knowledge. But we must know that it had to come from someone, from someone telling stories. The stories then become part of Ambrose's own account of his own naming, an account of the origin of his identity. That name, "Ambrose His Mark," is a reference to Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick, when Queequeg signs on to the Pequod, he makes a mark, because he is illiterate, in place of writing his name, signing his name, and in the novel it says "Queequeg, his mark." That's what's written underneath it on the contract. With that mark Queequeg signs on to the whole trajectory of Ahab's mad pursuit of the whale. We can think of that in another way, as well, though. With that mark, Queequeg signs on to the whole trajectory of the nineteenth-century novel, that whole narrative excess that Melville offers, and that whole sense of destiny that is bound up with Ahab's story. What does Ambrose sign up for with his mark? Well, the first thing to notice is that, unlike Queequeg, he does not sign that mark. The mark, here, is what he's marked by, not what he marks with. And so, it's as if the whole tradition comes out and grabs him and names him. And so, Uncle Karl's efforts to interpret the incident of the bee and its relation to the mark on his face suggests the way that certain kinds of tradition--that Uncle Karl has been reading, probably in the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia that he sells door to door (he's a sort of scholarly guy)--that that tradition has named him. He has no agency in this trajectory he's entering upon. The effort to take the story of his birth and tell it as if it were natural knowledge is the effort to fight against that lack of agency. He takes those stories and he makes them his own. That's an effort at gaining control over what he cannot know about his own origin and what he cannot choose in his own origin. I think that's also why Barth chose to write this story in the perfect short story form. And that form is also given to us in Lost in the Funhouse, on page 95, when we get the diagram of Freitag's Triangle. So, if you look at it here on 95, we're told in the course of the story about Ambrose and Magda and the family: The action of conventional dramatic narrative may be represented by a diagram called Freitag's Triangle: A, B, C--[And remember those are the letters from the mobius strip as well]--or more accurately by a variant of that diagram, A, B, C, D, with A, B representing the exposition… [and so on and so forth.] If you read on down in that paragraph, you will see that Ambrose in his frustration--in his effort to control the story that is always, in this story, spinning out of control--he wants to be able to use Freitag's Triangle to prop up what has become an uncontrollable narrative and give it a shape. He retells…even from one sentence to the next, he changes his mind. He says, "This can't go on much longer. It can go on forever." He died telling stories to himself in the dark." He's dreaming about what will happen to him in the funhouse. . . . years later when that vast suspected area of the funhouse came to light, the first expedition found his skeleton in one of its labyrinthine corridors and mistook it for a part of the entertainment. He died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark; but unbeknownst, unbeknownst to him, an assistant operator of the funhouse, happening to overhear him, crouched just behind the plyboard partition and wrote down every word. The operator's daughter, an exquisite young woman with a figure unusually well developed for her age, crouched just behind the partition and transcribed his every word. He changes the story from one sentence to the next. Freitag's Triangle won't help him at all. So, just knowing the form that the story is supposed to take, and then knowing that language has grabbed you, all these formulaic little phrases, "a figure unusually well developed for her age," these little stock phrases. They are what he has to work with, even though they are what defeat him in his effort to make sense of this experience with Magda. And it is the experience with Magda that produces the problem in the first place. And so, if we look at page 84, you can see the, sort of, primal scene of this problem. This is when he and Magda were having a sort of erotic game one summer in the shed. They were playing slaves and masters, and he was the master, and she was the slave. So, he's imagining their future and talking about it with Magda when they're older. I'm going to start sort of in the middle of the page. He would be quite famous in his line of work. Whether Magda was his wife or not, one evening when he was wise-lined and gray at the temples he'd smile gravely, at a fashionable dinner party, and remind her of his youthful passion. The time they went with his family to Ocean City; the erotic fantasies he used to have about her. How long ago it seemed and childish! Yet tender too, n'est-ce pas? [That's a Humbert moment. That's Humbert.] Would she have imagined that the world famous whatever remembered how many strings were on the lyre on the bench beside the girl on the label of the cigar box he'd stated at in the tool shed at age ten while she, age eleven. Even then, he had felt wise beyond his years; [Another stock phrase.] he'd stroked her hair and said in his deepest voice and correctest English, as to a dear child, "I shall never forget this moment." But though he had breathed heavily, groaned as if ecstatic, what he'd really felt throughout was an odd detachment as though someone else were Master. Strive as he might to be transported, he had heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it. Many of the digger machines were out of order in the penny arcades and could not be repaired or replaced for the duration. Moreover, the prizes, made now in U.S.A…. It goes off in this strange digression. It seems like his mind has simply wandered, as it does, from one version of the story to another. But the mention of the machines is not incidental. Narrative becomes a kind of machine. You put your penny in the slot and it works to produce the narrative. And that's that first part that I read, where he's looking back fondly with Magda from his eminence, later in life, and it seems safely past and something that can be talked about. But the problem is that, even if he could produce that kind of comforting narrative, the problem it produced at the level of identity will never be repaired. Self-alienation, in Barth's work, is the product of desire. Desire, love: that's the moment when you're supposed to be perfectly present. And what happens to Ambrose? That's the moment when he is perfectly, distressingly alienated from himself. And, it's the moment when language comes in and is the product of that alienation, or perhaps when language comes in and causes that alienation. So, he can't experience an erotic moment without also experiencing it through the screen of language, and what he ends up doing is experiencing language instead of sex. So, this is the problem that's never solved in Lost in the Funhouse, and it has all kinds of ramifications. This is on 83, just the page before. Remember, this whole story takes place under the aegis of his alienation from himself. He's thinking about what he'd like to do in the funhouse. If you knew your way around in the funhouse like your own bedroom, you could wait until a girl came along and then slip away without ever getting caught, even if her boyfriend was right with her. She'd think he did it! It would be better to be the boyfriend, and act outraged, and tear the funhouse apart. Not act; be. "He's a master diver," Ambrose said. In feigned admiration. "You really have to slave away at it to get that good." He's playing with Freudian slips. Of course, what he's thinking about all the time is the master-slave game, and so here it comes out, when he's talking about his brother's diving: "He's a master diver. You really have to slave away at it." He can't control the emergence of his desire, his memory of the desire, back into his daily speech. So, he can't control that Freudian slip, and he also has to correct himself, remind himself, that what he wants to do in the funhouse is actually not act like the outraged boyfriend but be the outraged boyfriend. This is always the problem for Ambrose. He can't just be something; he is always conscious of inhabiting a performance. And it's usually a verbal performance. These are the problems that plague Menelaus so terribly in that final story that I asked you to read. So, one of the problems with narrative, I said earlier when we talked about the mobius strip, is that it's repetition. This suggests a kind of exhaustion of language and Ambrose's use of these packaged phrases in Lost in the Funhouse suggests the impossibility of using all that tradition, all that stock of language, to adequately encounter what daily life will bring you, and especially to adequately inhabit something like desire. Barth wrote a famous essay just the year before these stories came out all in one volume. They had been written over a series of years, about five years, in the '60s. And he wrote a very famous essay--got a lot of exposure--called "The Literature of Exhaustion." And there, he criticized a lot of the work that was being done, and these are the terms he uses. He said there were two kinds of artists: ones who are "technically up to date," and ones that are not. Those who are not write turn of the century-type novels, only in more or less mid twentieth-century language and about contemporary people and topics. This makes them less interesting to me than excellent writers who are also technically contemporary, Joyce and Kafka, for instance, in their time, and in ours Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. What exhausts language is the failure to keep technically up to date, and that means in innovation in form. "Menelaiad" is where Barth really stakes his claim for innovation: those nested layers of narrative that are so off-putting on the page that I have to send you a handout to help you over the weekend. (Otherwise I worry that people will be really lost.) It's very off-putting, but it's precisely those nested stories that allow him to do some of the really pleasurable things that he can do in that story and, I would say, get at some of the very deep questions raised by the earlier stories that he finally, kind of, gets hold of (to use his own words) in this last story. So, I want to begin by thinking about Menelaus's predicament with Helen, and this is on 146. So, he spares Helen's life in Troy and brings her home, and this is the story that he has been telling. So, he says, "I decided that I would spare her life and accept her groveling for forgiveness instead." So, this is the story he's telling himself:. . . I forbore, resolved to accept in lieu of her death a modest portion of heartfelt grovel. Further, once she'd flung herself at my knees and kissed my hem I would order her supine and mount more as one who loves than one who conquers; not impossibly, should she acquit herself well and often, I would even entertain a plea for her eventual forgiveness and restoration to the Atrean house. Accordingly I drew myself up to discharge her objection--whereupon she gave over cleaning her nails and set to drumming them on one knee. """"""Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love." """""I only just came aboard," she replied. "I haven't unpacked yet." """"With a roar I went up the companionway, dashed stern to stem, close-hauled the main, flogged a smile from my navigator, and clove us through the pastures of the squid. Leagues thereafter, when the moon changed phase I overtook myself, determined shrewdly that her Troy chests were secured, and vowing this time to grant the trull no quarter, at the second watch of night burst into her cubby and forgave her straight out. "Of the unspeakable we'll speak no further," I declared. "I here extend to you what no other in my position would: my outright pardon." To which, some moments after, I briskly appended: "Disrobe and receive, it for the sake of pity! This offer won't stand forever." [And of course there are lots of phallic jokes here, so I hope you're getting those.] There I had her; she yawned and responded: "It's late. I'm tired." """"Up the mast half a dozen times I stormed and shinnied, took oar to my navigator, lost sight of Nestor, thundered and lightninged through Poseidon's finny fief. When next I came to season, I stood a night slyly by while she dusk-to-dawned it, then saluted with this challenge her opening eyes: "Man born of woman is imperfect. On the three thousand two hundred eighty-seventh night of your Parisian affair, as I lay in Simois-mud picking vermin off the wound I got that day from cunning Pandarus, exhaustion closed my eyes. I dreamed myself was pretty Paris, plucked by Aphrodite from the field and dropped into Helen's naked lap. There we committed sweet adultery; I woke wet, wept. . ." """"Here I paused in my fiction to shield my eyes and stanch the arrow-straight tracks clawed down my cheek. Then, as one who'd waited precisely for her maledict voice to hoarsen, I outshouted her in these terms: "Therefore come to bed, my equal, uncursing, uncursed!" """"The victory was mine, I still believe, but when I made to take trophy, winded Helen shook her head, declaring, "I have the curse." [She has her period.] """"My taffrail oaths took Triton's stamp-ground; I fed to the fish my navigator, knocked my head against the mast and others; hollered up a gale that blew us from Laconic Melea to Egypt. My crew grew restive; when the storm was spent and I had done flogging me with halyard, I chose a moment somewhere off snakèd Libya, slipped my cloak, rapped at Helen's cabin, and in measured tones declared: "Forgive me." Adding firmly: "Are you there?" He's pathetic! He runs through all these stories about himself, and as each one fails to win him back into Helen's cabin, he comes up with another one. This is a certain kind of exhausted narrative. It's the failure of any of these stock narratives to have the effect of restoring love and desire, but it's more than that. It's playful. It's funny. Barth's effort at showing us the exhaustion of narrative produces a kind of new pleasure in narrative. So it's by pointing it out, and then parodying it, that he begins to renew the resources of fiction. There are deeper and more difficult issues at stake, though, and this is in 155. We get a more serious version of the scene with Magda and the problem of self-alienation. And this is what is really at the heart of Menelaus's story. So, remember that the story is that he is obsessed with this question of why Helen chose him among all her suitors: why did she choose him? And, when he asks on their wedding night, she gives him an answer that only makes him more obsessed with the question. So, at the top of 155, he's asked his question. "'Speak,' he commanded. She whispered, 'Love.'" Now, the problem with that is that answer; it's a verb and a noun. And Menelaus doesn't know how to take it, so here it becomes a verb: He held her fast; she took him willy-nilly to her; I feel her yet, one endless instant, Menelaus was no more, never has been since. This is like that moment of erotic play with Magda for Ambrose. It eradicates identity, eradicates sense of self. It's gone forever, and you can see the change in pronouns. "She took him willy-nilly to her." He's telling a story about himself, seemingly, but who is the "I," then, that's left over? "I feel her yet." There is some residual identity left over that can still have a sense of embodiment. . . . In his red ear then she whispered, "Why'd I wed you?" Less what than who, et cetera?""""" """My very question." """""""Speak," Menelaus cried to Helen on the bridal bed," I reminded Helen in her Trojan bedroom," I confessed to Eidothea on the beach," I declared to Proteus in the cave-mouth," I vouchsafed to Helen on the ship," I told Peisistratus at least in my Spartan hall," I say to whoever and where- I am and Helen answered: """""""Love.""""""" ! """"""He complied. He complied as to an order. She took his corse once more to Elysium, to fade forever among the fadeless asphodel; his curious fancy alone remained unlaid; when he came to himself it still asked softly: "why?""""""". And don't I cry out to me every hour since. . . . So, that self-alienation causes him to lose his love. We're told later that he stops sleeping with her because he just can't get it out of his mind. He'd rather sit and wonder. His curious fancy is more active than his desire. Or, you might say, his desire to know is more active than his desire to love. But there is yet a complication to this problem. It's not just about Menelaus and what he chooses to do with his desire. It's also about Helen and her action and her answer. On 156 he reflects. Seven years of this, more or less, not much conversation, something wrong with the marriage. Helen he could hold; how hold Menelaus? To love is easy; to be loved as if one were real, on the order of others: fearsome mystery! Unbearable responsibility! To her Menelaus signified something recognizable, as Helen to him. Whatever was it? There is that sense that the other person looking at you, loving you, assures you somehow of your reality, that you're real, that you're not an imaginary being. So, it's a way of reminding you that you're not really alienated, but this is what Menelaus cannot get his head around. He cannot understand that he could be loved for no reason and Proteus sort of gives us a sense of how we could understand this. This is on 161. Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change. Let go. It's a failure of faith in Aphrodite. So, to accept love is to accept your being and to have faith that love affirms it, affirms that being. Remember that self-admonition: not act like the boyfriend but be. This is what Menelaus has to ask forgiveness for. He didn't have enough faith in love just to be and to accept the affirmation of his being that Helen's reasonless, causeless love embodies. Barth is asking a really serious question about the compatibility between life and voice. Remember that in "Ambrose His Mark" Ambrose is saved from the bees lighting on his mouth because his mouth is on his mother's breast. He's asleep there having nursed. It's as if the bees which signify eloquence if they land on your mouth, they land on his eyes and on his ears instead. He can't have both that connection with his mother and that kind of eloquence. It's one or the other. You can't have love and language somehow, and this is a very Freudian understanding of how language works. He tells a story about a child playing what's called the "Fort-Da" game: here, away. He has a little ball. A little two- or three-year-old kid has a ball. He throws it away and then retrieves it, he throws it away and retrieves it, and Freud theorizes that he does that and he says, "Fort, da, fort, da." He does that because the language is a way of controlling his mother's absence and the ball stands in for the mother. It disappears and then it comes back. It disappears and comes back, and at that time his mother, who is actually Freud's daughter, was going out to work for the first time on some days, and the boy was getting used to letting her go. So, language arises from that loss. And Ambrose is only named once he's separated from his mother and no longer nurses as a result of the bee incident, and he also only gains a male name at that time. And so, I think it's important that the masculinity of language asserted with a talking sperm at the very beginning of this collection is consistent with this sense that you become male when you enter into language. Somehow when you're unnamed you're not part of language; you're still connected to the mother. And he actually had a female name. Remember he's called Christine for a while. So he becomes a boy after he's separated from his mother. Menelaus's problem with Helen suggests that incompatibility of being connected to the other, and here across the line of gender, connected with the other and somehow being able to be assimilated into language, and the silence of the oracle on the question, "Who am I?" This is on 158, and you just get that blank, silence, and you can see it enclosed in all those quotation marks. This is Barth's effort to enclose the silence into something readable, to contain that impossibility in the structure of the story. So all the quotation marks suggest human voice. I want to suggest to you finally that Barth is interested in the oral tradition above all other traditions in this book. He's using Greek epic as the source of his literary canon, here, and his canon of stories, of narratives, because it's oral tradition that brings the human voice and the human being, the fact of a person, together most closely. That's what fascinates him about the spoken word, as opposed to the word you read. And in other stories in this collection Barth experimented with recording them with tape. So, these are stories, some of them for voice and tape, and he'd do readings where he'd go and he'd put a tape recorder on the podium and he'd stand next to the tape recorder as his voice read the story from the tape recorder. And it was all to dramatize the problematic relationship between voice, story and person. But I think the dream of Menelaus is that somehow that voice can be residual, that somehow it can survive. And, in that sense, I think it has something in common with Nabokov's fantasy of the living artwork. But, unlike Nabokov's fantasy, it requires this concept of love, because love is what makes being into narrative. It takes two, and it takes desire. Desire moves narrative. And so at the end, the comic ending of "Menelaiad," which echoes the comic ending of Odysseus' trip back home, of The Odyssey, he says: Menelaus's story itself in ten or ten thousand years expires, yet I'll survive it [Who is this "I"?], I, in Proteus's terrifying last disguise, Beauty" spouse"s, odd Elysium: the absurd, unending possibility of love. If you think that Barth in all his heady, intellectual, canonical difficulty is uninterested in the world outside of his fiction, I think you could argue that it's on this notion of desire that he stakes his work's connection to the world. And the echo of that desire is, I would say, pleasure: something like, in this case, Nabokov's aesthetic bliss, but here it's more funny than that. It's not even so much the transportation and the nostalgic quality of Nabokov's description, sometimes. It's that wit, that pleasurable wit, the pleasure we get reading, being absorbed by something that we have to work hard to read, and yet repays us with that pleasure. When you read Crying of Lot 49 I'd like you to think about what that novel represents in the relation between language and the world. Is it similar? Barth and Pynchon are often talked about as part of the same metafictional movement in this couple of decades, '60s and '70s. Are they assimilable to one another in these terms? Think about that as you read.

Literature_Lectures

8_Jack_Kerouac_On_the_Road.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: So, today we find ourselves in a very different novelistic world than we've been in for the last week and a half: On the Road. Did anyone take this course because they love On the Road? Anybody? One, sort of ambivalently. Yes. Okay. Sometimes I do get students who have just an image of this novel in their mind, or they read it when they were in high school and have a sort of irrational, passionate love for it. And so, sometimes people approach it in that way, and I think in a way it holds that aura around itself in our culture and in the history of the novel in this period that we're studying together. I'm going to talk a little bit about its publishing history, its compositional history, actually, at the end of my two lectures on the novel. So, I would ask you just to reserve whatever curiosity you have about that. So, in a way, I'm flipping my usual practice; I would tell you a little bit about its publication history at the beginning. I'm going to do that at the end for this reason: that it has such a special place in the imagination of our culture. And so, I'm going to talk about that after we have a better understanding of what's going on in the book. My point, at the end of my lecture on Lolita on Monday, was that Nabokov is trying to imagine an autonomous work of art that has a life to it, that is in some sense animated or personified, and that this desire to make the aesthetic something living introduces to the world of the aesthetic the problem of mortality. It's mortality that gives it that sense of ephemeral value, but it's also mortality that threatens to cancel it out altogether. The language that the Beats tried to imagine, tried to write, takes up some of these problems that we saw in Nabokov. Unlike Nabokov, these writers are not trying to make a language that is autonomous and separate from the world, so you will not see the kind of artifice and the labored attention to form. You're not going to have a writer spending a month on the representation of a barber from Kasbeam. You're not going to get that in the Beats. Instead, you're getting something, a language that tries to come as close as possible--not necessarily to life in all its facets--but to life as we experience it. In a certain way, this is not a rejection of modernism and its desire for the autonomous work of art, because partly, as I've shown, the desire for the autonomous work of art shades into the desire to replicate life. There is that desire much more explicitly in the writing of Jack Kerouac, the desire to replicate experience as you read, the feeling of having the experience that the writer wants you to have and that the writer himself has had. That's always going to be important to understanding this work. So, that's one aspect in which it shares something with modernism, even though stylistically, and as a matter of craft and composition, it looks very distinct. The other way it shares an ambition of modernism is precisely in that effort to communicate experience, consciousness. So, if you've read at all in the novels of Virginia Woolf, for example, or in James Joyce's novels, you know that part of modernist innovation, part of the stylistic difficulty, is the effort to put on the page what happens in the mind, that sense of the mind drifting from one idea to another that you get in Virginia Woolf's prose, so magically in Woolf's prose. So, that is something these writers share with modernism, but there is one big difference and I want to exemplify that for you just by reading to you two parallel texts, one from the modernist canon and one from the Beat canon. So, first I want to read to you the footnote to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Now The Wasteland was the first poem to have footnotes, and you have to ask yourself: what do you have to think the poem is in order to think that it needs footnotes? So, I'm going to say a little bit more about that, but let me just read to you, first, from the notes on The Wasteland: Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge)." He has a little bibliography, there: Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. And then there are particular notes for the different parts of the poem. That's the introduction to the footnotes. What I want you to note there is the sense that the matter of the poem comes from an archive, an archive of scholarly work, a body of knowledge that you read about. And I also want you to note that language: "Miss Jessie Weston." It's a very mannered, decorous language. Now I would like to read to you from the footnote to Howl, Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, that for many people embodied at the time what it meant to be engaged in this new literary project. So, this is footnote to Howl: Holy! holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! Everybody's holy! Everywhere is holy! Every day is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy! the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggar holy the hideous human angels! A little different tone, don't you think? A few things I want to note about that besides the obvious. The fount of poetic inspiration is not to be found in an archive. It is not to be found in Miss Jessie Weston's book on ritual and romance. It is not to be found with a bibliography saying "Cambridge." That's not where you find the fount of the great poem. The footnote to Howl says that the source of Howl--that's what footnotes are; they're an indication of the source--it says that the source of the poetry is that holy, lived experience, and a particular slice of lived experience: the formerly rejected, the indecorous, the ecstatic. I noticed that several of you were smiling, in a way, as I read, that suggested you were embarrassed by the performance. Right? I did not elicit this by accident. Embarrassment is something that the Beats value. When Ginsberg first read Howl, he was on stage, and there was a little bathroom. It was--I think it was--in a book store. (I can't remember; I didn't reread my notes on Howl.) And so, when the show started he was in the bathroom, on the pot with the door open, and then he got up, and he hiked up his pants, and he waltzed out and he gave his reading of Howl. This is indicative of the sense that he wants to lay bare, in a literal way, all the seaminess of human life, all the aspects of what it means to be an embodied person, all the ecstasies that come from that embodiment. And, of course, this is not at all original to Ginsberg. If you read Walt Whitman, you will see much of the same ethos (and probably a lot better poetry). So, Ginsberg is not the first to do this in the American tradition, for sure, but it's a very important part of what the Beats revive. And I want to get at that question of embarrassment, because it comes up very explicitly on page 36. Embarrassment is thematized in On the Road, and it's assigned what I think is a very interesting provenance. So, this is Chad King talking to Sal Paradise: A quavering twang comes out when he speaks. "The thing I always liked, Sal, about the Plains Indians, was the way they always got s'danged embarrassed after they boasted the number of scalps they got. In Ruxton's Life in the Far West there's an Indian who gets red all over blushing because he got so many scalps and he runs like hell into the plains to glory over his deeds in hiding. Damn, that tickled me!" The sense of embarrassment is the sense that the excess of--what?--joy, in this passage, the Indian's bravery, his achievement, his success; all of that is in excess of the decorous presentation of that experience, of that real world of life, of that excessive joy. And it's given here this sort of clichéd, noble origin with the Native American, the Plains Indian. So, there is a sense, in the Plains Indian, that he is both the embodiment of a noble, restrained lineage; but also, deep in that American past, is this sense of great excess. Embarrassment tells us we're in the presence of the excess, and that's why Beat writers court it. That's why I courted it today for you. The excess requires, for the Beats, a new kind of language. One aspect of their language which maybe you've noticed in On the Road--it's not quite so pronounced in On the Road as it is elsewhere, certainly--in the letters that these figures write to each other. Part of that is the elimination of small words, "the," "and"; the abbreviation of certain words, "your" to "yr." There are all kinds of little abbreviations they make, and it suggests that language has to be wrenched out of its conventions; syntax can be set aside; language needs to move at the speed of experience and at the speed of ecstasy. So, that's one small way in the language that they practiced tried to imitate the experience that they were immersing themselves in. But there were more formulated ways of capturing that experience in language. Jack Kerouac had a list of essentials that he taped up on his wall when he was writing, and this is what they include: Scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages for your own joy [and that's "yr," your own joy]. Submissive to everything, open, listening. Try never to get drunk outside your own house.[Well, this is a piece of advice clearly he never took.] Be in love with your life. Be crazy dumb saint of the mind. Blow as deep as you want to blow. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind. The unspenspeakable visions of the individual. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you. And then, my favorite one is: "You're a genius all the time." Now, try putting that up in front of your desk: "You're a genius all the time." It will help you to produce a lot of writing; I guarantee. Kerouac tried over and over again to write On the Road, and it was an effort to practice this kind of free language that would be uninhibited and that would gesture towards some deeper, bottomless part of the human experience, the human soul. Sometimes it was spiritualized. In this sense, this is why I put this quote up on the board from On the Road: "We've got to go someplace, find something." There is a relentless seeking sense that's at the heart of this work. Now, for those of you who don't know, On the Road does document pretty closely the actual road trips that Jack Kerouac took with Neal Cassady and a whole host of others, and I can do a little decoding for you. Old Bull Lee is William Burroughs, and his wife, Jane, Jane Lee. So, Allen Ginsberg is Carlo Marx, and Ginsberg went to Columbia. He was kicked out of Columbia, and then sort of went back. He was in and out of school. So, a lot of them were in this little community, and they picked up wanderers and various people who wanted to learn from them. And that's what Neal Cassady was to them at first, a kind of wanderer who wanted to be in their intellectual, but bohemian, circle. So, you see the kind of language that Neal represents at the very beginning of the novel. First of all, he's introduced in this very mysterious way: "First reports of him." This is on the first page of Part One, the middle of that first paragraph: "First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who had shown me a few letters from him, written in a New Mexico reform school." So, his letters come out of this western land, New Mexico, and a land of criminality, the reform school. So, he's exotic just from the very beginning, and it's an exotic language. It's the letters that come out of this exotic place that first catch their attention. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jail kid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou. It's that passive sense: "There was talk." Who's talking? We don't know. That passive verb, "there was talk," gives you the sense that there is this wide community passing word mouth to mouth of the coming of a mysterious spiritual figure: "first reports of him;" "news came;" "there was talk." So, language is this communal set of rumors spiritualized by its very vagueness and shared quality. And then, it's just fascinating to listen to what Dean says. Now this on page 2. This is how he talks: All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this. "Now, darling. Here we are in New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed the Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville Reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal love things and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans ..." and so on in, the way that he had in those early days." His language is a sort of mishmash of poorly used academic locutions: "worklife plans." It sounds almost like corporate speak, in a way. It has that dry quality to it. And then, on the top of 3, we get another example: "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans." So, this is not yet that idealized speech that Kerouac is dreaming of when he writes the list of Essentials for Spontaneous Prose. Dean's language is not that in these passages. His desire for the intellectual download from Chad is not what's going to make him the figure of the new language for Sal. Rather, it is another kind of language that he represents that will be that kind of germ of what Sal is looking for. This is, you see, also on 2 at the beginning here: I went to the cold-water flat with the boys and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch. Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen probably to make coffee while he proceeded with his love problems for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding like a young boxer to instructions to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand "yes"es and "that's right." There is this sense of enthusiasm, so his response is not an articulation of some thought, but an effusion: "Yes; that's right." It's a visceral response, and you see it even more clearly on 4. So, he's staying, Dean is staying with Sal, and Sal has been writing. And they're ready to go out, and Sal says: "Hold on a minute. I'll be right with you as soon as I finish this chapter," and it was one of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls." So, I'm going to skip along a little bit. ("I was…" Oh, let's see. "As we…"Actually, I am going to read that part.) As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel, we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life and though he was a con man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it for room and board and how to write, etc., and he knew I knew. This had been the basis of our relationship but I didn't care and we got along fine. No pestering, no catering. We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned, he said, "Go ahead. Everything you do is great." He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories yelling, "Yes, that's right. Wow, man," and "Phew!" "Wow" is Dean's word. "Wow" is the kind of word that means nothing, but it suggests the immediacy of Dean's engagement. So, all that talking on the bus, and the way they're moving their hands, the bug, that's all where this language is rising from. That's where the new language is going to come from, and you can see how Sal assimilates that on page 35. This is just as he is coming into Denver: I said to myself, Wow, what'll Denver be like? I got on that hot road and off I went in a brand-new car driven by a Denver businessman of about 35. He went 70. I tingled all over. I counted minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead over the rolling wheat fields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night with all the gang and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark word and the only word I had was "wow." So Neal's--sorry--Dean's sense (I will do this and please forgive me. I will sometimes slip in to calling him Dean because he, Dean… nevermind. You know what I'm saying. I will sometimes slip in to calling him Neal when his name is Dean.) Dean has already projected this mode of language into Sal, so even as he's saying to Sal, "Teach me how to write," what he's doing is teaching Sal how to write, how to write this kind of book, how to be the prophet of "wow." This is all over the text. If you look at page 62, it's in these little stories: Remi woke up and saw me come in the window. His great laugh, one of the greatest laughs in the world, dinned in my ear. And then, if you just skip up to the top of 63: The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh I swear on the Bible was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. The laugh is a lot like the "wow." It's that sound you make just because you're experiencing something, just because you're having a response to what's in front of you, something someone says. Okay. That's another example. And the last one I'll give you is on 55. This is when they've gone up to the mountain pass after getting in fights in the bars in Denver: In the whole eastern dark wall of the divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind except in the ravine where we roared and on the other side of the divide was the great Western Slope and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs and dropped and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad, drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell I guess across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking towards us with the word and would arrive any minute and make us silent. Their yell at the top of the world seems to Sal something that calls for a replacement; it calls for some other prophet to come walking ragged towards them and make them fall silent with his word. But, in the meantime, what you have is the continual reproduction of that yell, that laugh, that "wow," that "yes," that "that's all right," all those things that they say just to register their existence and their relation with one another. I want to note something else, though, about the first time that Dean and Sal meet and the contextualizing of that meeting. When they first meet in that passage that I read to you, he's just rising up from having sex on the couch with Marylou in someone else's apartment. He sent the owner of the apartment into the kitchen so he could have sex with Marylou on the couch. In other versions he says that Dean got up and was naked, not that he was in his shorts. There is an immediate sexual sense that charges the relationship between these people. Those relationships take place in the context of continual negotiations of sexual relationships, and so the book begins with that explanation that: I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it had something to do with the miserably weary splitting up and my feeling that everything was dead. Dean's negotiations between Marylou and Camille in Denver--where he has his schedule, and he has his exact time he has to get from one hotel to the other to sleep with each of them, and then he has to meet Carlo Ginsberg, Carlo Marx, in the basement to have his conversations to get to the "bottomlessness" of each other's mind--all those negotiations are absolutely crucial. It's what they spend their time talking about, often. It's what they spend their time negotiating. So, the search for the immediate language of experience is part and parcel of a very complex negotiation of sexual ties between multiple people. And it's not just between the men and the women. It's between the men and the men. And that moment when Sal meets Dean at the door, and he's naked; it's reflected when he sees Dean with Camille. Camille opens the door to their room when they're in Denver, and he finally sees Dean in Denver. He opens the door to the room, and there is a picture that Camille has drawn of Dean: a portrait of him completely naked, and it notes his penis in that picture. It's as if Sal's first experience of Dean is already, in that scene, assimilated into the image of Dean: the disembodied, aesthetic image of Dean. But that aesthetic image of Dean is all bound up in these negotiations. So, it's a picture that Camille has drawn, and of course Camille doesn't know that he's sleeping with Marylou in another hotel on the same day, and so on. So, all of that is very palpable, and Sal's own desire for Dean is sublimated in those scenes, but it's everywhere at the level of the language. And, if you note the repeated presence of that question, where was Dean? Where was Dean? He's always missing. When Sal gets to Denver, that's what he wants to know. When he gets back to New York, finally, at the end of this first road trip, he has missed Dean. There's always the sense that Dean evades him, and I think part of that sense of an evading object of desire is, again, the pursuit of sex in this novel; it's part of the pursuit of sex. You might think, given all this, and given the ultimate plot of On the Road, that being on the road is about pursuing that kind of desire, and that it is necessitated by leaving home: you have to leave home in order to pursue that desire. But I would suggest to you that home is absolutely crucial to the production of this desire. And I want to point you to page 26. This is Sal's story about Big Slim Hazard, a hobo that he once knew. He was a hobo by choice: As a little boy, he'd seen a hobo come up to ask his mother for a piece of pie and she had given it to him and when the hobo went off down the road the little boy had said, "Ma, what was that fellow?" "Why, that's a hobo." "Ma, I want to be a hobo someday." "Shut your mouth. That's not for the like of the Hazards." But he never forgot that day and when he grew up after a short spell playing football at LSU he did become a hobo. Being a hobo is produced in this little vignette by the experience of seeing a hobo get pie from your mother. Now, did any of you notice how often Sal eats pie? Let me just demonstrate the litany of pie. Okay, page 15. Actually, let's start on 14, or perhaps on 13: "Along about three in the morning after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadside stand…." That's Sal. Top of 14: I ate another apple pie and ice cream. That's practically all I ate all the way across the country. I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious. Fifteen, bottom: I ate apple pie and ice cream. It was getting better as I got deeper in to Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon. They were coming home from high school but I had no time now for thoughts like that and promised myself a ball in Denver. And if you look on 107, the first thing Sal does when he gets home is eat. When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My mother got up and looked at me. "Poor little Salvatore," she said in Italian. "You're thin. You're thin. Where have you been all this time?" I had on two shirts and two sweaters. My canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnants of my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money I had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family. There is a sense in which hunger, the hunger generated by the road, in Sal's case in this last scene--he's been penniless; all he had was cough drops to eat at the very end--that the hunger generated by the road exists in a necessary relation to the consumption of home. And I would suggest to you that the consumption of home is driven by a certain kind of desire as well, that desire to move up in the American class structure: "the first electric refrigerator in my family." He's earned a little money on the road and sent it home. What it does for him is allow him to buy his aunt this symbol of a middle-class American domesticity, and he is a happy participant in this new purchase. This is not exactly just what the women do while the boys are out on the road. The boys want the pie. The boys want to become hobos because there's a kind of hunger that's generated at home; it's satisfied at home, but it's also generated at home. And I want to suggest to you that part of the misogyny of the novel--which I'm sure is palpable to all of us as we read--part of that misogyny is connected to this consumptive ethos. So, when we talk about desire for something--"we've got to go someplace, find something--the very vagueness of that desire is connected with the basic hungers of the body for sex, for food, for sleep even. We see Dean sort of begging for sleep after his conversation with Carlo Marx in the basement in Denver. Those kinds of desires are connected also with that American habit of consumption. This is a consumer society; in the 1950s it was already very much so. The mass production after World War II had already taken hold. Supermarkets, as we saw in Wise Blood, are already something one can be fond of, as Enoch was. And so, if this is a novel whose aura has always said to us, "Be free, be countercultural," what I'm suggesting is that it's structured around a very deeply embedded American cultural trait of consumption. It spiritualizes that kind of desire, and my symbol for it is pie. I want to show you one last thing about how the language works, and this is on page 49. To set aside the critique of that search for a moment, I just want to move back into it in these spiritual terms and see what we can see. When Dean and Carlo are talking to each other, there's a lot of anxiety on either part about whether they have actually attained that thing that they were looking for. On 48, their talk is described as business in the beginning. Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed cross-legged and looked at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it, reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events. Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations. And then, they have this very complicated back-and-forth about things that they remembered, or didn't, and they hashed these things over: Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul. "Why do you bring that up again?" "There is one last thing I want to know.'" "But dear Sal, you're listening. You are sitting there. We'll ask Sal. What would he say?" And I said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all." So, all this language is produced because you can't ever get to that last thing; you have to keep hashing it over. But if you go to the next page you can see--or actually two pages over--you can see that already Sal is taking what he can get from this language and transposing it into his experience of reality. So Carlo had earlier--sorry to flip back and forth so much--had read earlier his poem--this is on 47--to Sal. He had been reading poetry. Carlo woke up in the morning and heard the vulgar pigeons yakking in the street outside his cell. He saw the sad nightingales nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother. A gray shroud fell over the city. The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were papier-mache. The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and extremely strange. So, this is what Carlo represents in his poetry. Well, if you look, Sal, after witnessing what it means--what their business is with one another, the way they try to get to the bottom of each other's soul--he looks out, and he sees the world through Carlo's eyes. He's been awake all this time listening: "What were you thinking, Sal?" I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing maniacs and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of a watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud Pass and was yet made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world. They smiled. I pointed my finger at them and said, "If you keep this up, you'll both go crazy but let me know what happens as you go along." I walked out and took a trolley to my apartment and Carlo Marx's papier-mache mountains grew red as the great sun rose from the eastward plains. So, the poetry that is part and parcel of the conversation between Dean and Carlo--Carlo's poetry--seeps out of that basement room. And there's a real spatial sense here, that it's being generated at the base of the world, and it goes up and it transforms these mountains into papier-mache. It makes them in one sense false; there is a falseness to the overlay that Carlo gives to Sal, and through which he then sees. There's a falseness, a craftedness, but it's a kind of folk craftedness. This is not the craftedness of modernism. This is papier-mache, a fairly crude folk art. Anyone can do it. Get your strips of newspaper and paste them up. So, it has a quality that is different from Humbert's elaborate world view through which we see or don't see Lolita. It's a very different kind of crafting, but yet it does replace reality in a similar way, or it makes demands on reality that push the real back. And so, even though they can never get to the bottom of their souls--they can never get, as Sal says, that last thing, that's what you can never have--even though that's true, it has this world-making power. To what end will that power be used? This is one question I want you to think about as you finish this novel. What do these figures think language can be used for? What's it good for? What can it do for them? What beyond that kind of economics of desire, that accounting? If you look on 107-108, again at the very end of the section: "I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too." What are the losses? What are the gains? Is it just a representation of an imaginative and desireful economy, or is there some other thing being produced here? What is the something? What is the someplace? So, in that relation, I'd like you to think about the representation of America in the novel. What do you see there when you think about the America they're giving us, all these figures? So, that's for your reading. In section please bring Lolita. I think you're going to spend most of your time talking about Lolita. Section for On the Road will probably be next week unless your TF wants to bring up some brief questions about it, but that's all for today.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_3A.txt

a [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so here we are again for another session of English 3328 British literature from the late 18th century beginning of the 19th century to the present time and we have been discussing Wordsworth and at the end of our last class we had been going over words where tinter Abby in considerable detail and the one thing that I did want to say by way of concluding our discussion of tinter Abbey is that if you look at the very last section and the very last section is is the last verse paragraph these are not stanzas these are really verse paragraphs and that is uh one 11 and following you'll notice what he does is he turns now to his daughter excuse me his daughter his uh I'm thinking about another thing that we're going to be taking up he's uh he turns now to his young sister Dorothy and whether she can hear him or not is not clear but he is addressing her in any event in the poem and so he talks about how nor per chance if I were not thus taught in the way that I have been by nature and by my experiences with nature that we have been talking about in which he has been profoundly moved and he believes profoundly changed even to the point where his his moral character has been changed for the better by his experiences with nature which are essentially spiritual experiences not simply physical experiences and as spiritual experiences they have provoked in him a kind of spiritual growth both as a poet and simply as a human being and so he says nor per chance if I were not thus taught taught those things in that way should I the more suffer my genial spirits to Decay for thou art with me here upon the banks of this Fair River thou my dearest friend thou my dearest friend and you know at different times in their life they actually lived together or when they weren't living together they were living close to one another and were for much of their lives in very close contact with one another my dear dear friend and in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart the language of my former heart the way I was the first time I was here at tinter Abbey 5 years ago I can see that kind of experience now taking place in you and read my former Pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes of thy wild eyes now wild not in the sense of being out of her mind but wild in the sense of being out there just enjoying bouncing around and rolling around in the grass and just spontaneously innocently enjoying nature even as a wild animal could without thinking about it oh yet a little while may I hold in thee what I was once my dear dear sister and this prayer I make knowing that nature never did betray the heart that loved her it is her privilege through all the years of our life to lead from Joy To Joy for she can so inform the mind that is within us so impress with quietness and beauty and so feed with lofty thoughts that neither that neither evil tongues rash judgments nor the snears of selfish men nor greetings where no kindness is nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life shall air Prevail against us or disturb our cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings so he goes on by the way to talk about this in an interesting religious way that the experience for him is really a kind of religious experience and this is something that I have touched on with Blake but this will come up again of course with Wordsworth and with colage and with some of the other 19th century writers who may not always have been religious in a conventional sense of belonging say to a particular relig religious denomination but they frequently were profoundly religious in another sense that is to say in the search for some kind of spiritual Beauty and spiritual enrichment and this was the sort of thing that they found in their living in nature and experiencing nature and through that experience with nature we're undergoing transform ations of themselves spiritual intellectual imaginative aesthetic creative transformations in themselves so uh you'll frequently note that they will use religious language or religious metaphors to describe their experience why not I mean what what other metaphors do we have right I mean the the metaphors of religious experience all have to do with the cultivation of the spirit and of some kind of uh closeness to some higher reality or Transcendent reality right uh from time immemorial those kinds of metaphors have circulated among us and so it's natural enough for these poets then to reach out for similar kinds of religious met for to explain their spiritual quests and Journeys okay so he now is anticipating that his sister Dorothy is going to be experiencing the kind of enrichment after today after her experience out there at tinter ABY today that he has since he was there the first time and so he says even if this were not going to work for me any longer as a profoundly moving experience still I would be cheered by the knowledge that it is going to do so for you so um very interesting poem and it becomes a kind of Touchstone for us of a certain kind of romantic poetry and as I've mentioned this is something that we find not only in people like Wordsworth and colid and other romantic writers but this is something that we also find not only in England but we find uh being speculated about by the idealist philosophers particularly in Germany German philosophers from uh Kant at least from Emmanuel Kant onward uh one thinks of course of of perhaps the greatest German philosopher of the certainly of the earlier 19th century perhaps of the whole 19th century uh Hegel who were constantly meditating on and attempting to analyze and to understand what were the subjective conditions for knowledge people as I've said here before had been spending a great deal of time especially with the emergence of modern science in in trying to to analyze and to articulate the objective conditions for knowledge but what about the subjective conditions one of the things that we're going to find in the romantics is an absorption to the point of a preoccupation for what takes place in the mind of human beings and by mind I don't mean simply intellect but in the mental activities the mental faculties the mental energies of human beings as they encounter not only themselves but the people and the natural world around them you see what kinds of interactions or transactions take place and they're interested in that from the view of the knowing and experiencing subject okay this is not an effort to establish objective norms for judging knowledge as such now it's not by the way an effort to try to repudiate the objective Norms being established by scientists and philosophers of Science of the time it's simply to try another course something which they felt was far too much neglected and it's really to a large extent to the romantics then that we owe a modern interest in Psychology which focuses on human emotion and on human consciousness 18th century psychology tended to uh focus on the faculties for knowing from the point of view of figuring out how we formed ideas of things based on our experience particularly our observation of empirical data and then all well and good and of course it's a necessary process in scientific investigation and in the formulation of scientific ideas ultimately of scientific theories Grand theories but what was not really being investigated in the process generally speaking was what happens in the consciousness of the subject what kinds of of of energy are brought to play in The Knowing subject okay and this is something we're going to be talking about in Greater detail in just a moment as we turn now to words words Prelude some people pronounce it Prelude but uh you know it may be a little bit uh clearer for us to call it the Prelude because this was intended truly to be a pre lude or Prelude to a larger a yet larger work about the poet poetry po poetic creation and so forth um Wordsworth began this at the end of the 18th century as you see on the screen here with the dates that I've put up here he if you look at the head not in your text to the Prelude you'll notice that he he completed several hundred lines in his first effort at it we know that around 1805 he completed a much longer version of the Prelude he tinkered with this for much of the rest of his life up at least until 1839 and it was found among his unfinished Works after his death and it was published by his wife and his literary executiv with some minor Alterations by the way in 1850 and if you look at the different versions of the Prelude one of the things you see is not only its subject the growth of a poet's mind as described in the poem but you see something of the growth of wordsworth's mind over half a century because he continued to make changes in the work some of them very minor but some of them substantive in later years and one of the things that you notice about Wordsworth is that he progress prively became more conservative as we're about to see in just a moment he started out as a uh as a young radical a young political radical very much uh a celebrator of the French Revolution which of course from an English point of view as well as from a conservative French point of view but certainly from an English point of view was very very radical indeed and there was a handful but but a handful of radicals in England at the time who were celebrating the French Revolution as a great New Day Dawning for humankind so uh what we're going to see of course is the crisis that Wordsworth went through partly as a result of that kind of political affiliation and the crisis that had brought upon him how he dealt with that crisis how he came ultimately out of that crisis but as he tinkered with the poem and as we compare some of his tinkering with the poem in his later years with some of his other writings in his later years we see that he became much much more conservative as he grew older now sometimes that uh is used as oh support for a kind of cliche that well you know lots of people when they're young become begin as uh as radicals and then they naturally enough become more conservative as they grow older well maybe that's true of some people and not true of others but nonetheless it was true of of woodsworth so uh not true of Byron by the way we'll talk more about that in another class but in in any event uh let's go back to the screen please this is a poem really of Epic Proportions he he writes this as a new kind of Epic it's not an epic of grand events such as you find in Homer Virgil and Milton in Homer we find the great epic narratives of the the Greeks and the Trojans locked in Mortal Combat and of course the efforts of odius one of the great Greek Heroes to return after their victory at Troy to return to his homeland and all of the the trials that he undergoes in doing so so Homer is painting his picture on a large scale a grand scale of what is taken to be ancient history Virgil is doing his redo of the homeric tradition in which he takes the case of anas who is one of the Trojan Heroes and he talks about well what would have happened to the Trojans after the fall of Troy presumably they weren't all killed in the the uh defeat of Troy and of the Trojans so what happened or what could have happened and so he writes an epic of anas a great Trojan leader who leads his surviving Trojan followers across North Africa uh where they encounter all kinds of tests and difficulties and temptations and so forth and ultimately to Italy where according to Virgil anas is going to found the line that ultimately will found Rome leading up to the Glorious institution of the Roman Empire which by the way happened in his lifetime and he was friends with the first emperor uh Caesar Augustus by the way so once again you have an epic told on a very very Grand kind of scale well then there could be nothing grander than the scale of Milton's Paradise Lost because this is is retelling of the great biblical Narrative of the creation and the fall in which you have the whole Cosmos involved the fight with the rebellious angels in heaven uh God through the Archangel Michael hurling the devil and uh all of the minor Devils down into hell which is created especially as a place of punishment for them them rising up and sending their great leader Lucifer to the Garden of Eden where God has created recently the Garden on Earth and created man and woman to enjoy the fruits of the garden save for the fruits of the one tree of the knowledge of good and of evil and of course we have the Temptation in the garden the fall and through that from a Christian theological point of view and Milton was by the way a Christian Theologian uh one of one of the great Protestant or Puritan theologians of his time and and Milton uh saw this as really the great epic not only of the fall but of what makes Not only possible but necessary the Redemption of the whole Human family through the coming of Christ so what could possibly be on a larger epic scale than that we're talking about the whole history or salvation history as the Germans like to call it h gika uh of the whole Human family so uh here woodsworth sees himself as working within a tradition and you can find all kinds of verbal Echoes In Wordsworth of Homer of Virgil particularly certainly of Milton everybody read Milton at this time you know it has been uh uh estimated by Scholars who have studied reading habits of people who were literate in the 18th and 19th centuries and it is certain that anybody who knew how to read had at least three books on their shelf one of course would be the Bible another would be Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress which is a religious allegory and then Milton Paradise Lost and uh so you find all kinds of of Echoes of Milton all over the place in 18th and 19th and on into 20th century uh literature by the way in English Okay so what kind of Epic is this then this is the Epic now of the growth of an individual person of the growth of an individual person and this too is going to be a kind of Journey but it's going to be a different kind of Journey than the journeys of odius and anas because to a large extent this is going to be an interior Journey so this is an epic of subjective history the events in the growth of the poet's mind reconstructed as memory subjective history the events in the growth of the poet's mind reconstructed as memory now we talked about that last time when we looked at words worth preface to the second edition the 1800 edition of lyrical ballads and we saw that one of the things that he said took place in the creation of poetry was the recollection in Tranquility of an overflow of powerful emotion well what we have here is the representation in many cases of overflows of powerful emotion but here they are reflected upon after the fact and they are reconstructed in memory and as memory so that this is a narrative of Wordsworth own personal early growth we're going to see examples of that in just a minute a severe psychological crisis virt a near complete psychological comp collapse and healing through discovering the power of spirit through discovering the power of spirit of his Spirit or of any human Spirit to to commune with nature so notice what underlies this is a premise not always directly stated though it sometimes is stated in nearly the words that I have up here that poetry is or at least can be therapeutic poetry is or at least can be therapeutic either in compos osing poetry or in reading poetry or both so this can be a form of therapy for the one who writes poetry we touched on that last time in which the writing of a poem becomes not only the expression of one's deepest feelings but also a way of working through articulating and working through those feelings especially conflicts in one's feelings so that the act of poetic expression can itself become a form of psychotherapy but not everyone is a great poet not everyone is a great poet now Shelly said that we're all poets but uh you know we're not all going to publish poetry and we may not all uh compose equally fine poetry but uh Shelly claimed that we're all poets in some sense you see that the the same kinds of imaginative processes and possibilities that exist in poets exist in all of us if we would simply cultivate them if we would simply cultivate them well we can read and reading we can experience we can enter into the experience it's not just a matter of experiencing vicariously or secondhand what words worth experiences we can be drawn into the poem in such a way that we undergo The Experience ourselves in a certain sense okay and that that too can be a kind of therapy for us as well now it was during this time that people became very interested in Aristotle's notion of how tragedy can arouse in US painful feelings painful emotions as we watch the events taking place in the life of a sympathetic character on the stage with with whom we can identify sufficiently that we have powerful feelings for that person and those feelings are painful as we see that person undergoing a tragedy but then Aristotle says that the whole purpose of this in the design of the play is to lead us to a catharsis or a purging of those emotions so that when we leave the theater there should be a sense in which we experience relief and release okay at least that's for Aristotle and uh for him that's the whole rationale behind tragedy at least the very best of tragic plays uh his famous example of course is edus or edus the king okay so then the Prelude is also in the tradition of great autobiographical spiritual Journeys such as St Augustine's confessions I don't know how many of you are familiar with Augustine's confessions but uh most people have at least heard about them right what happens is that Augustine after he converted to Christianity which was in his 30s by the way when he did so after he converted to Christianity he looked back on his earlier life and he tried to figure out how it was that he was led to undergo the kind of spiritual and ultimately Rel religious conversion that he did undergo and so there is a very complex very subtle psychological analysis of the processes of development that he went through leading up to and then in the midst of the crisis which produced his religious conversion as I said he wasn't he wasn't a Christian his mother was but he wasn't a Christian until he was uh you know as I said in his 30s so uh this becomes the model for the great spiritual autobiographies okay now when I say spiritual autobiographies in a Justin's case of course it deals with a literal conversion to Christian religion there are other spiritual autobiographies which are certainly spiritual in their Journey quests but may not lead to a specifically religious conversion of the kind that Augustine went through and that's what we're talking about in the case of woodsworth though the ultimate model for such works is Augustine Wordsworth however finds his salvation and again you know we're forced to rely as he is forced to rely on religious metaphors here both in and through nature and that's something that we're about to get into what is he talking about now when he talks about what happens in the growth of a mind in communion with other people with external events but ultimately with nature what happens and what kind of development does he go through okay um well let's see let's look at the very beginning okay everybody with me okay book first introduction childhood and school time there's a kind of preface at the very beginning now remember this is looking back on events this is autobiographical it's not written while the events were taking place this is looking back on the events being described this is like Augustine looking back on his earlier life from the perspective of his already having undergone his conversion oh there is blessing notice again see I'm in to say this over and over again uh the use of of religious language what other language do we have to talk about the kinds of things he wants to talk about oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze a visitant that while he fans my cheek does seem half conscious of the joy he brings from the green fields and from Yan Azure sky the breeze the breeze does anybody know uh what what Breeze could signify there's there's actually a kind of pun here yeah you know you have to use the button there isn't the breeze his Muse The Breeze is his Muse that's true the breeze is his Muse is his source of inspiration in a sense Breeze wind anybody know what I'm talking about yeah okay like a there's a spirit in nature yes why why would you make that connection because that's just that's just how it how in it's like a living thing I guess going through the okay the woods it's the breeze you can feel it I guess okay okay uh in a way you can feel it in a way you can touch the breeze but in a way you can't right it's like you're putting your hand through it uh and you can't you can touch it and you can't touch it at the same time uh that by the way is there's there's a kind of pun that is also involved in that the word in Latin for wind or breath I suppose is also related to the word for Spirit okay and so it provides the basis often enough in Western poetry for talking about the wind or the breeze as a kind of metaphor for Spirit something that we can feel is there but you can't quite put your finger on it you can't quite contain it or you can't quite measure it in in the ways that we experience it whatever his mission the soft Breeze can come to none more grateful than to me escaped from the vast City vast city of London where I long have pined where long have pined a discontented sojer somebody who was forced to live in the city but that's not where I wanted to Live Now free free as a bird to settle where I will what dwelling shall receive me and what Veil shall be my Harbor underneath what Grove shall I take up my home and what clear stream shall with its murmur low me into rest the Earth is all before me with a heart joyous nor scared at its own liberty I look about and should the chosen guide be nothing better than a Wandering cloud I cannot miss my way I breathe again it's as if I've been suffocating and now I Breathe Again do you ever go out into the country and you feel like you can actually breathe in a way that you don't feel like you can breathe in the city um okay trances of thought and mountings of the heart come fast upon me it is shaken off that burden of my own unnatural self of my own unnatural self the heavy weight of so many a we day not mine in other words we live lives most of us much of the time maybe not all the time but much of the time at any rate which are burdensome I mean there are all kinds of stuff we got to do right about which we can't make choices but now he has gotten out of that kind of unnatural State once again into the mountains the Lakes the free Breeze and he's free again and such as were not made for me so notice down a little bit further in uh 31 dear Liberty yet what would it Avail but for a gift that consecrates the joy consecrate also is a term taken over from religion from religious services for I me thought while the sweet Breath of Heaven was blowing on my body felt within a correspondent Breeze that gently moved with quickening virtue now notice what he's saying here not only am I feeling this Breeze which is coming coming to me from Heaven as it were but I feel within me a correspondent a co-respondent breeze Co together right Co together respondent responding braise in other words it's not just something outside me with which is coming upon me or into me there's something in me that is stirring as well okay and it is the intermingling of these two stirrings from outside and from inside that is what is really real and that's what he wants to talk about and that's what this whole poem is going to be an effort to try to discover and to articulate okay uh and notice that this is breaking up a long continued Frost in line 40 and then in 46 he directly addresses his friend and the friend of course is his very dear friend Samuel Taylor colorid and remember that when he first wrote this was when the two of them had first become very very good friends and they were actually meeting together almost daily taking walks together talking about poetry writing poems reading their poems to one another uh going over one another's poetry and so on and so on and so on and of course they published as you know now Leaves of Grass in 1798 at around the same time that Wordsworth was working on the first version of the Prelude so here he addressing colorage thus far o friend did I not used to make a present Joy the matter of a song pour forth that day my soul and measured strains that would not be forgotten and are here recorded to the Open Fields I told a prophecy a prophecy see this is also the poet as prophet in the same sense that the great epic Poets of the past had been prophets not unlike the biblical prophets poetic numbers came spontaneously to clothe notice in Priestly robe a renovated Spirit capital S spirit singled out such Hope was mine for Holy Services okay see how he views himself as engaged in a Priestly function as a poet now my own voice cheered me in Far More the mind's internal Echo internal echo of the imperfect sound to both I listen drawing from their Bo a cheerful confidence in things to come well okay where is this leading well still in book one flip over to line 357 and following here we have one of the most famous scenes in words where's Prelude he's a young boy and he gets a rowboat and he rows out on a lake and he talks about the experience that he has and he can't really explain that experience in common sense terms okay you know what I mean sometimes we have an experience and we go over it and we try to explain the experience and we try to use our Common Sense okay but this is an experience that at least for him cannot be explained in such terms so what does that lead to one summer evening led by her nature I found a little boat tied to a willow tree within a rocky cave its usual home straight I am loed her chain and stepped in pushed from the shore it was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure cuz he's actually taking the boat without permission it's somebody else's boat nor without the voice of mountain Echoes did my boat move on leaving behind her still on either side small circles glittering idly in the moon until they M melted all into one track what he's talking about here is the play of the boat and then of course the OES on the surface of the water okay as the the water is illuminated by the moon of well one track of sparkling light but now like one who Rose proud of his skill to reach a chosen point with AN unswerving line I fixed my view upon the summit of a craggy Ridge okay I don't know if you've ever rode but uh in this kind of rowing you're rowing backwards I mean it's not like rowing in a canoe where you're going forward this is in a rowboat in which you're you're actually with your back towards your destination okay so how do you row in a straight line it's actually not very easy I don't know if you've done this or not but it's not very easy to row in a straight line uh you can very easily start rowing in circles uh but in any event uh one of the ways that you're supposed to do this is by fixing on some point and keeping the boat aligned uh in relation to that fixed Point okay um but now like one who Rose proud of his skill to reach a certain point with AN unswerving line I fixed my view upon the summit of a craggy Ridge The Horizon's utmost boundary for above was nothing but the Stars in the gray sky she was an elfan pinace lustily I dipped my ores into the Silent Lake and as I Rose upon the stroke my boat went heaving through the water like a swan when from behind that craggy steep this is the mountain he's got his eyes fixed on till then the horizons bound a huge Peak black and huge as if with voluntary power Instinct upred its head see what happens he's got his eyes fixed on this Ridge on the mountain this Ridge on the mountain side on the other side of the lake as he's rowing and now as he's going along and he's really beginning to pick up speed it is as if there is some huge Peak rearing up over him I struck and struck again this is struck the water with his ores and growing still in stature the Grim shaped towered up between me and the stars and still for so it seemed with purpose of its own and measured motion like a living thing stroe after me notice he's having the impression of this huge mountain striding across the water toward him with trembling ores I turned and through the silent water stole my way back to the covert of the willow tree there in her moing place I left my bark and Through The Meadows homward went in grave and serious mood but after I had seen that spectacle for many days my brain worked with a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being or my thoughts there hung a Darkness call it Solitude or blank desertion no familiar shapes remain no Pleasant images of trees of sea or Sky no colors of green fields but huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men moved slowly through the Mind by day and were a trouble to my dreams see he's undergone some kind of an experience out there now don't forget that in part it's a guilty experience because he wasn't supposed to take this boat it's not exactly stealing the boat but he's quote borrowed the boat but you know what if the owner of the boat came along uh you know no doubt the owner of the boat would not have been happy at all about this so uh and and he's had this tremendous kind of of experience in which nature seems to be alive stalking him looming over him wisdom and spirit of the universe thou Soul he's addressing some kind of spiritus Mundy some kind of spirit of the world or even of the universe thou soul that art The Eternity of thought that give us to forms and images a breath and everlasting motion notice once again the metaphor of breath not in Vain by star or Starlight thus from my first dawn of childhood did thou intertwine for me the passions that build up our human soul not with the mean and vulgar works of man but with high objects with enduring things with life and nature purifying thus the elements of feeling and of thought and sanctifying again a religious metaphor by such discipline both pain and fear until we recognize a Grandeur in the beatings of the heart wow now it's not that he understood all that then when he was a child it's only looking back on that that he understands what was beginning to happen to him and that's exactly what Augustine does in his Confessions by the way when he looks back from the perspective of being a mature man having undergone his religious conversion and he looks back on his childhood he looks back on his teen years he looks back on his early adulthood and he now understands from his new perspective he now understands what was going on inside him in a way that he did not understand before now of course because Augustine is not only converted to Christianity but he becomes one of the greatest Christian theologians of all time he interprets that in theological terms as the spirit of God working in him but notice all you have to do is change a few words around and you've got something very close to Wordsworth don't you Wordsworth is not talking about this as a Christian Theologian but he is talking about some kind of of great Universal Soul or Spirit which is working in him even in ways that he did not comprehend as a child okay so let's move right along here and let's move to the end of book one and here he refers once again to his friend of course colid and he read or at least read sections of different uh drafts or versions of this poem to colorage I began my story this is at the in the last verse paragraph beginning in line uh 6113 and following I began my story early not misled I trust by an infirmity of love for days disowned by memory fancying flowers where none not even the sweetest doer can survive for him at least whose Dawning day they cheer nor will it seem to thee o friend colorage so prompt in sympathy you who are so prompt in sympathy fellow feeling the old sense of of sympathy is not feeling sorry for somebody but having fellow feeling with another person remember in uh your science class probably in 8th grade or ninth grade or sometime like that when you would have the little experiment with tuning Forks tuning forks and you you'd strike one fork and it would vibrate and then the other one would start vibrating as well and that was described to you as sympathy right well that's actually a metaphor for the physical event taken from the older sense of the word sympathy which now we've more or less replaced by the word empathy to Fe feel with another person and that's what he gets from cage you see is that cage can actually feel with him some of these same things oh friends so prompt in sympathy that I have lengthened out with fond and feeble tongue the old sense of font which uh in Shakespeare for example means something like foolish a tedious tale meanwhile My Hope has been that I might fetch invigorating thoughts from former years might fix the wavering balance of my mind go back to former years and fix the wavering balance of my mind now he hasn't told us about this yet but he's anticipating the kind of emotional crisis that he's going to go through okay in which he lost the balance of his mind and then notice further along there in 637 and following one end and in the sense of goal at least hath been attained my mind hath been revived my mind hath been revived okay and that of course is what the whole work is going ultimately to be about okay um I'm going to skip over some of the early books here so that we can focus on certain passages that illustrate the development that he's talking about here um he talks about having gone off to school and he talks about having gone off to Cambridge University where he went to college and uh that was not a terribly meaningful experience for him uh many scholars as I mentioned last time and historians have uh talked about how Cambridge was not in its best days at that time and the curriculum was not particularly uh exciting to somebody of Wordsworth original personality um okay so book the 6th book the 6th the part of book the six that we're going to look at involves his response to his trip through France and Switzerland people used to do this a lot some people still do I suppose you know uh students either on vacation or maybe when they graduated from college they would uh go off I'm talking about you know having some money to do this so you don't really have to have that much uh and going off to Europe and simply tramping around you know and and experiencing the sites the culture and so forth of Continental Europe so so uh and of course you know as I said uh that's something which is by no means over you know one of my daughters did that when she went uh to to Spain uh on one of those study abroad programs and then ended up after it with a friend of hers whom she had met in Spain from but who was originally from Australia and the two girls went you know all the way around Europe together just riding the rails you know and staying in hospit which cost almost nothing and uh you know just had a great experience well that's the kind of thing of course that woodsworth and a friend of his are doing here but the France they arrive at is France at a very special moment in its history this is France having just gone through the French Revolution when the third summer freed us from restraint a youthful friend he too a mountaineer somebody who loved the mountains and love to hike in the mountains not slow to share my wishes took his staff and sallying forth we journeyed side by side Bound to the distant Alps a Hardy slight did this unprecedented course imply of college studies in their set rewards nor had in truth the scheme been formed by me without uneasy forethought of the pain the censures and Ill Omen of those to whom my worldly interests were dear in other words a lot of people tried to talk him out of doing this but nature then was Sovereign in my mind nature then was Sovereign in my mind and mighty forms forms in nature these are almost platonic forms in nature seizing a youthful fantasy excuse me a youthful fancy had given a charter to irregular hopes in any age of uneventful calm among the Nations surely would my heart have been possessed by similar desire but Europe at that time was thrilled with joy France standing on the top of golden hours and human nature seeming born again now it's hard for people to imagine this the American Revolution had taken place just a few years earlier but the American Revolution was a relatively small event I mean ultimately in the course of history a huge event but at the time a very important event but but small by comparison with the French Revolution because here was one of the most ancient kingdoms in Europe overthrown by the people okay I mean it it's it's just very very difficult to imagine how people felt at that point uh both those who were being attacked and those who were the liberators or presented themselves as liberators okay with an incredible sense of being at a moment of history that was irreversible and that the world would never be the same again and that principles like Liberty equality fraternity would Prevail in other words democracy Republican democracy would Prevail okay uh and in the long run that happened now of course France had various other things happen along the way and we're going to hear about some of those in just a moment uh unfortunately under robes Pierre and others there was the reign of terror with Madame Guillotine you know in which hundreds of people were executed because they were political opponents of uh robes Pierre and the the Committee of Public Safety public security and uh as it was called and it was a blood bath you know and had little to do with what we normally think of as a Democratic Republic and the protection of the rights of human beings and of course that paved the way for a military dictator to arise in the middle of that kind of chaos and of course the mil AR dictator was Napoleon and Napoleon eventually had himself crowned the Emperor of FR well actually he didn't have himself crowned he took the crown away from the pope he had the pope summoned from Rome by the way to uh to crown him and he took the crown away from the pope and put it on his own head uh to signify that only Napoleon could crown Napoleon not even the pope could crown Napoleon well okay uh and of course eventually you know he was defeated and then defeated again and we have various stages at which there are Restorations of the monarchy and then the monarchy is kicked out again and then the monarchy returns then the monarchy is kicked out again and so forth uh until we have a series of monarchies and a series of republics in the 19th and then ultimately in the 20th centuries so uh so in the long run of History things did change but they didn't change all at once and at first they changed it appeared for the worse so okay let's see what happens now with Wordsworth full of his enthusiasm um he he goes on let's see in book the 9th go over to the beginning of of the selection from the ninth book this is about his residence in France and remember while this does not become part of his account uh he had a love affair with Annette Von they had a child when he had to leave France and they were going to get married when they had to when he had to leave France uh you know he had every intention of going back to England and then returning to France and marrying anet Von he was prevented from doing so in large part because England and France declared war on one another and and were then at war with one another and so it was impossible for somebody to get from England to uh to France and uh so then when they finally could have gotten together and married they both decided that they had changed so much that they no longer really had anything in common to get married for uh but they did have a child and it is to his credit that he acknowledged the child and uh he took care of the child and took care of support of the child so okay so here we have in his residence in France from the 9th book lines uh 07 and following now we start aesh with courage and New Hope risen on our toil Fair greetings to this shapeless eagerness whenever it comes needful in work so long Thrice needful to the argument which now awaits us oh how much unlike the past so he's he's not only talking about historical events but he's also talking about the progress of his own poem and how things are about to take a new turn over in 42 and following he refers to Paris he refers in uh 49 to the National Senate which was actually the National Assembly and the Jacobin who were the revolutionaries uh and in line 50 I saw the Revolutionary power and uh he refers even in line 608 to the bestas deal and you'll remember that on June 14th 1789 that uh this was the date of the storming of the bast deal and that was the beginning officially at any rate of the uh of the French Revolution and that's the date that you know everybody in history class has to has to memorize and of course it's commemorated To This Day in France as bastile day with great great Applause and ceremony and jolity and so forth I made the mistake one time of driving into Paris with a uh a friend of mine who then was a professor at the uh University of Florida and uh forgot that this was going to be bastile day when we arrived in a red car in Paris and of course talk about gridlock there's nothing on the katd freeway to uh to parallel what we experienced there trying to drive into Paris on best deel day and there were young people literally walking across the hoods of cars and some of them had bottles of wine in both hands and they'd come over and offer you drinks and so forth and wanted to sing and dance and all the rest of it and you know uh it was just a big party so uh and still is on bastile day okay at the end of book 9th or our selection at any rate notice that he had become a patriot and my heart was all given to the people with a capital P and my love was theirs okay then in the 10th book we're going to have his return to England he refers in line 51 to the prison where the unhappy Monarch way associate with his children and his wife in bondage and of course they're going to be executed in Fairly short order and then he refers in lines uh to 20 two I believe that is and following how he is dragged by a chain of harsh necessity so seemed it then anyway now I thankfully acknowledge forced by the gracious Providence of Heaven to England I returned and then skip down to the next verse paragraph lines 263 and following what then were my emotions when in arms Britain put forth her Freeborn strength in League oh pity and shame with those Confederate Powers what he's saying is what then were my emotions when Britain declared war to join Allies in War against France and what he found found was not in my single self alone I found but in the minds of all ingenuous youth change and subversion from that hour no shock given to my moral nature had I known down to that moment see I'd never experienced anything like that before see on the one hand he wants to be a loyal Englishman but on the other hand he feels now this terrible loyalty to France and so he feels utterly divided and so in 284 and following yay afterwards truth most painful to record exalted in the Triumph of my soul when Englishmen by thousands were overthrown secretly I welcomed the French victories in 290 this is a conflict of Sensations in Me by the way without name of which he only may love the sight of a village steeple as I do can judge when in the congregation bending all to their great Father prayers were offered up or Praises for our country's victories and mid the simple worshippers per chance I only like an Uninvited Guest whom no one owned sat silent shall I add fed on the day of Vengeance yet to come here he is in church and what are the people doing in church in an English church they're praying for the soldiers the English soldiers right and he feels that he can't join in the prayer he feels alienated from his own people and from his own fellow parishioners in the church well let's take this up again after the break [Music] [Music] [Music] a [Music]

Literature_Lectures

23_Edward_P_Jones_The_Known_World_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: My first lecture on The Known World focused on the question of knowledge and the problems of knowledge that the text raises for us throughout, both at the formal level and at the thematic level. So, I ended up with a reading of the account of the Broussard trial and how more and more detailed knowledge comes to us through the voice of the narrator, and we're really left with that question: where does that knowledge come from? Now, I suggested in the first lecture that my second lecture was going to be about an equally abstract subject, and that is: how can anything exist in the world? I'm going to get to that about in the middle of the lecture, beginning from this question, though, where we ended last time, about the Broussard trial and the problem of knowledge, where knowledge comes from. If we look a little bit earlier in the passage about the Broussard trial on 171, 172, you find what I think is quite a striking model for the very problem of this novel as a whole. And this is when Skiffington is trying to write an account of Broussard's crime, and here it is on the bottom of 171. He's having trouble filling out this form. Skiffington picked up the list of questions. Now he would have to start all over again. Nature of the alleged crime. Are there witnesses to the alleged crime? Can such witnesses be believed? So, the problem of evidence and the problem of whether witnesses are to be trusted, the problem of enumerating a crime, these are all problems that the novel as a whole takes up for the crime of slavery. So, we can think of the novel itself as a version of Skiffington's report. Now, it's important that Skiffington has such a problem writing it. The very difficulty of writing is thematized over and over and over again, not just in moments like this where it's actually talking about writing, but, I'm going to argue, in a number of ways that are much more subtle. And to show you one of them, I want to look on 192 with you. This is the scene where Stamford, the slave, is trying to remember the names of his parents, and this is how he does it. This is the middle of 192. He closed his eyes and took his parents in his hands and put them all about the plantation where he had last seen them, his mother in his left hand and his father in his right hand. But that did not feel right, and so he put his father in his left hand and his mother in his right hand, and that felt better. He set them outside the smokehouse, which had a hole in the roof in the back. "Hants come down that hole and take you to the devil," an older boy had once told him. Stamford was five, and it had not been long since his parents had been sold away. And you get more of the story, and he finally comes to remember the parents' names, his parents' names. Why does he take them in these specific hands, his father in his right hand and his mother in his left; "that did not feel right so he put his father in his left and his mother in the right"? I would argue that this is for two reasons: a figure of Jones' own writing, first of all in the obvious sense that it's an act of recovery, of recovering a past that needs to be imagined, or somehow entered into, not through rational thought, but through an imaginative act. So, that's one reason that Stamford in this moment is a double of Jones. But the other reason is this "handedness" that's noted. I'm going to tell you, throughout the lecture, a few things about Jones' life and his work outside of this novel, and so here's the first piece of that story. Edward P. Jones was the son of a very poor single mother living in D.C. He had a younger brother who was mentally disabled who had to be given away to an institution because the mother could not support him. Jones' mother was illiterate. So, here is someone writing this novel, and his background is an illiterate mother. This matters enormously to him. He, in his first story collection, has a story called (I think it's called) "First Day," where he tells the story of a young girl going off to school for the first time, holding the hand of her illiterate mother. Jones reveres his mother. When he talks about her, it's with incredible reverence and love. Jones sees his mother very much as a source of his writing. So, here's that first tension in the act of writing, that here is a writer who takes as his source, spiritual source, an illiterate woman. That's why the mother has to go in his right hand in this scene. Now, of course, not everybody writes with their right hand, but I think no matter whether Jones is right or left handed--and I thank Andy Heisel for pointing out, our wonderful TA Andy Heisel, for pointing out that in the photograph of Jones he is wearing his watch on his left hand, and so this would suggest that he is, perhaps, right handed. But even if we didn't want to rely--Oh, Neil, you're going to give me trouble--even if you did not want to rely on that little piece of evidence, we can say that in the cultural vocabulary of handedness the dominant hand is the right hand for writing. So, I would say that whenever you see right-handedness or left-to-right movement, Jones is meditating on and figuring the act of writing, and I'm going to show you some more examples 'cause it's quite striking. It's subtle and strange, but quite striking. So, the mother has to go in the right hand because she is the source of inspiration. The father--Jones' father--was very distant. He only met him when he was much older, and he was not really a part of Jones' life at all. It really revolved around his mother. So, if writing is undermined by the shadow of illiteracy for Jones, it's undermined in other ways, too, and I want to look at one of those stranger episodes. This is on 142,143. This is the story of how Henry began to court Caldonia at Fern Elston's dinner table, and this is a very detailed scene. This is in the middle of 142. He's telling Caldonia that she needs to look up when she rides her horse. He took the pepper shaker in his right hand, extended his arm before him, and moved the arm from right to left. Everyone at the table was now watching him. The hand with the shaker moved smoothly, gracefully, from the right to the left. "That's how everybody else rides," Henry said, "me and everybody else." Henry put the pepper shaker in his left hand, tipped it, and moved his arm less gracefully from the left to the right. As it moved pepper poured out of the shaker onto Fern's white tablecloth. He said, "I'm sorry to say this, but that's how you ride." Henry did this with the shaker several times. Going from right to left, the pepper shaker was upright, but going from left to right the pepper flowed down. Fern thought there was something rather sad about the pepper falling and it was all the sadder because it really didn't have to be that way. She said to Anderson, the pamphleteer from Canada, this was his clumsy way of telling Caldonia she was losing something by not looking up. How odd, that insistence on the movement left to right, right to left. It figures Henry's mixed-up relation to both language and the act of creation. It's mixed up, because when he is moving in the direction that text is read and written, left to right, he's using his left hand, and the correlative of that left handedness of his relation to language is in the dialect. He doesn't speak correctly in Fern Elston's house no matter how hard she tries to teach him. So, he is clumsy, not only in spilling pepper on the table, but also in not being able to speak proper English. But the other thing about that movement is that when it goes left to right pepper spills on the table. This is an image of ink flowing out of a pen--it is black on the white tablecloth--and it's an image for language in jeopardy because of course it's dust; it's powder; it will never cohere; it's the sign of his uncouth table manners. So, it's never going to be a redemptive medium for him, and it's represented by this pepper that then he can scrape into a little pile. This is the fragmentation of language in its very literal sense. There are other examples of this, on 189 when you get the first account of the frozen dog that Calvin is so interested in, in the photograph from New York. Once again, direction is carefully noted. In the front yard, alone, was a dog looking off to the right. The dog was standing, its tail sticking straight out as if ready to go at the first word from someone on the porch. [And I'm going to skip down.] He had a very tiny hope that when he got to New York he might be able to find the house and those people and that dog and learn what had transfixed him. There was a whole world off to the right that the photograph had not captured. "Off to the right" is the direction of flowing narrative, a world, a possible world that his imagination is drawn to, and it's a visual image of the imagination and its seduction. But because of this obsessive direction noting, I would read it as a textual imagination, that there's a narrative off to the right. And you can see that Jones' novel works this way. There is always a narrative proximate to wherever you are, a little narrative that arises from the next character who shows up on the road, and you'll get that narrative. So, this is just one of those that doesn't quite get articulated, but Calvin can imagine that it's there; he can see, as if he can see the form of the novel that Jones is writing. And then there are just even tinier ones. On 162, this is John Skiffington sitting and reading the Bible after visiting Clara's house. "Skiffington looked up and followed a male cardinal as it flew from the left to right and settled in one of the peach trees." They're all over the place once you start noticing them, so I think this is why: that it's a constant meditation among the multiplying versions of meditations on the composition of this novel within the novel. So, we'll get to some others. The problem is that the written word is always threatened. So, if writing has all this static that surrounds it, it also has some more direct and aggressive enemies, and on 375 you see one version of that. This is the account of Barnum Kinsey's grave marker that his son makes after they leave Manchester County and he dies. This is at the bottom of 374. Matthew stayed up all the night before he was buried--[this is Kinsey's son] putting his father's history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father's name on the first line, and on the next he put the years of the father's coming and going, then all of the things he knew his father had been. [And it then lists this whole set of things.] The boy filled up the whole piece of wood, and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father's grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. Text is simply fragile, as a material object, so that's what this scene tells us, in a poignant way. But, of course, the most poignant example of this is when Augustus's free papers are eaten by Travis. So, the real terror of the written word comes in that scene. Now the terror is of course that it's an exercise of power--arbitrary, violent. It will end in Augustus' death back in slavery. There are lots of ways of imagining what the terror is. I'm going to go into some of them, but this is the sign of it, that even though Augustus has memorized every word of his free papers--remember, we're told that he has them read to him every day for a month. He's illiterate. He has them read to him every day for a month until he has them totally memorized after he gets his freedom--even though those words will exist forever in Augustus' mind, his freedom is nowhere, once the written word is gone. So, this is my question: How can something exist in the world? Here, the ultimate thing to which that question applies is freedom. How can freedom exist? What makes freedom exist? Well, in the law, those free papers make freedom exist for Augustus, but the law cannot guarantee that freedom exists when the physical artifact of the text is gone. That's how weak writing is. It seems to be everything. This is something that Mildred understood quite early on. On 113, when she and Augustus are worried about Henry hanging out with Robbins, she says, in suggesting that it's okay to let Henry go about with William Robbins, "'Them free papers he carry with him all over the place don't carry enough freedom,' she said to her husband, 'with slavery behind him.'" She wanted her son to go about and see what had always been denied him, so she wants the world to be a big place for him. She sees that freedom is something much more than those papers, but the problem is that freedom cannot be without them, and that once they're gone, it is gone too. So, that is one of the threats that is associated with writing, but there are more of them. On 311 and 312, one danger is that, in the effort to write justice in law, it's simply ineffective. So, here is the story we get of Skiffington trying to write up this crime, the crime of selling Augustus, a free man, back into slavery. This is on 312. He's been in contact with a man named Sanderson in, I think he's in Georgia. He got a letter from Sanderson three days after that. The crime had indeed been committed, he wrote, and Sanderson included material he had copied from books saying so. So, Skiffington wasn't sure whether it was really a crime. Somehow he began to get confused, and you can see that confusion--I won't read it--on the prior page, on 311 in the middle of the page. So, when Skiffington once again starts writing up the crime, he becomes confused. Did he really have a crime to describe? He gets confirmation that he does. But Skiffington heard from Richmond [yes, it's a letter from Richmond] again four days later, in handwriting he did not recognize. Graciela Sanderson let him know that her husband, Harry, was dead and that she was now charged with keeping up his correspondence. He read the eight-page letter twice, but he found nothing in it about what Virginia was doing about the crime of selling free Negroes. The widow told him about her husband, how she had met him when he vacationed in Italy, how he had wooed her, brought her to America after their wedding and made her a happy woman in Richmond, " where the governor is in residence." [And then she closes with comments about the weather.] So, the law's effort to deliver justice through the writing of a crime, the documenting of a crime, is displaced by a woman's effort to recover her lost husband by telling that story. So, there are competing claims on language in this scene: the widow's and Skiffington's, and more distantly Augustus' and Mildred's. None of these claims are adjudicated in any kind of way that puts one above the other, and Skiffington's weakness, of course, is that he will never seek to right that balance. He resigns himself to the weakness of writing. More chillingly, and I think more complicatingly, writing also carries the risk of reinstating the master-slave relationship, and I think it does this by direct reference back to Jones himself. If you read slowly through the scene of Augustus being sold back into slavery, it's quite striking the way contingency or happenstance plays a part in the scene. So, after Travis has eaten Augustus' papers--this is at the very bottom of 212--"a wagon twice as large as Augustus' came up to the four men. Driving it was a large black man, and beside him a much smaller white man." And Travis teases Darcy, the slave trader, about how he's never known the time in his life, but suddenly here he is at exactly the right time. Then he later says--as he's formulating the idea of selling Augustus to Darcy, he says--"God works in mysterious ways. This ain't exactly what I had in mind when I stopped this nigger but this here will do just the same." Who made that wagon appear? Why does that wagon appear? Jones made that wagon appear. What we're given is not a fiction about Travis intending to sell Augustus back into slavery, but what we're given instead is a surprise on the road. Who makes that surprise appear? Only one person, the person in charge of making the narrative. So, the problem with writing is not just that it's shadowed by the fact of illiteracy. It's not just that it's vulnerable to physical decay. It's not just that it's weak and it can't make anything exist in law. It's not just that it's demanded by multiple people for different purposes that come to cancel each other out. It's that by writing, by taking on that quality of masterfulness, you begin to be complicit in the very crime that you're describing. The imagery of God looking down on his creation is everywhere in this novel, and it's applied to all kinds of characters, including Henry, who thinks that he will look down on his slaves the way God looks down on his creation from heaven. That position of mastery and that geographic remove of being above your subject is associated with the slave-master, but it's associated very much with Jones. And I'll come back to this in a minute when I talk about the tapestry, because of course the tapestry at the end of the novel--Alice's tapestry--is the most dramatic figure for the whole novel. There are lots of figures for the novel, including the map of the "known world," but foremost that tapestry at the end which mimics the novel in every way. Even that has the perspective of little figures looking up, so it even puts Alice in that masterful position, or indeed anyone who looks upon that tapestry. So, if writing is so weak, if it entails such terror, are we given any alternative for creative durability? And I think we are, in the plastic arts. Now, I'm sure you've noticed how much carving goes on in the book, not just because Augustus is a woodworker, but because Elias carves for Celeste; that's his first act of love. And, if you read Jones' stories, this is rampant in his stories. He has carvers everywhere and various kinds of workers in plastic arts. Alice is another example working in textiles, clay, paint, some amalgamation of sculpture and painting. On 279 the two arts, the verbal art and woodworking, are put in competition with one another, or in juxtaposition with one another, and I think you see who has the upper hand here. This is an account of Skiffington's bookcase, which Augustus made. In Winifred and John Skiffington's parlor there was a wondrous-looking bookcase, lovely oak, a lion's growling face at each edge of the top ends, three shelves, a secondhand item made by Augustus Townsend not long after Augustus bought his freedom. He had first thought he would keep it for himself and the family he would buy out of slavery, though none of them could read, then. He and Mildred would never learn to read. [There is that shadow of illiteracy. Our attention is called to it the minute the books are mentioned.] He would keep it as a kind of symbol for his determination to get them, but then he realized that what he could get for the bookcase would bring his wife and child closer to him so he put a price on it, fifteen dollars. It had been originally sold to a man of two slaves who lost his sight, [another risk to reading: you can go blind] and so, as he told Skiffington, lost his hunger and thirst for books. Skiffington bought it for five dollars. Augustus' art is durable. It can be passed from person to person, and it maintains its figurative power. It's important that all of his work is figurative. It suggests narrative, and so it's aligned with Jones' art, in that way, but it is not subject to the vulnerability of text, and here in this bookcase you see the vulnerability of text set right next to the wondrous durability of the bookcase. There are other examples. When Rita is discovered in the box of walking sticks, when she is sent in a box out of slavery to New York, she hands the boy who is looking down at her the walking stick with Adam and Eve and all their generations. It's as if in that act Rita's freedom is instantiated, that she and all her descendants emerge into this new world, and that that is a kind of gift to the family that takes them in, in the North. So, it has a very evocative narrative power that doesn't depend on people's being able to read it, and we're told in that scene that the boy receives it as if this is what he had been waiting for all along, suggests a perfect receptivity, no going blind here, perfect receptivity. There is also on 219 one of Augustus' chairs that I think is worth looking at. This is when Travis is reflecting on, or we are being told about, how Travis first came to know Augustus. He had first come to know Augustus Townsend many years ago through a chair Augustus had made for a white man in the town of Manchester. The man weighed more than four hundred pounds. [And then I'm skipping down.] In the man's parlor was Augustus' chair, plain, not even painted, but smooth to the touch, and when the man sat in it the chair did not complain, not one squeak. It just held up and did its job, waiting for the man to put on another three hundred pounds. Travis examined the chair, looked all about it trying to discover its secret. The chair gave nothing. It was a very good chair. It was a chair worth stealing. The chair gave nothing. Well, it gave nothing in terms of knowledge to Travis. It would not give up its secret of durability, and that's, in a way, what makes it durable, that it can hide the essence of itself, keep it to itself. It takes the weight without one squeak. Its very silence is what marks its invulnerability. It's also what enrages a man like Travis. So, the novel sets up a competing set of art forms, carving foremost among them, against the art form of language. The tapestry at the end answers one of our questions from the first lecture, which is who knows the known world, known by whom? What we come to find out is that Alice, although she seemed insane, is the one who knows Manchester County. She has walked all over it, in the freedom carved out by her insanity. One thing that's interesting about Alice is that she--despite her insanity, seeming insanity--is the one most in control of her language. She is the most successful storyteller in this novel. So, if you think of other alternatives, Moses--He tells Caldonia stories that finally fail to persuade her imagination that any slave she owns could be free. We're told explicitly, as Calvin tries to persuade her at the end of the novel, that it's her failure of imagination that keeps her from emancipating her slaves after Henry's death. Despite all of Moses' stories, she still cannot see him, or anyone else, as a free person. So, Moses' storytelling is a complete failure in this way, but Alice's storytelling about the mule that kicked her in the head, we find that out early in the novel that the story about her--that's why she is said to be crazy we're told--so vivid, so sad, that everybody believed it. The very control she has over her crazy chants is what persuades the whole world around her that she is not worth bothering with, as she wanders around the roads with impunity. It also gives her occasion to mock the master, the structure of slavery, the patrollers, and she can do it with impunity, as well. So, she has a freedom of mind as well as a freedom of movement that nobody else in the novel has who is a slave. So, she is doubly marked as an artist in language and in the plastic arts, but she is--importantly, I think--not a writer. You'll note, if you look at 384,385, where the tapestry is described, there is still some whiff of that fragility. And I see that in the admonition that is hung next to the tapestry and that Priscilla repeats when Calvin reaches out to touch it. She says, "Please do not touch." There is that sense that this is still something that needs to be protected. Now, why the terror? Why the fragility? Well, I think this has a lot to do with how this novel was composed. Edward P. Jones wrote his first book of short stories in the 1990s, in the early '90s. I can't remember the date exactly. And it was very successful, but not successful enough to support him, so he worked as an editor at a journal called Tax Notes. It was a journal of tax law, scintillating. Jones was working there, and I'm going to tell you a story, now, that he tells in some of his interviews, but I heard first from his agent, a guy named Eric Simonoff, who I had up to visit one of my classes when we were studying this novel. Eric says that he heard from Edward that Edward had this idea for a novel about a black slave owner but he said, "Don't tell anyone. This is a stealable idea." So Eric, when he went down to D.C., would occasionally stop in over the years and see Edward and he'd say, "Well, how's the novel going?" Didn't seem to be much on paper, and time passed, ten years or so, and Eric thought, "I'm not sure if this novel's ever going to get written." In the meantime Jones had amassed about a hundred and twenty five books of history of the period that he is working in, in the novel, because he felt that in order to write a novel like this he really needed to master that history. It was very intimidating to him, though, so that--combined with his Tax Notes job--he had about twelve pages written. So, he went on vacation after a long time. He hadn't had a vacation. He had about a six-week vacation, and he finally got a start, and one of the ways that he got himself to start was he decided that he was going to forget about the history; he was going to make it all up. So, all the historical sources-- if you read the back of the book you will know this--all the historical sources are fictional, here. The census reports, every detail is fictional, so that was his first move. Then he got laid off from Tax Notes right after this vacation. Edward P. Jones then wrote this novel in three months, and Eric says that it became clear to him over the years that Jones had in fact memorized entire chapters of what became this novel. It was all in his head, all the words in their order, and so when he had the time and when he freed himself from the obligation to history, out it came. I think this says a lot about the images of writing that you see all over the novel. Imagine the kind of terror that you would feel, knowing that you had all this in your mind and knowing also that it didn't yet exist on paper, that you had only twelve pages. Maybe if you're writing papers now, you feel this terror of the blank page. It's possible. That's a real terror for a writer. Combine that with the shadow of illiteracy, the feeling of possible betrayal, for a son to be a writer when his beloved mother had no access to the written word. This is a very vexed, complex psychological relationship that I would suggest--my guess is--that has a lot to do with how he imagines the relative fragility and the relative power of fiction versus these other arts. So, Jones models his narrative on those other arts in an effort to solve the problems that are presented by the terror of the written word's fragility, its very uneasy relation to existence. Does a novel exist? Does it not? And I think there is, actually, even a figure for Jones in a particular character, one of these tiny characters, on 343. This is a young man with a wonderfully complicated mind. Wilson had learned a great deal at that university, and his mind would have contained even more, but well in to his second year the cadavers began to talk to Wilson and what they said made far more sense than what his professors were saying. The professors, being gods, did not like to share their heaven with anyone dead or alive, and they sent the young man home in the middle of his second year. Here you see a figure for someone whose imagination is so powerful that it makes the dead talk, and think back again to the image of Stamford finding--by placing the image of his parents all over the mansion, all over the plantation--finding their names. That's a little like talking to cadavers. They are dead, those parents. It verges on insanity. This is another problem with the mode of composition, that a mind this powerfully populated by an alternate reality comes to look insane, and I think this is another reason why Alice is what she is as a character. If she is going to be one of the major doubles for Jones, her insanity is part of that picture. We can think of it as a willed insanity, but it has the residue of doubt about it. Maybe she really is insane to some degree. Is there a sharp line between an imagination that can produce a narrative so thoroughly populated as this one and a mind that sees cadavers talking to you? Another thing that is remarkable about Jones' work--and this relates back to what I was saying about postmodernism and grand narrative last time--Jones' work is seemingly very fragmented. There are lots and lots of narratives, but they don't all come together in one narrative, so it seems fragmented, and when you start to read it, it looks disorienting. If you read his stories, you will see that all of the stories are interconnected back to the novel, to Jones' life. So, for instance in All Aunt Hagar's Children, his most recent story collection, and I think it came out in 2007, there is a woman who has a walking stick that is clearly made by Augustus, in the twentieth century. What I was saying about the durability of the plastic arts is imagined in that quality of his fiction. These objects of carving turn up throughout his stories. Also, people are related to each other in separate stories. They're related to people in this novel. The title of this novel appears in a story called "Tapestry" in All Aunt Hagar's Children. He is obsessive about putting the locations of all the places that he lived in D.C. into his stories perfectly accurately. When an editor at The New Yorker tried to get him to change one of these descriptions and the address, in one of the stories that he submitted for the magazine, he was very resistant. He finally changed it for The New Yorker, but when it went into the story collection it went back, because he wanted it to be absolutely accurate to what it was like when he lived there, what it actually looks like on that corner in D.C. What I think Jones is doing, in the largest version of his project, is actually one of the most wide-reaching and ambitious unifying efforts that I know of in contemporary fiction. So, this is not about the fragmentation of grand narrative. It's about the enormous, large-scale accumulation of wholeness. He is piecing a world together, bit by bit by bit, as he adds to his literary oeuvre. So, this is a vision of unity that goes way beyond generic boundaries. Is it a short story? Is it a novel? This is something more like an opus that Jones is building, and, more importantly, it's something that lives in his mind very clearly. These people, these characters, live in his mind. There is no one doing what Jones is doing today. If there is something truly postmodern, I would say Jones is it. He looks very different from what comes before him, in modernism, and its ascendancy in the mid-twentieth century. He is making pretty dramatic claims for the power of fiction, for the power of narrative, to put the world together, but at the same time, as I've noted, acknowledges the very difficulty of that project, the very weakness that lies at its heart. And I think that's what, for me, makes his work extremely powerful, that for all its ambition we're never allowed to forget its ambivalence. That ambivalence is always there on the surface, and it's bodied forth in the kinds of moral problems that this novel dwells upon, the question of how human love can exist in slavery, whether it can exist, all its complicated forms, what the forms of freedom look like, how freedom can possibly exist, how you build it, how it can be maintained. All these things are there in an incredibly ambitious literary form. That's what Jones is doing that nobody else is doing at this moment. So, I will stop there and we will think about what Foer is doing on--I will think about what Foer is doing on Monday.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_2B.txt

okay so we are now back alright right before we took our break I was reading aloud Blake's poem the the little black boy now once again as I said before the break what we need to pay attention to here is the persona in the poem we actually have two voices but the principal voice is that of the little boy the little black boy and once again the little black boy has been taken advantage of in all kinds of ways that we're about to talk about and as in earlier cases such as the chimney sweep poem the child is not fully aware and that's part of the irony and that's part of the poignancy of the poem the child is not completely aware of the extent to which he has been taken advantage of look at this my my mother bought me in the southern wild' the southern wild' of course being Africa obviously and I am black but oh my soul is white and noticed it already not only is he distinguished between blackness and whiteness but notice the but here you see I am black but but oh my soul is white see what that implies already is that that that black is inferior and white is superior I my skin may be black but hey look my my soul is white so I must be okay okay why does an angel is the English child okay here's the little little bark boy now who's looking at the English child and saying like ahadees like an angel but I am black as if bereaved of light is if bereaved a fight a child of darkness okay rather than a child of light and this is all biblical imagery - isn't it and then of course my mother taught me and what did his mother teach him my mother taught me this this very simple but very good natural religion okay and we all put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love and these black bodies and this sunburned face is better cloud and like a Shady Grove see the body is not the true reality it's like a cloud in the sense that it's not really real it's not really solid and when the body passes away the spirit will remain and it's the spirit that will go into some kind of everlasting life and into heaven and so on and so on okay and thus did my mother say in kiss me and thus I say two little English boy and notice by the way the syntax that's used here break is even trying to imitate the syntax of an African born boy okay speaking English when I from black and he from white cloud free the the cloud again being the flesh the body when we're free and round the tent of God like Lambs we joy again lambs right what will I do I being the black boy now I'll shade him from the heat I'll shade him from the heat I will be his servant even in heaven by the way I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear to lean on joy in joy upon our fathers knee and then I'll stand and Stroke his silver hair I'll stand and Stroke his silver hair because that's what's beautiful you see not my black hair but his silver hair that's what's really beautiful and be like him and he will then love me see it's not that he could love me now as I am a little black boy or even then until I have performed services for him but only then after I have performed the service for him even in heaven and stroked his silver hair because that's what's beautiful not my black hair but his silver hair and then I will be like him and he will then love me now I remember Martin Luther King one time making a very very very interesting point he said that one of the most horrible things to watch was when a child a small child isn't aware of color or race and so forth but at some point a child will actually become aware that there's some kind of a difference there I'm it's not just that we look different but I mean that's no big deal I mean some of us are taller or shorter or darker or lighter or men or women or whatever but you know the child doesn't really think about those things in the way that adult culture does until the child is taught to think about those things the way adult culture does and what dr. King was talking about was there's there's that terrible moment when you look and you realize that the child realizes not only that he or she is different but that he has looked down upon or she has looked down upon for being different and see that's the kind of thing that's happening in this poem I mean that would be tough enough for adults to deal with but imagine that from the perspective of a child and that's what this poem is really about now at this time England was probably the largest entity involved in the African slave trade and even when they made slavery illegal in England they didn't make it illegal to conduct the slave trade so there were English slave traders who went to Africa and who bought slaves bought Africans and and took them over to the Caribbean in some cases to places in the southern United States but often enough to put two ports in the Caribbean and so forth from which obviously slaves were then transported to other places and so of course what break is doing here is he's drawing our attention to the evils of that kind of social practice and one of the ways of doing that would be to get up and give a thunderous sermon or political speech another way is to write this kind of a poem and you'd have to be hard-hearted indeed not to be touched by this poem and by the plight of the child in this poem okay so once again break not only ahead of his time but also not really recognized very much in his own time now let me also be clear about something bike yes of course was a person of conscience but there were other people in England who are people of conscience just as there were people of conscience in the United States and elsewhere who thought that the slave trade was horrible and and sinful and immoral and evil but it took a while for them ultimately to prevail and again it probably comes back to the kind of point that I was talking about how you can sometimes have people who are ahead of their time as blake clearly was and we now look back and we say well yeah sure but in his own time he would have been as we sometimes say swimming against the current not for everybody not for everybody but for many okay let's look at these sick rows we're now going to look at final three poems that are very different from what we have been looking at one of the things that bike was also very much ahead of his time in was he was opposed to what he felt were very very very unwholesome unhealthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality we're going to see that in the next couple of poems the sick rose the rose by the way going back at least into the Middle Ages maybe even farther back than that has been used as a symbol for female sexuality in particular there's the runaway bestseller in the central and later Middle Ages was a French work called bandoleros the romance of the rose in which the the central symbol of the Rose stands for a woman but particularly for woman's sexuality and of course that has everything to do with rose symbolism you know in later literature the giving of roses you better give the right kind of rose because of the symbolic nature of roses remember Shakespeare in his famous sonnet 130 says if my love if my lady loves cheeks are like roses they are damask red and white okay in other words they're not pure red they're not pure white but they are a mixture of the of the two you can play with this kind of imagery in this kind of symbolism in all sorts of ways if you want to well here we have blank a rose thou art sick the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm has found out the I bed of crimson joy and his dark secret love does thy life destroy now I don't think that I have to explain to any adult the kind of near blatant sexual symbolism that we have in this poem right but what he's suggesting here and elsewhere is that we have sick ideas about sex it's not that sex is sick but that we have sick ideas about sex or at least have had I mean maybe we're emerging from some of those let's hope so but at least we have had now here once again you know bike is obviously way ahead of his time and talking about something like that okay and then let's move along to the garden of love which even more directly makes this point I went to the garden of love another very conventional symbol going back at least to the Roman delle rose you know which you have the rose in an enclosed garden and of course what the lover wants to do is he wants to get into the garden so that he can possess the Rose I went to the garden of love and saw what I had I never had seen notice how he will sometimes put words not out of order because English is pretty flexible about word order but put them in a in a place in the sentence where you have to stress it more than you think you would otherwise normally we would say and saw what I saw what never I unseen or I had never seen or something like that but he is and so what I never had seen so there's a special emphasis on never a chapel was built in the midst a chapel in the midst of the garden of of where I used to play on the green now there's a chapel there and the gates of this chapel were shut and thou shalt not wit over the door this is the chapel in the garden of love which has thou shalt not so I turned to the garden of love that somebody sweet flowers bore and I saw it was filled with graves I saw it was filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires okay thorn bushes you see which of course would not only bind you but in the process would inflict pain physical pain is a constant reminder thou shalt not indulge in the joys and the fly of the joys and desires amidst the flowers of the garden of love well again we've talked about Blake as a rebel right well he's a rebel not only in his art and in his politics and in his social attitudes but also in his attitudes towards the church as well as the state okay that doesn't mean that he's irreligious he's one of the most profoundly religious poets not only of his time but of all time I mean he was a profoundly religious man we're not reading some of that poetry but he was a mystic it was a religious mystic and he wrote poems that were visionary prophetic poems that drew upon these kinds of mystical visionary experiences that he had of some kind of transcendent realms beyond this one so I mean it would be outrageously unfair to say that he's he's irreligious he's just opposed to certain kinds of institutional religion which he felt would be hypocritical okay and and and and really destroyed the better parts of human nature well then we get to London remember what I've said about the romantics and urbanization and so forth a wander through each Chartered Street what he's doing is here's the poet who is walking through the streets of London and he's seeing and he's hearing different things okay it's a very interesting device because he's he's on the move it's like the the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes is a very interesting poem in which in the summertime in Harlem people have their windows open you know because it's hot and so he can hear all of the voices with different African American dialects coming to him floating on the air from the different apartments from the perspective very City that's the same kind of device that Bank is using here though obviously fashioned in a different way okay I wander through each chartered street near where the chartered Tim's does flow and mark in every face I meet what of all the people I meet on the street marks of weakness marks of woe he's walking down toward the river and this would be obviously where some of the poorer parts of the city are to in every cry of every man and ma'am capitalized here means man and woman I mean it's the older usage of the word man doesn't just mean males you never cry of every man and every infants cry of fear infants cry of fear not joy not laughter in every voice in every band the mind forged manacles I hear that's a very famous phrase mind forged manacles you know what manacles are right what a manacles manacles what are manacles handcuffs would be one example of manacles okay mind forged we could have manacles on our minds on our spirits that were forged by people's minds or spirits how the chimney sweepers cry every blackening Church appalls and the hapless soldiers sigh runs in bed down palace walls this is England out you know attacking much of the rest of the world to try to conquer it but most through midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlots curse the youthful she's youthful to the youthful harlots curse blasts the new-born infants tear and brights with plagues the marriage hearse I mean once again this is strong strong medicine as the saying goes but most of midnight streets are here not just a youthful holid but the youthful Hollywood's curse blasting the newborn infants tear newborn infant apparently unwanted child right and blights with plagues and get this the marriage hearse the marriage hearse I mean my god talk about the social evils of the time you know he wants to push our faces into them here this is no longer the subtle kind of strategy that he was using with his personae of children for whom we can feel profound sympathy and want to change their way of life and their conditions of living this is something much more direct ok this is a real attack ok so a very very interesting poet if you like bake there's a lot more to break not only in our anthology but you can go on you can look at as I've said some of his paintings and engravings as well as some of his poetry if you really really get turned on by Blake you might want to look into some of his prophetic and even mystical poetry it's complicated it's difficult you may want to have a guide to that there are lots of good critical commentaries on it that you can find but he's a very very interesting poet so next let's turn to William Wordsworth and again while I'm not requiring it I encourage you to read these introductory notes to each one of our authors because that tell you stuff about the author's life and times than otherwise you you might not know unless you've taken a course in romantic poetry before and we find out that Wordsworth was born then grew up in the latter part of the 18th century he was fortunate enough to grow up in a small town in the Lake District which is a very beautiful part of England and this had a profound influence on him his mother died when he was very young and then his father died when he was also young and he was reared by a woman who took care of him and the other children and he was sent to school but he was also given a lot of freedom to wander around in the woods on his own and this is a practice that you know most of us would not experience in a city I mean would you let your children just wander around on their own in a in a city like Houston or or some other big American or European or Latin American or African or Asian or whatever kind of city right cities are dangerous places or at least they can be dangerous places and people often felt very safe letting their children just wander off into the woods you know because what kind of trouble are they going to get into in the woods I mean it's not that you couldn't get into trouble that the general thought was you know that they I mean they've got to work out this energy somehow you know kids have got all kinds of energy and stuff they've got to work out that energy somehow this is perfectly safe for them and you know I mean we're not talking about playing on cliffs or you know in the deep ocean or anything like that we're talking about just going off in the the woods here by the lake and so Wordsworth talks in his poetry about how important that was to him in terms of his growing up experience and then is his experience as an adult so he went to college he went to Cambridge University he felt that Cambridge wasn't a very interesting place when he went there and most historians will tell us and biographers of Wordsworth will tell us that Cambridge was not having one of its better periods at this time and things were not going let's say in very stimulating directions at least many people think so and he was unimpressed by his college education and then he went back into the leg country for a little while but in the meantime he'd also taken some some tours to the European continent and among other things was there you know with celebrations of the French Revolution going on he took other walking tours at Wales we'll talk more about that later on he even had a girlfriend Annette Bell on when he was in France they were going to get married along the way she became pregnant and they had a child but he was forced they thought temporarily to go back to England because he didn't have any money and he had an inheritance which was due to him but the inheritance was all tied up in the courts so he went back to England well then war broke out between france and england and so he wasn't able to get back and then by the time he could get back into contact with her years had passed we'll talk more about this in detail later on years had passed and so they simply decided that they no longer really had a basis to get married i mean the two of them had just grown in totally different directions he by the way was honorable about this he recognized his child as his child and he supported the child and provided you know and that with the with as much money as he could afford as he became more more you didn't become super wealthy but he he became more prosperous as time went on he was able to provide more and more support for the child so so he did do the right thing by the by the child but on the other hand this was a really really really really really wrenching experience in his life and he went through almost a total emotional and mental collapse over this what used to be called a nervous breakdown and we now would talk about this in more catastrophic terms of a kind of mental and emotional collapse and nowadays he would have had to go into an institution you would fed all kinds of psychotherapy and probably psychoactive drugs and so on and so on those things didn't exist in his time and so what he did was he turned to his poetry as a form of psychotherapy which is actually a very interesting project you know writing is a or can be a form of psychotherapy and as a matter of fact people who do have psychological problems are generally encouraged to write I mean maybe you're not a poet but you could write a journal you can you can write whatever you're capable of writing because the very act of writing and expressing and exploring their feelings is its self therapeutic and he eventually fortunately was able to work his way out of his what we would now adays have to call an illness and you know went on to live a very full life after that got married and so on and so on it's on okay well along the way he met samuel taylor coleridge another one of the very great Romantic poets and they became very very close friends even to the point where when one of the moved the other one would move to a place close enough where they could still meet on a regular basis and they would take in the early days of their friendship these long walks in the woods and down around the lakes and so forth and they would talk about poetry and they both started writing poetry and then they sent themselves a project College talks more about this in his biography a little area in a section that we're going to read a little bit later on that they sent themselves different projects what Coleridge was going to do in this book that they were jointly going to publish called lyrical ballads what Coleridge was going to do is he was going to write poetry about things that were super normal or even supernatural other-worldly other-worldly but try to make them believable as if they were worldly happenings not that they were but as if they were and the lead poem in this book as it turned out was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner which everybody's encountered at some point or at least parts of Wordsworth had the contrary task his was to take ordinary everyday kinds of experiences and show how extraordinary they truly are if we really look at them and really understand them for what they are okay how is it possible to be bored because even very ordinary things are extraordinary if you look at them in the right way okay when they published the first edition of it it sold out in a couple of years the critics didn't all love it but there was a good audience for this poetry and there were a lot of people who thought this is amazing poetry this is so different from the kind of poetry we are used to it's amazing stuff that there was going to be a second edition the first edition came out in 1798 two years later in 1800 there was a second edition and for this Wordsworth wrote a preface in prose in which he explained what he encouraged but particularly what he was trying to do in his poetry and it's very interesting we don't have very many statements early on from poets about what they were trying to do we have some but not very many hope for example has his essay on criticism in which he talks about poetry we have some sidelong glances in Shakespeare and in Chaucer where they're reflecting sometimes on the art of their poetry but we don't have extended treatments of this the way we do in Wordsworth preface to the second edition of lyrical ballads of 1800 until Wordsworth I'd like to draw your attention to a couple of passages and I know that not everybody is dealing with the with the same edition so I'm going to count paragraphs in the 7th edition this is on page 241 but for those of you who don't have the 7th edition it's in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 paragraph the 6th paragraph of the selection of the preface let me read this and comment on it the principal object in which I propose to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life just from common ordinary life I'm not going to talk about you know God and the angels of Milton in Paradise Lost I'm not going to talk about great heroic figures like in Homer and Virgil I'm going to talk about ordinary people in ordinary life and to relate or describe them throughout as far as possible in a selection of language really used by men not the highfalutin language of the poets of his time but the real language used by real people and at the same time to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way ordinary things be presented in an unusual way and further and above all to make these incidents and situations interesting to make them interesting by tracing in them truly though not ostentatiously the primary laws of our nature from ordinary experience maybe we can figure out some very fundamental things about human nature and how we experience the world around us as well as ourselves chiefly as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement you know when we have some kind of of exciting idea or of an exciting experience and and how do we associate things at that point what's going on in our psyches at that point whoa and rustic life was generally chosen whoa and rustic ordinary commonplace country people because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil than they can obtain wood in which they can attain their maturity or less under restraint and speak a plainer and more emphatic language because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently maybe more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings and what he's talking about basically all through this paragraph and you know you can read the rest of the paragraph for yourselves is that among country people there is a tendency for people to be much more direct in the way they speak and they don't give way to idle sophistications and they're much more direct in the expression of their feelings and Wordsworth finds that very attractive very attractive he's he's tired of the the excessive sophistications of some people who are simply being artificial and trying to show off ok well then if you will turn over a few pages you will see in your book in the seventh edition this is on page 250 that in your text this comes toward the end of the selection from his preface in which he gives one of the most famous definitions of poetry that we have ever had I am said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings notice he's treating poetry from the point of view of the poet and the psychology of the poet the psychology of the poet what the poet experiences the spontaneous not planned not made-up not artificially contrived the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility recollected in tranquility the writing of the poem doesn't take place in the midst of the emotional overflow how could you write a poem and have the overflow of powerful feeling at the same time but this is in the remembrance the recollection afterward of that emotion in tranquility the emotion is contemplated to by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears and in emotion kindred not the same as but kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced and does itself already exist in the mind now what Wordsworth means by that is demonstrated by a simple exercise everybody tried this exercise just you know I'm not going to go into this and and at any great length but just try this exercise for a moment just think about some moment in your life in which you experienced something that moved you very very powerfully it could be a very pleasant and joyful experience could be a painful experience but something that really really moved - very very powerfully in your life and obviously that's going to be different for each one of us all right just think about that for a minute and I'm not going to extend this too far but notice what would happen if you really really carried that out and carried it out for any length of time is that gradually the feeling begins to come back doesn't it whatever that feeling was you know happiness maybe disappointment whatever the feeling was anger or maybe joy for that matter I mean we have lots of very good feelings that are very memorable as well as ones that are not so good and the feeling actually begins to come back and you can actually feel something like what it felt like when you had the original experience it's not quite the same but it's very much like it his word is kindred kindred to it it's then that you can write a poem according to Wordsworth see if you read in the middle of the experience I mean how can you how can you write about the experience right oh my god this is so incredible this is wonderful I am totally awestruck by this experience and at the same time I'm scribbling away my poem about it unless you're somehow or another two people or perhaps truly schizophrenic you know it's hard to imagine how that could take place okay but it's afterwards that you can draw on the experience and draw on the emotion of the experience by recollecting it at a more tranquil time in your life maybe sitting alone sitting in your study sitting wherever you might sit or stand or walk okay very interesting coach also is going to expand on this and develop an even more complex notion of the psychology of poetic creation because that too is something that the romantics are interested remember now it's not that they're not interested in objectivity in the objective world in the usual senses in which we use those terms but what they are is more interested than most of their predecessors in the subjective world the subjective world of our psychological experience and in analyzing and attempting to understand that subjective reality and that that subjective reality can tell us a great deal about who we are and what our relations to the world around us may be now in order to understand how he does that how he actually makes use of that let's flip over to his poem the Tintern Abbey lines written a few lines above Tintern Abbey and like you unfortunately I didn't put a book marker in here sorry 2:35 in this edition thank you yes thank you very much okay what we're going to see let me just anticipate this for you a little bit what we're going to see is Wordsworth going out to this very beautiful spot which is on the borderland between the western part of England and the eastern part actually southeastern part of Wales okay let me see if I can I'll have to draw maps I'm not very good at it but I love to try my hand at it okay if if you take this and you say that this is roughly what England looks like that's really not what any good looks like but in the oranges over a year by the way okay then right in roughly about there is Wales okay and Tintern Abbey is roughly right about there okay now Wordsworth had been here five years earlier and talk about recollecting spontaneous overflow of emotion in tranquility he will tell us that he has many times gone back to the experience of being a tintern abbey in the intervening five years and that that has been a very very important experience for him to draw on and now he is returning to tintern abbey and what he's doing in effect is he's comparing the spontaneous experience he had here five years ago with the experience that he has now which is not only an experience of this beautiful setting but also the remembrance of what he felt like when he was here before the first time and how he no longer feels exactly what he felt then and he's no longer really capable of the same kind of spontaneous feeling now that he was capable then it also happens that he's not alone his younger sister Dorothy is out there with him and she's just having a great time she's rolling around in the grass and singing and dancing in the sunrise and just being great and he's thinking with some sadness but while he's so happy for her that she's having this great spontaneous experience in nature there's a certain amount of sadness toward the end of the poem because he realizes that he's no longer capable of that kind of spontaneity but he's become too self-conscious self-conscious in the sense that you know we can become too self-conscious when we no longer just having the experience that we're watching ourselves having the experience we're contriving to have the experience you know and there's a certain amount of contrivance and even maybe artificiality in that I mean maybe it's better than not having the experience at all right like going on vacation right you have to play on most most people anyway you have to plan to go on a vacation especially if they've got obligations work family whatever okay so a certain amount of planning has to go into that but that doesn't mean that once you're actually on your vacation you can't have some marvelous experiences but what happens if we become so self conscious that we're just constantly observing ourselves having the experiences we have and maybe even god help us analyzing the experiences that we have they don't let somebody like that you've ever done it yourself you know that's that's the kind of thing that words worth actually is feeling kind of sad about toward the end of this poem okay well having said all of that let's look at the poem itself five years have passed oh by the way let me just also say this about Tintern Abbey well any of you have been there or know about tendrán Abbey is it's a medieval evidence it's a church and the grounds of a monastery now in ruins by the way now in ruins and so we are reminded that in the 1530s after Henry the eighth then King of England proclaimed himself also the head of the Church of England ordered the dissolution of the monasteries but the dissolution of the monasteries really meant it's a kind of euphemism what it really meant was going into the monasteries and in many cases smashing you know the beautiful stained glass windows smashing the heads off statues burning the libraries the monastic libraries the monks who wouldn't simply surrender and give them and convert to your your church now leave their own church and convert to your church in many cases they simply slaughtered or otherwise simply drove away into a kind of Exile and these churches of monasteries from the Middle Ages many of which are really really beautiful were allowed to disintegrate into ruins over time and in some cases you've actually got sketches from the 16th 17th 18th and 19th centuries so you can see the progress of their disintegration over time and so all over England Ireland Scotland Wales the British Isles you will find the ruins over there very common you will find the ruins of old churches and old monasteries now another aspect of romanticism that I had not really talked about but it goes hand in hand with that critique of the new urbanization industrialization and so forth that I was talking about was a critique of that then was regarded as modernism of the modern world we're talking about the end of the 18th century now the beginning of the 19th century and there were lots of people who were looking back past the modern world to the Middle Ages and saying you know back there in the Middle Ages people think that it was the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and you know where these poor benighted souls running around and superstitious and you know thought controlled by the kind of monolithic Church and so forth and those thank God we left that behind with the Renaissance and then the anointment well there were a lot of people starting in the 19th century who started looking back and saying uh uh wait a minute maybe we've been sold a bill of goods maybe the Middle Ages are our lost golden age and so they began to romanticize the Middle Ages in all kinds of ways and we're going to talk a lot about that in this clips because a lot of 19th and early 20th century literature and God knows even contemporary culture contemporary with us culture goes back and provides us with all kinds of images attractive images appealing images of the Middle Ages I mean think of our movies you know that have to do with Middle Ages not only earlier movies you know we can either his court and Connecticut Yankee and the King Arthur's Court and all of those movies about knights and ladies and just sand warfare and courtly love and all of the rest of it but that continues you know into our own time you know with very popular movies like Braveheart like the the movie King Arthur Tolkien's Lord of the Rings talking was a professor of of anglo-saxon and and Old Norse old Icelandic literature he's a medievalist by profession and so of course when he wrote those books he was drawing directly on Old English and old Icelandic literature for the basic storylines developments of characters you know and conflicts and so on and so on and so on in all kinds of very interesting ways so if you were to read that early medieval literature which is wonderful stuff by the way you know you would see what Tolkien was doing with it and it's it's really very wonderful what he did with it so anyway starting in the 19th century there's this renewed interest in the Middle Ages and taking the Middle Ages seriously and saying wait a minute you know maybe there was something very very important and valuable back there that we have lost yes we've gained a lot that maybe we've lost a lot to along the way and so there was a tendency often to go back and idealize the Middle Ages was seeking out a place like Tintern Abbey would be part of that you know you're going to go out on a day trip where you gonna go oh let's go to that old ruined medieval monastery down the road there by the river why why would you do that unless there were some kind of poles some kind of attraction in this okay five years have passed five summers with the length of five long winters and again I hear because I'm out here again now again I hear these waters there's a river that runs down there it's beautiful absolutely beautiful rolling from their Mountain Springs with a soft inland murmur once again do i behold these steep and lofty cliffs the you know the river is cutting actually through an area where you know how rivers will often enough if the rock formations are of the right kind will cut over thousands of years you know through mountains and whatnot and say they're high hills and and even cliffs on either side of the river they're on a wild secluded scene impressed thoughts of more deep seclusion notice that when I look at the scene what I'm interested in is the thought that that impresses on me notice the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity that's what this poem is ultimately about in many ways see that what is interesting for words fears about his experience in and his knowledge of the external or objective world is what that does to him subjectively what that does to him inside it was really the Romantics of God is convinced that we are better people for going on trips out into the country of I mean if you're city dwellers that's actually something that will improve us and improve us as people well how could that be well read on and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky the day is come when I again repose here under this dark sycamore and view these pots of cottage ground these orchard Tufts he's looking at the farms okay he's up on the hillside and he's looking down on the farms which at this season with their unripe fruits are clad in one green hue and lose themselves mid groves and copses once again I see these hedgerows Hartley hedgerows little lines of sportive would run wild now that is the way they would work if you're up above filmer Bend up in a hard place looking down on farmland and you can see the marquee you know the the fences or the hedge rows or whatever there are then mark off the different fields of the different farms that's what he's looking at and they look like just little lines because he's up high now looking down it okay these pastoral farms this is a pastoral setting in the sense of being out there in nature that's one of the meanings of the word pastoral but the other meaning of the word pastoral is that the Latin word pasture means shepherd being shepherd green to the very door I mean unlike most parts of London unless you're real rich and you can afford to have you know an expansive lawn you know most people have concrete up to their doors or flagstone up to their doors and ways of smoke sent up in silence from among the trees with some uncertain notice as might seem of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods or have some hermits cave where by his fire the hermit sits alone a hermit being an image of somebody who is a kind of contemplative who lives out there in nature these beauteous forms okay I've got a break now he's describing the setting but now he's actually going to start exploring what that physical setting does to him subjectively these beauteous forms through a long absence have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man's eye okay you know what what does a blind person see I mean if if a blind person were to be told about a landscape the person might have some notion of what that was but wouldn't be able to experience it in the same way that someone with sight could but often lonely rooms often lonely rooms this is in the intervening five years since I was out here last often lonely rooms amid the din of towns and cities you know carriages and horse-drawn wagons and whatnot loitering around and people shouting and you know running here and there and so forth I have owed to them I have owed to them these beauteous forms of nature out here in the woods I wrote to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet felt in the blood then felt along the heart and passing even into my pure mind with tranquil restoration see these are the feelings now being recollected in tranquility when he's lying around or sitting around or whatever he's doing in his room in the city and this is a tranquil restoration just thinking about what it was like being out there in the country and having that great experience brings to him a kind of restoration feelings two of unremembered pleasure such perhapses have no sight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life and what is that best portion of a good man's life his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love it's very interesting that's been very often quoted by the way it's a very famous passage notice the experienced and in nature is morally improving we come away from that better people and as we reflect back on it and we experience it in certain ways in tranquillity that restores us and restores the best parts of us okay and they have no sight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life the best portion of a good man's life or a good woman's life is not doing great deeds it's the little everyday things it's the little everyday things that's the best portion of a good man or woman's life little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love those are the things that constitute goodness as far as Wordsworth is concerned nor as I trust to them I may have owed another gift of aspect more sublime that blessed mood in which the burden of the mystery in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened that serene and blessed mood in which the affections the older word for feelings in which the affections or feelings gently lead us on until the breadth of this corporeal Fame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended we arrayed a sleep and body and become a living soul while with an I made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy we see into the life of things now what's he talking about he's talking about how sometimes may not happen very often but sometimes we may experience something that just so carries us up out of ourselves that we forget who we are and where we are and what we are and at least for a moment we have entered into some kind of transcendental role or realm okay you're walking along the the seashore it's dark and then if you've ever done this you know what happens next is you have what people call the false dawn because it looks like it's dawn that's not really the dog yet and then the dawn begins and the dawn comes in all of its glory but home are called rota dr. los años rosy-fingered dawn you see those rosy colors and pastel colors spreading out over the vastness of the sky and the sea and let's just say that you could just get so caught up in the experience the time would pass and you wouldn't even be aware of time passing that you wouldn't even be aware of who you were where you were you're just totally caught up in that experience that's what Wordsworth is talking about here it doesn't have to be by the seaside but but something some kind of experience like that and he's talking about an experience in nature why aha let's see if this bee bit of vain belief I mean criticize me if you will say this is just a vain believe if this could be bit of vain believe yet oh how often darkness and amid the many shapes of joyless daylight when the fitful store unprofitable and the fever of the world the fever of the world you know exactly what the fever of the world is if you drive on one of our freeways right that's the fever of the world have hung upon the beatings of my heart how often spirit not literally because I'm away someplace else how often spirit have I turned to the o'sullivan why sofa is a Latin word for woods forest and the why is the why River Oh Sylvan why thou wander'st or through the woods he's addressing the the river now that wanders through the woods how often has my spirit turned to thee okay okay and now with gleams of half this distinguished thought with many recognitions dim and faint and somewhat of a sad perplexity the picture of the mind revives again because after all the memory does tend to fade doesn't it but now I've gone back and so here is the picture right in front of me all over again as it were while here I stand not only with the sense of present pleasure but with pleasing thoughts in this moment there's life and food for future years see the argument by analogy he's making here just as five years ago he had a great experience out here and he now has learned that in the five years he's been away that experience has been life and food for future years the next five years now also by analogy he argues I'm not only having a pleasant experience right now but it is also present for me to reflect on the fact that this is going to nourish me for a long time to come when I've gone far away from Tintern Abbey and so I dare to hope though change no doubt from what I was when first I came among these hills when what was he like then like a roll I bounded all the mountains by the sides of the deep rivers and the lonely streams wherever nature led more like a man flying from something that he dreads that one who sought the thing he loved for nature then the coarser pleasures of my boyish days and they're glad animal movements all gone by when he is a boy as I can animal just sort of frolicking in the middle of nature never watched the animals just being playful you know it's wonderful to me was all-in-all I cannot paint but then I was the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion the cataract is a waterfall haunted me like a passion the tall rocked the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood their colours and their forms were then to me an appetite that's a very interesting metaphor notice he doesn't say a mental impression an idea they were an appetite an appetite is something that wants to be fulfilled right a feeling and de love that had no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied nor any interest unborrowed from the eye in other words I didn't have to bring to bear on this some kind of idea to make this really impressive oh isn't this interesting because this is an example of really interesting geological formation or something like that okay I just experienced it that time has passed that time has passed now there's going to be a little nostalgia about that that he can no longer experience things that way that time has passed and all its aching Joy's are now no more and all its dizzy raptures you know the wild confused feelings that somebody very young might feel okay there may be some advantages in growing older but one of them for Wordsworth is not the ability to have this kind of a spontaneous relationship nature not for this faint to I nor mourn or memories he you know he's really protesting too much as Shakespeare says you know I'm not complaining I'm not complaining other gifts have followed for such loss I would believe abundant recompense okay he's trying to cheer himself up it's true I can't have that kind of experience any longer but I have gotten something very important instead with my maturity for I have learned to work on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity nor harsh nor grating though of ample power to chasten and subdue and I have felt this is one of the most important and famous passages in all of our literature this is quoted everywhere and I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the right of setting Suns and the round ocean and the living ear and the blue sky and in the mind of man it's not just out there it's also in the mind of man in the psyche of man a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thought that as subject as well as object and rolls through all things and rolls through all things see he is experienced and now he can contemplate how in those moments of transcendence what he has been experiencing is a great spiritual force that rolls through everything not just through nature conceived of is something out there objectively but me too right here subjectively and I experienced my connection with nature in an intimate and as the romantics constantly said an organic way therefore am I still a lover of the mountains of the woods and mountains the meadows in the woods and mountains and of all that we behold from this green earth of all the mighty world of eye and ear both what they have create and what perceived well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anger the the anchor of my purest thoughts the nurse the guide the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being moral being and notice that knowledge is not simply something which is empirical knowledge of the objective world I to half create with my own psychic subjective apparatus that which I perceive and that which I experience that's because whatever is outside me is in some genuine and true sense also what is inside me if I only let myself realize it the problem with our ordinary ways of thinking is that we deliberately and systematically and even methodologically have cut us off from that experience and therefore from that realization of the organic connectedness of us with all existence all existence ok so notice that it is through his analysis of his subjective experience that he comes to a whole new understanding not simply about himself but of what we are sometimes pleased to call objective reality as well and relations between subjective and objective reality in other words this is a passage to knowledge not through objective study but through subjective experience and that's something new that the idealist philosophers and romantic writers are bringing to our culture okay

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_2A.txt

you well hello again here we are back for our second session and we're going to be taking up Blake this evening and then we're going to begin our discussion of Wordsworth which we will be continuing into next week or for those of you who are watching this on on tape or dvd in the next segment so first of all though I want to ask if there are any questions and I encourage people who are here in the live classroom with me to ask questions because in part they're asking questions on behalf of those of you who are out there taking this as a distance education class so there was a question about the paper I believe right yeah you ain't you remember let me just say this to the rest of the folks first that if you're going to say something you have to press where it says press the button there on that little microphone in front of you and hold it down as long as you're talking otherwise your voice doesn't go into the system okay okay are you not looking for a an actual criticism of the novel that we choose to read because it says that you would like to have a brief historical context for the issue your author treats and then number two it says analysis of a specific work by your author showing how it treats the particular issue and three an assessment of your authors contribution to one of these Victorian issues so basically so basically you're not really looking for criticism on the novel itself just basically what you're asking here well the analysis though would be criticism I mean what in most advanced literature courses we call criticism critical analysis if you will which really for the most part will be an interpretive analysis do you understand what i mean by an interpretive analysis you will be going through and interpreting what is going on in a novel or in a long-ish poem or whatever it is you take up but you will be doing so by direct reference to the text itself in going through the text either section by section or at least the matically you know looking at the different places in the text that will illustrate the kind of thing that you believe is going on in the novel in terms of one of these issues well let me just give you a very brief illustration of this later on in the course we're going to be reading Virginia Woolf mrs. Dalloway and as you know one of the issues with which I am asking you to to deal is the what the Victorians called the woman question that is to say what is the role of women in society what kinds of identity issues come up and dealing with women and various kinds of gender issues women in relation to men and you know so what Virginia Woolf is doing in mrs. Dalloway is dealing with those questions at very great lengths particularly through the development of the character of mrs. Dalloway and so if you were to take mrs. Dalloway which is actually out of bounds because it's something we're going to be doing in in class itself but if you were to take say another one of Virginia Woolf's novels which likewise would deal with some of the same kinds of issues that's what you would do you go through and you would talk about certain kinds of scenes relationships speeches of characters comments by the author or authorial voice in the novel and so forth in order through your interpretive analysis to show how wolf is dealing with the question with the questions that you say she's dealing with at the beginning of your paper okay and then you will conclude with a final paragraph in which you say this is how I think she has contributed to a discussion of this question does that answer your question okay any other questions about paper assignment or anything else as a matter of fact for the course no questions well okay was your hands moving towards microphone okay go ahead and press the button now for the weekly journal is that is that the one that's due next week is for today yeah see we haven't actually taken up the literature itself until today okay and for those of you who are watching this either on television or on VHS tape or on DVD you may not be aware that these are actually weekly segments and so what I asked the students who are taking the course live to do is when they complete the first week in which we actually studied the literature begin studying the literature itself which is week two which is today I want to find out what your reflections are about these works and about how they're treated in class or maybe comments that i make about them with which you agree or disagree or the writer herself or himself and what your responses are to that writers work and you would turn that in the week after we have the discussion of that writer and of those works in other words the discussion of texts in week two you would respond to in Week three the discussion of works in Week three you would respond to in week four and so forth and as I mentioned in our introductory class sometimes people get behind you know things can happen you know somebody gets sick or there's some other kind of problem and I understand that just catch up just catch up because this is an important part of your grade so just catch up if you get behind and if you have to turn in two or three at a time that's ok but just catch up ok any other questions about the journal ya know ok yes don't forget to pressure button yeah in on the on the email I mean for the length of the journal entry yeah can you give it a criterium a line needs to be in the email format well you'll have to kind of guess what that looks like in your particular program what I say is you know that if it were typed out on paper or printed out on paper or what we're handwritten you know a paragraph or so you know certainly no more than a page now a page double spaced is usually about 250 words if it's single spaced it obviously would be double that so you'll have to get a sense of what that looks like in your particular email program because that's going to vary from one program to another and from one font size to another but that will give you a rough idea anyway ok any other questions yeah you don't have a microphone ok um well that's a very good question that's a very interesting question let me see I'll have to go back I'll just have to go back there's a you know for those of you who are watching this at a distance there's a question about maybe a confusion in the in the dates on the syllabus that I've distributed here to students who are alive with me I'll go back and I'll figure that out okay I'll let you know about that next time and this will not be a problem by the time those of you who are watching this at a distance get it because such a problem will have been corrected ok let's see anything else ok well let's move on the first actual writer we're taking up is one of the great writers one of the earliest but also one of the greatest writers of the Romantic period romanticism as we talked about last time is a great cultural movement which sweeps across Europe not England alone and of course it's over to North America and too much of the rest of the world that is in regular contact with the culture of the west and it has an enormous impact not only on literature but also the other arts as well music painting sculpture dance theatre you know all of the arts essentially are influenced in influence profoundly by the development of romanticism and we also find it having an extraordinary impact in areas like philosophy religion even science in ways that maybe we'll be able to pursue a little bit here I don't know how much time we'll have for that but but we'll see we'll see you will recall the last time I said that one of the problems that people were beginning to become aware of was the increasing displacement of very large parts of the population in England this was going to happen in a different way on the continent and it really wasn't going to happen in the same way over here in North America because of the potential for expanding into new lands but in England what happened was once again very very briefly hundreds of thousands of people and ultimately millions of people were displaced from farm lands from rural settings moved into cities there were terrible problems with urban blight and the Romantics in part we're developing a critique of all of these kinds of problems and what they were doing they felt not only physically to people but also spiritually to people I mean what what happens to the humanity of human beings when these kinds of things happen ok so in William breaks songs of innocence and experience what he does is he pairs poems to a large extent you don't in every case have poem for poem one in the songs of innocence and another in the songs of experience but a number of them are paired and we're going to see that in just a moment and one of the things that I want you to pay attention to particularly is the voice or persona which is used in a poem now let me see if I can get this here on our desktop this is very much related to the term voice let me talk about these these two terms because they come up again and again and again in literary discussions persona originally in this I think is a fairly clear way of explaining it originally was a Latin word which is based on an earlier greek word for the role that an actor would play in a play in the ancient world there would be plays in which with the exception of the chorus there would be a limited number of actors on the stage at any one time and it was possible for one actor to play more than one role and the way you knew what the character was that an actor was playing was that the actor wore a mask so if I were playing Oedipus let's say you know I would come out on stage wearing a particular mask if I were playing a different character in Sophocles tragedy I would come out on stage with a different kind of mask now this wouldn't work in the case of Oedipus but in many of these early plays it was possible for one actor to play more than one role it's just that each time the person came on stage the person would have to be wearing a different mask and of course we as the audience would have become accustomed to this as a convention of the stage and so we would not confuse the actor who is playing two different roles with the roles themselves right so we would recognize oh here the person is adopting this role or they're the person is adopting a different role well this concept got taken up by the early readily shins now you know what rhetoric is and everybody has taken freshman English in which you probably talked a lot about rhetoric and rhetoric according to Aristotle to take another one of the great ancients in his famous treatise on rhetoric is the art of figuring out how to persuade people of a given point in a particular context you're going to construct an argument you're in a particular context what are the best means you can use to persuade people now obviously arguments have a lot to do with that but one of the things that Aristotle and other ancient resolutions and writers on rhetoric came to realize very early on was that how people are affected by a speech is going to have a lot to do not just with the logic of the argument so that's important but also with how they respond to the what they take it any rate to be the character of the person who is doing the speaking is this somebody you trust is this a good person is this a decent person is this a humane person or the reverse I mean is the person untrustworthy so that one of the things that became very important was for the Greeks to talk about the ethos of the speaker the ethos of the speaker let me well that didn't quite work let's see okay I'll do it this way okay the ethos of the speaker and I'm going to use our alphabet system but this is actually a Greek word and it's the word from which we derive things like ethics and ethical and so forth and what do ethics have to do with ethics have to do with values right and with evaluating different kinds of actions now when we're talking about the fs of a speaker we're talking about the character of the speaker or the ethos of the speaker in a special sense of the word character I'm not talking about also and so as a character in a pie I'm using the term character in the way a sports announcer uses the term character you know in say a football game the quarterback gets knocked down yet again you know for the umpteenth time in the game by some enormous defensive tackle you know in the quarterback struggles back up gamely to to fight once again and somebody like John Madden start screaming that guy's got real character okay that's the sense in which we're using the term character here it's it's the sense of somebody's strength of character okay or weakness of character for that matter you know the in this case that the person is courageous let's say and is able to fight through the pain in order to do what he regards as his duty okay that's having character in the sense that we're talking about here okay so another thing that people began to realize was not only that an audience will respond to somebody in terms of how they perceive the character of the individual but that a speaker may adopt a different persona with different audiences and in different situations now the good sense in which that can take place there's also a bad sense but the good sense in which that can take place is but you probably speak differently to me if you were to have a conversation with me about your paper assignment then you do when you're talking to your buddies right and you probably talk differently to children than you do to fellow adults and you probably would talk differently to a police officer then you might do you know somebody you meet outside of class and so on and so on okay in other words we all learn to adapt to different situations or you know let's hope that we learn to adapt to different situations and you know in this case different audiences even if the audience is only an audience of one because what you want to do is you want to come across in a way usually anyway you want to come across in a way that will be persuasive to the person if you're trying to argue the person into something or if you're trying to convince the person that you're a law-abiding citizen or whatever it may be or a good student for that matter okay now unfortunately there are some people and we can think of certain unfortunate political examples of this where a politician will simply adopt a persona in order to try to manipulate people that's usually what we talk about when we say oh it's just all image you know that's not who this person really is that's just an image that the person is trying to create okay now that's the bad sense of using a persona and trying to persuade people by the use of a persona now we also just to take this another step further we also notice that people do respond to the ethos of the speaker at least what they perceive to be the fos of the speaker and that's why so much attention is given in political elections not just political elections but let's say in political elections to either building up one's own ethics or unfortunately in negative advertisements tearing down the f us of one's opponent ok so that people won't respect the other guy you'll respect me but you won't respect my opponent ok now my opponent may be doing the same thing with me right so that's simply further evidence of the importance of ethical proofs but in rhetoric are called Beth achill proves that is to say attempting to prove oneself to prove one's case by proving oneself ok some of the most brilliant trial lawyers are geniuses at adopting certain kinds of personae right the same thing is true with politicians the same thing is true with lots of people ok so there is a good sense in which we can talk about a persona and then unfortunately sometimes there is a negative sense in which we can talk about somebody simply creating an image in order to try to manipulate other people but now let's go to break with this in mind what break is doing in a number of these poems is he is adopting the persona he's an adult miam now he's a mature guy but he's adopting the persona of a child of a child why why does he make the speaker in the poem the one whose voice we are hearing a child in some cases a small child because what do we associate with children we associate innocence with children right and now you've paid to a certain extent with children and we want to be protective of children and if children are being mistreated or abused or otherwise ill handled then we feel very sympathetic towards children especially small children okay now let's just take a couple of his poems here let's start with the lamb let's start with the lamb everybody with me little lamb who made d two stout know who made thee gave the life and bid thee feed by the stream and or the mead gave the clothing of delight softest clothing woolly bright gave these such a tender voice making all the vales rejoice with Allium who made thee just I'll know who made thee with a ram I'll tell thee little lamb I'll tell thee he is called by thy name for he calls himself a lamb he is meek and he is mild he became a little child I a child and dalla Liam we are called by his name with a ram god bless thee little lamb god bless state now what does that sound like it sounds like a kind of nursery rhyme doesn't it or notice the the rhythm of this you know divided out today you know it could easily be put to music and sung is a kind of lullaby to a child or with a child ok and notice the whole thing is about softness and innocence lambs you know whatever real lambs are like you know little lambs anyway are soft and cuddly or at least we have an impression of them being soft and cuddly and warm and loving and of course when we have you know Dino who made thee with a ram I'll tell thee he is called by thy name for he calls himself a lamb it's obviously a reference to what or who yet to Christ right in in the Christian Gospels you have the lamb the pastor the shepherd all of the imagery of the lamb and the the you know the black sheep and gathering the sheep and the Good Shepherd and so on and so on and so on the Lamb of God the Agnus Dei II well okay so this is a very simple little poem and of course once again you see either the speaker is a child or somebody who is talking to a child now that's important to keep in mind now let's flip over to the tiger which is the companion poem to the lamb ok Tiger Tiger burning bright in the forests of the night what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry in blakes time that would have been pronounced symmetry by the way so it actually would have been a rhyme in what distant deeps our skies burnt the fire of thine eyes on what wings dare he aspire what the ham dare seize the fire and what shoulder and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart and when thy heart began to beat what dread hand and what dread feet what the hammer what the chain in what furnace was thy brain what the enville what dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp when the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears did he smile his work to see did he who made the lamb make thee Tiger Tiger burning bright in the forests of the night what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry now notice where as the poem the lamb is in the songs of innocence a collection of poems entitled songs of innocence the tiger is in the collection of poems entitled songs of experience this is experience this is what we learn ok as we grow up we're no longer children now and we begin to realize that reality is not as simple as it might have appeared to us as children and so now we have to confront the existence of the tiger and that the the tiger is depicted here as not only a majestic animal but also as a ferocious animal and is a dangerous and destructive potentially destructive animal right and what immortal hemmed or I could frame thy fearful symmetry what immortal hand or eye well Corey this is a reference to some kind of God right and in what distant deeps our skies burnt the fire of thine eyes on what wings dare he aspire what the hand dare sees the fire the fire being what what what are we talking about what's the image here the fire that created the animal but yeah what can we press this a little further I was going to say maybe the the soul or whatever is like the essence of the tiger yes yes the essence of the tiger but what is the specific image of the workmen who is daring with his hand to seize the fire and beating and what the hammer what the chain in what furnace was the brain what the mville and so on and so on what is that a physical image of blacksmith it's like a blacksmith isn't it it's like a blacksmith who would take a piece of iron put it into a furnace and then use the then heated iron to hammer into the form or shape that the blacksmith wanted it to be and this becomes an image of creation right but in this case an image of the creation of something terrifying something terrifying I mean awesome in a way but still terrifying okay and when the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears did he smile his work to see did he who made the lamb make thee did he who made the way up make thee and we're talking of course about the Creator we're talking about God right so if we can go back to our CI guess I have to do this since I need to do to do to do to do to do I think there's a simpler way to do that but I don't think this is programmed for it okay so what we're confronting here is something which philosophers and philosophers of religion and theologians call the problem of evil it's a technical term in philosophy and theology by the way it's a technical term problem of evil anybody know what the problem of evil is what's what's the problem of evil it's the the whole question about if God created good how could he create bad you know how could there be evil in the world if God is all good and loving and knowing right right exactly it's a question which is of course very very ancient and it's still very much an important question if you are a religious believer in some sense of a religious believer who believes in and all good and all loving in all just God who created everything that exists how do you account for the existence of evil and manifestly we do experience evil in the world not all the time not everybody is evil not everything is evil but there is evil in the world of two kinds there's natural evil such as horrible storms that may destroy people's lives and property or or terrible cancers and so on and so on those are natural evils and how could and all good and all loving and all just and all-powerful God create a world in which such evils exist secondly there's moral evil this is the evil that we do to one another this is the way in which we may hurt one another I mean not all of us I'm not talking about that but we can point to certain instances of course of evil in the world moral evil okay once again how could an all good all loving all just all-powerful God create a world in which there is moral evil as well as physical or natural evil well there are all kinds of efforts to try to deal with that question one time gave a electrode another University on the history of the of the problem of evil and I only had a few weeks to to research the background for this particular lecture and nevertheless I was able to come up with 17 distinct arguments regarding the problem of evil / / history in the West just in West now okay now the point is that this is a problem which has perplexed people for thousands of years literally thousands of years and there's obviously no easy or simple answer to the question here Blake is dealing with this in a kind of dialectical way where he is posing the view of the innocence of the Lamb which is obviously something very positive and loving and good and warm and nice over against the image of the tiger and the fact of the matter is that both exist in the kind of world that we inhabit and Blake thought that it was naive and sentimental in the bad sense of sentimental simply to stress all of the good and all of the optimistic or on the other hand to stress simply the pessimistic side of things that good and evil for Blake exists in a kind of dialectical tension with one another okay and notice what happens from the last line in the first quatrain to the last line in the last quatrain or stanza here what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry at the beginning and then at the end it becomes what immortal hand or eye dare dare frame thy fearful symmetry very interesting kind of pairing of these poems it was also very bold you know I mean he's writing these things in the in the 18th century this is very daring very bold and of course Blake was not a popular poet nor was he a popular artist those of you who read the the head note in our anthology to William Blake will know that he was not only a poet but he was also an artist and in the most recent edition of the norton anthology we actually have some illustrations of his original engravings when he published his poems he because he also had learned the the Argent skill of engraving he designed pictures and then he would use the engraving plates to produce and reproduce these these plates or pictures in copies of his books so that the poems were actually read within the context of the pictures now we don't have that opportunity here but you can go to a good library such as our university library but but really any good library should have some collections of William Blake that would have facsimile zat least of his poems with the original engravings ok but he never became a popular writer in his own lifetime it was only long after he was dead that people really came to recognize the genius of William Blake which obviously in more recent times has contributed further to that notion of the Romantic individual is someone who doesn't care about the crowd or about the public ok but is often the lonely imaginative poetic soul in many cases even rebelling against are struggling against the crowd and against the the the popularity of the crowd and that's an image which still continues to be popular in certain ways I mean think of popular culture figures who cultivate that kind of the image okay let's move on to the chimney sweeper let's take the first chimney sweeper poem in the songs of innocence and then we'll take the second one in the songs of experience by the way these were published together break published the songs of innocence and then he wrote more poems which he collected as the songs of experience and then he published them together okay in parallel chimney sweeper when my mother died I was very young and my father sold me while yet my tongue could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep so your chimneys I sweep and in sit I sleep there's little Tom Baker who cried when his head that cold like a lamb's back was shaved so I said hush Tom never minded for when your heads bear you know that the suit cannot spoil your white hair and so he was quiet and that very night his tom was a sleeping he had such a sight the thousands of sweepers dick jonet and Jack we're all of them rocked up in coffins of black and by came an angel who had a bright key and he opened the coffins and set them all free then down a green pine reaping laughing they run and wash in a river and shine in the Sun then naked and white all their bags left behind they rise upon clouds sport in the wind in the angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy he'd have God for his father and never want joy now again this is a child who is the speaker of the poem and the Speaker of the poem is not William bike but a persona he has created for this particular poem okay there's a certain kind of poignancy in a certain irony that comes from the fact that this is a child speaking here and this is about chimney sweepers anybody know you know what chimney sweepers were I mean now we have people who have mechanical apparatus is you know for for cleaning out chimneys and and you know periodically if you have a chimney you have to have it cleaned you know for safety of nothing else so in the old days and bakes time they didn't have these mechanisms you know a mechanical apparatus that could do it for you so does anybody know what actually happened with the chimney sweeps let's see I don't know yeah go ahead oh okay go ahead oh you know they sent down the little kids because they're small enough to go fit fit into the chimney and they climbed down with their bristles scrub them out and then I guess bag up all the suit in the fireplace and so what would happen to the child in the process they get pretty dirty but also what are they breathing get in their lungs you know see the I mean the chimneys are not that big right and if you're dealing with a you know a chimney that's that's just you know maybe a couple of feet many of them wouldn't even be a couple of feet wide and maybe you know a foot or a foot and a half deep and you lower a child in a harness with a rope down knee into the chimney and deanne oh he's got his his as you say his bristles you know the bristles of his brush you know working away on that of course all that the dust that suit is right there and of course what is he breathing you know that's what he's inhaling and it's just like the coal miners in the old days before they started enacting legislation to to try to protect the coal miners from the kind of coal dust and soot and whatnot that that will not suit but the kind of coal dust that they would be inhaling all the time there is a disease which is known as black lung which is known as Black Lung and it's something that affects you well depending on how early you're exposed to it but if you're exposed to it as a child it's something that affects you from the earliest time you have exposure to these conditions and it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse and by the time you are 30 it will be it will have become irreversible maybe even as early as your middle to late 20s but certainly by the time you're 30 it is irreversible and by the time you're 30 or in your early 30s you would be if not already an invalid you would be on the verge of becoming an invalid and the chances are you would probably die before 40 or not much over 40 because what happens of course is that you know the little air sacs in your lung just shut down you know and you have smaller and smaller and smaller areas of your lungs in which to breathe and eventually of course that's going to kill you so I mean not immediately but it will over time so this was a horrible a horrible set of conditions into which children were introduced in the exploitation of children okay and this is in big cities like London that not only London okay his mother died when he was very young and his father sold him while yet my tongue could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep well if you've ever been around small children you know this would mean that the child was very young I mean really very young okay maybe 23 years old sold well yes in a sense because what would happen often is that a parent could I mean not that all parents did this by any means but a parent could sell a child into an indenture where the child would be an indentured servant now what that meant in effect was a period of time in which you will literally a save now you are to save forever it wasn't like savory as we usually mean savory that's it savory for life but so that there would be a period of time for this period of incitement but you were legally bound to your master or your mistress and if you tried to escape the indenture they could hunt you down and you would be very very severely punished so it was a horrible horrible situation and it existed in England had also existed in the United States in the early 19th century and places like Canada and so forth I have a great great uncle who actually was able to jump his indenture in Canada and get across the border into America and then you know he was safe once he got over over here but you know that was not that uncommon was not that uncommon okay so your chimneys I sweep and in such I sleep but notice the child is not complaining busy that's part of the irony of choosing the child to be the speaker in the poem and then just listen to this for a second once again there's little Tom Baker who cried when his head that curled like a lamb's back was shaved so I said hush Tom never mind it for when your heads bear you know that the scent cannot spoil your white hair what does that sound like I mean just the rhythm sound like something you've heard all of your lives okay and so he was quiet in that very night is tom was a sleeping he had such a sight the thousands of sweepers dick jonet and Jack were all of them locked up in coffins of black what does that sound like the night before Christmas exactly it's the same rhythm isn't it ok now there were children's poems but adopted rhythms like this and so since the speaker is a child what what break is doing is he's experimenting with using the poetic meter the political of children's poetry in effect ok and notice a the dream the dream here there's little Tom Baker who cried when his head was was was shaved his hair used to curl like a lamb's back like the curly hair on a Liam again association with a lamb purity innocent softness ok we're shaved why would you shave the the head of a child yeah otherwise it'd get filled up with the suit right okay and and he cried harsh Tom never mind it for when your heads bear you know that the suit cannot spoil your right here now obviously a child would not have white hair but he's talking about fair hair so he probably is has or has had blond hair ok so the sudden how can't spoil that that beautiful blond hair of yours and then when he was sleeping that night thousands of sweepers we're all of them rocked up in coffins of black what does coffins of black suggest I mean obviously we know what coffins are and you know in death and so forth but what does that suggest in the context of this poem they're stuck in the chimney exactly which becomes for them a kind of coffin I mean you're totally enclosed in this dark place you might be able to see a little bit of light up there but it's you know you're just totally enclosed in this darkness which of course is going to be your death and by came an angel so you know they run on the hillside there in the Sun this is a dream of course and only in a dream and they splash around in the water naked and write all their bags left behind okay then they rise and the clouds and so forth in the angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy he'd have god for his father never want joy in other words this is the kind of thing that might be told to such a child just go along except you a lot and everything will work out in the end okay let's look at the other chimney sweeper problem now songs of experience a little black thing among the snow crying weep weep in notes of woe where are thy father and mother say now this is an adult speaking to the child okay and now the child replies they are both gone up to the church to pray ah because i was happy upon the heath and smiled among the winters snow they closed me in the close of death and taught me to sing the notes of woe and because I am happy and dance and sing they think they have done me no injury because I am happy and dance and sing they think they've done me no injury okay I mean this is something that often happens with oppressed people they may find some way of finding some small amount of happiness in their lives singing songs or whatever it may be but does that mean that they're really happy and that the people who have oppressed them are doing them no injury and are going to praise god and his priest and king who make up a heaven of our misery now that's laying it on the line you know what he's talking about as he's talking about hypocrisy obviously not everybody is a hypocrite but he's talking about hypocrisy how could these people claim to be good Christians they've gone up to church to pay right and what have they done they've left the little chimney sweeper there in his clothes of woe and he's suffering he's suffering they think that they're doing you know damned no damage or no injury because there are times when he will sing perhaps even dance then they've gone up to the church to praise god and his priest and king who make up a heaven of our misery you see who take our misery and say it's all okay because you're going to go to heaven because you're being a good boy or good girl is the case might be okay so once you can see how he is pairing these poems and and what the effect is yeah go ahead you don't have a microphone okay well we'll have to repeat it then go ahead right right that's that's a very very good point and if you couldn't hear that because unfortunately she doesn't have a microphone on her desk if you couldn't hear that her basic point and correct me if I mistake this or miss paraphrases was that this may not be so much a criticism of you know some kind of religious belief or God or Christ or whatever as it is a criticism of the church and of the state the church represented here by the priests and the state represented here by the reference to the King which would be acting in a very hypocritical way is that rougher your point okay good so yes I totally agree with that and I think that's a very good point and you know a break even got himself into trouble because he was a political rebel in his own time for quite a while he was actually an advocate of the French Revolution and there were other English people who are advocates of the French Revolution wordsworth among them but there was also a huge crisis because by the time of this poem France was at war with England and in that caused a real crisis I mean if you were if you were an Englishman or English woman and you had strong sympathies for the French and the French Revolution you could be regarded as if not a traitor at least somebody who was very unpatriotic was very unpatriotic and I it's the same kind of thing that happens anytime there's a war you know if one expresses some kind of sympathy for the other side ones patriotism gets called into question and in some cases that can even be regarded as a criminal offense so as a matter of fact break in his own life got into a scuffle with a with an English soldier and apparently roughed up this English soldier and apparently Sid some things along the way and the soldier and and the soldiers friends then filed charges against Blake that he was a traitor because of whatever he said you know perhaps political you know about the soldiers and you know the Army in the war and whatnot that was going on at the time that Blake was eventually cleared when the case was brought to trial but he was always sort of playing around the edges of being a rebel is a rebel in politics he was a rebel in in religion he was a rebel in poetry he was a rebel in the arts and once again many people will often look back to somebody like Blake as the Prophet he was not recognized in his own time you know that sometimes that's true sometimes people are so far ahead of their times that they're not only ignored in their lifetimes but maybe even attacked in their lifetimes but then you know a few generations later people are turning around and saying you know think I really had it right all along it's just that we didn't realize it back then but times have changed now and we've come around to that point of view okay let's next look at the Holy Thursday poems okay holy thursday we have a note here by the way that says in the anglican church or the Church of England the Thursday celebrating the Ascension of Jesus 39 days after Easter that's the Holy Thursday it was the custom on this day to march the poor of frequently orphan children from the charity schools of London to a service at st. Paul's Cathedral okay so this is for a religious service to Rosanna Holy Thursday their innocent face is clean the children walking two and two in red and blue and green grey-headed Beatles walked before with wands as white as snow till into the high dome of Paul's they like the Thames waters flow or what a multitude they seemed these flowers of London town seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own the hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands now like a mighty wind they raised to heaven the voice of song or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among beneath them sit the agent men wise guardians of the poor then cherish pity less do you drive an angel from your door well well well see up until the end this seems to be a kind of celebration doesn't it you're the children you know going off to church on this holy day in their church and they are singing beautiful hymns and so forth and then we get to the end of the poem the last two lines and beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor clearly that's ironic right I mean Blake doesn't really think that these are wise guardians of the poor these are people who are paid institutionally to control these poor children okay then cherish pity West you drive an angel from your door well okay well let's look over at the other Holy Thursday poem is this a holy thing to see in a rich and fruitful land England was was the wealthiest nation on earth talking about at the time that Blake was writing I mean what nation would have competed with with with with England is this a holy thing to see in a rich and fruitful land babes reduced to misery babes removed I mean how can you reduce children to misery when you live in a land of plenty there's plenty to go around for all of us so why don't we share it with these poor babes fed with cold and you zarus hand what is usury anybody know what user is usually is the lending of money at exorbitant rates of interest at exorbitant rates of interest and what it does is it locks poor people in I mean you can't pay your rent well maybe you go and borrow you know whatever you need just to pay your rent or you pawn something that you love just to pay your rent and then you find out that the rate of interest is so outrageous that what are you going to do how could you possibly pay it back in order to get pay it back you may have to borrow some more you know and you just get further and further and deeper and deeper into debt is that trembling cry a song can it be a song of joy and so many children poor sir it is a land of poverty and their son does never shine in their fields abrecan bear and their ways are filled with thorns it is eternal winter there for where the Sun does shine and where the rain does fall babe can never hunger there nor poverty the mind appalled well again I mean this is really laying it on the line with the criticism of a people who may be in too many cases unfeeling no obviously not everybody was unfeeling towards the poor or towards children okay but there were government policies such that the government would not interfere with the way in which children were treated or mistreated in the mines in chimney sweep operations in workshops and so on and so on and so on and as a matter of fact there were lots of people who fought and fought desperately against child labor laws that were enacted simply to try to protect children saying that that was an interference with a free economy and therefore would undermine the system of a free economy I mean that was an argument that was advanced very very seriously in the 19th century and of course continued into the 20th century in some quarters anyway it sounds like that Blake is just disgusted by society because of a you know it's a rich society but yet we have all of these poor children running around right right exactly exactly and see what he's doing is he's trying to evoke in us some kind of feeling now in the 18th century this is not true of every single person in the 18th century but in the 18th century many of the leading intellectuals of the time we're fostering reason objectivity science rationality as the best guides to human behavior and human moral behavior in particular here Blake is rebelling against that what is he trying to do he's not trying to appeal to our reason so much as he's trying to touch us emotionally to touch us subjectively to touch our feelings because these may provide us with the best moral guides ultimately let's look briefly at the little black boy and then we may not be able to discuss it fully until after our break my mother bore me in the southern wild and I am black but oh my soul is white why does an angel as the English child but I am black as if bereaved of light my mother taught me underneath a tree and sitting down before the heat of day she took me on her lap and kissed me and pointing to the east began to say look on the Rising Sun there God does live and gives us light and gives his heat away and flowers and trees and beasts and men receive comfort and morning joy in the noonday and we are put on earth a little space that we may learn to hear to bear the beams of love in these black bodies and this sunburnt face is but a called and like a shady grove for when our souls have learned the heat deburr the cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice saying come out from the grove my love and care and round my golden tent like lambs rejoice thus did my mother say and kissed me and thus I say to little English boy when I from black and he from white cloud free and round the tent of God like lambs we joy I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear to lean in joy upon our father's knee and then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair and be like him and he will then love me and of course the key word there is then love me now over the break think about this think about this poem in which the primary speaker is again a child we have the mother's voice but it's presented to us through the child

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_20_Responses_to_Suffering_and_Evil_Lamentations_and_Wisdom_Literature.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: When Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon burned the temple and destroyed Jerusalem, the initial reaction was one of overwhelming grief and sadness, and that's represented primarily in the Book of Lamentations. It's a very short book of dirges that laments the loss of Jerusalem as the death of a beloved person. And it's traditionally attributed to Jeremiah. The Bible itself doesn't make this claim; it's an old tradition. It may have arisen, however, because of all of the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who reveals the most to us about his personal suffering and grief, and because he was present as an eyewitness at the destruction. There's no real logical development of ideas in Lamentations primarily because it's structured by an artificial device. There are five chapters and four of the chapters are acrostic poems. This means that each verse, or sometimes a series of verses, begins with a letter of the alphabet in sequence. So in chapter 3 you have three verses per letter of the alphabet. But this kind of acrostic poetic formation gives the poem a kind of formal unity, at the same time that it has no logical unity or logical flow. And it's been pointed out that that form is particularly appropriate for an expression of grief that is too profound or too all encompassing to be logical. The Lamentations over Jerusalem resemble very much David's lamentations over Saul. The mourner spends time contrasting the former splendor of the beloved to his or her present state. And we have lots of Ancient Near Eastern prototypes for this kind of lamentation--lamentations over destroyed cities which are understood as the result of the deity's decision to abandon the city. In Lamentations we're given a very detailed picture of the great suffering that accompanied the final collapse. Lamentations 1:1: "Alas! Lonely sits the city Once great with people! She that was great among nations Is become like a widow; The princess among states Is become a thrall." Chapter 4: Alas! The gold is dulled, Debased the finest gold, The sacred gems are spilled a At every street corner. The precious children of Zion; Once valued as gold-- Alas, they are accounted as earthen pots, Work of a potter's hands! Even jackals offer the breast And suckle their young; But my poor people has turned cruel, Like ostriches of the desert. The tongue of the suckling cleaves To its palate for thirst. Little children beg for bread; None give them a morsel. Those who feasted on dainties Lie famished in the streets; Those who were reared in purple Have embraced refuse heaps. The guilt of my poor people Exceeded the iniquity of Sodom, Which was overthrown in a moment, Without a hand striking it. Her elect were purer then snow, Whiter then milk; Their limbs were ruddier then coral, Their bodies were like sapphire. Again, the description of the physical beauty of the beloved, Now their faces are blacker then soot, They are not recognized in the streets; Their skin has shriveled on their bones, It has become dry as wood. Better off were the slain of the sword Than those slain by famine, Who pined away, [as though] wounded, For lack of the fruits of the field. With their own hands, tenderhearted women Have cooked their children; Such became their fare, In the disaster of my poor people. The poet here, though, does adopt the standard Deuteronomistic interpretation of events which infers sin from suffering, and therefore, harps on the sin and the uncleanness of Jerusalem that brought on this calamity. Their guilt exceeded the iniquity of Sodom in the passage we just read, and this is a strategy that of course justifies God. The poet singles out the corrupt priests, the corrupt prophets for blame. He attacks the popular ideology of the inviolability of Zion. Israel's many sins are what caused Yahweh to pour out his wrath and destroy Jerusalem utterly. The descriptions of Yahweh's wrath, anger, his consuming rage, these are some of the most powerful and most violent poetry in the Hebrew Bible. They tend to divert attention, in fact, from the people's guilt and focus attention on their suffering. Children crying for bread, children starving to death, women raped, men abused. In chapter 3, the poet switches into the first person so Jerusalem is speaking like one who is pursued and abused, beaten by an angry and violent master. Chapter 3: I am the man who has known affliction Under the rod of His wrath; Me he drove on and on In unrelieved darkness; On none but me He brings down His hand Again and again, without cease. He has worn away my flesh and skin; He has shattered my bones. All around me He has built Misery and hardship; He has made me dwell in darkness, Like those long dead. He has walled me in and I cannot break out; He has weighed me down with chains. And when I cry and plead, He shuts out my prayer; He has walled in my ways with hewn blocks, He has made my paths a maze. He is a lurking bear to me, A lion in hiding; He has forced me off my way and mangled me, He has left me numb. A remarkably violent passage. And in another remarkable passage, the poet describes God as refusing to hear the prayers of Israel. He no longer can forgive. He simply has to punish. This is in chapter 3 as well, verses 42 to 45. We have transgressed and rebelled, And You have not forgiven. You have clothed Yourself in anger and pursued us, You have slain without pity. You have screened Yourself off with a cloud That no prayer may pass through. You have made us filth and refuse In the midst of the peoples. So God is simply refusing to even hear Israel's prayer. This is an emphasis not so much on Israel's guilt, but on Israel's tremendous suffering, God's hardheartedness. The poem ends with a plea of reconciliation in 5:19-22. But You, O Lord, are enthroned forever, Your throne endures through the ages. Why have you forgotten us utterly, Forsaken us for all time? Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself, And let us come back; Renew our days as of old! For truly, You have rejected us, Bitterly raged against us. Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself, And let us come back; Renew our days as of old! Lamentations represents one response to the fall of Jerusalem. It's an overwhelming sense of loss, grief, misery, a sense of shock too at God's treatment. And also a longing to return, a longing for renewal and reconciliation. The 200 years following the destruction would prove to be a time, a very critical time, of transition. And Israelite literature in this period reflects the Israelites' struggle with the philosophical and religious challenge of the destruction. How could the disastrous events be explained? We've already seen the response of the Deuteronomistic School. Israel was collectively punished for idolatry. We've seen that history simply reflects justice on a national and international level in this view. We've also seen the response of Ezekiel. He promoted the idea of a continued relationship with God in exile and was awaiting a fantastic restoration, a redesign of human nature. We've seen the response of Second Isaiah which emphasizes the universal significance of Israel's suffering, a universal mission for Israel. For both Ezekiel and the author of Second Isaiah, Israel's suffering is serving a purpose in the divine plan. It's necessary. Israel needs purification and redemption and that will prepare her for a new role in world history. But there are other responses as well and they're found in the material that's collected in the third section of the Hebrew Bible. That's the section referred to really as Ketuvim, which in Hebrew simply means writings, written things. It's sort of a miscellany, a catch-all phrase. And the final portion of the course is going to be devoted now to that third section. So Torah, Neviim or prophets, and Ketuvim, or writings. Next time I'm going to discuss the problem of dating many of the works that are in this third section, the Writings. For now it'll suffice to say that while some of the books in this third section of the Bible may have pre-dated the exile, they became canonical, they became authoritative for the community in the post-exilic period and therefore served as a prism through which to view and come to grips with Israel's history. So we're going to turn today, first of all, to an examination of the three books that represent the Wisdom tradition, what's referred to as the Wisdom literature, or Wisdom tradition in ancient Israel. The Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible are Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Israelite Wisdom literature belongs to a much wider and broad Wisdom legacy or tradition in the Ancient Near East. There's very little in biblical Wisdom literature apart from its monotheism that lacks a parallel in the Wisdom literature of Egypt or Mesopotamia. So Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature is literature that's characterized by a praise of human intelligence, applied to understanding the ways of the world, the ways of society. It tends to contain traditional advice--advice that's been found to be tried and true. It tends to be very individually oriented, but at the same time, quite universal and humanistic in its orientation as well. In keeping with this style, Israelite Wisdom literature doesn't really speak to the particular historical condition of Israel. It speaks to the general human condition. It makes no claim to having been divinely revealed--no special claim to having been conveyed by a prophet or by Moses. It's simply observational wisdom; advice and counsel that can be weighed or confirmed or disputed by experience. Again, if you were simply to open up the Book of Proverbs and read something in there, unless it had the word Yahweh, you wouldn't know that it didn't come from some Egyptian Wisdom literature, or Mesopotamian Wisdom literature. There are various types of Wisdom material. Scholars have classified the Wisdom material into three main categories. The Hebrew word for wisdom--which is the word hokhmah--literally means skill and probably refers to the skill of living well or living properly. The three types of Wisdom literature that we find are what we could call (1) clan or family wisdom. These materials tend to be common sense aphorisms and observations, the kinds of things that are common to all cultures. They're scattered around the Hebrew Bible, but most of them are contained in the Book of Proverbs. So, for example, Proverbs 15:17, "Better a meal of vegetables where there is love / Then a fattened ox where there is hate." It's the kind of thing you can imagine your grandmother saying. Chapter 20:14: "'Bad, bad,' says the buyer, / But having moved off, he congratulates himself." Or 26:14: "The door turns on its hinge, / And the lazy man on his bed," and neither of them really gets anywhere. 25:25: "Like cold water to a parched throat / Is good news from a distant land." Many of the Proverbs we classify as clan or family wisdom are parental. They tend to sound as if they're being said to a son, not so much a daughter, but to a son. The second category of Wisdom literature is what we call court wisdom, and we have a lot of this from Egypt. A great deal of court wisdom came from Egypt to serve the needs of the court. It tends to be bureaucratic advice, administrative advice, career advice, instruction on manners or tact, how to be diplomatic, how to live well and prosper--practical wisdom. So, for example, Proverbs 24:27, "Put your external affairs in order, / Get ready what you have in the field, / Then build yourself a home." Or 21:23: "He who guards his mouth and tongue / Guards himself from trouble," tact; 11:14, "For want of strategy an army falls, / But victory comes with much planning," or 12:1, "He who loves discipline loves knowledge; / He who spurns reproof is a brutish man." Then the third category of Wisdom literature is what we might call more free-wheeling existential reflection or probing--a reflective probing into the critical problems of human existence, and I'm going to talk about that in much more detail as we get to the Book of Job. Now as I mentioned before, all of these types of Wisdom literature tend to be very universalistic, humanistic, ahistorical. There's nothing particularly Israelite about them. There's no mention of the exodus, there's no mention of Sinai or Moses or covenant or any of the early narratives of the nation. And they are paralleled in great abundance in the writings of other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Sometimes there's an attempt to connect wisdom specifically with belief in Yahweh. But biblical Wisdom like Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom generally grounds morality on non-specific notions of prudence and God-fearing in a sort of non-specific way, rather then on the historical covenant with Yahweh. So let's look at the Book of Proverbs in a little more detail. Proverbs is the classic book of Wisdom. It contains some material of great antiquity. Even though the book probably reached its final form only in post-exilic times, surely a great deal of it is much older. There are many affinities between Proverbs and Egyptian and Canaanite Wisdom literature, so that suggests that Israel assimilated Wisdom material from the wider environment. The chief aim of Proverbs seems to be the inculcation of wisdom as the means to social tranquility and a happy life. Young people should learn to master their impulses. They should lead productive and sensible lives. Many of the maxims are intended to educate sons, there's no mention of daughters here, and a good deal of the first nine chapters is formally pedagogical, clearly pedagogical, and can be compared quite productively with some Egyptian writings that we have from the third millennium--the Egyptian teaching of Amenemopet, or the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom; tremendous parallels among these works. But these first nine chapters warn against the seductions of foreign women and they urge young men to pursue wisdom. And wisdom here is figured--almost hypostasized, an attribute or a characteristic that's almost put into a concrete human form, wisdom is figured as a virtuous woman who promises insight and counsel. This woman was created before all other created things. And wisdom again, figured as a woman, assisted Yahweh in the creation--in the ordering, I should say, the ordering of the universe. Wisdom was with God at that time. Proverbs values hard work and diligence, and warns against excessive sleep and sex, and wine. Proverbs recommends honesty in your business affairs and kindness, and loyalty, impartiality, sobriety, and humility, restraint, and sincerity. Wealth is very nice, but it's not to be desired at the cost of calmness and peace. The Wisdom sayings that appear in Proverbs are usually these short two-line sentences in which the second line runs parallel in some way to the first. Some scholars have classified the different kinds of parallelism you find in the book of Proverbs and I've written the three main forms up here. An example of synonymous parallelism, where the second line is essentially synonymous with the first--that's found in Proverbs 22:1. It's a classic feature of biblical poetry in general. We'll see it in the Psalms. For an example, "A good name is to be chosen rather then great riches / And favor," parallel to a good name, "is better then silver and gold," parallel to great riches . So the two lines are somewhat synonymous. In antithetic parallelism the two lines form a balanced pair of opposites, so in Proverbs 10:1, "A wise son makes a glad father / But a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother". When the second line seems to complete the thought of the first, it's called ascending parallelism. We find that in Proverbs 11:22, "Like a gold ring in the snout of a pig / Is a beautiful woman bereft of sense." Another feature of Proverbs is that wisdom itself is established as a religious concept. It seems to have some religious value. Proverbs tries to link wisdom with reverence for God and obedience to God. In Proverbs 1:7, "The fear of the Lord" or reverence, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fools despise wisdom and discipline," or chapter 3:5-8, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, / And do not rely on your own understanding." Wisdom guards one from evil, the wise person accepts the sufferings with which God is disciplining him. So in Proverbs 3:12, "For Yahweh reproves," or disciplines, "him whom he loves / As a father, the son in whom he delights". Keep that in mind as we turn to Job, because I think the most important thing about the Book of Proverbs is its almost smug certainty that the righteous and the wicked of the world receive what they deserve in this life. There's a complacency here, an optimism. God's just providence and a moral world order, are presuppositions that it just doesn't seem to question. The wise person's deeds are good and will bring him happiness and success. The foolish person's deeds are evil and they are going to lead to failure and ruin. The key idea is that a truly wise person knows that the world is essentially coherent. It's ethically ordered. There are clear laws of reward and punishment that exist in the world. Proverbs 26:27; "He who digs a pit will fall into it / and a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling". Or 13:6: "Righteousness protects him whose way is blameless; Wickedness subverts the sinner." If the righteous suffer then they are being chastised or chastened by God just as a son is disciplined by his father. He shouldn't reject this reproof, he should welcome it. This insistence, on the basic justice of the world, and the power of wisdom or fear of the Lord to guarantee success and security was one strand of ancient Israelite thought. It reaches crystallization in the Book of Proverbs. It was available as a response to or an explanation of the catastrophes that had befallen the nation. We've seen it at work in the Deuteronomistic school, unwilling to relinquish the idea of a moral God in control of history and preferring to infer the nation's sinfulness from its suffering and calamity. Better to blame the sufferer Israel and so keep God and the system of divine retributive justice intact. But it's precisely this formulaic and conventional piety that is challenged by two other remarkable Wisdom books in the Bible: the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In Job we find the idea that suffering is not always punitive. It is not always a sign of wickedness. It's not always explicable. And this is the first of several subversions of fundamental biblical principles that we encounter in the Book of Job. The Book of Job--we really don't know its date. It's probably no earlier then the sixth century BCE, but scholars disagree and there are portions of it that seem to reflect a very old and very ancient tradition. It's one of the hardest books of the Bible for moderns to read, and I think that's because its conclusions--to the degree that we can agree on what the conclusions might be--its conclusions seem to fly in the face of some basic religious convictions. You have to allow yourself, I think, to be surprised, to open your mind, to allow yourself to take Job's charges against God seriously. After all, the narrator makes it clear that God does take them seriously. God nowhere denies Job's charges and, in fact, at one point the narrator has God say that Job has spoken truly. So no matter how uncomfortable Job may make you feel, you need to understand his claims and not condemn him. Job is going to attack the optimistic conventional piety that is typified in the Book of Proverbs. He's going to challenge the assumption that there is a moral world order. The issues that are raised in this book are twofold: first, why God permits blatant injustice and undeserved suffering and evil to exist in the world, and second of all, whether people will be virtuous when they are afflicted and suffering. In other words, are people righteous only because God will reward them for it, or are they righteous because of the intrinsic and inherent value of righteousness? Those are the two issues. Now literarily, the book contains two primary elements. First, we have a prose story and that provides a framework for the book, that's chapters 1 and 2 and then it returns in chapter 42 at the end of the book. Into this prose framework a large poetic section of dialogue and speeches has been inserted. So there are two main literary components. Now the prose framework concerning a scrupulously righteous man named Job, afflicted by horrendous calamity, was probably a standard Ancient Near Eastern folktale of great antiquity. The story isn't set in Israel; it's not about an Israelite. It's set in Edom. Job is an eastern magnate who dwells in the country of Uz, not an Israelite. But the Israelite author has used this older Ancient Near Eastern legend about a man named Job for his own purposes. The name Job, which in Hebrew is pronounced, iyyov, is bivalent in meaning. It can mean "enemy" in Hebrew, by changing vowels around; but it's the root for enemy, oyev, or, if we take it in Aramaic, it can mean "one who repents," "a repentant one." And as we're going to see, the name will be appropriate in both senses as the story progresses. There's a handout on the side of the room. I'm not sure everyone took one when they came in. I'm wondering if it could be distributed please. I'm sorry. It's going to help you chart what goes on in Job. But this handout contains an outline of the book's structure on one side--so it's mapped out on one side. On the other side, it has some important verses and terms. But we'll see from the outline of the structure, chapters 1 and 2 have this prose prologue about the pious and prosperous Job and his devastation, which is the result of a challenge which is put to God. At the end of that prologue, at the end of chapter 2, he has three friends who come to sit with him in silence for seven days. The silence doesn't last very long because we move then into the large poetic section and that extends from chapter 3 all the way to chapter 42, verse 7. So you'll see that structure on the handout. There are many ways to map the structure of the Book of Job. Your handout charts, I think, one of the more common and clearer representations. Looking now specifically at the poetic section: First, you have a dialogue between Job and his three friends that goes from chapter 3 to chapter 31, verse40. And it can be divided into three cycles of speeches. Job opens each cycle--so the first speech in each cycle is by Job--and then his friends speak in a regular pattern. First, Eliphaz with Job responding and then Bildad with Job responding and then Zophar; and you have this pattern of six speeches. It occurs three times but in fact the third time the reply by Zophar is omitted and that deviation ensures that Job has the first and the last word. He has a summation speech in chapters 29 to 31. At first, the friends seek to comfort Job and to explain his suffering but they become increasingly harsh, ultimately bearing a callous contempt for Job's condition. Now this section closes with the long speech by Job, as I said: 29 to 31. He's lamenting the loss of his past, pleasant life. He protests his innocence, he calls on God to answer. But then Elihu, this previously unannounced fourth friend appears. He gives four speeches from chapters32 to 37. He admonishes Job; he defends God's justice, and then this is followed by a poetic discourse between God who poses a series of rhetorical questions and Job who appears contrite. And that section also falls into four parts rather like Elihu's speech. You have two long speeches by Yahweh, two short ones by Job. Finally, there's a concluding prose epilogue that vindicates Job. God criticizes Job's friends, and then in a rather unexpected happy ending, we have Job restored to his fortunes and finally experiencing a peaceful death. So let's look at the contents in greater deal now that we've reviewed the structure. The story opens by introducing us to Job. He's said to be a blameless and upright man. He fears God and he shuns evil, that is chapter 1, verse 1. So the moral virtue and innocence of Job is established in the opening line as a narrative fact, a non-negotiable narrative fact. And yet this Job is to become the victim of a challenge issued by "the satan" in the heavenly counsel. I say "the satan" deliberately. The satan. The satan is certainly not the devil. There's no such notion in the Hebrew Bible. The phrase, "the satan," occurs four times in the Hebrew Bible, here and in Numbers 22 and in Zechariah3. "The satan" is simply a member of the divine counsel--one of God's minions whose function it is to investigate affairs on earth and to act as a kind of prosecuting attorney. He has to bring evildoers to justice. And it's only in later Jewish, and especially Christian thought, that the term loses the definite article--from "the satan" which means "the prosecutor" essentially, the prosecuting attorney--and becomes a proper name, Satan, for an enemy or opponent of God. This later concept of Satan develops as a means of explaining evil without attributing it to God, but that isn't the function of the satan here. He works for God and when Yahweh boasts of his pious servant Job, the prosecuting angel wonders, as his portfolio requires him to do, whether Job's piety is sincere. Perhaps he's motivated by self-interest. Since he's been blessed with such good fortune and prosperity he's naturally enough pious and righteous, but would his piety survive affliction and suffering? Deprived of his wealth wouldn't he curse God to his face? You have to notice as you're reading the euphemistic use of "bless God" instead of "curse God." The ancient writers did not want to write down "curse God" so they wrote "bless God," but we need to understand that's a euphemistic way of avoiding writing "curse God." So wouldn't he curse God to his face? God is quite confident that Job's piety is not superficial, it's not driven by the desire for reward, and so he permits the satan to put Job to the test. Job's children are killed, his cattle are destroyed, his property is destroyed, but Job's response in chapter 1:21 is, "Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall return; God gives and God takes away, may the name of the Lord be blessed. The narrator then adds in verse 22, "In all this--," and if you flip over I've got some of these key verses on the back of your handout to help you keep track, "In all this Job did not sin or impute anything unsavory to God." And God again praises Job to the satan, saying, "And still he holds on to his integrity, so you incited me to destroy him for nothing." That's chapter 2:3. So the satan proposes increasing the suffering, and God agrees on the condition that Job's life be preserved. So the satan strikes Job's body with these terrible painful sores, trying to crush his spirit and Job's wife rages, "Do you still hold on to your integrity? Bless God," curse God "and die," chapter 2:9. But still Job will not sin, he will not curse God, he insists on remaining virtuous and he responds, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?" So at first glance it would appear that Job accepts his bitter fate. But note: after the first round of suffering, the narrator observed that "in all this Job did not sin with his lips or impute anything unsavory to God," but now he merely observes, "in all this Job did not sin with his lips." Not with his lips perhaps, but in his heart did he impute unsavory things to God? If we were to move directly to the conclusion of the folktale in chapter 42, if we jump from this point just to the conclusion, in 42:7 is where the conclusion begins, we would find that Job is rewarded fully for his patience and steadfast loyalty and his household and his belongings are restored to him twice over. The folktale standing alone could be read as the story of an innocent man tested, who accepts his fate. He retains his faith, and he's rewarded. Standing alone, the tale appears to reflect the values and the conventional piety of the Wisdom literature and of the Deuteronomistic school. But the folktale doesn't stand alone. The anonymous author of Job uses this earlier legend concerning the righteous man Job as a frame for his own purposes, and the hint at the end of the prologue that Job perhaps is beginning to impute unsavory things to God points forward to this extensive poetic dialogue that's following. Here are Job's unsavory accusations against God. Here we have a most impatient and furious Job who will charge God with gross mismanagement of the world and eventually deny the existence of a moral order altogether. So reading the Book of Job is a fascinating exercise because the two types of material in the book, the prose frame and the poetic dialogue in the middle, they appear to be in tension. And yet interwoven, as they are now, they work together and the one shapes our reading of the other. Our reception of the accusations of Job's friends in the poetic dialogue--our reception of those words is determined by the prose framework's assertion that Job is innocent. That's a non-negotiable narrative fact and because of the fact of Job's righteousness, we know Job's friends are lying when they say Job must be suffering for some hidden sin. And we know that Job's self-defense, that he hasn't deserved the suffering is correct. We're going to rehearse some of the arguments that are advanced in the central core, the poetic core of the book, and here I think a helpful guide through the arguments--there are lots of commentaries on the Book of Job, but one commentary that I think is helpful in just sort of working through some of the arguments of the interlocutors is the analysis of Edwin Good. Although Job doesn't exactly curse God in his first speech, he does curse the day of his birth. And in a passage that alludes repeatedly to creation, Job essentially curses all that God has accomplished as creator of the cosmos. He wishes he were dead, and at this point he doesn't even ask why this has happened to him, he only asks why he should be alive when he prefers death. Eliphaz's reply is long and elaborate. He seems to offer comfort. He seems to offer comfort, until he injects a new element in the discussion and that's the element of justice. Job hasn't mentioned the issue of justice up to this point, but Eliphaz says, "Think now, what innocent man ever perished? / Where have the upright been destroyed? / As I have seen, those who plow evil / And sow mischief reap them," chapter 4:7-8. So Eliphaz is handing Job the standard line of biblical Wisdom literature as exemplified by something like the book of Proverbs, belief in a system of divine retributive justice--that retribution is just. By definition there can be no undeserved suffering. The implication is that Job has deserved this suffering--a thought that apparently hadn't occurred to Job--and the question of undeserved suffering is now going to dominate the rest of the discussion. Job's second speech is very disorderly. It's full of wildly contradictory images that may reflect the shock and the pain and the rage that now overwhelm him. He seems to be haunted by Eliphaz's connection of his suffering with some sin and so he turns to address God directly. He admits he's not perfect but surely, he objects, he doesn't deserve such affliction. In chapter 8 we have Bildad's speech and it's tactless and unkind. He says, "Will God pervert the right? / Will the Almighty pervert justice? / If your sons sinned against Him, / He dispatched them for their transgressions," 8:3-4. In other words, God is perfectly just and ultimately all get what they deserve. Indeed, your children, Job, must have died because they sinned, so just search for God and ask for mercy. The friends' speeches lead Job to the conclusion that God must be indifferent to moral status. God doesn't follow the rules that he demands of human beings. This is chapter 9:22, "He finishes off both perfect and wicked." When Job complains, "He wounds me much for nothing," chapter 9:17, he's echoing God's own words to the satan in the prologue. Remember when God says to the satan you have "incited me to destroy him for nothing," and we suspect by this verbal coincidence that Job is right. Legal terms dominate, as Job calls for the charges against him to be published, and then he hurls countercharges in a suit against God. Charges of unworthy conduct, of spurning his creatures while smiling on the wicked, on scrutinizing Job even though he knows Job to be innocent, and this too is a subversion of a common prophetic literary genre that we've seen: the riv or the covenant lawsuit in which God through his prophets charges Israel with flagrant violation of the terms of the covenant and warns of inevitable punishment. Here, in Job, it's a man who arraigns God and yet, Job asserts, since God is God and not a human adversary, there's really no fair way for the lawsuit between them to be tried or arbitrated. "Man cannot win a suit against God," chapter 9:2. Job is powerless in the face of this injustice. These ideas all find expression in Job 10:1-7: I am disgusted with life; I will give rein to my complaint, Speak in the bitterness of my soul. I say to God, "Do not condemn men; Let me know what You charge me with. Does it benefit You to defraud, To despise the toil of Your hands, While smiling on the counsel of the wicked? Do You have the eyes of flesh? Is Your vision that of mere men? Are Your days the days of a mortal? Are Your years the years of a man, That You seek my inequity And search out my sin? You know that I am not guilty, And that there is none to deliver from Your hand… Job repeats his wish to die, this time less because of his suffering and more because his worldview has collapsed. He sees that divine power is utterly divorced from justice and that's a second fundamental biblical assumption subverted. But Job's words only seem to egg his interlocutors on. Eliphaz had implied that Job was a sinner. Bildad had baldly asserted that his sons had died for their sins and now Zophar's going to claim that actually Job is suffering less then he deserves. And Job isn't persuaded. He isn't persuaded that he has sinned or more precisely, that he has sinned in proportion to the punishment he is now suffering. God is simply unjust. The Job of this poetic dialogue portion of the book is hardly patient or pious. He is angry, he is violent, he argues, he complains and vehemently insists upon his innocence. In the fourth speech by Job--now this is the speech that opens the second cycle of speeches--Job appeals to creation. God's controlling power is arbitrary and unprincipled. He interferes with the natural order, he interferes with the human order, and this is itself a subversion of the Genesis portrait of creation as a process whose goal and crown is humankind. Again, Job demands a trial. He demands a trial in the widely quoted and mistranslated verse--this is Job 13:15: "He may well slay me. I may have no hope-- but I must argue my case before Him." In other words, Job knows that he can't win but he still wants his day in court. He wants to make his accusation of God's mismanagement. He wants to voice his protest even though he knows it will gain him nothing. In a pun on his name, Iyyov, Job asks God, "Why do You hide Your face, / And treat me like an enemy?" ,treat me like an oyev, 13:28. In his second speech Job fully expects to be murdered, not executed, but murdered by God and hopes only that the evidence of his murder will not be concealed he says in 16:18, "Earth, do not cover my blood" . Job's third speech reiterates this desire, the desire that the wrong against him not be forgotten. "Would that my words were written, would that they were engraved in an inscription, with an iron stylus and lead, forever in rock they were incised," 19:23-24. Job's three speeches in the second cycle become increasingly emotional and for their part the speeches of his friends in this cycle become increasingly cruel. Their insistence that suffering is always a sure sign of sin seems to justify hostility towards and contempt for Job. He's now depicted as universally mocked and humiliated and despised and abused. One cannot help but see in this characterization of Job's so-called friends, an incisive commentary on the callous human propensity to blame the victim, and to do so lest our tidy and comfortable picture of a moral universe in which the righteous do not suffer, should come apart at the seams as Job's has. Job opens the third cycle of speeches urging his friends to look, to really see his situation, because if they did they would be appalled. Job's situation looked at honestly requires the admission that God has done this for no reason and that the friends' understanding of the world is a lie. Job asserts baldly: there is no distributive justice, there's no coherent or orderly system of morality in this life or any other. There is no principle of afterlife, after all, in the Hebrew Bible. Chapter 21:7-26: Why do the wicked live on, Prosper and grow wealthy? Their children are with them always, And they see their children's children. Their homes are secure, without fear; They do not feel the rod of God. …their children skip about. They sing to the music of timbrel and lute, And revel to the tune of the pipe; They spend their days in happiness, And go down to Sheol in peace. …How seldom does the lamp of the wicked fail, Does the calamity they deserve befall them? …[You say,] "God is reserving his punishment for his sons"; Let it be paid back to Him that He may feel it, ...One man dies in robust health, All tranquil and untroubled; His pails are full of milk; The marrow of his bones is juicy. Another dies embittered, Never having tasted happiness. They both lie in the dust And are covered with worms. But the friends can't look honestly at Job; they can't allow that, indeed, a righteous man suffers horribly. By the end of the third cycle Job is ready and eager for his trial, but he can't find God. Job's final speech in the third cycle focuses on this theme of divine absence. God is irresponsibly absent from the world and the result is human wickedness. So from the idea that God is morally neutral or indifferent, Job has moved to the implicit charge that God is responsible for wickedness. He rewards wickedness; he causes wickedness by his absence, his failure to govern properly. He is both corrupt and a corrupter of others. "If it is not so, he says, who will prove me a liar and bring my words to nought." Yet, even in the depths of his anguish, and even though he is now convinced that God does not enforce a moral law in the universe, Job clings to one value: righteousness is a virtue in and of itself, and even if it brings no reward Job will not give up his righteousness. Face to face with the shocking insight that good and evil are met with indifference by God, that righteousness brings no reward and wickedness no punishment, Job although bitter, refuses to succumb to a moral nihilism. Chapter 27:2-6: By God who has deprived me of justice! By Shaddai who has embittered my life! As long as there is life in me, And God's breath is in my nostrils, My lips will speak no wrong, Nor my tongue utter deceit. Far be it for me to say that you are right; Until I die I will maintain my integrity. I persist in my righteousness and will not yield; I shall be free of reproach as long as I live. These last lines recall the words of God and the satan in the prelude. The satan had said that a man will not hold on to virtue or to righteousness in the face of suffering. He'll give everything away for his life. So this narrative set-up guides or influences our interpretation of Job's statement here. Although he is losing his life, Job says he will not give anything away but he holds onto, he maintains his integrity just as God had scolded the satan in chapter 2:3 which reads, "Still he holds onto his integrity. You have incited me to destroy him for nothing." So in his darkest, most bitter hour with all hope of reward gone, Job clings to the one thing he has--his own righteousness. In fact, when all hope of just reward is gone then righteousness becomes an intrinsic value. Yehezkel Kaufman writes of this moment, "the poet raises Job to the bleak summit of righteousness bereft of hope, bereft of faith in divine justice". Or in the words of another scholar, Moshe Greenberg, we see here ..the sheer heroism of a naked man, forsaken by his God and his friends and bereft of a clue to understand his suffering, still maintaining faith in the value of his virtue and in the absolute duty of man to be virtuous. The universe has turned its back on him. We may add he believes God has turned his back on him--yet Job persists in the affirmation of his own worth and the transcendent worth of unrewarded good [Greenberg 1987,285]. So in a way then, for all their differences in style and manner, the patient Job of the legend and the raging Job of the poetic dialogue, are basically the same man. Each ultimately remains firm in his moral character, clinging to righteousness because of its intrinsic value and not because it will be rewarded. Indeed, Job knows bitterly that it will not. At the end of his outburst, Job sues God. He issues Him a summons and he demands that God reveal to him the reason for his suffering. Job pronounces a series of curses to clear himself from the accusations against him, specifying the sins he has not committed and ending, as he began, in chapter 3, with a curse on the day of his birth. We expect to hear from God now but instead we hear from an unannounced stranger, Elihu. I'm going to have to give Elihu short shrift. He's the only one of the four interlocutors to refer to Job by name, address Job by name. He repeats many of the trite assertions of Job's friends. He does hint, however, that not all suffering is punitive. He also hints that contemplation of nature's elements can open the mind to a new awareness of God and in these two respects, Elihu's speech moves us towards God's answer from the storm. So in the climatic moment, God answers Job in an extraordinary theophany, or self-manifestation. In chapter 38 God speaks out of the tempest or whirlwind, "Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge," is he referring to Job, to Elihu, the three friends, all of them? God has heard enough, it's his turn to ask questions, the answers to which are clearly implied; these are rhetorical questions. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Speak if you have understanding. Do you know who fixed its dimensions Or who measured it with a line?" You did, God. …Have you ever commanded the day to break, Assigned the dawn its place, …Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, Or walked in the recesses of the deep? No, no human has. And God continues with these rhetorical questions, questions regarding the animals, their various powers and attributes, but one wonders what the purpose of all these questions is. One senses that they are irrelevant. Job has posed some very specific challenges to God. Why am I suffering? Is there a pattern to existence? Is God's refusal to answer these challenges a way of saying there is no answer? Or is it God's way of saying that justice is beyond human understanding? Or is this theophany of God in nature and the focus on creation, an implicit assault on the fundamental tenant of Israelite religion that God is known and made manifest through his interactions with humans, his rewards and punishments in historical time. You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is generally understood to have effected a break from mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from various natural forces, limited by meta-divine powers and forces of the cosmos. The biblical God wasn't another Ancient Near Eastern or Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent power--He was figured this way in many parts of the Bible--known not through the involuntary and recurring cycles of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions in historical time. Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine retributive justice. Only an essentially good God who transcends and is unconstrained by mechanistic natural forces can establish and administer a system of retributive justice, dealing out punishment and reward in response to the actions of humans in time. Is the author of Job suggesting that history and the events that befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of revelation? Is God a god of nature after all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural world and not in the unpredictable and incoherent arena of human history and action? If so, then this is a third fundamental biblical assumption that has been radically subverted. So we'll turn now to God's direct speech to Job in 40:8,40, verse 8, excuse me. "Would you impugn my justice? / Would you condemn Me that you be right?" God, I think, is now getting at the heart of the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you. They attributed sin to you, so that they might be right. But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me, attributing wickedness to Me so that you might be right. Job's friends erred because they assumed that there's a system of retributive justice at work in the world and that assumption led them to infer that all who suffer are sinful, and that's a blatant falsehood. But Job also errs; if he assumes that although there isn't a system of retributive justice, there really ought to be one. It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a sign of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a falsehood. Job needs to move beyond the anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of Scripture and the Genesis 1 account of creation, according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process of creation. God's creation, the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such teleological and rational categories. In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a moral accountant. The idea of God as a moral accountant is responsible for two major errors: the interpretation of suffering as an indicator of sin, or the ascription of injustice to God. In his final speech, Job confesses to a new firsthand knowledge of God that he lacked before, and as a result of this knowledge Job repents, "Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes," 42:6. Here we see the other meaning of Job's name, "one who repents," suddenly leap to the fore. What is he repenting of? Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the accusations against Job. Indeed he states explicitly in a moment that the friends were wrong to say he had sinned. But he has indicated that guilt and innocence, reward and punishment are not what the game is all about, and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the wicked and the righteous actually get what they deserve, he nevertheless had clung to the idea that ideally they should. And it's that mistaken idea--the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness to God--that Job now recants. With this new understanding of God, Job is liberated from what he would now see as a false expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a covenant relationship between God and humankind, enforced by a system of divine justice. At the end of the story Job is fully restored to his fortunes. God asserts he did no evil and the conventional, impeccably Deuteronomistic view of the three friends is clearly denounced by God. He says of them, "They have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has," 42:7. For some, the happy ending seems anticlimactic, a capitulation to the demand for a happy ending of just desserts that runs counter to the whole thrust of the book, and yet in a way I think the ending is superbly fitting. It's the last in a series of reversals that subverts our expectations. Suffering comes inexplicably, so does restoration; blessed be the name of the Lord. God doesn't attempt to justify or explain Job's suffering and yet somehow by the end of the book, our grumbling, embittered, raging Job is satisfied. Perhaps he's realized that an automatic principle of reward and punishment would make it impossible for humans to do the good for purely disinterested motives. It's precisely when righteousness is seen to be absurd and meaningless that the choice to be righteous paradoxically becomes meaningful. God and Job, however we are to interpret their speeches, are reconciled. The suffering and injustice that characterize the world have baffled humankind for millennia. And the Book of Job provides no answer in the sense of an explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice, but what it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their wickedness, and the Charybdis of blaspheming against God by assuming his. Nor is moral nihilism an option, as our hero, yearning for, but ultimately renouncing divine order and justice, clings to his integrity and chooses virtue for nothing.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_1A.txt

well welcome here we are for English 3328 the survey of British literature which begins at the end of the 18th and beginning of the nineteenth century and then comes down to the present time so what we're going to be doing in this course is we're going to begin with one of the major cultural transitions in our history with the emergence of Romanticism and we'll be talking a good deal about that this evening but also a great deal about it for the next couple of meetings and we're going to be reading a number of the most important Romantic poets some of whom you no doubt have read before at least in part and some of whom may be new to you and maybe a real surprise in the sense that you may find out some people whom you would like to continue with and and spend some more time with and then we are going to be moving into the major Victorian writers and talking about the kind of culture that was developing in the middle to later 19th century which of course carries on into the early part of the 20th century and I should pause and make this comment now and I'll probably have to make this again and again but when we're talking about any kind of history and here of course talking about something like cultural history you can't come up with absolute defining lines you know so when we say the literature of the 18th century is characterized by such and such features or Romantic literature is characterized by such and such features and that really is dominant in the early part of the 19th century though in many ways its influences continue for very long time in the 19th and on into the 20th centuries so that people didn't wake up on January 1st to 1800 and all of a sudden find themselves in a new world obviously that's not the way history works and it certainly is not the way cultural history works so when I give you these broad senses of time and of periods and so forth remember now that this is simply a convenient way of talking about certain times in which there were certain elements in dominance but there may also have been lots of older traditions that were still going on at that time and maybe among many many people and having very important influences but there were now new forces that were coming into dominance and if we were to look far enough in the future we might even begin to see some hints of something yet to come so the one we're talking about history we're talking about something which is much more fluid than our usual ways of establishing categories would suggest but once again when we talk about the romantics we're talking about a kind of cultural movement that came into dominance in the in the early part of the 19th century though we can already see certain features of Romanticism beginning to emerge in the 18th century and of course many features of Romanticism are going to continue on down to the present day even though they are no longer dominant in our culture in the way that they were 150 years ago or there abouts so we will as I said also be looking at the major Victorians and we'll be talking a lot about the kinds of things that were happening not only in Victorian England but I'm also going to be talking about how these cultural events had an impact on the United States as well because especially during the earlier periods what was happening in England frequently was also happening in the United States maybe not at the same time but we often find that a movement will start in England and then it will be brought over either by immigrants from England or elsewhere to the American colonies and then to the young American Republic or simply by virtue of a kind of cultural transmission from one place to another from the old world to what then was called the new world and eventually we're going to be working our way into a discussion of modernism which begins to emerge a little bit before World War one just to give you kind of a convenient dating time and then of course comes into dominance after World War one and certainly until late in the twentieth century by which time other factors are beginning to come into play and we enter into something that for want of a better term is often called post-modernism which is the stage that many of us find ourselves in today does that mean that we have totally left behind some of the features of earlier cultural moments that we're going to be talking about in this class certainly not and some of the issues that were burning issues to people in the 19th century are still very important to issues to us today but to some extent the the stage has shifted some of the players have shifted some of the settings have shifted and so we're going to be talking about those kinds of things what continues what gets supplanted how these transitions take place and try to understand the development of our modern world or our contemporary world as it has emerged out of these forces from the last couple of hundred years and along the way we're going to be talking to a certain extent about history history will have to talk about great events great historical events things like the Industrial Revolution which we'll be talking about a little bit later on we'll be talking about things like the French Revolution we'll be talking about some of the great religious movements of the nineteenth century all of which have a very very important impact on the literature so that as we study the literature we're going to be looking at literally works in their historical contexts literary works do not come out of a kind of vacuum they are not simply springing full-grown from the brow of some genius who has absolutely no influences on her or him they grow out of cultural contexts and they are created within certain cultural contexts and for people living within certain cultural contexts who choose to receive them or not to receive them with favour at different times given the kind of context that we're talking about so that means we're going to have to talk a certain amount about political history social history religious history economic history just history history so nonetheless I should stress the fact that this is after all literature class and so our primary emphasis is always going to be on the literature however when we're talking about people like Wordsworth say one of the things that when's worth was very much influenced by was the French Revolution so we have to make at least some kind of reference to what that meant where was Wordsworth in terms of his connections with France what happened to him is an Englishman who found himself not only sympathizing with the French in many ways but then finding his own native country of England at war with France and this caused a terrible crisis in his life and you see that kind of crisis which profoundly influenced his career as a poet in the kind of poetry that he wrote that can only really be understood within a specific kind of historical and social context so that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about here now I'd like to talk a little bit just about the the kinds of things that you all need to know about how we're going to be proceeding so if we can go to the PowerPoint slides now please since this is a distance education class in which I am sitting right now with a group of students who are here with me physically with me and you're going to be seeing them those of you who are taking the course at a distance you're going to be seeing these students from time to time and be hearing from them as they ask questions or make comments but this is essentially a distance education class which is being videotaped for showing to those of you who are taking this course at a distance either by watching the classes on television or by watching them on DVDs either here in the main library at the University of Houston or by purchasing those DVDs and so let me tell everyone both the students who are here with me and those of you taking the course at a distance how to get ahold of me here is my email address and I check my email pretty much every day not quite every day but pretty much every day so that's a convenient way to get a hold of me this is my telephone number not my home number but my office number and you can leave a message for me at any time if you wish if you have some brilliant idea or question that occurs to you at 3 o'clock on Sunday morning you can call me and you can tell me about it share the experience with me if you wish I can't promise to be in my office at 3 o'clock on Sunday morning but I can get the message afterwards and I can call you back and my office is as you can see here in 235 B of the roy cullen building which most people know of simply as the english department because the english department occupies all of that building so here's my mailing address and I give you my mailing address because as you will see a little bit later on I have certain assignments that I'm going to be asking you to turn in and some of those can be turned in by email but some of them will have to be either hand-delivered to me or mailed in so here is the mailing address just my name with Department of English University of Houston you don't need any street numbers or anything like that because the zip code 77204 is unique to the University of Houston and then the 301 3 is for the English department that's the mail stop for the English department ok there is also an assistant instructor with the course and this is someone who has a PhD or who was very close to a PhD in English and it was taught for quite a number of years and has worked with me in these classes before and is very experienced in working with these classes and this person's name and email address may be found in the course description online and for those of you who are physically here with me I will give you all of that in a printed form but for those of you who are taking the course at a distance you'll be able to get that information online or during the orientation sessions at the beginning of the semester for distance education courses and so you may contact the assistant instructor about assignment scheduling problems and so forth what I mean by that are the routine issues that come up you know when do we have to have this in is it possible if something is due on Friday for me to get it in on Monday because I have such and such problem you know those kinds of things can be taken care of by the assistant instructor who actually keeps the folders for each one of the students and so the assistant instructor is the one who actually has the not only the folders but also the up-to-date records on each student and when things are turned in and so forth okay the required texts are the Norton Anthology of English literature volume to make sure you get volume too because there's also a volume 1 volume 1 is the the one that begins in the early Middle Ages and goes down through the end of the 18th century and that's the textbook that I use in the first half of this course remember that British literature survey English 33 27 and 33 twenty-eight there's really two semesters now don't get alarmed you don't have to take both semesters in order to get credit for the course that you're currently enrolled in but if you want to there is the other course with the other half of the story and many students who take 1/2 such as the one that you're taking now very much may want to go back and take the other half so that they get the the full narrative there are students here with me this evening who have taken the first half with me and are now here for the second half so Norton Anthology of English would ensure volume to the addition that is current at the time we are taping is the seventh edition but it really doesn't make any difference if you're using the sixth edition that's perfectly fine if you can get it more cheaply than the seventh edition that's fine you can even go back to the fifth edition and that would be fine too though there might be a work here or there that you would want to Xerox from you know a current edition in the library or some other place one of the other students in the class okay but these different editions of the Norton Anthology have not changed that much from one edition to another so Dickens hard-times Charles Dickens famous novel hard times we're going to be taking up around the middle of the semester and everybody sort of Dickens right well this is one of his most interesting works and this is also a famous and widely published work and if you can find a secondhand copy of it in one of the book stores that sells such editions and you can save yourself a little bit of money I'm always in favor of saving you money you know I had kids of my own in college course I had same kind of issues when I was going to college myself you know having to scramble to get the money to to buy the books so anything you can do to to make things a little bit easier on your pocket pocket book the better and the same is true with Virginia Woolf's novel mrs. Dalloway will be reading this about three-quarters of the way through the semester so once again if you're a little strapped right now for funds go ahead and get the anthology and hold off on getting the Dickens and the Wolfe novels until a little bit later on when we're closer to the time when we're going to be studying them here in class okay and Virginia Wolf's work you know that's very well known and that's you know widely available and should easily be available in secondhand copies and of course it's in high school libraries and public libraries and everywhere it was even a movie version done of it just a few years ago which is actually quite a good movie by the way the broadcast tape schedule does not really apply to students who are here with me right now but be sure to set your VCR if you're taping the class off the air at the times designated and usually what will happen like this particular semester is that classes are broadcast on Thursday morning well that for most people is really Wednesday night you know because it's early Thursday morning when these classes are our broadcast is usually after the channels have completed their regular programming and they would otherwise simply have dead air in the night and so we broadcast educational television classes on the educational channels not only our own channel eight here at the University of Houston but also a couple of other educational channels here in the Greater Houston area and so you know what always has to be careful about that so you know if it's Thursday that's really Wednesday night and very early Thursday morning if you miss taping a class and this is also true for those of you who are here with me if you happen to miss a class god help you you can always go and view that class in the current journals room here in the main library at the University of Houston and there's a set of I think they're now doing them in DVDs they used to do them in VHS format but I think they're now doing them all in in DVDs and so you can go upstairs for us here to the current journals room go in there and you can see there's a whole area where they have distance education classes VHS tapes and DVDs and they have DVD players VHS players with monitors right there in that room and so you can simply take the DVD pop it in and watch the class so and you can even purchase the the tapes I'm not trying to promote that I I don't make any money off of that so you know I don't have any particular interest in your buying them but some people find it convenient to buy the tapes so that's also a possibility if you wish actually to meet with me the professor and or the assistant instructor you can always call or email for an appointment at the office and I can't give you an exact office hour right now because that will vary from semester to semester and this this tape is going to be playing for a number of semesters and no doubt my hour will shift from year to year or from semester to semester but you can always call for an appointment and I'll be happy to meet with you personally if that would be helpful to you or we can talk in the telephone or you can talk with me or the assistant instructor by the way through email as well the term paper is going to be one of the major assignments in the course and so let me say a few words about it now this is all in the course description and syllabus by the way but let me say a few words about it now the term paper is going to be on one of the Victorian issues Victorian issues is a section here in our textbook it's about the middle of our textbook and it's called Victorian issues and it's a series of cultural issues which are were of special importance and special prominence during the middle and later 19th century though once again as I said at the beginning of our class this evening history is much too fluid to set up lines of demarcation between periods and dates and so forth in any absolute way so that the first of these issues is evolution which brings up the whole crisis about religion and science it's not simply evolution that there were huge debates in the 19th century and those debates go on into the 20th century and they now are still going on in the 21st century over science and religion and focusing not entirely on questions of evolution but in part they come up through the discussion of evolution I mean even right now we have groups who go to the State Board of Education and appear before textbooks committees to to make presentations that certain views should or should not be included in our science textbooks that are used in our public schools well those kinds of concerns go all the way back into the 19th century and so we'll see where some of those debates come from how the debates were conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries of course and this is one of the sections in the Victorian issues part of our textbook now what that means is that if you have the textbook with you and you were to turn to that section you would see a whole series of readings usually short accepted pieces from longer works by writers who were key figures in the debate so if you were to choose this topic you would go through not only that section and we're going to be going through these different sections by the way in one of our classes a little bit later on this semester and I'll be explaining these things more fully then but then you might want to apply that to one of the literary figures and we're going to be studying and you can write on somebody who is in our textbook or you can write on somebody who is not in our textbook but is a British author of the general period that we are discussing here in other words someone who is active in his or her literary career from 1800 onward not American somebody in the class always says well gee what about and then they'll come up with an American writer and I say well you know I mean save that writer for your American literature course here this is British literature so it has to be someone who's been broadly understood British so that the person could be British in the sense of obviously English or Irish Scottish and that that's fine too or in some cases someone who was a writer in the old British Empire in the old British Empire there were African writers for example or Asian writers and so forth Caribbean writers who were part of the old British Empire and who are writing really in effect as British subjects at the time that can lead to some very interesting discussions I'm going to come back to that again in a moment but in any event British broadly understood okay the second of these Victorian issues is industrialism which is really the industrial revolution progress or decline now obviously many people think of the Industrial Revolution as bringing us unlimited progress in technology and in the safety and security and comfort of our lives and things are getting better and better and better through industrialization and technological achievement and there are others who will point to what we often call the downside of this and talk to the serious problems that have come about as a result of industrialization yes it's true that we have gained a lot but we've also lost a lot too and what we have lost also has to do with quality of life and there was a huge debate already at the end of the 18th century in the beginning of the 19th century over things like that things like well great you know to have all these factories and so forth that we're producing these wonderful Goods relatively cheaply so that they were accessible to to many more people than they had been previously but what happened as a result pollution urban pollution urban crowding the deterioration of cities especially large segments of cities the differentiation of people into widely differing classes so that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and these were also some of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution how if we dealt with those things what are the issues being debated and still being debated I mean you know some of the things that I'm talking about right now is timely as this morning's newspaper write and then thirdly what the Victorians called by the way very quaint expression the woman question well the woman question of course has to do with something but also is not brand new in the nineteenth century you can find eighteenth century writers already talking about this kind of thing and in some rare cases people even earlier talking about that what about women what about the role of women in society and in the 19th century this became a widely discussed issue in what is sometimes referred to as the first wave of feminism this was a time in which people began to say if women are truly equal then they have to be treated equally and equality means among other things equality of opportunity right equality of opportunity and you can't have equality of opportunity without equality of Education right and this is something that then became part of the whole reform movement in the 19th century not everybody agreed with it but many reformers did agree the proposition that women should be given the same kind of access to quality education that men had otherwise they never would have the same opportunities and if they didn't have the same opportunities they never would have a chance to to be equal to men right and achieve the same kind of potential that men might and it will come as no surprise to you that until the almost the end of the 19th century women could not attend medical school and sit for examinations and receive medical doctorates I mean the scenes see what I'm doing is I'm just taking one area of education I mean you could talk about other areas of Education too but this one area of Education in which obviously by excluding people from equality of access to education you were excluding a whole group of people from equality of opportunity right now obviously the same kind of cause has been taken up by other groups it's become a common place and it's really an idea which comes out of the Enlightenment the so-called enlightenment of the 18th century but obviously comes to fruition in many ways in the 19th and 20th centuries so that in more recent times the same kinds of arguments have been made by African Americans by people of color of you know all different kinds of groupings and ethnicities and minorities and so forth if we truly believe in the Equality of all human beings as brothers and sisters of the earth then it's our moral obligation isn't it not simply our obligation as citizens but it's moral obligation to provide equality of opportunity and the only way we can give true equality of opportunity is to give equality of education now it's not quite as simple as that of course but that's one of the principal ways in which the the whole argument has been framed going back into the 19th century there are those who had very conventional stereotypes of what a woman ought to be the you know the nice woman the sweet woman the woman who never got angry the woman who was in a phrase made famous by the title of a poem that was famous in the 19th century the woman was supposed to be the angel in the house now we're going to see some writers including women writers by the way who supported those kinds of of stereotypes for women and we're going to see others who are very critical of them so that becomes a very interesting thing to look at as a theme in the literature we've already got a bunch of things then when we're reading a novel does the novel have something to do with science and maybe even moral questions about science think about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein you know what is that about I mean among other things it's about science gone mad isn't it you see a scientist who finds the capability of producing human life my god we're on the verge of that ourselves aren't we I mean it was only a fantasy at the beginning of the 19th century in Mary Shelley's novel but we're virtually there aren't we I mean we already have been able to create life right in a certain sense of creating life and it is virtually within our grasp to create human life what does that mean what does that mean you know what kinds of moral and philosophical considerations come into play there what kind of religious questions come up as a matter of fact those are very interesting kinds of issues Mary Shelley is dealing with those already just because we have the knowledge to do something odd we to do that thing aren't we to do that thing okay I mean it's sort of let's let's take an obvious instance of this just because we have the capability to exterminate all life on this planet should we do it right just because we have the capability of incinerating vast populations should we use that ability that kind of knowledge that kind of technology you know those are very interesting questions in the areas of genetics and biology and so forth once again those issues are still very much with us and if anything they're even more with us today than they have been in the past because they are now literally at our doorstep and there are lot of writers who in one way or another have dealt with those kinds of issues industrialism once again dickens hard times what makes the hard times hard it's for working-class people in Victorian England yes the rich got richer and even the people of the upper middle class did very well generally speaking but people of the lower classes had a very very very hard time of it then that's what hard times is really all about it's about more than just that but that's one of the main things that it's about the woman question God knows we've got writers all over the place dealing with questions of gender and gender identity gender relations and so forth because obviously it's not just about women is it I mean as soon as you start reflecting on the question of women in the role of women in society very soon you're going to have to put that in a context of men as well right so if we start asking about the identity roles and so forth for women we very quickly are going to begin to question what are the proper roles identities and so forth for men what constitutes masculinity for example not only what constitutes womanly nose but what constitutes manliness and those are very interesting issues and the Victorians wrestled with those issues by the way in work after working after work after work one of the things that we're going to see as we come into the 20th century just to take an obvious case is Virginia Woolf not only in mrs. Dalloway which we're going to be reading and talking about here which again and again and again is dealing with questions of gender identity and relations between men and women but also her famous work a Room of One's Own which we're going to be reading substantial portions of and talking about here as well okay but in addition to that recently there's been a great deal of interest in talking about masculinity and what does it I mean see what I'm talking about is that that there's a kind of dialectic here that when you talk about the one that's going to lead to talking about the other so you will not be restricted by the way to Victorian literature even though I'm asking you to consider one of the issues raised by the Victorians and much discussed by the Victorians you can do a 20th century writer or now even 21st century writer or work if you choose to do so okay so that for example Virginia Woolf would be fair game let's say I'm not trying to promote any particular writer here nearly Shelley who actually comes before the Victorian debate a little bit would be fair game because she's within our general time period okay but I'm also not trying to promote women writers alone we've got God's plenty of great men writers in this in this course as well now what I will ask you to do is this not to do for your paper a work that we are covering in class okay so if you want to take one of the writers we are covering in class but I'll ask you to do is work with a different novel a different poem or a different play or whatever it is then the one that we're dealing with here in class okay or choose a writer who is not on the syllabus at all and there are plenty of very very interesting and important writers and we just don't have time to include in a semester-long course like this okay and I'm going to provide you with a fourth alternative or an alternate topic something I touched on a little earlier the colonial experience in the old British Empire or the post-colonial experience in the former colonies the colonial experience in the old British Empire the old British Empire if you don't know what the old British Empire consisted of the inside cover of the current edition of the Norton Anthology is a world map with all of the old colonies of the British Empire shaded in so you can see what they are but we have obviously vast areas in Africa in Asia in the subcontinent of India and Pakistan over here obviously in the in the in our hemisphere in the Caribbean area particularly and also Australia New Zealand and so on and so on and so on these are all former cotwell Canada - these are all former colonies of the British in the old British Empire so if you were to take an author who is writing out of that experience that would be fine somebody who just pops into my head is Ian Forrester in his passage to India is talking about the experience of being British and living in India during the colonial period and being a person of conscience I'm not talking about just being an exploiter but didn't care about people but being a person of conscience we're going to see in Conrad's case Conrad is heart of darkness we're going to be taking up a little bit later on well what we have is we have the white man in Africa and what's going on well a lot of horrible exploitation was going on not only of the natural resources and physical richness of of Africa but also of the human beings of Africa and that was enormous Lee important ok and important for people of conscience I'm talking about now white Europeans of conscience too face up to but even then even then you see their problems as the the great african novelist Achebe has pointed out there are certain seemingly inescapable racist structures in Conrad's work and so we're going to be reading Conrad and a GB by the way side by side and reading a chibis critique of Conrad's work that's very interesting stuff or post-colonial what about writers who are either of British ancestry or still living in some of the former colonies or people who are indigenous peoples living obviously in former British colonies and writing out of their experiences well there's some really interesting kinds of things going on Achebe being a very good case by the way of an African and you know a native or indigenous African writing out of the experience of someone who came from and came out of a kind of British cultural milieu as it was translated into Africa or to take somebody from the other side of the equation Doris Lessing a very famous and important woman novelist and short story writer who also spent many years in Africa as a white European but also as a person of conscience and very sensitive to the kinds of problems that were involved in that and so you know some very very interesting and complex issues come up with the kind of literature that I'm talking about now and those issues were not brand new in the twentieth century we're to see when we take up break break is our first author by the way we're going to see when we take up bake in a poem like the little black boy little black boy is a very very interesting poem in which the the little black boy becomes the speaker in the poem and there are all kinds of incredible ironies involved in making the little black boy the speaker in the poem well we'll talk about that but this is really the end of the 18th century beginning in the 19th century when Blake was living and writing so we're not talking about somebody you know 150 years later so ok any questions by the way among any of you here about what I've been talking about we're going to have lots more opportunities to talk about these things as we go along and as I said we're going to have a whole class set aside for the discussion of these issues and the texts that we have in our anthology dealing with these issues okay I'm providing you with a kind of outline I don't mean to make this a mechanical exercise but people always want to know well you know what are you really looking for well I'm suggesting a three-part structure for your paper first in a page and a half to two pages something like that establish the social and historical context for the issue your author is addressing the social and historical context for the issue your author is addressing what was going on you know what what what are the stakes here then choose some work by your author could be a novel could be a long short story could be a play if you choose shorter works you'll probably want to take a of shorter works like a a closely related group of poems and you'll do that for the major part of your paper this is your analysis now and then sum up thirdly in about a paragraph giving your assessment of your authors contribution to the particular issue okay that makes sense we're talking about a paper that's roughly eight to ten pages long now the last thing I want to do is count words in students papers so believe it or not I actually do have better things to do with my time than that and so you know I'm not going to take points off if somebody's slightly under or slightly over that but I'm giving you a suggested length of about eight to ten typed or printed pages so that you can have some idea of what I have in mind okay I'm not looking for a 20 or 30-page paper I'm looking for a paper roughly around ten pages give or take a little bit okay so lengthen form then eight to ten double-spaced printed pages now Playfair here you know don't use some huge font and create huge margins with just a little trickle of text down the middle of the page you know I'm talking about you know a genuine 8 to 10 page double spaced paper use footnotes or endnotes to documentary sources if you're an English student is in English major or minor you will probably want to use the MLA style sheet form because that's the one that is professionally used in literature courses and if you were to go on to graduate school in English you would be expected to use the MLA form for documentation but I don't insist on that and if you have Social Sciences major or an education major and you have grown up with the APA or American Psychological Association from that's fine it's a perfectly good form or any other one is fine so long as it is clear as long as you just give me a clear reference to any source that you have relied on and you're going to have to rely on some sources right now if you're going to talk a little bit about the life and times of your writer the you know the issue that was going on in your writers time that your writer became involved with where are you going to get that information you have to go to some kind of sources and then of course there's going to be the literary work itself which is going to be your primary source right so you're going to be needing then to give some documentation of your sources now be sure be sure and I don't want to have to repeat this but be sure to document your sources okay there is never ever ever any reason for anybody to get involved in plagiarism I hate even to talk about it but it does come up sometimes if you use somebody else's words just put quotes around them okay put quotes around somebody else's words and then put a note in there I got this from so-and-so sure I mean that's what we all do by the way that's part of scholarship if you read articles in the journals the historical journals the philosophical journals the social science journals the literary journals what you're going to see is people constantly citing and quoting other people but it's part of our academic culture that we give credit where credit is due right if you use somebody else's loads put quotes around them and then put in a note telling where you got it if you picked up some information or idea from somebody else and you're not putting it in their exact words but you picked up the idea of the information from some source put a note in there say you know I you know have gotten this information about you know Charles Dickens from you know so-and-so's biography of Charles Dickens let's say and that's fine that's the way it works in our academic culture it doesn't mean that your work is any less valuable or any less original the original part of what you have to present to me is your analysis your analysis of the novel let's say the player the Palmer short story I say short studies because while unfortunately we don't really have time to do justice to James Joyce in this course Joyce is one of the major writers of the 20th century and we have in our anthology two of his stories one called Arabi and another one called the dead and the dead is itself a classic it's a long short story but itself is it is itself a classic and would be a marvelous subject for a paper okay and then at the end of your work I would like to see a narrative bibliography by a narrative bibliography what I mean is not just a listing but I want some indication from you of the usefulness of each one of these works to you in doing your topic okay was this useful wasn't it useful how is it useful how is it not useful okay now most things are going to find useful because I hope you're not wasting your time on things that are not useful I mean you can glance at some things I oh my god you know that's not going to be very helpful to me you set it aside and go on to something else okay and again if you have any questions at all just see me or the assistant instructor okay let's talk about the final examination obviously another big big big big big big project a list of study questions for the final examination will be presented and discussed in the review class at the end of the course the last class will be a review session in which I will present you with a list of study questions for the final I will go over those questions and you will have an opportunity to ask me questions about the questions and then when you come in to write the final examination all questions on the final examination will be taken from the list that you will have in advance in other words you will already know what questions are going to be for the final you just won't know exactly which ones are going to be on the final until you come in to write the final exam okay see there are no tricks no surprises and you can use your textbook and you can do use your textbook during the final exam I ask you not to bring in additional books notes and so forth but you can bring in your textbook and some people will say well can I bring in a dictionary well yes you can bring in a dictionary if you find that helpful it's okay okay and we'll talk more about the final later on but that's basically what it's going to be in addition there is a weekly journal starting the second week you don't have to I mean tonight what we're doing is mainly I'm talking about the the nature of the course the format of the course kinds of assignments and so forth and then we're going to take a break in a little bit and then after the break I'm going to begin to talk about some of the things happening in England particularly in the beginning of the nineteenth century that will provide the context for the emergence of romanticism as a cultural movement and in particular as a literary movement but I'm not asking you to come up with a journal entry about that so starting the second week when we actually begin to take up the Ritter ature you will turn in a journal entry giving your personal responses to the works covered that week personal responses this is what you think okay it's not necessarily what I think you can agree with me or disagree with me what I'm interested in is your personal response to that work there's no way you can get this wrong because it is personal to you and each entry should be a paragraph or so and no longer than a page so I'm not trying to make a huge assignment out of this I'm not asking you to write a long paper each week just a journal entry and I'm not grading these for you no punctuation or spelling or something rather like that what I'm doing here is I'm trying to to get a sense of what you're thinking about when you are studying these works okay I mean to a certain extent you can tell me those of you me here but you can tell me even more by writing in your journals and those of you who are taking this course at a distance on television or by tape or DVD purchase I have no way of knowing what your responses are unless you send me in your weekly journals okay yep question now let me just say because you're the first person is going to be asking a question there is in front of each of you except I think the people on the very back well there is a microphone and you'll notice on the edge of that facing you there's a little place where it says push you have to press that down and hold it as long as you're talking in order for your voice to be heard okay go ahead what kind of form did you want the journal in or do you want us to keep a notebook or just give you like a page just a page and I'm going to be telling you how to turn it in in just a second so okay but that's a good question any other questions about the journal yes so on it um handwritten or typed if you I'm going to be telling you more about this in a moment but you'll probably be emailing it in to me and if you email it in obviously you'll be typing it you can handwrite it though and simply give it to me here in class and those of you who are taking the course as a distance education class if you want to handwrite it mail and then that's that's fine or those of you who come to campus anyway you can put it in my mailbox in the English department if you want to that's fine that probably the most efficient way is to send it in by email it's real easy to keep track of things that are emailed in but I don't require that okay so see here we are journal entries should be emailed or sent by regular mail to the assistant instructor and for those of you who are here with me I'm going to be giving you a printed copy of stuff that you will need to know about the course in our next meeting for those of you who are taking the course in a distance if you haven't already gotten the full course description and some of this at one of the orientation sessions you can get it online through the distance education website and that also has all the information about how to contact the assistant instructor by email so please include if you if you do email please include the entry within your email message itself rather than send it as an attachment I know it's you know one of those things we automatically want to do just click you know and attach something except that there are so many different formats in which attachments come that some of them we can open and some of them we can't open and so it's always better to just include it within the email message itself the text of the email itself is that clear everybody knows what I'm talking about right okay final grade everybody's always concerned about grades right the final grade is going to be based on the three categories of assignment let me go backwards the journal will count for 10% of your grade so there's no way to get this wrong if you turn the journals in each week you get full credit you get an A on the journal part of your grade okay just by doing it now notice also the 10% is a good deal isn't it I mean 10% is the difference between one letter grade and another letter grade it's the difference between an A and a B or B in the series C in a D and so forth okay so do the journals if you get behind somebody always gets behind you know usually I mean I'm not going to try to pry into anybody's personal life here but often enough in these classes yeah if somebody who's about to have a baby or you know somebody else has to have an operation or you know there's a car accident or God knows what can happen I mean sometimes life intervenes right and so you may miss one of the journal entries right if you get behind just catch up don't worry about it if you get behind just catch up just make sure that you get them all in because otherwise you will not get full credit for this part of the computation of your final grade and then the term paper in the final examination roughly equal one to the other okay any questions about this weighting of the of the grades all right and then policy on course completion now naturally we don't want to see anybody withdraw on the other hand it does sometimes happen that somebody really needs to withdraw because you know as I said you know people have accidents people have health problems there may be family issues that come up that you know can't be resolved within the space of the semester and somebody just gets too far behind and they don't feel they can really catch up and yes you can withdraw if you have to though I would encourage you not to withdraw if at all possible you would need to contact the assistant instructor because the assistant instructor keeps the folders on each one of the students okay so the assistant instructor would be the one for you to contact and you'll have that person's email address so you can contact the person by email if you wish then of course there will be there's a forum that you're supposed to fill out when you drop the class now don't worry if something happens you know at the very tail end of the semester and god help us you know nobody's going to have some terrible accident or something that if something did happen we can always manage to to help you out at the end of the course even at the end of the course okay and then secondly if you have a non-academic reason for requesting a grade of incomplete please contact the assistant instructor now notice why I have those bolded and underlined non-academic most students and most teachers really feel very uncomfortable within completes you know it is an option sometimes it's impossible to to complete a course during the regular time for one reason or another but why I stress the word non-academic is that it really ought to be something beyond just I've gotten behind with the reading you know like a health problem or a family problem or something you don't have to give me personal details I'm not you know I'm not trying to pry into anybody's personal lives but but if you tell me this is also on the honor system this is on the honor system and if you tell me that you or a member of your family has some kind of a health problem fine we will deal with that or some other kind of issue we will deal with that and I am not requiring you to have doctor's excuses I'm not requiring you to go into any kind of personal details okay this is on the honor system okay so that is an option though it's something that naturally I and I hope you feel uncomfortable with because people think oh yeah take an incomplete and I'll finish the course up in the next couple of weeks and the low and behold I cannot tell you how often this happens at the end of each semester we get a printout of all of the students in our classes who have taken in completes and a year has elapsed and they have not completed the in completes and those in completes are about to turn automatically into FS it's real easy to put off I mean it's real easy to put off so believe me if there's any way that you can scramble even if you've gotten behind and complete the course during the regular term it is very much to your interest on the other hand that is an option if you have to avail yourself of it okay I mean after all we have to make this system as as humane as we possibly can so any questions about any of the things that I've been talking about having to do with the nature of the course the format of the course the kinds of assignments that you're going to have to do in the course well I hope that this have this part of our presentation hasn't been too intimidating because really I hope that you will enjoy the course and it's actually a lot of fun we're going to be reading some great stuff and talking about some terrific stuff as I hope I've given you some indication of in some of the illustrations I've provided in talking about assignments so we're going to be taking a break and for those of you who are with me it's going to be about ten minutes and then we'll come back and we'll do our second segment okay you you

Literature_Lectures

Linguistics_Style_and_Writing_in_the_21st_Century_with_Steven_Pinker.txt

Why is so much writing so bad? Why do we have to struggle with so much legalese? As in, "The revocation by these Regulations of a provision previously revoked subject to savings does not affect the continued operations." Why do we put up with academese? As in, "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness of its fall into conceptuality." Why is it so hard to set the time on a digital alarm clock? [LAUGHTER] There's no shortage of theories; and the one that I hear most often is captured in this cartoon, in which a boss says to a tech writer, "Good start. Needs more gibberish." That is, that bad writing is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to evade responsibility. Pasty-faced nerds get their revenge on the girls who turned them down for dates in high school; and the jocks who kicked sand in their faces. Pseudo-intellectuals try to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook, disguising the fact that they have nothing to say. Well, I have no doubt that the bamboozlement theory is true of some writers some of the time; but as a general explanation, it doesn't ring true. I know many scientists who do groundbreaking work on important topics. They have nothing to hide and no need to impress, but still their writing stinks. Good people can write bad prose. The second most popular theory is that digital media are ruining the language. Google is making us stupid. The digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardises our future. Twitter is forcing us to think in 140 characters. Well, if the dumbest generation theory were true, then that implies that it must have been much better before the advent of digital media, such as in the 1980s. Many of you will remember that that was an era in which teenagers spoke in articulate paragraphs. Remember when bureaucrats wrote in plain English and every academic article was a masterpiece in the art of the essay? Or was it the '70s? The thing is that complaints about the imminent decline of the language can be found in every era, such as 1961, in which a commentator complained, "recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all." Well, we can then go back before the advent of radio and television. In 1917, a commentator wrote, "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments." Well, maybe you have to go back even earlier to, say, the glory days of the European Enlightenment, such as 1785, in which a commentator said, "our language is degenerating very fast... I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it." And then there are the ancient grammar police said, "Oh, for crying out loud... you never end a sentence with a little bird." [LAUGHTER] I think a better theory comes from Charles Darwin who wrote, "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write." That is, whereas speech is instinctive, writing is and always has been hard. Your readers are unknown, invisible, inscrutable. They exist only in your imagination when you put pen to paper. They can't react or break in or ask for clarification. As a result, writing is an act of pretense, and writing is an act of craftsmanship. Well, what can we do then to improve the craft of writing? For many decades, this question had, at least in the United States, a single answer, which is that you hand students this, the iconic "The Elements Of Style" by Cornell Professor William Strunk, Jr. and his student, EB White, who later went on to glory as the New Yorker essayist and the author of the children's classics, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Note, by the way, that both these men were born before the turn of the century. That is, before the turn of the 20th century. Now, there is, undoubtedly, a lot of good sense in The Elements of Style. There are little gems of advice like "Use definite, specific, concrete language." "Write with nouns and verbs." "Put the emphatic words at the end." And my favourite, their prime directive, "Omit needless words." —which is, by the way, an excellent example of itself. [LAUGHTER] On the other hand, there are many reasons why The Elements of Style and other traditional style manuals like Fowler's Modern English Usage, probably the closest English equivalent, why they cannot be the basis of writing advice in the 21st century. For one thing, a lot of the advice is obsolete. Language changes. For example, Strunk and White declared that, "to finalize is a pompous, ambiguous verb." Now, many of you will be surprised to find that this perfectly unexceptionable and useful word would be deemed pompous and ambiguous at the time. But it just happened to be new in Professor Strunk's era. It grated on his ears. He declared it pompous, but it then fell into common usage, and no one even remembers that it was ever considered ungrammatical. Or, "to contact is vague and self-important. Do not contact people; get in touch with them, look them up, phone them, find them, or meet them." Of course, Strunk and White did not live to see the day in which you could also text them, instant message them, tweet them, email them, and so on. Nor did they really appreciate that "to contact" actually is an indispensable verb, because there are some times when you don't care whether one person phones or meets or texts another, as long as they do get in touch with them by one means or another. And for that purpose, "to contact" is a perfectly useful verb. Some of the advice is baffling, such as this, "the word people is not to be used with words of number, in place of persons." That is, you should not say 'six people'. Why not? Well, "if of 'six people' five went away, how many people would be left? Answer: one people." [LAUGHTER] Did you get that? By the same logic, you should never say, I have two children or 32 teeth. or two feet or any other irregular plural. Or how's this? Note that the word clever means one thing when applied to people, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one not an ingenious one. [LAUGHTER] The problem with traditional style advice is that it consists of an arbitrary list of dos and don'ts based on the tastes and peeves of the authors. It's not based on a principled understanding of how language works. And as a result, users have no way of understanding and assimilating the advice. And as I've noted, much of the advice is just wrong. I think we can do better today. We can base advice on writing on the science and scholarship of language, on modern grammatical theory, which is an advance over the old grammars that are ported over from Latin, on evidence-based dictionaries, on research in cognitive science on what makes sentences easy or hard to read, and on historical and critical studies of usage. It all begins with a model of effective prose communication. As I have been emphasising, writing is an unnatural act, and good style must begin with a coherent mental model of the communication scenario: How the writer imagines the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish. And my favourite model of this sort comes from a lovely book by the English scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, and they call it classic style. The model behind classic style is that prose is a window onto the world. The writer has seen something in the world that the reader has not yet noticed. He positions the reader so that she can see it with her own eyes. The writer and reader are equals. The goal is to help the reader see objective reality and the style is conversation. Now, that may seem obvious, but classic style is just one of a variety of styles that they explicate, including contemplative style, oracular style, and practical style. But the one that they argue that infects most academic prose is one they call post-modern or self-conscious style, in which the writer's chief if unstated concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naivete about his own enterprise. They continue. "When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside and expect the author to put aside the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophical traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone ever tell us anything true about cooking? Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject." Well, I'd be defying the principles of classic prose if I just talked about it without showing you an example. And here's an example. It is an article by the physicist Brian Greene on the theory of inflationary cosmology and one of its implications, multiple universes. And he wrote it for Newsweek magazine. Greene writes, "if space is now expanding, then at ever earlier times the universe must have been ever smaller. At some moment in the distant past, everything we now see, the ingredients responsible for every planet, every star, every galaxy, even space itself, must have been compressed to an infinitesimal speck that then swelled outward, evolving into the universe as we know it. The Big Bang Theory was born. Yet scientists were aware that the Big Bang Theory suffered from a significant shortcoming-- of all things it leaves out the bang. Einstein's equations do a wonderful job of describing how the universe evolved from a split-second after the bang, but the equations break down, similar to the error message returned by a calculator when you try to divide 1 by 0, when applied to the extreme environment of the universe's earliest moment. The Big Bang thus provides no insight into what might have powered the bang itself." Now, in these few sentences, Greene has covered some fairly sophisticated cosmology and physics. But he does it in a way that anyone can see for themselves. That is, if you can imagine the universe expanding, you can run that mental movie backwards and imagine that it must have originated in an infinitesimal speck. And even the abstruse mathematical notion of equations breaking down, he presents in a way that anyone can see for themselves. You can either pull out a calculator and try it-- try dividing 1 by 0, and indeed you will get an error message, or you can try to wrap your mind around what it could possibly mean to divide the number 1 into 0 parts. And that is classic style. The reader can see it for herself. Now, many examples of writing advice I think are implications of the model behind classic prose. To begin with, the focus of classic prose is on the thing being shown, not on the activity of studying it. So here's an example of the kind of prose that I have to wade through during my working day. A typical article in my field might begin as follows-- in recent years, an increasing number of researchers have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent theories of this process will be reviewed. Well, no offence, but not a whole lot of people are all that interested in how professors spend their time. A more classic introduction to the same subject matter could have been, all children acquire the ability to speak and understand a language without explicit lessons. How do they accomplish this feat? A corollary of this advisory is to minimise the kind of apologising that academics in particular feel compelled to do. Again, this is the kind of sentence that I have to deal with in my daily life. The problem of language acquisition is extremely complex. It is difficult to give precise definitions of the concept of language and the concept of acquisition and the concept of children. There is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. More research needs to be done. [LAUGHTER] Now, this is the kind of verbiage that could be deleted at a stroke with no loss in content, because classic prose gives the reader credit for knowing that many concepts are hard to define and many controversies hard to resolve. The reader is there to see what the writer will do about it. Another corollary is to minimise the hedging that is apparently obligatory in academic prose. The sprinkling of words into prose such a somewhat, fairly, rather, nearly, relatively, seemingly, in part, comparatively, predominantly, apparently, so to speak, and presumably. And the similar use of shutter quotes, by which a writer distances himself from a familiar figure of speech. So here's an example from a letter of recommendation I received. "She is a quick study and has been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her." Well, are we to take this recommendation as saying that the young woman in question is a quick study or that she is a quick study, namely someone who is only rumoured or alleged to be a quick study but really isn't. And if she's been able to educate herself in virtually any area that interests her, are there some areas that interest her where she tried to educate herself but just failed? This habit was brought home to me when I came across an acquaintance at an academic conference. We hadn't seen each other in a number of years, and I asked how she was. And as she pulled out a picture of her four-year-old daughter, and she said, we virtually adore her. [LAUGHTER] Aw. Why the compulsive hedging? Well, there is an imperative in many bureaucracies that the bureaucrats abbreviate as CYA-- cover your anatomy. But there is an alternative in classic style-- so sue me. That is, it's better to be clear and possibly wrong than muddy and, as the physicists say, not even wrong. Also classic prose counts on the cooperative nature of ordinary conversation. The fact that two people in chit-chat will read between the lines and connect the dots so that not everything has to be stated with absolute precision. So if I were to say, well, in recent years Americans have been getting fatter, you interpret it as meaning on average or in general. You're not going to hold me to the claim that every last one of the 350 million citizens of the United States have all been getting fatter. I call these tendencies professional narcissism, the confusion of the activities of your guild or field or profession with the subject matter that it is designed to deal with. And it is not just a problem in academics, but it infects many professions. News media, for example, will often cover the coverage, giving rise to the notorious media echo chamber. Much coverage of movies and popular music will tell you all about the first weekend gross receipts and the number of weeks on the charts but say nothing about the actual work of art. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been bored to tears by the museum display where you get a shard in the showcase and a lengthy explanation of how it fits into a classification of pottery styles. But it says nothing about the people who made it or what they did with it. And many government and business websites will instruct you into the bureaucratic organisation but have no ready way to find the information that you actually need. A second feature of classic prose is that it keeps up the illusion that the reader is seeing a world rather than just listening to verbiage. And as such, it avoids cliches like the plague. We are all familiar with the kind of writer who dispenses sentences such as we needed to think outside the box in our search for the holy grail but found that it was neither a magic bullet nor a slam dunk. So we rolled with the punches and let the chips fall where they may while seeing the glass as half full. It's a no-brainer. Now, the problem with writing in cliches is that it either forces the reader to kind of shut down her visual brain and just process the words as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or if she actually does think through the prose to the underlying image, she'll inevitably be upended by the inevitable mixed metaphors. Here's another sentence from a letter of recommendation I received. "Jeff is a Renaissance man, drilling down to the core issues and pushing the envelope." It's not clear how you can do all of those at the same time. Or this is from an article in The New York Times. "No one has yet invented a condom that will knock people's socks off." [LAUGHTER] And if you write this way, you will be eligible for membership in AWFUL, that is, Americans Who Figuratively Use Literally. And I'm told there's a British chapter. Now, it is perfectly acceptable to say she literally blushed. It's much more problematic to say she literally exploded. And it's very, very bad to say she literally emasculated him. Now, third, classic prose is about the world. It's not about the conceptual tools with which we understand the world. And as such, it avoids the excessive use of metaconcepts, that is, concepts about other concepts, such as approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, paradigm, perspective, process, rule, strategy, tendency, variable. Admit it, you use these words a lot when you write. As in, this is a sentence taken from an editorial by a legal scholar. "I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution would work on an actual level. On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable, which is to say, I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it." Or this from an email I received. "It is important to approach the subject from a variety of strategies, including mental health assistance, but also from a law enforcement perspective." Translation-- we should consult a psychiatrist about this man, but we may also have to inform the police. [LAUGHTER] Classic prose narrates ongoing events. We see agents who perform actions that affect objects. Non-classic prose thingifies the events and then refers to them with a single word using a dangerous tool of English grammar called nominalization, turning a verb or an adjective into a noun. So instead of appearing, you make an appearance. Instead of organising something, you bring about the organisation of that thing. Helen Sword, a language scholar, calls them zombie nouns, because they kind of lumber across the page with no conscious agent actually directing the action. And they can turn prose into a Night of the Living Dead. Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word, which is another way of saying people saw sentences, each followed by the word true or false. Subjects were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation, to wit, we tested the students in a quiet room. But again, it is not just academics who have this bad habit. It is also politicians. When a hurricane threatened the Republican Party National Convention a few years ago, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, "right now there is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation." That is, right now we don't anticipate that we will have to cancel it. And just to be nonpartisan, on the other side of the American political spectrum, here we have Secretary of State John Kerry saying "the president is desirous of trying to see how we can make our best efforts in order to find a way to facilitate." In other words, the president wants to help. [LAUGHTER] And corporate consultants. A young man interviewed by a journalist explained that he is a digital and social media strategist. "I deliver programmes, products, and strategies to our corporate clients across the spectrum of communications functions." And when the journalist confessed that he had no idea what that meant and asked him what he really did, he finally broke down and he said, "I teach big companies how to use Facebook." [LAUGHTER] And product engineers. Portable generators and combustion heaters used to carry a warning more or less like this-- "mild exposure to CO can result in accumulated damage over time. Extreme exposure to CO may rapidly be fatal without producing significant warning symptoms." Yeah, yeah. Whatever. And as a result, several hundred Americans every year turn their houses into gas chambers and asphyxiated themselves and their families by running heaters and generators indoors, until they replaced the warning with this one-- "using a generator indoors can kill you in minutes." [LAUGHTER] So classic prose can literally be a matter of life and death. Yes, literally. So part two. How can an understanding of the design of leaving lead to better writing advice? Another contributor to zombie prose is the passive voice. This refers to the contrast between a sentence in the active voice, such as the dog bit the man, and a sentence like the man was bitten by the dog, in the passive voice. It's well known that the passive voice is overused by academics, as in, on the basis of the analysis which was made of the data which were collected, it is suggested that the null hypothesis can be rejected. For passives in one sentence. And lawyers. If the outstanding balance is prepaid in full, the unearned finance charge will be refunded. Three passives. But perhaps most infamously of all, politicians. Here we have one of candidates for president in the United States, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who in explaining how it was that his administration caused a three-hour traffic jam by deliberately closing the lanes to a tunnel during rush hour in order to punish the mayor of a town that would not endorse his re-election, he said, "mistakes were made." The infamous politician's evasive passive. Not surprisingly, all of the traditional manuals warn against using the passive voice. Strunk and White say, "use the active voice. The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive. Many a tame sentence can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard." Well, I'm glad to hear from the laughter that a number of people have noted that, yes, Strunk and White used the passive in order to tell people not to use the passive. The other iconic bit of writing advice is the classic essay, Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, probably the second-most widely distributed bit of advice on writing. And Orwell too says, "a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose," he wrote in 1949, showing that some things don't change. "I list below various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged. The passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active." A passage that has not one but two uses of the passive voice to tell people not to use the passive voice. Well, the passive construction could not have survived in the English language for 1,500 years if it did not serve some purpose. Why can't we do without it even when telling people not to overuse it? It comes down to the design of language. You can think of language as an app for converting a web of thoughts into a string of words. Now, the writer's knowledge can be thought of as a kind of mind-wide web what cognitive psychologists call a semantic network. That is, a collection of nodes for concepts. Here we have a fragment of a person's knowledge of the tragic events brought to life by Sophocles in his play Oedipus Rex. So you've got a number of nodes for concepts like father, kill, marry. You've got a bunch of links that indicate how the concepts are related. Doer, done to, about, is, and so on. Now, when you just lie back and ponder your knowledge base, your mind can surf from one concept to another in pretty much any order. But what happens when you have to translate your web of ideas into a sentence? Well, now you've got to convert that tangled web into a linear string of words. In Sophocles play, Oedipus married his mother and killed his father. That means that there's an inherent problem baked into the design of language. The order of words in a sentence has to do two things at once. It's the code that English syntax uses to express who did what to whom. At the same time, it necessarily presents some bits of information to the reader before others and thereby affects how the information is going to be absorbed. In particular, the early material in the sentence refers to the sentence's topic and naturally connects back to what's already reverberating in the reader's mind. In the metaphor of classic prose, it refers to the general direction in which the reader is looking. The later words in the sentence contain the sentence's focal point, what fact it is now conveying. In the metaphor, it's what the reader is supposed to now notice. Any prose that violates these principles, even if each sentence is clear, will feel choppy or disjointed or incoherent. And that brings us to the passive. The passive is a workaround in English for this inherent design limitation of the language. It allows writers to convey the same ideas, namely who did what to whom, while varying the order of words. In particular, it allows a writer to start the sentence with the done to or the acted upon rather than the doer or the actor. And that's why avoid the passive as a general law is bad advice. The passive is, in fact, the better construction when the done to or the acted upon is currently the target of the reader's mental gaze. Again, I'll give you an example. This comes from the Wikipedia entry for Oedipus Rex, and it describes the pivotal moment in the play in which the horrific backstory is revealed to the audience. Spoiler alert. "A messenger arrives from Corinth. It emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time he was given a baby. The baby, he said, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child." Now notice that this passage has three passive sentences in a row and for good reason. As the passage opens, our eyes are on the messenger-- a messenger arrives from Corinth-- and so the next sentence telling us something about the messenger should begin with a reference to the messenger, and thanks to the passive voice, so it does. He, the messenger, was given a baby. Well, now we're kind of figuratively looking at the baby, at least our mind's eye is, and the next sentence should then begin with the baby. And again, thanks to the passive voice, it does. The baby was given to the messenger by another shepherd. Well, now we're looking at this new shepherd and the next sentence telling us something about him should begin with that. And again, the passive makes that possible. The other shepherd had been told to get rid of the child. Now imagine that the writer of this passage had either followed the advice in the traditional manuals literally or was the victim of the kind of copyeditor that turns every passive sentence back into an active, then you would have a messenger arrives from Corinth. It emerges that he was formerly a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron, and during that time someone gave him a baby. Another shepherd from the Laius household, he says, whom someone had told to get rid of a child, gave the baby to him. Now, I think you will agree that this is not an improvement. Your attention is kind of jerked around from one part of the story to another. And participants kind of parachute in without warning or a proper introduction. More generally, English syntax provides writers with constructions that vary the order in the string while preserving the meaning. Oedipus killed Laius. Laius was killed by Oedipus. It was Laius whom Oedipus killed. It was Oedipus who killed Laius, and so on. And writers must choose the construction that introduces ideas to the reader in the order in which she can absorb them. Well, why then is the passive so common in bad writing, as it surely is? It's because good writers narrate a story, advanced by protagonists who make things happen. Bad writers work backwards from their own knowledge, writing down ideas in the order in which they occur to them. They begin with the outcome of the event, because they know how it happened. And then they throw in the cause as an afterthought, and the passive makes that all too easy. So why should this be so hard? Why is it so hard for writers to deploy the resources made available by the English language to convey ideas effectively? The best explanation that I know of is conveyed by this cartoon, and it's called the curse of knowledge. The fact that when you know something, it's hard to imagine what it's like for someone else not to know it. Psychologists give it various names. It's also called mind blindness, egocentrism, hindsight bias, about half a dozen others. Perhaps the best introduction comes from a classic experiment that will be familiar to any of you taking a course in child psychology, the M&M study or in Britain you can call it the Smarties Study. A three-year-old boy comes into a lab, sits down at a table. The experimenter gives him a box of Smarties. He's all excited. He opens it, and he finds that instead of containing Smarties, the box contains pencils. So the child is surprised. And the experimenter puts the pencils back in the box, closes it, puts it back down on the table. And he says, OK. Well, now another little boy is going to come in, Jason. What does Jason think is in the box? And the boy will say pencils. Even though, of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box contains pencils, the boy knows it, but a newcomer would not. And in fact, if you ask him, well, when you came into the room, what did you think was in the box? And he'll say pencils. Now that he knows it, he can no longer recover the innocent state in which he once did not know it. Now adults, of course, outgrow this limitation-- kind of, a little-- because many studies have shown a similar effect in adults. People will tend to attribute their own obscure vocabulary to the population at large. If they know of fact, they assume everyone else does. And in one study, the more practise someone had at using a complicated gadget like a smartphone, the less time they estimated it would take someone else to learn it, because the more familiar the were, the obviously easier it must be, because it was easy for them. I think that the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that readers haven't learned their jargon, don't know the intermediate steps that seem too obvious to mention, can't visualise a scene that's currently in the writer's mind's eye. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon or spell out the logic or supply the concrete details, even when writing for professional peers. It's a lazy excuse that writers often have that they don't have to spell things out because, after all, they're just writing for their professional peers. But because of the curse of knowledge, even prose written for professional peers is often surprisingly opaque. I'll give you an example. This is a passage from an article on consciousness written in a journal called Trends In Cognitive Science, which is designed to present short, readable summaries of research for the benefit of cognitive scientists keeping up with one another's work. So here's a passage. "The slow and integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observation such as the "rabbit illusion" and its variants or the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived, is influenced by post-stimulus events arising several hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus." Now, I've been in this business for almost 40 years, and I have no idea what they're talking about. I have never heard of the rabbit illusion, though I know an awful lot of illusions. And I know what the word stimulus means, but I have no idea what they're talking about when they talk about how a stimulus is ultimately perceived. So I went to my bookshelves, and I found one that had an entry for something called the cutaneous rabbit illusion, which works as follows-- the subject closes his eyes, sticks out his arm. The experimenter taps him three times on the wrist, three times on the elbow, three times on the shoulder. And the person experiences it as a series of taps running up the length of his arm, kind of like a hopping rabbit, hence the rabbit illusion. Well, why didn't they just say that? Not only is it no less scientific to spell out the concrete scenario, but it's actually more scientific because knowing that that's what the rabbit illusion is, I can then follow the logic of what they are claiming, namely what it allegedly shows us is consciousness does not track sensory events in real time. But our brain is constantly editing our experience after the fact to make it feel more coherent. Well, knowing what the illusion actually consists of, I can then ponder whether that really follows, whether that's a correct interpretation of the illusion or whether it might have some alternative explanation, something that I can't do with stimulus this and post-stimulus that. The temptations of thoughtless abbreviation are I think best captured by an old joke. So a man walks into a Catskills resort in Upstate New York and walks into the dining room, and he sees a bunch of retired Borscht Belt comedians sitting around a table. And so there's an empty chair. He joins them. And he hears one of the comedians saying 47, and the others break out into uproarious laughter. Another one says 112, and then again they all just burst out into peals of laughter, rolling on the floor. And he can't figure out what's going on. So he asked the guy next to him. He says, what's happening? And the guy says, well, you know, these old timers, they've been together for so long, that they all though the same jokes. So to save time, they've given each joke a number, and now they just have to say the number. They guy says, that's ingenious. I'll try it. So he says 31. Stony silence. He says 77. Everyone stares at him. No one laughs. So he sinks back down into his seat and he says to his friend, uh, what happened? Why didn't anyone laugh? The guy says, well, it's all in the way you tell it. [LAUGHTER] So how do you exercise the curse of knowledge? Well, the traditional solution is always keep in mind the reader over your shoulder. That is, empathise with your reader, see the world from her point of view, try to feel her pain, walk a mile in her moccasins, and so on. Well, this is good advice as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, because a lot of research in psychology has shown that we're not very good at figuring out what people know, even when we try really, really hard. A better solution is to actually show a draft to a real-live representative reader, and you will often discover that what's obvious to you isn't obvious to anyone else. You can even show a draft to yourself after some time has passed, and it's no longer familiar. And if you're like me, you'll find yourself thinking that wasn't clear or what did I mean by that, or all too often, who wrote this crap? [LAUGHTER] And then rewrite, ideally several times, with the single goal of making the prose understandable to the reader. Finally, how should we think about correct usage of what is right or wrong, correct or incorrect? Which is the aspect of writing that by far attracts the most attention and arouses the most emotion. Now, some usages are clearly wrong. There is a famous and beloved American children's character known as Cookie Monster, who's famous on the Muppets and Sesame Street, whose signature line is, "me want cookie." Now, even, three-year-olds appreciate and can laugh at Cookie Monster, because even by their own lights, they know that Cookie Monster has made a grammatical error. Many of you may be familiar with the form of humour or alleged humour called the lolcat, as in I can has cheezburger, the humour in which resides in the fact that this cat is incompetent at English grammar. If we didn't recognise that the cat was making a grammatical error, we would not find it funny, at least those people who do find it funny. [LAUGHTER] Is our children learning? Even ex-president President George W. Bush acknowledged that this was a grammatical error in a self-deprecating speech in which he pointed out many of his own past speech errors. But others are not so clear, just again to be nonpartisan, the Democratic President Bill Clinton, when he was running for office in 1992, had as one of his campaign slogans "give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back," appalling the nation's English teachers who pointed out that this is an example of the notorious between you and I error. And it should be "give Al Gore and me a chance to bring America back." Another Democratic President, Barack Obama, said no American should live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like. The infamous singular "they" error. Captain Kirk of Star Trek, the five-year mission of the Starship Enterprise, "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Split infinitive. The Beatles, "you think you lost your love. Well, I saw her yesterday. It's you she's thinking of, and she told me what to say." Anyone? Sentence with a preposition at the end. Preposition at the end of a sentence. And then I doubt many people will recognise this American icon. This is Dick Cavett, who was the host of our short-lived and much-missed urbane, witty, intelligent talk show. And in an Op Ed in which he was talking about a college reunion, he wrote "checking into the hotel, it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby." Anyone? [INTERPOSING VOICES] Anyone go to school before the 1960s? Yes. It's a dangling participle. Well, what do we do with these more contested usage errors? They have given rise to what journalists sometimes called the language war. On the one side, there are the prescriptivists who prescribe how people ought to speak and write. They are also known as the purists, sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nitpickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis, and the gotcha gang, according to whom rules of usage are objectively correct. To obey them is to uphold standards of excellence. To flout them is to dumb down literate culture, degrade the language, and hasten the decline of civilization. Now, according to the scenario, on the other hand side, we have the descriptivists, who describe how people do speak and write, according to whom rules of usage are just the secret handshake of the ruling class, and the people should be liberated to write however they please. Now, I think there are reasons to believe that the language war, however beloved it is of certain magazines, is a pseudo-controversy. If it were really true, then the prescriptivists would have to insist that the lyrics to the famous Beatles song should be, it's you of whom she's thinking. And the descriptivists would have to claim that there is nothing wrong with I can has cheezburger, in which case they could not get the joke of the lolcat. I think we need a more sophisticated way of thinking about usage. So what are rules of usage? Where do they come from? They're certainly not logical truth that you could prove in the propositional calculus, nor are they officially regulated by dictionaries. And I can speak with some authority here, because I am the Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and when I joined the panel, I asked the editor in chief, so how do you guys decide what to put in the dictionary? And his answer was, "we pay attention to the way people use words." That is, when it comes to correctness, there's no one in charge. The lunatics are running the asylum. [LAUGHTER] So a way to make sense of rules of usage is that they are tacit, evolving conventions. A convention is a way of doing things that has no particular advantages other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. Paper currency is an example. A piece of paper with a picture of the queen has no inherent value other than the fact that everyone expects everyone else to treat it as having value. There's no particular reason to drive on the right as opposed to driving on the left. There's nothing sinister about driving in the left or gauche or socialist. [LAUGHTER] But there's an excellent reason to drive on the left on this side of the Atlantic, namely that's what everyone else does. Unlike the rules of traffic or laws authorising currency, though, the rules of language are tacit. They emerge as a rough consensus within a community of careful writers without explicit deliberation, agreement, or legislation. And the conventions evolve, as I mentioned in the case of "to finalise and to contact," they organically change over time. So should writers follow the rules? And the answer is, it depends. Some rules just extend the logic of everyday grammar to more complicated cases. So let's take is our children learning, which not only George W. Bush but the Microsoft Word grammar checker flags as an error with the famous wiggly green line. "Is our children learning" is equivalent to "our children is learning." Everyone can see that "our children is learning" is ungrammatical, and therefore "is our children learning" is also ungrammatical. Or a slightly more complicated case, the impact of the cuts have not been felt yet. Why did Microsoft Word put a wiggly line under that? Well, when you think about it, that sentence is "the impact have not been felt." If you delete the optional "of the cuts," that just jumps off the page as ungrammatical. Of course, it's "impact has not been felt," and so it's "the impact of the cuts has not been felt." The writer was just distracted by the plural cuts that happened to be cheek by jowl with the verb have. Also, there are some rules of word choice that make important semantic distinctions. Fulsome is not a fancy-schmancy synonym for full. Fulsome means excessive or insincere. And so one ought not to thank someone for their fulsome compliment, that is, that if someone gives you a fulsome compliment, that's a bad thing, not a good thing. Likewise, you should not compliment someone's elegant theory by calling it simplistic. Simplistic means overly simple or childlike or incorrectly simple. Nor if you think that something is meritorious should you call it meretricious. If you don't know why, you can go home and look it up in the dictionary. In general, one should avoid reaching for a hoity-toity word to replace a humbler synonym. If you do, you might elicit the reaction of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride when another character kept using the word inconceivable to refer to things that just happened. He said, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. On the other hand, not every pet peeve bit of grammatical folklore or dimly remembered lesson from Miss Thistlebottom's classroom is a legitimate rule of usage. And many supposed rules of usage turn out to violate the grammatical logic of English, turn out to be routinely flouted by the best writers, and often have always been flouted by the best writers, singular they being an excellent example. A recent article in a conservative opinion magazine in the United States argued that singular they was a feminist plot that had been forced down our throats by angry women's liberationists in search of a gender neutral means of expression and that we should resist this linguistic engineering and go back to the crystalline prose of Jane Austin. Whoops. Turns out that Jane Austin used singular they 87 times in her novels, as in "everybody began to have their vexation." Likewise, if you've got a problem with sentence final preposition, maybe you should go back and edit Shakespeare, when he wrote "we are such stuff as dreams are made on." And the same is true of split infinitives, dangling participles, between you and I, and many other pseudo-rules. In fact, not only is obeying bogus rules unnecessary, it can often make prose worse. Here is a sentence from a communication that I got from my own employer, Harvard University, in one of its boastful newsletters. "David Rockefeller has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates." Now, this writer twisted himself into such a pretzel to avoid a split infinitive that he churned out a sentence that, as far as I can tell, does not belong to the English language. [LAUGHTER] In fact, obeying bogus rules can literally lead to a crisis in governance-- literally. In 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was a famous grammatical stickler, was charged with administering the oath of office to Barack Obama. And the wording of the oath of office, as stipulated in the US Constitution would be "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States." But Chief Justice Roberts spotted a split verb in that oath, and so he had Obama say "I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President of the United States faithfully," which not only is not a stylistic improvement, but it calls the legitimacy of the transition of power into question. And so they had to repeat the oath of office in a private ceremony in the White House later that afternoon. So how should a careful writer distinguish legitimate rules of usage from bogus ones? Well, the answer is unbelievably simple. Look them up. If you turn to a dictionary, say Merriam-Webster's, and look up split infinitive, it will say, "it's all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity since clarity is the usual reason for splitting this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you want to." Encarta World English Dictionary, "there is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives." American Heritage Dictionary, Random House Dictionary, none of the dictionaries say that there's anything wrong with a split infinitive. So modern dictionaries and style manuals do not ratify pet peeves, grammatical folklore, or bogus rules. And that's because they base their advice on evidence, on the practises of contemporary good writers, on the practises of the best writers in the past, in some cases on polling data from a panel of writers in contested cases, on effects on clarity, and on consistency with the grammatical logic of English. Also, we should keep correct usage in perspective. Now, I do think that it is a good idea to respect the legitimate rules. But in fact, they're the least important part of good writing. They pale in significance behind maintaining classic style, coherent ordering of ideas, overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of factual diligence and sound argumentation. And also, even when we get grumpy about some undoubtedly grammatical error, we should keep in mind that they are not signs of the decline of language. And this is nicely captured in an XKCD webcomic by Randall Munroe, in which he shows a purist who is haunted by a vision of things to come, by a ghost in the middle of the night, and says "I bring a cautionary vision of things to come. This is the future. And this is the future if you give up the fight over the word literally." [LAUGHTER] And yes, they are exactly the same. So to sum up, I've suggested that modern linguistics and cognitive science provide better ways of enhancing our writing, a model of prose communication, namely classic style, in which language is a window on the world; an understanding of the way language works, namely as a way of converting a web of thoughts into a string of words; a diagnosis of why good prose is so hard to write, namely the curse of knowledge; and a way to make sense of rules of correct usage, namely tacit, evolving conventions. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] It seems as thought the way in which we're acquiring words is definitely speeding up because of digital technology. And I was wondering if you thought the same was happening with usage and grammar. Are we seeing an increase in the pace at which things are changing?

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_5A.txt

he okay all right so here we are once again uh with British literature from roughly the end of the 18th century down to the present time and this evening we're going to be talking about the Victorian issues which of course continue in most cases in one form or another down to our own time and uh this is going to lead us into a discussion of the term paper and these you will recall are the topics for the term paper remember I said all the way back at the beginning of the course that I wanted you to investigate one of the so-called Victorian issues we have a whole section in our Anthology dealing with this these issues are first of all evolution which of course was the principal science it was not the only science by the way that was controversial in the 19th century but the darwinian theory of evolution became especially controversial and there were those who felt that it contradicted the literal reading of the Bible and therefore provided our culture with a kind of conflict between religion and science and whether there was in fact such a conflict or not uh there was from a cultural point of view such a conflict in the sense that many many many many many people believed that there was such a conflict so uh in some ways that continues to the present time in ways that we'll talk about as we go along the second one of our great issues is the the whole question of industrialization and is industrialization really something that has brought about great progress or has it brought about uh a kind of cultural decline in other words we all would agree that we have accomplished great things through industrialization urbanization scientific advancement and Technology on the other hand have we paid a very high price price and some might even say too high a price because of the way in which we have conducted this Industrial Revolution and of course we're going to see that there are all kinds of debates that went on and some of this we've already touched on because at least by implication many of the romantics are really providing a critique of urbanization and its attendant industrialism we'll come back to that in a few moments and then of course we have what in the Victorian age was somewhat quaintly called the woman question the woman question and of course what we have beginning among a very very small number of women in the 18th century but an increasingly large and vocal group of women in the 19th century and then on into the 20th century as well who are arguing for and even demanding equality especially equality of opportunity for women and that's something that we're going to be looking at in some detail not only through some of the selections that we have in our text but these are issues that we're going to be continuing to discuss as we take up future writers in the coming weeks now in addition to that I have also offered an optional topic which would deal with literature that represents the colonial or postcolonial experience in the old British Empire Colonial experience would be obvious right that uh people either living in the colonies or knowing about the colonies or having some experience in the old British colonies and writing about that experience uh often had very very interesting things to say many of them by the way critical of the colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries since those colonies have become independent those former colonies have become independent many of the peoples in those cultures now regard themselves as living in a kind of postcolonial situation and what does that mean what kinds of complexities are involved in that as a people attempts to try to emerge out of the identity the cultural identity it had as a colonial member of the British Empire into developing some kind of new identity for itself which of course is never going to abandon entirely the the old identity but uh May build on that and adapt that in all kinds of ways in forming a new cultural and even national identity so we'll talk about these issues in particular as we go along but what I'm asking you to do is to choose one of these great cultural issues that began in the 19th century and of course continued well through the 20th century and are still with us in one form or another at the beginning of the 21st century so what you will do yeah question um on a term paper you said that um could be an alternate topic um from someone from the old Colonial Peri or whatever and um right um in the in the um under the Victorian issues you said that we could do Evolution industrialization or the woman question question um what kind of topics apply to the other alternative topic if it was to choose the one having to do with Colonial or post Colonial experience yes yeah um well we're going to be reading for example uh Conrad's Heart of Darkness which is all about uh White Europeans in Black Africa and uh the experience mainly of the white Europeans from the European point of view in a former European colony in Africa uh that work has been very controversial by the way and we're going to also be looking at a critique by a famous African novelist and intellectual of Conrad's novel so what I'm getting at is here's a a literary work that deals directly with that issue or when we get to Virginia Wolf's Mrs delaway uh one of the things that people usually think of when they take up Mrs delaway is quote the woman question right because much of the work is about the the identity of women in relation to men and remember this is something that I talked about earlier that you can't really talk about female identities completely independently of male identities because we all live in the same society and there clearly are going to be some kinds of relations among these different uh uh efforts to to form different kinds of identities so that's one thing that's going to be pretty obvious when we talk about that novel but another thing that comes up not as the major part of the novel but certainly as an important theme in the novel is the relationship between England and one of its most important colonies at the time which was India India and it would be interesting for somebody actually to to look at how that is treated in the novel and there are lots of others you know some of you may be uh familiar with em Foresters uh novel Passage to India which again is about the experience of the British in India but Forester though he is a British person and writer himself attempts at any rate to give some account of what this meant to Indians from their perspective there are certainly also people who uh you know are Indian writers or African writers or Asian writers who have written about that kind of experience from their point of view and now as we have moved into a postcolonial period postcolonial in the political sense that these former colonies are no longer colonies of the old Empire but they are now independent nations you know such as South Africa and Nigeria and India and so on and so on and so on and so on around the world and what are writers in these countries now doing with the postcolonial experience of being former members of the British Empire who are now working to forge a cultural identity of their own and that's a very very interesting kind of problem and uh some of our most interesting literature as a matter of fact is literature dealing with Colonial and or postcolonial experience so that's an optional fourth title and it's a topic excuse me and even though it's not listed in our textbook under Victorian issues it's an issue that began to come up particularly in the 19th century and then of course it gained great momentum during the 20th century does that answer your question do you think pretty close example um if I let's say if I was to pick to a t one of his books and um I'm going to have to write about either Evolution or industrialization or the woman question or something like that or or the colonial or postcolonial experience as represented in his work okay I mean he's an African writer who uh who lives in and writes from the experience of living in an African country that is a former British colony and so if you were to take that fourth optional topic that would be the focus of your attention now doesn't have to be I mean one could certainly take an Indian writer and talk about uh uh quote the woman question or a British writer living in India and and talking about that for example uh Passage to India would be a very interesting project for talking not simply about colonialism but also talking about feminism because much of what goes on in that novel has to do with both of these things which also means and and this may help to clarify things a little bit further that also means that there sometimes will be a certain overlap of these issues so that you could be taking a novel and I've given you a couple of examples already uh you could be taking a novel in which there's more than one thematic Focus so that the the novel might very much be an ex examination of certain experiences and attitudes towards women and at the same time also have to do with uh say industrialism Dickens Hard Times which we're going to be taking up shortly you could very easily look at Hard Times in that way it is from one point of view a critique of the Industrial Revolution at least it's darker side at least its darker side in places like kok town the imaginary Coke town of of England a mining town in England but at the same time you have a lot going on there which has to do with male female relationships women's roles women's identities and so forth over again against and and in relation to men's roles and men's identities so that it would be entirely possible with that same novel to move either in One Direction or in the other so that your primary focus may want to be on one of these topics though you may along the way want to acknowledge the existence of other thematic elements is is that clear okay and remember now and I'm going to be going through the issues one by one here this evening and if need be because this is so important to us if need be uh if we don't get everything in tonight we'll just carry over a little bit into uh into our next class so we're going to have lots of time for discussing this and every class from now on if you want to bring up questions about paper topics please do so so that we can work towards clarifying all of these things and of course you can always talk to me outside of class and for those of you who are taking this course at a distance you can always email me or my assistant instructor in the in the class so okay um any other questions before we move on remember now that I'm asking for for a three-part paper a three-part paper these will not be equal parts but three-part paper the first part of your paper and since we're talking about something eight to 10 pages long roughly roughly and I've said here before I don't count Words believe it or not I actually have other things to do in my life than than count Words in student papers uh so this is just to give you a kind of rough idea of what I'm looking for an 8 to 10 page double spaced printed paper in which you first of all explain the historical context within which the literary work that you have chosen is created Focus f using particularly on those elements of the context the historical context that will apply to your analysis of the novel and then secondly you will do an analysis of the novel in terms of its representation it's dealing with one of these four General topic areas and then you will conclude your paper with a paragraph in which you offer your judgment of the contribution that your author has made to our understanding of that topic and I'm not trying to give you a formula but I would say that the first part where you establish the historical context would probably be somewhere between a page and a half and two and a half pages but again I'm not trying to give you a formula and you may find with a particular topic that you need to treat that a little bit differently than than just to count the number of words and number of pages then that would mean that the longest section in your paper would be the middle one in which you would probably be devoting somewhere between five and six pages or thereabouts to the analysis a detailed analysis in which you would be drawing my attention to specific things in the novel specific characters actions speeches and so forth that were relevant to your discussion and then then you conclude with really a single paragraph is probably all that it would take okay yeah go ahead um you say here uh footnotes or endnotes would a work cited page be sufficient or yeah yeah a work cited page is usually sufficient if you give a reference I mean like let's say you're going along and you're talking about Dickens Hard Times okay and uh let's say that you have looked at a biography of of Charles Dickens I mean after all you're going to have to go to some secondary sources to find out information about your author and your author's life and times right um so unless you just happen to have in your attic access to original materials uh you know a trunk full of letters that Dickens wrote you know or something or other like that you're going to have to go to some kind of secondary sources so uh and I'm not trying to make this into a research paper but you'll have to go to one or more secondary sources just in order to find out some stuff about your writer and his or her life and times okay uh and let's say you were writing about Dickens and you made reference to a standard biography and you could say something to the effect of you know as so and so you know uh Joseph Smith says in you know his book blah blah blah or in his biography of Dickens blah blah blah blah and then in parentheses at the end of your quotation or your paraphrase you could simply put the page numbers right the reference to the page numbers and then in a work cited you would give the full bibliographical reference to that work now I'm not a stickler about the forms for documentation I just insist that you use some clear form for documenting your use of sources so that if you want to use footnotes that's perfectly fine with me if you want to use end notes that's perfect fine with me if you want to use internal forms of documentation which refer then to Fuller bibliographical information in work cited at the end of the paper that's fine with me if you're uh an English or foreign language student you probably will want to use the MLA stylesheet if you haven't learned it already you will need to know that sooner or later in in your courses in uh The English Department or one of the foreign languages if you're a social science major it's perfectly fine for you to use the APA or American Psychological Association for it's perfectly good they're both very good uh the University of Chicago style is the one that's used by many many Publishers and that's also very good any clear form for document ation is fine okay all right well any questions just about how to handle the the paper itself well let's get into talking about the topics and we can go to the PowerPoint please okay so here we are first of all evolution in earlier editions of the Norton Anthology this used to be called uh evolution in science or sometimes religion in science and so forth but anyway Evolution the reason why I put up here lel's principles of geology published in 1830 is to make the point that the discussion did not really begin with Darwin alone that there were other scientists who already were raising certain kinds of questions that were objected to even raising the questions by the way much less the answers by certain people uh on religious grounds and we're going to talk about that now in some detail for example there were many not everybody of course but there were many who who accepted the view in earlier times and I mean up through and including the 18th and 19th centuries as articulated by Bishop Usher in England guy named Bishop Bishop usher in England that you could calculate on the basis of analysis of the Bible the exact time from creation to the present the exact time and so what Bishop Usher and other Scholars had done is they had gone through the Bible beginning with the stories of creation and they had looked for Chronological references and simply did the arithmetic and what they came up with was that the period from creation to the time of Christ or the birth of Christ say was and I don't have the exact number in front of me but it was around 4,000 years and then let's say you add whatever number of years since then so you know 6,000 years or something or other like that uh and you would have the age of the universe okay well some scientists were very very doubtful about that uh but in general many scientists simply uh didn't want to rock the boat uh we all remember the story of Galileo and when Galileo started publishing some of his observations his astronomical observations and theories not in Latin simply for fellow Scholars but in Italian where they could be read by all kinds of people uh rather than simply the scholars and fellow scientists and the church stepped in and said well wait a minute now uh what you're saying runs counter to church teaching and Galileo got himself into Big Time trouble at a time when getting in trouble with the church whatever the church happened to be could really land you in very very serious difficulties you know uh uh house arrest would be perhaps the least of your worries uh and you could very well be sent to prison and in some places there was what the Portuguese called the autoa in which people were tortured and even burned at stake and that happened in various parts of Europe and it wasn't simply one religious group it was various religious groups that carried out those kinds of of Horrors so obviously if you were a scientist who felt that there were things that you had discovered or other scientists had discovered that ran counter to the teachings of the religious community within which you lived you might want to be very cautious on the other hand the usual view was that everything we learned from science actually confirms what the uh the the teachers and preachers of religion tell us at least in certain ways so that if we go back into the 18th century and some of you know what I'm talking about because you've studied this I know some of you have studied this with me uh you can find works like Alexander Pope's long philosophical poem the essay on man in which he really makes the argument that Newton was a theologian who made his greatest contribution to theology with his scientific work because what Newton did was to establish the the physical laws of the universe in such a way as to demonstrate how the universe was perfectly ordered and from that according to not only Pope but uh people like paly who wrote a book called natural theology that was a big seller in the 18th century and very influential and lots and lots of others from that orderly universe that that Newton and others had discovered or believed that they had discovered one could infer the necessity of a Divine orderer in other words that this kind of intricate order could not have come about by chance that there had to be some kind of orderly plan and design on such a scale that it would require a Transcendent intelligence an all knowing and all powerful God to have created this this kind of a universe okay so notice that that was an effort in the 18th century to reconcile any potential dispute between religion and science or philosophy well then along comes lyel with his principles of geology and he says you know based on geological research sech you know where you actually go and you look in places at the different levels of the development of the of the earth you know and and there are places where obviously you can do this right you know sheared off uh mountains or or Cliffs and so forth where probably many of you have actually seen this where you can see different sedimentary layers uh that were created over very very long periods of time and lall didn't have it right but he was on the right track in saying that planet Earth had to be at least hundreds of thousands of years old we now know that it was actually millions of years old or is millions of years old um but LEL at least was on the right track and subsequent scientific research has established with greater accuracy these figures well you can imagine that LEL raised quite a stir because here were people who were going around simply saying well you know the Earth is only you know a few thousand years old and we can establish this on the basis of biblical chronology and on the other hand here's LEL and his fellow scientists and students saying uh uh uh uh you know it's very clear on basis of our scientific research that that is not the case okay at the time that lyel and a little bit later on Darwin were doing their work in order to get sponsorship from the British Academy of Science which endorsed scientific research projects in order to get their end ment one of the things that you had to do was you had to establish or you had to proposed to establish how your research was going to contribute to traditional theological beliefs that was one of the requirements I don't know if any of you have ever filled out a a Grant application but if you fill out a Grant application to uh to try to get some kind of a research Grant or maybe a student grant there are certain things that you have to questions that you have to answer right so what I'm saying here is that one of the questions that a scientist would have to answer is how his or her research was going to further our understanding of the traditional teachings of theology which of course meant Christian theology okay now that's the kind of cultural world that we're operating in so that when Darwin came along with his origin of the species and then later on even more spectacularly with his Descent of Man what he did was he touched a kind of nerve that was even more sensitive than LEL had I mean l said well look the Earth is a lot older than we thought and there are people who are sort of scratching their heads and saying well okay maybe we need to rethink you know this whole business of biblical chronology okay but that didn't fundamentally upset the whole theological cart unless of course one was was a literalist A literalist in the in the reading of the Bible which of course some people were and are okay uh but look at what Darwin was saying Darwin was saying not only have all species not been created at once all existing species not are not create were not all created at once at the moment of creation by God in their present form but they got to where they are through a process of what he called Evolution and in that process some species did not survive other species survived by changing to adapt themselves to the circumstances in which they lived and those circumstances were often changing over time now traditional theological teaching at this time was that whenever the creation occurred God created everything in its present form all at once in one moment clearly evolutionary theory went against that teaching secondly even more horrifying to many people in the Victorian world was Darwin's claim that we human beings actually evolved out of lower forms of life and most people not only couldn't get their brains around that but they just totally totally were scandalized by that notion because it ran counter to all of our religious and philosophical traditions in the west and one might argue beyond the west but I'm confining myself to the West here because that's what we're dealing with okay so what do Darwin actually say well let's look open your book Let's look the very beginning of the origin of the species by the way you know Darwin's one of those interesting figures whom everybody's got some opinion about or at least a lot of people have some idea or opinion about how many people have actually read Darwin Darwin's a very very interesting writer and very interesting thinker I have in the past taught of course in the literature of Science in which what I've taught are all scientific writings and looked at them with the eye of a literary critic and it's very interesting you know Darwin was a a very very complex and interesting writer as well as thinker we will now discuss in a little more detail than he had you know up to this point we're we're actually beginning in the middle of the work the struggle for existence nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for Life Universal struggle for life okay each individual species is struggling to stay alive and in some cases it's struggling with other species in its effort to stay alive this is not the kind of world that many people wanted to Envision this is a world that in the words of the poet Alfred Lord Tennison was a nature red in tooth and Claw and we'll see with what consequences for many people in the Victorian age so nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life or more difficult at least I have found it so than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind unless it be thoroughly ingrained in the mind the whole economy of nature with every fact on distribution Rarity abundance Extinction and variation will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood we behold the face of nature bright with gladness remember Wordsworth we often see super abundance of food we do not see or we forget that the birds which are idly singing around us mostly live on insects or seeds and are thus constantly destroying life or we forget how largely these songsters or their eggs or their nestlings are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey we do not always bear in mind that though food may be now super abundant it is not not so at all seasons of each recurring year and so he goes on I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense that's interesting that just absolutely knocked me off my pins when I first read Darwin saying not only here that he's using some of his terms in a metaphorical sense but later on in the Descent of Man when he talks about natural selection he said you know I don't understand what the fuss is about because people are taking literally my understanding of natural selection when I really meant that as a metaphor and you go a metaphor my God what is he talking about it's an interesting guy so I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another and including which is more important not only the life of the individual but success in leaving progyny two canine animals in a time of Dar may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live and he goes on and on and on and on with that sort of thing okay now you can imagine how there were certain people who took over this kind of thinking and applied it to society applied it to society and the functioning of social systems so that what what Darwin is ultimately going to be working towards here is his his theory that there is survival of the fittest you know the famous phrase the survival of the fittest so that those who are most fit are those species which can adapt to altered circumstances especially endangering circumstances and are most fit to do that adapting and therefore they survive now there were people in the 19th century and of course this is carried on through the 20th century down to our own who applied that kind of thinking to society and came up with what is called if we can go to the tablet please see if we can do this okay social Darwinism and social Darwinism holds that people thrown into social conflict in which everybody is competing for everybody else with everybody else and there may even be uh somewhat limited resources that those who are fittest to survive will not only survive but Thrive so that the reason why there are some people who are more wealthy than others let's say is that they are more fit to adapt to the economic realities of the social environment than those people who have much less in terms of spendable income or perhaps very little at all and notice that where this really gets harsh is when you begin to talk about people who are living in poverty social Darwinism would hold that the reason why poor people are poor is that that is simply of the very nature of things you see that there are simply people who don't have the skills or the abilities to give them the kind of Fitness to survive and to flourish that others do so uh notice that that leads to a very kind of harsh social system and a very unforgiving kind of social system uh and that has been at different times in the 19th and 20th centuries uh a political force in one country or part of the world or another okay let's move over a little bit to The Descent of Man the selection we have from The Descent of Man I want to draw your attention to two passages this is far along in the work where we begin and what he's doing fortunately for us is providing us with a summary of the argument a brief summary will here be sufficient to recall to the reader mind the more Salient points in this work many of the views which have been Advanced are highly speculative and some no doubt will prove erroneous but I have in every case given the reasons which have led me to one view rather than to another it seemed worthwhile notice he's establishing his scientific method and The credibility of his scientific approach to the problems he has dealt with it seemed worthwhile to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man Natural History meaning the physical history as distinguished from something like say political history or social history and so on false facts are highly in urious to the progress of science for they often long endure but false views if supported by some evidence do little harm as everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness and when this is done one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened okay so notice that this serves a rhetorical function this opening paragraph in which he's establishing not only the credibility of his method as a scientist but in a larger sense his credibility as a scientist the main conclusion arrived at in this work and now held by many naturalists naturalist was the 19th century word for scientist who are well competent to form a sound judgment is that man is descended from some less highly organized form from some less highly organized form now remember that this work was done about 12 years after the origin of the species so the origin of the species had been around and uh at least people in the scientific Community were were quite familiar with it and had an an opportunity to think about it to talk about it to argue about it to test some of the evidence to uh question some of the arguments in that work and this is what he says now has happened the grounds upon which this conclusion rests Will Never Be Shaken for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development as well as in innumerable Point points of structure and Constitution both of high and of the most trifling importance the rudiments which he retains and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally liable are facts which cannot be disputed by the way no scientist would write a sentence like that nowadays uh but Darwin like everybody else in his time had a literary education I mean you would have a literary education based on the classics whether you ultimately went into business or science or you know whatever they have long been known but until recently they told us nothing with respect to the origin of man now when viewed by the light of our knowledge of the whole organic World little presumptuous uh as we would now say but the whole organic world at least as it was understood In Darwin's time their meaning is unmistakable the great principle of evolution stands up clear and firm when these groups of facts are considered in connection with others such as the mutual affinities of the members of the same group their geographical distribution in past and present times and their geological succession it is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely he who is not content to look like a Savage like a Savage in other words anybody who doesn't agree with me is not going to look at facts like a scientist but rather like a Savage he who is not content to look like a Savage at the phenomena of nature as disconnected cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate Act of Creation remember that's what I said earlier the belief that that human beings were created separately from other species and that all species were created at once as separate and distinct species by God he will be forced to admit that the close resemblance of the embryo of man to that for instance of a dog the construction of his skull Limbs and whole frame independently of the uses to which the parts may be put on the same plan with that of other mammals the occasional appearance of various structures for instance of several distinct muscles which man does not normally possess but which are common to the quadrumana and a crowd of analogous fact acts all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the Cesc with other mammals of a common progenitor now what does that cause mean you see that we we human beings are cescs with other mammals from a common progenitor okay now that's a a very very very striking claim well uh let's turn over a page or so and look at his conclusion this is the the final two paragraphs the main conclusion arrived at in this work namely that man is descended from some lowly organized form will I regret to think be highly distasteful to many persons the astonishment he's going to now give a personal anecdote by the way about his own experience we're going to come back to this later on the astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of fans you know he went to Tiara Del fego which is where is that yeah where where in southern yeah it's way down yeah yeah southern tip yeah um okay uh the astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of fans on a wild and broken Shore will never be forgotten by me for the reflection that once rushed into my mind such were our ancestors this goes back to an earlier idea that you find in the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century that there are different races of human beings which really amounted to different subspecies and that some were more advanced or less advanced than others and that was a very commonly held idea even among scientists in the 19th century and of course among some on into the 20th century and was used by the way to justify all kinds of of racist oppression and so forth for the reflection at once rushed into my mind such were our ancestors see it's not you know these are my cousins these are my ancestors this is the stage out of which I now have evolved into a higher order of being these men were absolutely naked and bedbed with paint their long hair was Tangled their mouths frothed with excitement and their expression was wild startled and distrustful you know you wonder if you ever talked to any of them you know I mean did he learn that language did he try to find out what they thought you know what kinds of ideas they had or what kinds of stories they told what kinds of beliefs they had they possessed hardly any arts and like wild animals lived on what they could catch they had no government and were merciless to everyone not of their own small tribe he who is seen a Savage in his native land will not feel much shame if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature Flows In His veins a Savage in his native land okay for my own part I would ass soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper or from that Old baboon who descending from the mountains carried away in Triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs as from a Savage who Delights to torture his enemies offers up bloody sacrifices practices infanticide without remorse treats his wives like slaves knows no decency and is haunted by the grossest superstitions man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen though not through his own exertions to the very Summit of the organic scale and the fact of his having thus risen instead of having been aboriginally placed there may give him hopes for a still higher Destiny in the distant future I mean after all why should we think that evolution is going to stop here I mean there's absolutely no basis whatsoever you know I mean if if evolution is what God here to this point why should we conclude that evolution is now going to stop that we've reached the end point but we are not here concerned with hopes or fears only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it I have given the be the evidence to the best of my ability and we must acknowledge as it seems to me that man with all his Noble qualities with sympathy which he feels for the most debased with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature with his Godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and Constitution of the solar system with all these exalted Powers man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin well okay Darwin uh very very interesting guy okay let's see what kind of debate did this actually inspire in the 19th century the next selection we have in our text is from Leonard Huxley who was the son of the great Thomas Henry Huxley who was a scholar and scientist biologist by the way and and man of letters or person of letters uh in the 19th century and a uh a great intellectual and thinker and somebody who had tremendous influence through his writings in the latter part of the 19th century and on into the early part of the 20th century uh there's a whole line of Huxley by the way who have been very distinguished writers and thinkers and scientists and so forth in England okay here's Thomas Henry Huxley um and his son because there were only some newspaper accounts and so forth and no doubt his father's Reflections to work with his son had undertaken to write a biography of his famous father and Huxley was very very famous in his time and talks in particular about a meeting that took place in the University of Oxford in 1860 now this would have been very shortly after the publication of the origin of the species and in this debate there clearly are going to be those who are arguing on behalf of Darwin and Darwin's findings and Darwin's theories and there are going to be those who will argue against and those who were arguing against in particular were doing so on religious grounds and so after some initial speakers this huge crowd that had packed into a room uh so that it was really almost suffocating was demanding that the principls get up and address the crowd and so Bishop Wilber Force who was very very well known at his time a a great ecclesiastical orator and a great rhetorician and a great defender of traditional religious beliefs Bishop Wilberforce got up and let's see what he had to say this is about two pages into the uh into the work the bishop spoke for full half an hour with inimitable Spirit emptiness and unfairness okay isn't that interesting spoke for full half an hour with inimitable spirit and then we're expecting something else and what follows emptiness and unfairness in a light scoffing tone fluid and fluent he assured us that there was nothing in the idea of evolution Rock pigeons were what rock pigeons had always been then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence he begged to know was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey this was the Fatal mistake of his speech Huxley instantly grasped the Tactical Advantage which The Descent to personalities gave him descent to personalities the odd homonym attack everybody knows what I'm talking about with that right you don't know what I'm talking about okay well let's go back to the tablet please are we back to the tablet okay great okay there there are various things that are called fallacies in argument okay fallacious forms of read reasoning one of them is the attack or argument Odum anybody know what that means OD hominum against the man against the person against a person okay so if you attack the person rather than the deal with the issue that is an odd homonym attack sounds familiar doesn't it in uh a time of political elections odd hominum attacks flying everywhere well okay um so that's what happens here this was the Fatal mistake of his speech Huxley instantly grasped the Tactical Advantage which The Descent to personalities gave him he turned to Sir Benjamin Brody who was sitting beside him and emphatically striking his hand upon his knee exclaimed the Lord hath delivered him into mine hands the bearing of the exclamation did not dawn upon sir Benjamin until after Huxley had completed his forcible and eloquent answer to the scientific part of The Bishop's argument and proceeded to make his famous retort see first first of all what Huxley did was he went through the scientific part of The Bishop's presentation and simply showed where he was wrong I mean the bishop did not know his science and holey did and then he proceeded to make his famous report retort on this continues the writer in McMillan's magazine Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose a slight tall figure Stern and pale very quiet and very grave he stood before us and spoke those tremendous Words Words which no one seem sure of now nor I think could remember just after they were spoken for their meaning took away our breath though it left us in no doubt as to what it was he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth no one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous one lady fainted and had to be carried out I for one jumped out of my seat and of course you know what happened as a consequence is that the people who were there regarded Huxley as having totally defeated wilburforce in this debate and uh Huxley went on by the way to become such an advocate of darwinian theory and darwinian science that he came to be nicknamed Darwin's Bulldog Darwin's Bulldog well okay um I said that this kind of thing continued for a very long time well think about the famous Scopes trial in the United States when Scopes a biology teacher in high school in a town in Tennessee was not only fired by the uh the school board for teaching the theory of evolution in his classroom but then there was the famous trial court trial in which Clarence Darrow was the uh the person who presented the case for Scopes and of course did an absolutely brilliant brilliant brilliant job and um so think about uh the fact that there are people even today who go to Schoolboard meetings or to the uh the Board of Education in Austin and who argue against having science textbooks which uh uh present the theory of evolution okay yeah or or who or who argue at the very least that if you're going to have Evolution presented in the textbook you also have the traditional religious Christian interpretation of creation and in the biblical story of creation presented side by side with the theory of evolution so what I'm saying is that the debate is not really over but it's a debate that that continues at least in some quarters down to the present time and it's not confined to the question of evolution alone but we could extend that to other areas of science as well so okay let's move right along here to talk about the second one of our major topics industrialism progress or decline well one of the principal texts that we have here is by Thomas babington mcau who is a very very famous uh writer of of and thinker of the Victorian period and he wrote a review of a book in which he was going to be arguing counter to the argument in the book under review he was going to be arguing in effect that all is well with the world that we were on track that the Industrial Revolution was bringing all of the greatest of benefits to humankind and that we could look forward to unlimited progress in the future okay essentially through the system of industrial capitalism and some of his arguments of course one still can hear today okay uh turn over about three pages into the work I say that only because I know people are dealing with different editions if you have the uh the seventh edition which is the one I'm using right now uh this is on page 1700 okay it is not strange that differing so widely from Mr Sai Sai by the way was a romantic poet and in the book that mcau was reviewing s he had been arguing as other Romantics often had been arguing that industrialization and urbanization were really destroying our world and that we would be better to roll back history to an earlier time it is not strange that differing so widely from Mr syi as to the Past progress of society we should differ from him also as to its probable Destiny he thinks that to all outward appearance the country is hastening to destruction but he be he relies firmly on the goodness of God we do not see either the piety or the rationality of th confidently expecting that the Supreme Being will interfere to disturb the common succession of causes and effects we too rely on his goodness on his goodness as manifested not in extraordinary interpositions but in those general laws which it has pleased him to establish in the physical and in the moral world see what he's doing is he's going to be arguing from religion know from the goodness of God's order and design we rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth and on the natural tendency of society to Improvement well now isn't that interesting the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth and on the natural tendency of society to Improvement well I mean would we necessarily agree with mcau that these are natural that is to say that it's of the very nature of human beings to tend in these ways we know no well authenticated instance of a people which is decidedly retrograded in Civilization and prosperity except from the influence of violent and terrible calamities such as those which laid the Roman Empire in Ruins or those about the beginning of the 16th century which Des ol ated Italy we know of No Country which at the end of 50 years of peace and tolerably good government has been less prosperous than at the beginning of that period And so what he's going to be arguing for is that progress is something that is going to be directed by the Divine hand and therefore it must be essentially good so look at the next paragraph history is full of the signs of this natural progress of society we see in almost every part of the anals of mankind how the industry of individuals struggling up against Wars taxes famines conflagrations mischievous prohibitions and more mischievous protections creates faster than government can squander and repairs whatever Invaders can destroy we see The Wealth of Nations increasing and all the Arts of Life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection in spite of the grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers well that's a very very optimistic view of History isn't it and then look at the last paragraph it is not by the intermeddling of Mr sai's Idol the omniscient and omnipotent state but by the prudence and energy of the people that England has hitherto been carried forward in Civilization and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope our rulers will best promote the Improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties by leaving Capital to find its most lucrative course Commodities their fair price industry and intelligence their natural reward idleness and Folly their natural punishment by maintaining Peace by defending property by diminishing the price of Law and by observing strict economy in every Department of the state let the government do this the people will assuredly do the rest well if you were wondering where that kind of thinking came from it came from people like Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations at the end of the 18th century and it was promoted by people like Thomas babington mcau in very famous uh Publications such as the one that we have just been reading but this is a kind of thinking and a kind of rhetoric that is still very very much with us today and uh as a matter of fact all you have to do is turn on the television set and you can you can hear these same phrases you know coming out of the mouths of some of our some of our political leaders okay well let's take a break now and then we'll come back to the critique e e for

Literature_Lectures

19_The_New_Historicism.txt

Prof: So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that I'll turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere. It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen Greenblatt, whose brief essay you've read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, called Representations--always has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. It's a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called "Renaissance." The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term "Renaissance" with the term "Early Modern." Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that I'm not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think it's fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That age--the emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the United States-- has been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly influenced by this approach. When we discuss Jerome McGann's essay, you'll see how it influences Romantic studies. Now the New Historicism was--and this probably accounts for its remarkable popularity and influence in the period roughly from the late seventies through the early nineties-- was a response to an increasing sense of ethical failure in the isolation of the text as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms of literary study. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction, and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among scholars, especially younger scholars, that somehow or another, especially in response to pressing concerns-- post-Vietnam, concerns with globalization, concerns with the distribution of power and global capital-- all of these concerns inspired what one can only call a guilt complex in academic literary scholarship and led to a "return to history." It was felt that a kind of ethical tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by modes of analysis in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central. I have to say that in debates of this kind there's always a considerable amount of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways it's not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about history and undertook to orient the techniques of deconstruction to an understanding of history, just to give one example. The New Historicism, on the other hand, evinced a preoccupation with issues of form and textual integrity that certainly followed from the disciplines, the approaches, that preceded them. Also to a large degree--and this is, of course, true of a good many other approaches that we're about to investigate, approaches based in questions of identity also-- to a large degree, appropriated the language of the generation of the deconstructionists and, to a certain extent, certain underlying structuralist ideas having to do with the binary relationship between self and other, and binary relationships among social entities, as opposed to linguistic entities; but still, as I say, essentially inheriting the structure of thought of preceding approaches. So, as I say, it was in a polemical atmosphere and at a moment of widespread self-doubt in the academic literary profession that the New Historicism came into its own-- a response, as I say, to the isolation of the text by certain techniques and approaches to it. Now very quickly: the method of New Historical analysis fell into a pattern, a very engaging one, one that's wonderfully exemplified by the brief introduction of Greenblatt that I have asked you to read: a pattern of beginning with an anecdote, often rather far afield, at least apparently rather far afield, from the literary issues that are eventually turned to in the argument of a given essay. For example: a dusty miller was walking down the road, thinking about nothing in particular, when he encountered a bailiff, then certain legal issues arise, and somehow or another the next thing you know we're talking about King Lear. This rather marvelous, oblique way into literary topics was owing to the brilliance in handling it of Greenblatt, in particular, and Louis Montrose and some of his colleagues. This technique became a kind of a hallmark of the New Historicism. In the long run, of course, it was easy enough to parody it. It has been subjected to parody and, in a certain sense, has been modified and chastened by the prevalence of parody; but it nevertheless, I think, shows you something about the way New Historicist thinking works. The New Historicism is interested, following Foucault--and Foucault is the primary influence on the New Historicism. I won't say as much about this today as I might feel obliged to say if I weren't soon be going to return to Foucault in the context of gender studies, when we take up Foucault and Judith Butler together-- but I will say briefly that Foucault's writing, especially his later writing, is about the pervasiveness, the circulation through social orders, of what he calls "power." Now power is not just--or, in many cases in Foucault, not even primarily-- the power of vested authorities, the power of violence, or the power of tyranny from above. Power in Foucault--though it can be those things and frequently is-- is much more pervasively and also insidiously the way in which knowledge circulates in a culture: that is to say, the way in which what we think, what we think that it is appropriate to think-- acceptable thinking--is distributed by largely unseen forces in a social network or a social system. Power, in other words, in Foucault is in a certain sense knowledge, or to put it another way, it is the explanation of how certain forms of knowledge come to exist-- knowledge, by the way, not necessarily of something that's true. Certain forms of knowledge come to exist in certain places. So all of this is central to the work of Foucault and is carried over by the New Historicists; hence the interest for them of the anecdotes. Start as far afield as you can imaginably start from what you will finally be talking about, which is probably some textual or thematic issue in Shakespeare or in the Elizabethan masque or whatever the case may be. Start as far afield as you possibly can from that, precisely in order to show the pervasiveness of a certain kind of thinking, the pervasiveness of a certain social constraint or limitation on freedom. If you can show how pervasive it is, you reinforce and justify the Foucauldian idea that power is, as I've said, an insidious and ubiquitous mode of circulating knowledge. All of this is implicit, sometimes explicit, in New Historicist approaches to what they do. So as I said, Foucault is the crucial antecedent and of course, when it's a question of Foucault, literature as we want to conceive of it-- perhaps generically or as a particular kind of utterance as opposed to other kinds-- does tend to collapse back into the broader or more general notion of discourse, because it's by means of discourse that power circulates knowledge. Once again, despite the fact that New Historicism wants to return us to the real world, it nevertheless acknowledges that that return is language bound. It is by means of language that the real world shapes itself. That's why for the New Historicist-- and by this means, I'll turn in a moment to the marvelous anecdote with which Greenblatt begins the brief essay that I've asked you to read-- that's why the New Historicist lays such intense emphasis on the idea that the relationship between discourse-- call it literature if you like, you might as well-- and history is reciprocal. Yes, history conditions what literature can say in a given epoch. History is an important way of understanding the valency of certain kinds of utterance at certain times. In other words, history is--as it's traditionally thought to be by the Old Historicism, and I'll get to that in a minute--history is a background to discourse or literature. But by the same token there is an agency, that is to say a capacity, to circulate power in discourse in turn. Call it "literature": "I am Richard II, know you not that?" says Queen Elizabeth when at the time of the threatened Essex Uprising she gets wind of the fact that Shakespeare's Richard II is being performed, as she believes, in the public streets and in private houses. In other words, wherever there is sedition, wherever there are people who want to overthrow her and replace her with the Earl of Essex, the pretender to the throne, Richard II is being performed. Well, now this is terrifying to Queen Elizabeth because she knows-- she's a supporter of the theater--she knows that Richard II is about a king who has many virtues but a certain weakness, a political weakness and also a weakness of temperament-- the kind of weakness that makes him sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings, that kind of weakness, who is then usurped by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV, introducing a whole new dynasty and focus of the royal family in England. Queen Elizabeth says, "They're staging this play because they're trying to compare me with Richard II in preparation for deposing me, and who knows what else they might do to me?" This is a matter of great concern. In other words, literature--Fredric Jameson says "history hurts"--literature hurts, too. > Literature, in other words, has a discursive agency that affects history every bit as much as history affects literature: literature "out there," and theater-- especially if it escapes the confines of the playhouse because, as Greenblatt argues, the playhouse has a certain mediatory effect which defuses the possibilities of sedition. One views literary representation in the playhouse with a certain objectivity, perhaps, that is absent altogether when interested parties take up the same text and stage it precisely for the purpose of fomenting rebellion. Literature, especially when escaped from its conventional confines, becomes a very, very dangerous or positive influence, depending on your point of view on the course of history. So the relationship between history and discourse is reciprocal. Greenblatt wants to argue with a tremendous amount of stress and, I think, effectiveness that the New Historicism differs from the Old Historicism. This is on page 1443 in the right-hand column. John Dover Wilson, a traditional Shakespeare scholar and a very important one, is the spokesperson in Greenblatt's scenario for the Old Historicism. The view I'm about to quote is that of John Dover Wilson, a kind of consensus about the relationship between literature and history: Modern historical scholarship [meaning Old Historicism] has assured Elizabeth > that she had [this is the right-hand column about two thirds of the way down] > nothing to worry about: Richard II is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the deposition of the legitimate king as a "sacrilegious" act that drags the country down into "the abyss of chaos"; "that Shakespeare and his audience regarded Bolingbroke as a usurper," declares J. Dover Wilson, "is incontestable." But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure… Greenblatt wins. It's a wonderful example. It's the genius of Greenblatt to choose examples that are so telling and so incontrovertible. We know Queen Elizabeth was scared > on this occasion, which makes it quite simply the case that John Dover Wilson was wrong to suppose that Richard II was no threat to her. It's not at all the point that a broad, ideological view of Richard II was any different from what Wilson said; that was perfectly true. Bolingbroke was considered a usurper. It was considered tragic that Richard II was deposed; but that doesn't mean that the text can't be taken over, commandeered and made subversive. Wilson doesn't acknowledge this because his view of the relationship between history and literature is only that history influences literature, not that the influence can be reciprocal. You see, that's how it is that the New Historicism wants to define itself over and against the Old Historicism. If there is a political or ideological consensus about the legitimacy of monarchy, the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of succession under the sanction of the Church of England and all the rest of it-- all of which is anachronistic when you're thinking about these history plays-- if there is this broad consensus, that's it, that's what the play means according to the Old Historicism, even though plainly you can take the plot of the play and completely invert those values, which is what the Essex faction does in staging it in those places where Queen Elizabeth suspects that it's being staged. Okay. Now another way in which the Old Historicism and the New Historicism differ-- correctly, I think-- according to Greenblatt is that in the Old Historicism there is no question-- I'm looking at page 1444, the right-hand column about a third of the way down-- of the role of the historian's own subjectivity. "It is not thought," says Greenblatt, "to be the product of the historian's interpretation…" History is just what is. One views it objectively and that's that. Now notice here that we're back with Gadamer. Remember that this was Gadamer's accusation of historicism, the belief of historicism--what Greenblatt calls the Old Historicism-- that we can bracket out our own historical horizon and that we can eliminate all of our own historical prejudices in order to understand the past objectively in and for itself. This is not the case, said Gadamer, remember. Gadamer said that interpretation must necessarily involve the merger of horizons, the horizon of the other and my own horizon as an interpreter. I cannot bracket out my own subjectivity. Okay. If that's the case, then Gadamer anticipates Greenblatt in saying that the naïveté of the Old Historicism is its supposition that it has no vested interest in what it's talking about-- that is to say, its supposition that it wants history to accord in one way or another with its own preconceptions, but isn't aware of it. The anecdote--again, wonderfully placed in the polemical argument-- that after all, John Dover Wilson delivered himself of these opinions about Richard II before a group of scholars in Germany in 1939 is, after all, rather interesting. Hitler is about to be the Bolingbroke of Germany. John Dover Wilson wants his audience to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Stick with vested authority. > You have a weak democracy, but it is a democracy. Don't let it get away from you." And so he is speaking, the horse already having escaped from the barn, in this reassuring way about German politics as a means of sort of reinforcing his own view of the politics of Elizabethan England. But this, Greenblatt supposes, is something about which he has very little self-consciousness. That is to say, his own interest, as of course it should be on this occasion, is in the preservation of vested authority, and his own interest then folds back into his understanding of Elizabethan ideology in such a way that it can conform to that interest. He has, in other words, as we say today, a hidden agenda and is very little aware of it, unlike the New Historicist who, following Gadamer in this respect, is fully cognizant of the subjective investment that leads to a choice of interest in materials, a way of thinking about those materials, and a means of bringing them to life for us today and into focus. In other words, it's okay for Greenblatt, as it was for Gadamer--much to the horror of E. D. Hirsch--to find the significance of a text, as opposed to the meaning of a text. The significance of the text is that it has certain kinds of power invested in it. Those kinds of power are still of interest to us today, still of relevance to what's going on in our own world. All of this is taken up openly as a matter of self-consciousness by the New Historicists in ways that, according to Greenblatt and his colleagues, were not available consciously in the older Historicism. Now the world as the New Historicism sees it-- and after I've said this, I'll turn to McGann-- is essentially a dynamic interplay of power, networks of power, and subversion: that is to say, modes of challenging those networks even within the authoritative texts that generate positions of power. The Elizabethan masque, for example, which stages the relation of court to courtier, to visitor, to hanger-on in wonderfully orchestrated ways, is a means--because it's kind of poly-vocal-- of containing within its structure elements of subversion, according to the argument that's made about these things: the same with court ritual itself, the same with the happenstance that takes place once a year in early modern England, in which the Lord of Misrule is so denominated and ordinary authority is turned on its ear for one day. Queen for a day, as it were, is something that is available to any citizen once a year. These are all ways of defusing what they, in fact, bring into visibility and consciousness-- mainly the existence, perhaps the inevitable existence, of subversion with respect to structures and circulatory systems of power. It's this relationship between power and subversion that the New Historicism, especially in taking up issues of the Early Modern period, tends to focus on and to specialize in. Now it's not wholly clear that Jerome McGann has ever really thought of himself as a New Historicist. He has been so designated by others, but I think there is one rather important difference in emphasis, at least between what he's doing and what Greenblatt and his colleagues do in the Early Modern period. McGann doesn't really so much stress the reciprocity of history and discourse. He is interested in the presence of history, the presence of immediate social and also personal circumstances in the history of a text. His primary concern is with--at least in this essay--textual scholarship. He himself is the editor of the new standard works of Byron. He has also done a standard works of Swinburne, and he has been a vocal and colorful spokesperson of a certain point of view within the recondite debates of textual scholarship: whether textual scholarship ought to produce a text that's an amalgam of a variety of available manuscripts and printed texts; whether the text it produces ought to be the last and best thoughts of the author-- that's the position that McGann seems to be taking in this essay-- or whether the text, on the contrary, ought to be the first burst of inspiration of the author. All the people who prefer the earliest versions of Wordsworth's Prelude, for example, would favor that last point of view. In other words, McGann is making a contribution here not least to the debates surrounding editing and the production of authoritative scholarly texts. It's in that context that the remarks he's making about Keats have to be understood. I think the primary influence on McGann is not so much Foucault, then, with the sense of the circulation of power back and forth between history and literary discourse, as it is Bakhtin, whom he quotes on pages eighteen and nineteen; or whose influence he cites, I should say rather, in a way that, I think, does pervade what you encounter in reading what he then goes on to say at the bottom of page eighteen in the copy center reader: What follows [says McGann] is a summary and extrapolation of certain key ideas set forth by the so-called Bakhtin School of criticism, a small group of Marxist critics from the Soviet Union who made an early attack upon formalist approaches to poetry [just as he, McGann, is, and as the New Historicists are themselves, in their turn, doing]. The Bakhtin School's socio-historical method approaches all language utterances-- including poems--as phenomena marked with their concrete origins and history. That is to say, phenomena voiced by the material circumstances that produce them or phenomena, in other words, in which the voice of the Romantic solitary individual is not really that voice at all, but is rather the polyglossal infusion of a variety of perspectives, including ideological perspectives, shaping that particular utterance and also, in the case of the textual scholar, shaping which of a variety of manuscripts will be chosen for publication and for central attention in the tradition of the reception of a given text. So all of this McGann takes to be derived from Bakhtin rather than from Foucault. I do think that's a significant difference between our two authors. Now McGann's most important contribution to the return to history of the seventies and eighties is a short book called The Romantic Ideology, and this book--well, what it is is an attack on Romanticism. At least it's an attack on certain widely understood and received ideas about Romanticism-- ideas with which, by the way, I don't agree, but this course isn't about me. The Romantic Ideology is an amalgam of two titles. One of them is the important early critique of Romanticism by the German poet and sometime Romantic Heinrich Heine called Die romantische Schule, or The Romantic School, in which the subjectivity, even solipsism, and the isolation from social concern and from unfolding historical processes of the Romantic poets is emphasized and criticized. In addition to that--that's where the word "Romantic" comes from in the title The Romantic Ideology-- the other title that it amalgamates is Marx's book The German Ideology, which is about many things but is in particular about Lumpenproletariat intellectuals who think with Hegel-- still following Hegel despite believing themselves to be progressive-- who think with Hegel that thought produces material circumstances rather than the other way around: in other words people, in short, who are idealists and therefore, under this indictment, also Romantic. McGann's title, as I say, cleverly amalgamates these two other titles and sets the agenda for this short book, which is an attack not just on Romanticism but on what he believes to be our continued tendency still to be "in" Romanticism, still to be Romantic. There his particular object of attack is the so-called Yale school, which is still under attack in the essay that you've read for today. Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman's well-known essay on Keats's "To Autumn" are singled out for particular scorn and dispraise, all sort of on the grounds that yes, it's all very well to read Romanticism, to come to understand it, and even to be fascinated by it; but we can't be Romantic. In other words, our reading of Romanticism-- if we are to be social animals, politically engaged, and invested in the world as a social community-- must necessarily be an anti-Romantic critique. This is, as I say, still essentially the position taken up by McGann. All right. So I've explained the ways in which he differs from Greenblatt in leaning more toward Bakhtin than toward Foucault. I have explained that McGann is engaged primarily in talking about issues of textual scholarship in this particular essay, that he defends Keats's last deliberate choices, that he believes the so-called "indicator" text of 1820 of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is Keats's last deliberate choice, as opposed to the 1848 text published by Monckton Milnes in the edition of Keats's poems that he brought out at that time. Now I think that in the time remaining to sort of linger over McGann, I do want to say a few things about what he says about Keats. I want to emphasize that his general pronouncements about the historicity of texts, about the permeation of texts by the circumstances of their production, their conditioning by ideological factors, is unimpeachable. It seems to me that this is a necessary approach at least to have in mind if not, perhaps, necessarily to emphasize in one's own work of literary scholarship. The idea that a text just falls from a tree--if anybody ever had that idea, by the way > --is plainly not a tenable one, and the opposite idea that a text emerges from a complex matrix of social and historical circumstances is certainly a good one. So if one is to criticize, again it's not a question of criticizing his basic pronouncements. It seems to me nothing could be said really against them. The trouble is that in the case of McGann-- who is a terrific, prominent Romantic scholar with whom one, I suppose, hesitates to disagree--everything he says about the text that he isolates for attention in this essay is simply, consistently, wrong. It's almost as if by compulsion that he says things that are wrong about these texts, and the reason I asked you in my e-mail last night to take a look at them, if you get a chance, is so that these few remarks that I make now might have some substance. Take for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." In the first place, who says we only read the 1848 text? A scholarly edition--and his main object of attack is Jack Stillinger's scholarly edition of Keats--gives you basically a variorum apparatus. Yeah, maybe it gives you a particular text in bold print, but it gives you the variant text in smaller print in a footnote. It doesn't withhold the variant text from you. It says, "No, look, there's this too. Take your choice." Really the atmosphere of a variorum scholarly edition is an atmosphere of take your choice, not a kind of tyrannical imposition on the public of a particular version of the text. Everybody knows the 1820 Indicator text. "What can ail thee, wretched wight?" is at least as familiar to me, as a Romanticist, as "What can ail thee, knight at arms?" the way in which the 1848 text begins; and frankly how many people who aren't Romanticists know anything about either text? What are we talking about here? > The Romanticists know what's going on. They're not in any way hornswoggled by this historical conspiracy against the 1820 indicator text, and people who aren't Romanticists don't care. That's what it comes down to; but, if it's not enough simply to say that, turning to the question of which text is better--well, it's hard to say which text is better. McGann's argument is that the 1820 version is better because it's a poem about a guy and a girl who sort of meet, and the next thing you know they're having sex and that doesn't turn out so well. In other words, it's about the real world. These things happen. It's not a romance, whereas the "What can ail thee, wretched knight?" in the 1848 version--and all of its other variants, the "kisses four" and so on-- the 1848 version is a kind of unselfconscious-- in McGann's view--romance subscribing to certain medieval ideas about women, simultaneously putting them on a pedestal and fearing, at the same time, that they're invested with a kind of black magic which destroys the souls and dissipates the sap of deserving young gentlemen: all of this is ideologically programmed, according to McGann, in the 1848 version. Why? Because Charles Brown behaved despicably toward women, he didn't like Fanny Brawne, and because Monckton Milnes, the actual editor of the 1848 edition, loved pornography and was a big collector of erotica. So that's why the 1848 text with its fear of and denigration of women, in contrast to the 1820 text, is inferior. Well, two things: first of all, who's to say the 1848 text wasn't Keats's last thoughts? In other words, yes, he was already ill when the Indicator text was published in 1820. It is pretty close to the end of his ability to think clearly about his own work and to worry very much about the forms in which it was published, but at the same time we don't know when Brown received his version of the text. We can't suppose, as McGann more than half implies, that Brown just sort of sat down and rewrote it. > Nobody has ever really said that, and if he didn't rewrite it, then Keats must have given it to him in that form. Who's to say that wasn't his last and best thoughts? Who's to say Keats didn't really want to write a poem of this kind? After all, the title, taken from a medieval ballad by Alain Chartier, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," bears out the "What can ail thee, knight at arms?" version. It's about a Morgan Le Fay-type. For better or worse, whatever we think of that ideologically, it is about, if the title is right, the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1848 version, as opposed to the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1820 version. So the 1848 version is simply more consistent with the title. That's one point to be made, but the additional point to be made is that taking advantage of the New Historicist acknowledgement that one's own subjectivity, one's own historical horizon, is properly in play in thinking about these things, McGann is then able to infuse Keats's text and therefore Keats's intentions with a pleasing political correctness. That is to say, Keats can't possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. By the way, everything-- I like Keats, but everything in his letters suggests that he did-- but back to McGann: Keats can't possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. Therefore, the 1820 text is the text that he intended and preferred. Okay. That, of course, makes Keats more consistent with our own standards and our own view of the relations between the sexes, but does it, in other words, make sense vis-à-vis the Keats whom we know and, despite his weaknesses and shortcomings, love? There is a great deal, in other words, to be said over against McGann's assertions about this textual issue, not necessarily in defense of the 1848 text but agnostically with respect to the two of them, saying, "Yeah, we'd better have both of them. We'd better put them side-by-side. We'd better read them together; but if by some fiat the 1820 were somehow subsequently preferred to the 1848, that would be every bit as much of an historical misfortune as the preference, insofar as it has actually existed, of the 1848 or the 1820." I think that's the perspective one wants to take. Now I was going to talk about "To Autumn." I'll only say about his reading of "To Autumn" that McGann, who doesn't seem to like the poem very much-- he likes "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," so he makes it politically correct. He doesn't like "To Autumn" because he thinks that "Autumn" was published in collusion with Keats's conservative friends in the Poems of 1820, which bowdlerized everything he had to say of a progressive political nature. He thinks that "To Autumn" is a big sellout, in other words, and that yes, 1819 happened to be a year of good harvest, and so Keats turns that year of good harvest into something permanent, into a kind of cloud cuckoo-land in which the fruit falls into your basket and the fish jump into your net and everything is just perfect. Well, do you think the poem is really like that? You've read the third stanza, which McGann totally ignores apart from "Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?" In other words, he gives you the opening but he doesn't give you any sense of the rest of the stanza, because for him "To Autumn" is all about the first stanza. For him, Keats seems to identify with the bees who think warm days will never cease, "for Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells." Keats is like a bee. He's all into the sensuous. Well, again just in terms of historical evidence, this is outmoded by at least eighteen months if we consult Keats's letters. He was like that early in his career, but he has had severe misgivings about a point of view which is represented in what he said in an early letter: "Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts…" That's no longer Keats's position when writing "To Autumn." Keats's position when writing "To Autumn" is the position of a guy who has a sore throat just as his tubercular brother did, who is increasingly afraid that he's going to die soon and is trying to confront mortality in writing what is in fact-- and I say "in fact" advisedly-- the most perfect lyric ever written in the English language, and which is most certainly not a celebration of sort of wandering around like an aimless bee, thinking that the autumn is perfect but that autumn is always perfect, that warm days will never cease, and that everything is just lovely in the garden. It is not that kind of poem, and it's really a travesty of it to suppose that it is simply on the grounds that it was published in the Poems of 1820 as a kind of sellout to the establishment under the advice of Keats's conservative friends. All right. So much then for McGann's remarks on Keats, which I want to say again in no way impugn or undermine the general validity of the claims that he's making about taking historical circumstances into account. Precisely, we need to take them into account and we need to get them right. That's the challenge, of course, of working with historical circumstances. You have to get it right. With that said, let me turn quickly to a review of Tony from Bakhtin to the New Historicism. I may glide over Tony according to Jameson, because we did that at the end of the last lecture, so let me go back to Bakhtin. You can see the way in which in the structure of Tony the Tow Truck the first part of the poem is absolutely saturated with the first person singular: I do this, I do that, I like my job, I am stuck-- I, I, I, I. Then as you read along through the text you see that the "I" disappears, or if it still appears, it's in the middle of a line rather than at the beginning of a line. In other words, the "I," the subjectivity, the first person singular, the sense of having a unique voice-- this is gradually subsumed by the sociality of the story as it unfolds. I am no longer "I" defined as a Romantic individual. I am "I," rather defined as a friend-- that is to say, as a person whose relation with otherness is what constitutes his identity, and in that mutuality of friendship, the first person singular disappears. What is spoken in Tony the Tow Truck, in other words, in the long run is not the voice of individual subjectivity but the voice of social togetherness, the voice of otherness. According to Jauss, the important thing about Tony the Tow Truck is that it is not the same story as The Little Engine that Could. In other words, in each generation of reception, the aesthetic standards that prevail at a given time are reconsidered and rethought, reshuffled. A new aesthetic horizon emerges, and texts are constituted in a different way, much also as the Russian formalists have said, only with the sense in Jauss of the historical imperative. The Little Engine that Could is all about the inversion of power between the little guy and the big guy, so that the little guy helps the big guy and that is unequivocal, showing, as in Isaiah in the Bible, that the valleys have been raised and the mountains have been made low. That's not the way Tony the Tow Truck works. The little guy himself needs help. He needs the help of another little guy. There is a reciprocity not dialectically between little and big, but a mutual reinforcement of little-by-little, and that is the change in aesthetic horizon that one can witness between The Little Engine that Could and Tony the Tow Truck. In Benjamin the important thing, as I think we've said, is the idea that the narrator is the apparatus. The humanization of a mechanized world, through our identification with it, is what takes place in Tony the Tow Truck. In other words, all these cars and trucks, all these smiling and frowning houses, of course, have as their common denominator their non-humanity, but the anthropomorphization of the cars and trucks and of the houses constitutes them as the human. They are precisely the human. We see things, in other words, from the point of view of the apparatus. Just as the filmgoer sees things from the point of view of the camera, so we see Tony the Tow Truck from the point of view of the tow truck, right? And what happens? Just as the camera eye point of view leaves that which is seen, as Benjamin puts it, "equipment-free"-- so, oddly enough, if we see things from the standpoint of equipment, what we look at is the moral of the story: in other words, the humanity of the story. What we see, in other words, surrounded by all of this equipment, is precisely the equipment-free human aspect of reality. So Tony the Tow Truck works in a way that is consistent with Benjamin's theory of mechanical reproduction. For Adorno, however, the acquiescence of this very figure-- the apparatus of mechanical reproduction, of towing again and again and again-- in the inequity of class relations, rejected as always by Neato and Speedy, proves that the apparatus which Benjamin's theory takes to be independent of the machinations of the culture industry, that the apparatus in turn can be suborned and commandeered by the culture industry for its own purposes. All right. I will skip over Jameson. The Old Historicist reading of Tony simply reconfirms a status quo in which virtue is clear, vice is clear, both are uncontested, and nothing changes--in other words, a status quo which reflects a stagnant, existent, unchanging social dynamic. The New Historicism in a lot of ways is doing this, but let me just conclude by suggesting that if literature influences history, Tony the Tow Truck might well explain why today we're promoting fuel-efficient cars, why the attack on the gas guzzler and the SUV or minivan-- remember the car that says "I am too busy"-- is so prevalent in the story, and why if we read today's headlines we need to get rid of the Humvee if GM is to prosper, and we need to downsize and streamline the available models. The little guys, Tony and Bumpy, reaffirm the need for fuel-efficient smaller vehicles and you can plainly see that Tony the Tow Truck is therefore a discourse that produces history. All of this, according to the prescription of Tony, is actually happening. All right. Thank you very much. One thing that needs to be said about Tony the Tow Truck is it has no women in it, and that is the issue that we'll be taking up on Thursday.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_19_Literary_Prophecy_Perspectives_on_the_Exile_Jeremiah_Ezekiel_and_2nd_Isaiah.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: I'm going to go ahead now and get started with some sixth-century material which--prophetic literature--which confronts the issues that were raised by the final destruction of Jerusalem. What was the meaning of this event and how could it be reconciled with the concept of Israel as God's elect? How could such tremendous evil and suffering be reconciled with the nature of God himself? This is going to be a question that will return in the next lecture when we look at the wisdom literature and the Book of Job, and some other texts as well as we proceed through the rest of the course. In classical terms, if God is God, then he's not good if all these terrible things happened, and if God is good then he mustn't be all powerful because he failed to prevent this evil. That tends to be the dilemma, the way it's phrased. Now, Ezekiel was a priest and he was deported in the first deportation. You remember there was a deportation of exiles in 597, and then the final siege and destruction and deportation of exiles in 587. Ezekiel was among the deportees of 597. He was therefore, in exile in Babylon during the final destruction and the fall of Jerusalem in 587, but his priestly background and his priestly interests are clearly reflected in his prophecies. He accuses the Israelites of failing to observe cultic laws, ritual laws, and his promises for the future and his vision of a restoration, we will see, center around a new temple and a restored Jerusalem and temple complex. There's a striking correspondence between Ezekiel and the priestly sources in terms of language and theme, particularly H, the Holiness code. Now, the prophecies in Ezekiel, conveniently and unlike many of the other prophetic books, actually follow a fairly chronological order. So the first section of the book consists of prophecies that were before the final destruction, between 597 and 587, and then beginning in 33, it seems we have prophecies that followed the destruction. He gets the report of the destruction, and then we see how his tone and his message changes. So in those first 24 chapters where you have prophecies that are delivered in Babylon, before the destruction, we have three chapters that are devoted to his call and his commission as a prophet. We see his inaugural vision. I'll come back and talk about that in a minute as well as many other visions and symbols. Then you have, from chapters 4 to 24, oracles that are condemning Judah and Israel. There are some interesting elements within this. We have the depiction of the kavod (which represents God) departing. We'll talk about that text in a minute. We also have, in chapter 18, a very interesting emphasis on individual responsibility for sin. We'll come back and touch on that as well. Chapters 25 to 32 contain oracles against foreign nations just as we have in Jeremiah and Isaiah. Throughout, Ezekiel refers to these nations as the uncircumcised. The tone here is vengeful and very gloating, and these oracles have exerted a very strong influence on the New Testament, particularly the Book of Revelation. After 587, Ezekiel prophesied and those prophecies are contained in the latter part of his book from chapters 33 to 48. So in 33 we hear of the fall of Jerusalem, and then after that, oracles of promise and hope for the future. The last chapters, from chapter 40 to 48 are visions: Ezekiel's visions of the restoration, his vision of a rebuilt Temple and a rebuilt Jerusalem. So the book opens with a narrative account of Ezekiel's call in about 593 or so in a Jewish community that's on the River Chebar, which is a large irrigation canal off of the Euphrates in Babylon. And this is the first time that we hear of a call of a prophet outside the land of Israel. It's a remarkable vision. Like many of the visions in the Book of Ezekiel it has a sort of surrealistic, almost hallucinatory quality. The vision itself is very reminiscent of descriptions of Baal, the Canaanite storm god. So there's a stormy wind and a huge cloud, and a flashing fire. God is riding on a kind of throne chariot. He's enthroned above four magnificent creatures. Each of these has a human body and then four faces: the face of a human, the face of a lion, the face of an ox, and the face of an eagle. There are four huge wheels under this throned-chariot, and they are said to gleam like beryl beneath a vast and awe-inspiring expanse or dome, which gleams like crystal. Above that is the semblance of a throne that is like sapphire, and on the throne was the semblance of a human form that's gleaming like amber, and its fire encased in a frame, which is radiant all about. So this kavod, this cloud that contains or hides the fire that is Yahweh's presence--That is also the term that's used in the Torah, in Exodus and the priestly sources to describe the presence of God among His people, this fire that's encased in a cloud, the kavod. In Exodus 24 we read that this kavod had settled on Mount Sinai representing God's presence. In Exodus 40, this cloud covers the tent of meeting; it fills the tabernacle, so when Ezekiel sees it now he says, that it "was the appearance of the semblance of the Presence of the Lord. When I beheld it, I flung myself down on my face and I heard the voice of someone speaking." Notice this language; it was the "semblance of the appearance of the Presence." Ezekiel wants to emphasize the transcendent nature of the deity. He's having a vision of something which cannot in fact be seen or perceived, which is a kind of paradox of all of his visions. The prophet's humanity is emphasized in contrast to this transcendent divinity, and that's something that happens throughout Ezekiel. He emphasizes his humanity with this phrase "Son of Man," ben adam. Son of Man; it simply is the Hebrew term for a mortal being as opposed to divine being. Son of Man simply means a human, a morta. Ben adam, one who is like Adam. Now, the call of Ezekiel is reminiscent of the call of Jeremiah and Isaiah. He is sent to a nation of rebels, rebels who will not be listening to him. His commission is symbolized by a scroll that's handed to him, and we hear at the end of chapter 2 that inscribed on this scroll are lamentations and dirges and woes, and he's commanded to eat of this scroll and then go to speak to the House of Israel. So he swallows this scroll and all of its dreadful contents. It tastes to him as sweet as honey and then his task is spelled out in chapter 3. He is to be a watchman, one who gives warning of danger, and people will either heed him or not, but each one of them is ultimately responsible for his or her own fate. In a vision, in chapter 8, an angel transports Ezekiel to Jerusalem and into the temple courts, and there he sees and gives a very vivid description of the shocking abominations. These are represented as justifying or explaining the destruction of the city and these descriptions are characterized by more than the usual amount of prophetic hyperbole. As he watches the slaughter and the destruction that's going on there, Ezekiel sees the kavod, that is the presence of Yahweh, arise from the Temple and move to the east. Chapter 10:18-19: ...the Presence of the LORD left the platform of the House and stopped above the cherubs. And I saw the cherubs lift their wings and rise from the earth, with the wheels beside them as they departed; and they stopped at the entrance of the eastern gate of the House of the Lord, with the Presence of the God of Israel above them. In chapter 11:23-25: …The Presence of the LORD ascended from the midst of the city and stood on the hill east of the city. A spirit carried me away and brought me in a vision by the spirit of God to the exiled community in Chaldea. [So now he's back to Babylon.] Then the vision that I had seen left me, and I told the exiles all the things that the Lord had shown me. So this image draws on Ancient Near Eastern traditions of gods abandoning their cities in anger, leaving them to destruction by another god. The primary difference here is that God, rather than another god, is himself also bringing the destruction. Moreover, God doesn't retire to the heavens. He doesn't abandon his people. He doesn't remain behind with those left in Judah, but he moves into exile. In the book of Ezekiel those left behind are guilty. God does not stay with them; God moves east with the righteous exiles. Then at the end of the Book of Ezekiel, we're going to see a vision of a restored Temple, this happens in Ezekiel 43, and here Ezekiel will see the kavod returning from the east and back to the temple, …And there, coming from the east with a roar like the roar of mighty waters, was the Presence of the God of Israel, and the earth was lit up by His presence. … The Presence of the LORD entered the temple by the gate that faced eastward. … …and lo, the Presence of the LORD filled the Temple. That was 43:1-6. So just as the presence, the Divine presence, went eastward with the exiles so it will return with the re-establishment of Israel in her home. What is significant here is the idea that God is not linked to a particular place but to a particular people. And the implication then is that God is with His people, even when they are in exile. So Ezekiel preached a message of doom and judgment like his prophetic predecessors and his contemporaries, but his condemnations tend to emphasize the people's idolatry and their moral impurity and this of course makes sense of his priestly heritage. His denunciations of Jerusalem are among the most lurid and violent that you'll find in the Bible. Again, these prophesies were likely delivered between the two deportations, between 597 and then the final destruction and deportation in 587,586. And Ezekiel warns that Jerusalem will fall deservedly. He says that rebellion against Babylon would be treason against God. He employs all kinds of very vivid metaphors to describe Israel's situation. Jerusalem, he says, is Sodom's sister except even more vile. Jerusalem is a "vine" but a wild one or a burned one. She produces nothing of use. Purity language is employed metaphorically throughout Ezekiel. Jerusalem has been utterly defiled and there are all sorts of images that inspire revulsion in these chapters. So destruction is the only possible remedy. There are metaphors of sexual promiscuity throughout the book. God's destruction of Israel is figured as the abuse doled out by an insanely jealous husband who is violent, and the images are disturbing, they're haunting, they're quite nightmarish. Ezekiel also engages in various dramatic signs--prophetic signs or actions--to convey his message. It's something that we've seen in some of the other prophets, but his are so bizarre and so extreme sometimes, that he was accused of insanity. He cooks his food over a fire of human excrement as a symbol of the fact that those besieged by Nebuchadnezzar will be forced to eat unclean food. He doesn't mourn when his wife dies in order to illustrate the fact that Yahweh will not mourn the loss of His temple. He binds himself in ropes; he lies on his left side 390 days to symbolize the 390 years of exile of Israel, and then he lies on his right side for 40 days to symbolize the length of Judah's captivity, which he says will be 40years. Neither of these terms of captivity turn out to be correct. Finally, he shaves his beard and his hair and he burns a third of it, he strikes a third of it with his sword, and he scatters a third of it to the winds. He just keeps a few hairs bound up in his robe. This is to symbolize the destruction of a third of the people by pestilence and famine, a third of the people by violence, and the exile of a third to Babylon; only a few will God allow to escape. Ezekiel makes it clear that those who ignore the warnings are doomed. Those who heed will be spared, and in this, he sounds the theme of individual responsibility that is so characteristic of Ezekiel. I want you to listen to the following passage and compare it to, or think about, other verses or terms in the Torah that you've studied that may relate to the same topic. How is he modifying those earlier ideas? This is all from chapter 18, various verses throughout: The word of the Lord came to me: What do you mean by quoting this proverb upon the soil of Israel, "Parents eat sour grapes and their children's teeth are blunted"? As I live--declares the Lord GOD--this proverb shall no longer be current among you in Israel. Consider, all lives are Mine; the life of the parent and the life of the child are both Mine. The person who sins, only he shall die. … A child shall not share the burden of a parent's guilt, nor shall a parent share the burden of a child's guilt; the righteousness of the righteous shall be accounted to him alone, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be account to him alone. Moreover, if the wicked one repents of all the sins that he committed and keeps all My laws and does what is just and right, he shall live; he shall not die. … Is it My desire that a wicked person shall die?--says the Lord GOD. It is rather that he shall turn back from his ways and live. So, too, if a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does wrong, practicing the very abominations that the wicked person practiced, shall he live? None of the righteous deeds that he did shall be remembered; because of the treachery he has practiced and the sins he has committed--because of these, he shall die. … Be assured, O House of Israel, I will judge each one of you according to his ways --declares the LORD GOD. Repent and turn back from all your transgressions; let them not be a stumbling block of guilt for you. Cast away all the transgressions by which you have offended, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, that you may not die, O House of Israel. For it is not My desire that anyone shall die--declares the Lord GOD. Repent, therefore, and live!" It's an important Torah idea that Ezekiel is rejecting or contradicting here. And that's the Torah principle of collective or even intergenerational punishment. It's found most famously in the Second Commandment, the declaration that God punishes children for the sins of their fathers unto the fourth generation. Now, we need to note that we're talking about divine justice here and not human justice. As we saw in our study of biblical law in the sphere of human justice, only the guilty are punished in Israelite law. You don't have literal punishment. Someone kills someone's son, then their son is put to death--that idea is rejected in biblical law. But God operates according to a different principle--the principle of collective responsibility. And that principle is understood in the early sources quite positively. That the sins of the father's are visited upon the children is an expression of God's mercy. Exodus 34:6 and 7 describe God as merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness and thus tolerating sin, though not completely clearing the guilty. As a mercy he spreads out the punishment over three or four generations. So this notion is tied up with the aspect of God's mercy. But evidently there are some who found this idea unjust and other biblical passages try to bring a different sense of justice to this picture, and they emphasize that the third and fourth generations themselves must be wicked. That seems to be the case in Exodus 20:5. The Book of Chronicles, which is a rewrite of the historical material, the historical narrative in the Book of Kings, rewrites that material in a manner that never explains a catastrophe on the basis of guilt incurred by someone other than the one experiencing the catastrophe. In other words, it rejects the Deuteronomistic historian's device of delayed punishment which you'll remember we discussed. It changes the narrative account so that no one suffers for a crime committed by someone else. It isn't the sin of an earlier generation that's finally visited upon a grandson or a king of a later generation. So it seems that after 586, or certainly in Ezekiel's case, some accepted the idea that the nation was suffering because of the accumulated guilt of previous generations, notably the Deuteronomist. But for others like Ezekiel, the idea of accumulated guilt and intergenerational punishment seemed to lose some of its explanatory power, perhaps because the destruction and the exile seemed devastatingly severe punishments that didn't fit the individual crimes. So Ezekiel is one who rejects the doctrine of collective responsibility in the operation of divine justice. In chapter 18, he responds to the idea of suffering for the sins of one's ancestors by declaring that God isn't going to work that way anymore. God will no longer punish people collectively. Each one will be judged individually. Only the sinner will be punished--and that's a major departure from Exodus 34 and even from the contemporaneous Deuteronomistic view. At this point, I think, we would do well to remind ourselves of the nature of the biblical text. In the opening lecture, I asked you to set aside certain presuppositions about the biblical text. One of them is that it is a uniform or unified text with a single doctrine or theology. I asked you to remember that the Bible isn't a book; it's a library. It's a library of works that originate in vastly differently historical periods, vastly different historical situations. It responds to a variety of shifting needs and events, and reflects a range of perceptions about God and his relation to creation and to Israel. It isn't a book of theology, that is to say, rational argumentation in support of certain doctrines about God. And it most certainly doesn't speak with a single voice on points of theology or matters that are of traditional concern to the discipline of theology. Doctrine isn't its concern. Understanding and making sense of the historical odyssey of the nation of Israel in covenant with God--that is its concern. So we're going to find many different interpretations of the meaning of that history, the nature of that God, and the meaning of that covenant. And certainly there are some basic points of agreement, but even some of the most basic points of agreement do not pass without some contestation. So for example, the basic point that humans are free moral agents. This seems to be clearly assumed throughout most of the books of this little library. But there are some isolated episodes that would appear to contradict even that most basic assumption. God hardens Pharaoh's heart. God seals the people's ears sometimes so that they will not hear the message of the prophets, or will not understand them until a later day. To be sure, there are only a few of these contradictory passages, but they do exist. And so here we find also a major shift in the exilic period, away from the tendency to see divine justice working through collective or intergenerational punishment to the idea of the individual's culpability before God. I shouldn't say a shift away; we see arising a dialectic. This isn't a linear progression. These are different ideas coming out at different times and receiving emphasis at different times. But this kind of polyphony didn't impinge upon the authority of the Hebrew Bible for the nation of Israel, because the Bible's authority doesn't arise from some supposed consistency or univocality. That's a modern notion and it's based on Hellenistic ideals of truth as singular. Western culture, influenced by Greek philosophical traditions, defines truth in monistic terms. Only that which contains no contradiction is true and only that which is true is authoritative. Those notions are somewhat alien to the ancient non-Hellenized world. The Bible doesn't strive to present philosophical truth. It presents the best efforts of sages and prophets, and scribes and visionaries, to respond to and to explain the crises of the nation over a period of centuries. And its authority derives from the explanatory power of its insights into and understanding of God's governance of the world and his plans for Israel. So those insights and those understandings may shift, and even stand in contradiction with one another, but they are not mutually exclusive and their contradictions don't affect their authority, their ability to explain, to console--their ability to nourish the faith of a people convinced that God would never desert them no matter how difficult it may be to understand his interactions with them. Back to Ezekiel now; and in chapter 33 we learn that a fugitive from Jerusalem brings news of the fall of Jerusalem. So it's about 587,586; and when he hears this, Ezekiel exchanges his message of doom for a message of hope. Before the fall of the city, his task had been to shatter the people's illusions. He wanted to shake them out of their complacency, but now the people are reduced to despair and remorse, and his task is to offer reassurance and hope. God is going to initiate a new beginning. Though Israel's punishment was deserved, it was not, according to Ezekiel, a sign of the end of the relationship between Yahweh and his people, and a new Israel would rise from the remnant of Judah and Israel. He expresses this restoration by means of many metaphors and visions. So chapter 34 condemns the shepherds. This is a very common Ancient Near Eastern metaphor for the leadership of a people; a king is always a shepherd and so on. So chapter 34 condemns the shepherds of the people and promises to set up in the future one shepherd of the House of David to be prince among the people. Chapter 36 uses metaphors of purity and cleansing. Israel will be cleansed from the impurities of the past. She'll be given a new covenant of the heart. This is in verses 24 and 25 in chapter 36. I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries and I will bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you [pure water upon you], and you shall be clean: [Pure.] I will cleanse you from all your uncleanness and from all your fetishes. And I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh; and I will put My spirit into you. Thus I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules. [There are echoes here of Jeremiah also.] Then you shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people and I will be your God. So we have again this almost utopian redesign of human nature that we heard in Jeremiah. One in which the problems that are associated with the exercise of free will may be obviated. Another metaphor that's used for the restoration of a new Israel out of the remnant of the old, is the metaphor of revival from death and this is found in chapter 37--a very, very famous passage: Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones: The hand of the Lord came upon me. He took me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the valley. It was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many of them spread over the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "O mortal, can these bones live again?" I replied, "O Lord GOD, only you know." [Very diplomatic answer.] And He said to me, "Prophesy over these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! Thus said the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live again. I will lay sinews upon you, and cover you with flesh, and form skin over you. And I will put breath into you, and you shall live again, and you shall know that I am the LORD!" I prophesied as I had been commanded. And while I was prophesying, suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had grown, and skin had formed over them. … The breath entered them, and they came to life and stood up on their feet, a vast multitude. And He said to me, "O mortal, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, our house is gone; we are doomed.' Prophesy, therefore, and say to them: Thus said the LORD GOD: I am going to open your graves and lift you out of the graves, O My people, and bring you to the land of Israel. You shall know, O My people, that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves and lifted you out of your graves. I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil. Then you shall know that I the LORD have spoken and have acted--declares the LORD. In the interpretation that follows the vision, we are told that the bones symbolize Israel now, in this state, in exile. In their despair they're crying: our bones are dried up, we're dead, now our hope is lost. And God promises to raise Israel from the grave, which is a metaphor for exile, and restore her to her own land as one people, north and south, with one prince to rule over her. This text has often been de-contextualized and cited as an Old Testament or Hebrew Bible source for the doctrine of literal resurrection after death, as if it's speaking about literal resurrection. But I think in its context it's quite clear that it is one of many metaphors that Ezekiel uses throughout this section for the redemption of the community from exile, the restoration of the people back in their own land. At the center of the restored community that Ezekiel envisions is a new Jerusalem, and at its center is a rebuilt temple. And it is described in great detail in the last nine chapters of the book. In Ezekiel's utopian vision, the land is equally allotted, it's divided up and equally allotted among all 12 tribes now, who will be brought back. And Jerusalem lies in the center with 12 great gates, one for each tribe, surrounding it. This temple is the source of a never-ending river that gushes forth from it, a river that will make the Dead Sea flow with fresh water again. Ezekiel sees Zadokite priests presiding in the Temple, they are assisted by Levites who are just menials (they are sort of demoted in his vision). And he insists no foreigners will be permitted entry. We're going to see that that's a view that wasn't shared by others in the post-destruction era. While Ezekiel believed that God would restore a purified Israel to its land under a Davidic monarchy, and he prophesied to this effect, he, like Jeremiah, also maintained that a relationship with God was possible, in the meantime--a relationship outside the chosen land. And the Jewish diaspora ("diaspora" refers to a community living outside of its homeland)--the Jewish diaspora was a new thing; it was a religious-national body of a type that had not been seen before. You had a people remaining loyal to their God, while in exile from their own land (and what was believed to be that God's land) without worshipping him cultically, or by means of sacrifice. Remember the only legitimate site for an altar or for sacrifice to God is Jerusalem. And in time, slowly, a new worship will be fashioned; one without sacrifice, one that consists of prayer and confession, and fasts, and other kinds of ritual observances. Three times a day Jews will pray and they'll pray in the direction of Jerusalem. Worship in synagogues eventually will come into being, and the importance of the Sabbath will grow--the Sabbath as a memorial of the covenant and the symbol of Jewish faith. And so you also find, beginning shortly after this period, for the first time, non-Jews are joining themselves to Yahweh, adopting this religion of Israel out of religious conviction, not simply because they may be residing in the land and have to follow God's laws. This is outside the land. You have people choosing to opt into this community. So again, we see that as the history of the nation of Israel came to an end, the history of Judaism, the "religion" Judaism, begins. So in Ezekiel we've seen one response to the national disaster and the exile: the idea that while suffering and punishment are fully deserved, a relationship with God remains possible. God is with his people even in exile. A second response to the destruction and exile can be found in the anonymous writings that are appended to the Book of Isaiah. I mentioned these writings briefly. We'll be able to look now at what's been called Second Isaiah. So there are two discrete units of material that are appended to Isaiah. Chapters 40 to 55 are referred to as Second Isaiah, and chapters 56 to 66 are referred to as 3 Isaiah. And these chapters differ from Isaiah proper, from the eighth-century prophet, in several ways. It's clear, first of all, that these parts of Isaiah were written after the Exile . Parts of Third Isaiah were written after the Exile, all of second Isaiah, (and Isaiah proper was clearly written in the eighth century on into the early seventh century). Jerusalem is referred to as destroyed. The audience that's addressed is living in exile. Babylon is the oppressor, not Assyria. Assyria was the oppressor in the time of Isaiah proper. The appended materials even seem to know of the overthrow of the Babylonians. That's going to happen in about 539 when Cyrus of Persia will conquer the Babylonians. We have passages that express some euphoria over this, because Cyrus, of course, authorized the Jews to return from Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple. There are also all kinds of stylistic differences between First Isaiah and Second and Third Isaiah. Second and Third Isaiah, for example, have no biographical data and First Isaiah has quite a bit. These materials also have a different theology of history, a different understanding of history, a different attitude towards foreign nations and a very strong and renewed emphasis on monotheism. These also mark it as different. Among the scrolls that were found in the caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea, we have a very large and very famous Isaiah scroll, which is now in a museum in Jerusalem. On the scroll there is a gap after Isaiah 39, and a new column starts with Isaiah 40. So it seems to signal some sort of implicit recognition that there's a difference between these two sections. They are not the same unit, not the same author perhaps. So we're going to talk right now about Second Isaiah because this is a wholly post destruction work. The opening or inaugural oracle that occurs in chapter 40 is an oracle of consolation. It's an oracle of comfort, and the prophet sees a straight and level highway prepared in the wilderness for a dramatic procession of Yahweh the shepherd who will lead his people back to Jerusalem. It's very, very famous--made very famous by Handel's Messiah actually. So chapter 40 (taking from various verses in this chapter): Comfort, oh comfort My people, Says Your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, And declare to her That her term of service is over, That iniquity is expiated; For she has received at the hand of the LORD Double for all her sins. A voice rings out: "Clear in the desert A road for the Lord! Level in the wilderness A highway for our God! Let every valley be raised, Every hill and mount made low. Let the rugged ground become level And the ridges become a plain. The Presence of the LORD shall appear, And all flesh, as one, shall behold-- For the LORD Himself has spoken." A voice rings out: "Proclaim!" Another asks, "What shall I proclaim?" All flesh is grass, All its goodness like flowers of the field: … But the word of our God is always fulfilled!" … Behold, the Lord GOD comes in might, … Like a shepherd He pastures His flock: He gathers the lambs in His arms And carries them in His bosom; Gently he drives the mother sheep. So this highway will appear leading the exiles straight to Jerusalem. All of the topography will be flattened and God will lead them as a shepherd leads the lamb. Why? Because the word of the Lord is always fulfilled. So what this voice is proclaiming is a literal return from exile. God is opening a highway, he's leading His flock home like a shepherd in a new exodus. And this is an idea that's so important that it recurs at the end of the unit as well in chapter 55: the idea of a new exodus. A second key theme that's sounded at the beginning and end of the unit again (so it happens in chapter 40 and again in chapter 55) is this idea that the word of our God is always fulfilled. Or in some translations, the word of our God "stands forever." This idea is the essence of the Israelites' hope during the period of captivity and exile, and it appears in the first oracle. It's beautifully restated in the last oracle, in chapter 55, verses 10 through 12: For as the rain or snow drops from heaven And returns not there, But soaks the earth And makes it bring forth vegetation, Yielding seed for sowing and bread for eating, So is the word that issues from my mouth: It does not come back to Me unfulfilled, But performs what I purpose, Achieves what I sent it to do. Yea, you shall leave in joy and be led home secure. Before you, mount and hill shall shout aloud, And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. So the everlasting word of the Lord--it's guaranteed fulfillment (specifically--to bring his people home in a new exodus)--these are ideas form an envelope or an inclusio, that kind of literary structure where something is mentioned at the beginning and again at the end to form an inclusio or an envelope around the entire unit of SecondIsaiah. We see also in Second Isaiah an extreme monotheism. The monotheism is explicit of course in Isaiah--implicit, I'm sorry, implicit in Isaiah, but it becomes quite explicit in Second Isaiah. As we've seen, to come to terms with the destruction of 587 entails the acceptance of the idea that Israel's punishment was deserved, and Yahweh's control of history means he controls not only Israel but all other nations as well and can use them for his purpose, including punishing Israel. There's no power other than Yahweh. So referring then to the rise and fall of nations, Isaiah 41:4 states, Who has wrought and achieved this? He who announced the generations from the start-- I, the LORD, who was first And will be with the last as well. The first and the last--which is a way of saying everything, all inclusive. There is nothing but me. And Isaiah 44 satirizes those nations who make and worship idols, and ridicules the folly and stupidity of ascribing divinity to that which one has created with one's own hands. In Isaiah 41, God states his case against these vain and useless idols. He summons them to answer for themselves, show that they are gods by announcing something that will occur, announcing what will occur and seeing if it comes true. Chapter 41:22-24: Let them approach and tell us what will happen. Tell us what has occurred, And we will take note of it; Or announce to us what will occur, That we may know the outcome. Foretell what is yet to happen, That we may know that you are gods! Do anything, good or bad, That we may be awed and see. Why, you are less than nothing. Your effect is less than nullity; One who chooses you is an abomination. But this is only half the picture because not only are the gods of the nations no gods, but Yahweh is the true God of all of these other nations. So who raised Cyrus of Persia from the north to sweep through the Ancient Near East and conquer the Babylonians? No one but Yahweh. Isaiah 41: "I have roused Him from the north, and he has come …And He has trampled rulers like mud, Like a potter treading clay …The things once predicted to Zion-- Behold, here they are!" [from vv 25-29]. So in these passages, the author of Second Isaiah is drawing the logical conclusion, perhaps, towards which Israelite religion has tended from its inception. Yahweh, once a Canaanite deity, then the God of Israel's patriarchs, then the national God of Israel, is here the Lord of universal history. The only real God, Second Isaiah is claiming, is the God of Israel. Second Isaiah is also quite well known for the Servant Songs that it contains, the famous servant songs. These occur scattered in chapter 42, chapter 49, chapter 50, and then most extensively 52:13 to 53:12, so much of 52 and 53. The identity of this servant--I'll read some of these passages in a minute, but it refers to this servant, God's servant, and the identity of the servant has been a puzzle to biblical interpreters for centuries. Sometimes the servant is referred to as a collective figure, sometimes the servant is referred to as an individual figure. In chapter 49 the servant is referred to or described as a prophet with a universal message rather than a message for the Israelites alone, but then there's some ambiguity here. The servant is first identified, or the prophet--the servant or prophet--is first identified as Israel herself. So in chapter 49:1-3: …The Lord appointed me before I was born, He named me while I was in my mother's womb. He made my mouth like a sharpened blade, He hid me in the shadow of His hand, And He made me like a polished arrow; He concealed me in His quiver And He said to me, "You are My servant, Israel in whom I glory." Yet, in verse 5 it would seem that this prophet/servant has a mission to Israel to bring her back to Yahweh, and that would imply that the servant or prophet is not Israel. Verse 5: And now the LORD has resolved-- He who formed me in the womb to be His servant-- To bring back Jacob to Himself, That Israel may be restored to Him. For He has said: "It is too little that you should be My servant In that I raise up the tribes of Jacob And restore the survivors of Israel: I will also make you a light of nations, That My salvation may reach the ends of the earth." Chapter 50 quite famously refers to the servant as rebellious and as persecuted. Verse 6: I offered my back to the floggers, And my cheeks to those who tore out my hair. I did not hide my face From insult and spittle. But it's the famous and difficult passage in Isaiah 53 that most movingly describes the suffering and sorrow of God's servant. 53:3-11: …He was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, Our suffering that he endured. We accounted him plagued, Smitten and afflicted by God But he was wounded because of our sins, Crushed because of our iniquities. He bore the chastisement that made us whole, And by his bruises we were healed. We all went astray like sheep, Each going his own way; And the LORD visited upon him The guilt of all of us." He was maltreated, yet he was submissive, He did not open his mouth; Like a sheep being led to slaughter, Like a ewe, dumb before those who shear her, He did not open his mouth. … And his grave was set among the wicked, And with the rich, in his death-- Though he had done no injustice And had spoken no falsehood. But the LORD chose to crush him by disease, That, if he made himself an offering for guilt, He might see offspring and have long life, And that through him the LORD's purpose might prosper. There have been many attempts to equate this man of sorrows with all kinds of figures. Early on, Jesus' followers saw Jesus as the suffering servant of God in Isaiah. The New Testament writers specifically borrowed passages from Isaiah, particularly this chapter, chapter 53, when constructing their narratives of Jesus, taking those verses and using them in describing his story. So he is depicted as the innocent and righteous servant who suffered for the sins of others. In the teachings of Paul, however, you have a different use of these verses. Christians, generally, are identified as the servant who suffers with and for Jesus. Despite these later theological interpretations, the anonymous writer of Second Isaiah wasn't writing about a remote Nazarean teacher and charismatic healer who would live more than five centuries later. Examined in its original context, it appears most likely that the servant is Israel herself described metaphorically as an individual whose present suffering and humiliation is due to the sins of other nations, but whose future restoration and exultation will cause astonishment among those nations who will then be humbled to Yahweh. But there are problems with even this interpretation and you should be aware of that. This has never been solved satisfactorily. The main problem with interpreting Israel as the servant is the verse that describes the servant as having a mission to Israel. It seems a little odd to say that Israel bears a mission to Israel. But this problem can be solved, if we remember that Israel was often divided in prophetic rhetoric. So perhaps the writer envisions a mission of one part, the righteous part, to the other, the part that has gone astray. Leaving aside this difficulty, the more prominent motif in the servant song of Isaiah is that the servant has a mission to the world. That's the more prominent motif, and that is a role that would suit Israel quite well. Furthermore, you have the phrase, "Israel, My servant," appearing in Second Isaiah about eight times. So the idea of Israel as God's servant to the nations is clearly a part of Isaiah's conceptual world, and since we're dealing with poetry rather than a rigorously consistent metaphysical treatise, it shouldn't be too surprising that sometimes the servant is spoken of as a group collectively, sometimes as an individual. The same holds true of Israel in general, by the way, throughout much of the literature. Sometimes Israel is spoken of in plural terms and sometimes as a single individual. So in its original context it's likely that the servant refers to Israel herself. If the servant is Israel, then we can see how Second Isaiah is another response to the events of 587. And it's ultimately a positive interpretation, a positive response. The punishment that Israel suffered even if excessive (remember Isaiah 40 claims that Israel has suffered double for her sins, so it's been an excessive punishment)--that punishment isn't meaningless. It will lead to redemption. Israel will be healed by her wounds. God's word will not be returned unfulfilled. In addition, suffering leads to a new role for Israel among the nations. Second Isaiah expresses a new self-awareness that is taking hold in the exile. Israel saw itself as the faithful servant of Yahweh, a servant whose loyalty to God in this dark time would serve to broadcast the knowledge of God throughout the nations. So Israel was chosen from the womb to serve God's universal purpose. Israel suffered unobserved by others, but eventually this would make possible the recognition of God by those others. Where once God covenanted with David to lead his people, Israel, he now covenants with Israel to lead the nations of the world in God's way. It's an expansion of God's purpose, and this is an idea that appears in Isaiah 55:3-5: Incline your ear and come to Me; Harken, and you shall be revived. And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, The enduring loyalty promised to David. [The covenant and loyalty that was promised to David I'm now transferring to you.] As I made him a leader of peoples, A prince and commander of peoples, So you shall summon a nation who you did not know, And a nation that did not know you, Shall come running to you-- For the sake of the LORD your God, The Holy One of Israel who has glorified you. So God makes an eternal covenant with Israel, like that he once concluded with David. And the function of the institutions of the old order are transferred to the nation as a whole. What kings and priests, and prophets did for Israel, Israel will now do for the whole world. As the mediator between the only God and the nations of the world she is a light unto them, and all will ascend to her because from her will come Torah, instruction in the divine will and salvation. This is the idea of universal mission that comes out of Second Isaiah. When we come back on Wednesday, we're going to take a look at what I think is probably the single most profound book in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Job. And again, I'll remind you that final paper information will be available on the Classes server tonight. I want you to have it in time to be able to ask questions of your TF or myself about the assignment. It's pretty detailed so sit and read through it carefully; it'll be there later tonight.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_15_Hebrew_Prophecy_The_NonLiterary_Prophets.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: So we were talking last time about the Deuteronomistic historian and their interpretation of the events that befell Israel, a very special interpretation that would make it possible for Israel to remain intact after the destruction of the state, the temple and the national basis of their society. And according to the Deuteronomist, it's the sin of idolatry, specifically the sin of idolatry and particularly the idolatry of the king, for which the nation is punished with exile and destruction. Punishments come for other sorts of sins, but the national punishment of exile and destruction follows upon the idolatry and particularly the idolatry of the king. So in the book of 2 Kings, a king who permits sacrifice only at the Jerusalem Temple is praised no matter what other faults he may or may not have, and one who does not is condemned, no matter what other accomplishments he may have to his credit. Now the Deuteronomistic historian is aware that the historical record doesn't lend itself very easily to this kind of interpretation. Because there are some good kings who reigned very briefly, and there are some very bad kings, on their view, who reigned for a very long time. Manasseh is a case in point. He reigned for over 50 years and is viewed as the most wicked of all kings. Sometimes disaster would strike right after the rule of a king that the Deuteronomist would view as a good king because of their faithfulness to Yahweh, and sometimes it would not strike after the rule of a king that was viewed to be very wicked. So the Deuteronomist sounds the theme of delayed punishment-- delayed punishment, deferred punishment. So for example, Solomon's misdeeds in allowing the building of altars for the worship of foreign gods to please his many wives, his foreign wives, is blamed for the division of the kingdoms, but the punishment was deferred until after his death and the time of his sons, and then you have this split between north and south with Jeroboam and Rehoboam reigning, respectively, in the north and south. The Deuteronomist sees Israel's defeat at the hands of the Assyrians in 722 as deferred or delayed punishment for the sins of Jeroboam I. Jeroboam I, 922 or so, came to the throne and installed two cultic centers at Dan and Beth-El, erecting golden calves. This is seen as a sin, for which the nation was punished 200 years later. As for the southern kingdom of Judah: you had some good kings in the view of the Deuteronomist in the south. Hezekiah--he's judged to be a good king; he instituted sweeping reforms and got rid of idolatrous altars and managed to maintain Judah's independence against the Assyrians. But his son Manasseh, who reigned for a large part of the seventh century, is viewed as extraordinarily wicked. He turned the Jerusalem temple into a pagan temple, and it was a time of great misery for those who were loyal to Yahweh, a time of great terror. And yet, he reigned a long time. His eight-year-old grandson, Josiah, came to the throne upon his death, sometime, probably, in the 630s. And the Deuteronomist views Josiah as a good king. We've already heard about, or read the story which is reported in 2 Kings 22, of the refurbishing of the temple, which happens when he's about 25 or 26 years old; discovers the book of the law, reads it, and is distressed because its terms are not being fulfilled. And so Josiah orders the abolition of outlying altars and pagan cults. He brings all of the priests to Jerusalem and centralizes all worship there in Jerusalem. So in the Deuteronomist's view, Josiah is believed to be a very good king for purging the country of these idolatrous rites and centralizing worship. But the sin of Manasseh was too great and it had to be punished. So a prophetess, a prophetess named Hulda, tells Josiah that God plans to bring evil punishment on Judah for these sins, but it will be after Josiah's lifetime as something of a mercy to him. And, in fact, it's in the next generation that Judah falls. In 586 the walls of Jerusalem are breached and the Temple is destroyed, and the king at that time, King Zedekiah, is blinded and taken in chains into exile with his court. And only the poor are left behind. This is the Deuteronomist's attempt to account for these anomalies within their historiosophic view. And the result of the Deuteronomist's interpretation was remarkable. Because if the defeat of the nation were to be seen as the defeat of the nation's god by the god of the conquering nation, then the Israelites would have turned from the worship of their god, Yahweh, and embraced the new ascendant god Marduk. And undoubtedly, there were Israelites who did do this. That would have been the argument of history in their view. But not all did. For some, defeat did not lead to despair or apostasy because it could be explained by the likes of the Deuteronomistic historian or the Deuteronomistic School as fitting into the monotheistic scheme. This did not impugn God's kingship or lordship over the universe, it was proof of it. God was punishing Israel for the sin of idolatry, which was in violation of his covenant. And to punish Israel, he had raised the Babylonians. They were merely his tool. The historiosophy of the Deuteronomistic historian finds it classic expression in 2 Kings 17. I'm going to skim through sections of it so you can see the argument that's laid out there: In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria [the capital of the northern kingdom]. He deported the Israelites to Assyria and settled them in…[various places]. This happened because the Israelites sinned against the Lord their God, who had freed them from the land of Egypt, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshipped other gods and followed…the customs which the kings of Israel had practiced. Putting, again, the blame on the kings as the head of this idolatry. The Israelites committed against the Lord their God acts which were not right: They built for themselves shrines in all their settlements, from watchtowers to fortified cities; they set up pillars and sacred posts for themselves on every lofty hill and under every leafy tree; and they offered sacrifices there, at all the shrines, like the nations whom the Lord had driven into exile before them. So now he's going to follow through since they behaved the same way, to drive them into exile also. They committed wicked acts to vex the Lord, and they worshipped fetishes, concerning which the Lord had said to them, "You must not do this thing." The Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet [and] every seer, So God didn't just stand by idly. He was constantly sending prophets, messengers to tell them to turn back to the covenant. And we'll start talking about those prophets today. He sent warnings by "every prophet [and] every seer," saying, "Turn back from your wicked ways, and observe My commandments and My laws, according to all the Teaching that I commanded your fathers and that I transmitted to you through My servants the prophets." But they did not obey; they stiffened their necks, like their fathers who did not have faith in the Lord their God; they spurned His laws and the covenant that He had made with their fathers and the warnings He had given them. They went after delusion and were deluded;…they made molten idols for themselves--two calves-- and specifically now, the sin of Jeroboam at Dan and Beth-El, two calves, "and they made a sacred post and they bowed down to all the host of heaven, and they worshipped Baal." (We'll hear more about that today.) They consigned their sons and daughters to the fire; they practiced augury and divination, and gave themselves over to what was displeasing to the Lord and vexed him. The Lord was incensed at Israel and he banished them from His presence; none was left but the tribe of Judah alone. Nor did Judah keep the commandments of the Lord their God; they followed the customs that Israel had practiced. So the Lord spurned all the offspring of Israel and He afflicted them and delivered them into the hands of plunderers, and finally He cast them out from His presence. It's a very depressing ending of things that started so auspiciously back in Genesis 1. But if the Deuteronomist laid the blame for the tragic history of the two kingdoms at the door of the sin of idolatry, and particularly the idolatry of the royal house, a different answer will be provided by Israel's classical prophets--no less an answer, no less an interpretation, and no less an interpretation that was intended to shore up faith in this God that one might think had abandoned His people. We'll be turning to the prophetic answer to this great crisis that faced the Israelites in the next lecture. In this lecture, I first want to talk about the phenomenon of prophecy and some of the prophets who appear in the historical narrative. So, in the historical books that we've been looking at in the section of the Bible we call the Former Prophets--remember, the section called the Prophets we divide into Former Prophets and Latter Prophets: the section we call Former Prophets is a historical narrative; it runs from Joshua through 2 Kings, and it reads like a narrative--in that material, you have several prophets who appear, and they play a very important role in the national drama. The prophets of the tenth century, the ninth century BCE were associated with religious shrines. On occasion they were associated with the royal court. But starting in about the eighth century, you have prophets whose words were eventually set down in writing, and they come to be in the books that now bear the names of the prophets to whom they are attributed. So these prophets, the ones whose words get recorded in books that bear their name, these prophets we call the literary prophets or the classical prophets, in contrast to the prophets who are characters in the stories that we read from Genesis through 2 Kings. So there are two kinds of prophets. The literary prophets: those books are collected together in the section we call the Latter Prophets. I hope this is making sense. So Former Prophets is the historical narrative, which happens to feature kings and prophets as characters in the narrative. The Latter Prophets, those are the books of prophetic oracles that bear the name of the person who gave the utterance, or the oracle. Okay? And as I just said, the literary prophets, just like the Deuteronomist, struggle to make sense of Israel's suffering and defeat and to come up with an explanation and a message of consolation. And we will get to that next time. Today we'll look at the phenomenon of prophecy in ancient Israel by comparing or examining narratives in Samuel and Kings particularly, narratives that feature prophets. And that will provide very important background for the next lecture, when we turn to the books of the literary or classical prophets and the themes of that literature. Now, prophecy was very widespread in the Ancient Near East. It took different forms in different societies, but ultimately very widespread. We know of ecstatic prophets from Second Millennium BCE texts in Mesopotamia. Seventh-century Assyria also has ecstatic prophets. Their primary focus was on delivering oracles for kings, usually favorable. It was always wise to give a favorable oracle to your king. And we have ecstatic prophecy in the Bible also, among the earliest prophets in particular. The term ecstasy, when it's used in this context, refers to the state of being overcome with such powerful emotions that reason seems to be suspended, self-control is suspended, what we might think of as, you know, normative behavior. These things, normal behavior, these are suspended. Ecstatics would employ music and dance; they would induce a sort of emotional seizure or frenzy. They would often be left writhing and raving, and the Bible attributes this kind of ecstatic state to the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of Yahweh, which falls upon a prophet or rushes upon a prophet, comes upon a prophet and transforms him then into some sort of carrier or instrument of the Divine Will or the Divine message. We'll see that we have bizarre behavior among many of the prophets. We even have bizarre behavior among many of the later literary prophets. Ezekiel, for example, will engage in all kinds of unusual, outrageous, dramatic behavior as a vehicle for the communication of his message. And I think this is the heritage of the ecstatic prophecy that was so much a part of Ancient Near Eastern prophecy. But not all biblical prophecy has this ecstatic character. The Hebrew word for prophet is a navi, and the word navi seems to mean one who is called, or perhaps one who announces. That's important because it signals to us that a prophet is someone who is called to proclaim a message, to announce something, called by God to carry a message. And so in the Bible we have this phenomenon of what we call "apostolic prophecy." An apostle is merely a messenger. The word "apostle" means messenger, one sent with a message. So apostolic prophecy--this refers to messenger prophets. They are called by God and charged with a mission. They can even be elected against their will. They must bring the word of God to the world. This is very different from prophets who are consulted by a client and given a fee to divine something. This is different. This is the deity now charging a prophet with a message to a people. So these apostolic prophets are represented in the Bible as the instrument of God's desire to reveal himself and to reveal his will to his people. And many scholars have noted that, in a way, Moses is really the first in a long line of apostolic prophets in the Bible. In some ways, his call and his response are paradigmatic for some of these later classical prophets. In many of the literary prophets you will read, they will contain some account of their call, of the sudden, dramatic encounter with God. Usually the call consists of certain standard stages. You first have this unexpected encounter with God. Maybe a vision of some kind or a voice that issues a summons or a calling. And then you have the reluctance of the individual. And that was also paradigmatic with Moses, wasn't it? The reluctance of the individual concerned to answer this, but ultimately the individual is overwhelmed and eventually surrenders to God and his persuasiveness. That happens in many of the prophetic books. So in the Bible this kind of apostolic prophecy is a little different from ecstatic prophecy. It's also distinct from divination. Divination is an attempt to uncover the divine through some technique, or, excuse me, the divine will, through some technique, perhaps the manipulation of certain substances, perhaps inspecting the entrails of a sacrificed animal. Divination of this type as well as sorcery and spell casting and consulting with ghosts and spirits are all condemned by Deuteronomy. This is a very important part of the Deuteronomist's diatribe against the practices of other nations. But the fact that Deuteronomy polemicizes so vehemently against these practices is a sure sign that they were practiced--they were practiced at a popular level. This is probably what Israelite-Judean religion consisted of to some degree. And some of you will be looking in section, I know, at the story of the Witch of Endor--when Saul goes to a witch to conjure up the spirit of, the ghost of Samuel to consult with him. Moreover, we do have divination in the Yahweh cult itself. But this was performed by priests. They consulted some sort of divinely designated oracular object or objects. We call these the urim and the tummim, which should be familiar to all of you here at Yale. But urim and tummim are usually untranslated in your text, because actually we don't really know what they mean. They might be related to the word for light, which is or, and the word for, you know, integrity, perhaps, or perfection, which is tam. It's probably something like abracadabra, a little bit of a nonsense syllable that plays on words that did have meaning. We don't really know what the urim and the tummim were, but they are said to be assigned by God. We think they, it may have been colored stones that were manipulated in some way by the priest to give a "yes or no" determination to a question. But these were said to be assigned by God as a means that he himself authorizes for divining his will. And so, the Deuteronomist accepts these. But in general, it's the view of the Deuteronomistic historian that divination, sorcery and the like are not only prohibited, they're quite distinct from the activity of prophets. That's not what the prophets were about, according to the Deuteronomistic representation. The Hebrew prophet wasn't primarily a fortuneteller. And I think this is a very common misconception. The navi, the prophet, was addressing a very specific historical situation and was addressing it in very concrete terms. He was revealing God's immediate intentions as a response to the present circumstances. And the purpose of doing this was to inspire the people to change, to come back to faithful observance of the covenant. Any predictions that the prophet might make had reference to the immediate future as a response to the present situation. So in reality the prophet's message was a message about the present, what is wrong now, what has to be done to avert the impending doom or to avert a future calamity? There were some women prophets in Israel. None of them are found among the literary prophets, that is to say none of those books bearing the names of the prophets who uttered the oracles in them are named for women. So we have no women among the literary prophets, but you do have prophetic or prophesying women besides Miriam in the Pentateuch. There's also Deborah, who was a tribal leader and a prophet featured in Judges 4 and 5. I mentioned Hulda, her advice is sought during the reign of King Josiah. And you also have Noadiah. Noadiah prophesied in the post-exilic period. So this doesn't seem to be limited to males. Prophecy and kingship are closely connected in ancient Israel. And this is going to be very important. You'll recall, first of all, that the king is the anointed one of Yahweh, and it's the prophet who's doing the anointing. And that makes the connection between kingship and prophecy quite strong. If you think about Israel's first two kings, you also see a strong link with the phenomenon of prophecy. The first king, Saul, who was anointed by the prophet Samuel, is in addition, said to have prophesied himself in the manner of the ecstatic prophets. When he is anointed king, he's then seized by the spirit of Yahweh. He joins a band of men--and this is in 1 Samuel 10:5; they're playing harp, tambourine, flute and lyre, and he joins them and this induces an ecstatic frenzy, a religious frenzy, that transforms him into another man, according to the text. And on another occasion during his ecstatic prophesying, Saul strips himself naked. We have other accounts in the Bible of ecstatic prophets who would engage in self-laceration. David, the second king, is also said to prophesy himself. He also receives Yahweh's spirit or charisma from time to time, in addition to being anointed by a prophet. Subsequent monarchs aren't said to prophesy themselves. So that ends really with David. It's only Saul and David who are among the prophets. But even so, though subsequent monarchs, do not themselves prophesy, the connection with prophecy remains very, very close. And it's exemplified in several ways. Again, prophets not only anoint kings, but they also announce their fall from power. They are kingmakers and king-breakers to some degree. Also, you have a remarkable motif that runs through so much of biblical narrative, and that's the motif of prophetic opposition to kings. Every king had his prophetic thorn in the side. So you have Samuel against Saul. You have Nathan against King David. We'll talk about him a bit later. You have other prophets, Elijah, of course, against Ahab, Micaiah against Ahab. You have Elisha against the House of Ahab. Jeremiah is going to also stand against the king quite dramatically. So that prophetic opposition to the monarch, to the king, sort of God's watchdog over the king, is an important theme throughout the stories of the former prophets. And it sets the stage for us to understand the writings of the named prophets that will come later. Those are very often given in opposition to official policy or royal policy. Very often you have this literary motif that introduces the prophet's opposition. The Word of the Lord came to X, prophet X, against Y, against king Y. And then you get the content of it: because you have sinned I will destroy you, I will wrest the kingship from you and so on. I want to take a quick look, though, at some of the roles that are played by prophets in the stories in Samuel and Kings. And I have them listed over on the far side of the board. The first thing I want to consider is the notion of what I call "yes-men," as opposed to true prophets. Like the kings of Assyria, the kings of Israel and Judah found it politic to employ prophetic guilds. And in many cases these court prophets, who were in the king's employ, were little more than endorsers of royal policy. So on numerous occasions we see these professional prophets, these royal prophets, at odds with figures that the biblical writer will view as true prophets. They are truly proclaiming the word of God and not just endorsing royal policy. And they proclaim it whether the king wants to hear it or not, whether the people want to hear it or not. And the classic example is Micaiah, the son of Imlah. Micaiah prophesies the truth from Yahweh even though it displeases the king and ultimately is going to cost him his freedom--not to be confused with Micah: Micaiah. His story is told in 1 Kings 22. This story is a pointed critique of the prophetic yes-men who are serving as court prophets for, and automatically endorse the policy of, King Ahab. He's the king in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century. And during King Ahab's reign, the kingdoms of the north and the south, of Israel and Judah, have decided to form an alliance. They want to try to recapture some of the territory that has been lost to the north, territory in Syria. But you didn't undertake any military expedition without first obtaining a favorable word from the Lord. So King Ahab's prophets--and he has 400 of them--they are called, and the King asks them, "Shall I march upon Ramoth-gilead," this is this region in the north, "for battle? Or shall I not?" "March," they said, "and the Lord will deliver it into Your Majesty's hands". So we see that prophecy here is an institution. It is functioning as a source of royal advice. But the King of Judah, King Jehoshaphat, he had been perhaps hoping for an oracle against the campaign. And he says, "Isn't there another prophet of the Lord here through whom we can inquire? And the King of Israel answered Jehoshaphat, "There is one more man through whom we can inquire of the Lord; but I hate him, because he never prophesies anything favorable about me, only disaster--Micaiah, son of Imlah". Well, Jehoshaphat insists and Micaiah is summoned. And he's warned by the messenger who summons him that he'd better speak a favorable word like all the other prophets. The messenger says, "the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king. Let your word be like the word of one of them; and speak favorably" . It's almost an open admission that the prophets are, you know, little more than yes-men. So Micaiah answers the king's question when he asks about the advisability of marching to the north. And he says, "March and triumph! The Lord will deliver into Your Majesty's hands." He's done what he's been told to do: give the same answer as the other prophets. But he doesn't use the prophetic formula. He doesn't say, "Thus says the Lord" or some other indication that he's had a vision, that he's prophesying, that he's actually conveying the word of the Lord. And the king seems to sense this and sense this deception, and he says, "How many times must I adjure you to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?" So Micaiah lets the king have it, and he tells of this vision that he received from God, a vision of Israel scattered among, I'm sorry, of Israel scattered over hills like sheep. So he's seeing sheep, right, without a shepherd. The implication being that Israel's shepherd, who is the king, is going to be killed in battle and, like the sheep spread on the hill, Israel will be scattered. So the king is very irritated by Micaiah's prophecy. He says, "Didn't I tell you…he would not prophesy good fortune for me, but only misfortune?" What's interesting is, in the section that follows, Micaiah gives an explanation for why he is the lone dissenter. He doesn't accuse the other prophets of being false prophets. He represents them instead as being misled, and as being misled by God, if you will. So for the second time Micaiah utters the word of the Lord. He has a second vision. And this vision is a vision of God, who is seated on a throne and the host of heaven are gathered around him. And God asks, "Who will entice Ahab so that he will march and fall at Ramoth-gilead?" And a certain one comes forward; he volunteers for this task, and he tells how he's going to do this. He says, "I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets." And God says, "You will entice, and you will prevail. Go out and do it." So Micaiah concludes this vision by saying, "So the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets of yours; for the Lord has decreed disaster upon you." It's all part of God's plan. God is setting up Ahab for disaster, presumably as punishment for his many sins, just as he set up Pharaoh by hardening his heart, so that he would be punished--hardening his heart against Moses' pleas to let the Israelites go. This is God's way of insuring their demise and insuring their punishment. The king's a little upset. He doesn't know whom to believe. So he doesn't kill Micaiah on the spot. He imprisons him; he puts him on rations of bread and water, just to see what the outcome of the battle will be first. And Micaiah agrees to this. He says, "If you ever come home safe, then the Lord has not spoken through me". His prophecy proves accurate, of course. The king tries to disguise himself so that no one will know that he is king and no one will be able to target him in the battle. So he disguises himself. Nevertheless, he is killed in the battle and his army scatters. The story of Micaiah is polemicizing against what the biblical writer perceived to be the nationalization or the co-optation of the prophetic guild. And in the process, it paints a portrait of what the true prophet looks like. Micaiah is someone who is determined to deliver God's word, even if it's opposed to the wishes of the king or the view of the king and the view of the majority. He's going to proclaim God's judgment, and it will be a judgment against the nation. It will be a message of doom. And interestingly enough, this will eventually become understood as the mark of a true prophet. You know, the prophet of doom is the one who's the true prophet. As you can imagine, this kind of negativity didn't sit well with established interests. But at a later point in time looking back, the tradition would single out some of these prophets as the ones who had spoken truly. So that's one role. The true prophet stands up against the prophetic guilds, the prophets who are employed by the kings. A second role that we see prophets playing in this section of historical narrative: we see prophets as God's zealots. And here again there's a contrast between true prophets and false prophets. You find it particularly in those zealous Yahwists, Elijah and Elisha. The Elijah stories are found in 1 Kings 17-19 and 21. The Elisha stories appear towards the beginning of 2 Kings 2-9 and a little bit in chapter 13. These materials are good examples again of independent units of tradition, popular stories that were incorporated into the Deuteronomistic history. They are highly folkloristic; they have lots of drama and color, plenty of miracles, animals who behave in interesting ways. That this material began as a set of folk stories is also suggested by the fact that there's a great deal of overlap in the depiction of the activities of the two prophets. So you have both of the prophets multiplying food, both of them predict the death of Ahab's queen, Queen Jezebel. Both of them part water and so on. But in their final form the stories have been interspersed with historical footnotes about the two prophets and then set into this framework, this larger framework, of the history of the kings of the northern kingdom. So they've been appropriated by the Deuteronomistic School, which, remember, is a southern, Judean-based Deuteronomistic School. They've been appropriated for its purposes, which include a strong condemnation of the northern kingdom, of Israel and her kings, as idolatrous. So Elijah, Elijah the Tishbite--which means that he comes from the city of Tishbeh in Gilead, which is the other side of the Jordan--Elijah is a very dramatic character. He comes across the Jordan. He's dressed in a garment of hair and a leather girdle. At the end of his story he's sort of whisked away, one of the king's servants surmises, by the wind of God. He does battle with the cult of Baal and Asherah. We associate Elijah most with the battle with the cult of Baal and Asherah. This had been introduced by King Ahab to please his Baal-worshipping queen, Queen Jezebel. And as his first act, Elijah announces a drought. He announces a drought in the name of Yahweh. Now, this is a direct challenge to Baal, because Baal is believed to control the rain. He's believed to control the general fertility of the land and life itself. So Elijah's purpose is presumably to show that it is Yahweh, and not Baal, who controls fertility. We have very good evidence that Baal was in fact worshipped in the northern Kingdom right down to the destruction. This is something we've touched on earlier as well. It's quite possible that Israelites in the northern kingdom saw no real conflict between the cult of Baal and the cult of Yahweh. But in the Elijah story the Deuteronomistic historian represents these two cults as being championed by exclusivists. It's one or the other. Jezebel, Ahab's queen, kept a retinue of 450 Baal prophets and was killing off the prophets of Yahweh. And by the same token, Elijah is equally zealous for Yahweh. He refuses to tolerate the worship of any god but Yahweh, and he performs miracles constantly in the name of Yahweh to show that it is Yahweh and not Baal who gives life, for example. He raises a dead child; he multiplies oil and flour and so on, all of this in the name of the Lord to show that it is Yahweh, and not Baal who has true power. But as I've mentioned before, there are some scholars who argue that biblical religion, again as opposed to Israelite-Judean religion--what actual people were doing in Israel and Judah, that's one thing, but biblical religion, which is this exclusive Yahwism or the tendency towards monotheism--there are some who believe that that biblical religion originated in the activity of zealous prophets like Elijah and Elisha in the north, doing battle with Baal worship. After the fall of the northern kingdom, those traditions, those Yahweh-only traditions, came south and were eventually absorbed in the Deuteronomistic School. So this in fact may be the origin of some: this Yahweh-only party represented by figures like Elijah and Elisha. The conflict between the two cults, the Yahweh cult and the Baal cult, reaches a climax in the story in 1 Kings 18, this wonderful story in which Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal and Asherah to a contest. We have to remember that a severe drought has fallen on the land, which Elijah attributes to God's punishment for Ahab's sin in introducing Baal worship on a broad scale. Now, Elijah is hiding from the king, who's very angry with him for declaring this drought in the name of God. After three years he returns to Ahab. Ahab sees Elijah, and he says, "Is that you, you troubler of Israel?". And the prophet responds, "It is not I who have brought trouble on Israel, but you and your father's House, by forsaking the commandments of the Lord and going after the Baalim. Now summon all Israel to join me at Mount Carmel together, with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table" that are supported by the royal house. When all of these people are gathered, Elijah challenges the Israelites. He says, "'How long will you keep hopping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; and if Baal, follow him!'". You're hopping between two opinions. So it seems that at the popular level there is no problem with integrating these two cults, but you have the prophets of both that are demanding a certain exclusivity. He's met with silence. So Elijah prepares for a dramatic contest. Two bulls are slaughtered, and they are laid on altars, one an altar to Baal and one an altar to Yahweh. And the 450 prophets of Baal are to invoke their god and Elijah will invoke his God to send a fire to consume the sacrifice. The god who answers first, or the god who answers with fire, is truly God. So the Baal prophets invoke their god morning to noon, and they're shouting, "Oh, Baal. Answer us." And the description that follows is wonderfully satirical. But there was no sound, and none who responded; so they performed a hopping dance about the altar that had been set up. When noon came, Elijah mocked them, saying, "Shout louder! After all he is a god. But he may be in conversation, or he may be relieving himself [in the bathroom], or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up." So they shouted louder, and gashed themselves with knives and spears, according to their practice, until the blood streamed over them. When noon passed, they kept raving until the hour of presenting the meal offering. [1 Kings 18:26-29; see note 2] So more hours have gone by and still there's no sound and none who responded or heeded. And then it's Elijah's turn. Elijah sets up 12 stones to represent the 12 tribes; he lays the bull out on the altar. He then digs a trench around the altar and he orders water to be poured over the whole thing so that it's completely saturated and the trench is filled with water. This is going to highlight, of course, the miracle that's about to occur. And then he calls upon the name of the Lord, and instantly a fire descends from God and consumes everything: offering, wood, stone, earth, water, everything. And the people prostrate themselves and declare, "Yahweh alone is God. Yahweh alone is God." The prophets of Baal are all seized and slaughtered. Elijah expects an end to the drought, and a servant comes to report to him that "A cloud as small as a man's hand is rising in the west," and the sky grows black and there's a strong wind and a heavy storm, and the drought is finally over. The language that's used to describe this storm is the language that's typically employed for the storm god Baal. It drives home the point of the whole satire, that Yahweh is the real god of the storm, not Baal. Yahweh controls nature, not Baal. It's God who is effective; Baal is silent and powerless, and Israel's choice should be clear. Yahweh should be the only God for Israel, just as he is for Elijah, who's name El-i-yahu means "my God is Yahweh." So Jezebel is pretty upset and she threatens Elijah with execution. He flees into the desert, and he will spend 40 days and 40 nights on a mountain called Horeb, or Sinai. That, of course, is the site of God's revelation to Moses. Moses also spent 40 days and 40 nights there, and many scholars have pointed out the numerous parallels between Elijah and Moses. It seems that there was a conscious literary shaping of the Elijah traditions on the model of Moses, in more ways than just these two. We'll see a few coming up. Elijah is in great despair at Sinai. He wants to die. He feels that he has failed in his fight for God. And so he hides himself in a rocky cleft, and this is also reminiscent of the cleft that Moses hides himself in in order to catch a glimpse of God as God passes by. Similarly, Elijah hides in a cleft where he will encounter God. This passage is in 1 Kings 19:9-12: Then the Word of the Lord came to him. He said to him, "Why are you here, Elijah?" He replied, "I am moved by zeal for the Lord, the God of Hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and put Your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they are out to take my life." "Come out," He called, "and stand on the mountain before the Lord." And lo, the Lord passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind--an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake--;fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire--a soft murmuring sound. Or perhaps a still, small voice. A lot of translations use that phrase, which is very poetic. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Elijah seems to be renewed somehow at Sinai. This was the mountain that was the source of Israel's covenant with God. But whereas the earlier theophonies there at Sinai had involved earthquake and wind and fire, the narrative here seems to be making a point of saying that God is not in the earthquake and the wind and the fire. He is in the lull after the storm. This might then be providing a kind of balance or corrective to the preceding story that we've just had of Mount Carmel, Elijah on Mount Carmel. God may be the master of the storm, and Elijah dramatically demonstrated that, but he isn't to be identified with the storm in the same way that Baal was. He's not a nature god, and he's known only in silence. A kind of awesome vocal silence. In the theophony then that follows to Elijah, God instructs Elijah to return. He has to leave Sinai; he has to return to the people. He has work to do; he has to foment rebellion, or revolution I should say, in the royal house. This task is one that Elijah will not complete. His disciple Elisha will end up completing it. But the importance in this scene I think is its emphasis on God as the God of history rather than a nature god. Israel's God acts in history; he's made known to humans by his acts in history. His prophet cannot withdraw to a mountain retreat. He has to return and he has to play his part in God's plans for the nation. So we've discussed the prophet as God's zealot, particularly as illustrated or exemplified by Elijah and Elisha. The prophets also had other roles, and we'll see this in Elisha. Elisha succeeds Elijah. The cycle of stories about Elijah ends with Elijah's ascent into Heaven on a fiery chariot in a whirlwind. That's a detail in the story that has contributed to the longstanding belief that Elijah never died. And so Elijah will be the harbinger of the Messiah. He will come back to announce the coming of the Messiah. Elijah left his prophetic cloak to his disciple and successor Elisha. Elisha's involvement in the political arena was also important and highlights another prophetic role we've touched on before, that of kingmaker and king-breaker. So just as Samuel anointed Saul king and then David king in private meetings, you also have Elisha. He sends an associate to secretly anoint Jehu (Jehu is one of Ahab's ex-captains) as king of Israel. This is going to initiate a very bloody civil war. Jehu is going to massacre all of Ahab's family, all of his supporters, his retinue in Israel. He also assembles all of the Baal worshippers in a great temple that was built by Ahab in Samaria, and then he orders all of them killed and the temple demolished. So it is a pitched battle, an all-out war between the Yahweh-only party the Baal party. We're not going to be looking at Elisha in great detail, but I will just point out one last aspect of his prophetic profile that I think is notable here in the book of Kings. And that is the characteristic of prophets as miracle workers. Like Elijah, Elisha performs miracles. He causes an iron axe to float; he raises a child from the dead; he fills jars of oil. He makes poison soup edible. He causes 20 loaves of barley to feed a hundred men, and he heals lepers. These legendary stories, in which divine intentions are effected by means of the supernatural powers of holy men, this represents a popular religiosity. People would turn to wonder-working holy men when they were sick or in crisis, when they needed help. And this kind of religious activity--which was clearly widespread in the Ancient Near East and in Israel--this kind of popular belief, this fascination with wonder-working charismatics, it's also seen very prominently in the gospels of the New Testament. A final prophetic role is very well-illustrated by the prophet Nathan. Nathan is the classic example of a prophet who serves as the conscience of the king. In 2 Samuel: 11-12, we have the dramatic story of David and Bathsheba. King David's illicit union with Bathsheba--as you know, she's the wife of Uriah who is fighting in the king's army--his illicit union with Bathsheba results in her pregnancy. And when David learns that Bathsheba is pregnant, he first tries to avoid the issue. He grants Uriah a leave from the frontlines. He says: Come on home and have a conjugal visit with your wife. And Uriah is very pious (and it leaves you to wonder who knew what when). It's a great story. It's told with a lot of subtlety and indirection. But Uriah is very pious, and he refuses: No, how could I enjoy myself when people are out there dying? which is an implicit criticism of the king, who just did that very thing. And so David is foiled there, and he plans to then just dispose of Uriah. So he orders Uriah's commanders to place Uriah in the front lines of the battle and then pull back so that Uriah is basically left on his own and he will be killed. And indeed he is. So David adds murder to adultery. But not even the king is above God's law, and God sends his prophet Nathan to tell the king a fable. This is in 2 Samuel 12:1 through 14. "There were two men in the same city, one rich and one poor. And the rich man had very large flocks and herds, but the poor man had only one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He tended it and it grew up together with him and his children: it used to share his morsel of bread, and drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him. One day, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was loathe to take anything from his own flocks or herds to prepare a meal for the guest who had come to him; so he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him." David flew into a rage against the man and said to Nathan, "As the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He shall pay for the lamb four times over because he did such a thing and showed no pity. And Nathan said to David, "That man is you." It's such a wonderful story, and it's wonderful to think that Nathan wasn't struck down on the spot. He escaped with his life after this accusation. But it's symptomatic of the biblical narrator's view of monarchy, the subjugation of the king to Yahweh, to Yahweh's teachings, to Yahweh's commandments, to Yahweh's true prophets that we don't hear that Nathan is carted off, but instead David acknowledges his guilt and he repents. He doesn't escape all punishment. For this deed the child of the union does in fact die, and there's a great deal of future strife and treachery in David's household as we know, and the writer does blame a good deal of that on the deeds, these terrible sins of David's. Elijah similarly is going to function as the conscience of King Ahab in 1 Kings 21. There you have a story of a vineyard. The king covets this particular vineyard of a particular man. So the king's wife Jezebel falsely accuses the man of blasphemy. That is a capital crime and the man is stoned to death, even though these are trumped up charges, and his property is transferred to the crown. Shortly after that, Elijah appears, and he pronounces doom upon Ahab and his descendants for this terrible deed. Ahab admits the sin. He repents. And so his punishment is delayed, but as we've seen he is later killed in battle at Ramoth-Gilead. So in these stories we see the prophets functioning as troublers of Israel--certainly from the royal point of view. And their relationships with the royal house--these relationships are quite adversarial. So we're ready to move into what we call the period of classical prophecy and the literary prophets. And that's a period that begins with two prophets, Amos and Hosea, whom we'll be talking about next time. The last prophet of the classical prophets was Malachi. So you have about a 320-year period. You have the prophets prophesying from about 750 down to about 430,320 years. That's the span of time covered by these books of the literary prophets. And these prophets were responding to urgent crises in the life of the nation. It's easiest if we think of them as being grouped around four periods of crisis or four critical periods, which I've listed here. First we have prophets of the Assyrian crisis. Right? Remember the fall of Israel in 722--so around that, clustering around that time. We have prophets of the Babylonian crisis, the destruction, of course, is 586, so we have prophets who cluster around that time, a little bit before. Then you have prophets of the Exile, the years that are spent in exile in Babylon, and that's primarily Ezekiel. And then we have prophets of the post-exilic or restoration community, when the Israelites are allowed to come back to restore their community. And we'll see certain prophets there. So in the eighth century, the Assyrian Empire is threatening Israel and Judah. You have two northern prophets, Amos and Hosea. The N is for north, so Amos and Hosea are prophesying in the north, and they're warning of this doom. It's going to come as punishment for violations of the Mosaic Covenant. Israel fell in 722. You have a similar threat being posed by the Assyrians to the southern kingdom, Judah. And so you have two Judean prophets, Isaiah and Micah. They carry a similar message to the Judeans. So those four we associate with the Assyrian crisis. With the fall of Nineveh the capital of Assyria--that fall is in 612 and that's something that the prophet Nahum celebrates; then Babylon is the master of the region--Judah becomes a vassal state but tries to rebel. And the prophets Habakkuk and Jeremiah, they prophesy in the southern kingdom, in Judah. Jeremiah, he urges political submission to Babylon because he sees Babylon as the agent of God's just punishment. We'll come back and look at all these messages in great detail. Post-exilic prophet, or exilic prophet, Ezekiel as I said, a prophet of the exile who's consoling the people in exile in Babylonia, but also asserting the justice of what has happened. And then finally at the end of the sixth century when the first exiles are returning to restore the community, returning to the homeland, they face a very harsh life. And you have Haggai, Zechariah promising a better future. You have prophets like Joel and Malachi who bring some eschatological hope into the mix. So that can help frame--those are the ones we're going to touch on mostly. We're not going to hit all of the prophetic books, but these are the main ones we'll hit. And we'll start with Amos next time.

Literature_Lectures

18_The_Political_Unconscious.txt

Prof: Well, I'd like to begin by pointing out that the first name of Fredric Jameson is spelled F-r-e-d-r-i-c. The reason I point that out is that most scholars don't seem to be able to grasp that simple fact and that references to him, which are rife in the critical literature, perhaps one-third of the time spell his first name wrong. So I thought it would be important for you to be among the cognoscenti and to know that it is spelled in the way that I just mentioned. It's a strange thing. When I started teaching I taught many, many, many sections of English 129, and of course in the first semester, the first text that we read was The Iliad. Now "Iliad" is spelled I-l-i-a-d. Why it is that of the student population I taught over all those years, hundreds and hundreds of students, fully a third of them spelled it I-l-l-i-a-d I really couldn't say, but there are words that simply seem to be insusceptible to being spelled correctly, > and one of those words is the first name of Fredric Jameson, so stand advised. Okay. Now last time I talked about four possible options of an aesthetic nature for a Marxist approach to literature, and passed them in review. I mentioned realism, both realism according to the tastes and theoretical preferences of Engels and Lukacs, and also tendentious realism as it pervaded the Soviet world, especially after 1934; then also the participatory aesthetic of figures like Walter Benjamin, and the high Modernist aesthetic of the "whole" embraced particularly by Adorno-- those last are the two aesthetic modes that we passed in review last time-- and finally, as a fifth notion, the idea that realism being somehow outworn, having developed hardening of the arteries as a kind of a bourgeois perspective on things, needs somehow or another to be replaced aesthetically in the Marxist view of things by something else. Perhaps the most eloquent proponent of replacing it with something is Jameson, who earlier in the introductory chapter of The Political Unconscious-- much of which you've been assigned for today-- writes a section which he calls "Magical Narratives" and which promotes, very much in keeping with the thinking of Northrop Frye about the role of romance in society-- and particularly the religious role of romance in society-- proposes that an aesthetic of the romance which entails folklore, the folk tale, the fairy tale, and various forms of folk expression as a magical resolution of conflicts that can't otherwise be resolved, is the more appropriate aesthetic to take up. The long passage that I sent to you last night, which I'd like quickly to go over, is meant to further the promotion of this aesthetic and also to pose for us a critique of what the consequences would be of lingering with a realist aesthetic. So Jameson says, on the second passage on your sheet: Let Scott, Balzac and Dreiser serve as the [and remember that Balzac is the favorite author of Engels; Scott is the favorite author, at least in 1927, of Lukacs; and Dreiser is a figure from the so-called naturalist movement, the American novelist who is a very appropriate addition to the list. It's in that context that Jameson is dropping these particular names] non-chronological markers of the emergence of realism in its modern form. These first great realisms are characterized by a fundamental and exhilarating heterogeneity in their raw materials, and by a corresponding versatility in their narrative apparatus. At such moments a generic confinement to the existent [in other words, the only thing you have to do if you're a realist is talk about things the way they really are] has a paradoxically liberating effect on the registers of the text and releases a set of heterogeneous historical perspectives: the past for Scott, the future for Balzac, and the process of commodification for Dreiser-- normally felt to be inconsistent with a focus on the historical present. In other words, in Scott's treatment of history as dialectical, against the foil of the present there is envisioned a kind of romanticized evocation of a feudal past, and so it is in turn--I don't want to linger long over this with the other writers. Indeed, this multiple temporality tends to be sealed off and re-contained again in high realism and naturalism [in other words, it starts getting too easy, and the formulas of representing and evoking the real begin to become, as I said, sclerotic. They begin to harden. They begin to confine us in ways that had hitherto been liberating] where a perfected narrative apparatus, in particular the threefold imperatives of authorial depersonalization-- that is to say, the voice in style indirect libre, authorial depersonalization; unity of point of view, and restriction to scenic representation begin to confer on the realistic option the appearance of an asphyxiating self-imposed penance. In other words, "this is all I can say and this is the only way I can say it. There are no other possibilities of literary expression because I now feel confined to this reification of the real, this insistence that the real, the evocation of the real, is my only literary option, and so it's no longer liberating." It is in the context of this gradual reification in late capitalism that the romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and freedom from the reality principle. That is, in a way, a jab at Freud, but at the same time an acknowledgement that Freud participates in a sort of growing despair over the necessity of confining oneself to the real, evoking freedom from the reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage. Okay. So that's the aesthetic of Fredric Jameson, and before we begin an analysis--that is to say, before we begin to consider his three horizons or concentric circles of interpretation-- from other points of view, I thought it would be interesting to find this romance aesthetic in those three levels. We're talking, of course, about the "political," the "social," and the "historical": the political, the kind of chronicle-like--as he puts it-- record of successive happenings in a fictive context, constructed as a plot by some individual voice; the social as the conflict--or emergence into our awareness of its being a conflict-- of what Jameson calls "ideologemes"-- that is to say, ways of thinking about the world as expressed by disparate and conflicting classes; and then finally the historical, which Jameson calls "necessity." At the end of the essay, he says it's "what hurts," but in terms of literary analysis, as we'll see, it has to do with understanding the overlap of the succession of modes of production as they unfold in historical time. We'll have more to say about modes of production, but our basic three horizons, then-- in which I am now going to look for the romance aesthetic-- our basic three horizons, then, are what Jameson calls the political, the social and the historical. It's important that he does sometimes call them concentric circles, because you have to understand that as you advance through the three stages, you're not leaving anything behind. The political is contained within the social and the social is contained within the historical. All of that is what is not to be left behind but is rather to be rethought, reconsidered. Jameson sometimes uses the word "rewritten," thinking of the text that is the object of one's study as one advances through these three stages. So that's why he thinks it appropriate to call them concentric circles. So what is the essential political moment of the creative act? Well, it's what Jameson, borrowing from Kenneth Burke, calls "the symbolic act." As an individual writer, I undertake to resolve symbolically a contradiction-- and Marxism is always about contradiction: that is to say, the way in which the perspective of any class exists in a contradictory relation both with its own needs and desires and with other classes. In any case, then, the symbolic act at the political level is designed to resolve a contradiction that can't be resolved by other means. In other words, it's a fantasy, it is the fairy tale, it is the princess and the pauper. It is the arbitrary happy ending tacked onto a situation for which in reality there would be no happy ending. In other words, it is a romance perspective about the world, the realistic approach to which would somehow or another leave us feeling much more confined. "Slumdog Millionaire" is an interesting example. It's an auteur film made by Danny Boyle, an interesting example of an individual act which magically resolves a contradiction through the whole Bollywood apparatus that it brings to bear on it. The contradictions, of course, are rife between Hindu and Muslim, the contradictions entailed in globalization, the contradictions of caste--all of these contradictions, not to be resolved on a realistic plane, nevertheless can be resolved by an individual symbolic act: You hit the Lotto. You win against all odds a prize that makes you a millionaire. Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, we all > want to be millionaires, but only one of us miraculously, magically, through a series of completely implausible happenstances, is able to do so. Now notice this: it's not that it doesn't happen. People do hit the Lotto. People do win the $64,000 question or whatever it is. It's not that it's absolute never-never land, but the point is--and I think this is really ultimately the point of that extravagant dance in the railroad station at the end of the film-- the point is that even were it to happen in reality, it wouldn't resolve contradictions. That is to say, your life would not have that kind of scripted perfection: You get the girl, everything is going to be perfect, and the whole world falls in line, dancing behind you. This just > doesn't happen. In other words, it can be sort of tragic to hit the Lotto, as many stories of that kind have made clear to us. That, it seems to me, is finally how the film is somewhat self-conscious about its nature as a symbolic act. Anyway, that's the romance element of the political level of interpretation as understood by Jameson. Now the second level brings to the surface the element of subversion that has to be entailed in this same fairy tale resolution of a conflict that can't otherwise be resolved. There are all sorts of other aspects at the second level, but remember I'm discovering the romance aesthetic here in all three levels before turning to other matters having to do with them. At the second level, on page 1297, the right-hand column, you have Ernst Bloch's understanding of the fairy tale. This is at the second level, about two thirds of the way down. Thus, for instance, Bloch's reading of the fairy tale, with its magical wish-fulfillments and its Utopian fantasies of plenty and the pays de Cocagne, restores the dialogical ["The Big Rock Candy Mountain" basically is the pays de Cocagne] and antagonistic content of this "form" by exhibiting it as a systematic deconstruction and undermining of the hegemonic aristocratic form of the epic… In other words, it's not just a symbolic act, the fairy tale. It is a thumbing of the nose at hegemony. It is, in other words, an act of antagonism which, of course, recognizes the impossibility of resolution or reconciliation precisely in its register of antagonism; so that at the second level, the social level, in which the ideological voices of various classes and perspective are openly in conflict, you don't get resolution. What you get is subversion and reaction. You get, in other words, a tension of voices that is not meant to resolve anything but is rather meant to lay bare the conflicts that are entailed. Still, however, in doing this you get the kind of carnivalesque uprising from below which Jameson associates with romance: that letting off of steam, that entertaining of the possibility of utopia that you get, for example, in the early modern period on that day in which someone is called the Lord of Misrule, the entire social order for one day is inverted, the low are elevated to positions of authority, and for one day you get the keys to the castle, in effect. This is a day in which conflict is expressed and not resolved because everybody knows that tomorrow it's going to be the same old-same old and back to business as usual; but there is still the romance element, the idea that folk expression is simultaneously the expression of a wish, a wish similar to the wish that's expressed at the first political level but the expression of a wish which is collective-- that is to say, in behalf of a class and a perspective, and which is also, with great self-consciousness, not a wish that can in any way expect to be fulfilled, but rather one that is used subversively with respect to the dominant ideology that it expresses its abrasiveness toward. The third level involves the way in which there is at any given time at the historical level a dominant mode of production. A mode of production is a system of thought or production generated by an overarching social or economic arrangement. Jameson lists them in his text, and we'll come back to them and we'll read that listing and we'll think about those terms; but Jameson gives an excellent example of the way in which, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment began to be the dominant form of expression of an emergent mercantile, successfully capitalist bourgeoisie. That is to say, the values that drove the development of industrialization and capital were those values emerging from feudal and aristocratic ideals that were less realistic, less engaged with actuality and the way in which you can actually get things done in the world. The Enlightenment is understood as an expression of an emerging new mode of production, or capitalism as it succeeds feudalism. But Jameson points out--and here's where romance comes in, and then after that we'll move on to our next point-- that at the same time you get Enlightenment, at the same time that that does seem to become the dominant form of expression, you also get two modes of resistance or contestation. On the one hand you have Romanticism, which can be understood in this context as a kind of atavistic throwback to aristocratic and feudal idealism, codes of conduct, beliefs, visions of utopia within Romanticism-- all of them sort of trying to recode in an age of Enlightenment various sorts of idealism that had come to seem outmoded. So that's a kind of, as it were, reactionary mode of production overlapping with or expressing itself through the dominant one. Then at the same time, you get folk resistance to the increasing mechanization of the Enlightenment. With Political Economy, with the rise of social engineering and with the various forms of social organization associated with Utilitarianism, you get folk resistance. You get popular resistance in the forms of protest, "frame-breaking," disruption of labor activity, protest against industrialization, all of which also-- because it insists on earlier forms of agricultural and industrial cottage industries and so on-- is atavistic, also a throwback to the way in which labor is performed or conducted under feudalism. So that, too, in the form of folk expression-- of longing for, in this case, a utopian past, more agrarian, more individualized as a mode of labor, and more cottage-oriented--in all of this you get an overlapping mode of production. So the tension among modes of production, which is the focus of analysis at the historical level, the third historical level, can also be understood in terms of the romance of utopian nostalgia. All right. So that, then, just to show how Jameson's aesthetic, his sense of the importance of romance, can be seen to pervade the way in which he understands analysis at all three of these levels. So that's his aesthetic. The question then is: what is the interpretative payoff of undertaking literary analysis at these three levels? That is to say, why should we take the trouble to do it? What's so interesting about it? Well, from Jameson's point of view-- this, of course, is the title of his book-- each of these three modes of analysis is designed to disclose, to uncover, to lay bare an element of the "political unconscious." As for deconstruction, as for Freud, this sense of a political unconscious exposes or reveals something that is antithetical to ordinary consciousness-- that is to say, undermines our conventional understanding of things, shows us that beneath our conventional understanding of things there are laws and causes and dynamics at work that we need to understand. In this case, however, the unconscious in question is not a linguistic unconscious; it is not a psychological unconscious. It is a political unconscious. Insofar, in other words, as we are political animals, the acts that we perform, the dialogues that we engage in, the modes of production that we participate in-- all of them have political ramifications; that is to say, we do what we do, as opposed to doing other things, for political reasons of which we may not be fully aware-- hence the emphasis in analysis of this kind on the political unconscious. So again the three levels. Going back to the idea of the "symbolic" act: what political unconscious, in other words, is revealed by a symbolic act? Well, Jameson gives a wonderful example taken from structuralism, and you can see that he leans very heavily on structuralism for his understanding of the way in which something is going on in a narrative form of which it is not immediately apparent that anybody can be aware. Take for example Caduveo face painting. Levi-Strauss asks both in The Savage Mind and again in Tristes Tropiques: why the excessive complexity of these paintings? Why the curious tension in the marks on the faces between the vertical and the horizontal? Why, in other words, do you get a feeling of tension, of aesthetic beauty but also of tension and complication, in this cross-hatching, in this sense of the relation between the vertical and the horizontal? So Jameson's argument, which he brings out more clearly than Levi-Strauss-- but Levi-Strauss does say the same thing, contrasting the Caduveo in this respect with neighboring tribes like the Bororo-- his explanation is that the Caduveo are a hierarchical society in which there are open and obvious forms of inequality that one must perforce be aware of as a member of the tribe, but that neighboring tribes, (and this is something that probably the tribe itself can observe) work out a way of seeming to resolve the contradictions inherent in hierarchy by the exchange of moieties, which is to say, of kinship gifts and wedding gifts and so on-- that Levi-Strauss talks about. This exchange of moieties seems to impose on these social orders in real life, in real terms, a way of making society more equal than it might otherwise be. Yes, it's still hierarchical, but at the same time, wealth is distributed, each person has his own form of asserting dignity, and so on. The Caduveo doesn't have this. Levi-Strauss's and Jameson's point is that the Caduveo never really worked that out, so they're stuck with a simple form of hierarchical organization. Face painting, then, according to Levi-Strauss followed by Jameson, is their way of symbolically resolving the problem by introducing the horizontal-- by introducing, in other words, the ways in which other tribes have successfully offset hierarchy with ways of distributing wealth and prestige more equally. The symbolic act which other tribes were able to accomplish in real life, in real terms, the Caduveo accomplish individually, with each individual woman painting her face as a symbolic act, a symbolic act expressing the political unconscious-- because this is not an act, we suppose, of which any individual is aware. The unawareness, the lack of consciousness of what's going on in a story, is much more readily available to us in the Oedipus myth because that's the part of Levi-Strauss's "Structural Study of Myth" that we happen to have read. The next part is > Caduveo face painting, but in "The Structural Study of Myth," Levi-Strauss begins by talking about the Oedipus myth. Well, the whole point of that is, "Gee, there's a terrible contradiction, born from two or born from one." Plainly, no individual version of the story, certainly not Sophocles' version, is saying to itself, "Oh, this is a terrible contradiction. I don't know whether I'm born from two people or born from one person." That is the unconscious, in other words, of the story which is brought out, brought to the surface, by a structuralist analysis of the myth. Jameson doesn't talk about it because it's not in any obvious and immediate way a political problem or a problem susceptible of Marxist analysis. It is perhaps ultimately--everything is-- but not immediately, and so he turns instead to a discussion of the Caduveo myth, which has as its unconscious an issue that's obviously a political one, but it is nevertheless the case that a structural analysis of a symbolic act is designed to and will inevitably reveal an element of unconscious thought, political or otherwise. That then is the way in which the political unconscious, as Jameson describes it, is brought out at the first political level of understanding, the individual symbolic act. Now at the second level, the social, in which the text, as Jameson says, rewrites itself not as an individual act but as, very much in the spirit of Bakhtin, a heteroglossal expression of voices, of points of view, writing themselves as it were through the text-- there the political unconscious in question is something that has to be understood in terms of ideologemes. In other words, people reflexively express, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, views and opinions which are intelligible not arising out of their individuality, not because they are who they are, as they themselves might say-- but rather because of their economic class and prestige status. In other words, because of their place in the world, it follows that they will hold certain views. They will be the mouthpieces, in other words, for certain ideologemes, and those ideologemes Jameson understands to be at least in part unconscious. One doesn't know, in other words, that the opinions one so fervently expresses and so devoutly believes in are opinions conditioned by the social circumstances in which one finds oneself, so that literature then becomes a kind of drama of ideologemes, a representation of unresolved conflict that manifests in the variety of class or status voices brought to bear. You can see this is the point at which Jameson's work is closest to Bakhtin's and most clearly reflects some of the preoccupations of Bakhtin as we have encountered them already. Jameson gives a very good example of the way in which this conflict works-- because part of the mystery of these clashes is that they always present themselves within a shared code. This already begins to look forward to the idea of the mode of production. At the bottom of page 1296, Jameson is talking about the violent religious controversies of the seventeenth century in England between Cavalier and Roundhead, with all the controversies surrounding the interregnum of Cromwell, the restoration of Charles the Second, and the tremendous ferment, largely religious ferment, taking place during that period; but this ferment for any Marxist--and Christopher Hill is the leading historian writing about this period who has made it most clearly intelligible in these terms-- for any Marxist this conflict has an underlying political unconscious: that is, its ultimate motives are an assertion of rights and an expression of class views. This is the way Jameson puts it, bottom of page 1296: "…the normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one…" He's alluding here to Bakhtin, for whom frequently the dialogical is simply a kind of happy cacophony of voices, a carnivalesque expression of chaos from below, all of which is a kind of yeast-like ferment, and somehow or another in the long run energizing and socially progressive. But Jameson points out that the ideologeme is very often expressive of conflict as well, an antagonistic one, and that the dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code. Thus, for instance, the shared master code of religion becomes in the 1640s in England the place in which the dominant formulations of a hegemonic theology are re-appropriated and polemically modified. In other words, the Church of England stands for--and this is the word that was used--"esta blishment." Roundhead points of view, various forms of Puritanism and other forms of religious rebellion, are antiestablishment, and yet they are all coded within the discourse of the Christian religion. That is to say, they have to fight it out on a common battlefield, and that's the way it is with conflict of this kind. Maybe a contemporary example would be not so much in the sphere of religion. Well, today one could speak again of religion, but in the sixties and seventies it was maybe more a question of ethics. Think, for example, of the sexual revolution. Again there is a common ground, a sense of the centrality of sexual conduct to human life; but what you get in--not so much, perhaps, the conflict of classes as conflict of generations in this case-- what you get in the conflict of generations is an inversion of values, not a new set of values exactly but a simple transvaluation of what exists. Everything that one faction considers bad, another faction transvalues and considers good. The very thing against which one is warned is the thing that one rushes to embrace and so on. So once again you get a clash, an unresolved clash, but a clash that arises from and participates in the semiotic structure of a common code, right? That's the way in which social antagonism expresses itself at the second level, and it usually involves, because there are underlying interests, elements of the political unconscious and brings to the surface elements of the political unconscious. Finally, at the third level what comes out, what is made manifest, is the tension or clash among modes of production as they jostle each other historically. It's understood that the danger, as Jameson puts it, of thinking in terms of a succession of modes of production is that each one of those modes of production might seem like a synchronic moment. In other words, if you're in capitalism, you might get lulled into thinking that no other mode of production is available. If you're in patriarchy, you might get lulled into thinking that no other mode of production is available; yet as Jameson points out, the tension between corporate hierarchy and patriarchal hierarchy-- the tension, in other words, which very often drives a wedge and has driven a wedge in polemic between Marxist and feminist points of view-- is a reflection of the coexistence of modes of production from completely different eras: one contemporary, one completely--at least insofar as it was the dominant-- a thing of the past, and yet persisting and still overlapping with a mode of production that is contemporary. All of that is simply a matter of historical fact, but in literary analysis you begin to think of it in more formal terms, and you see, for example, the very choice of verse form-- and I'm taking as an example Shelley's famous poem "The Ode to the West Wind"-- you see the very choice of verse form as an instance of what Jameson calls "the ideology of form" that can be understood in terms of the conflict of modes of production. The verse form of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" has five strophes, and each strophe is exactly the same in form. It is simultaneously a sonnet and--the first twelve lines of which, concluding in a couplet--a succession of terza rima. Now these two forms brought together, synthesized as a single strophic form in Shelley, are coded in entirely different ways. Each aspect of them has an ideology. Terza rima is coded "prophecy" because it is in the tradition of Dante. It's the verse form in which The Divine Comedy is written, and it is a mode that is expressive of hope that resolves all contradiction in the divine, in the revelation of the divine, in The Paradiso; so that terza rima expresses for Shelley the hope of the poem, which is that the west wind will be through him the trumpet of a political prophecy. If winter's here, can spring be far behind? Revolution is in the offing, everything's going to be great. But at the same time, the poem is shot through with a kind of pessimism--a sort of, if you will, realism; an awareness that this notion of prophecy is rather farfetched. Why should the wind do his bidding? The wind is just wind. It's not inspiration. Therefore, the very stanza which is written in terza rima is written at the same time as a sonnet, fourteen lines. The first stanza in particular is coded not just as a sonnet but also as an allusion specifically to one sonnet, Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet, which begins "That time of year in me thou mayest behold"-- in which I'm getting old. I don't have any hair left. I'm just a bare-ruined choir where late sweet birds sang. In other words, I am in a parlous state, I am getting old, and there's nothing to be done about it. At the end of the poem, the embers of my fire are about to be snuffed out. There is just no hope for it. That's the way it is: you get old. In other words, winter's here and spring isn't coming. There is no prophetic possibility. There is only the reality of the trajectory of a life spent. If there is rise, there is also fall. If there is development, there is also decline and decay, and these, as the sonnet form codes it, are simple facts of life that poetic idealism, that Romanticism, cannot override. So what you get in Shelley's verse form is a tension between ideas, the prophetic idea which you can associate with a feudal and theocentric world in which the contradictions of reality really can be resolved theologically, on the one hand, and a kind of proto-realist tradition in which we just have to come to terms with the way things are, coded through--which is, after all, proto-Enlightenment, and Shakespeare is often sort of thought of as a proto-Enlightenment figure-- the sonnet. So formally, both the terza rima and the sonnet participate in what Jameson calls "the ideology of form," and they reflect modes of production, feudal and Enlightenment respectively. They reflect attitudes that one can associate with those modes of production. So that's an example of the way in which the political-- perhaps one had better call it quasi-conscious because Shelley was an incredibly self-conscious poet-- the way in which the political "quasi-conscious" expresses itself at the third or historical level of analysis. Now in formal terms--and I have already sort of gotten into this, and I'll go through it rather quickly because there isn't much time left-- in formal terms we can think of the essential critical task at the first or political level as one of thematization. That is to say, what theme is the plot structure of an individual symbolic act trying to express? What is the contradiction that's being resolved in this symbolic act? At the second level, the formal principle that we do bring to bear is the idea, the Bakhtinian idea, of heteroglossia: the clash of voices, the way in which the voice is no longer individual but rather social, the representative of a social point of view that expresses itself through the individual author's writing. At the third level, you get what Jameson calls "a repertoire of devices," and I have already reflected a little bit on that. Let me just add another example, also taken from Romanticism, in keeping with Jameson's exemplification of the overlap of modes of production as being particularly interesting in the age of Enlightenment. In Romanticism there is a long tradition leading up to it of the formal Pindaric ode. Wordsworth is still making use of that tradition in writing his ode, "Intimations of Immortality," but in the meantime he and Coleridge have developed a new kind of ode, if you will, which is called the "conversation poem": Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" are notable examples of the conversation poem. Now the difference is very clearly intelligible in terms of a conflict of modes of production. The formal ode, derived ultimately from Pindar celebrating Olympic victories of aristocratic patrons in Greece-- horse races, foot races, wrestling matches: that's the original purpose to which the formal ode was put-- plainly is coded once again as feudal-aristocratic, whereas the conversation poem belongs very much, as the word suggests, in the public sphere. It's the atmosphere of the coffeehouse. It's the atmosphere in which people sit down and talk together, exchange views, and address each other. It is a poem always of address to some individual person that turns to that person at a certain point, evokes the nature of that person, sometimes solicits that person's opinions. In other words, it's a poem that performs dialogism. It's a poem that performs the sense of the give-and-take of a much more open, democratic culture in the public sphere. So you can see that the very transition from the formal ode to the conversation poem is itself intelligible as a transition between-- or what Jameson calls "a cultural revolution" brought in by a seismic shift in-- modes of production. All right. So these exemplify, in various ways, what can be done with these three levels. Jameson himself reminds us of the dangers. If we think of a narrative as a symbolic act, we are much too prone either to forget that it's based on reality by emphasizing the structuralist nature of what's going on or to forget that form is involved at all by emphasizing the social contradiction that's being resolved. As Jameson says, these two dangers at the first level are the danger of structuralism and the danger of vulgar materialism. The point in analyzing the symbolic act is to sustain a balance or a synthesis between formal and social elements within the text. At the second level, the problem is that if we start thinking in terms of un-reconcilable class conflict, our analysis can become static, as though class perspectives didn't shift, as though one perspective might not succeed another as the hegemonic: in other words, as though change didn't take place, as though there was always the same old-same old in class conflict. The boss is always going to speak demeaningly of the worker. The worker is always going to laugh at the boss behind his back. This is the way it is; this is the way it will always be. There are static relations in other words among the classes that history can't resolve. Finally, at the third level, there is the danger of thinking in terms of impasse-- late capitalism, for example, as an impasse that simply can't be surmounted. Think of Adorno and his incredible gloom about the culture industry. There isn't much hope in Adorno, > is there? And by the same token, you could argue that poor old Jameson talking about history as necessity, history as what hurts, history as just what has happened-- by the same token, you could argue that Jameson, too, is perhaps a little bit subject to this sense of impasse, which is why I quote for you, as these people themselves often do, the ringing warning of Marx in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." That is ultimately the focus of Marx's analysis. Let's revisit Tony in the remaining minute. Now a reified realist approach to Tony, the kind that Jameson criticizes on the sheet, would point out that nothing happens to Neato and Speedy. They are manifest villains, and yet at the same time, nothing can happen to them. They simply have their place in the social order: one of them is a fastidious aristocrat who doesn't want to get dirty, the other is completely committed to productivity and the time clock and the work ethic, a bourgeois Speedy. There they are; nothing to be done. They're not nice to Tony but nothing happens to them. There is no recrimination. But then at the first level, if we understand this as a symbolic act, the resolution of what would otherwise be a hopeless conflict is through friendship-- the friendship of Bumpy and Tony; the fact that it's perfectly okay if I'm just a working guy. I've got my buddies. We go out. We drink beer. We have a good time. Life is great. It doesn't matter, in other words, that there's a class structure, that there's a social system. "I'm happy," Tony says in effect. "I like my job." That in itself, of course, is a resolution, > is a symbolic act and a resolution in advance of the conflicts that the story might otherwise manifest. At the second level, you get the discourse of ideologemes. "I can't help you," says Neato the car. "I don't want to get dirty." "I can't help you," says Speedy the car. "I am too busy." "I can help you," says Bumpy; but notice that this is all within an individual, single code, and that's what the complete parallelism of these three utterances shows us. Within a single code, these ideologemes, which can't really be resolved, get themselves expressed. All right. Now finally modes of production: plainly, the very existence of Neato and Speedy in the same story suggests that there is a certain tension between the feudal and the bourgeois at work, but it's not a tension that in any way necessarily works itself out. The important thing to notice here, it seems to me, is the conflict between pulling and pushing. It's very interesting--and I've said this before--that a tow truck, something that pulls--and once again Tony is a mode of production, right? He's a tow truck, right? And something that pulls has to be pushed. Bumpy, like the Little Engine that Could, is a sort of a throwback to an earlier, less energized, less powerful mode of production. He has to push. Think of the way walls get put up: a prefabricated wall before the invention of the crane and the pulley has to be pushed up by a bunch of people. Pushing is the essential labor mode before the kind of technology arises that makes it possible to pull something. After that, you have a crane. You run the hook down, and you just pull the wall up into place. Before then, you got maybe one person standing on a rafter with a rope kind of pulling but everybody else is down on the ground pushing; and so the relationship between pushing and pulling in the story is a crucially important one which suggests the overlap of older and newer modes of production, all of which can be resolved at Jameson's third or historical level of analysis. Okay. So much then for Jameson and for Tony. We'll be coming back to Tony again next time in the context of talking about the New Historicism.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_10_Biblical_Law_The_Three_Legal_Corpora_of_JE_Exodus_P_Leviticus_and_Numbers_and_D.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: So as we saw last week, before we stopped to talk about the priestly materials and the Holiness Code--as we saw last week, the covenant ceremony at Sinai included God's announcement of and Israel's agreement to certain covenantal stipulations. So Exodus 24:3 and 4, describe this agreement as follows: Moses went and repeated to the people all the commands of the lord and all the rules; and all the people answered with one voice, saying "All the things that the lord has commanded we will do!" Moses then wrote down all the commands of the Lord. So the covenant concluded at Sinai is the climactic moment in the Pentateuchal narrative. And it came to be viewed as the initiation of God's articulation of the laws and rules and ordinances and instruction by which the ancient Israelites were to live. And so later editors consequently inserted law collections from later times and circles into the story of Israel's meeting with God at Sinai, and subsequent sojourn in the wilderness. This was done in order to lend these collections an air of high antiquity and to give them divine sponsorship. The conclusion of biblical scholarship is that a number of separate bodies of law have gravitated to the story of the 40-year period of Israel's formation into a people. So that's the period of the covenant at Mount Sinai and then the journey towards the Promised Land. All Israelite law is represented in the biblical account as having issued from that time, that 40-year period of intimate contact between God and Israel. So on your handout, I've given a division, a rough division, of the different legal collections that we have in the Pentateuch. The laws that scholars will often refer to as the JE laws, since they sort of are introduced by that narrative--some people think it's best to just think of these as separate legal collections--those occur in Exodus. And so they tend to be dated tenth-ninth century in their written form. The laws of the priestly material are mostly going to be found in Leviticus and Numbers, and those will be formulated somewhere from the eighth to the sixth century. Same period of time roughly we have the laws of D, which are found, obviously, in Deuteronomy. But these sources themselves are clearly drawing upon much older traditions. Some of the individual laws are clearly quite ancient. They have a great deal in common with Ancient Near Eastern legal traditions, generally of the second millennium. The laws of Exodus, for example--some of them bear such similarity to the Code of Hammurabi that we can really assume that they are drawing upon a common legal heritage: Canaanite law or what would have been known as a legal tradition in Canaan. So whatever their actual origin, however, the bible represents these materials as having been given at Sinai or during that 40-year period after. So given at Sinai, now this is on your sheet, you have the Decalogue--not very well translated as the Ten Commandments--we'll come back to that. Covenant code, so that's a chunk of material, three chapters in Exodus. Then we have a small passage referred to as a ritual Decalogue--we'll come back to that--you have priestly legislation--a little bit in Exodus about the cult, obviously, then on into Leviticus and some Numbers. According to the biblical narrative then, the following materials were given in the 40 years after Sinai, as the Israelites are encamped in the wilderness on their journey toward the land of Israel. So those are presented as supplements in Numbers, but also the Deuteronomic code. Let's talk a little bit now about the Decalogue. There was a scholar by the name of Alt, A-L-T. Albrecht Alt, a German scholar who examined the legal material of the Bible in general. And he noticed that there were really two forms of law. Yeah--these things I forgot to write down . There's conditional law and apodictic law. Conditional law is case law, casuistic law. And then there's absolute or apodictic law. He noticed these two forms. Casuistic law is the common form that law takes in the Ancient Near East, and you've seen it in the Code of Hammurabi. It has a characteristic if/then pattern. Casuistic law tells you, for example, if a person does X or if X happens, then Y will be the consequence. It can be complex. It can be quite specific. If X happens, Y is the consequence, but if X happens under these different circumstances, then Z is the consequence. And it can be quite detailed giving three or four sub-cases with qualifications. Absolute or apodictic law, by contrast, is an unconditional statement of a prohibition or a command. It tends to be general and somewhat undifferentiated. You shall not murder. You shall love the lord your God. And absolute law, apodictic law, is not unknown as a form in other Ancient Near Eastern cultures, but it seems to be most characteristically Israelite. You find a great deal more of it in our legal collections in the Bible than anywhere else. The provisions of the Decalogue--and again, the translation Ten Commandments is actually a very poor translation; in the Hebrew, it simply means ten statements, ten utterances--the ones that are in some sort of legal form, are in absolute or apodictic form. The Decalogue is the only part of God's revelation that is disclosed directly to all of Israel without an intermediary. But its directives are couched in the masculine singular. So it seems to be addressing Israelite males as the legal subjects in the community. And the Decalogue sets out some of God's most basic and unconditional covenant demands. The division into ten is a bit awkward. It probably should be seen as an ideal number, an effort to find ten statements in there. Because, in fact, there are really about 13 separate statements. And we see the fact that ten doesn't work very well in a very interesting phenomenon, which is that the so-called commandments are actually numbered differently by Jews and by Christians and then even within the Christian community, different Christian denominations number the commandments one through ten quite differently from one another. They disagree about what is number one and what is number two and so on. The first statements, either one through four or one through five depending on your counting, but the first group of statements concern Israel's relationship with her suzerain, with God. She's to be exclusively faithful to God. She's not to bow down to any manmade image. She may not use God's name in a false oath, to attest to or swear by a false oath. She is to honor God's Sabbath day, and honor parental authority, which is arguably an extension of God's authority. The remaining statements then concern Israel's relationship with her fellow vassals, if you will. And they prohibit murder and adultery and robbery, false testimony and covetousness. It's important to realize that the Pentateuch contains three versions of the Decalogue. And there are differences among them. The Decalogue is going to be repeated in Deuteronomy, chapter five. And there are some minor variations. Specifically you'll see that the rationale for observing the Sabbath is different. God's name in Deuteronomy 5 is not to be used in a vain oath as opposed to a false oath. There are differences in the meaning. And there are some more differences too in language. So what are we to make of this? One scholar, Marc Brettler, whose name I've mentioned before, he says that what we learn from this, these variations, is something about the way ancient Israel preserved and transmitted sacred texts. They didn't strive for verbatim preservation when they transmitted biblical texts. And they didn't employ cut and paste methods that might be important to us in the transmission of something. Texts were modified in the course of their transmission. Verbatim repetition was not valued in the way that it might be for us. So that even a text like the Decalogue, which is represented as being the unmediated word of God, can appear in more than one version. There's a more surprising variation that occurs, however, in Exodus 34. After smashing the first set of tablets that were inscribed with the Decalogue--the tablets in Exodus 20, those are smashed after the golden calf incident--Moses is then given a second set of tablets. And the biblical writer emphasizes in the story at that point that God writes on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets that were broken. The same words. So we expect now a verbatim repetition of Exodus 20. And yet we don't have it. The Decalogue that follows in fact has very little overlap with the earlier Decalogue. There's really only two statements that even have the same content. And even those, which do overlap in content, vary in wording. This Decalogue, which is often called the ritual Decalogue, so it's listed on there in Exodus 34, bans intermarriage with Canaanites less they entice the Israelites into worship of their gods. It has other terms that give commandments about the observance of the festivals, various festivals, the dedication of first fruits to God, the dedication of first born animals to God and so on; things that were not in the Exodus 20 Decalogue. So evidently, there were different traditions regarding the contents of the Decalogue. And the story of the golden calf and Moses' destruction of the first set of tablets is a brilliant narrative strategy for introducing this second Decalogue tradition. Also surprising is the fact that the Decalogue in Exodus 20 doesn't stand completely unchallenged in the Bible. Exodus 20, verses 5 through 6, contain explicitly the principle of inter-generational punishment. God is said to spread punishment for sin out over three or four generations. This is understood as a sign of his mercy. It's reducing the punishment on the actual sinner by spreading it out and limiting the consequences to only three or four generations, in contrast to what is said in the next verse, that kindness he spreads out over thousands of generations. Right? So it's seen as merciful mode of operation. But the notion of intergenerational punishment is something that some segments of the community or perhaps later in time was rejected? Some segments of the community rejected this notion. And so in Deuteronomy 7, we see that quite pointedly. "God punishes only those who spurn him, and does so instantly." Ezekiel, when we get to Ezekiel, we'll see that he will also very adamantly reject the idea of intergenerational punishment. The children do not suffer for the sins of the father, only the father. So what are we to make of this? Again, Marc Brettler concludes that the Decalogue or Decalogues did not originally possess the absolute authority that is so often claimed for it even today. Later religious traditions have elevated the Decalogue in Exodus 20 to a position of absolute authority. A position that's not completely justified given the Bible's own fluid treatment of the wording, the Decalogue's text, and its content, and its later objection even to one of its terms. So the claim that God's revelation of the Decalogue was fixed in form--the words that we see in Exodus 20, for example--and immutable in substance is not a claim that's really native to or even justified by the biblical text. It's a later ideological imposition upon the text. And I want to talk a little bit more about biblical law's connection with the legal patrimony of the Ancient Near East. Because certainly biblical law shares in that patrimony, even if sometimes it's clearly reforming it. So it's helpful and it's instructive to compare it with other ancient law collections. And I hope you've had time to sit and read--there was a study guide posted on the website and I hope you had time to work through these materials. They're fascinating. And we'll see that there are certain key features that distinguish Israelite law from the other Ancient Near Eastern legal collections. I've also put on the handout for today just a list of those collections: the Laws of Ur-nammu, the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar, the Laws of Eshnunna, the Code of Hammurabi, which is CH, the Hittite laws, the youngest laws would be the middle Assyrian laws, giving you rough dates and so on. So you have that to refer to for the information about these particular collections. I should also say that we would do better to understand these materials as legal collections and not codes. I know the word code gets thrown around a lot, Code of Hammurabi and so on. But they really aren't codes. Codes are generally systematic and exhaustive and they tend to be used by courts. We have no evidence about how these texts were used. In fact, we think it's not likely that they were really used by courts. But they were part of a learned tradition and scribes copied them over and over and so on. They are also certainly not systematic and exhaustive. So for example, in the Code of Hammurabi, we don't even have a case of intentional homicide. We only have a case of accidental homicide. So we really don't even know what the law would be in a case of intentional homicide. We can't really make that comparison with the biblical law. Now, in a very important article that was written nearly half a century ago now, it's hard to believe, by a man named Moshe Greenberg--he's a biblical scholar and he argued that a comparison of biblical law with other Ancient Near Eastern collections reveals the central postulates or values that undergird biblical law . I'll be drawing extensively on Greenberg's work in this presentation as well as other scholars who have picked up some of his ideas and have taken them in other directions. But it was really Greenberg who was the one who I think made the first foray into this kind of comparative approach, and since then others have taken advantage of that idea. There is, Greenberg says, an immediate and critically important difference between Ancient Near Eastern collections and the Israelite laws as they're presented by the biblical narrator. And that's a difference in authorship. So if you look, for example, at the prologue to the laws of Ur-nammu: An and Enlil gave kingship to Ur-nammu, but Ur-nammu is said to establish equity and the laws. If you look at Lipit-Ishtar, both the prologue and the epilogue: An and Enlil, the gods, give kingship to Lipit-Ishtar, but Lipit-Ishtar establishes justice. He refers to the laws as "my handiwork" in the first person. Or the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi. Again, lofty Anum and Enlil established for him an enduring kingdom. They name him "to promote the welfare of the people…cause justice to prevail… When Marduk commissioned me… to direct the land" and now it continues in first person speech: "I established law and justice in the language of the land…At that time, (I decreed): the laws of justice," the laws that the efficient King Hammurabi set up. "I wrote my precious words on my stela," which you can go and see at Sterling Memorial Library "and in the presence of the statue of me, the king of justice, I set up in order to administer the law of the land, to prescribe the ordinances of the land, to give justice to the oppressed." And he refers to it as "my justice," "my statutes," no one should rescind them. "My inscribed stela," "my precious words." Do not alter the law of the land which "I" enacted; I, I, I throughout. By contrast in biblical law, authorship is not ascribed to Moses, ever. It is attributed always to God. So you see in Exodus 24:3 and 4: Moses went and repeated to the people all the commands of the lord and all the rules; and all the people answered with one voice, saying "All the things that the lord has commanded we will do!" Moses then wrote down all the commands of the Lord. It's the repetition that makes you feel that the biblical writer here is not accidentally saying these things, trying to drive home a very strong point. Exodus 31:18: "When he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the Pact, stone tablets inscribed with the finger of God." So Greenberg, and since him, Brettler, and many others, have argued that the principle of divine authorship has certain very important implications. First, it has a significant effect on the scope of the law. Ancient Near Eastern and biblical law differ concerning the areas of human life and activity that fall within the concern of the law. That doesn't mean they don't fall within the concern of humanity, they just fall within concern of the law. That's an idea I'll come back to in a minute. Israelite law will contain more than just rules and provisions that fall within the scope of the coercive power of the state to enforce. More than what would fall under the jurisdiction of law courts, for example, or legal decisors. It is holistic. The scope of the law is holistic. It's going to contain social and ethical and moral and religious prescriptions, and very often they're going to be couched in an authoritative, apodictic style, particularly the things that aren't enforceable in a court of law. They will tend to be the ones that are backed up by the authority of God directly: you shall do this, I the Lord am your God. Notice how many times that refrain is used. And it's almost always used with those unenforceable kinds of things. Love your neighbor as yourself, you know, I the Lord am your God. It's me who's watching out for this one, not the court, okay? The extra-biblical law collections deal almost exclusively with matters that are enforceable by the state. That doesn't necessarily mean they were. We don't know how these were used. But they don't tend to deal with matters that we would call, we would call, matters of conscience or moral rectitude. So you'd be very hard pressed in the extra-biblical collections to find a law like Exodus 23:4 and 5: When you encounter your enemy's ox or ass wandering, you must take it back to him. When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden, and you would refrain from raising it, you must, nevertheless, raise it with him. Or Leviticus 19:17 and 18: "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart." Can you imagine Congress passing a law like that? "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsmen, but incur no guilt because of him." And don't carry around a grudge. Reprove him, tell him what's wrong, clear the air. Don't carry around a grudge. "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself: I am the Lord." That refrain always comes after those kinds of statements. So the Bible includes norms for human behavior set by the divine will, even though enforcement has to be left to the individual conscience. And in the Torah, therefore, life is treated holistically in the realm of law. One's actions aren't compartmentalized, and that's why the legal materials to us can sometimes seem like an indiscriminate mix of laws concerning all areas of life. And it's one of the things that makes people confused. Because a lot of moderns have gotten the idea that the Bible only deals with what we call morality. And so they don't understand all this other stuff that's in there, right? And sometimes if we tell ourselves, well, this is a legal collection, then we don't understand why there's all this moral-looking stuff in there. It is a mixture because it's holistic. It is the will of God, and God has something to say about all areas of life. And so in Exodus 23, you're going to have a law that tells you not to oppress a stranger because you were a stranger. It tells you to not plow your land in the Sabbath year immediately following that to let the poor and needy eat from it. It tells you to observe the Sabbath day rest. You shall not mention any other gods. It tells you how to observe the three pilgrimage festivals and rules of ritual offering and then there are also civil laws. Same thing in Leviticus: 18 through 20. We have incest laws, we have ritual laws, we have civil laws and we have moral laws all together. Now, a second implication--another idea that flows from the fact that this law is divinely authored--so a second implication of divine authorship, according to Greenberg, is this connection between law and morality so that in the biblical, legal framework, every crime is also a sin. Every crime is also a sin. Law is the moral will of God and nothing is beyond the moral will of God. So what's illegal is also immoral, and vice versa; what's immoral is also illegal. Law and morality are not separate, as we moderns tend to think they are and ought to be, right, in our society. Offenses against morality in the biblical world are also religious offenses. They're also sins because they are infractions of the divine will. So the fusion of morality and law, Greenberg argues, is the reason that biblical law not only expresses, but legislates a concern for the unfortunate members of society, for example; orphans, strangers, widows, as well as respect for the aged. From the Priestly source, this is Leviticus 19:32, we read, "You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old; you shall fear your God. I am the Lord." Again, that refrain always has to come with this kind of a statement. The extra-biblical codes certainly exhibit concern for the rights of the poor. This is very important, particularly in their prologues. We've read some of these prologues. You know, my desire was to help the orphans, the strangers and so on. But when you look at the content of the laws, as in our society, they don't legislate charity. They don't legislate compassion. It's likely that these were considered acts of, who knows, personal conscience, religious conviction, something that was between the individual and society and their God. I don't know, but they were outside the domain and jurisdiction of the court. That doesn't mean that charity and compassion were not present in other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. The point is that law is not understood as being the appropriate vehicle for the expression of those values. There were other sorts of texts that might do those sorts of things and urge people to charity and compassion. But law, the legislation, is not understood to be the appropriate vehicle for the expression of those values. So again, I'm not trying to say that in Ancient Near Eastern society, everybody was mean, I'm trying to say that law, because of its divine authorship, suddenly takes on a scope, a holistic scope and a fusion of law and morality that are kept separate in other cultures and very much in our own. So the two, however, are combined. And law is understood to be the appropriate vehicle to legislate compassion, for example. So in Leviticus 19:9, verse 10, legislating charity, When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I, the Lord am your God. Again, from the Holiness Code, Leviticus 19:14, "You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind. You shall fear your God: I am the Lord." Again, always has to back it up because this is not something the courts can back up, right? This is a question of your morality. Or Leviticus 20:18 "Love your fellow as yourself. I am the Lord." Leviticus 19:33-34: "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I, the Lord, am your God." Deuteronomy 22:6: "If, along the road, you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life," meaning God will reward you. So again, this is enforceable by God. Furthermore, Greenberg argues that the fact that every crime is also a sin lays the ground for certain acts to be viewed as absolutely wrong, and transcending the power of humans to forgive. Absolutely wrong and they transcend the power of humans to pardon or forgive. Take for an example, adultery. Deuteronomy 22:22: "If a man is found lying with another man's wife, both of them--the man and the woman with whom he lay--shall die. Thus, you will sweep away evil from Israel." And murder is the other one. Numbers 35:16, "…the murderer must be put to death…" "You may not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer" "who is guilty of a capital crime; he must be put to death." In the view of the biblical text, adultery and murder are absolutely wrong. They must always be punished regardless of the attitude of the offended parties. So a husband can't say "Oh, that's okay, I don't want to punish my wife; let them have their fun. It's no big deal; I don't mind." Alright? And the family of a murder victim can't say, "You know, Joe was such a pain in the neck anyway, you've really done us a favor, you know? Just pay the funeral costs, we'll call it quits." You can't do that. These are absolutely wrong. These deeds, as infractions of God's will, and God's law, they're always wrong. They transcend the power of human parties to pardon or forgive or excuse. And you compare that with the extra-biblical collections and you see quite a difference. In the Code of Hammurabi, number 129, adultery is considered a private affair. "If the wife of a seignor"--and I have to-- this terminology is just wonderful. Seignor. This comes, I think, from French feudalism. These have to do with class distinctions. And so the translators of this particular translation chose these feudal--very meaningful to you I'm sure--these feudal categories. Essentially what's going on here is the underlying Akkadian words, I guess, are awilum, mushkenum, and then a third category, slave. When the three--when they appear together, awilum tends to refer to an upper class person, a mushkenum to a commoner. Awilum can just mean an ordinary citizen, but when it's in juxtaposition with the other terms, it's clearly someone of a higher social class. So we'll use aristocrat, which is where we get the French feudal seignor, and then we'll use commoner and slave. So in the Code of Hammurabi, "If the wife of a citizen has been caught while lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water. But if the husband of the woman wishes to spare his wife, then the king in turn may spare his subject." It's up to the husband. He's the offended party. It's a private matter. He decides. The middle Assyrian laws on Tablet A numbers 14 to 16. Again, it's a crime against the property of the husband, and so it's within his power to either prosecute or not. "If a seignor," an awilum has lain with the wife of another, either in a temple brothel or in the street knowingly," knowing that she was a wife, "then they shall treat the adulterer as the seignor orders his wife to be treated." Okay? So whatever he does to her, they do the same thing to the male. But if he was innocent, he didn't know that she was a married woman, "the seignor shall prosecute his wife, treating her as he thinks fit." It's up to him. "If… the woman's husband," more ifs and thens, but here's a case of "if… the woman's husband puts his wife to death, he shall also put the seignor to death, but if he cuts off his wife's nose, he shall turn the seignor into a eunuch"--I guess this is considered equivalent--"and they shall mutilate his whole face. However, if he let his wife go free, they shall let the seignor go free." Again, it's a private matter. In the Hittite laws as well, Tablet 2,197-198, the husband can decide to spare his wife, If he brings them to the gate of the palace and declares: "My wife shall not be killed' and thereby spares his wife's life, he shall also spare the life of the adulterer and shall mark his head. But if he says, "Let them die both of them!" …[then] the king may order them killed, [but also], the king may spare their lives. And we see the same sorts of distinctions in murder cases. We'll come back to them later. A third implication or consequence of the divine authorship of biblical law, according to Greenberg, is that the purpose of the law in Israelite society is going to be different from the purpose of the law in other societies. So in non-Israelite society the purpose of the law is to secure certain sociopolitical benefits. Think about the preamble of the American Constitution, which states the purpose of the law. It reads almost exactly like the prologues to these ancient collections. You can pick out words that are identical. The purpose of the law is to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty." So when you see the prologue of Ur-nammu, the purpose of the law: "establish equity," protect the underprivileged, promote the common weal and welfare, basically. The Laws of Lipit-Ishtar in the prologue: "establish justice… banish complaints," I like that one, "bring wellbeing"--promote the common weal and welfare. Same again with the Code of Hammurabi's prologue: to promote the welfare of the people, good government, the right way, prosperity. But for Israel, the law does include these benefits, but is not limited to these benefits. The law also aims at sanctifying. A concept we dealt with at great length in the last lecture. Sanctifying, rendering holy or like God those who abide by its terms. So the laws that are presented in the Holiness Code are introduced with this exhortation, which you don't find in other places. Leviticus 19:2: "You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am, holy." And then the laws begin; "You shall each revere your mother and father,… keep my Sabbath," etcetera, etcetera. But the introduction, "You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy"--being holy in imitation of God is emphasized repeatedly as the purpose of the laws in the Holiness Code especially. The holiness motif is represented as being present at the very inception of the covenant. When Israel is assembled at Mount Sinai, that opening speech that God makes in Exodus 19:5 and 6, "Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, keep my laws, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." These are the rules that demarcate you as dedicated to me; i.e. holy. Now, there are lots of general and specific similarities and parallels between Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern laws. Lots of goring oxen, lots of pregnant women who are in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting struck and accidentally miscarrying. But we're going to look at some of the formal and stylistic differences between Ancient Near Eastern and biblical law. And we can assume just a tremendous amount of common ground, okay? And some of these are pointed out by Greenberg and some by other scholars. But I've listed them there under "features." One distinguishing feature of Israelite law is the addition of a rationale or a motive clause in many of the laws. Which again is not something that's really featured in the genre of law writing in these other collections. It's not a part of the genre of writing those. It doesn't mean they didn't have a rationale, but it wasn't how it was presented. So we find this in the Bible particularly in what we might refer to as the humanitarian laws. And on the whole, these rationales will appeal to historical events like the exodus or creation. Here are a few laws that express the idea that the experience of slavery and liberation should be the wellspring for moral action. It should be the impetus for moral action. Exodus 22:20: "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." 23:9: "You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." And Leviticus 19 contains a similar exhortation not to wrong a stranger who resides with you, but "love him as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Likewise, in Deuteronomy 5 --this is the Decalogue in Deuteronomy--which is talking about Sabbath observance, and ensuring that all in your abode rest "…you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or your ass, or any of your cattle…" "stranger in your settlements, so that your male and female slave may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there." Also , "For the Lord your God is God supreme and Lord supreme, the great, the mighty and the awesome God who shows no favor and takes no bride." Takes no bride also! But takes no bribe "…but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. you too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." We have two rationales there; one is the explicit rationale of imitatio dei. This is what I do and this is what you should do. And there are more. Many of them referring to the exodus in Egypt and others referring to the notion of imitatio dei. So it's also illuminating to compare the Ancient Near Eastern and the biblical legal materials in terms of the concern for the disadvantaged, the elimination of social class distinctions, and a trend toward humanitarianism. Greenberg notes that the Torah's concern for the disadvantaged of society is quite marked in the actual laws themselves. Many of the extra-biblical legal collections pay homage to this idea in their prologues. It doesn't always seem to be appearing, however, in the actual terms of these collections. Now, these collections are incomplete. We don't have everything. And again, it may be another literary genre that accomplished some of that work in that culture. The Torah laws-- And also, the laws in those collections very often, despite the prologues' rhetoric that they bring justice to the disadvantaged and so on, many of the laws clearly serve the interests of an upper class. Okay, that's the more important point. They clearly serve the interests of an upper class. The Torah laws do not contain all the same distinctions of social class among free persons as the contemporary laws--the Laws of Eshnunna, the Laws of Hammurabi. These laws distinguish between punishments for crimes committed against upper class and lower class persons, not to mention slaves. So if we look at the Code of Hammurabi, there's a stretch of laws numbering 195 to 208 something. And they're--very interesting to read them all in a row. I'll hit some highlights. So if an upper class person, if an aristocrat has destroyed the eye of a member of the aristocracy, they destroy his eye. If he breaks his bone, they break his bone. But as you move down to 198, if he destroys the eye of a commoner or breaks the bone of a commoner, he pays one mina of silver. And if it's a slave, he pays half the value of the slave. On to 200 and 201: If he knocks out an aristocrat's tooth, they knock out his tooth. But if it's a commoner's tooth, he pays a third of a mina of silver, and so on. The Hittite laws too: there are different amounts fixed by class in the miscarriage laws, 95 and 99. The middle Assyrian laws also distinguish between the awilum, the mushkenum and the slave. Leviticus 24:17-22--we have, there, laws of personal liability; bodily injury, assault and battery or bodily injury. And we find a clear and explicit statement to the effect that there shall be one standard for citizen and stranger alike. This is known as the principle of talion; lex talionis. So reading from Leviticus, "If anyone maims his fellow." "If anyone maims his fellow, as he has done so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The injury he inflicted on another shall be inflicted on him… You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike: for I the Lord, am your God." This was a radical concept in its day, evidently. The punishment should fit the crime, no more and no less for all free persons--granted slaves are not included--regardless of social class. Equality before the law. And this casts the principle of talion, I hope, in a new light. The law of talion, which is essentially the principle that a person should be punished according to the injury they inflicted, it's been decried as a primitive, archaic reflex of the vengeance or vendetta principle. The notion of "an eye for an eye" is usually cited or held up as typical of the harsh and cruel standards of the vengeful Old Testament God. But when you look at it in a comparative light in its legal context, we see that it's a polemic against the class distinctions that were being drawn in antecedent and contemporary legal systems, such as the Code of Hammurabi. According to the Bible, the punishment should always fit the crime regardless of the social status of the perpetrator on the one hand or the victim on the other. All free citizens who injure are treated equally before the law. They're neither let off lightly nor punished excessively. If you read the middle Assyrian laws, don't want to do that on an empty stomach. A.20, A.21 and F1--you have multiple punishments that are carried out. Someone who causes a miscarriage: they have a monetary fine, they have to pay two talents and 30 minas of lead. They're flogged 50 times and then they have to do corvée, forced labor for the state for a month. Multiple punishments. For sheep stealing, that's even worse. You're flogged 100 times and they pull out your hair and there's a monetary fine, and you do corvée, forced labor, for a month. So are these ideas--is this idea that the punishment should be neither too little nor too much, it should match the crime, that all free persons are equal before the law, that one standard should apply regardless of the social status of the perpetrator or the victim--are these ideas really primitive legal concepts? In addition to asserting the basic equality before the law for all free citizens, the Bible mandates concern for the disenfranchised. We've already seen that a little bit in the laws of Leviticus 19:9-10, which says that you have to leave, you know, don't go over your fields picking every little last bit. You know, just go through, get what you need, but leave a little bit behind and let the poor and the stranger glean there. Deuteronomy is a little less generous. They substitute the phrase "the widow, the orphan and the stranger" in that law where Leviticus says the poor. Deuteronomy 24:20-22: When you beat down the fruit of your olive trees, [or gather the grapes of your vineyard; see note 2] do not go over them again. That [which remains on the tree] shall go to the stranger, the orphan [see note 3] and the widow… Always remember you were a slave in the land of Egypt, therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment. So Leviticus supports outright charity for the poor in the form of gleanings. Kind of a welfare system. Deuteronomy has more of a workfare system in mind; they actually never mention the poor. It's only Leviticus that mentions the poor. For Deuteronomy, it's those who really can't provide for themselves: the widow, the orphan and the stranger who may not be able to find employment. The poor should be working. But you can assist them with loans, according to Deuteronomy. And these should be generous. Here's Deuteronomy's admonition to loan money to the poor even if it means potential loss to yourself because the seventh year is imminent; the sabbatical year. In the sabbatical year, all debts were released, cancelled. Okay? Sort of an economic corrective to restore people to a more equal economic situation. So in the sixth year, some people will feel 'I don't really want to lend money out. It's going to be cancelled next year. I won't get my money back.' Loans must be made even if the debt will be cancelled, for the simple reason that the problem of poverty is a terrible and persistent problem. Deuteronomy 15:7-11: If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brethren, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need whatever it may be. Beware lest you harbor the base thought, 'the seventh year, the year of debt release is approaching' so that you are mean to your poor kinsman and give him nothing. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, for the poor will never cease out of the land. Alright, the poor will always be with you. This is where it comes from, but it gets misquoted later. It's taken to mean the poor are always with you, so you don't have to do anything. That's not what it means here in Deuteronomy. Lend to them because the poor will never cease out of the land," therefore I command you, open wide your hand." Get busy, give charity. It's a problem that never goes away, so you can never rest. Connected with this is the biblical trend towards humanitarianism. And there is, of course, much in biblical legislation that offends modern sensibilities. There's no point in pretending that there isn't. For example, as in the rest of the ancient world, slavery existed in Israel. It did. Even so, and this is not to apologize for it, there is a tendency toward humanitarianism in the laws concerning slavery. The Bible is equivocating on this institution. In some societies, in their legal systems, it's clear that slaves are the chattel, the property of the master. The Bible, again, equivocates on this question. They affirm some personal rights for the slave, but not all. In contrast to, for example, the middle Assyrian laws, where a master can kill a slave with impunity, the Bible legislates that the master who wounds his slave in any way, even losing a tooth--which is understood to be a minor thing, because it's not in any way an essential organ--so even if he knocks out a tooth, right, he has to set him free. That's in Exodus 21:26-27. Moreover, the slave is entitled to the Sabbath rest and all of the Sabbath legislation. And quite importantly, a fugitive slave cannot be returned to his master. That's in Deuteronomy 23:16-17: You shall not turn over to his master a slave who seeks refuge with you from his master. He shall live with you in any place he may choose among the settlements in your midst, wherever he pleases; you must not ill treat him. This is the opposite of the fugitive slave law, actually in this country in the nineteenth century, but also in Hammurabi's Code. Right, Hammurabi's Code, 15,16 through 19: "If a citizen has harbored in his house either a fugitive male or female slave belonging to the state or private citizen and has not brought him forth at the summons of the police, that householder shall be put to death." The term of Israelite, Israelite slavery, that is to say an Israelite who has fallen into service to another Israelite through, generally, indebtedness--that's a form that slavery took in the ancient world and in the biblical picture--the term was limited to six years by Exodus, by the Covenant Code. In the Priestly code, it's prohibited altogether. No Israelite can be enslaved to another Israelite. So it's actually done away with as an institution altogether. In general, the Bible urges humanitarian treatment of the slave, again, 'for you were once slaves in Egypt' is the refrain. Other evidence of the trend towards humanitarianism is the lack of legalized violence in the Bible. Here if you compare the Middle Assyrian laws, you'll see something quite different. There, the middle Assyrian laws explicitly authorize inhumane treatment of a deserting wife--you can cut off her ears; legalized violence in the case of a distrainee, a distrainee is a pledge, someone who has been placed in your house because of a debt and is working for you. The citizen may do what he wishes as he feels the distrainee deserves. He may pull out his hair. He may mutilate his ears by piercing them. The middle Assyrian laws also legalized violence against a wife. "When she deserves it" a seignor may pull out the hair of his wife, mutilate or twist her ears. There's no liability attaching to him. Legal systems often express their values by the punishments that are posited for various transgressions. And here, Moshe Greenberg has done something very interesting, a little controversial, not everyone agrees with this. But he's pointed out that the Bible differs from the other extra-biblical codes in the value that it places on human life. And you consider the crimes that are punished by capital punishment, and the crimes that are punished by monetary compensation, and he feels this is quite revealing. So I've put this very handy little chart on the board for you listing codes on one side. And you'll see the kinds of things that are punished by monetary fine or compensation. In the Hittite laws, homicide--you pay a certain amount of money to compensate for the death. Personal injury, bodily injury, you pay a certain amount of money. In the middle Assyrian laws also, homicide--it's up to the family. They can decide how they want this to be punished, but they can take money. Code of Hammurabi, we only have an accidental homicide case, we don't have an intentional homicide case, so we don't know, but bodily injury when it's between equals, then the principle of talion applies. But when it's not between equals, monetary payment and so on. Death, on the other hand, is the punishment for certain property crimes instead of personal injury and homicide crimes. Death for theft in the Hittite laws and for bestiality. In the middle Assyrian laws, also theft and in the Code of Hammurabi, theft and cheating. I'll go over some of these in a little more detail. So Greenberg is going to argue that the Bible reverses the view of the other codes, he says, because in those, life is cheap and property is highly valued. So Hammurabi's Code imposes the death penalty for the theft of property, for assisting in the escape of a slave, which is its master's property, for cheating a customer over the price of a drink. Middle Assyrian Laws: there's death to a wife if she steals from her husband and death to any who purchased the stolen goods. The Bible never imposes the death penalty for violations of property rights--personal property rights, private property rights. Only for intentional homicide, and certain religious and sexual offenses, which are seen to be direct offenses to God. Greenberg argues that in so doing, the Bible is expressing the view that the sanctity of human life is paramount in its value system. The Bible states explicitly that homicide is the one crime for which no monetary punishment can be substituted. You cannot ransom the life of a murderer. He must pay with his life. Numbers 35:31-34: "You may not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of a capitol crime; he must be put to death. Nor may you accept ransom in lieu of flight to a city of refuge." Remember if it's an accidental homicide, there is a leniency in the law that that person can run to a city of refuge and remain there until the death of the high priest. The shedding of his blood purges the land of "blood guilt," if you will, because this is a religious crime. But you can't pay money instead of running to the city of refuge. "You shall not pollute the land in which you live." There's a notion here of blood guilt, of pollution. …blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it. You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I myself abide, for I the Lord abide among the Israelite people. And outside the Bible, we really don't have that absolute ban on monetary compensation for murder. Greenberg has argued that for the biblical legislators, human life and property are simply incommensurable. Crimes in the one realm cannot be compensated by punishment in the other realm. A crime in the realm of life/personal injury has to be compensated in the same realm. In the same way property crimes are not punished by death. Also in the bible there's no, what I call, literal punishment. You'll sometimes see people refer to this as vicarious punishment. I don't think it's vicarious punishment. I call it literal punishment. Literal punishment: for example, in the Code of Hammurabi, where someone's ox kills a child, then the ox owner's child is killed. That's not vicarious. You're not substituting. It's literal. The legal subject is the father; he has lost a child. So I have to suffer the literal punishment, as a father, I have to lose my child. Right? It's not a substitution; it's a literal punishment for what you did to the other. And the Bible explicitly rejects that idea. In Exodus 21, it explicitly says that the owner's child is not to be put to death, is not killed. Deuteronomy 24:16 states that, "Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for their parents: a person shall be put to death only for his own crime." The equal value of human life and limb is also protected by the principle of talion that we discussed above. In the Code of Hammurabi, an aristocrat can simply pay money for injuring an inferior. That's not going to be much of a hardship to a wealthy person, and it certainly reflects the low value that's placed on the life and limb of a member of the lower class. Talion only applies between social equals in the Code of Hammurabi. In the Bible, the extension of talion to all free persons, regardless of class, expresses the notion that all persons are of equal value. In the case of rape, the rapist's wife is not raped, as happens in the middle Assyrian laws. Again, a literal punishment. Other biblical values are reflected in the emphasis on laws that deal with the plight of the poor, the slave, the alien, the rights and dignity of debtors and so on. I've reached just about the end of my time. Just one last statement, because I don't want to leave you with the impression that the biblical materials speak with one voice--they don't. I mean, Greenberg has tried to pull out some common values. Biblical legal materials contain provisions that contradict one another. Later versions of the law, particularly in D for example, will update and revise earlier versions of the law. Leviticus takes issue with the whole institution of Israelite slavery that's accepted in the covenant quoted in Deuteronomy and says just no, that can't happen. All Israelites are servants of God; none of you can be servants to another. So in these laws--there is contradiction. Nevertheless, I think what Greenberg is trying to say is that it is still fair--even though the materials contain contradictions--it's still fair to say that they sound certain common themes. They express certain important principles and values, which include: the supreme sanctity of human life: that's pretty consistently maintained among the codes; the value of persons over property: pretty consistently maintained; the equality of all free persons before the law: consistently maintained; the importance of assisting the disadvantaged in society: very consistently maintained; the integration and the interdependence of all aspects of human life all coming within the will of God to legislate: very consistently maintained. When we come back on Monday, I just want to say a little bit about the narrative context in which the laws are found before we move on into Deuteronomy. Monday evening will be the time at which the midterm exam will be posted on the website, and that'll be at 6:00 pm Monday evening. You'll have a 24-hour period of time in which to find--I forget what I said--30 or 40 minutes? It'll be clear on the instructions. To just sit and treat it as if you're in an in-class exam situation, and write your essay.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_3_The_Hebrew_Bible_in_Its_Ancient_Near_Eastern_Setting_Genesis_14_in_Context.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: Today what I'd like to do is begin our survey of Genesis 1 through 11, in order to illustrate the way that biblical writers--and precisely who we think they were and when they lived is something we'll talk about later--but the way biblical writers drew upon the cultural and religious legacy of the Ancient Near East that we've been talking about, its stories and its imagery, even as they transformed it in order to conform to a new vision of a non-mythological god. We're going to be looking at some of Kaufman's ideas as we read some of these texts. Now one of the scholars who's written quite extensively and eloquently on the adaptation of Ancient Near Eastern motifs in biblical literature is a scholar by the name of Nahum Sarna: I highly recommend his book. It appears on your optional reading list, and I'll be drawing very heavily on Sarna's work as well as the work of some other scholars who have spent a great deal of time comparing Israelite and Ancient Near Eastern stories, particularly these opening chapters, in order to see the features that they share and to wonder if perhaps there isn't after all a chasm that divides them quite deeply. In our consideration of Genesis 1 and 2, we first need to consider a Babylonian epic, an epic that is known by its opening words at the top of the column over there, Enuma Elish, which means "when on high," the opening words of this epic. And the epic opens before the formation of heaven and earth. Nothing existed except water, and water existed in two forms. There's the primeval fresh water, fresh water ocean, which is identified with a male divine principle, a male god Apsu. You have a primeval salt water ocean which is identified with a female divine principle, Tiamat. Tiamat appears as this watery ocean but also as a very fierce dragon-like monster. I will be reading sections from Speiser's translation of Enuma Elish, part of the anthology put together by Pritchard. It begins: When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name, Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, [And] Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters co-mingling as a single body; No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared, When no gods whatever had been brought into being, Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined--; Then it was that the gods were formed within them. So there's some sort of co-mingling or union of these male and female divine principals, a sexual union of Apsu and Tiamat that begins a process of generation and it produces first demons and monsters. Eventually gods will begin to emerge. Now, in time, Tiamat and Apsu are disturbed by the din and the tumult of these younger gods. The divine brothers banded together, They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth, Yea, they troubled the mood of Tiamat By their hilarity in the Abode of Heaven. … Apsu, opening his mouth, Said unto resplendent Tiamat: "Their ways are verily loathsome unto me. By day I find no relief, nor repose by night. I will destroy, I will wreck their ways, That quiet may be restored. Let us have rest." … Then answered Mummu, [Mummu Tiamat] giving counsel to Apsu; [Ill-wishing] and ungracious was Mummu's advice: "Do destroy, my father, the mutinous ways. Then shalt thou have relief by day and rest by night." When Apsu heard this, his face grew radiant Because of the evil he planned against the gods, his sons. So he decides to destroy the gods and he is thwarted by a water god named Ea, an earth-water god--sorry, he's a combination earth-water god--named Ea. And Apsu is killed. Tiamat now is enraged and she's bent on revenge. She makes plans to attack all of the gods with her assembled forces. The gods are terrified and they need a leader to lead them against her army and they turn to Marduk. Marduk agrees to lead them in battle against Tiamat and her assembled forces, her forces are under the generalship of Kingu, and he agrees to lead them against Tiamat and Kingu on condition that he be granted sovereignty, and he sets terms. His heart exulting, he said to his father: "Creator of the gods, destiny of the great gods, If I indeed, as your avenger, Am to vanquish Tiamat and save your lives, Set up the Assembly, proclaim supreme my destiny! …Let my word, instead of you, determine the fates. Unalterable shall be what I may bring into being, Neither recalled nor changed shall be the command of my lips." And the agreement is struck. And Marduk fells Tiamat in battle. It's a fierce battle and there is in fact a memorable passage that details her demise. In fury, Tiamat cried out aloud, To the roots her legs shook both together. …Then joined issue, Tiamat and Marduk…, They strove in single combat, locked in battle. The lord [Marduk] spread out his net to enfold her, The Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face. When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him. He drove in the Evil Wind that she close not her lips. As the fierce winds charged her belly, Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open. He released the arrow, it tore her belly, It cut through her insides, splitting the heart. Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life. He cast down her carcass to stand upon it. Well, what do you do with the carcass of a ferocious monster? You build a world, and that's what Marduk did. He takes the carcass, he slices it into two halves, rather like a clamshell, and out of the top half he creates the firmament, the Heaven. With the other half he creates the land, the Earth. He split her like a shellfish into two parts. Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky, Pulled down the bar and posted guards. He bade them to allow not her waters to escape. Alright, so he has used her body to press back her waters and that's what the ceiling is, the firmament, a firm sheet or structure that's holding back waters. When little holes come along, that's rain coming through. And the bottom part is the land, which is pressing down waters below. They come up every now and then in springs and rivers and seas and lakes and things. That is the created world, but he doesn't stop there and he creates various heavenly bodies at this point. "He constructed stations for the great gods"--the heavenly bodies were understood as stations for the great gods-- Fixing their astral likenesses as constellations. He determined the year by designating the zones; He set up three constellations for each of the twelve months. … The moon he caused to shine, the night to him entrusting. And then the complaints begin to roll in. The gods are very unhappy because they have now been assigned specific duties in the maintenance of the cosmos. The moon god has to come up at night and hang around for a while and go back down. And the sun has to trundle across the sky, and they're pretty unhappy about this and they want relief from working and laboring at their assigned stations, and so Marduk accedes to this demand. He takes blood from the slain General Kingu, the leader of Tiamat's army, the rebels, and he fashions a human being with the express purpose of freeing the gods from menial labor. Blood I will mass and cause bones to be. I will establish a savage, "man" shall be his name, Verily, savage man I will create. He shall be charged with the service of the gods That they might be at ease. … "It was Kingu who contrived the uprising, And made Tiamat rebel, and joined battle." [So] They bound him, holding him before Ea. …[And] Out of [Kingu's] blood they fashioned mankind [And] Ea imposed the service and let free the gods. So the grateful gods now recognize the sovereignty of Marduk and they build him a magnificent shrine or temple in Babylon, pronounced "Bab-el" which simply means gateway of the god, the gate of the god. Babylon means the city that is the gateway of the god. And a big banquet follows and Marduk is praised for all that he's accomplished, and his kingship is confirmed and Enuma Elish ends. It was the great national epic of the city of Babel or Babylon. It was recited during the New Year festival, which was the most important festival on the cultic calendar, and Nahum Sarna points out that it had four main functions which I've listed over here. The first of those functions is theogonic. It tells us the story of the birth of the gods, where they came from. Its second function is cosmological. It's explaining cosmic phenomena: the land, the sky, the heavenly bodies and so on, and their origins. It also serves a social and political function, because the portrait or picture of the universe or the world and its structure corresponds to and legitimates the structure of Babylonian society. The position and the function of the humans in the scheme of creation corresponds or parallels precisely the position of slaves in Mesopotamian society. The position and function of Marduk at the top of the hierarchy of authority parallels and legitimates the Babylonian King , with others arranged within the pyramid that falls below. The epic also explains and mirrors the rise of Babel as one of the great cities in the Ancient Near East. It explains its rise to power, and Marduk's rise from being a city god to being at the head of the pantheon of a large empire. This also had a cultic function as well. According to Sarna and some other scholars, the conflict, that battle scene between Tiamat and Marduk which is described at some length, symbolizes the conflict or the battle between the forces of chaos and the forces of cosmos or cosmic order. And that's a perpetual conflict. Each year it's dramatized by the cycle of the seasons, and at a certain time of the year it seems that the forces of darkness and chaos are prevailing but each spring, once again, cosmic order and life return. So the epic served as a kind of script for the re-enactment of the primeval battle in a cultic or temple setting, and that re-enactment helped to ensure the victory of the forces of cosmos and life each year over the forces of chaos and death. So if we recall now, some of the things we were talking about last time and the theories of Kaufman, we might describe the worldview that's expressed by Enuma Elish in the following way, and this is certainly what Sarna does. We're going to consider first of all the view of the gods, the view of humans, and the view of the world: three distinct categories. First of all the gods. The gods are clearly limited. A god can make a plan and they're thwarted by another god who then murders that god. They are amoral, some of them are nicer and better than others but they're not necessarily morally good or righteous. They emerge from this indifferent primal realm, this mixture of salt and sea waters, that is the source of all being and the source of ultimate power, but they age and they mature and they fight and they die. They're not wholly good, not wholly evil, and no one god's will is absolute. The portrait of humans that emerges is that humans are unimportant menials. They are the slaves of the gods, the gods have little reciprocal interest in or concern for them, and they create human beings to do the work of running the world. To some degree, they look upon them as slaves or pawns. The picture of the world that would seem to emerge from this story is that it is a morally neutral place. That means that for humans it can be a difficult and hostile place. The best bet perhaps is to serve the god of the day--whatever god might be ascendant--to earn his favor and perhaps his protection, but even that god will have limited powers and abilities and may in fact be defeated or may turn on his devotees. Now if we turn to the creation story, the first of the two creation stories that are in the Bible, because in fact there are two creation stories with quite a few contradictions between them, but if we turn to the first creation story in Genesis 1 which concludes in Genesis 2:4…and, not for nothing, but everyone understands the function of the colon, right? So if you say Genesis 1:1, I mean chapter one, verse one. And then it goes to Genesis 2 chapter two, verse 4; left side of the colon is chapter, right side of the colon is verse, and every sentence has a verse number in the Bible; approximately sentence. If we look now, we'll see a different picture emerging. The biblical god in this story, which I hope you have read, is presented as being supreme and unlimited. That's connected with the lack of mythology in Genesis 1 or rather the suppression of mythology. Okay, there's a distinction between the two and we'll have to talk about that, and I hope that you'll get into some of that in section as well. I'm using the term mythology now the way we used it in the last lecture when we were talking about Kaufman's work. Mythology is used to describe stories that deal with the birth, the life events of gods and demi-gods, sometimes legendary heroes, but narrating a sequence of events. The biblical creation account is non-mythological because there is no biography of God in here. God simply is. There's no theogony, no account of his birth. There's no story by means of which he emerges from some other realm. In the Mesopotamian account, the gods themselves are created and they're not even created first, actually; the first generation of beings creates these odd demons and monsters, and gods only are created after several generations and the god of creation, Marduk, is actually kind of a latecomer in the picture. And this is also a good time for us to draw a distinction between mythology and myth. Kaufman and others have claimed that mythology is not in, certainly, this biblical story or if it's not there it's at least suppressed. But in contrast, myth is not mythology. Myth is a term we use to refer to a traditional story. It's often fanciful, it relates imaginatively events which it claims happened in historical time, not in a primordial realm before time, and a myth is designed to explain some kind of practice or ritual or custom or natural phenomenon. "And that is why to this day," you know, "there…", I don't know, give me some myth that we all know of, you know, Paul Bunyan's axe handle is something in American nature which I now no longer remember! But myths are fanciful, imaginative tales that are trying to explain the existence of either a thing or a practice or even a belief…sometimes it's a story that's a veiled explanation of a truth, we think of parables, perhaps, or allegories. And so the claim that's often made is that the Bible doesn't have full-blown mythology. It doesn't focus on stories about the lives and deaths and interactions of gods, but it does certainly contain myths. It has traditional stories and legends, some quite fanciful, whose goal it is to explain how and why something is what it is. So returning to Genesis 1, we have an absence of theogony and mythology in the sense of a biography of God in this opening chapter and that means the absence of a metadivine realm. If you remember nothing else from this course and certainly for the mid-term exam, you should remember the words "metadivine realm." There's a little hint for you there. It's an important concept. You don't have to buy into it, you just have to know it, okay. But there is an absence of what Kaufman would call this metadivine realm, this primordial realm from which the gods emerge. We also, therefore, have no sense that God is imminent in nature or tied to natural substances or phenomena. So, the biblical god's powers and knowledge do not appear to be limited by the prior existence of any other substance or power. Nature also is not divine. It's demythologized, de-divinized, if that's a word; the created world is not divine, it is not the physical manifestation of various deities, an earth god, a water god and so on. The line of demarcation therefore between the divine and the natural and human worlds would appear to be clear. So, to summarize, in Genesis 1, the view of god is that there is one supreme god, who is creator and sovereign of the world, who simply exists, who appears to be incorporeal, and for whom the realm of nature is separate and subservient. He has no life story, no mythology, and his will is absolute. Indeed, creation takes place through the simple expression of his will. "When God began to create heaven and earth," and there's a parenthetical clause: "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light." He expressed his will that there be light, and there was light and that's very different from many Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies in which there's always a sexual principal at work in creation. Creation is always the result of procreation in some way, male and female principles combining. There's a very similar Egyptian creation story actually in which the god Ptah just wills "let this be." It reads very much like Genesis 1 and yet even so there's still a sexual act that follows the expression of those wills, so it is still different. Consider now the portrait of humans, humankind, that emerges from the biblical creation story in contrast to Enuma Elish. In Genesis, humans are important; in Genesis 1 humans are important. And in fact the biblical view of humans really emerges from both of the creation stories, when they're read together--the story here in Genesis 1 and then the creation story that occupies much of 2 and 3. The two accounts are extremely different but they both signal the unique position and dignity of the human being. In the first account in Genesis 1, the creation of the human is clearly the climactic divine act: after this God can rest. And a sign of the humans' importance is the fact that humans are said to be created in the image of God, and this occurs in Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." What might that mean? Looking at the continuation of the verse, of the passage, we have some idea because humans, we see, are going to be charged with specific duties towards, and rights over, the created world. And it seems, therefore, that the idea of being created in the image of God is connected with those special rights and duties. A creature is required who is distinguished in certain ways from other animals. How are humans distinguished from other animals? You could make a long list but it might include things like the capacity for language and higher thought or abstract thought, conscience, self-control, free-will. So, if those are the distinctive characteristics that earn the human being certain rights over creation but also give them duties towards creation, and the human is distinct from animals in being created in the image of God, there's perhaps a connection: to be godlike is to perhaps possess some of these characteristics. Now being created in the image of God carries a further implication. It implies that human life is somehow sacred and deserving of special care and protection. And that's why in Genesis 9:6 we read, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, in exchange for that man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man created". invoke that rationale from Genesis 1 in the absolute prohibition on murder. There is no way to compensate or punish someone for murder, it simply means forfeiture of one's own life. That's how sacred human life is. That's the biblical view. So, the concept of the divine image in humans--that's a powerful idea, that there is a divine image in humans, and that breaks with other ancient conceptions of the human. In Genesis 1, humans are not the menials of God, and in fact Genesis expresses the antithesis of this. Where in Enuma Elish, service was imposed upon humans so the gods were free--they didn't have to worry about anything, the humans would take care of the gods--we have the reverse; it's almost like a polemical inversion in Genesis 1. The very first communication of God to the human that's created is concern for that creature's physical needs and welfare. He says in Genesis 1:28-29, he blesses them, "God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky and all the living things that creep on earth.'" In Genesis 2:16 after the creation story there, "And the Lord God commanded the man saying, 'Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat.'" His first thought is what are you going to eat? I want you to be fruitful and multiply, and so on. So, humans in Genesis are not presented as the helpless victims of blind forces of nature. They're not the menials and servants of capricious gods. They are creatures of majesty and dignity and they are of importance to, objects of concern for, the god who has created them. At the same time, and I think very much in line with the assertion that humans are created in the image of God, humans are not, in fact, gods. They are still creatures in the sense of created things and they are dependent on a higher power. So in the second creation story beginning in Genesis 2:4, we read that the first human is formed when God fashions it from the dust of the earth or clay. There are lots of Ancient Near Eastern stories of gods fashioning humans from clay; we have depictions of gods as potters at a potter's wheel just turning out lots of little humans. But the biblical account as much as it borrows from that motif again takes pains to distinguish and elevate the human. First, the fashioning of the human from clay is--again--in that story, it's the climactic or, well not quite climactic, it's the penultimate, I suppose, moment in the story. The final climactic act of creation is the creation of the female from the male. That is actually the peak of creation, what can I say [laughter]? Second and significantly, not an afterthought, it's the peak of creation! Second and significantly, God himself blows the breath of life into Adam's nostrils. So while he fashions this clay figure, this carcass actually--and then breathes life, his own life into it. So, in the second creation story just as in the first, there's a sacred imprint of some kind that distinguishes the human creation from the other creatures. So this idea that the human being is a mixture of clay, he's molded from clay, but enlivened by the breath of God, captures that paradoxical mix of sort of earthly and divine elements, dependence and freedom that marks the human as unique. It should further be noted that in the first creation account, there's no implication that man and woman are in any kind of unequal relationship before God. The Hebrew word that designates the creature created by God is the word adam. It's actually not a proper name, small a; it is adam, it's a generic term. It simply means human or more precisely earthling because it comes from the word adamah, which means ground or earth. So this is adam, an earthling, a thing that has been taken from the earth. Genesis 1 states that God created the adam, with the definite article: this is not a proper name. God created the adam, the earthling, "male and female created he them." That's a line that has vexed commentators for centuries and has spawned many very fascinating interpretations. And you will be reading some of those in the readings that are assigned for section discussion next week and I think having a great deal of fun with them. Moreover, this earthling that seems to include both male and female, is then said to be in the image of God. So that suggests that the ancient Israelites didn't conceive of God as gendered or necessarily gendered. The adam, the earthling, male and female was made in the image of God. Even in the second creation account, it's not clear that the woman is subordinate to the man. Many medieval Jewish commentators enjoy pointing out that she was not made from his head so that she not rule over him, but she wasn't made from his foot so that she would be subservient to him; she was made from his side so that she would be a companion to him. And the creation of woman, as I said, is in fact the climactic creative act in the second Genesis account. With her formation, creation is now complete. So, the biblical creation stories individually and jointly present a portrait of the human as the pinnacle and purpose of creation: godlike in some way, in possession of distinctive faculties and characteristics, that equip them for stewardship over the world that God has created. Finally, let's talk about the image of the world that emerges from the creation story in Genesis 1. In these stories, there's a very strong emphasis on the essential goodness of the world. Recall some of Kaufman's ideas or categories again. One of the things he claims is that in a polytheistic system, which is morally neutral, where you have some primordial realm that spawns demons, monsters, gods, evil is a permanent necessity. It's just built into the structure of the cosmos because of the fact that all kinds of divine beings, good and bad, are generated and locked in conflict. So the world isn't essentially good in its nature or essentially bad. Note the difference in Genesis. After each act of creation what does God say? "It is good," right? Genesis 1 verse 4, verse 10, verse 12, verse 18, verse 21, verse 25… and after the creation of living things, the text states that God found all that he made to be very good. So there are seven occurrences of the word "good" in Genesis. That's something you want to watch for. If you're reading a passage of the Bible and you're noticing a word coming up a lot, count them. There's probably going to be seven or ten, they love doing that. The sevenfold or the tenfold repetition of a word--such a word is called a leitwort, a recurring word that becomes thematic. That's a favorite literary technique of the biblical author. So we read Genesis 1 and we hear this recurring--"and it was good… and he looked and it was good… and he looked and it was good," and we have this tremendous rush of optimism. The world is good; humans are important; they have purpose and dignity. The biblical writer is rejecting the concept of a primordial evil, a concept found in the literature of the Ancient Near East. So for the biblical writer of this story, it would seem that evil is not a metaphysical reality built into the structure of the universe. So all signs of a cosmic battle, or some primordial act of violence between the forces of chaos and evil and the forces of cosmos and good are eliminated. In Enuma Elish, cosmic order is achieved only after a violent struggle with very hostile forces. But in Genesis, creation is not the result of a struggle between divine antagonists. God imposes order on the demythologized elements that he finds: water, but it's just water. Let's look a little bit more closely at Genesis 1 to make this case. The chapter begins with a temporal clause which is unfortunately often translated "In the beginning," which implies that what follows is going to give you an ultimate account of the origins of the universe. You sort of expect something like, "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth," like this was the first thing to happen in time. So, that translation causes people to believe that the story is giving me an account of the first event in time forward; but it's actually a bad translation. The Hebrew phrase that starts the book of Genesis is pretty much exactly like the phrase that starts Enuma Elish: "When on high," there was a whole bunch of water and stuff, then suddenly this happened--very similar in the Hebrew. It's better translated this way: "When God began creating the heavens and the earth… he said, 'Let there be light and there was light.'" And that translation suggests that the story isn't concerned to depict the ultimate origins of the universe. It's interested in explaining how and why the world got the way it is. When God began this process of creating the heaven and the earth, and the earth was unformed and void, and his wind was on the surface of the deep and so on, he said, "Let there be light and there was light." So, we find that, in fact, something exists; it has no shape. So creation in Genesis 1 is not described as a process of making something out of nothing: that's a notion referred to as creation ex nihilo, creation of something out of utter nothing. It's instead a process of organizing pre-existing materials and imposing order on those chaotic materials. So we begin with this chaotic mass and then there's the ruah of God. Now sometimes this word "ruah" is kind of anachronistically translated as "spirit"; it really doesn't mean that in the Hebrew Bible. In later levels of Hebrew it will start to mean that, but it is really "wind," ruah is wind. So: "when God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void," the wind of God sweeping over the deep. Remember the cosmic battle between Marduk and Tiamat: Marduk the storm god, who released his wind against Tiamat, the primeval deep, the primeval water, representing the forces of chaos. And you should immediately hear the great similarities. Our story opens with a temporal clause: "When on high," "when God began creating"; we have a wind that sweeps over chaotic waters, just like the wind of Marduk released into the face of Tiamat, and the Hebrew term is particularly fascinating. In fact, the text says "and there is darkness on the face of deep." No definite article. The word "deep" is a proper name, perhaps. The Hebrew word is Tehom. It means "deep" and etymologically it's exactly the same word as Tiamat: the "at" ending is just feminine. So Tiam, Tehom--it's the same word, it's a related word. So, the wind over the face of deep, now it's demythologized, so it's as if they're invoking the story that would have been familiar and yet changing it. So the storyteller has actually set the stage for retelling the cosmic battle story that everyone knew. That was a story that surely was near and dear to the hearts of many ancient Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern listeners, so all the elements are there for the retelling of that story. We've got wind, we've got a primeval chaotic, watery mass or deep, and then surprise, there's no battle. There's just a word, "let there be light." And the Ancient Near Eastern listener would prick up their ears: where's the battle, where's the violence, where's the gore? I thought I knew this story. So something new, something different was being communicated in this story. And don't think the biblical writers didn't know this motif of creation following upon a huge cosmic battle, particularly a battle with a watery, dragon-like monster. There are many poetic passages and poetic sections of the Bible that contain very clear and explicit illusions to that myth. It was certainly known and told to Israelite children and part of the culture. We have it mentioned in Job; we have it mentioned in the following psalm, Psalm 74:12-17: "O God, my king from of old, who brings deliverance throughout the land;/it was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;/it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan," a sea monster. Other psalms also contain similar lines. Isaiah 51:9-10: "It was you that hacked Rahab"--this is another name of a primeval water monster--"in pieces, / That pierced the Dragon./It was you that dried up the Sea,/The waters of the great deep." These were familiar stories, they were known in Israel, they were recounted in Israel. They were stories of a god who violently slays the forces of chaos, represented as watery dragons, as a prelude to creation. And the rejection of this motif or this idea in Genesis 1 is pointed and purposeful. It's demythologization. It's removal of the creation account from the realm and the world of mythology. It's pointed and purposeful. It wants us to conceive of God as an uncontested god who through the power of his word or will creates the cosmos. And he follows that initial ordering by setting up celestial bodies, just as Marduk did. They're not in themselves, however, divinities: they are merely God's creations. In the biblical text, the firmament appears to be a beaten, the word in Hebrew is something that's been beaten out, like a metal worker would hammer out a thin sheet of metal. And that's what the firmament this by the way is the portrait of the world; it looks a lot like my map of the Ancient Near East, but it's not. So you have this firmament, which is beaten back to hold back primeval waters that are pressing in; you have land which is holding down the waters here. We inhabit the bubble that's created in that way. That's the image in Enuma Elish and it's the image of Genesis 1. And later on when God gets mad he's going to open up some windows up here, right, and it's all going to flood. That's what's going to happen in the Flood. That's the image of the world that you're working with. So, the firmament is sort of like an inverted bowl, a beaten-out sheet of metal that's an inverted bowl, and again as I said: echoes of Enuma Elish, where you have Marduk dividing the carcass of Tiamat, like a shellfish. He separates the waters above and the waters below and creates this space that will become the inhabited world. Now the story of creation in Genesis 1 takes place over seven days, and there's a certain logic and parallelism to the six days of creating. And I've written those parallels here. There's a parallel between day one, day four; day two and five; day three and six. On day one, light and dark are separated. On day four, the heavenly bodies that give off light by day or night are created. On day two, the firmament is established. That water is separated, that bubble has opened up so we've got the sky created and we've got the waters collected in certain areas down here, and we've got sky. On day five, the inhabitants of the skies and the waters are created, birds and fish. On day three, land is formed to make dry spots from the waters below. So you have land being formed on day three, it's separated out from the sea and on day six you have the creation of land animals. But days three and six each have an extra element, and the fact that the first elements here pair up nicely with each other suggests that the extra element on day three and the extra element on day six might also be paired in some important way. On day three, vegetation is produced, is created, and on day six humans are created after the creation of the land animals. So the implication is that the vegetation is for the humans. And indeed, it's expressly stated by God that humans are to be given every fruit bearing tree and seed bearing plant, fruits and grains for food. That's in Genesis 1:29. That's what you are going to eat. There's no mention of chicken or beef, there's no mention made of animals for food. In Genesis 1:30, God says that the animals are being given the green plants, the grass and herbs, for food. In other words, there should be no competition for food. Humans have fruit and grain-bearing vegetation, animals have the herbiage and the grasses. There is no excuse to live in anything but a peaceful co-existence. Therefore, humans, according to Genesis 1, were created vegetarian, and in every respect, the original creation is imagined as free of bloodshed and violence of every kind. "And God saw… very good." So on the seventh day, God rested from his labors and for this reason he blessed the seventh day and declared it "holy." This is a word we'll be coming back to in about five or six lectures, talking about what it is to be holy, but right now it essentially means it belongs to God. If something's holy, it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to God. And part of the purpose of this story is to explain the origin of the observance of the Sabbath, the seventh day, as a holy day. So this is a myth in the sense that it's explaining some custom or ritual among the people. So Israelite accounts of creation contain clear allusions to and resonances of Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies; but perhaps Genesis 1 can best be described as demythologizing what was a common cultural heritage. There's a clear tendency in this story towards monotheism in the abstract terms that Kaufman described. A transformation of widely known stories to express a monotheistic worldview is clearly important to these particular biblical writers, and we'll be talking later about who these writers were who wrote Genesis 1 as opposed to Genesis 2 and 3. But these stories rival, and implicitly polemicize against, the myths or mythologies of Israel's neighbors. They reject certain elements but they almost reject them by incorporating them. They incorporate and modify them. So, one of the things I've tried to claim in describing Genesis 1 is that in this story evil is represented not as a physical reality. It's not built into the structure of the world. When God rests he's looking at the whole thing, it's very good, it's set up very well. And yet we know that evil is a condition of human existence. It's a reality of life, so how do we account for it? And the Garden of Eden story, I think, seeks to answer that question. It actually does a whole bunch of things, but one thing it does, I think, is try to answer that question, and to assert that evil stems from human behavior. God created a good world, but humans in the exercise of their moral autonomy, they have the power to corrupt the good. So, the Garden of Eden story communicates what Kaufman would identify as a basic idea of the monotheistic worldview: that evil isn't a metaphysical reality, it's a moral reality. What that means ultimately is that evil lacks inevitability, depending on your theory of human nature, I suppose, and it also means that evil lies within the realm of human responsibility and control. Now Nahum Sarna, the scholar whose work I referred to earlier, he points out that there's a very important distinction between the Garden of Eden story and its Ancient Near Eastern parallels. He says the motif of a tree of life or a plant of life or a plant of eternal youth, that's a motif that we do find in other Ancient Near Eastern literatures, in Ancient Near Eastern myth and ritual and iconography, and the quest for such a plant, or the quest for immortality that the plant promises, that these were primary themes in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. We'll have occasion to talk in great depth about this story next time. But by contrast, Sarna says, we haven't as yet uncovered a parallel in Ancient Near Eastern literature to the biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It's not the tree of knowledge, it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil--it's a longer phrase. What is the significance of the fact that the Bible mentions both of these trees? It mentions a tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and then goes on to just focus on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It virtually ignores the tree of life until we get to the end of the story, and that's important. But this tree of life which seems to be central to many other myths of this time and this part of the world… Sarna argues that the subordinate role of the tree of life signals the biblical writer's dissociation from a preoccupation with immortality. The biblical writer insists that the central concern of life is not mortality but morality. And the drama of human life should revolve not around the search for eternal life but around the moral conflict and tension between a good god's design for creation and the free will of human beings that can corrupt that good design. The serpent tells Eve that if she eats the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she will become like God. And he's really not telling a lie, in a certain respect. And God knows that, that human beings will become like God knowing good and evil. It's one of the things about God: he knows good and evil and has chosen the good. The biblical writer asserts of this god that he is absolutely good. The humans will become like gods, knowing good and evil, not because of some magical property in this fruit; and it's not an apple, by the way, that's based on an interesting mistranslation. Do we know what the fruit is? No, I don't think we really know but it's definitely not an apple. That comes from the Latin word which sounds like apple, the word malum for evil is close to the Latin word for apple which if anybody knows... whatever. And so iconography began to represent this tree as an apple tree and so on, but it's not an apple tree. I don't know if they had apple trees back then, there! But it's not because of some magical property in the fruit itself, but because of the action of disobedience itself. By choosing to eat of the fruit in defiance of God--this is the one thing God says, "Don't do this! You can have everything else in this garden," presumably, even, you can eat of the tree of life, right? It doesn't say you can't eat of that. Who's to say they couldn't eat of that and just live forever? Don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Student: Is there any sort of an explanation for why God says you can't eat of this tree when he's given all of the fruit bearing trees... Professor Christine Hayes: There have been about--how many thousands of years of speculation--on what's going on and you're going to be reading a wonderful and interesting gnostic interpretation. And so, yep, there's been lots of interesting… and this is all in the realm of literary interpretation: read the story closely, see if you can figure out what's going on here. Why does God do this? Isn't this, in a way, putting an obstacle in front of someone almost ensuring they're going to trip over it? That's been an argument that some commentators have made. Others see it differently. So, keep that thought, take it to section and read Elaine Pagels' work and some of the other interpretations. That's something that people have struggled with for centuries. Where does this come from? Who's the serpent and what's he doing there? They're all very important. It is true--and maybe this will go a little bit of the distance towards answering it--it's by eating of the fruit in defiance of God, human beings learn that they were able to do that, that they are free moral agents. They find that out. They're able to choose their actions in conformity with God's will or in defiance of God's will. So paradoxically, they learn that they have moral autonomy. Remember, they were made in the image of God and they learn that they have moral autonomy by making the defiant choice, the choice for disobedience. The argument could be made that until they once disobeyed, how would they ever know that? And then you might raise all sorts of questions about, well, was this part of God's plan that they ought to know this and should know this, so that their choice for good actually becomes meaningful. Is it meaningful to choose to do the good when you have no choice to do otherwise or aren't aware that you have a choice to do otherwise? So, there's a wonderful thirteenth-century commentator that says that God needed creatures who could choose to obey him, and therefore it was important for Adam and Eve to do what they did and to learn that they had the choice not to obey God so that their choice for God would become endowed with meaning. That's one line of interpretation that's gone through many theological systems for hundreds of years. So the very action that brought them a godlike awareness of their moral autonomy was an action that was taken in opposition to God. So we see then that having knowledge of good and evil is no guarantee that one will choose or incline towards the good. That's what the serpent omitted in his speech. He said if you eat of that fruit, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you'll become like God. It's true in one sense but it's false in another. He sort of omitted to point out… he implies that it's the power of moral choice alone that is godlike. But the biblical writer will claim in many places that true godliness isn't simply power, the power to do what one wishes. True godliness means imitation of God, the exercise of one's power in a manner that is godlike, good, life-affirming and so on. So, it's the biblical writer's contention that the god of Israel is not only all-powerful but is essentially and necessarily good. Those two elements cannot become disjoined, they must always be conjoined in the biblical writer's view. And finally, humans will learn that the concomitant of their freedom is responsibility. Their first act of defiance is punished harshly. So they learn in this story that the moral choices and actions of humans have consequences that have to be borne by the perpetrator. So, just to sum up, Sarna sees in the Garden of Eden story, as I've just explained it, a message that's in line with Kaufman's thesis about the monotheistic world view. He says this story conveys the idea that, "…evil is a product of human behavior, not a principal inherent in the cosmos. Man's disobedience is the cause of the human predicament. Human freedom can be at one and the same time an omen of disaster and a challenge and opportunity". We've looked at Genesis 2 and 3 a little bit as an attempt to account for the problematic and paradoxical existence of evil and suffering in a world created by a good god, and that's a problem monotheism really never completely conquers, but other perspectives on this story are possible. And when we come back on Monday, we're going to look at it from an entirely different point of view and compare it with the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_4A.txt

okay well here we are back again for another discussion of English Romantic poetry and this is going to be our final class meeting in which we're going to be discussing the romantics and then we're going to begin to move on to the Victorians and we'll be spending several class meetings with the Victorians and then we'll move into the moderns so believe it or not were actually almost 1/3 of the way through the course so I know it's hard to believe isn't it so do any even have any questions about anything that we've been doing so far any of the material we've covered or any assignments or anything like that no questions okay well don't forget that if you do have questions please just interrupt me you know I mean I don't feel interrupted if you get it up me so you know just raise your hand or otherwise signal me so that you can get my attention and I'd be glad to hear from you okay the next writer whom we're moving on to is Lord Byron and Byron is a very very interesting poet and we're going to be discussing some of the ways in which he is interesting he is particularly responsible not simply for his influence on poetry as such in the way that Wordsworth was and to a certain extent Coleridge was in their influence on subsequent poets though Byron did obviously have his influence and he was immensely immensely popular in his own time but one of the things that now cultural historians recognize is how important he was in terms of promoting a certain kind of image of individualism and of the artist is rebel so let's talk a little bit about that this is what is frequently called the Byronic hero it's a kind of cult of the Byronic hero okay is that pretty readable up there in that screen is it legible okay good okay the Byronic hero and the Byronic hero is a general cultural concept that consists of several features first of all heroic individualism it is a celebration of the individual in a very very radical way that ultimately what is most important is not the group is not the collective is not the institution is not even the people taken as a nation or some kind of other larger grouping but what is most important ultimately is the individual now Byron of course was not the only person who had talked about individuals and individualism this is a concept which had been discussed for a very long time and particularly in the early modern period of the 17th and 18th centuries an enormous amount of theoretical and even some practical attention was being given to a discussion of the individual the role of the individual in society and here we have byron celebrating individualism as the highest form of heroism for byron the great soul the great soul by the way is the person who cultivates individualism and individual characteristics and powers most foully becomes a center of knowledge of value and of power we're going to see examples of this in the poetry in just a few minutes but this needs also to a notion of the heroic individual as both outside and above the norms of society the individual by being an individual is going to be forced to place herself or himself increasingly beyond the usual conventions of the society or of the social group whatever that social group happens to be and the more individualistic somebody is the more the person may seem not really quite to fit in okay now this this individualism which places somebody outside or above the rest of the group does not necessarily translate into antagonism toward the group it can translate into antagonism towards the group but not necessarily not necessarily this probably became very popular in the 19th century particularly because as we've talked about before the pressures on the increases in population on industrialization on urbanization on increasingly melding people into larger social groups in which people increasingly were having crises and anxieties about their own individual identity for Byron to come along as a kind of prophet of the value of the individual even when the individual did not conform and even when the individual did not fit in despite all of the social pressures to make the individual fit in and to conform there was a widespread appeal now that doesn't mean that everybody went out and became Byronic heroes what it means is that he became a kind of cult hero or culture hero if you will and the image that he promoted became immensely popular byron was far more popular than the other great romantic writers in his own time everybody in Europe who knew anything at all about what was happening in the culture knew about Byron and Wordsworth and Coleridge had their followings but they were relatively small followings of other writers and the people who were interested seriously interested in literature but they nobody had the same kind of following that Byron did and Byron of course cultivated this image in a very public way he was very flamboyant he was very outgoing he was outrageous in some of his behavior his personal behavior he deliberately flaunted the values of the of the conventions of society of his time he was constantly involved in various kinds of sexual scandals which might seem a little tame by our standards in our time but in the early 19th century were setting everybody abuzz with with talk about these scandals and even to the point where Byron ultimately was was really ostracized in large part from society and had to retire from England and go abroad so what do we have here I mean what is the consequence of this well that whole conception of the artist or of the creative person as a kind of rebel you know that's really a very Byronic conception there's no reason why a poet has to be rebel against the society necessarily I mean look at some of our great poets some of our great poets have been people like TS Eliot who was a banker Wallace Stevens who was the vice president in one of the largest insurance companies in America the Hartford insurance company which I'm sure you've all heard of we've had poets who were doctors I mentioned one time William Carlos Williams here who was a was a doctor we've had other doctors we've had lawyers we've had housewives we've had all kinds of of people from you know occupations and professions that we would consider to be very much of the mainstream of society so one doesn't have to be a rebel in some kind of external way to be a creative person or to be creatively free as an artist on the other hand there are certainly those who have really made it their life's work to create themselves or to recreate themselves as outsiders so we have for example there was a Oh a film that came out just a very few years ago entitled Pollock which is the kind of film biography of Pollock the the you know the the great painter you know modernist painter expressionist painter abstract expressionist painter American and how he lived this really really crazy life I mean it wasn't it was a bad person but he was just this constant rebellion against all the grounds of society and he got himself into all kinds of trouble all the time and you know ultimately you know died in a in a very tragic way and there's a kind of an image of a certain kind of artist or other creative person as being a kind of rebel like that but then there's the other kind of rebel you know Wordsworth would have claimed that he was a rebel but that he was a rebel of the spirit he was a rebel inside he didn't have to be a rebel outside because he was a rebel inside in the in the sense that he was rebelling against many of the conventions of thought and of the noise of his time and certainly of the poetry of his time but that's a different kind of rebellion so here is then the Byronic hero and the Byronic hero by the way is also the one who will deliberately flaunt the values of the middle class you know what the French and then we take it over into English call the bourgeoisie and talk about things as bourgeois values or middle-class values in a derogatory sense in a derogatory sense as if there was something wrong with being middle class or inferior in being middle class okay so we have the image of the artist by the way Byron by no means did this Byron actually had quite a lot of money and is a titled Ward and actually sat for a period of time in the House of Lords where he generally spoke for and voted for what in the day way extremely liberal issues things like workers rights and the Catholic emancipation in both England and Ireland believe it or not Catholics at that time did not have the right to own property or to vote in elections or to hold office and it wasn't until the 1830s that what was called the Catholic commands patient Act was passed while Byron is one of the early supporters of that and you know on the premise that you know everyone should have the same rights in the society and certainly the same rights as citizenship regardless of religion or other factors so Byron was a very complicated figure in many ways and he did not himself act out what I'm about to say but increasingly in the 19th century we have artists who are acting out this kind of role as Byronic heroes in which they deliberately set themselves outside Society for example that if you go live in a poor part of town and you wear poor clothes and you drink cheap wine and you live what in terms of the norms of most people in the society would be a quote irregular life well that became fashionable in the nineteenth century and of course in the 20th century as well among certain groups of people not everybody to be sure not even all artists but certainly among certain groups of people okay where does that sort of thing come from it's hard to say that it all comes from Byron but he was certainly very important in popularizing in popularizing that kind of image okay so a deliberate flaunting of social norms the artist is hero often is heroic rebel and as your editors observe in the head note to Byron's poems in your anthology Bertrand Russell in his history of philosophy devotes a whole section - Byron not because Byron was a philosopher in the same sense that Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Kant and Hume and Hegel and Russell himself were philosophers he certainly was not a systematic thinker in the way that we usually think of philosophers but because he was responsible for promoting and those who followed him were responsible in holding him up as an image in promoting this whole cult of individualism which Russell claimed led to the German philosopher Nietzsche's celebration of the Superman the the person who is not only beyond but above the rest of us and therefore cannot be judged by the same moral or legal rules as the rest of us because this is somebody who simply transcends ordinary human nature okay and as such should be given license to behave in ways that the rest of us cannot okay that of course became an extremely controversial idea in Nietzsche's thought and of course was picked up by all kinds of unsavory people in the 20th century not the least of which where the were the Nazis in in Germany now one can't hold either Byron or Nietzsche responsible for the Nazis nevertheless it was the Nazis did look back to Nietzsche who looked back to Byron for the whole notion of there being a super race a supergroup of people who were above the normal rules of society its morality and it's law okay but of course it would once again when he distressed that would be unfair to ray all of that at Byron's feet and Byron would have rosed the people who invoked him as a kind of model okay but having said all of the above let's look at childe Harold's Pilgrimage and before we get to the stanzas that I've got up here on the board we can even take those away just for a moment and I'll come back to those I'd like to look at the very very beginning because the very beginning of childe Harold's Pilgrimage a long narrative poem which made Byron sensationally famous all across Europe most people have taken the first part of this to be autobiographical child held is a figure who seems to stand in in certain ways for Byron himself even though Byron and his letters said don't confuse me with child held the hero of my long poem people consistently have gone back and said well it sure looks on awful lot like barn to me once you find out about the actual details of his life and compared them with the events in childe Harold okay child held that is child with an e on the end of it as one of our editorial notes points out this is an antiquated and in Byron's time is an antiquated designation for a young man who was awaiting knighthood who had not yet achieved knighthood but was awaiting knighthood and you'll notice that in the first part of this work this is in canto the first and while we don't have canto the rest of Quetta the first or Kent of the second they are written in a kind of style the model for which in Byron's case at any rate appears to have been Spencer in The Faerie Queene Spencer was one of the great poets of the sixteenth century of the Elizabethan period in the English Renaissance and Spencer wrote in a style which even in his time was deliberately antiquated was deliberately antiquated okay if you read Spencer people didn't talk like that in Spencer's time he was making up a kind of dialect that he imagined had been spoken in England at an earlier time and here Byron at the beginning of his work is doing the same kind of thing though he abandoned that style later on when he came back to child held held and wrote the third and fourth Kyoto's as we shall see when we get to the third canto okay but let's look at the first canto and I want to jump to the second stanza and of course here will let me I mean will obviously is not a modern English word this goes back to the to the Middle Ages Willem in other words once upon a time in Albion zile Albion is an older name for England they're drawn to youth who not in virtues ways to take delight he's gonna be the rebel he's gonna be exactly what we've just been talking about not in virtues ways did he take delight but spent his days in riot most uncouth in riot in rioting okay drinking carousing and so forth and vexed with mirth laughing shouting and so forth The Drowsy ear of night one of those people you know out in the streets yelling and screaming and laughing and so forth in the middle of the night army in since he was in since in truth he was a shameless white white also as a middle english word person sir given to revel and ungodly agree few earthly things found favor in his sight save save what concubines concubines and carnal company and flaunting wasa lers of high and low degree well okay footnote here says noisy insolent drinkers that what is Wasel anybody know what lhasa is it's it's like yeah she says apple cider but it's sort of like that it's it's an alcoholic punch that's that's drunk at Christmastime yeah it's yeah it's spiced and I mean they're different ways of making it but you can use some cider and you can use some rum and you know some spices and so forth and it's typically heated okay so childe Harold he was called well well well well well look in line 32 and following but long ere scarce a third of his in the sense of his life passed by a third of his life well what would that mean you know the biblical life was 70 so a third of that would be what 30 early 30s something like that but long air scarce a third of his life passed by worse than adversity the child befell what could be worse than adversity like getting mortally sick or something like that he felt the fullness of satiety or satiety what does that mean what does that word mean fullness fullness fullness to what to what degree jibber overeat fever overeat you know where you're not just full but you really feel kind of sick full well that's really what is going on here then was he in his native land to dwell which seemed him more alone than a hermits said cell okay he's going to go abroad he's tired of it all he is weary and world weary for he through sins long labyrinth and run sins long labyrinth it's a wonderful phrase he threw sins long labyrinth had run notice the metaphor being being used here a labyrinth the whole point of a labyrinth is that you get lost in a labyrinth right now made atonement when he did a miss had side too many though he loved but one and that wealth one alas could never be his oh happy she the one woman whom he fell in love with oh happy she she was very lucky that she didn't fall in with him to escape from him whose kiss had been pollution unto art so chaste okay she would have been corrupted by him who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss and spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste Norcom domestic peace had ever designed to taste well okay one thing we do know about by Remi we know a lot about byron actually one thing we do know about byron is that he married a woman who apparently was was quite bright she wasn't particularly interested in his poetry but she was she was bright but very simple and very naive and she was apparently totally horrified by by byron and apparently in particular and I'm not going to go into any of the the particulars here I'd probably be censored and cut off the ear if I did but apparently the honeymoon was a disaster need i say more and you know here was this rake he'll you know who you know now was was married to this this innocent and within a year they were legally separated by the way and she wrote a book this is not in our text by the way she wrote a book in which she denounced him on moral grounds and defended herself and then of course he and his friends replied to that you know and just said she was pretty Shand prudish and so of course this this became one of those things that was fought out I mean today it would be fought out in the tabloids it was it was that sort of thing you know when you're going through the grocery line and you see those newspapers to tabloid newspapers you know about the latest sex scandal of this person or that person and who's angry at home and so forth that's exactly what was going on here even Harriet Beecher Stowe you know Harriet Beecher Stowe the American novelist who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin she even wrote a book in titled lady Byron vindicated so I mean this is this is huge stuff at its time okay and now child held was sore sick at heart and from his fellow ba canals would free ba canals Baca knows what's about to now Rebecca Dahlia what's the pond canal his Bacchus the god of wine okay and a bacchanal in ancient Rome was supposed to have been a ceremony in which the people who participated in all drank a lot of wine and they they got themselves into some elevated state and danced around and frolicked in the garden of Bacchus well okay to set at times the solemn tiered would start that pride congealed the drop within his eye apart he stocked in joyless reverie sea apart he's setting himself now is the person apart even from his fellow partygoers and from his native native land resolved to go and visit scorching climes beyond the sea with pleasure drugged he almost longed for whoa and in for a change of scene would seek the shades below would seek the shades below would seek the shades below anybody know what that means it's a longing for death yes in the in the idiot wall see and Homer but certainly in Virgil's Aeneid and by the way Byron had a classical education so he would have known you know the Aeneid very well in the Aeneid the Gnaeus goes down into the underworld which is the land of the dead and there he meets the shades or shadows shadowy figures of the dead okay so for a change of scene he would even seek the shades below you see that's how world-weary he is well okay let's see an example of a bionic hero is Napoleon so look over here now this is in canto three and this is stanza 36 okay everybody with me and he's reflecting on Napoleon now Napoleon has fallen but that's part of the point is that Napoleon still is from his point of view that is to say from Byron's point of view one of the greats one of the greats he had very ambivalent feelings towards Napoleon of course Baron was himself English and therefore on the other side from the French but at the same time Byron is not one to give way to conventional ways of thinking moreover Byron's saw in Napoleon a kind of spark of genius and a kind of spark of greatness which somehow or another put him beyond the usual categories for judging let's see what he says they're sunk the greatest nor the worst of men who spirit antithetical II mixed one moment of the mightiest and again on little objects with like firmness fixed extreme in all things extreme in all things see Byron could see big pictures but also he could you know be a minut two-tier person he's empathetically mixed antithetical mixed he's contradictory he's complex hadst thou been betwixt if you had been a less extreme person a more moderate person on our middle impersonal the throne had still been died you'd still be on your throne if you were a more moderate person nowhere where it stands a 36 it stands 236 third canto yeah it stands 236 okay maybe I didn't make that clear enough so okay so what we're looking at then is Byron's view of how Napoleon is a very very complex figure of contrary extremes in his personality and that's what makes him so unusual as far as Byron is concerned so if you've been more of a middling person your throne would still be yours or never been in the first place for daring maids I rise as fall your daring your boldness is what made you rise but it's also what made you fall though seekest even now to reassume the imperial mane and shake again the world the Thunderer of the scene Conqueror and captive of the earth aren't now she trembles at these still this is even after Napoleon had been defeated and thy wild name was near more brooded in men's minds than now that thou are nothing saved the jest the joke of Fame who would be once dive a soul and became the flattery of thy fierceness till thou wert a god unto thyself nor rest the same to the astounded kingdoms all inert who deemed thee for a time what ere thou didst assert in other words you know he was a God unto himself but he willed all over the place certainly in Europe okay and he'll were these kingdoms which were subservient to Napoleon in his day Oh more or less than man in high or low battling with nations flowing from the field now making monarchs next I footstool now more than thy meanest soldier taught to yield an empire thou couldst crush command we build but governed not by pettiest passion nor how however deeply a men's spirit skilled works through thine own nor curbs the lust of war they learn that tempted fate will leave the loftiest star in other words his greatness consists of not only his strengths but his very strengths are themselves his flaws yet while thy soul hath looked the turning tide with that untaught innate philosophy which be it wisdom coldness or deep pride is gall and wormwood to an enemy when the whole host of hatred stood hard by to watch and mock the shrinking thou hast smiled with us a date and all enduring aye when fortune fled her spoiled and favorite child he stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled that's important because of what we're going to see in another section in just a moment notice that even when people turned against him he was unbowed he was unbowed okay then you know this goes on and on and on Sager than in died fortunes and you know if like a tower upon a headlong Rock and so on and so on so then in 42 that quiet to quick busins is a hell - quiet - quick resumes is a hell a quiet life - a quick prism-gram bane as the old word for for killer destroyer there is a fire and motion of the soul which will not dwell in its own narrow being but aspire beyond the fitting medium of desire and that once kindled quenchless evermore preys upon high adventure nor can tire of aught that rest a fever at the core fatal to him who bears to all who ever bore well okay and then over in 45 look at stanza 45 he hung his sins to mountaintops shall find the loftiest peaks most rapt in clouds and snow so we're talking about the person who puts himself above the rest he ascends to mountaintops in the metaphor he's not going to find warmth is not going to find friendliness okay Gila sentence to mountaintop shall find the loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow he who surpasses or subdues mankind must look down on the hate of those below though high above the Sun of glory grow and far beneath the earth and ocean spread round him our icy rocks and loudly blow contending tempest s' on his naked head and thus reward the toils which to those summits led okay in other words the one who is truly successful who is successful so far beyond other people and who has gifts and abilities and a genius beyond other people is not going to be loved by them because people are actually going to be envious of that person and try to pull that person down okay so then flip over to stanza numbered 85 because here we have a different well kind of a shift to a different tone because in the case of Napoleon we are talking about somebody who is out there in the midst of the world of action not only as a politician but also as a great military leader but what about the kind of romantic figure who emerges in quietness and in solitude that's what happens here at this lake clear Placid women die contrasted lake with the wild world i dwelt in is a thing which warns me with its stillness to forsake as troubled waters for purrr spring this quiet sale is as a noiseless wing to waft me from distraction once I loved torn oceans war okay once I love torn oceans roar but then he's addressing the lake of course thy soft murmuring sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved that I was Stern delights should ear have been so moved and he refers to the hush of night he talks about how in stanza 86 there breeze a living fragrance from the shore of flowers yet fresh with childhood notice this is a softer kind of experience the stars in 88 which are the poetry of heaven and then 89 this is stanza 89 all heaven and earth are still though not in sleep that breath has every as we go with feeling most and silent as we stand in thoughts too deep all heaven and earth or still see now we're talking about stillness quiet and what does the solitary individual experience then from the high hosts of stars to the low lake and mountain coasts all is concentred in a life intense we're not a being nor air nor leaf is lost but hath a part of being in a sense of that which is of all creator and defense then stars the feeling infinite so felt in solitude where we are least alone which is very interesting paradox dense tears the feeling infinite so felt in solitude where we are at least alone when in solitude when we're in alone and without their experiencing the lake and the sky with the stars in the lane were all by ourselves experiencing the profound quiet of this experience that is in one sense when then stirs the feeling infinite sounds like Wordsworth doesn't it in stairs the feeling infinite so felt in solitude not when there's a bunch of people around but when you're all around where we are least alone when you're literally alone is when you are least alone because that is when you are open to the experience of the infinite okay but then in stanza 92 the sky has changed see suddenly things are going to change now and the poem is going to change the sky is changed in such a change at night and storm and darkness you know wondrous strong yet lovely in your strength is it's the light of the dark eye and woman fall along from peak to peak the rattling Craigs among leaps the live thunder not from one while lone cloud but every mountain Nell hath found a tongue and your answers through her misty shroud back to the joyous Alps who call to her aloud and this is in the night most glorious night that would not sent for slumber let me be a share in thy first and far delight and then over in stanza 96 sky mountains river winds make lightnings yes with night and clouds and thunder and a soul to make these felt and feeling well maybe things that have made me watch fall the far role of your departing voices is to know of what in me is sleepless if I rest but where are you you tempest is the goal are you like those within the human breast or do you find at length like Eagles some high nest you see these tempest s' in the human breast as well as in nature could I embody a nun BISM now that which is most within me could i Rick my thoughts upon expression and thus through soul heart mind passions feelings strong a week all that I would have sought and all I seek bear no feel and yet breathe into one word and that one word were lightning I would speak but as it is I live and die unheard with the most voiceless thought sheathing it as a sword you see if I could be all of these things I would sum it up in one word I would be lightning I mean think of what lightning is and think about the whole concept of the Byronic hero right in the midst of an otherwise tranquil nature and then look at stanza thirteen now we're ready for stanza thirteen like so they 113 sorry 113 okay if we can go back to the board here I had written down here some of these that I wanted you to pay particular attention to because of the way they illustrate certain aspects of the Byronic hero okay canto three stands at 1:13 I have not both the worlds nor the world me I have not flattered its rank death were bowed to its idolatries a patient knee though accord my cheek two smiles there cried aloud in worship of an echo in the crowds they could not deem me one of such I stood among them but not of them in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts and still could that I not filed my mind which thus itself subdued well ok let's go back over that I have not loved the world where the world me see this is the Byronic hero I've not loved the world i score in the world you see and the judgments of the world in the values of the world in the snobbery of the world and the biases of the world nor the world me the world doesn't left me either I have not flattered its rank breath the full rank breath of the world nor bowed to its idolatries the things that it worships the things that the world worships a patient knee and this is a wonderful metaphor nor coined my cheek two smiles coined my cheek two smiles coined money how do you get ahead right smile on your face and I shine on your shoes says Willy Loman you know in Death of a Salesman you know the two coin one's cheek two smiles you see to be a good salesman to get ahead there cried aloud in worship of an echo not an original voice but an echo and we were surrounded in popular culture with echoes all the time aren't we it only rarely was something original in the crowd they could not be me one of such you know the other people in the crowd wouldn't think that I was a member of that crowd I stood amend them but not of them in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts okay covered over but thinking thoughts that are not their thoughts okay so I've not loved the world nor the world me and so on okay so this is the kind of thing that we find throughout Byron but at the same time well Byron takes himself very seriously or seems to take himself very seriously in childe Harold he could laugh at himself in his own heroic gestures for example the poem written after swimming from sestos to Abydos which we have earlier in our text and you can look at at your leisure he's just making fun of himself he compares himself to a mythical heroic figure but then laughs at himself for his own pretentiousness okay any questions about what we've been talking about does it make sense what I've been saying about the Byronic hero and about how that became a kind of image that many people have attempted to act out in one way or another and that that became its cultural importance one of the things that occurs to me is that sometimes this has been used as a defense on the part of those who wanted to place themselves above the law one of the most famous criminal cases in American legal history is the case of Leopold and Loeb - absolutely brilliant brilliant brilliant young university students who committed to murderer in order to prove that they could do it and get away with it now they've made a fatal mistake along the way and they got caught and eventually were sent for life to prison but it was one of Clarence garrow's most famous cases by the way and but the but in their defense one of the things that they wanted to to argue Darrow didn't really argue this for them by the way but that they wanted to argue was that they were so superior in intelligence and otherwise as human beings that they should not be judged by the ordinary standards of law or morality well again you can't really lay that at the feet of Byron you know Byron's not responsible for the extremes and sometimes even fanatical or even crazy extremes to which some of his ideas were taken but nevertheless nevertheless there was back there in the early part of the 19th century a kind of cultural movement which centered itself on Byron's poetry developing and that did have ramifications later on in the 19th century and on into the 20th century and who knows judge for yourselves into the 21st century as well okay and may I also say if we can go back to the screen just for a moment please that his great poem Don juin that's pronounced not Don Juan but Don Julian is satirical and it's really in many ways outrageously funny in other words it's not one of these self-serving self-indulgent kinds of things that we find at least in parts of childe Harold I might just mention in passing this is something very English the English traditionally used to I don't think that this is true any longer it would be quite rare nowadays but it used to be true that the English would pronounce other languages as if they were English so that Maria became Mariah and Don Juan became Don juin and so on and so on and so on I even had a professor who was trained at a graduate degree in a bachelor's degree in a graduate degree in French and was trained in that system and that's why he was absolutely fluent in French but he spoke French the way he would pronounce the words in English because that's the way he was trained to do it's very interesting yep and there were some like that sure okay there you are there you are and of course from a certain point of view and I'm jumping ahead a little bit that we've already touched on this issue with Blake in his poem the little black boy and some of his other poems the the whole notion of they'll always be in England and the Sun never sets on the Union Jack the British flag and British colonialism and the greatness of empire and all of that sort of thing fostered a certain sense among the English of a cultural superiority so that they really believed many of them not everybody of course but many of them really believed in the 19th century that if you wanted to speak to an Englishman you had to learn English you said we're in English and if the Englishman we're going to learn your language at all it would be on English terms well well well okay we're going to talk more about colonialism and Empire a little bit later on so okay let's move on to Shelley and let's first of all look at his poem him to intellectual Beauty and then we'll look at a song men of England and another short poem that follows that almost immediately in our anthology okay the hymn to intellectual beauty this is often been singled out as an example not only in Shelley of a kind of platonism we've talked here briefly about Platonism before but also about his recollection of his experience as a young boy when he converted to a whole new way of thinking that not only has profoundly influenced his life but also has profoundly influenced him as a poet as an artist intellectual Beauty in the 19th century there was a tremendous amount of interest in aesthetics aesthetics as a branch of philosophy devoted to the study of beauty not simply of things that we called beautiful though obviously that's what one would ultimately get down to but of beauty with a capital B but with a capital B and beauty with a capital B was viewed as something which in patan ik terms would transcend this world but it was something that we would always aspire to it was itself spiritual it could influence us here below it is that which would inspire the artist to create something beautiful to try to make what he created conform to the ideal of beauty which would exist in some transcendent realm beyond this world okay and so among people who got caught up in this way of thinking there was the notion that there is some kind of spirit or even spirit realm or spiritual realm beyond our world that which may to some extent enter into our world and that's precisely what we have to try to find ways of opening ourselves up to okay because our normal ways of thinking and feeling and experiencing tend to cut us off from that kind of experience okay or so it would be argued or so it would be argued now when I say platonic thought I mean I've talked about this before in connection with Wordsworth and this is a kind of thinking that ultimately goes back to Plato there obviously philosophers and other thinkers over the centuries have to some extent developed and modified Plato's ideas so that Plato might not agree in every detail with some of the things that his followers claim under the banner of Plato okay so and I think I've mentioned this here before that one time the the 20th century philosopher Whitehead made the observation that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato well that's obviously overstating the case but it's an interesting provocative way of talking about the importance of plate so that even people who are not played mists have had to work out their own systems of thought in relation often to the systems of the plate mists okay hem to intellectual beauty intellectual beauty is that which we can approach with some kind of mind some kind of mind not not intellectual in the sense of oh just having ideas are talking about ideas okay but some kind of mind which is capable of apprehending the beautiful the awful and awful here means capable of inspiring or capable of inspiring or that which is full of awe the awful shadow of some unseen power throats though unseen amongst us okay notice the metaphors that he's going to be using things that we experience but we can't quite put our finger on them like a shadow the shadow is both real and unreal at the same time isn't it it's both there and not there the awful shadow of some unseen power floats though unseen among us visiting this various world with its inconstant wing as summer winds that creep from flower to flower again we've talked about this before the metaphor of the wind for spirit it's something you can feel you know it's there but you can't quite get it right and we can't hold it like moonbeams but behind some piny mountains shower what does that mean moonbeams okay there's a shower it visits within constant glance each human heart and countenance like hues and harmonies of evening like clouds in starlight widely spread like memory of music Fred like art that for its grace maybe dear yet dear for its mystery see these these similes here are all of things that are like the awful shadow in the first line right I mean think about the memory of music Fred you listen to a piece of music and now it's over but in some sense it's still there in your head okay so in some sense it's still alive in some sense it's still real spirit of beauty all capitalized that just consecrate with thine own hues all down dust shine upon of human thought or form where art thou gone okay you consecrate you make holy with your own use all that does shine upon human thought or form okay ask I mean if you want to say where's this gone you have you know let's ask questions ask why the sunlight not forever weaves rainbows or yon mountain river why art should fail and fade that once he's shown you know ask a question like that and yes why the rainbows aren't there all the time okay no voice in the third stanza from some sublime Oh world hath ever to sage or poet these responses given therefore the name of God and ghosts in heaven remained the records of their vain endeavor frail spells what he's talking about is that our language really fails us that that there are people who try to talk about this this spirit of beauty and they come up with all kinds of formulae and words and teachings and so forth if they don't really have it okay and then notice in stands of five well yet a boy I this is autobiographical now sought for ghosts and sped through many a listening chamber cave and ruin and starlight wood with fearful steps pursuing hopes of high talk with the departed dead is out there you know haunting the caves and the graveyards and so forth thinking that he's going to have some kind of spiritual experience generally do anything like that I grew up next to a graveyard or the edge of the edge of our property it wasn't right next door but it was sort of off the end of of our property and you know his kids and his teenagers we would wander around especially at dusk and then as it got dark in the in in the graveyard you know imagining that they were spiritual you know beings they're walking around you know of course we're terrifying ourselves when musing deeply on the lot of life at that sweet time and winds are wooing all vital things that wake to bring news of birds and blossoming sudden thighs shadow fell on me I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy well that's pretty extreme line by the way in critics will sometimes point to a line like that to say yeah you know she always a good poet but he can be pretty excessive sometimes okay that that all of a sudden this spirit of beauty comes upon him and what does he do i shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy I vowed that I would dedicate my powers to D and dine have I not kept my vow with beating heart and streaming eyes even now I called the Phantom's of a thousand hours each from his voiceless grave they have envisioned Bowers of studious zeal or loves delight watched with me the envious night and so forth at the end of the stanza loveliness would give whatever these words cannot express if only the spirit of beauty could somehow or another make known what my feeble words and in everybody's feeble words cannot truly Express well ok ok let's go on to a song men of England okay this is sung by the way at labor union meetings in England let's put two music men of England wherefore plow for the Lord's who lay you low wherefore weave with toil and carer the rich robes your tyrants where will for feed and clothe and save from the cradle to the grave those ungrateful drones who would drain your sweat nay drink your blood well for bees of England Forge many a weapon chain and scourge that these stingless drones may spoil the first produce of your toil have you leisure comfort calm shelter food loaves gentle balm or was it you by so dear with your pain and with your fear the siege is so another reaps the wealth you find another keeps the robes you weave another wears the arms you Forge another there's so seed but let no tyrant reap find wealth but no impostor heap weave robes but not the idle wear Forge arms in your defense to bear shrink dear sellers holes and cells in halls you deck and other dwells why shake the chains you wrought to see the steel you tempered glance on you with bow and spade and hoe and gloom trace your grave and build your tomb and weave your winding sheet till fare England be your Sepulchre sounds like some of those poems in blade clearly Shelley even though he came from aristocratic backgrounds was himself a very very radical guy he was a follower of God 1 William Godwin who was the great radical of his day the radicalism of that day by the way doesn't sound very radical nowadays you know I mean these were people who were in favor of democracy and the rights of workers to have things like eight-hour days and was against small children being forced to work in the mines you know those kinds of things and so Shelley was a great promoter of these kinds of ideals and so was considered of course his own day to be quite a radical but as so often happens in history the radicalism of one generation becomes the commonplace of another well let's talk more about this after our break

Literature_Lectures

25_The_End_of_Theory_NeoPragmatism.txt

Prof: Well, I'd like to welcome the prospective students. I won't say the word "Yalie" prematurely, but of course I hope you all come. I wish I had a chance to provide a little context for what I'm going to say today, but maybe you'll scramble into some sense of things as we go along. This lecture concerns an essay written to immediate widespread acclaim and controversy by two young, at the time quite uninfluential and untenured scholars trying to make their way in the world. They certainly succeeded with this essay, which was published in Critical Inquiry, then certainly the leading organ for the dissemination of innovative theoretical ideas, and they were, generally speaking, gratified by the results. Almost immediately the editors of Critical Inquiry decided to publish, together with "Against Theory," in book form a series of responses to "Against Theory," all of them sort of polite, carefully thought-through responses which made a very interesting thin book, which is still available. I think it's still in print and well worth having if you take an interest in the controversies that the article generated, and of course, I'm hoping in the time remaining to get you to take an interest in them. Knapp and Michaels were then, still are, what's called "neo-pragmatists," which is to say they are influenced most immediately by an important book written in the 1970s by the philosopher Richard Rorty called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; but Rorty was writing in a tradition that goes back through the important work of John Dewey in the 1930s and '40s, and before then not only to the great philosophical interventions of William James, Henry James's brother, but also a theory of signs by Charles Sanders Peirce, a theory which at the time didn't generate too much recognition or controversy. It was taken up by the so-called Cambridge School of literary critics headed by I.A. Richards. He and C.K. Ogden wrote some reflections on Peirce's semiotics, but today with pragmatism, neo-pragmatism-- a fairly important strain in academic theoretical and literary thinking-- Peirce's semiotics is in a way receiving more attention, in a way also challenging the hegemony in the field of literary theory of Saussure's semiotics. This sense of the sign as something different from what Saussure said it was is going to be the underlying theme of the second and central part of this lecture. Nineteen eighty-two was probably the high-water mark both of the fascination and the frustration with literary theory in this country. It was a hot-button topic--we've gone into this before-- in ways that it is not really today, so that our interest in literary theory is at least in part historical, one might want to say. In 1982, though, where you stood on these matters just made all the difference, and it was in that atmosphere that Knapp and Michaels's "Against Theory" was published. Now as I say, they were neo-pragmatists, and what that means basically is that one knows things, which is the same thing as to say that one believes things, such that one acts in the world unhesitatingly as an agent. Everything that matters in being human has to do with one's powers of agency, but there are no actual foundations in what we can know objectively for our beliefs and actions. In other words, it's a position which is called anti-foundational or anti-foundationalist but not a position that, as such a position might imply, somehow entails nihilism or a kind of crippling radical skepticism. On the contrary, it's a position that insists that we just do what we do, that we are always doing, thinking, believing, and saying something; that we are always exerting an influence as social beings in our surroundings, and that the only thing that needn't concern us about our powers of agency is that perhaps we don't really have a full, adequate objective account of how and why it is that we do and say and believe and influence things in the way that we do. That position is essentially the position taken up in Knapp and Michaels. Now you saw it last time already in the essay of Stanley Fish-- Stanley Fish, who takes it that we are largely produced by the interpretive community to which we belong. You'll recall his understanding of this community as that which constitutes our values-- in other words, there's nothing intrinsic to ourselves, nothing unique in our own modes of perception, but rather only the ways in which our educational circumstances bring us to believe and understand things. This, too, is a neo-pragmatist position. Now you notice that in the third part of the Knapp and Michaels essay, they engage in a kind of polite disagreement with Fish. There is an underlying, very broad agreement with him, but remember in the third part of the essay they're talking about the synonymity, the identity, of knowledge and belief, and they point to a particular passage in one of Fish's arguments where he kind of slips into the idea that, on the one hand, you have knowledge and then, on the other hand, you have, in relation to that, belief. They say, "No, no, no, no. You can't separate knowledge and belief," and just on those grounds they disagree with Fish. Fish writes one of the responses in the book that's then subsequently published concerning "Against Theory," but it's a completely friendly controversy about a transitory and superficial matter. As a matter of fact, while I'm going to pay a lot of attention to the first two arguments-- there are basically three arguments in this essay-- I'm going to pay very little attention to the third argument in which Fish is challenged about the relationship between knowledge and belief, in part at least because it's an argument that belongs to philosophy. It is the cornerstone of Rorty's argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and perhaps not so immediately relevant to the kinds of things that we think about in doing literary theory. So to turn then to what they actually do say in relation to this movement that I'm talking about, you notice for example that in tone, their work is very similar to that of Stanley Fish. It's a kind of a downright, no-nonsense, let's-get-on-with-it kind of tone that, after reading Derrida and other writers of that kind, you're perhaps not quite ready for. In a way it's bracing. It must be kind of a relief to get this sort of no-nonsense attitude toward these issues after all the tacking and veering that we're likely to have experienced in earlier writers. In a way, the tone comes with the territory. You take these views and in a way, the tone seems to follow from it, because what they're saying in effect is, You just do what you do. You think what you think. As a literary interpreter, you're bound to have some opinion about what you're looking at, so just get on with it. Express that opinion, that's your job of work. On this view and in this tone, the only way you can go wrong is to grope around for some theoretical justification for what you're doing. It's just fine that you're doing it. Don't worry about it. Get on with it, but don't think, according to the argument of Knapp and Michaels, that you can hope to find anything like an underlying or broad theoretical justification for what you're doing. Obviously, that rather challenging and provocative notion is something that lends itself readily to the sort of no-nonsense tone that I'm talking about. So turning then to their argument, they argue that people become entangled with issues of theory, all of which in their view should be avoided, when they do two--well, three but, as I say, we're going to set "knowledge and belief" aside-- when they make three fundamental mistakes. The first is to suppose that there is a difference between meaning and intention: in other words, for example, that to know a meaning you have to be able to invoke an intention, on the one hand, or in the absence of an intention, we cannot possibly speak of a meaning, on the other hand. That's their first argument: people become embroiled in theory when they make one of those two mistakes. We'll come back to that in a minute. The second argument is their insistence that there is no such thing as a difference between language and speech: in other words, the Saussurian idea that we have language somehow or another virtually present in our heads as a lexicon and a set of rules of grammar and syntax, that language or langue produces speech, what I say from sentence to sentence, or parole--this notion is simply false because there is no difference between language and speech. That's their second premise. Now before I launch into those arguments, let me say one more thing about their attitude toward theory. Let me call your attention to the very first paragraph, which in your copy center packet is on page 079. This is the very first paragraph of "Against Theory," where interestingly they exempt certain ways of thinking about literature, certainly quasi-scientific ways of thinking about literature, from their charge against theory. They say: The term ["theory"] is sometimes applied to literary subjects with no direct bearing on the interpretation of individual works, such as narratology, stylistics, and prosody. Despite their generality, however, these subjects seem to us essentially empirical, and our arguments against theory will not apply to them. Well, now this is a little surprising because for one thing, in this course, which is presumably devoted to theory, we've talked about some of these things-- especially about narratology: stylistics-- which is the science of style and how one can approach style syntactically, statistically and in the variety of ways in which that's done-- and poetics, which is general ideas about what constitutes a poem, or a text written in some other genre. All of these, for example, must remind us very much of the Russian formalists. Narratology, as we studied it, is largely derived from structuralism, indeed also from certain ideas of Freud, and all of this sounds suspiciously like theory. What point are they making about it? Well, simply, the point that those ways of thinking about literature, which they exempt from their diatribe against theory. are the ways that they call "empirical," ways of thinking about literature that are based on observation-- and that, of course, would certainly, it seems to me, apply to the Russian formalists or at least to what the Russian formalists think they're doing-- ways that are empirical in the sense that they observe data, they build up a kind of database, and they generalize from what they have observed. They begin, in other words, with the object in question and then draw conclusions from it. So empirical approaches to literature, the simple observation of data from which one can generalize-- they exempt these from the general charge against literary theory. Turning then to the idea that intention and meaning just must be the same thing, and then subsequently the idea that language and speech just must be the same thing: in the background I'd like you to be thinking about some of the implications of this sentence [points to board: "I can know the meaning of a word, but can I know the intention of a word?"] by Stanley Cavell which was written in another one of the responses to this essay that was published in the book, Against Theory. I don't want to reflect on it now, but it seems to me a strikingly vivid way of posing a challenge to the Knapp and Michaels position which in a variety of ways, if only by implication, we'll be touching on. So what do Knapp and Michaels do in order to convince us?-- and I'm going to be going a long way with them here, indeed almost all the way, even though I'm going to be taking a sharp turning toward the end of the road which, I hope, saves theory. After all, it's scarcely conscionable to stand here twenty-six times in front of you for an hour each and then finally to confess at the end that the thing we have been talking about should be banished from our vocabulary. > Needless to say, it's incumbent on me to save our subject matter. I will, but you're going to have to wait a while because, as I say, I am going to be going a long way down the road with Knapp and Michaels. Knapp and Michaels say in effect, Well, you know what? The thing about the way in which we approach any text, any utterance, any instance of language floating before us, is just to take for granted that it has an intention. As theorists and critics, we worry away at the question of how we can know intention, and all of this is a dangerous mistake because the fact is, in everyday practice any piece of language we encounter we just assume to have an intention. All right. So they give us an example in which this assumption is tested and makes us realize what's at stake in supposing that we know the meaning of something. Ordinarily, we just spontaneously say, "I know what that means," or if we don't know what it means, we say, "It must mean something even though I don't know what it means." That's our normal approach to a piece of language. Then they say, Suppose you're walking on the beach and you come across four lines-- "lines" is already a dangerous thing to say-- four scratches in the sand that look an awful lot like the first stanza of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal': A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears. She seem'd a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. There it is on the beach just right in front of us; and we say, Oh, well, somebody's come along, some Wordsworth lover has come along here and scratched these lines in the sand, so that the intention of the text is unquestioned. Wordsworth wrote it. Somebody now wants to remind us of what a wonderful stanza it is, and there it is. Of course, it's very difficult to know what it means, but at least I can ascribe meaning to it because, no doubt, it's an intended thing. But then what happens? A huge wave comes along and leaves on the beach underneath the first stanza the other stanza, and this of course is highly problematic. There it is: No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. Now we are really puzzled. Maybe, as Knapp and Michaels say, the sea is a kind of a pantheistic being that likes to write poetry--so the sea wrote it. Maybe, they say later on, there are little men in a submarine who look at their handiwork and say, "Gee, that was great. Let's try that again." In other words, we can infer all sorts of authors for the stanza, but it's much more likely that instead of saying that the sea writes poetry, or instead of saying there are little sort of homunculi in submarines writing poetry-- instead of saying that, it's much more likely that we'll say, "This is an amazing coincidence, truly amazing, but it's just a coincidence. What else could it be?" Knapp and Michaels's point, which was the same point that you might make about a parrot saying, "My boss is a jerk," for example-- you know the parrot doesn't mean that. The parrot is just making words. Somebody else meant it, maybe, but that's just words for the parrot, okay? Or monkeys at typewriters writing Shakespeare. We are told that given eternity, this is a task that could be accomplished, always supposing somebody were there to whisk away the sheets whenever they wrote a word > and finally put it back together. All of these things are possibilities, but we suddenly realize that those texts, "My boss is a jerk" and "A slumber did my spirit seal," written by chance by whatever it is-- and already there is a sort of an intentionality entailed in the idea of writing "by" something-- but just left by chance, we suddenly realize, according to Knapp and Michaels, that in that case those words are only like language. They are not actually language because nobody wrote them; nothing wrote them; no entity or being from God on down wrote them. They are just there by chance. Therefore, even though they look like language, we suddenly realize that it would be foolish to suppose that they have meaning. There is a poem that exactly resembles this bunch of marks that we see in front of us, and that poem has meaning, but this bunch of marks does not have meaning. Now I think probably most of us--and that's why I think in a way Knapp and Michaels could have chosen a better example-- I think probably most of us would resist the idea that we can't interpret the bunch of marks. They're identical to language. We feel free to interpret them. After all, nobody knows what the poem means anyway! It's been the subject of critical controversy for decades. That's one of the reasons Knapp and Michaels choose it, and so okay, there it is on the beach. I'll have my stab at it. It must mean something, so here goes. And so we resist that. That's why I gave you this other example, because it seems to me that in a way, the other example is more compelling than that of Knapp and Michaels. [Points to handout.] Now you see these two ladies looking up at the tree. The upper--what do you call them? What do you call it when the branches are sawed off and eventually there's a kind of a scar formed? Student: A burl. Prof: Burl? The upper burl certainly looks an awful lot like Jesus, > and when this appeared in Milford about fifteen years ago, not just these two ladies but hundreds and hundreds of people visited the site. Now they, of course, believed that that was on the tree because God put it there. Therefore, it had meaning. We knew what it was. It was a representation of the face of Jesus, and the feeling that one could know what it was, interpret it, and take it to be an actual representation of something was therefore unquestioned. As we would all agree, you accept the premise: God wrote it or I should say put it there. He's been known to do the same thing with toasted cheese sandwiches and tacos, and it happens, right? You accept that premise and you're all set. But suppose you say, "No, no, no, no. God didn't write that. God didn't put that there. It's just an accident." Wouldn't you then say, "Oh, therefore it has no meaning, it's not a representation of anything, it just looks like something"? In other words, in this case-- however you feel about "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"-- in this case you would accept Knapp and Michaels's argument. You would say, "It really does depend on the inference of an intention. If I infer no intention, I ascribe no meaning. If I infer an intention, I ascribe meaning." So Knapp and Michaels are simply making the same argument about "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," and I think it's a very strong argument. Once you realize--or once, I should say, you accept the idea--that meaning just is intention and think about it etymologically-- when I say "I mean," that precisely means "I intend," right? It doesn't quite work that way in all languages, but it certainly works that way in English, and it's worth remembering to mean is "to intend" -- it makes a lot of sense to say that a meaning just is an intention and that it's perhaps against the grain of common sense to factor them apart, to say, "Well, I can see this sentence and I have a certain notion what it might mean, but I still don't know what the author intended to say," which is forbidden from the standpoint of Knapp and Michaels. Of course, you know what the author intended to say. You've just ascribed meaning to the sentence. Now mind you, you may be wrong, but that isn't to say that your being wrong hinges on knowing what the author intended. In a certain sense, Knapp and Michaels agree perfectly well with the New Critics and with Foucault or whoever it might be and say, "Well, you can never know what an author intended." But that's not the point. The meaning of the sentence in itself entails intention. If it weren't a sentence spoken intentionally by an agent, human or otherwise, it wouldn't have meaning because it wouldn't be language. In a certain sense this, then, can carry us to our second argument because, having established in their own minds satisfactorily that for any text the meaning of the text must just be its intention-- in other words, to be understood as language at all, to repeat myself once again, and to be understood as language at all, an intention needs to be inferred. The argument here is that we ought to be able to recognize, supposing we succeed in not inferring an intention, that what we are looking at is actually not language; it's just a simulacrum of language, an effective copy of language like, for example, the speech of a parrot or the words produced by monkeys on typewriters and so on. We should not from such simulacra of words infer not only intention but meaning as well. It is meaningless to speak of marks that are not signs as language. Bringing us to the notion of "sign": for C.S. Peirce, who actually discriminated among hundreds of different kinds of signs, all signs are active--that is to say, they have an agency, they have a purpose, they have a function. Peirce, in other words, does not understand them in the way that Saussure does as being differential. He understands that too, but for him the central point about a sign is the agency of the sign. Now the implication of this is clear, and it's the implication that Knapp and Michaels draw on in this argument. Their claim is that there is no distinction to be made between language and speech. Now let's just pause over their argument. I would think the fact that as we think about that-- especially since we have been exposed to Saussure and, I hope, have come to accept the idea that language is a virtual synchronic entity laid out in space, and speech is an actual diachronic performance derived from language laid out in time-- since we have absorbed that and since we just have this sort of spontaneous belief, if we're students of literary theory, that there is a distinction between language and speech: what do we do when we come face to face with this claim of Knapp and Michaels's? Now I think that they make their most effective case in a footnote. This is the last footnote I'll be calling your attention to this semester, and it's, like all footnotes, perhaps the most telling thing in the essay. It appears on page 084 in the copy center packet, footnote number twelve. I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just going to read a single sentence at the top their page twenty-one, footnote twelve, in which they say, "… [A] dictionary is an index of frequent usages in particular speech acts-- not a matrix of abstract, pre-intentional possibilities." Think about that. Language, we suppose, is, in addition to being a set of grammatical and syntactical rules, also a set of definitions made available for speech acts. That is the assumption that a course in literary theory provides for us. Knapp and Michaels are denying that in this footnote. They are saying that dictionary definitions are just a sum total, as it were, of words in action, that any definition is of a word which is already a speech act. You go through all eighteen definitions of a word. They're all of them embedded in sentences, speech acts, and can be taken out of sentences and still understood in their agency as performed. Any word in a dictionary, in other words, according to Knapp and Michaels, is a word performed, and the record fossilized, as it were, in the dictionary is a record not of meaning per se but of performance, of the way in which the word works in speech, in history. A dictionary is nothing other than a composite or a sum total of speech acts. To distinguish, therefore, between language as something which is pre-action and speech as the implementation of language is a mistake. Language, even in the sense that it's always there before us, is nevertheless always active. It is a record of those actions that have taken place before our own actions as speakers. There's no difference between me acting through speech and language preexisting as something which is not action. It's all continuous as an ever-deepening, broadening, and self-complicating record of action, or speech action. Now this is a very interesting idea and I think, again, it's an idea that one might well go a long way with. I think it should be said in defense of Saussure, by the way, that in a certain way he anticipates this position. Remember I told you that although for purposes of learning, to understand structuralism and its aftermath we only distinguish between language and speech, langue and parole, but in Saussure there's actually a third category, a sort of intermediate category, which he calls langage. Langage is actually the sum total of all known speech acts. If you could codify or quantify everything that's ever been said or written, that would be langage. You can see how it's different from langue, which needn't necessarily ever have been said at all. I'll be coming back to that in a minute. Langage, in other words, is "empirical," as Knapp and Michaels would say. It is something that, had we enough information, we could actually codify into a vast database. It would be the sum of all speech acts, and that actually, what Saussure calls langage, would be not unlike what Knapp and Michaels mean by language. Saussure is aware that you can think of the sum of speech acts in the way that Knapp and Michaels do, but he still holds out for this other category, this notion of langue as the code from which speech acts are derived, as a thing apart. Now I think, as I say, this is a persuasive position, because after all, as long as we suppose that language exists for communication, that it is interactive--as long as we accept, as we have accepted from Bakhtin and others during the course of the course-- the idea that language is social, that all of its deployments are interactive, derived from the speech acts of others, appropriated for oneself as one's own set of speech acts, and influential on yet other people as a speech act-- as long as we accept this, we say to ourselves, "Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to think of language as inseparable from speech, to think of language simply as the sum of all agencies so that no meaningful distinction between that sum of agencies and the individual agency of a speech act needs to be made." Notice though--and here, by the way, is where I'm going to make my turn and save theory, so sharpen your pencils!--notice that I began that last riff by saying "as long as we suppose language exists for communication." Now we do suppose language exists for communication. What else could it exist for? What do we do with language except to communicate? You could say, "Well, we write doodles. We make meaningless marks in the sand." There are all kinds of things that maybe we do with language, but let's face it: we don't, right? If I do, in fact, make marks in the sand amounting to "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," it's because I love Wordsworth, as by the way I do, and I wish to communicate that love to the rest of the world. It's a speech act. Come on, I'm not just making marks. If I wanted to make marks, I'd do something rather more mark-like [gesticulates]. Well, so > in any case, we certainly inhabit a life world in which it is almost inconceivable for anyone to come along and tell us, "Language is not for the purpose of communication." In other words, Knapp and Michaels seem to be completely right. What else is it for? That's what we use it for. We have refined it to a fare-thee-well as an efficient, flexible, sometimes even eloquent medium of communication. That's what language is for, that's what it exists for. As I'm saying, if we accept this idea-- which seems simply to carry the day, because who could think anything else?-- if we accept this idea, then there's a very strong case for Knapp and Michaels being right. Really there's no significant or important difference between language and speech. But now suppose we approach the question from a--I don't say from an empirical point of view > but from a speculative anthropological point of view. Suppose we approach it with some rather commonsense remarks. Now we say language is for communication; the purpose of language is for communication. We say that. Especially if we think of the whole history of mankind, does that mean that the purpose of fire is for cooking? Or to bring it a little bit closer to home, does it mean that the purpose of the prehensile thumb is for grasping? Does it mean that the purpose of a cave, a hole in the rock, is for dwelling? No. In those cases, adaptation is what makes fire a good thing to cook with, the prehensile thumb a good thing to grasp with, and a cave a good thing to take shelter in, but they all in their various ways are just there. Plainly, all of them have other, well, not "purposes," because a purpose is, when you think about it, only something that we can impose on something; but they certainly are not there in any sense for us to do the thing that it turns out we've decided it's a good idea to do with it. Fire burns us but we can cook with it, and so on. Now in the case of language, we have to suppose as a matter of fact that language, as it were, appeared among us in the same way that the prehensile thumb did. Of course we "discovered its use," but that's a funny way to put it. It might be more circumspect to say that we discovered it had a use for us which was to communicate, and so once we were able to put this-- whatever it was, this weird capacity to make differential sounds-- once we put this weird capacity to make differential sounds to work, henceforth for us and for our purposes language was there to communicate. Of course we made an enormous success of it, or a tower of Babel of it, whichever you prefer to think, but in any case we have it, and it has developed among us as a means of a medium of communication. But by whatever mutancy language arose, supposing this to be the case--and I'm not making an argument that has anything to do with "intelligent design" one way or another-- supposing that by whatever mutancy language appeared, then, of course, the next day there were an avalanche: then it might well be the case that this species consisting of all of us sitting in this room and I guess a few other people, > that this species might be mute. It might be communicating perhaps with incredible eloquence, perhaps even with literary genius, by means of signs or--who knows? Or for that matter it might have taken a detour in its development such that communication was not anything one could identify as specifically human. All sentient beings communicate, but it's possible that this particular species could have taken a turn in its development after which communication was much as it is among mice or ants or whatever. All of this is possible, you see, when we think about language--a property that we have and manipulate and communicate with--anthropologically. It comes into being in such a way that it is, I would think, scarcely relevant to say that its purpose is for communication. It comes into being simply as an attribute, a property, something we happen to have, something someone happens to have for which a use is then discovered, as for fire, for the prehensile thumb and for the cave. The relationship between the cave and the house, it seems to me, is a particularly interesting way of thinking about the relationship between language as a set of differentials and language as speech. Notice something about the signs of language--and here of course we also invoke Saussure. Saussure lays every stress on the idea that language is made up of differential and arbitrary signs. In other words, Saussure denies that there is such a thing in language as a natural sign. The Russian formalists do this as well. Both Saussure and the Russian formalists warn us against believing that onomatopoetic devices-- for example, "peep, peep, peep"--devices like that, are actually natural signs, that they are derived, in other words, from the thing in the world that they seem through their sound to represent. Saussure reminds us that these are accidents of etymological history which can also be understood in adaptive terms. Onomatopoeia exists in language because it's good for communication and it's fun to communicate with, but it doesn't enter language as a natural sign. It only passes through moments--in the evolution of a given word-- it only passes through moments in which the relationship between the sound and the thing represented seems to be natural. This is a matter upon which great stress is laid both in Saussure and in the Russian formalists. When you read these passages in which such stress is laid on it you may have thought: well, that's overkill. Who cares about onomatopoeia? Well, it anchors the entire idea about language, which is precisely that it is something other than speech. When we speak, we not only endeavor to communicate; we endeavor to refer. In other words, we take language and we try to make it, as the philosophers say, hook on to the natural world. We take a set of signs, a code which is not in itself natural, which is arbitrary, and through the sheer force of will, we make those signs as best we can hook on to the natural, to the actual world. In doing so, we reinforce the idea that language is for communication--whereas my argument is language isn't for communication; speech is. When we speak, that is--entirely and exclusively and without any other motive-- for communication, except for one thing that the Russian formalists in particular took note of. There are funny things going on in our speech-- alliteration, unnecessary or uneconomical forms of repetition-- weird things going on in our speech which don't seem to have the purpose of communication. As a matter of fact, they actually seem to impede communication. When I really start messing language up-- for example, in Lewis Carroll's "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe"-- I am impeding communication because I am laying stress on elements of rhythm, pattern, and sound recurrence which cannot be said to have any direct bearing on communication. This, of course, is what we've studied recurrently and, I have to say, empirically > because these are all empirical facts about language, as the Russian formalists insisted. What we have studied recurrently is the way in which language rears its ugly head in speech, the way in which, in other words, language won't be repressed as mere communication, the way in which speech entails elements that keep bubbling up to the surface and asserting themselves, which oddly enough really can't be said to conduce to communication. Those things, those elements that bubble up to the surface, are nothing other than evidence of the presence of language, precisely in the way that in Freud the Freudian slip-- the fact that I can't get through a sentence without making some kind of blunder, very often an embarrassing blunder-- is understood as the bubbling up into the conscious effort to speak of that which speech can't control, of that which Freud calls "the unconscious" and which, by the way, we would have no idea of the existence of if it weren't for the Freudian slip. In other words, as Freud said in the first handout that I gave you at the beginning of the semester, we infer the unconscious from the behavior of consciousness because, given the erratic nature of the behavior of consciousness, it seems necessary to do so. By precisely the same token, we can and, I think we should say, we do infer language as something else from the composite or sum total of speech acts. We infer language from the erratic behavior of speech because it seems there is no other way to account for the erratic behavior of speech. That sense of language, which I'm going to be talking a lot more about on Thursday, sort of bubbling up and from below in speech, and proving its existence as something other than a composite record of all speeches, is what suggests to us that Knapp and Michaels are not quite right in saying there is really no difference between language and speech; that if there is a difference between language and speech, as I am claiming, and if the difference between language and speech is much as we have been taught to think of it by Saussure and his successors down through deconstruction-- if there is such a difference, then guess what? We have literary theory back in the fold, alive and well, and we no longer have to say that it should be jettisoned from our thinking about literature. We have a real use for literary theory. But that's exactly where Knapp and Michaels, supposing they were here and I'd convinced them--by the way, I know them both. You can't convince them of anything, but that's not unusual. You probably can't convince me of anything either--suppose we had them here and I had succeeded in convincing them. They would say, "Well, okay, but isn't it a pity? Because you have proved better than we did that literary theory has no purpose. Why on earth should we worry about all this bubbling up of stuff that has nothing to do with communication? After all, we're here to communicate, aren't we? We've begun by saying that our life world consists precisely in the deployment of language for communication, and here is this person saying there is this stuff bubbling up, which makes communication difficult. What use is that?" Knapp and Michaels might say. You see, they are pragmatists, aren't they? They are pragmatists, or they are concerned with practicality. Their interest, their reason for being interested in meaning and interpretation, is a practical reason entirely entailed in the understanding of communication and the furtherance of communication; whereas theory, which I have saved, I nevertheless seem to have saved at a pretty considerable cost because I have suggested that theory itself is completely impractical. I have suggested it, and we're going to get back to that next time. That's what the Thursday lecture is going to be about. In the meantime you say to yourself, "Okay, fine. We've got theory, but we have also been shown that you can't really do anything with it, and so it might just as well suit us to suppose that Knapp and Michaels are right and to proceed as though theory could be jettisoned." One last quick point, going back to the distinction between meaning and intention: notice the two-pronged argument. On the one hand, there are people like E.D. Hirsch who believe that you can invoke an author's intention in order to pin down a meaning-- on the one hand, you have people like that and, on the other hand, you have people doing deconstruction who say that because there is no inferable intention, texts themselves have no meaning. But that's not quite right, because that's not really what deconstruction says. Deconstruction doesn't say texts have no meaning. Deconstruction doesn't even say that you can't know what the meaning of a text is, exactly. What deconstruction says is that you can't rope off meaning in a text. Texts have too much meaning. Texts explode with meaning. You can't corral the way in which texts produce meaning. You can't corral it by inferring an intention. You can't corral it by taking a particular interpretive path. Meaning just explodes in texts. That's not at all the same thing as to say, according to the claim of Knapp and Michaels, that in deconstructive thinking texts have no meaning-- a very, very different proposition altogether. I think it might suggest to you that the relationship between intention and meaning isn't really what's at stake in deconstruction. A text is intended, or you can say, "Well, it may be intended, no doubt it's intended"-- all sorts of ways of putting it, but is that really the point? The text is the text on my view, and the text, just as I say, fairly bristles with meaning, that being precisely the point. You can't rein it in. That's not really the flip side--as Knapp and Michaels would want to make you think–that's not really the flip side of the idea of the followers of Hirsch that in order to know a meaning, you have to be able to infer an authorial intention. There is no symmetry there and, as I say, I'm not sure that deconstruction, whatever its claims, whatever its perfections and imperfections-- I am not sure that really deconstruction has the question of intention in relation to meaning very much at heart one way or another. Sorry to have kept you. We'll see you Thursday.

Literature_Lectures

12_Thomas_Pynchon_The_Crying_of_Lot_49.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Before launching into Pynchon today, I thought I would just take a few moments to look back over the books that we've read and talk about the visions of language that they have offered us, and also just to reflect for a moment on the relationship imagined between those visions of language and what is happening outside of fiction in what we might call the real world. We started this course talking about Black Boy and the way that a whole world of pressure--political pressure, racial tension--pushed on the borders of that work and actually changed its very material form. After that, I began a series of readings of novels that emphasized more what you might call the history of literature, the history of literature's forms and ambitions. And so, beginning that series we had O'Connor embodying a new critical craft of fiction that comes out of modernism, imagining nevertheless that the craft is reflective of a transcendental order in the world, a religious order. When we moved on to Nabokov, we had an author trying to imagine a work of art so autonomous from the world that it could be something like an autonomous form of life. That, of course, I argued in those lectures, opened it up for the threat of mortality. If you imagine your artwork is living, it can also die. It's a kind of hauntedness that surrounds Nabokov's vision of aesthetic bliss as one's response to that autonomous artwork. Kerouac represents a whole group of writers, the Beats, who reject the formalism embodied by both O'Connor and Nabokov. They reject that formalism as an impediment to language's access to the real, and to our access to the real through language. They dream of an unmediated relationship between experience and the word. They don't think so much of language as a mediating force as an expressive force. I argued in my second lecture on On the Road that, in the end, that dream looks quite deflated when Dean can't even speak in a coherent sentence, and he has to be rejected by Sal as Sal drives off to the jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. Nevertheless, that dream is spiritualized. It's a way of becoming not just close to the real, but also part of some mystical unity. That thread of the mystical quality of language at its extreme of literary power is what I drew out of Franny and Zooey. So, Salinger, too, has the dream that the artifice of literature, of literary language, the performance of language in the style of his novels, can somehow be the essence of the human soul, that it can somehow communicate the truth of the universe just through its form: its human, distinctive form. It's a way of thinking about form that has more to do with individuality than it does with convention. Remember that way that Franny can identify the timbre of her brother's voice very specifically: it's like no other. So, Salinger imagines that the literary art imitates that kind of voice, and in that way it is a sacred practice, a sacred art. Barth rejects the idea that language is an unmediated form of access to the real: absolutely impossible for Barth to countenance that idea. He sees life as continually, always already mediated by language. Now, I should say, as someone from the class who came up to me after lecture and asked me about this, that Barth's understanding of language as preceding human understanding, preceding any sense of ourselves, in a sense always slipping out of our control, is very much in concert with what was going on at very high-level language theory at that time. So, the work of Jacques Lacan in France in the 1950s and '60s and of Jacques Derrida who brought deconstruction to the United States, actually to Johns Hopkins first of all in the 1960s where Barth was teaching. He presented that work in a very famous lecture in the late '60s. This is all part of a way of thinking about language that became very powerful through the next decade and a half, and we're going to see it some too next week when we read Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. So, this is part of a larger intellectual trajectory. Barth is not alone in thinking these things about language. I argued that Barth tried to counter that sense of helplessness at the hands of language by imagining that the human effort at connecting with another person through the mechanisms of love and desire always renewed the possibility for language to do new kinds of work in the world. So, if language seems exhausted because it's always preceding you, everything has always already been said, there's no new plot to be had, the world is full of stock phrases, how do you use them to embody an experience that seems fresh to you? How do those stock phrases alienate you from the very experience you hope that they can describe? He thinks that following out desire can renew language, and Menelaiad, I think, is his attempt at doing that. So, now we arrive at that tension, and I want to suggest that Barth was still dreaming of a pretty autonomous version of the literary art, even though in his 1987 preface to Lost in the Funhouse--I don't know if any of you read it--he says about these stories, which were published throughout the '60s: The high '60s, like the roaring '20s, was a time of more than usual ferment in American social, political, and artistic life. Our unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations, race riots, the hippie counterculture, pop art, mass poetry reading, street theater, vigorous avant-gardism in all the arts together with dire predictions not only of the death of the novel but of the moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global village: those flavored the air we breathed then, along with occasional tear gas and other contaminants. One may sniff traces of that air in the Funhouse. I myself found it more invigorating than disturbing. May the reader find these stories likewise. It's a very interesting little comparison he makes at the end. He takes that whole foment of 1960s politics and counterculture, and essentially he says, "I found that invigorating as I hope you will find these stories invigorating," as if the stories in this very--almost, seemingly, hermetically--sealed literary world that he offers us are somehow meant to have the effects of a whole decade of foment, social foment. If Barth only gestures towards that world, the politics of that decade, Pynchon actually lets us see it. And if you look on page 83, this is just one of many, many examples. But I choose this one just because it's so obvious. Oedipa is going to Berkeley looking for Emory Bortz, and she comes on a summer weekday in the mid afternoon. No time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came down the slope from Wheeler Hall through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blond hair, horn rims, bicycle spokes in the sun, book bags swaying, card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the fountain, students nose to nose in dialog. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative universes it would take for she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat not only among her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them [that whole world of government and social life]. Oedipa is in a different generation, of a different generation, but we can see the social foment just in that little snapshot of the Berkeley campus. I don't know all of the acronyms. I don't know what the FSMs are, but the YAFs are the Young Americans for Freedom. The VDCs are the Vietnam Day Committees. The Vietnam Day Committee organized a 24-hour teach-in in 1965 against the Vietnam War. There is a little anecdote from that teach-in that I want to share with you, that I think embodies some of the tensions in this novel. They invited Ken Kesey to come and speak at the convention, at the teach-in. Now, Ken Kesey, some of you probably know, was a sort of performer, writer, not really an activist. He was a purveyor of street theater and most famously the advocate of LSD, and he and his Merry Pranksters would ride around the country doing street theater, advocating the use of LSD and marijuana. Who, in 1964, do you think drove their bus, which was called Further? Who do you think drove their bus? Neal Cassady drove their bus. When they came to the Vietnam Day at the Berkeley campus, Kesey addressed the assembled people saying, "Turn your back on the war. Look at the war, turn your back on the war and say 'fuck it.'" This is a group of people he was addressing who were intent on doing something to stop the war, and this was Kesey's response. That moment, for me, embodies this tension right at the center of the 1960s, a tension between countercultural self-development and an ethos of play, "drop out, tune in," and (I can't remember Kesey's little motto). Essentially, leave the institutional life of America--that means schools, government, politics, all those traditional sources of order--and create disorder. And do that as a way of finding what's true about yourself; do it in the company of others. It had this communal aspect, for sure. On the other side, you have a growing political movement among young people, and of course it's legendary. By 1964, the Civil Rights movement had accomplished amazing things. As a result of the Freedom Rides, they had integrated interstate transportation, at great cost to the volunteers who rode those buses. They were beaten. Some were killed. Civil Rights workers were murdered in various states. It had come to a kind of crescendo with voter registration drives and the Voting Rights Act of 1964. At the same time, Lyndon B. Johnson was ratcheting up the Vietnam War, so the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964, which authorized bombing raids on Cambodia. This was a new turn in the war, and it promised to escalate it, and this really galvanized--especially student--resistance. So, this was a time of major political stakes, and young people at universities--primarily at universities, but also people out doing the March on Washington, in the South, in small towns--were really changing the face of America and its role in the world. So, Ken Kesey, on the one hand, is looking for that internally directed, playful response to the oppressive order of the world. And then there is this very political response. Pynchon lets us see both. And he's parodying both kinds of response in this novel, so in that sense, the novel is very much of its time. Now, I want to pause for a moment there and ask you a question. I want you to think about what kind of protagonist Pynchon sends out into this world. What do you think of Oedipa Maas? How does she strike you as a character? How would you describe her? Yeah. Student: Desperate.Professor Amy Hungerford: Desperate. Okay. How else? Yeah.Student: Powerless.Professor Amy Hungerford: Powerless. Uh huh.Student: Very confused.Professor Amy Hungerford: Confused. What else? Those are all pretty negative adjectives. Does she bring any resources? Yes.Student: She's especially attractive.Professor Amy Hungerford: She's attractive. Yes, she is. What else? What other resources does she bring? Yeah.Student: She's curious.Professor Amy Hungerford: She's curious. Yeah. What else? Anything else? Student: She's determined.Professor Amy Hungerford: Determined. Uh huh. When this book first came out, critics called her a lightweight. Was that a word that ever occurred to you? Did anyone think, "this is just a fluff character"? I would suggest to you that the difference in your response and the critics' is the difference that feminism in the '70s made. In the 1960s, to have a protagonist go into the world and discover this incredibly complex set of patterns, and to have that protagonist be a housewife, was very much playing against type. So, Pynchon took a certain kind of risk by choosing to make his protagonist a housewife. So, the question is, why did he do that? I want to suggest to you that he did that because a woman is expected to occupy certain conventional roles at this moment, and we see her in one at the very beginning of the novel. She has just come back from a Tupperware party where the hostess put too much kirsch in the punch, so she's a little drunk. So you get this image of her as this stereotypical '50s housewife going to Tupperware parties. And then she makes salad, she does the shopping, she picks herbs from the garden, she makes lasagna, she mixes drinks so that they'll be ready when Mucho comes home, when her husband comes home: very typical. So, this is the moment in which she discovers that she's been chosen, or named, as the executrix of Pierce's will. It's that conventionality that then allows her to occupy multiple roles. And let me just detail some of those. You see it almost in language of aside. This is when she first meets Genghis Cohen. Yes. Now the names in here, we have to think about them at some point. One thing you can say about them is that they are funny. A second thing you can say about them is that they seem redolent of meaning. I can't tell you how many scholars have come up with different readings of what Oedipa's name means. That's just Oedipa, and then there are so many hundreds of others. They are redolent of meaning. What are we to do with that fact? It's a question for you. Three: they declare that language is always mediated, always mediating, that your experience of people is never clear of some set of meanings that someone else has assigned to it. Your encounter with the world is always mediated. So, these names drag associations with them, and one question I want to ask is: what to do with those? But I'm going to set that question aside for a moment, and note that, at meeting Genghis, "Oedipa felt at once motherly." Now, this may seem like a small aside, but if we look also on 73, when she meets Mr. Thoth, she says (on the very top; he's telling Oedipa his dream, and she sees in it clues to the Thurn and Taxis mystery): Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the bronze marker, smiled at him as granddaughterly as she knew how and asked, "Did he ever have to fight off desperados?" And then, of course, she gets a major clue for figuring out what the whole story is behind the Tristero and the post horn. "Granddaughterly." It's a role she occupies with great ease. A last example, on 122. This is when she's going to meet Emory Bortz: Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student-like twist, went easy on the makeup. These are her resources: makeup, clothes, hair. With them she can occupy all these different roles, and in doing so she has access to certain kinds of knowledge. Her roles are as fluid, in some ways, as Pierce's were. Remember that when Pierce calls her, he's always impersonating someone. So, he was speaking with his Lamont Cranston voice the last time that she spoke to him. The difference between the way Oedipa occupies these various roles, and Pierce did it, is that Oedipa's roles have a kind of traction in the world with other people that Pierce's voices--or even Dr. Hilarius's voices--simply don't have. These male versions of it are all so apparently performances that they can't get much out of them, except to annoy Oedipa. But Oedipa jumps right into these conventional roles, and in that act comes to know more about the world in a way that these men cannot. Oedipa is--even from the time she was a child--a reader, and we find that out on page 14 when she has her religious instant. And I hope you remembered that scene of Sal looking down on Salt Lake City, the birthplace of Dean, from On the Road, very similar structure. He looks down, and he sees the little city laid out below him. So, this is Oedipa in one of the first instances of her becoming a reader: She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight [this is when she first sees San Narciso], onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together like a well-tended crop from the dull, brown earth, and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets from this high angle sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There had seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her if she had tried to find out. So, in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all around the horizon. The sun on the bright, beige countryside was painful. She and the Chevy seemed parked at the center of an odd religious instant, as if on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of words were being spoken. She suspected that much. She thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job. Was it something like this he felt looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to? Did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it? She gave up presently as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened and so broken the religious instant, whatever it might have been. Here, the cloud becomes the obscuring of this sense of intent to communicate or a sense of meaning's pattern. But it still retains--as it did in Flannery O'Connor--that spiritual sense that the divine is always shrouded around by some Cloud of Unknowing. But here we see her with the desire to know. And the difference between her as a child and her in this moment is that she had not bothered to find out. If she had tried to find out about the radio circuit, she would have learned something. She did not try. This time she will try. So, she's a reader who notices patterns even from a young age. And at this moment she is called upon--and she rises to the occasion--to figure out what the pattern will mean. And, of course, she progresses through a kind of education as a reader. She goes from being a reader who can listen, for example, to the ambiguities in the Wharfinger play. She can hear when the ambiguity creeps in between the words, and that tells her that she needs to find something out. That's what causes her to have the curiosity to go backstage. She becomes a critic. She moves from interpretation to actually finding the history, and the intertextuality, and the variations of these editions of the play. She learns history, of the U.S. and of Europe, about the mail systems. She learns the history of Inverarity's enterprises. So, she becomes a scholar in a certain way, an amateur scholar. She's not just a reader; she's someone who actually performs research. Where does all of this get her? Well, I think, what we're led to believe, is precisely nowhere, in terms of revelation. Does a revelation ever happen? Of course, the book ends with her waiting for the anonymous bidder to reveal himself. Whether that would ever happen, if Pynchon had decided to let us in on the secret, I don't know. Pynchon, instead, chooses to end the novel before that moment, and so we're left with a kind of emptiness. We're left with the multiple options that she laments. If you look on 146-147, she rehearses all the possibilities of meaning, and her conclusion, finally, is this: San Narciso was a name, an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall line or tornado's touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities, storm systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence. There was the true continuity. San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself weeks ago to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America. And then, I'm going to skip down a little bit: Though she never again called back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac he'd tried to find a way out of, for the enigma his efforts had created. What we don't get here is a sense of whether there really is an alternate secret postal system that serves a sort of underground of private networks. We don't ever get a sense of whether these stamps and the signs that she sees everywhere in San Francisco when she travels through the city in the night, whether these things are a coherent meaning, or whether they are her fabrication. We don't really know and she never really can say. All she has is the sense that there is this pattern. Now, there are two things that she is left with, in the passage I just read: that sense of San Narciso being all of America, and, moreover, of it being constituted of "storm systems of group suffering and need." So, remember all of the little subcommunities that she interacts with have some sort of pain or loss associated with them: the Inamorati Anonymous for example, people who don't want to love. It's all comedy, but then there is a heart, a kernel. And if we look on page 101-102, we can begin to see what that heart or kernel is that recuperates what I would call the sentimental. So, this is when she's in San Francisco, looking around the city. She's come there hoping to escape the network of symbols that she has seen--all those post horns--and instead she's immersed with a new network of them. We're told: Just before the morning rush hour she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible, knuckles black with eyeliner and mascara from where she had rubbed, mouth tasting of old booze and coffee, through an open doorway. On the stair leading up into the disinfectant-smelling twilight of a rooming house, she saw an old man huddled, shaking with grief she couldn't hear. Both hands, smoke white, covered his face. On the back of the left hand she made out the post horn tattooed in old ink now beginning to blur and spread. Fascinated, she came into the shadows and ascended creaking steps, hesitating on each one. When she was three steps from him the hands flew apart and his wrecked face and the terror of eyes gloried in burst veins stopped her. "Can I help?" She was shaking, tired. "My wife's in Fresno," he said. He wore an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt, wide tie, no hat. "I left her so long ago I don't remember. This is for her." He gave Oedipa a letter that looked like he'd been carrying it around for years. And he tells her to drop it in the "W.A.S.T.E., lady," can. W.A.S.T.E. We're not allowed to say "waste," remember. And then she is gripped with--as she says, "overcome all at once"--by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him or would not remember him. And she reflects, just above that, on the mattress that he must sleep in, and this is one of those great Pynchon sentences. This is a question, but it comes in the declarative form, too. What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candle stubs lit to rotate in the air over him prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream like the memory bank to a computer of the lost. It's a sort of aria of description, and Pynchon can string those clauses together like no one else. There are even longer examples in the book, and I'm sure you noticed them. Oedipa needs to actually touch the man, and when she finally, sort of, takes him in her arms, the position she assumes looks like that of a mother with her broken son. And the image is much more specifically of Michelangelo's Pieta. And remember the Lago di Pieta figures prominently in the novel, both as the site of the rout of GIs in Italy, and the lake from which their bones are taken to make charcoal filters for cigarettes. So, the Pieta, the image of Mary with Jesus' body broken from the cross on her lap, is repeated, and here Oedipa comes to inhabit that position. It's not a social role in the way that she could be granddaughterly or motherly on those other occasions. It's a religious image. It's also a gendered religious image; it's also an aesthetic image. But here, it's infused with her compassionate approach to this man. And remember, in the passage that I read about Inverarity's escape, what she left with, as her final understanding. She has a kind of compassion for Pierce and the way that he had surrounded himself with this network of holdings that he had tried to escape from in some way. So, if you cannot, finally, have a pattern resolve into a clarity of truth or meaning, what you can do instead is inhabit a role where you will be in contact with the very material of social life. And that's what that mattress is: totally imbued with the bodily detritus of a human life, actually of many human lives. She reflects, later, on the set of all men who had slept on that mattress. Pynchon wants to imagine a very physical repository for the social, and especially for the human, affective dimensions of the social. That's why Oedipa has all these men stripped away from her. Remember, she says that, as she is growing more and more desperate at the end, that her men were being stripped away from her one by one. And so, when she comes to be isolated in this way, she can finally see and meditate upon, in a new way, all those systems of communication. And she has that vision of the telephone wires, and she looks up at them as she has just doubted all of the possibilities for making sense of the post horn and the Tristero. She looks up at the telephone wires, and she thinks about all the messages, unintelligible, full of human longing, going back and forth across those wires. So, if Pynchon gives us the pattern of meaning, rather than meaning itself in this novel, he also gives us a vision of what it means to embody that pattern. This is very different from Nabokov's idea of embodiment as a kind of alternate or rival creativity. Remember, I argued that Lolita has a dead child, and she dies in childbirth, in a way, because it's a kind of creativity that Nabokov wants to cancel, or that Humbert wants to cancel. In this novel, it's not a rival creativity. It's what creativity has to be, in the literary sense. Now, Pynchon was a student of Nabokov for a couple of years at Cornell University in the early '60s, so he took courses with Nabokov. I don't know how close they were, but he certainly learned a few things from Nabokov. This is something he revises from that old teacher. He is imagining a literary form that is soaked in the stuff of social life. So, if you only get a sniff of the tear gas in Barth, here you get a whole draught full of it. And what I think he is rejecting: if you look on page 95 (oops. That's not the one I want. Yes, it is 95. If you look on page 95…) there is a different vision of what the artwork could look like that I think we're meant to put next to that vision of Oedipa with the suffering sailor. This is when it first occurs to her that the whole world is being organized around her: Nothing of the night's could touch her. Nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma, as well, perhaps, to attenuate it, or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding time among the beasts in a zoo, any death wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams, simply to submit to it, that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening promised more delight. She tested it, shivering. I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence, but then she wondered if the gemlike clues were only some kind of compensation to make up for her having lost the direct epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. This is a meditation on both the joy and the loss of literary substitution for the real or for the truth, the substitution of abstract pattern for something like comprehensible meaning. So here, she's kind of enthralled with the idea that these gemlike clues--that's a very Nabokovian moment--the gemlike clues that are gathering around her would be a compensation for the loss of that real access to revelation. And this has this religious sense to it. It's not just the religious instant of looking down at San Narciso; it's the religious sense of the capitalized Word that comes back a couple of times towards the end of the novel, the epileptic Word. The "Word," capitalized, always refers back to the beginning of the Gospel of John, where John describes Christ as the Word made flesh: "The Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among us." So, Pynchon is using that religious vocabulary: not just the religious imagery of the Pieta, but the religious vocabulary of the capitalized Word. So, you can have a kind of system of symbols that's gemlike and pleasurable and that calls you to submit to it as it does here for Oedipa, but in the end there is something more that her search will produce, and that is the moment of compassion. And, I would submit to you that tears are just all over this novel. I don't know if you noticed it, but there are many, many examples. I'll just give you a few. First of all, there are the tears that accumulate in her bubble shades when she's in Mexico looking at Remedios Varo"s painting of the women in the tower embroidering the long tapestries that become the world. So, that sense of isolation in the tower makes her weep. On 117 you can see another example. This is Mucho talking about the Muzak: "Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer. 113, this is Dr. Hilarius, crying: "Tears sprang to Hilarius' eyes. 'You aren't going to shoot,'" he says. 146, in her moment of desperation when she loses her connection to the Inamorato Anonymous, or when she's about to talk to him: "She waited, inexplicable tears beginning to build up pressure around her eyes." Back on 108. This is the nurse who has just escaped from Dr. Hilarius: "'He thinks someone's after him.' Tear streaks had meandered down over the nurse's cheekbones." It's not just that we could explain any of these moments of tears. It's that Pynchon describes them all, notes them all. So, this is a novel that's full of people crying, which is an odd thing to think about when you think back to Pynchon's reputation as a metafictional novelist, as someone preeminently preoccupied with the formal aspects of fiction. What you find when you actually open up Pynchon's novels is an incredibly rich world of human detritus, of history. In Gravity's Rainbow he did enormous amounts of research in newspapers from the Second World War in London where some of the novel is set, so that you can go to newspapers and find the ads that he talks about in the novels. So, he combines this very attentive set of details, which are not always, and often are not at all, the aesthetic details with which Nabokov filled Lolita. Remember, when I asked you about the specificity of America in On the Road, and I asked you to think about whether there was anything there at all? In On the Road, there isn't anything. In Nabokov there is, but it's usually aesthetic: how things look, the look of a hotel, the look of a field, the look of a child, the look of a woman. In Pynchon, often, these are somehow social details about people talking to other people, political things, places, and how houses are arranged. But there is a sense that these are social worlds, not just patterns, even though at the beginning that's how Oedipa sees them. As she goes further and further in to her search for knowledge--and finally her abandonment of that search of knowledge--she sees more and more that this is not just pattern, that it's these storm systems of suffering and need. So, I think this is what Pynchon brings to the string of meditations on what language can do, and what the novel is for, that I began my lecture today with, just recapping for you. He's trying to imagine a novel that meditates both on these structures of meaning that imbue the real world, such that there is no name that isn't already saturated with associations, and that within such a world, if you enter into it, you can come to encounter the real. And the real is that sense of suffering, and that the novel can make you feel things, both the pleasure of humor or the pleasure of beauty, but also that sense of compassion. And I don't know about you, but I feel compassion for Oedipa. I feel like she's a real character. I think she is a character that you can--if not identify with--at least, you can understand and be interested in. So, Pynchon offers us that, and in our next reading, when we start with Toni Morrison and also Maxine Hong Kingston, what you're going to see is a kind of shift. So all these meditations on language, these different ways of thinking about how language interacts with the real, and what you can do by messing with language, are almost, I would say, taken as read, taken as the starting point from which a writer like Morrison or Kingston will begin to rethink how those things can be used in relation to the real world. So, that's where we'll start when we think about Morrison next week. Let me just also say there are a thousand things to talk about in this novel, so I hope you'll get to some of them in section. And if you want to write about this, it's a very rich novel for writing your papers.

Literature_Lectures

Frieze_Lecture_The_Metamorphosis_100_years_later.txt

so thank you all for being here I'm pleased to be here to talk with you about Kafka's metamorphosis as Kai said I teach German language and literature and films and I tried to help students understand what's fascinating about this culture and language I've taught this work Dacascos metamorphosis in German a couple of times my colleague in German is Antonini and taught at this term in English to a group of students and I know that our colleagues in English have also used it so the Kafka belongs to everybody these are truly belongs to world literature so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what what makes them so great what makes this work so interesting I want to tell you a little bit about his confidence life and before talking about the market system in particular I made a PowerPoint with lists and pretty pictures but I there we go so who your discredit to the chakra who heads right over that pharmacist it's a challenging read in German I have to as are really long sentences they're wonderfully beautifully instructive sentences are really challenging for about language learner Kafka is one of those people who whose name has inspired words it's all been evident right a word that snake after a person like Obamacare or sousaphones and predict uses that were diesel what the diesel so we have word Kafka ask that comes from Afghanistan what does Kafka is suffocating oh that's not about this I have a really long list but if ever dreary dreary surreal box really nice thank you nadir life as opposed to that guy looks like Ralph Nader I made my own huge list uncertain threatening dark bureaucratic foreign anonymous helpless hopeless hard to understand in humane disorienting malformed bizarre and logical desperate frustrating a nightmarish not every work of Kafka's fits that bill but a lot we do and his works are a great mix of different styles actually to which I'll talk about so here we see cost yourself on this slide who was born in 1883 in Prague I lived most of his life in and around Chicago if you travel a lot around Europe just to orient adjust to remind I just put a little arrow to show us crime I'm in particularly so when Calkins warned it was our the austro-hungarian Empire he was from the air that's called leukemia so he was part of the area called Bohemia so right there next to the German Empire and the brandish'd apartment he was a German speaker that we also spoke Czech fluently yes I smoke to get it she was Jewish he's so French and Italian as well because he's not himself as a as a European they identified as being at the German speaker he identified as being check but he really saw himself as at the European and we know this we have some of his writings where he we have a lot of writers who can letters correspondence a diary so we know a lot about his inner thoughts not just from the literature so she's been back inspection he was from a middle-class Jewish family Richard's family worked its way up from more modest circumstances and he's that german-speaking population and Prague is a minority the Jewish population with that within that is a minority so he was a minority within a minority often felt that he was sort of between two worlds and you see that was my difficulties literature he studied chemistry briefly but then he switched to long I his father's insistence he was engaged several times to a couple of different women one of the multiple times but he never married he may have had affairs of children there's a lot of rumors on that one that though he worked in the accident prevention Department of the workers and accident insurance institution which was a new kind of field at the time in part in response to greater machinery mechanization in factories that there was a greater need to think about how to do that accidents did some work in that area some of what he did was dealing with insurance claims and some you might call technical writing he did technical writing at work and then came home wrote fiction he had to retire at only the age of 39 because of tuberculosis he went to various sanatorium in order to try to get better and he never did he died in 1924 and only at the age of great June near Vienna is very improper he wrote three novels that were more or less finished at the time that he died and his spent this time max wrote helped finish them and publish them the trial the castle and America Americans Melda became also called the man who disappeared so these are published posthumously by his friend Max Berg max was he tried to get his from maxsa promised to destroy his work after his death and this he didn't just violate that trust he said no I do it Kaka trust in anybody and he did good thing but publishing concerns for us he also wrote Kafka also got many stories and novellas and one of shorter pieces many published during his lifetime and many have been published almost all published in English translated throughout the judgment in 1913 my Marcus is in 1915 a country doctor 1919 in the penal colony 1920 and a Hunger artist 22 so today they were here to talk about the metamorphosis which was miniature written in 1912 and it was published in magazine before Arizona republish in 1915 which is of course I shouldn't have to think about there all of these freeze lectures December 1915 published and also as a separate publication after that and there's the book cover of that this work continues to be published and adapted in two different ways i recomment feeling I'm sure I had missed a lot actually I was just talking to Lisa beforehand she was talking about other mashups that involved metamorphosis we have this film version tonight to government of 19 from 2012 the Canadian director Chris Martin I haven't seen it if I watch the trailer on YouTube and the trailer shows you everything you need to know it's one of those super detailed trailers and so that was in English there's a melodious recording by a person whose name I can never actually pronounce correctly because I say it all the time then benedict ever met I say wrong all the time I purpose it now I can't say it correctly by the fpdc that's not on our website anymore but I come in at SoundCloud this work is clearly even by people who maybe haven't read certainly German it's used for a lot of different versions that actually there's a lot of cartoons that I think this is the wrong place that I think was actually book cover is it also cover I rearranged the order of this material of this this concept it's used a lot of people apparently play versions there's other mashup versions this is a political cartoon that requires you to understand but at least the basics of Kafka's metamorphosis I really was just doing a initiative just looking for Kafka it's interesting this is a political cartoon which is it's hot topic today but just to show you that this concept that's on there's a lot of questions Freud apopka which is nice some manner I'm pleased to see that this crowd had something to say about Kafka desk to say not what sometimes when I ask my students thank you for having Kansas this one is just a big nose oversimplification about the another version it's a little uh a little less childishness drawing my last image there back to the that's an addition so our protagonist is Gregor Samsa I think that kind of sounds like Kafka we also meet his sister Mei Chung great end Gregor are siblings and they have a fairly close relationship we meet his parents who in this novella don't have names they're just the parents there are three boarders who joined the household at some point and a couple of different servants but it supervisor and most of those people don't have the novella starts with as I think are really wonderful one of those wonderful first ones in literature like it was the best of times it was the worst of times when it was really great first lines and first paragraphs and I was got a quote just the first line but I didn't want to in English I brought the German person so this is one of those great first lines as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous apartment he was lined as hard as if it were armor-plated back and when he lifted his head a little you can see his dog like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the Fed bill to hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely his numerous legs which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk waved helplessly before his eyes in German though there's lots of different translations of this work I choose the one that refers to him as a monstrous Merman there's others that say gigantic insect the original in German is ungodliness wouldn't get CFI which means monstrous monstrous apartment one good Seifer means vermin it doesn't mean insect it means some sort of creature that is dirty and frightening and the word goes back to the work in middle high german that was its great-grandparents form means like unfit for sacrifice an animal that was unfit for sacrifice so it doesn't mean insect it doesn't mean cockroach and then that our house inspected in the description is pretty clear that it's some sort of bug but the remaining German does not say in effect so it's not entirely clear from that first line what kind of remedy is though as you heard from that first paragraph caffeine gives us really good indications pretty early on that is not kind of insect he's got an exoskeleton latex then it doesn't at first I'm not going to give a detailed plot summary that I'm going to prefer to some things that happened in this novella and because it's been around for a hundred years I'm going to go ahead and give spoilers okay I thought about not typically the ending but really the most interesting thing happens even before the story begins and that is the transformation has happened even before the first sentence things I'm going to just give you a little overview of the structure of novella this is a long geisha novella that's divided into three parts and in each one of these parts Gregor loses some McGrath's on his previous life in its previous existence in the first section he loses his his former before his body has changed shape and he also loses his ability to communicate so he has he wakes up and realizes that he is in a different kind of body he has to learn has to find out what he looks like he has to learn to control many of the he's disgusted by himself at first he doesn't know how to move and he doesn't know how to communicate which is also a blow for him he's in his bedroom with the door locked and he tries to try to communicate through the door and he cannot make himself understood so that's our first step is that he loses his former shape he loses his former his ability to communicate and we see the reactions of his family when they learned when he does find they open the door and they get to see him we see that for my response in the second part we see that he loses his job and with it is standing within the family he is no longer able to go to work for fairly obvious reasons and he which is a big blow because much of his identity was tied up with his work he had been the sole breadwinner of the family he worked a watch to maintain his family's middle-class existence he needed his Jonathan who seems a traveling salesman which meant he was he was on the road a lot by himself - you've slept in strange beds he Milla's - something and he did it to support his family so there was a certain amount of pride for him in that and he lost it he lost his ability to work and in the third bit he loses his name his humanity and then finally his life his family grows weary of dealing with about dealing with that monstrosity that's in the next room and they stop referring to him as Gregor they stopped referred to him as a brother that caught an itch they own that thing and eventually dies a few interesting questions arise for being the interpretation of this novella and the first is is Kafka's life relevant to understanding this novella some readers some regular some scholars think a lot of that was confidence like that how it relates to the medicine of themes in this work so thing Gregor Samsa they see from socotra the name itself is there are similar if the cruel father figure in the novella they seen from staff cuts domineering father and again we know from positive biographical writing secondly really had a chocolate relationship with his father in Gregor's frustration with his work they seek octaves own dissatisfaction when he called his cruel truth is his branded job that needs to turn this key in Gregor's ultimate destruction they see a criticism and an expression of disgust by Kafka about his own life I'm a bit skeptical about the biographical interpretations I think the work should be able to stand dependent respective of the rodent but a lot of people do make those comparisons with this kind of good it does have a well-documented biography we know a lot of things about another question that that this work raises for me is like what is the true nature of the metamorphosis the novella is called the metamorphosis but we don't actually see the primary transformation it happens actually before the first sentence begins and initially at least in that first sentence it's not entirely clear what he's been transformed into it becomes more and more clear as we get more details about what he looks like and what he's able to do again has an exoskeleton in the legs and it doesn't really have teeth that he turns out he can crawl around on walls and ceilings but initially we don't know he's never actually called an insect he's never called a cockroach the one of the circuit women does serve jokingly common dung beetle but we don't know for sure where he is but he's undergone some sort of transformation and when we think of transformations with insects but the ones that like that little kids learned I've got a seven-year-old daughter she really likes butterflies but that's the transformation that people think about that you go from a crawling insect and if something magical happens and you have this beautiful creature that can fly away his transformation is done in the reverse direction not that he was a flying creature the Corbitt he was a human being who could stand upright and could move and he's transformed into this thing that creeps low to the ground well until he likes to walk on the ceiling and I said is debased and he is limited in scope and raring to go he's pretty much confined to home so it's it's sort of a turning on its head what we usually think of trance with insects that it usually instinctive like growing up and going out and for Gregor Osama it's a transformation of something lower to the ground at home so it's not sort of a resurrection or a spiritual transformation eventually quite universe here related to this question of what the transformation is is why did this transformation happen and I want to offer a couple of different approaches that are intertwined with one another we don't ever really know for sure and Gregor and his family don't ask this question themselves as you might think that people might well often when there's tragedies people say like why why me why did this have to happen that people are seeking some sort of larger truth the same that doesn't seek to do that in the novella leaves that open for the frosted to figure out some people might take a Marxist approach I'm saying that it's his job that if his work in his capitalist system that has caused him to lose his Gregor hates his job he hates the traveling he hates getting up early being away from home worrying about training connection staying in strange beds he complains about how off of the work is how often this boss is how horrible it is to be constantly accused of not doing your job he complains about the boss sitting up on a desks that it's a really high such as he literally talks down to his employees the chief his chief clerk his supervisor comes to his home to find out why he hasn't come to work and Gregor's first thought is that he's in danger of losing his job he doesn't immediately think like oh he's concerned about he wants to find out we went okay he immediately said about this job his sister similarly weeps and Gregor assumes not because she's concerned for Gregor's health assumes the family has great debts and the Gregor has to work hard to try to repaint those so they got this Sam has a great art is a lot of burden when the chief Clark becomes impatient and starts impugning Gregor is character and his performance at work Gregor's responses to get into a panic to start making excuses to promise that he's about to get up and he is like to go to work and even in his transformed stage even with its inability to get out of bed all we can think is I have to get up if we get up now maybe I can make the proper training he's obsessed with this notion of getting back to work this line of thinking been presented a critique of capitalism of devotion to money into work and to Gujarat batteries it's kind of reading the very nature worker causes Gregor to lose his humanity it's his devotion to his work that causes him to transform the physical transformation that happens is just making evident that mental or spiritual transformation that's already happened in his head another explanation of why the metamorphosis takes place is that it's the result of his family taking for granted and taking advantage of them the quite early on in the novella it's pretty clear that he there's not a lot of love in that family he and his sister have a closer relationship but his parents not as much when it first appears that Gregor might be sick in the very first part I saw the response out of sympathy but my pounding on the door with his fists we see the word we were two fists several times he shakes his fist consciousness when Rhaegar first started working as a traveling salesman and money there was some initial they said the family was amazed and happy these are fine times but the family got used to him working and had to be gone and to him bringing home a comfortable salary and then there was no special operation warm feeling anymore I made it cease to appreciate his efforts he is filled with grief and shame as the novella progresses that his family has to go to work to earn their own keep though there doesn't seem to be any evidence that they felt bad about him working and sacrificing himself on their behalf he ultimately dies in his room which is a domestic space which ought to be comfortable but here resembles more more a prison for him because he is trapped there both of these possible explanations really did his job into his family works together that to suggest that Gregor has transformed and is robbed of his humanity because of unreasonable sacrifices to his work on behalf of this family he's emotionally distant from his parents and through his transformation he becomes physically separated as well and this novella that presents an implicit critique of this selfless devotion to his family and to his work and his life is unmarked by the disappearance of the things that give life real meaning I think that both of these interpretations are not tied to any specific time or place it can be seen as quite modern and very relevant today we might see today that novella is a critique of the culture of death that we have in this country that people buy a lot of things that people buy houses that are too big bigger than they can afford that we working on stuff to support lifestyles that we wish to have but then we don't have time to enjoy those very things that define the people that we buy before similarly we're a pretty mobile society people often take jobs moving across the country leaving family behind and then we lose that connection to things that the things that matter most in life even we become alienated and what makes us human thrown focus on earning money on getting ahead not being successful those are just a couple of interpretations of possible reasons of why gregor undergoes transformation but the fact that there's not a single clear one seems actually quite modern to me as well the novella can be interpreted and knew by ending every agenda every generation gets like what they think it means so every person can decide what they think it means another aspect that seems modern to me is the kind of mix of genres that we see in this some parts are grotesque and unnatural and disgusting Kafka and other parts are really rather matter of fact it's normal that every day and sometimes are funny as hard as that may be to believe the existence of the disgusting parts is not probably surprising to you we early on the read of itchy white spots on Gregor's abdomen and when he tries to stretch them himself or coils of disgust we read of brown fluid that dress he has sticky substance on a seed that he leaves behind on the walls and ceiling he gets injured it bleeds his wound giveth gets affected he develops a taste for stale bread and rotten cheese have to hate vegetables go and serve a previous and that's dinner today or the sauce lots of really good disgusting but there's some funny things too but a lot of his money details are borderline pitiful he has pitiful thin legs I think they're described as Kenneth lyrics paragraph what he first tries to get up like it seems a little bit like a Marx Brothers thinking as he tries to wrap himself from her multiple times I could see that early on I think it's actually quite funny / - pitiful the insists on thinking about work he's just realized that he's been undergone this amazing horrific transformation you know we can think of it's like well he keeps looking at mcLaughlin well if I get off I could promise to my country I think it's funny he makes putting a difficult simple request of the chief clerk that he has lots putting a good word for him at work as he was doing this job in time soon he scampers around the walls and ceilings I think this actually is described in a funny way once he figures out kind of work his body actually has sort of fun doing these things calling around he there's the serpent woman calls him the dung beetle is also sort of funny and there's there are some funny moments those all the pets that are going moving and even heartbreaking the aggression that he experiences with his father his father shaking his fist pounding his fists progressively driving him back and using a rolled-up newspaper and akane pushing him with his foot through the through the doorframe injuring him in the process his mother yearns to see him but she's prevented from seeing him because if people are concerned for her health that she's too weak to handle this kind of a shock his mother and his sister removed furniture from his room in order to give him more room to crawl once they realize he has been crawling around but in doing so they're removing his last his last way of clinging to his you Anna nice furniture it's like moving part of this password part of who he is and great result because more aggressive and less like it's for herself for example there's a scene where his mother and sister are trying to remove things from this room and he places his large buggy body over this one image this one the framed picture that's on the wall so that they can't remove it that he wants to hold on to this one thing again because he thinks it's like this is that this is mine this is my last bit of human and Canada habit and he gets quite angry with kind of threatening there's other bids where he feels frustrated he is tired during their hysteric conversations in the next year which is they were just shocked that's that's not the Southwest record though that would be here to describe earlier and in a particularly moving part he hears his sister play the violin that the family has taken in orders to help pay the rent and she is my violin to entertain them one night and he says the novella says the sister played so beautifully her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes Gregor advanced a little keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers was he a beast in music could move himself he felt as if away to the unknown and nourishment he longed for over coming to light so we have this mix of the pitiful of the sad of the moving and indeed though the funny this mix of genres also seems quite modern contemporary to me in a society that likes its mashups whether it's a music mixing different types of music or different kinds of genre in film the lack of ability to categorize it as one thing or another actually seems it makes it seem quite contemporary to me none of us needs to worry about waking up to find ourselves transformed into gigantic but we do all case the place the possibility of being alienated from what we love by our own choices and the kind of work we do and how we spend their money we face the possibility of losing control of our bodies through illness and aging we face the possibility of our personalities changing as we age the metamorphosis kindig conveys deep-seated human fears that adore the universal theme this universal theme is one reason that this work in this author have remained so influential but we can make our own interpretations in this openness draws us into this work into this offer as well I'd love to hear your thoughts the Indonesian is one of those were things add to little aspects and what is chaos yeah I think I think needs for Tucker a lot of alienation of modern life I mostly saw it as sort of a descent into aging but just a sort of with a beautiful twist to it rather than a genteel aging gracefully my three verse in which life is in arc and so start out in fetal development and then training along that arc and seeing it and just as beautiful and also was a little shaker really moment which he changes as a Salesman because fearful and breadwinner and ego stuff some other yeah there is something to be said for there's a normal our children's life but for him it's it's a really abrupt there's no right there's no aging principle he doesn't slowly change they said I think about the time that the work comes from you don't imagine this possible in 1850 and and what does that say about the difference in psyche and what the Industrial Revolution did in places like Austria Hungary the US but they make 2015 you don't see this being written today I mean there's a different about the individual you know nowadays everybody writing is a YouTube story so no one if anybody turns into a bug we would see it on YouTube and they become a celebrity 15 another 15 is I mean it's this novel that is just novella possible you know with him 15 or 50 years I decided when it was really I mean another week we try to be more proactive to what extent is this a product of its sounds like you have ideas stance I mean I don't know I just have more questions and world war one is now Rachel and this is a a rejection of logical rational reasonable same regression in without any emotional earnest and twist with an examination and so this sudden changed unexplainable unnatural progression of humankind is what's happened in World War one in a lot of thing it says the reason that people would be afraid of what it's been to fearfully question the role of individual and society it makes you wonder it makes you question everything and also think I mean the tough days it was hard to category sometimes he's described as an Austrian author but only in the austro-hungarian sense but you have to think that whoever who else what else well the work did he know and you can't not mention Freud right that is too often those names often come up with this exploration of the psyche and trying to understand the way people sometimes sometimes in frightening ways to try to understand how people make sense of their world I don't think of perhaps think of as a penal colony the trial and minimum orcas you know their sense of dude over what what's the use of trying to doomed anyhow and that seems to be for rain and I wonder as you comment at their World War one was raging and that's kind of a new saying not to the Balkans I don't think it was but was a new thing in general but long would that be industrial revolution and brand new things with India competin demoted cars tanks airplanes now and usually do some work for all the brand new stuff when it wasn't just the terms of century or up to ten to fifteen years previously you were still doing horse-drawn carts and clicking a reading firewood to blood for everything and I don't I kind of see a tie in there with a product of his time since Wars and the entire world was changed and people's lives were being disrupted where there was no security and they were leaving their homeland and there was all this disruption and I can you it certainly doesn't seem like it a work that could be written in this country there's no I mean you know it's written up down commit that all this world war but there's no real enemy this is this absurd thing happens there's no fixing it nothing would be done just have to endure and ultimately well I mean this is interesting talking about linking it with the war right I mean so what was the great Civil War I mean World War one did for Europe in one sense what's the civil war did for America is that it showed what happens when war is at an industrialized scale there's no more you know there's no one nothing noble about it you just slot right and so that produces for us Red Badge of Courage which is kind of a celebration of an individual right and then in a weird way the reason we feel about this is because of an individual so I like that I like the way you're saying it but I just wonder what that says about the American versus the Central European psyche I mean they both in their in their way celebrate the individual this is more hard to depict intense Trek but you know this other American novel Morgan you know wanting you know and continuing on this theme of not being written in the United States there was a novel written by trouble about a person who is a basket case literally has no face yes images and University community but when you look at what happened all crumble into this book is a book what happened just become sensor they become resisted resident he thought from movies and lives in I believe Europe somewhere in Paris on each issue and so that's what happened when there was an attempt to discuss it intellectually yes because suppressed in the United States yeah this work given the timing of this publication I mean think this is the story that says oldest as artists right that they often not well recognized during this during their time Thomas hood front did recognizes the genius of it didn't destroy it which is great but he didn't have a whole lot of success during his lifetime he it couldn't come back up his work couldn't pass resurgence during the vibrant Republic but I don't think it did and certainly during world war ii as a jewish man like yet there was no no chance right so it made it just a time to what you're talking about which is which courts of you are unpopular but this is coming to had its day until the post 1945 it at least in germany where they could finally been read in a different way and they were allowed to read it first of all because I was gratified in judgment but also read anneza it's a way of trying to understand the Germans and understand the individuals in the way that you couldn't have before because it was too grotesque too weird well that that begs a question they said how is this viewed in Germany today I mean how has its reception by you know every successive generation discovers the right how has that people I don't know I don't know if you're sure I mean this is one of those works that is like always is always broke the camera I don't know I can't I mean I think I myself a picture a fairly young man when I read this I mean I don't know that we know Hummel pians but I think the fact that it is so open I assume that he's in Prague and I assume that he's a young man and I assume certain things but really I think you can project anything you want on it I think that's part of the beauty of it I don't think this was nonsense what's the reaction currents what we were taught it in German the initially actually I have less when I taught it I had quite a few students in the class or Germans who didn't have any problem telling you like I don't like literature resume all wonderful things to second fingers dirty in the text and they understood it and it was I think this one describes you I think grammatically it's quite hard but there's so much that that's worth taking I think despite myself - transformer change thank you copy didn't want the book covers to have to depict the insect you're supposed to think about a lot of ultras didn't follow

Literature_Lectures

10_Deconstruction_I.txt

Prof: So anyway, to get launched on today's topic, obviously we confront one of the more formidable figures on our syllabus, a person who recently passed away and who in his last years and into the present has had a kind of second life as a person who in his later work didn't at all repudiate his earlier thoughts or indeed his earlier style, but nevertheless did begin to apply central aspects of his thinking to ethical and political issues. He and a number of other writers like, for example, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, are the figures whom we identify with what's called "the ethical turn" in thinking about texts, literature and other matters that is very much of the current moment. Hence Derrida's reputation and the tendency of people interested in theory to read him is alive and well today, but the materials that we are reading for this sequence of lectures date back much earlier. The essay that you read in its entirety for today, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Language of the Human Sciences," was delivered on the occasion of a conference about "the sciences of man" at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. It was an event that was really meant to be a kind of coronation of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose work had burst upon the American scene only a few years earlier. Levi-Strauss was there. He gave a talk, he was in the audience, and Derrida's essay was widely taken-- far from being a coronation of Levi-Strauss-- as a kind of dethroning of Levi-Strauss. I have to tell you that Levi-Strauss, who is still alive, a very old man, expresses great bitterness in his old age about what he takes to be the displacement of the importance of his own work by what happened subsequently. What happened subsequently can, I think, be traced to Derrida's lecture. One of the million complications of thinking about this lecture and about Derrida's work in general-- and, for that matter, about deconstruction-- is indeed to what extent it really is a significant departure from the work of structuralism. There is a self-consciousness in the thinking about structure that we find in many places in Levi-Strauss that Derrida freely acknowledges in his essay. Again and again and again he quotes Levi-Strauss in confirmation of his own arguments, only then in a way to turn on him by pointing out that there is something even in what he's saying there that he hasn't quite thought through. So it is not anything like, even as one reads it in retrospect, a wholesale repudiation or even really a very devastating critique of Levi-Strauss. Derrida, I think, freely acknowledges in this essay the degree to which he is standing on Levi-Strauss's shoulders. In any case, this extraordinary event in the imaginations of people thinking about theory in the West did, however, tend to bring about a sense of almost overnight revolution from the preoccupation we had in the mid-sixties with structuralism to the subsequent preoccupation we had throughout the seventies and into the early eighties with deconstruction. Derrida was, of course, a central figure in this. He was here at Yale as a visitor in the spring for many years. He influenced a great many people whose work is still current throughout the United States and elsewhere. He--after that--had a comparable arrangement with the University of California at Irvine and his influence there continued, a key figure whom many of us remember from his period at Yale as a galvanizing presence. The idea that there was what was called by one critic a "hermeneutical mafia" at Yale arose largely from the presence of Derrida together with our own Paul de Man and, more loosely connected with them, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom-- and also a scholar named J. Hillis Miller, whose departure for the University of California, Irvine resulted also in Derrida's decision to go there and be with Miller rather than to continue to stay here. That was the so-called Yale school. It generated extraordinary influence in some circles but, well beyond its influence, an atmosphere of hostility which had in many ways to do, I think, with what might still be called "the crisis in the humanities" as it is widely understood by state legislators and boards of trustees as somehow or another something needing to be overcome, backed away from, and forgotten > in the development of the humanities in academia. The reasons for this we can only imply, I think, probably, in the context of a course of this nature, but are nevertheless fascinating and will recur as we think not just about deconstruction itself but about the sorts of thinking that it has influenced. Now you have now read some Derrida. You've read all of one essay and you've read part of another, "Différance," and you've found him very difficult. Indeed, in addition to finding him very difficult you've probably said, "Why does he have to write like that?" In other words, "Yeah, okay. He's difficult, but isn't he making it more difficult than it needs to be?" you say to yourself. "I've never seen prose like this," you say. "This is ridiculous. Why doesn't he just say one thing at a time?" you might also want to say. Well, of course it's all deliberate on his part, and the idea is that deconstruction is, as a thought process, precisely a kind of evasive dance whereby one doesn't settle for distinct positions, for any sort of idea that can be understood as governed-- this is what "Structure, Sign and Play" is all about-- as governed by a blanket term, what Derrida often calls a "transcendental signified." We'll have much more to say about this. Derrida's prose style--its kind of a crab-like, sideways movement around an argument-- is meant as rigorously as it can to avoid seeming to derive itself from some definite concept, because, of course, deconstruction is precisely the deconstruction of the grounds whereby we suppose our thinking can be derived from one or another definite concept. Also--this is to be kept in mind, and this is of course one of the key distinctions between Derrida and de Man-- we'll have more to say about distinctions between them on Tuesday: Derrida is not a literary theorist. Though he sometimes does talk about texts that we call "literary," indeed he very often does, nevertheless Derrida's position and the logic of that position suggest that we can't really reliably discriminate among genres. In other words, we can't use genre either as a blanket term; and therefore he is one of the people-- one of the most influential people in persuading us that there's no such thing as literature, legal texts, theological texts, philosophical texts, or scientific texts. There is discourse, and to think about the field of texts is to think about something which is full of difference. > Needless to say, it's the central word in Derrida, which is nevertheless not classifiable or categorizable, and so for that reason we can't really say Derrida is specifically a literary theorist. Now I've been talking so far about difficulty and confusion, but in view of the fact that we're all in a state of tension about this-- I'm in a state of tension about it too-- let me remind us that we've already been doing deconstruction and that much of what's problematic in reading Derrida really has already been explained. Let's begin with a kind of warm-up sheet which we can anchor in these little drawings I've made [gestures towards chalkboard]. Obviously, you look at these drawings and you say, "Ah ha. That's the vertical axis," right? Of course, once we get to feminism, feminism will have certain ideas of its own about the vertical axis. We will be getting into that when the time comes. In the meantime the Eiffel Tower [gestures towards chalkboard] is a wonderful way of showing the degree to which the vertical axis is virtual. That is to say, if you ever saw a dotted line standing upright, it's the Eiffel Tower. There's nothing in it. It's empty. It's transparent. Yet somehow or another, if you're at the top of it-- if you're in the viewing station at the top of the Eiffel Tower-- suddenly all of Paris is organized at your feet. That is to say, it's a wonderful axis of combination that you're looking at. It is just there with its landmarks, not having the same kind of status as that which you are standing on, but rather just in a kind of row as the key signs, as it were, of the skyline of Paris: so you get the Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe and so on, all sort of lined up in a row, and there it is. Guy de Maupassant in a famous anecdote complained rather bitterly about this, according to Roland Barthes in an essay called "The Eiffel Tower": Maupassant often ate at the restaurant in the tower [up here someplace] [gestures towards the chalkboard] even though he didn't particularly like the food. "It's the only place," he said, "where I don't have to see it." In other words, if--as Saussure says, once again--we "put both feet squarely on the ground" of the Eiffel Tower, we're liberated from the idea that somehow or another it's a governing presence. If we're actually there, we no longer have to worry about the way it organizes everything around it into a kind of rigorous unfolding pattern. After all, there's a very real sense in which we infer the Eiffel Tower from its surroundings. It's built in the nineteenth century. It's by no means causative of the skyline of Paris. It's something that comes in belatedly just as langue comes in belatedly with relation to speech. The Eiffel Tower is a virtuality that organizes things, as one might say, arbitrarily. Sort of as a reflection on these same ideas, you get the famous poem of Wallace Stevens. I am sure you recognize this as Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar," but I will quickly quote to you the poem. I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. [As Derrida would say, the center limits free play, right?] The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. In other words, it is arbitrarily placed in the middle of the free play of the natural world, a free play which is full of reproductive exuberance, full of a kind of joyous excess which is part of what Derrida's talking about when he talks about what's "left over": the surplusage of the sign, the supplementarity of the sign. There's an orgasmic element in what Derrida has in mind, so that when he speaks of "the seminal adventure of the trace," toward the end of your essay, you want to put some pressure on that word "seminal." Well, in any case the jar is just arbitrarily in the middle of that, organizing everything without participating in the nature of anything. It is, in other words, a center which is outside the structure: "a center which is not a center," and we'll come back to that in a minute. Now the Twin Towers--and I first started using this example decades before 2001-- the Twin Towers have a kind of poignancy and pathos today that they would not have had then; but what they suggest is in a way today--which overwhelms us with grief--the ephemerality of the vertical axis. The Twin Towers had the same function in New York that the Eiffel Tower has in Paris. It was a wonderful place from which to see the city, a wonderful place from which to feel that everything was organized at its feet. There's a very fine essay about the Twin Towers--again, long before 2001--by Michel de Certeau, which makes this argument in sustained form. I recommend it to you. In any case, it's another example that we can take from our experience of the uneasy sense we may have that to infer a spatial moment from which the irreducibly temporal nature of experience is derived-- to infer a moment from the fact of this experience as a necessary cause of it-- is always problematic. It always necessarily must, as Derrida would say, put this sense of a spatial full presence of everything there at once in systematic order-- as Derrida would say, must put that "under erasure." In other words, in a certain sense you can't do without it. Derrida never really claims that you can do without it. If you want to get a sense of structure, you've got to have some sort of inference of this nature, but at the same time it had better be in quotes because it is always tenuous, ephemeral, dubious even as to its existence, and necessarily needs to be understood in that way. All right. Now other ways in which we've already been involved in the subject matter of what you've been reading today: take a look at page 921, a couple of passages in which Derrida is quoting Levi-Strauss on the nature of myth. Once having quoted you these two passages from Levi-Strauss, here's where I'll return just for a moment to Levi-Strauss's analysis of the Oedipus myth and show you how it is that Derrida is both benefiting from what Levi-Strauss has said and ultimately able to criticize Levi-Strauss's position. Bottom of the left-hand column, page 921: "In opposition to epistemic discourse [that is to say, the kind of discourse which has some principle or transcendental signified or blanket term as its basis-- in other words, something which in a given moment makes it possible for all knowledge to flow from it], structural discourse on myths--mythological discourse-- must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks." [And Derrida then says] This is what Lévi-Strauss [himself] says in [the following passage taken from one of Levi-Strauss' most famous books] The Raw and the Cooked. I just want to quote the end of it, the middle of the right-hand column, still on page 921. Levi-Strauss says: "In wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and too long, has yet to yield to its demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book on myths itself and in its own way a myth." In other words, here is a moment when Levi-Strauss is admitting something about his own work which he is not admitting in his analysis of the Oedipus myth in the essay from Structural Anthropology that you read last time. What Levi-Strauss is saying here is that his approach to myth is itself only a version of the myth. That is to say, it participates in the mythic way of thinking about things. It uses what in the Structural Anthropology essay he calls "mythemes" or "gross constituent units" of thought. It deploys and manipulates those gross constituent units of thought in the ways that we saw, but notice what Levi-Strauss is saying in that essay as opposed to the passage Derrida has just quoted. He says in effect, "This form of the myth is scientific. One of the versions that I have made use of to arrive at this scientific conclusion is, for example, Freud's version of the Oedipus myth. In other words, Freud, Sophocles, all of the other versions I have at my disposal, have equal merit as versions, but none of them is a transcendental signified, none of them is a blanket term, and none of them is the causal explanation or meaning of the myth. The meaning of the myth is discoverable only in my science." Now, of course, Freud himself thought he was a scientist, and his reading of the myth was also supposed to be scientific. What was Freud's reading of the myth about? Two or one! > It was, in other words, about the problem of incest, the problem of the over-determination of blood relations and the under-determination of blood relations. It was a thorough examination of that problematic leading to the conclusion that that's what the myth was about. In other words, Levi-Strauss's conclusions are already anticipated in Freud. Furthermore, what is Levi-Strauss doing? He's denying the influence of Freud, right? It's my myth, not his myth--right?--which of course is precisely what happens in the primal horde. It is a perfect instance of the Oedipus complex. Levi-Strauss is repudiating the father and, in repudiating the father, showing himself to fall into the very mythic pattern that Freud had been the first to analyze. Okay? So when you say that what you're doing is scientific in a context of this sort, you are making yourself vulnerable. The moments in this essay in which Derrida is criticizing Levi-Strauss are those moments in which Levi-Strauss has unguardedly said something on the order of "My work is scientific"; but there are lots of occasions, and he always quotes Levi-Strauss to this effect, when Levi-Strauss is not saying that-- when Levi-Strauss is conceding that his work, that is to say his viewpoint, disappears unstably into the thing viewed. All right. Now also take a look at--because we've been doing this too-- take a look at page 917, the left-hand column, where Derrida is talking not about Levi-Strauss but about Saussure. Here he's talking about the nature of the sign, and he is concerned, very much concerned, about this relationship between the concept and the sound image-- which is to say, the signified and the signifier-- that is the basis of the science of Saussure: that is to say, the relationship that's involved in the pairing of signified and signifier is the basis, the cornerstone, of the science of Saussure. So here's what, a little more than halfway down, the left-hand column, page 917, Derrida has to say about that. He says: … [T]he signification "sign" has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified. If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept [which is to say, a transcendental signified: in other words, the idea that the concept in some sense generates the signifier-- right?--which is the basis of Saussure's thinking about this]. Here's where I come back to that example that I already gave you with a question mark next to it when I was talking about Saussure. Suppose I think of the relationship between "signified" and "signifier" as the relationship between two terms-- because after all, one way of signifying the concept "tree" [gestures towards the board] is to write the word "tree" and put quotation marks about it. So if I take away the quotation marks, all I have is the word with no indication that it's a concept. Notice that this is now a relationship which Jakobson would call "metalingual." What it suggests is that "tree" is another word for "arbor." In other words, it's a relationship not between a signified and a signifier but between a signifier and a signifier, so that the binarism of the relationship is broken down, and we begin to understand the combinatory structure of speech or writing as one signifier leading to another-- I think-- signifier: Derrida says in effect, "Let's banish the word 'signifier,'" but he might as well say, "Let's banish the word 'signified.'" I think a signifier, and it triggers by association--as Saussure would say-- it triggers by association a subsequent successive signifier, which triggers another, which triggers another. That's what gives us, in the language of deconstruction, what we call "the chain," the signifying chain: not an organizational pattern but an ever self-replicating and self-extending pattern, irreducibly linear and forward-progressing through a sequence of temporal associations. One of the things that happens when you demystify the relationship between a concept and a signifier or a sound image is that you also demystify the relationship between a set of associations, which exist somehow in space, and the way in which association actually takes place, which is necessarily in time: in other words, if one signifier leads to another--if like history, where there's one damn thing after another, speech is one damn signifier after another-- then that is actually the nature of the associations that Saussure has been talking about in the first place. But it doesn't exist in a systemic space; it exists in an unfolding time, right? These are some of the implications of no longer being satisfied with the way in which a sign can be understood as a concept to which we attach belatedly a signification, a signifier. What we have is a situation in which we find ourselves caught up in a stream of signification, all of which is, in a certain sense, there before we came along and are moved, as down a stream, by the way in which one signifier succeeds another in ways that later on, as we take up concepts like "supplementarity" and différance, we can think of a little bit more precisely. Okay. So now finally then, there's one other way in which Derrida's essay from the very outset confirms what we've been saying about the crisis of structuralism being the need to deny ordinary understandings of genesis or cause. In structuralism, if something emerges, it emerges from between two things. That is to say, it's not this and it's not this, or it "emerges" as that which is not this, not this. It doesn't, in other words, derive from an antecedent single cause as an effect. It emerges, on the other hand, as difference within a field. Now that's what Derrida is talking about with extraordinary intensity of complication in the first paragraph of your essay, page 915, left column, first paragraph: his first words uttered at the famous conference in- at Johns Hopkins in 1966. He says: Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event" [évênement, something which emerges, something which is there now and wasn't there before]… That's the most problematic issue for structuralism. When structuralism thinks about how yesterday things were different from the way they are today, it has to say: yesterday there was a certain synchronic cross-section of data, and today there's a slightly different synchronic cross-section of data. But structuralism is unable and furthermore-- much more importantly--unwilling to say anything about how yesterday's data turned into today's data-- in other words, to say anything about change. It sees successive cross-sections, and it calls that "history." I am anticipating here, and we'll come back to this in other contexts: but it doesn't say "one thing led to another"; it says "one thing after another"--in my facetious reference to history as I have already given it to you. Now this is what Derrida is deliberately struggling with in this first paragraph: … an "event" [quote, unquote], if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-- or structuralist--thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" [quote, unquote] anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture [that is to say, an emergence among things, right--a rupture: the volcano parts and there you have lava, right--an event] and a redoubling [a redoubling in the sense that "something has happened"]. As Bob Dylan would say in effect, "Something has happened, but it's not something new. It is, in fact, a replication of what was unbeknownst to you because, Mr. Jones, you don't know very much of what was, unbeknownst to you, there always--as Derrida says-- already: something that emerges but at the same time presses on us its status as having already been there, always already been there." All right. So in all these sorts of ways, understanding structuralism as a problematic critique of genesis-- because it's still very hard to grasp, to accept the notion of things not having been caused-- why can't we say things were caused, just for example?--the notion of the sign as an arbitrary relationship between a substratum of thought which is then somehow or another hooked onto a derivative series or a system of signifiers; the notion of getting outside of myth and being scientific, and the notion that we can ascribe reality to the vertical axis-- all of these are ways of questioning the integrity, the security within its skin, of structuralism we have actually already undertaken. I only want to suggest to you with this long preamble that much of the work that lies before us is actually in the past and we have already accomplished it. Now "Structure, Sign and Play" is a critique of "structurality." It's not just a critique of structuralism. It's a critique of the idea of anything that has a center, one which is at the same time an enabling causal principle. In other words, I look at a structure and I say it has a center. What do I mean by a center? I mean a blanket term, a guiding concept, a transcendental signified, something that explains the nature of the structure and something also, as Derrida says, which allows for limited free play within the structure; but at the same time the structure has this kind of boundary nature. It may be amoeboid but it still has boundaries--right?--and so at the same time limits the free play within the structure. That's like the New Critics saying that a text has structure. It has something that actually in the phenomenological tradition is called an "intentional structure." Kant calls it "purposiveness"-- that is to say, the way in which the thing is organized according to some sort of guiding pattern. But to speak of an intentional structure as a center is not at all the same thing as to speak of an intending person, author, being, or idea that brought it into existence, because that's extraneous. That's something prior. That's genesis. That's a cause, right? The intending author, in other words, is outside, whereas we can argue that the intentional structure is inside. But that's a problem. How do you get from an intending author to an intentional structure and back? A center is both a center and not a center, as Derrida maddeningly tells us. It is both that which organizes a structure and that which isn't really qualified to organize anything, because it's not in the structure; it's outside the structure, something that imposes itself from without like a cookie cutter on the structure, right? This then is an introductory moment in Derrida's thinking about centers. On page 916 in the lower left-hand column, he talks about the history of metaphysics as a history of successive appeals to a center: that is to say, to some idea from which everything derives, some genesis or other that can be understood as responsible for everything that there is. The list is very cunningly put together. This is bottom of the left-hand column. It's not necessarily chronological, but at the same time it gives you a sense of successive metaphysical philosophers thinking about first causes, origins, and about whatever it is that determines everything else. I'll just take up the list toward the end: "transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth." Notice that though the list isn't strictly chronological, man nevertheless does succeed God. In other words, he's thinking about the development of Western culture. In the Middle Ages and to some extent in the Early Modern period, we live in a theocentric world. Insofar as he understands himself as man at all, man understands himself as a product of divine creativity, as something derived from God, as one entity among all other entities who participate and benefit from the divine presence. But then of course, the rise of the Enlightenment is also the rise of anthropocentrism, and by the time the Enlightenment is in full cry you get everybody from Blake to Marx to Nietzsche saying not that God invented man, but that man invented God. Man has become the transcendental signified. Everything derives now in this historical moment from human consciousness, and all concepts of whatever kind can be understood in that light. But then of course he says, having said "man," > he says "and so forth." In other words, something comes after man. Man is, in other words, an historical moment. There are lots of people who have pointed out to us that before a certain period, there was no such thing as man, and in a variety of quite real senses, after a certain moment in the history of culture, there is also no such thing as man. The argument Derrida is making about the emergence of his "event" is that a new transcendental signified has actually substituted itself for man. In other words, the world is no longer anthropocentric; it's linguistic. Obviously, the event that Derrida is talking about--the emergence, the rupture, an event which makes a difference--is the emergence of language. What I really want to talk about here is something that is on page 916, the right-hand column: The moment [of emergence--the event, in other words, about halfway down] was that in which language invaded the universal problematic [in other words, that moment in which language displaced the previous transcendental signified, which was man]; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse--provided we can agree on this word-- that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. He's making a claim for language while erasing it. In other words, he's painfully aware that language is just the new God, the new Man. Many critiques of deconstruction take the form of saying that deconstruction simply instrumentalizes language, gives it agency, and gives it consciousness as though it were God or man and then pretends that it isn't. This is a common response to deconstruction. Derrida is aware of it in advance. He says in effect, "Look, I know we're running this risk in saying everything is language," or, if you will here, everything is discourse. At the same time, we are saying something different, because hitherto we had this problem: in other words, we had the problem of something being part of a structure-- that is to say God is immanent in all things, human consciousness pervades everything that it encounters-- in other words, something which is part of a structure but which is at the same time outside of it. God creates the world and then sort of, as Milton says himself, "uncircumscrib'd withdraws," right? God is not there. God is the Dieu caché: God is the hidden God who is absent from the world and is, in effect, also the structure of the world. The same thing can be said of man. Man brings the sense of what the world is into being and then stands aside and somehow sort of takes it in through an aesthetic register or in some other remote way. Language doesn't do that. Language is perpetually immersed in itself. Derrida is claiming that language is different in the sense that it makes no sense to talk about it as standing outside of what's going on. This is an essential part of the critique of structuralism. Language is not other than speech; it is perpetually manifest in speech, right? It's simply a distinction that can't be maintained, which is why he calls it an "event." In other words, something of significance has happened, Mr. Jones, and that is language, right? All right. So I suppose in the time remaining and, alas, there isn't a lot of it, we'd better ask what "language" is. We've talked about it. We've had a great deal to do with it, but of course we still haven't the slightest idea what it is. Soon we'll know. First of all, we'd better say, as is already clear from what we've been quoting, language is not quite Saussurian. That is to say, it is not a system of signs understood as stable relationships between a concept world and a world of signifying. It is not a world in which language can be understood as somehow or another a means of expressing thought. Deconstruction calls into question the distinction between language and thought in calling into question the distinction between signifier and signified, so it's not quite Saussuria--even though, as Derrida says, it can't do without a Saussurian vocabulary. Another problem is--and also related to the critique of Saussure-- is that this idea that what's inward, what is essential, is something that can be voiced and should be voiced; so that if I think a sign is a way of talking about the expression of a thought, notice that I call--if I am Saussure-- that expression a "sound image." In other words, language, according to Derrida, in the Saussurian tradition seems to privilege sound over script, over what is graphic. He claims that this is a hidden bias in the whole history of metaphysics. Why, in other words, should we think of language as speech, as voice? Why do we think of voice--in the sense of the divine logos, the word: "in the beginning was the word"-- why do we think of voice as a kind of fully present simultaneity that is absolutely present precisely in consciousness or wherever it is that we understand language to derive from? What's so special about voice? Why do they say all of these terrible things about writing? Writing is no different from voice. Voice, too, is articulated combinatorially in time. Voice, too, can be understood as inscribed on the ear. This is a metaphor that Derrida frequently uses, as a kind of writing on the ear. The distinction, which Derrida takes to be metaphysical, that Saussure wants to make between something primary, something immediate and underivative-- voice--and something merely repetitious, merely reproductive, merely a handmaiden to voice-- namely writing--needs to be called into question. Now this is the point at which we need to say something about a number of key terms that Derrida uses to sustain this sort of criticism of traditional ideas of language. The first has to do with the notion of supplementarity. A supplement, he points out, is something that either completes something that isn't complete or adds to something that already is complete. For example, I take vitamin C. I also drink a lot of orange juice, so I've got plenty of vitamin C, and if I take a vitamin C pill I am supplementing something that's already complete; but if I don't drink any orange juice, then of course if I take a vitamin C pill I am supplementing something that's not complete, but either way we always call it a supplement. It's very difficult even to keep in mind the conceptual difference between these two sorts of supplement. Now a sign traditionally understood is self-sufficient, self-contained. Saussure has made it a scientific object by saying that it's both arbitrary and differential, but a sign understood under the critique of deconstruction is something that is perpetually proliferating signification, something that doesn't stand still, and something that can't be understood as self-sufficient or independent in its nature as being both arbitrary and differential. It is a bleeding or spilling into successive signs in such a way that it perpetually leaves what Derrida calls "traces." That is to say, as we examine the unfolding of a speech act, we see the way in which successive signs are contaminated. That's not meant to be a bad word but suggests being influenced, one might say, in the sense of "open the window and influenza," by those signs that precede it. Supplementarity is a way of understanding the simultaneously linear and ever proliferating, ever self-complicating nature of verbal expression. Now différance is a way, among other things, of talking about the difference between voice and writing. There is a difference between voice and writing even though they have so much in common. Voice and writing, by the way, are not a stable binary. There are no stable binaries in Derrida. The difference between voice and writing is that writing can give us all kinds of indication of difference that voice can't give us. Part of the interest of misspelling différance, as Derrida insists on doing, is that we can't, in terms of voice as sound, tell the difference between différance and différence. Actually, one can, slightly, but it's not a difference worth lingering over. Différance, in other words, with its substitution of the a-- and remember the riff in the essay "Différance" on a as a pyramid, as alpha, as origin, and as killing the king because the king, remember, is the transcendental signified: God, man and so forth. The riff on the a in différance as all of those things is something that we can only pick up if we understand language as writing, because in speech these modes of difference don't register. Différence (with an e) is simply the Saussurian linguistic system, a system of differences understood as spatial: that is to say, understood as available to us as a kind of smorgasbord as we stand in front of it. Différance introduces the idea of deferral and reminds us that difference-- that is to say, our understanding of difference, our means of negotiating difference-- is not something that's actually done in space; it's done in time. When I perceive a difference, I perceive it temporally. I do not understand the relation among signs as a simultaneity. I want to, if I want to pin it down scientifically, but in the actual--as Joyce would say-- stream of consciousness, I understand difference temporally. I defer difference. I unfold. I successively negotiate difference, and in doing that I need the concept of différance. All right. There a couple of things that I want to say about the key moves of Derrida. I will mention those next time. I will also look over my notes and see what I might say further about these troublesome terms and their relation to Derrida's understanding of language so that Tuesday our introduction will still have to do with Derrida and then we'll move into thinking about de Man.

Literature_Lectures

Unlearning_Our_Loneliness_Week_V_Perils_of_SelfDeception.txt

yeah all right welcome to CH eyes I'm learning on loneliness we are we cry of the peril session a little bit of a music we discussed discussed Milan Kundera's the hitchhiking camp which revealed how ambivalence can be traced to the fact that identities frequently are no more than fictions we have no absolute identity and our need to have that certainty of a partner can lead to conflicts additionally we discussed how art identities relate to how we navigate feelings about our bodies as well as the language we use as our identities change we may find that any alterations are met with ambivalence from a partner who likes and does not like who we are and who we become to unlearn our loneliness requires knowing the paradoxes that constitute our identity sound familiar Milan Street okay this week we'll examine Chekhov's lady with the dog in order to understand the perils of self-deception self-deception has the advantage of allowing us to act in the world but this advantage comes at the cost of knowing who we are and the causes of our loneliness put simply this story will help us to understand how our loneliness made or made it constant so long as you remain ignorant of our own motivations concerning how we were late especially at an intimate level with others so here we go page 68 the narrator starts out the familiar world the everyday world of gossip neutrally presenting a fact quote it was said that a new person had appeared in the seafront a lady with a little dog the narrator then presents the protagonist gujrat who is barely a home at Yalta and who had cooked begun to take an interest in new arrivals this interest is presented as another fact although the motivation behind this fact is left unsaid he had begun to take an interest in new arrivals as though just occurred out of nowhere the the bracketed to have sex with is just kind of left in the margins of the story check I was doing a lot of that throughout the story this first meeting is repeated quote and afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day she was walking alone always wearing the same and always with the same white dog no one knew who she was and everyone called her simply put the lady with the dog and club so that's her introduction page 69 Goomer flex quote if she is here alone without a husband or friends it wouldn't be a bad idea to make her acquaintance again no indication about what my prompt this thought is mentioned it is only at this time that the narrator presents us with information about GU Roth number one he's under 40 but he has three kids one almost 12 and that's because he married young number two he has a very ambivalent relationship with his wife hey first earth I guess first whichever you wanna go hey let's say she seems closer to 60 than 240 at least in his reckoning be she was cooked at all erect woman with dark eyebrows staid and dignified and as she set up herself an intellectual she read a great deal see GU Roth quote secretly considered her unintelligent narrow in delegate was afraid of her and did not like to be at home all in a jumble the fact that his considerations are kept secret likely has to do with the fact that he is afraid of her the nature of the fear may arise from the fact that he's intimidated by somebody who stayed dignified and who reads in speech slop which he does not d he's unfaithful to her which to him justifies his misogyny it's as though he thinks that the fact that he gets away with cheating means quote she's not so smart the fact that they're a lower race means that he needs to feel no guilt about what he does the lower race in case she didn't catch it his quotes that's his words not mine this is not what I think about alright number three he's ambivalent concerning women in general a on the one hand bitter experience has shown him the truth of the lower race B on the other hand he cannot go for more than two days without women see men meguro born cold and uncommunicative he cannot be himself among them D women allowed him to know what to say and how to behave II quote in his appearance in his character and his his whole nature there is something attractive and elusive but you've lured women and disposed him them in his favor he knew that and some force seemed to draw him to to them and go the whole paragraph here depicts the weak psychology underlying Karass Affairs he isn't as interested in his men he only feels himself around women and most tellingly there's a strange and inchoate attraction that he's helpless to fight against he's destined to meet the other women even though he knows about her number for his affairs follow a predictable pattern it starts great becomes unbearable and then someone new it helps him to forget everything to be learnt last time so quote experience often repeated truly bitter experience and talking long ago that with decent people every intimacy which it first saw ingredient Leda versified life it appears a light in charming adventure inevitably grows into a regular problem with extreme intricacy and then the long-run the situation becomes unbearable but in every fresh meeting with an interesting moment this experience seemed to slip out of his memory and he was eager for life and everything some seemed too simple in a music wash rinse repeat that's the cycle so the narrator then offers humorous interpretation of the lady with the dog based on her expression gates and hairstyle he figured that she was married alone and bored at Yalta for the first time there's been a series of ellipses as though commas unbidden and irrelevant quote the stories of the in words of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue he despises them and then it's such stories and for the most part made up by persons who would themselves have been galactus in' if they had been able but when the lady sat down at the next table three paces from him he remembered these tales and easy conquests of trips to the mountains and the tempting thought of a swift fleeting love affair romance with an unknown woman whose name did not know suddenly took possession of him essentially he all just seems to be like for Florida during spring break we on the one hand the confident morality there are likely inflated both by those who fear and by those who desire such romantic interpretations on the other hand everyone who goes to Yalta or the Florida for spring break are aware of the stories the seeming break in his consciousness in fact continues the train of thought concerning his interpretation of the lady that she's born alone and married and in Yalta the thought of the Swift leading love affair only seems to have suddenly taken possession of them in fact he has carefully curated a path toward the spot from the very first mention of the lady with the dog its suddenness is important only because it allows him to feel helpless it gives an irresistible time that he himself is generated right so the whole time the whole time he's thinking about the lady email like I'll be good to make her acquaintance you know she's not here with her husband doesn't have any friends oh is this mysterious lady that are we talking about I'm looking for somebody who's young and full of life that makes me feel excited again you know oh we're in all time you know they say Yalta that never happens whoa but wouldn't it be great if it did happen here with her and then there's this sudden like magical exclamation points voila and suddenly Garage is infatuated but he's helpless against it right because this this is a creation ex nihilo from his own perspective right death hot springs unbidden out of absolutely nowhere he had no idea that the thought was coming he missed the total set up DC where self-destruction emerges does that make sense right he ignores the whole path the whole trajectory of his thinking in order to arrive at the conclusion as a sudden even though it's it actually follows fairly seamlessly from his initial starting point which is he wants to have an affair and that's why does that make sense okay page 70 they have a brief conversation about dullness discussing how 20 it is to complain the boredom all on relaxes sound familiar oh how boring it is to be here they dinner like strangers a simile that produces an ambiguous strength tension after all they are strangers so saying that they're like strangers implies that somehow they're not they have to be quote white justing talk of people free and contented for whom it is all the same where they go or what they talked about the conversation of an elite upper class they discuss the weather and give facts about themselves GU Roth presents himself as wealthy and cultured he's really a philologist although he works in the bank he's trained for operate he has two houses he's the next Bachelor except he's done he learns that her name is Anna that she can't remember what her husband does mm-hmm there you go it becomes someone apparent that she's not all that in the next paragraph allows another moment of self-deception London deprives him of agency over his unlife given the forces of fate quote back in his own room he thought about her and felt sure that he would meet her the next day it was inevitable and because parentheses that aren't spoken by Chekov inevitable because of your rubble to make sure he puts himself in her way and that's right me of course is inevitable because he wants to meet her and it's not that we good place they will meet but possibly it isn't inevitable it makes it faded and thus something he's helpless against once again he then thinks of her in terms of his daughter framing Anna is naive and innocent quote this must have been the first time in her life that she had been alone in surroundings in which men who could follow her and watch her and speak to her all the time with the secret aim she could not fail to the body some big secret there you drive right you know it's a secret aim that the women don't know but they do but they don't because there was a but they do but they don't right and you just flip back and forth between the fact that she knows the fact that she's innocent doesn't she knows she doesn't makes it really easy for him to deceive himself that make sense company all right the secret leave of course is not so secret it's sexual desire it's seen her only to those who like the robber being unaware of their own motives which be Rob is gurus final thought involves quote her slender delicate neck her lovely gray eyes there's something pathetic about her anyway he thought and fell asleep this ensures that he's able to belittle his thoughts and feelings about her returning her to the general status of the lower race there's something pathetic there page 71 chapter 2 inning who robber hanging out at the pier weekender the relationship do Rob asks what they should do Anna made no reply and so if you're out quote looked at her intensely and all at once put his arm around her in kissed her on the lips and breathed in the moisture the fragrance of the flowers and he immediately looked around him and she's wondering whether anyone had seen them let's go to your hotel he said softly and they both walked quickly right oh no they might see us kissing let's go to your hotel room where these kisses will be anonymous this is nothing more want to sure what's in her room who are replacing the kinds of women he had relationships with there have been three one carefree good-natured women who are excited by his lovemaking and are grateful to him for their short lives happiness sure the veldt list is long and illustrious number two women like his wife who's put caresses were insincere affected hysterical makes up a great deal of quite unnecessary talk in he thought of sex is more significant than passion or lovemaking you know he just wants the sex the passion they want significance they wanted to be mean something he's instance here it's a fact that it's hysterical number three beautiful cold women whose features over his features limited a predatory expression betraying a determination to wring from life more than I could give women no long the first year capricious irrational despotic brainless once you robbed and cooled these women's beauty or once good cool these women's beauty arose and have nothing but revulsion in the lace trimming on their under clothes right in the fish scales in some ways though like the the predatory discrimination to wring from like one and it gives no longer the first youth apprecia s-- it sounds a lot like you're off right maybe now if the fish scales on but you are I've asked nonetheless right yeah and I later in the story there's some there's some subtle references to fish generally being prepared in a way that is a little bit less than perfect they make this comparison between the women use affairs with and fish that just just like overall Gubarev seems happy with them and very grateful and happy women who are grateful and to despise those women most like the predatory wants a mantra more out of life the sex scene in which they consummate he and Anna is wholly excised from the text which instead immediately jumps to hammers reaction so somewhere in between the lines they have sex here's where they check out writes Anna seem to regard the affair at something very special very serious as if she'd become a fallen woman an attitude you got odd disconcerting her features lengthened and drooped she assumed a pose of dismal meditation like her repentant sinner in some classical painting it isn't right she said you will never respect me anymore right so they have sex and then Anna very beautifully sad sense what kind of person I'm I do wrong what have you done to me I was once innocence no longer allows and bad thing right she's assuming opposed the team's manufactured to the narrator thus the like the classical panic right it's a show it's how she knows she ought to react it's not necessarily a native emotion it's just what what one is supposed to do when once it not yalta right this is this is how she's supposed to be here so the emotions might be genuine they only don't know him at that well at this point the de narrator clearly depicts what it's performed she becomes the bond woman complete with the assumed pose in garage reaction to her performance is revealing of his character this is my favorite line in the whole story so Ana says you'll never respect me anymore the next thing the narrator says is this quote on the table was a watermelon Gujrat cut himself with slice from it and began slowly eating it at least half an hour passed in silence why should I stop respecting us to be robbed you don't know what you're saying so she assumes the post says you'll never respect me he takes half an hour to eat a slice of watermelon and then just throws out why should I stop respecting yet it's brilliant that's good wrong right oh yeah I think I'm worried about stuff let me eat this watermelon ah watermelon oh yeah you're worried forget it it's fine this is Yalta things happen it's clear that it'd be difficult for you ought to stop respecting her as he hasn't shown himself capable of offering much respect in the first place right Ana's response shows a bit of honesty just enough though to fall back into an even deeper massive self-deception so here's your response to bureau's comic Club how can I justify myself I'm a wicked fallen woman I despise myself and have not the least thought of self justification it isn't my husband I've deceived it's myself and not only now I've been seeing myself that forever so long my husband is no doubt an honest worthy man but he's a flunky and now I've become an ordinary worthless woman and one has the right to despise me all right do you see how she just pin balls all over the place like and she works in there that she's lying to herself but that which she says she's lying to herself about is the quality and integrity of her husband that was she's actually lying to herself about is the fact that she feels bad about any of this so long as we discussed last week it's easy to assume the rules painted out literature other fictions instead of asking ourselves how we really feel right we learned that in the hitchhiking game in this case for science is a wicked fallen woman or even as an ordinary worthless woman these are performing stances they're not necessarily true number two Julianne games will admit that she's deceived herself with this deceit concerns the quality of her husband not herself admitting a shallow level of self deceit protects her from delving further into the meaning of her actions right and so I know that I'd be gaming in self deception like this much self deception don't just take up this much husband and I won't worry about this I'll just be like oh yeah there's that self-deception there it is I'm lying about who my husband is and she can know where all this it's really clever right I'm worried that I might be involved in self-deception so I'll just take this little slice and ignore the rest of the love do you see that does it make sense okay all right page 73 the narrator remains clear but there's something a bit less than genuine about Ian's reaction by discussing who robbed who clearly doesn't buy any of it he's not the most sensitive fellow but he's really not buying it quote do I listen to her bored to death the naive accents their amorous all was so unexpected still out of place but for the tears in her eyes she might have been just a play-acting right but he knows what he's supposed to do so he gazed into her fixed terrified eyes kissed her and soothed her with gentle affectionate words and gradually she calmed down a ringing or turquoise soon they were laughing together buried evidence and from there they seemed to continue on together Google has a fascinating moment of false insight as he sits at the anti quote enchanted by the sight of all this magical beauty anything's cooked when you come to think of it everything in the world is beautiful really but our own thoughts and actions when we lose sight of the higher aims of life and of our dignity of human beings and that sounds like a Starbucks coffee now try it like one of those inside it's just it's just perfect it's beautiful pithy wise and a special sort of way see yeah it's a nifty thought but it seems divorced from anything that grew up would actually consider living by his interests him far from the dignity of human beings especially the ones that he's seducing or from the higher aims of life that would involve other than having sex with women these thoughts allowed me to believe that he's the kind of person who cares about these things though however divorced they are for me in practice right he's like I listen to NPR although for Bernie Sanders it's fine I'm that kind of guy now let me just chime y'all sit for a while as long as I listen to NPR it's fine I'm the kind of person I want to be it'll be okay I even pledged this week right totally totally on board make sense page 74 the relationship continues as they continue meat cook the utter idleness those kisses in broad daylight accompanied by furtive glances and the fear of discovery the heat the smell of the sea and the idle smart well-fed people continually crossing the old division seem to have given him a new lease on life he told Anna she was beautiful and seductive while she was always pensive always trying to force for him the admission that he did not respect her that he did not love her a bit and considered her just in the ordinary right so he's telling her oh yeah and you're beautiful Lulu yours tonight you're always pensive right she's thinking she's like no you really don't like me really don't respect me over your way of way down here and there's their relationship truth is like she's kind of been all in ordinary and he's kind of been all in ordinary but as long as he pitches him up here and she pitches it down there then they have some tension in our relationship and it makes it more than about this axe right this is big existential drama the relationship in other words consist of each letting the other person believe what they wish to believe about themselves which in some ways is the formula for a great relationship it's also the formula for a great affair or any great lie or hoax that you don't have much integrity associated with you Rob never disagree Susannah herself down in a man never interrupts his new lease on life right how very kind of you to give that to each other there little guest eventually however his husband sends very cheap repairs ago it's a good thing I'm going she said to you rob it's the intervention of fate fate here is another term for self-deception it's a way that she can justify her actions by relinquishing all responsibility for their coming to a conclusion it must be fate that we're being separated nothing else could separate us because clearly it's a match made in heaven otherwise any questions so far the fate of her choosing to return home yeah oh I've been someone see you off it's been real you know summer love you can be John Travolta I guess put in your time but in yalta John Travolta something like that so he found uh hero's thoughts about the end of the affair continued along the train of self-deception rather than looking to face however durag reverses well practice stories could he had only just waked up and he told himself that this has just been just one more of the many adventures in his life and that into it was over leaving nothing but a memory he was moved and sad and felt a slight remorse the reason for the remorse a license justified his letting her leave without actually carrot coat after all this young woman whom he would never see again had not actually really been happy with him he had been friendly but in his whole behavior and the tones of his voice in his very caresses there had been a shade of irony be insulting indulgence of the fortunate nail which is a great line in other words he in retrospect realizes he is playing the role of the fortunate male to her fall in love in role play I quote even Sisson calling them good he had appeared to her different from his real self in a word he had involuntarily deceived her and code in allowing his deception to come to the surface after the fact and allowing it to be nothing that he could claim responsibility over guru ensures that he has nothing to feel badly about and that the pattern would be able to recognize right oh that was just specific to this time I mean the next person I'm sure will be totally sincere right is an achievement she just give this is hairy but it's here it just wasn't there that's her fault not mine okay Chapter three back in Moscow you rob the joins Moscow life reading three papers going on TV eight playing cards he assumed that quote in a month's time and it would be nothing more but a wistful memory and cook but instead find that she could did not come join me in his dreams she accompanied him everywhere like his shadow and he persists in his self deception by idealizing the past quote when to the page 76 when he closed his eyes she seemed to stand before him still lovelier younger tenderer than she had really bad he saw himself too is better than he had been in Yalta in the evenings he could hear her breathing the sweet rustle of her skirts in the streets he followed women with his eyes to see if anywhere liked her the last goal to find a replacement of course denies him his individuality in order to make very kind of woman that will suit her right to start off pining for Anna and the solution is to find in Anna that he can even be with instead any animal but what girl really wants is someone to share with him the world of injury he had developed the sea you're no longer binds Indiana it only makes him feel lonely he tries to talk to a friend who's replying focuses on the quality of the fish right that's the fish comment and this is easier odds what appears to be an existential break from the idle life of the elite quote what Lisa deve nning what tedious empty days frantic card playing gluttony perpetual talk always about the same thing the greater part of one's time and energy when our business the reserved nobody used to anyone and to discuss him the same thing over and over again when we talk about the Jonathan house just moments ago yeah I don't know it appeared out of nowhere ex nihilo in fact suddenly emerged and so while this is a great 14th of his life and it's true right his life is absolutely trivial and Monday it's a great honest critique of his life but he frames his depression in terms of missing Anna and not the dishonesty with which he exists because he feels in his absence is the problem and not the way that he spends his days visiting her becomes the solution he tells his wife Hawaiian goes to her town finds her house and doesn't know how to contact it right Weiser doesn't know what to say h78 so he decides to go to the theatre does so and sees Anna quote when who Ross glance fell on her his heart seemed to stop and he knew in a flash that the whole world can take no one nearer dearer to him no one more important to his happiness this little woman and no way remarkable now filled his whole life was his greed his joy all he desired and now this sounds like a description of love but remember it's unreality they've not talked for several months after a brief affair and summer vacation it wasn't good to her during the affair it is only using her afterward as a way to avoid thinking of his own life he's convinced himself that she's his whole world for conveniently forgetting that he's plenty of desires in the meantime remember all those other Anna's these looking kind of sizing about suddenly they don't matter anymore it's only his Anna that pathetic little girl they can truly desires are you seeing the perils of self-deception as the isn't it just kind of as check out just kind of spotlights this one this one this one's in the neon lights another spotlight over here alright P 79 Anna is shocked by its presence when they skate you about me she confesses I've been so unhappy I could think of nothing but you the whole time I lived on the thoughts of you I tried to forget why oh why did you come we don't have as good of a sense of her in her life as we do Corrado so it's difficult to know whether her response is more genuine than her earlier play-acting at the very least her ambivalence regarding the memory of the affair seems accurate she's unhappy she lives our memories and then she tries to forget them right I'm unhappy Oh remember that great time let me forget those memories you know either because she wants to not be distracted from finding interest in her life or because she's too distracted by how awful those memories actually are we're not sure in any case the affair is heightened her loneliness perhaps like goo Rock she feels unable to speak about what's on her body which is alienating and would continually refer back to the thoughts in Gujrat anna sends him away bidding him not to return promised he was here in Moscow the merrier as that kook her eyes showed that she in truth was unhappy so it's true that's right she's trying she said the sadness is there it's true true sadness chapter 4 I ready to move on okay the affair begins again a JD he began visiting him in Moscow which leads to more cases of deception and self-deception the narrator puts it beautifully quote every two or three months she left a ton of us telling her husband that she was going to consult a specialist on female diseases and her husband believed her and did not believe her the stance leaving and not believing is the stance of self-deception one could say that GU Romani and that both have the same feelings about each other they believe and don't believe that they're in love to really be in love would be way too dangerous right and so they both believe and don't believe it to the same extent and they're a great couple that way because they match in their level of deception and self-deception it's a match made in indolence so Guru has begun to find the relationship meaningful if only because it allows him to believe that he has an inner life of some sort quote he led a double life one in public full of conventional truth in conventional dissection exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances and another which floated a secret and only to some strange possibly quite an accidental chain of circumstances everything that was important interesting essential everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself everything that concludes the kernel of his life went on in secret while everything that was false in him his work his discussions his wife was on the surface so the relationship with Anna provides him with this sense that there's something true that angers him outside of the realm with me every day he even claimed that he never deceived himself because it feels true the relationship also allows them to have a superior interpretation of those arrival quote he began to judge others by himself no longer believed in what he saw and always assuming that the real the only interesting life of every individual goes on is under cover of night secretly every individual existence revolves around mystery understanding this allows him to tell himself that he's less lonely everyone else's like him and participating in a secret and unstable world in life appearances are always lies truths are always unknown he's so lonely but not alone in his loneliness especially now in Hana visits where then he can share that world that he otherwise guards alright here's here's what Chekhov's Diwali nu-uh if you remember was critical of this world of work cards gossip why all those things that are very publicly accessible what Ana offers is something pregnant and intimate he's never had much of a private intimate life before because he's never had a secret that he thought worth keeping ana becomes this private secret and suddenly because all of this he hates like he despises all that right suddenly because he despises his back because it doesn't excuse to treasure this it's like oh well the surface things are false feeling that this thing is true feeling I must really love him because she's that private secret that I keep saying and everything I think I made public is boring so my real true private self is Anna my open public also it makes sense right he uses a new tool to start interpreting everybody else right so everybody else in the world around him he sees her public so when he's nauseate advisor public self he suspects up their real self are these my question at this point is something and it displayed grew off establishes that he's had many past affairs what is it specifically about Anna that engenders this level of obsession compared to some of the affairs he's had in the past which seem to have been meaningless then at least based on the way right I think I think what happens is that he's suddenly bored with the public life in that like chase after the new and the fleeting in the ephemeral they used to start his finals over again he's kind of bored of that and the only alternative to that is his most recent adventure which is Anna you know like he's he says he can't forget her he's looking for other Anna so clearly it must be true love that's it you know maybe he's gotten older maybe he wants to settle down ash maybe he realizes he can't quite snare the 20-somethings anymore he doesn't like the 50-somethings you know it's uh festive and she's the last year that will get you know he's just before four yeah she's pictured as younger the wife is the wife's older twice in the forties he hooked 60 but Anna is young in 98 right I mean this is the first time she's ever born witness that secret aim of men right she's naive she's young she's probably not most forties does that make sense I am NOT opposed to him loving her I just like this narrator she's so snarky and so dismissive of any possibility of Europe having an honest feeling he is not an honest person and that's I mean that's the perils of self-deception right he's so successful at deceiving himself he wouldn't know Loveland it actually occurred right he's so twisted and convoluted in his own aims and ambitions and intentions he'll never find the truth no because I mean because the things like that right I mean he just continually doesn't respect her and then idealizes her right eating is watermelon like oh yeah sure I respect you but in transitions you wanted to be a love story I do okay okay okay when we get there we're on the self-deception trainer okay well see we'll see how the last page of my exact hallo comment later okay when I get to that point okay all right so all right age anyone in the visits they kiss he asks what's new and quote she could not see because she was crying you have decided to wait till she's had her cria hearing 14 a little later while he was drinking and she was still standing there her face to the window at least he's had his tea the merrier describes the tears quote she went from emotion from her bitter consciousness of the sadness of their life they could only see one another in secret hiding from people as if they were thieves was not their life a broken one don't cry he said there's not much pity but here's his thing quote it was quite obvious to him that this love the Bears would not soon come to an item and that no one can say when this end would be Anna loved him ever more fondly worshipped him and there would have been no point in telling her that one day it must end indeed she would not have believed it right Seguros knows I mean the clocks worked it out on this it'll come to me and but we don't need to tell her that because then she'll just cry or I mean this let the girl believe that it was this forever that's okay right let's just let her think it's forever I know that stalks running out but let's let her have this fine he still thinks of her as hopelessly in love with him it's probably a biased opinion maybe he's Coonrod after all kind of the hot stuff at the altar of course she but as he reaches out to her he catches sight of himself in the looking-glass haunting a moment of reflection it's here I did there he's in the glass he's reflecting see that his hair is already beginning to turn grey why does she look himself women had always believed him different from what he really was and loved in him not himself but the man their imagination picture a man they had sought for eagerly all their lives and afterwards when they discovered their mistake they went on loving him justice and that one of them had never been happy with him time had passed he had that one woman after the other but had never loved there had been all sorts of things between them but never loved right and so there's something that you are pines and again I suspect Iran has a slightly inflated self reputation maybe you know but what he thinks is that you know with his George Clooney cheekbones which he can see very clearly drawn and a bold chin also clearly drawn you know you're on a few I wasn't man upon his dreams but what they love in him is not you rob it's the imaginary Iran right to look in him something more like the super garage the pink is there and when they find out that it isn't there they're not disappointed they still love it right so he has this the lure of superheroes and the relation of ordinary you're on the spine right that's okay your ordinary go up here I'm dead nothing cents and it's odd to him it perplexes them why they wouldn't be disappointed in ordinary be robbed when would they really seem to crave was super be robbed which he is but pretends to be but it's not right so he gives them the gurage show they like the show but the same for the after show he's like huh that's weird in there were classes his mind that love might exist after the show right you might have a huge ego he has no self-esteem whatsoever he doesn't actually volume himself he doesn't value the selves of those he loves in the Spring Break Delta South loves right he does and in to that extent I think it's again an area are pushing against an interpretation where he really loves you that's just so he credits women with loving him that realizes as he reflects that he's still alone the person he had a lot of women to believe was him someone lovable isn't the person he ever saw himself as being his affair is never held to unlearn his loneliness because he lacked the self honesty required to be honest with another that make sense Chekov ends with you Rob's music quote he and Anna loved one another is people who are very closing in to as husband and wife his dear friends loved one another it seemed to them that fate had intended them from one another and they couldn't figure out why they were married to others they were like two migrating birds and separate cages they forgave one another of all that they were ashamed of in the past in the present and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both something has changed in goo Rob check out the lastest quote formerly he had consoled himself by the very way the first argument that came into his head but now arguments were nothing to him he felt profound that he desired to be sincere tender this at last seems to be a genuine moment and perhaps the beginning of love they talked about the situation about how to avoid the deception that plagues them and Chekhov ends with an ending that's beautifully ambiguous could it seemed to them that they were opening inch of arriving at a decision and then the new beautiful life would begin and they both realized that the end is so far far away and that the hardest the most complicated part is just beginning the trouble is that at least gurus love has been inspired by keeping truth secret by having an inner life that nobody know to come out into the open to divorce scandals aside would mean having only a single life which would risk having a mentor and the same for all the deep end already great what's Anna stops being in private Anna starts being surface well this will be Leslie hammered with each other well the problem is that she can't stand being private Anna if she had this same weird worldview where she liked the privacy and the secrecy I'd be something well here's my analytes Anna likes being the fallen scandalous she likes the impossibility of she doesn't like pregnant Vienna she likes the impossibility of public hammer right that's what she's less rich feeling the relationship her her she loves its impossibility but its potentiality it'll never happen but it couldn't happen right whereas me Rob loves keeping it this way she tells herself that it'd be better but she only tells me that herself out back birth she would be impossible which guarantees it will never happen this is what she's employed because it makes it ideal Wisel not real does that make sense yeah so it's difficult to say what the obvious moment of pity could possibly even be genuine for Rob just as it's impossible to know how much an anus emotions are mine performance it's hard to know what they do and don't know about themselves or each other does that make sense she hears the implications that aren't three number one check out does an excellent job of showing the little ways that we lie to ourselves how we put ourselves into situations that we then determine his fate how we play roles that we learn in culture how we allow ourselves to repeat patterns a lot noticing that that's what we're doing he also shows an inability to love honestly the key that keeps us trapped in lonely lives even if these are lives of shared love in us did you give that number to the story shows how our loneliness is perpetuated by mass culture not only trips to Yalta which become lonely and boring in the right kind of way but it's very droll but but also the rolling newspapers and conversations and cards and co-workers there's something that's empty about all of our interactions the crowd and something about this level of living that pushes us toward finding intimacy finding someone that we can truly share our whole being with and thereby unlock our loneliness right I mean the superficiality that they do wrong is despicable right I mean there's no intimacy there's no truth in that kind of gossipy surface level mingling right it's the talk of the big world the Heidegger talks about its empty bladder and that in swimming around in that of course makes you thirsty for something deep energy and true and real right and that makes sense doesn't it it's lonely up here so there's nothing real come back down find something it's down there you just have to stop number three check out also indicates along with Wallace the way that compassion seems to be the entrance is a lot one way to understand the ending of course is [ __ ] that the hardest was complicated part involves truly loving the other on a daily basis instead of fantasizing about the other from a farm which they do really well it's easy for gujrat to maintain a worshipful didn't worshipable demeanor from afar and easy for him to idealize something sees only once every few months how long can it last if they're actually seeing each other day after day after day if there is to become a happy ending it will require that Groff maintain his compassion and live an empty broken life and then he finds that Anna is able to love the person that he eventually finds himself to be the promise of the story the ray of hope perhaps is that even a false love my transplanted is something real at least eventually enchant God puts the really faint ray of hope at the very height but given everything else in the story it seems just probably a bitter hoax like sure there's that Ram ho might as well call fate and that may be think any nice nifty story jack question um it's related to an earlier part in the story okay um so there's this point where up it's very clear that um but uh Grubb is not satisfied with his mundane existence and it talks about how even though he's a baker gives out with many people who are according to do with a societal conception of this reality on repeated level he hangs out with all these actors and musicians I was just wondering what what is the origin of his impulse to describe his affair with Anna to these people look whenever he's hanging out with these people that are honest and exalted status yes this is this primal urge to tell them about Anna well because that that to him is kind of like it's kind of like political capital right if you were to tell them about Hanna if he played the anti card then of course all these actors and musicians had people would be like oh yeah we know come on you you've done it well but to actually tell them to actually disclose it would effectively prohibit from joining a club right so he can say that oh I live in a bohemian life just like all these actors and musicians right of course they have the Rockstar life I am like them I am winning the way Charlie Sheen is winning I do it all the time right and he can tell himself that as long as he doesn't actually disclose that that's what he's doing because once he told the actors like hey guess what I have an affair with this lady at the dog she's hot I don't think it quite given the capital that he wants to think that it would but as long as he keeps to the level of thinking that it would instead of actually trying it it's beautiful because it makes him feel like he's one of them even though so he's seeking some kind of validation yeah and he's utterly deny it well no he's is self-deception right he tells himself that he's not being denied because he doesn't actually seek the validation he tells himself that who he is is validated by the very fact that his idealized version of who they are would validate them if they knew that keeps him from actually ever having to work that all acts he's already done his head right it's a lot like the dentist in that way where she's or is it more like the dentist or this sister it's more like the dentist where she creates a fantasy and as long as she doesn't pursue the fantasy it's safe yeah yeah so that explains why he's so furious on the single occasion when he does the typology this information to somebody who you values any Genson this very obnoxious comment about fission theory private self but you're talking fish fish no other questions the idea that someone should not be interested in your own affair Oh terrible bringing to surface Anna right if it was Anna Betty loved it not the secrecy of the whole thing yeah but he's not wanting to share it he's wanting to put it I jerk his game right he's not like here's Anna look I got I got it I got it unburden my soul of the secret it's more like a party you're gonna check this out yeah right just like you mean yeah right you telling he tells one person and then I hear he half tells he insinuates to one person it doesn't go well he's like forget that I'll keep it a secret he's not bursting he's not your mix and all everybody the joy its music love he's like no gotta keep it like well they brought themselves as the open seeker no more they could actually be together it was it made it feel all that much more scandalous and thus more like what the ritzy people they have scandals around so check this out somebody could see us every W Zak there's also never a point in the entire story where he took a piece of personal information of yeah yeah I mean it seems like he's a predator but was she in the was she trollee of course she messed when people really all support nobody good nobody really goes he opted to do that but every reason you wanted to do that I mean it's one of those they told themselves that that's not what anybody does they're an orange of themselves be able to do it without telling themselves but they knew that that's what people do there yeah they don't really do that except for the ones that do like me but that doesn't actually ever really happen the characters agree the narrator I think though is even greater you know he's been narrator and that's one thing that it's leaps it's a cinema and theater is you don't really get it usually good sense a narrator and here in the narrator I mean the characters are really flat a lot of I mean they're really boring characters but a narrator is awesome so anything else good class

Literature_Lectures

Harvard_ENGL_E129_Lecture_3_Measure_for_Measure.txt

okay we ready to go welcome back um glad to rest you out of the clutches of the Red Sox for an hour or so we'll we'll return you before the fourth inning is over I'm betting um I a couple of announcements as we begin first just as a matter of information for me since we've reached this point in the term I just want to make sure that everyone who's in the room is registered for the course in one status or another is there anyone who is not registered for the course I'm in the process you're in the process okay we think you're very appealing okay um okay so but but but you're you're with us in spirit and soon to be with us okay Co anybody else who is in some some medial stage of transformation okay and for all of you at home uh for the distance students as well uh welcome and we hope that you are also fully registered for the course this is the point at which the lectures went online are only available to those of you who are registered for the course um and it's also the point as some of you have uh made it clear that you know uh when we're thinking about about the first paper and so we have a very clear and direct and we hope reassuring message to you about the first paper uh it's I'm going to say something about it in a second but it is designed so as to give you practice in close reading and in pulling things out of the text uh it should be something that you are comfortable doing that you will learn by doing and we we know that we are moving relatively quickly through a lot of very ample magnificent and difficult plays and we very much want you to be able to stay with us in the reading process so that we have Hello uh we have uh tried to think about a kind of exam that will be something you can do in kind of paper I'm sorry kind of paper that you can do in a in a with a lot of attention getting a lot out of it uh and to do well with it but also so that you can come back to your reading for the week and not lose a week in your reading so the uh there will be pre-selected passages uh and this will be largely a close reading paper uh and there will be a choice of passages of which you are to choose one and do uh an intensive reading of it there will be guiding information with the examination with it I'm sorry with the with the paper materials to uh show you the kinds of things that we would like you to address uh and again we're hoping we try to build into the course this term some close reading moments in every lecture uh we'll do some again toward the end of today uh we hope to model these close readings for you in this way but it's the idea is not to read like me but to read like you uh for you to dig into the text and see what it says and what it does and how it relates to the large play of which it's a part so there will be quite explicit directions and instructions and guidance uh and those things will be coming to you very soon is that right but Begin by the beginning of next week right and next week is a holiday uh it's Columbus Day go away enjoy yourselves don't worry about it the paper materials will be waiting for you when you return uh and and then we will be here and anything that's not clear about them we'll be able to try to address in person as well okay um any qu any any anxieties that you want to vocalize as we stand up with our our um microphones at the ready okay uh measure for measure um this is really an extraordinary play uh it is the first jacoban play that we're looking at the first play that is written during the kind time of King James uh I want to say some framing things about the readings of plays together and then I want to say something about ways of reading this play as we come to zero in on it uh remember that all plays uh exist in a number of different time contexts at once uh the time and place of its writing so in this case uh written by Shakespeare in early 17th century England uh performed in London the time and place of its fictive setting where is it set Vienna so uh and not not Freud's Vienna or maybe yes Freud's Vienna but in any case Vienna here as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire as a a a major European city as a city that is and is not the same place as Shakespeare's London uh uh so that's the second time and place of its setting and the third time in place of its setting is right here right now the place in which it is being performed or read or discussed that there is always you you cannot and this is a good thing completely Escape your 21st century selves uh or your location uh or in the case of a production the particular conditions of the production uh and those things too become part of the play if they are anachronistic uh the play will run to catch up with them because the Play Always does exist in the present time as well as in the past it always exists in the past as well as in the present that we we we can neither wish away anything about the history and culture nor can we put ourselves in a time machine and whisk ourselves back to that history and culture there will always be this interplay of now and then and of a multiplicity of places and every character therefore will be resonant of lots of different things and every I mean here's a speech or play I'm sorry about um uh extramarital sex about premarital sex we may think well how backward of them to have had such such strict rules about this um they depending upon your own chronological insertion into this structure you may remember days when there seemed to be this degree of punitive Behavior about about premarital sex but maybe it's not about premarital sex at all maybe it's about something very different in any case the idea that there are laws of Vienna and that the laws have been allowed to be unenforced so that somebody quite strict has to be called in in order to enforce them and that people get caught in these laws that are on the books that are are are not connected in any way to any understanding of humanity uh this is not an unfamiliar condition in the 21st century either so that there there there are bigf framed things that we can talk about that carry over as well as highly specific things about the play that we want to localize um this is a play uh that has been interpreted in a wide range of ways and I thought I would begin today by just marking out for you a number of different ways that the play has been read I'm not going to give you full interpretations but sort of the the 32nd version of interpretations just to give you a sense of how rich these plays are and of how important critical reading is and how how how many different ways of good critical readings there can be and this this play is particularly susceptible to this you'll see that we can also say the same about aell or about King Lee or about Anthony and Cleopatra but this play is a puzzle in every possible way and so it has been read in a wide range of ways and I want you to bear in mind that none of these ways are right or wrong some are more persuasive than others to one or or another of us uh they all are readings that are um interested readings and I mean that in a strong sense that is to say that they have a kind of purpose to them uh so one kind of how many of you have ever read this play before studied it in school uh if you studied in school years and years and years ago uh you might have encountered and I when I situate the play in this way I don't want you to say ah this is the oldfashioned one nobody believes this anymore uh but but I I a very uh familiar way of reading this play in the middle of the last century was to read it as a kind of metadrama as a meta the theatrical play the the Duke was like a playwright he was behind unseen he gave people their lines he set up scenes he brought characters together he waited to see what would happen he got people to lie he got people to behave against their own character um as you can see that that that what would some of the uh the the plays that this Duke would set up do you guys mind participating in in this so so by participating I mean that they're going to bring you the microphone um what would be some of the little scenarios that this Duke as playright sets up when Isabella wait you have to wait for the microphone sorry when Isabella I guess speaks with the frier and they're going to get Marana to seduce and to stand in yes so the whole the bed trick the substitution of the one woman for The Other Woman in Angelo's bed this is his idea he gets both women to participate in this plan uh that's certainly one scenario what else are we here the unmasking scene at the end of the play when all the characters are brought together in in Disguise of of some of them in disguises and the Duke un on reveal he has staged this whole thing he's got claudo muffled off off stage he's got Mariana in her veil he sets the up the whole entry into the city they all say well why is it that there has to be an audience and that there has to be a a a a processional and we have to present our authorities back to the to the uh to to the Duke he's set this thing whole thing up as a revelation as a set of unmaskings one last one back there sir I think in the beginning of the play the deputization of Angelo uh the Duke kind of abdicates his power gives his power to and and say a little bit why you think that that is the act of a playright well he has a choice to do that um escalus does I mean he could give the job to somebody else I guess um he's directing the action well it's the now escalus is the old counselor of course escalus is the wise old old you know uh steady person here we have three people we have the Duke Duke vincentio we have escalus the old counselor and we have Angelo the young deputy and so the conversation is between the Duke and escalus there's almost always this kind of character in these shakes early shakesperian moments some some Old Reliable counselor who who stands for the old way of thinking about things and Richard the Second it's it's it's his uncle the Duke of York uh we'll see in in Pericles there's such a figure that in in King leer it's Kent uh there's always some kind of figure of rectitude and often of of age uh we could argue that it's Nestor in the play that we looked at last week in trus and cresa but since trus and cresa is a play in which nothing turned out to be grounded there are no beliefs that actually hold uh the the old counselor function doesn't really function but yes so here his his abdication parent abdication of power at the beginning of the play where you think well this is very odd the play begins with by a character departing from the play uh turns out to be a ruse turns out to be the way that he stops being an actor and starts being a playwright so that he can come back and be an actor and a hero at the end and of course he gets caught up in more actions than he thought he would since he becomes involved in a love plot despite the fact that he has said that the dripping Dart of love has never touched his bosom so so so the the the this metth theatrical reading of the play that the Duke is like a playright that the play is about acting a play now again remember the play is written about the same time as Hamlet it's just a little bit after Hamlet the plays Within the play always appear in Shakespeare uh and that this question of of whether you are in a safe space with respect to the play that you've set up or whether the play is going to pull you into the action and either unmask you or make you perform within it this is always the case with it plays Within the play uh but but here the what what is called by Lucho at one point the old fantastical Duke of dark Corners the d The Duke who likes to remove himself from the Gaze of the people uh that this the fact that he is behind the scenes in Disguise as the frier uh means that he can be the the actor in the audience at once he can be the playright manipulating people of course not everything manipulates itself to his command what would be an example of something in which the playright cannot manage the play is it uh Bernard Bernardine it is is that how you pronounce itard barnardine when you can't um force him to reconcile with God before he goes he won't die this guy's got to Die the plan is is the exchange of the head of one prisoner for the head of another prisoner well they look very differently don't worry about it death's a great disguiser this is a great plan uh the problem is that the the one of the actor's revolts and he will not play this play I will not die today I will not consent to die today at any man's persuasion so he's completely obur he stands apart from the play and lo and behold what happens instead some kind of De exmachina someone else turns out to have already died who looks much more like claudo is the head would would be a much better substitute but more to the point this character whom we really quite get to like he's my favorite character in the play I think um is because he's the he's the ground of resistance he is the thing itself he and then we're going to see we saw in in trus and cresa what character or characters could be described as sort of the thing itself the unvarnished uh lifeloving non-rule obeying people who do you remember trus and cresa only last week thides okay so all all the argument is a hor and a cockled let's not dress it up in fancy language uh I'm going to tell it like it is ETC so in this play it's Barnard not going to die uh and so that you have instead the the the head exmachina the prisoner exmachina ragozine uh but but this is this is a Harbinger I mean I think when I say it's deliberate it's all deliberate but it's the it it it seems important to the effect of the play that the Duke himself not be all powerful that the playright uh encounter some resistances to the seamless running of the play and there are other ones of which I would say is falling in love with Isabella if he does is another interruption in the in the element of control that he because and we'll come in a second to the question of whether she reciprocates his love or Not So So Meta theater this is one Duke as playright uh the there is a course a veric course there is a strong historicist reading of this play uh which says well may be a play ride but he's also uh looks very much like the king who actually happens to be on the throne James the first uh a Protestant a figure with strong views about moral rectitude not his own but everybody else's anyway and and uh a a figure who very explicitly doesn't like to expose himself to the people that F famous passage in the play they're all famous but the passage in the play in which he says that I don't like to show myself to the people and to their a vehement to their their vehement hailing uh the I like to to he likes to remove himself uh this is was was said very much to be the case with James that he liked to sort of be the looker on that he liked to watch from the sides and so forth that um he was interested in this kind of social reform or social change uh and that the the reentry into the city at the end in which the the the deputies the substitutes give back their authorities to the King is very much like a royal progress of the king coming into London uh that uh many people said you know aha the Duke is James I first this is really a story about James's power and how different James's power is from the erotic and flirtatious and equally powerful but differently distant kind of power that Elizabeth held over her subjects and that was theatricalized in seductive figures uh seductive female figures who controlled by by by being beautiful and by being courted and so forth uh here we have a Shakespearean comedy if it is a comedy uh in which instead of going into a green world or a world of transformation as happens in as you like it when rosin goes into the green world uh or even in uh The Merchant of Venice in which Porsche a figure I think is very much like the kind of idealized figure for Queen Elizabeth uh Reigns in Belmont a place in probably that you know doesn't value money it's got gold but the gold is all decorative and beautiful and so forth it's full of Music uh this is a play in which the inner world uh and there is an inner world is an inner world that is revealed by unmasking and then by REM masking uh what is revealed is the corruption in Vienna the whouses the the the uh the the inner life of Angelo his capacity to be because he is so immoderate because his his rectitude is so immoderate so also is his lust immoderate it's it is there there two sides of the same thing and one could make the same argument about Isabella that her Purity require Desiring a more more strict restraint in the order of the cla's they they she wants to know what the what the game is about the what the rules are about the the the poor claes this extremely emus order which is a begging order of of nuns of sisters uh and she wants to know what are the limits here and they they say well you know is it that you feel too constrained no no Desiring a more strict restraint that she's immoderate in her as as Angelo is in in their refusal of sense of sensuousness of desire and even in their their uh toleration of human frailty the I mean know all these things that that Isabella says to Angelo and various other people do as well if you had been as him if you'd been in Claudio's situation if you'd been in love and had slipped in this way and were in love with the woman with whom you had sex and who was burying your child surely you would not have been so Stern uh and you wouldn't want your judge to be so Stern uh but this so this this this notion of uh of of hyper rectitude here as as uh being itself the enemy of of human feeling and of human Grace and human Mercy uh some of these things were also attributed hypothetically at least to James um in any case the the the idea that this play was a um an imagined version of James controlling his social world and trying to reform his social world had a lot of traction for quite a long time and there are quite similar things that are similar in this character uh to the character of James I you probably know if you looked at any of the prefatory material uh in your book that there are several sources to this play that there's classical sources and that there are Italian sources and so forth there lots of different versions of this story so it's not only about James it's about these previous examples wetstones promise and Cassandra and various other things uh but there there's been a strong argument that aha the right way to read this or a revealing way to read this is read this a kind of allegory about James's relationship to London to kingship to rule to the question of the King on a stage the word that he himself would use uh and whether princes which is the common word here for kings and queens uh like to show themselves to the people or not or whether they are more powerful if they're behind the scenes so you may say that this is an argument very like the metth theatrical argument but it's an argument based upon history uh there have been very powerful feminist readings of this play uh readings that that talk about uh Isabella's agency the degree to which she is and Mar and Mariana's agenc agcy and julieta's agency by agency I mean their capacity to be actors the agent the opposite of agent is patient that is someone to whom something is done um and the the uh so the and the opposite also of agency is posos is suffering is uh being a passive sufferer here uh so a big word for political criticism in the last you know 50 60 years has been this notion of agency of whether you are in control of your own destiny your own desires your own future and so forth and to look at these three women Mariana whose backstory we get uh Mar look at Mariana's entire situation she's entirely obligated to men and what they do her brother had her dowy in his ship his ship was sunk with it went the dowy the the protection of the brother and the marriage uh Angelo to whom she was betroth and get this is a story we get this as a story we only the only corroborating evidence we get is from her and a little bit from Angela when he repents at the very end of the play uh she was engaged to Angelo Angelo uh disavowed the engagement uh stepped aside from it and left her in an impossible position exiled out of the play Space Mariana in the moted gra a phrase that Tennyson would pick up and write a beautiful poem on this topic uh moted that is to say moled like wall separated away from the world again an image that wal Garden of course we we you see in Romeo and Juliet you see in the Paradise Lost you see uh in in many places wal Garden is an image of paradise and an image of virginity the the the old the the U unicorn tapestries that show the Virgin inside the fence the fence is the sign of her virginity of her enclosed of her perfected of the fact that she has not been invaded uh so Mariana is in a kind of uh sad automnal version of this uh enclosed Garden if you know the song of songs uh in the Bible a garden shut up is my sister my spouse that that's partly where this image comes from the idea that that the the V virginal woman the Beloved woman uh is is is pure is like a garden is uninvaded she is the Garden of Eden she's not only in the Garden of Eden she is the Garden of Eden so here we have U something I need to do Mill okay sorry um the so here we have Mariani in the moated Grange where a grange is a farmhouse and the moat surrounds it and she is off stage out of the playing space and stuck in this sort of anti- edenic Eden in which she's stuck with her own virginity she's stuck in that moment of wanting to be a wife but not being one uh and she has no agency at all she needs to be uh rescued here by the wise Duke uh in his capacity as the wise frier any reader of Romeo and Juliet should be a little cautious about wise friars and what they're going to do with women in Desperate situations because they always overstep uh think about this in connection with with Fri Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet who when Juliet is in extremist Romeo has been banished and so forth her cousin tiol has been killed decides that he's going to give her this magical potion that's going to simulate death uh and he's going to then bring her back to life and restore her to Romeo doesn't quite work out that way that this frier takes upon him the power of life and death and what they get is death in the play though you may say life in the memory of both those left on stage and those who watch play so here we have a frier who's not a frier uh who H has more control and less control uh who also imagines himself as rescuing a maiden in distress and who sets up the bed trick this is a you know old old folkloric inheritance this idea of the uh the the substitute in the bed uh it's this play has a bed trick and a head trick in it both of them are are are substitutions and I'll talk about the relation between them in a second when we come to a very different category the category of Freudian interpretation but let's hold that thought over here uh and just stick with the fact that the that that that Mariana is arguably in the play the the the the woman with the least agency um that here here I should say something that is historical and feminist at the same time and that is to let you know if you haven't read your footnotes carefully that marriage ceremonies were in a way speech acts in this period uh they're called spousal and there are at least two different kinds of spousal espousal that is to say a wedding an act of wedding one was the the spousal uh Dave parenti in the present I take you to be my wted husband or my wted wife and one was the spousal in food turo I will take you to be my weeded spouse if certain conditions are met now in the case of Mariana again what were the conditions the dowy the dowy is the principal condition that is not met then we also of course had had an unwilling husband uh as a result of that but so this is this is a promise that is not fulfilled uh one way one one very Vivid way of of having a marriage date presente in the present was not only to use the present tense I take you rather than I will take you but also to consummate the marriage to have sex uh and this is clearly what has happened with Juliet and claudo Julieta and claudo notice it's the same name um that they have had sex that they have embraced that they that she is pregnant uh we have several different descriptions of her pregnancy one of them says uh as as as those that feed grow full as spring turns into summer it's a very beautiful passage uh another one says the the the sign of their sin is written gross on Juliet a very different description of and again it's these two sides of the or looking through the two ends of the telescope um in uh in any case the the the the consummation is itself an act a speech act or a performance act that that moves from the future into the present and that's basically what the Duke as frier sets up for Mariano Mariana and Angelo uh at at in this this assignation in which there's the substitution that he had been promised to her he now has sex with the woman with whom he was promised or to whom he was promised and this rather than being extramarital sex is in fact the Fulfillment of the contract uh um and so at least this is how he explains it and how he rationalizes it then we have so we have Juliet who is the sexually fully engaged woman who however you may notice has relatively few lines in the play and I think no lines in the last act um in any case she somebody can prove me wrong I'd like to be proven wrong on this uh she um uh the the the story of claudo and Julieta is the is the cause for much that happens here because this is of course the rule that that Angelo is going to enforce this rule against premarital sex and they can't pretend they haven't had it because she's pregnant uh but and that's what leads to well because otherwise we have it's just he said he said uh the the the evidence of this is in in the in the child uh and and so the body speaks here when when it said it's written gross on Juliet that is the testimony that is the testimony that testifies against her that her body testifies both for her and against her uh so Juliet you might say is the most empowered woman in one sense because she is the most sexually active and the most uh love affirmative woman in the play uh and she makes a choice uh and what's gone wrong in fact with this marriage why isn't it a marriage sorry what's the dowy problem it's anybody remember more about the anybody that was Mariana's gll went that when when went downward ship what happened here yes they're hoping the family will come to like him more that more money is needed that's right and it hasn't yet been been produced so we haven't quite come up with this again money for love I mean and and please notice that on the other side of this whole equation of all these well-born women and whether they should have sex or not whether they get caught or not is mistress overdone is pompy the bond is all these women who are taking money for sex how is this different from taking money for sex in a dowy situation this is the story of Shaw's play Mrs Warren's profession about the relationship between marriage and running a wh house it's just a matter of social station so also here the entire range of women sex money is in play in this play uh Isabella is the central female character we could say of this play and she begins at as a novice in a Nery somebody who has said no to what Juliet says yes to she's choosing another path um notice that not only that she wants a more strict restraint and there's that that amazing passage uh when when uh claudo asks her please to have sex with Angelo so as to save him uh were I under the pain of death the impression of keen Whip's eyed as rubies and something myself to to death as to a bed that longing had been sick for a I'd give my yield my body up to shame so this extraordinary kind of SNM passage in which she talks about how much much more she'd rather be beaten and wear the signs of her beating as rubies as Jewels rather than give her body up to shame so that you know her imagination and her rhetorical imagination is is far more sexual and transgressive than the rules that she thinks that she is herself obeying uh but she begins in the nunery with this this strict restraint Desiring more strict restraint uh she herself remember is a noviciate she's half or a novice I should say half in and half out because the rule of the N what's the rule of the Nary about talking to men about encounters with men anybody have somebody has to wait for the come guys you you can't look at them and talk at the same time it's either one or the other you can either look at them or speak to them uh and there the changes are rung on this several times for example in the end of the play with the muffling and the unmuffle and the you know you can't see who they are uh but you can hear them or you can't hear who they are but you can see them because there are at least three disguised characters at the end of the play there's there's Mariana in her veil there's the muffled claudo muffled and Silent as if he's a kind of living figure of death at the end of the plane of course there's the disguised Duke as well in his hood and this question of what you can see and what you can hear uh is and of course in in the um in the off stage love scene or whatever it is the consummation scene between Angelo and Mariana uh she has very explicit instructions from the Duke about what she can say and what she can can't say she can't say her name uh she's supposed to just make appropriate noises of some kind it's it's a very funny little set of instructions that he gives her but in any case this business about Isabella's uh being out of the world and coming back into the world begins with this half instruction about you can either look at them and and and and not speak or if you're in the nunnery or else you can speak but not look so she receives this this this message and and is pulled out of the nunery and into the the world and then she's at the very heart of the play uh and she and Angelo are both extraordinarily kind of psychosexual figures and I'll say more about that under another heading in a minute uh but but uh as with The Taming of the Shrew uh so also with this play u feminist readings of this play have been quite unwilling to presume that the heroine this feisty outspoken heroine who speaks truth to power is so willing to make herself a a dependent upon a powerful man The Tam the Shu if you know it uh many many people said Katherine can't possibly really want to yield to Patricio she must be winking at the audience she must be pretending to say yes in this case uh there were and I've written about this some some extraordinary Productions of the play in which uh the rather notice that Isabella never actually says yes to the proposal of the Duke he proposes twice I have something to say to you if you'd like to listen to me again look at me and listen to me well no but she's off doing something else and again I have a pro proposal if you will This Way Incline in the last scene he proposes to her twice and she never says yes uh she doesn't say no either she doesn't say anything to him about this and his his second proposal to her so let's walk off and we'll talk about this that gesture that you say see at the end of just about every Shakespearean play whether it's a comedy or tragedy or history the idea that more conversation will take place in another place in comedies in particular which are are are less deeply fraught people are not in mourning they're not coping with with major losses there's this kind of ambling off together and chatting by the way uh but an unresolved matter at least in terms of lines of the play is question of Isabella's marriage to the Duke now it's a comedy supposed to end in marriage right so we've got the marriage the supposed marriage of Angelo and uh Mariana what other marriages do we have yeso Lucho and Kate keep down yes indeed Kate kown as you can tell from her name is a a a late inhabitant of the wh house uh he uh he Lucho is one of these uh preing Wise Guy characters that you also find who who's the version of this inist and cresa yeah cresa ches is like Lucho all right no indeed indeed CES is very like K I mean it's you hate to say that that cres is just like a piece of the traffic in women a piece of of women exchanged for between men but that's exactly what the shape of the play is so here also it's not neither Kate nor Lucho who initiate this exchange it's the Duke who says uh you annoy me and you're going to marry this woman uh and that's going to shut you up for good um and he I mean he is annoying but he's annoying in that very familiar way that that that there's almost always that Grano in The Merchant of Venice is like this thyes is a little bit like this as his Pander in in in trus and cresa um they they're uh Rosen CR and Gilden Stern are like this in Hamlet there characters like this in just about every play but yes there's the marriage of of Lucho and Kate keep down here we I do you mind that I keep talking about the whole range of Shakespearean plays in one in one gulp I can't help thinking this way uh and uh in a a slightly earlier comedy as you like it there are also four marriages and they range from the highly idealized to the extremely body and you know un idealized and so here too we have uh you know on the one hand Young Love and or whatever it is idealized love and unconsummated love on the other other hand we have first consummation and afterward the notion of marriage and then of course there's Juliet and claudo uh and so the Duke and uh Isabella these major characters they surely they've got to get together in order to March off together they should all go arm in arm all the pairs should be together what comedy is but she doesn't say yes and there really were Productions there were Productions in which she said no and there were Productions or in which she looked very indifferent and uninterested she didn't say anything uh and there I didn't remember whether I wrote about this in my chapter or not but there there was famous production in which she took off her wimple and shook her hair out and became an independent woman and it was quite unclear uh that she was was eager to enlist herself in another strict restraint that the idea was that the Nar and marriage were not so different from one another and that what had happened to Isabella was a kind of Liberation uh Isabella incidentally is the same name as Elizabeth um that Isabella it's the the Spanish Italian form of Elizabeth uh that here is a woman who might not be choosing marriage at the end of this play We it's undecided it may be undecidable but it's certainly undecided at the end of the play so so feminist readings of this play would include a kind of materialist feminism that was interested in this business of spousal and how they worked bringing that is to say the female characters into strong view not thinking this of this as a play in which the Duke and Angelo are the key figures and the women are just pawns trying to act out the power struggle between these two men in these two types uh but also feminist readings in which resistance uh was freedom and coming into language away from the Silence of the nunery into the speech into the prone speech of Isabelle as it's described she's required to plead for her brother she's then required to plead for Mariana remember she uh uh first the Duke wants her to lie and to say that she slept with Angelo he defiled me in order to get him to to you know feel that he has actually done this thing um and then when the if you'll remember the end of the play uh Angelo having apparently been convicted uh agrees to marry um Mariana and the Duke says Fine first you're going to get married and then you're going to be killed because you still did this bad thing against the rules that you yourself were enforcing and she Mariana asks Isabella to plead with her for not to make this a travesty not to make this a mockery to uh plead with her to allow Angelo to be pardoned so the marriage can continue and so Isabella becomes like Porsche a kind of lawyer a kind of arguer on behalf of people very eloquent and not necessarily she says in both of these cases uh I'm not necessarily saying what I think I'm saying what I think is right here uh the and in the case of Mariana she she moves from law to Grace she moves from I'm going to punish this man who wanted to punish my brother to uh my brother did not die therefore he didn't Angelo didn't do the deed that he wanted to do there's no point in punishing his intention especially when there is a social reason to keep him alive or you may say a dramatic reason to keep him alive so he can remain the spouse of Mariana uh but but a a a certain kind of feminist reading and this isn't by these aren't by any means they doesn't exhaust feminist reading any more than my snapshot of historicism exhausts a historical reading uh but a certain kind of feminist reading really wants to look at Isabella as the key figure in the play as a figure who is liberated into speech and into action and into agency and whose refusal to be recaptured by some of these constraining social forms uh marriage here being being analogous to the nunnery or the moded grain rather than an escape from it for her uh might constitute the ultimate Act of of heroism or self- knowledge or Defiance that would be one kind of reading that the play would make available through that um there are and have been for many many many years Christian readings of this play uh readings that that look at they say well look at the title measure for measure it comes from Matthew judge not that you be not judged that this is really an allegory about you know God on Earth and God is in Disguise and he comes down and he sees Sinners and he judges and he forgives them and uh that this is that the Duke participates in this notion of the disguised God uh the figure who knows everything and allows nonetheless the foibles and sins of mankind to play themselves out uh so that men men human beings uh will uh perceive their own guiltiness uh and will will repent uh and that God offers judgment he offers Mercy he offers punishment he offers his own uh uh Humanity his own embodied Humanity uh as an example here and so the disguising of the all powerful Duke uh as a frier who can be be be wrong can be reviled can be be spat upon by Lucho can be humiliated um can be unmasked uh that this this this is Christian allegory uh these arguments I mean this is again a a a kind of argument that is perfectly tenable within the the structures of the play uh it's an allegorical argument which is to say that it it uh it takes a certain distance if you like from some of the language of individual characters but it's completely consistent with the events of the play I mean and what I mean to suggest to you again is not that we're discarding these one by one because they're not good or we don't like them but that they all like those those images in your encyclopedia in which you see the body of the Frog and then you see its bones and then you see its internal organs and so this is one layer upon another layer upon another layer upon another layer that this that that this this is the anatomy of the play and that it's not I you could you you could choose one of these and reject others or you could say this one seems to me to bring out most to to get closest to the texture of the language or the emotions that the play seems to call out for me but all of these things are completely consistent with you can do good readings of the play with any of these things in mind as indeed you can do a good very powerful reading from the point of view of a kind of psychosexual or psycho analytic not psychological but psychoanalytic reading of the play now what's the difference between psychology and psychoanalysis are there analysts in the room um when I try to make a distinction between these two things I'm I'm I'm making a very crude distinction between motivations that seem to not be fully present in the minds of the the the characters or the actors that their language or the their behavior speaks for them in ways that seem contrary to what they think so that Angelo for example discover Angelo has this very uncomfortable moment in which he un encounters his unconscious in which he sees that uh beneath the angel Angelo and Angel Angelo uh will obviously participate in that Christian reading we talked about a second ago that that beneath the angel is a devil that inside him is this that that once he starts to think in this vein I have begun and now I give my sensual r erase the rain that he wants again like Isabella because he he has little experience and little moderation unlike escalus the old counselor at the beginning of the play for example um he whose name again not completely surprisingly reme resembles that of an classical Play Ride um Angelo is naive he is psychologically virginal he has no experience of these things and so they HIIT him really hard and he is unable to control the power of his own emotion and the power of his own desire uh and so I mean you it's like a cartoon what he does that he he he she comes to him pleading for her brother's life uh he confides to us that he finds her irresistible and before the scene is over he is basically saying to her sleep with me let me be very plain sleep with me first he puts it in the hypothetical supposing somebody were to ask you to do you know if I asked you to the prom would you go uh and she says well GE I don't really like proms well no no let me be really plain about this I am asking you to the prom will you go uh and so he you know all the pretense disappears and what's left is a is an amazing proposition it's a proposition much worse of course than the than the the Kate keep down Financial world because there at least there is some apparent recompense here what the the the the exchange is going to be the life of her brother does he mean it no turns out that he has already delivered this note to the Provost now the Provost in this case means Jailer uh uh saying no matter what else you hear kill claudo at a certain hour of the day so he has I mean it's it's not as if he's meaning to keep this this bargain with her uh he's already decided that he's going to be both sides of this equation he's going to keep this in the dark and that and she says I will I I will denounce you I will I will what you Angelo I will unmask you denounce you I will expose you what is you it's not it's none of those things um uh it's important what the verb is um I'll see if I can find it really quickly anyway she she she says this to him and he says nobody will believe you who will believe you I'm the figure of rectitude yes I will Proclaim you wonderful thank you uh and say now that you found the word say something about why why it's a good word and I will Proclaim you Angela so why is that better than all the ones that I was try public and it's an identity it's it's it's public it's uh it it involves the law or some kind of performance it is a performative word it's a word that has that's not the same as I'm going to tell on you or I'm going to denounce you it imagines a stage a scene a humiliation a shaming that his guilt is going to turn into shame and her he he says who will believe thee Isabelle uh I'm famous for my rectitude you're just a girl nobody is I'm very powerful I am the magistrate I am the person who makes the laws I the law uh mortality and mercy in Venice live in thy tongue and heart is what the Duke says to him so I'm the law you can't can't Proclaim against the law so you know we don't have to go very far from this play to our daily newspapers to look at moments of sexual harassment in which is he said she said whether it's the the New York Knicks or whether it's the return of uh Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill uh these these moments in which which distinctions of power I mean look at at Clarence Thomas he is the law he is the judge he is precisely uh he there's no one more powerful than I mean he his what is his title he's Supreme and what what is what is the name of the kind of figure that he is is not even a judge what is it he's a Justice he is the personification of Justice uh and uh so here too and um Angelo says I'm the law no one is going to believe you no one's going to believe you uh so he the language I mean where the language that she thinks is going to be her Aid I will Proclaim you he says nobody's going to believe it at all uh so here we have these two extraordinarily repressed characters who perhaps because of their now when I say because of I'm not their analyst I'm not their therapist uh their repression has as its other side rhetorically in the play these moments of immoderation uh he says I have begun and now I give my sensual race the rain she says one second she she says you know whip me if if I if I should do such a thing uh they betray themselves over here if you please just going to add an I am an analy it's called The Return of the repressed there you go of course of course absolutely uh but what does it return from I mean it's it it's it's uh the thing about the return the repressed is that of course it was always there right and and this this is preeminently a play about disavow in every possible and it also a play about displacement uh in which then that's that's actually why you got four pairs of love s because you could imagine this as one psychological relation if this is couples therapy one could imagine this as one psychological relation with all of these iterations it's uh purely sexual it's rhetorical it's it's it's self-denying it it fantasizes the power of the other there are lots of different ways that one could imagine this and and this is this is very much how Shakespeare uses his stage to unpack things psychologically psychoanalytically by having uh more than one I mean Hamlet is a perfect example of that in which the the the the various relations of son to Father uh are iterated in Fort and Bross and his F father in Hamlet and his father and so forth so in this play Whenever you have doubles or multiples you have versions of the same uh and and precisely they are so repressed they moreover they enjoy their repression it's an eroticized repression forgive me if I overstep here but the but but the fact that she wants a more strict restraint is really a tip off that there is I mean it's not a tip off that she doesn't belong in a NY it's a tip off that if she's going to stay in this Nery that this is one of the behaviors attitudes inclinations that she herself is going to have to disavow um and uh the the uh so these two characters are unbelievably eroticized in their language um oops um I've got a few more minutes before I stop and and change the tape um and they and they are present against the background of this city of Venice of sorry Vienna Venice there you go um um the the city of of Vienna which as they say is and is not Freud's Vienna in which uh what seems to be the problem is rampant Vice is that laws have been let slip uh and uh the the both both sexual behavior and also uh ordinary ethical Behavior has uh has has has because okay let let me put it this way the Duke himself is supposed to have mastered these things he he's meant to be the kind of super ego figure here who's supposed to be controlling things he has not done it and he feels that therefore he is not the right person you could perfectly well say well sir now that you see that your city has gone to hell you're the right person to put it back into shape and so indeed he is but he sees that he has to do it by indirections by that language from Hamlet Again by IND directions find directions out that rather than saying I I am your Duke and I do love you but I see that you really have to shape up he instead he sets up this test of Angelo and he also sets up an arrangement whereby he he will allow them to expose their own Folly so that he can come in as Savior and this if I can say this just briefly before we close for a moment uh this is also one of the behaviors that that is described in any historicist reading of the play because James famously utilized his power over the people through threats and pardons that that he would bring there a couple of occasions that they're described at least in beginning of a of a a good addition like this in which James has people brought to the scaffold and about to to die and then he pardons them and it's the power of Mercy that binds them to him it's more powerful than the power of justice that he that that that if he can forgive that is the because then then you can always have that anticipation of forgiveness of suspending the rules and that's what this Duke is able to do at the end of the play we'll stop here and we'll come back five minutes okay so in in this hour we're going to try to make sure to look at a some passages of text um to try to address which by which I do not mean answer but but respond variously to some questions that you may have and also maybe to look at a couple of scenes and how those scenes work let's see how much we can get done in this hour uh let me mention just to conclude the discussion we've been having uh in terms of lenses through which critical lenses through which which one might look at the play that there are folkloric ways of looking at the play that the bed trick the head trick the the the disdained wife the the all the the disguised ruler that all of these things are old fairy tale stories familiar stories stories that have a resonance to them and that in their familiarity give us some expectation of how they're going to come out which is again one of the things about the sort of undecided envy and ending in terms of of of what Isabella does or doesn't do with the Duke uh that would be a surprise in terms of our expectations uh if she does not accept his hand and and so what we need to notice is that we actually have very little information about that is not enough to say it's a convention therefore she must because Shakespeare is very capable of having women say yes I marry you yes I take you yes I love you they have happen this happens very often at the ends of comedies and other plays so if it doesn't happen here it's not because he forgot to write it in or maybe it is but we have a a a more open-ended moment uh and and this leads me to the last of these big framing categories that I wanted to mention to you which is is this the the category with which we began that is to say the category of of genre is it a comedy is it a tragic comedy is it a so-called problem play and I said to the first time we were all together that this term problem play is a kind of modern term uh that was really borrowed from criticism of ibson and strinberg and Shaw and other late 19th century playwrights who were interested in in plays having to do with social problems here it crosses over into another term that is often used these days and has been used by Scholars and critics to describe plays like this and that is City Comedy there's a whole genre in Shakespeare time of the City comedy of the play that takes place uh in London or in another city in which there are citizens rather than Royals and Nobles in which there are there's pros there's body joking there's this question of women and money uh there's the question of fidelity and infidelity of of um uh Spen thrips and dup dupes and and and miserliness and so forth whole set of concerns around nent capitalism for example which is what this is the time period in which this is happening in which uh the independent entrepreneur the question of of of use value and exchange value of money of the question of where value comes from and how value is related to wealth of whether women are in fact dependence of men or whether they have not only agency but some capacity to make money money are there any any female entrepreneurs in this play at all any women uh in business mistress overdone exactly mistress overdone is the capitalist woman in this play she is the woman who makes money uh she's uh mistress mitigation as they as as she is scornfully called uh and she is that which has to be I want to just call it repressed uh but she is that which has to be excluded put in jail put out of business and we could say well yes indeed she's in the business of immorality she's in the business of commodifying other women uh Bad Business uh but she is the only entrepreneur in the whole play uh and the play uh deliberately I would say and I shouldn't say that because I believe in intention in this way but the the the play architecture gives you a whole range of social categories and a whole range of from from the Duke and the the the the magistrate uh and the old counselor and the nuns and the Friars and also uh elbow the Constable tell me something about elbows language malapropisms malapropisms now again many low characters in Shakespeare especially many um policemen in Shakespeare talk this way dogberry much to do about nothing speaks exactly this way he speaks the opposite of what he intends so he says that you know his his wife was never respected by that he means disrespected uh he he uses precisely the opposite terms and so his language is itself a kind of allegory for the world turned upside down which is the world of this play that that and they again they can laugh at him from a position of apparent superiority and the audience can laugh at him and think that he gets everything backwards uh but in fact that getting everything backward tells a kind of uncanny truth about what's going on in this play and the fact that he is talking about his wife and her respectability and whether she is respected or suspected suspected and respected become the two words that are exchanged here and uh you know he's in the business of arresting suspects and so he makes this kind of exchange but the the on on many many levels that that is the anatomy of exchange of the play of reverse of the play and the play is is in a way about these kinds of reversals so City Comedy would be another kind of genre for this play uh does anybody in the play I should put a slightly different do any characters we encounter as characters in the play Die in the course of a play no now we talked about barnardine and the threat of the killing now we we have the the the tragic threat of the possible death of claudo uh you know appears in Chains uh and who Lucho says to him from whence comes this restraint and he says from too much Liberty Lucho Liberty so this this dialectic of Liberty and restraint that we see we I've been talking about in terms of of um Angelo and uh Isabella also functions with claudo and actually it is almost always the case not only with sets of lovers or sets of women in Shakespeare that that brothers or brothers and sisters are versions of each other that there's a family resemblance between claudo and Isabella uh the in in the way in which they deal with these issues of restraint and Liberty she wants more restraint he has behaved in a Libertarian way uh but in fact their versions of the same and their behaviors are versions of the same uh so that that that another way to get into this plan a way that has been very fruitful for some critics is to begin with a notion about a literary genre whether it's comedy or tragic comedy or or folk tale or whatever it is and then to see the degree to which the play obeys and resists some of our expectations about those genres uh now many of us grew up with the notion of the literary convention that you know a literary convention about petrarchan love for example is that the the the lover is the the servant of the mistress that the ladyes on a pedestal we saw this in troilus and cresa where he was like a petrarchan lover the hero of a petrarchan sonnet uh a sonnet whether written by petrarch or by Sydney or by Shakespeare in which the lady is idealized and as in the case for example of Shakespeare sonnets splits into a good one and a bad one that maybe she's in fact a a figure of excess of Shame of Seduction that's what happens to cresa too that that extraordinary moment in Tris and cresa in which he says this is and is not Cresent imagine that the world is coming apart so also here because she is at the core of my belief she when she splits apart into two in irreconcilable things this is and is not crested so also my world says trus splits apart is very much like what happens in Shakespeare's sonnets uh when he talks about to L loves have ey of comfort in despair or he talks about the the the the dark lady as a figure that that drives him mad and yet he can't help loving her and so forth uh any piece of literature literary conventions are back formations critics talk about them as if they were already there but no writer sits down no good writer and no bad writer sits down says okay here are the rules about a tragedy it's got to have this and that no reader of Aristotle sat down and sort of said ah yes where where is the anoris where is the moment of turn I've got to have it now uh these the these are deductive categories and literary conventions are deductive categories they are deduced from by critics from Reading many examples of something uh Petro doesn't stop start by saying I've invented a category called the petren lover here are the 12 rules of it so go off and write petren sonets uh and so here if we say that that the conventional end of a comedy is a marriage or that these plays conventionally begin in a parent Concord that masks a kind of Discord then they turn into full-blown Discord and then they they return to a kind of resolution um Shakespeare does not have I mean maybe he does um we there have not survived any little guide books about how to write a play that begin with these rules so that when we talk about rules we're talking paradoxically about things that happen after and that are then codified as if they came before um uh so that it's completely fruitful to look at the conventions or expectations or normal practices within a genre if the genre is pastoral or comedy or satire and to say how does this particular example both embody them and also resist them because it always will do both I now going to stop talking for a second um before we come to a passage or two let let's do what we didn't have a chance to do at all last time and that is to hear some questions from you and try to use those as the basis for some discussion thanks um in terms of the play being a comedy or comic tragedy I was struck by the scene where Isabella um goes to her brother and tells him the um what the Duke had said and he said yes you you should um do this for for my life and I thought there was an incredible betrayal and there was nothing comic about it and I was sort of wondering um what you thought or what other folks thought about that so this is the scene again in which uh Isabella has an expectation about what claudo is going to do uh and in fact the scene itself is full of reversals let's let's It's a Wonderful scene let's look at it um gosh it's a great play it's really hard to find um so 31 is I was going to say as I'm passing through acts one and two and three I I I'm just pausing as I go uh now this this is an amazing scene again because um because of the of the degree to which they speak things that that are not in their conscious thoughts that that that the the degree I mean when claudo says if I must die I will encounter Darkness as a bride and hug it in M arms uh at to which her reply and is so symptomatic is there spake my brother there my father's grave did utter forth a voice so she hears the father in the brother and the the the memory of her father as a kind of figure of rectitude now dead uh is throughout this play He Is she wants him to be in the paternal position uh with respect to her uh but but it's a scene that's full of turns uh because she expects that of course he is going to say you couldn't possibly do that and he does initially he says um I uh Heavens it cannot be uh Thou shalt not do it thanks dear Isabel um and then in the middle of a sentence about line 112 um well a little earlier sure it is no sin or of the deadly seven it is the least which is the least says she thinks she's clenched this deal she's off the hook she doesn't have to even wrestle with her conscience CU her brother doesn't want to do it uh sure it is no sin one of the dead or of the deadly which is the least she says this if she's leaving the stage which is the least wait a second if it were damnable he being so wise why would he for the momentary trick be perbly fine oh Isabelle now here here he's unable to keep keep to his resolve what says my brother death is a fearful thing and here you have this extraordinary passage from here this absolutely amazing passage I but to die and go we know not where to live in cold obstruction and to rot this sensible warm motion to become a needed claw and the delighted Spirit to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling region of thick rivid ice to be imprisoned in the viewless winds and blown with Restless violent violence round about the pendant world the hanging world or to be worse than worst of those that Lawless and uncertain thought imagine howling is too horrible the weariest and most loathed worldly life that age ache penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death so he looks death in the face here just as he has you know he was counseled by the frier to be absolute for death but this is the moment when he looks death in the face and he looks at it through all of these the story of Dante with you know worst of of hell is actually ice the story of the vess winds here um uh and and the bringing together of paradise with his vision of hell um also imagining himself being unable to imagine that's that's the the The Uncanny astonishing quality of this I but to die and go we know not where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot this sensible warm motion to become a needed CLA yes um that when you're talking about feminism this passage um reminds Rems me of Juliet's meditation on death before she takes the poison I mean she and she she's very specific about how horrible it is but then she she does it right right right now she also looks death in the eye absolutely and there several different I mean the the Romeo also has a moment in which he he uh physically imagines what what it's like to die yes well I found this the most troubling relationship I really didn't care whether she married the Duke grut I never but I thought this because it seemed so unresolved these difficult questions that none of us between this in this particular scene yes yes between brother and sister they were that he uses that to bring up such troubling impossible questions which are never resolved and and I thought that relationship was was never uh I just couldn't I didn't get it well I'm with you up to the not getting it but what what would you like to get well I wondered what would they be willing to do for each other well why should they do anything for each other well because they love each other I thought and and is I thought there was a powerful Bond of powerful love between these two something I never thought existed in any of the other relationships so but is no no and I agree with you and you can tell that I agree with you because in in my chapter I talk a lot about the fact that at the end of the play the the the is between the brother and the sister that Juliet is really not so much a part of it and that the Duke's double double proposal seems to me to be missed by by Isabella because she's focused on on CL but look what she says is it not a kind of incest to take life from thine own sister is shame that that that the the idea of incest Rises to the surface here the idea of an erotic relation but a fulfilled erotic relation between the two of them Rises to the incest to to the surface here and becomes a kind of taboo is it not a kind of incest to take life from thine own sister's shame how how would you explicate that line for me what does it mean just has problems with sex well no no but that's that's not what the sentence means that could be a that could why did she why did she use that ter is it not a kind of incest to take life from thine own sister's shame what it just do me a paraphrase or an interpretation of it it seems like uh Isabelle has to commit a sexual act to save Claudio's life um so that claudo gains his life through her her sexual submission uh so why is it incest back there that he's actually participant in the act that he takes part in a way by receiving the benefit of the ACT SOC because why because because his life actually comes out of this carre experience is that right correct right it's it's his act almost as much as hers he's the the proximate cause of the ACT okay anything more about this he is in effect reborn through the ACT yes I think that's crucial that that that his to take life here means not only to keep it but as if as if the the the the coupling that she sent off to do will produce him as as a new child as a as a reborn child that that there's there's the sense in which she gives birth to him again that's not in the act of incidence is a sexual relationship between in this case brother and sister the brother being reborn as a result of the sister's sexual act is is not is that incest look at look at her line what does she say does she say is it not incest he says is it not a kind of incest that is to say she is stretching the term so is to talk talk about something that isn't quite literal incest but that partakes of that over intimacy it's sexual they're not having sex with one another but as as other people have said there their sexualities are here so inter imbricated and will produce this result that it is a kind of incest is it not a kind of incest um now this is again the playwright who just wrote Hamlet who was interest interested in these these the questions of kinds of in you may know that one of the big debates uh about about Henry VII was whether I mean his his his first divorce of of Katherine American uh he claimed was because he had unwittingly would committed incest by by marrying his his brother's widow uh and another kind of incest and that that was why his offspring were cursed that is to say he didn't have any male offspring so the kinds of incest are very much sort of being discussed year it's not only as you might think in the 20 20th 21st century a parent and a child have sex together or brother and sister have sex together but remember that parent child is also here in cist as well as brother sister I guess I responded a lot here to the idea of um the hatefulness and you know that was involved in their relationship and that somehow or other I so the question came to me but what if she were asked to donate an organ or to give a bone marrow transplant to save him um is that a kind of ancestor you know well um I don't know I I the issue itself doesn't quite wrong I mean the the the degree to which this play functions like logic or like a fairy tale is that everybody is asked to do the thing that they want least to do or the thing about which they have a certain kind of resistance so if she were asked to go get money not a problem she would go with her begging bowl and she would go get money because she's not she's not defended against that she is asked to do the one thing that she can't do it's not so it's not about him it's about a resistance in her he is the he is the flasho point of her encountering a resistance in herself uh and it's that that has to be overcome it's not about whether she really loves her brother or not it's that's it's and or how she loves her brother because indeed this incest theme as I say really does come back in I think in the staging of the play at the end in which the the the the reunion seems to be the rebirth of cludo we do have precisely a rebirth of claudo he is in FS not speaking he's a child he's muffled he unmuffled himself and he is reborn so he is reborn uh and he's reborn to her but it's really about her resistances and as in some you know horrible Magic World uh it's only the specific punishment for your or as in Dante you're in the circle of hell that is designed around your own sin you're in the situation which is your own blockage because it's really your interior world that is extrapolated here there any number of things that she could do for him that would cost her nothing because they're on her list of okay for Isabella to do she's precisely asked to do the one thing that she can't do or that she feels that she can't do otherwise there'd be no test yeah thanks I guess also going along with with the Freudian interpretation if indeed there were an incestuous um bond between them then she definitely wouldn't want him okaying her sleeping with somebody else right right absolutely she she uh precisely good um yeah is there anything to the fact that she's given her that she's made a vow that she's keeping a promise and that he's asking her to break the promise well you mean the the promise in the noviciate yeah well it's has done it yet that's why it's important that she's just a novice that she hasn't taken her final vows because if she had taken her final vows a it would be but but of course this is a play about broken promises this is a play about about the range of promising this is why a speech act reading of this play is actually very interesting because a A promise is a principal kind of performative speech act I marry you or I will give you this or I will rescue you uh Angelo breaks his promise twice breaks his promise to Mariana he breaks his promise to Isabella he has no intention of fulfilling the bargain of producing claudo alive he's already sent the message against himself um and and if I can just pursue this for one more second uh in that moment there are two Angelos there's the Angelo who is the letter of the law as encountered as in the letter that he send saying never mind what else you hear kill him and the there's the Angelo who is the animated Spirit who resists against this and who is unable to reduce himself or expand himself to that law and he too encounters the only devil that is you will see this in a fellow next week we'll see that that there are millions of things that would not get to a aell is has no difficulty with armies or with deserts or with thirst or with the the any suffering in the world he can do what he can't stand is erotic jealousy and and and and and the sense of of lack of self-worth it's the one thing that in in this otherwise impermeable surface of this very admirable man that he cannot tolerate so the one thing that his tempter gets at him for and that's what that's what happens here yes I'm curious about because we know so much about the two characters who end up who are presumably going to end up in the end Isabella and the Duke I was under the impression that by the end from knowing so much about the two of them that she would not want to be with him and the reason why is it's kind of glossed over as you're reading but no one really ever says anything about the fact that this guy has been impersonating a religious figure throughout the entire play and the fact that he's in these in these very immoral situations where he's telling people that so and so's dead and they're um it's like that experiment where where they had the people pressing the buttons and thinking they were shocking somebody in the other room is moral to be do that to be giving people theirs and I thought in the end I was like she'd probably be repulsed by this guy for standing in as someone I just didn't know what you thought about that well okay so here we have two things we have your projection on is Isabella that she should think as you do about him uh with without any evidence of I mean she doesn't say that you you have said so I want to separate what what what we might think that Isabella if we were actresses that we performing Isabella might have in mind and just go back to your judgment on the Duke and see how other people feel about that because you have given us evidence from the play uh about his behavior though not yet about her response I mean you're you're you've extrapolated a response based upon your own response to him but let's talk about about your response to him and how people feel about about I mean he's a he's a liar and a cheat and a blasphemer I have a question for you so my question question is uh the Duke stands for Liberty but in the same time claudus uh Isabella's brother stands for Liberty definitely Isabella loves her brother why shouldn't her love the Duke well I think the point here is that the Duke uh impersonates lies counterfeits that mean this this language of of impersonation and counterfeiting is all over the play it's part again of its mertile structure this idea of of counterfeiting and of money but the question of impersonation is very much an issue for the play of pretending to be that which you are not uh the word person comes from the which you know in a Libertarian sense in a loan sense that you know you own your person your personal property comes from the word for mask Persona which means not you so that a person is already an impersonation and an uh putting on a Persona is an impersonation of an impersonation so by this logic and this is Hamlet's logic only an actor speaks the truth because only an actor knows he acts whereas other people actually think they have Essence and are mistaken in thinking that there is a coincidence between their inside and their outside notice the prevalence in this play of the word seeming seeming seeming I I I I I have you Angelo for seeming uh this the The non-co Coincidence of the inside and the outside uh now the Duke makes this into an operating principle uh but bear in mind that he is never undetected by us that we see his withdrawal we see the plan we see the costume we see uh him say to us every once in a while I'm going to I sorry Provost I've got to leave for a little while I'll be back because he doesn't want to be there when isab B coms and so forth that everything about his stage managing which is maybe a better word than playwriting here is on the surface for us so he's not lying to us is there any moment in the play yes is he stage sorry is he stage managing the moment when he chooses not to tell Isabella ah that um claudo is alive well that is the the moment where you think to yourself we're 17th century people different from I mean what does it mean to know that her brother is alive and to to test her further by saying get over it you really have to sorry we were too late and the the beheading did take place and so uh sorry he's dead um what what kind of motivation you know what what is what does he what does he offer as his motivation what does he say his motivation is she'll that she'll be all that much happier when she discovers that he's really alive it's um the moment when she stops banging her head against the wall right right and again I mean it's it's not it's not an answer to say that that logic is used by other characters in other plays of Shakespeare but it is we'll see when we come to symboling that Jupiter does the same thing and he says the reason I test him is to make the this this thing the more delayed delighted that the longer you have to suffer the gladder you're going to be uh and there there are other characters between here and there who do the same thing yes please but I mean this is just like him playing God God like oh this is what she would want and that's the part that makes me repulse him the most is that he feels like he has the like the intelligence and the power to be in that kind of position to make those kind of decisions many readers and critics have felt as you do about his self-importance and his controlling uh they haven't these such critics have not always also said as you said he's impersonating a religious figure and so that's a bad thing on his Ian these are two different discourses that that could cross over but need not necessarily cross over but something about his his the smugness with which he he undertakes this this these controlling activities have made it made some people admire him and some people uh see through feel that they see through him and that precisely this is exactly the kind of guy that that they don't admire yeah say one more thing um there's something very specific that that I wanted to point out and it's doesn't when he's talking to Lucio L Lucho and he thinks Lucho thinks he's a Fri yes and he admits to him that he's had this relationship with a woman but if he were a real frier telling him that isn't that supposed to be held confidential and this is just like a total betrayal of of everything that's supposed to be sacred about religion I we have to gain our notion of the rules of this world from the text of the play uh there are in choser uh religious figures who have sexual relations yes I'm dying to jump in on this to m i i i have to um I want to build upon what she's saying because it is in the text I think that um the reason that we feel him to be particularly creepy and perverted Beyond many of the characters who were just supposed to take um as a matter we suspend our judgment or our dis our our disbelief because we know that there is this stock character who dresses up like a frier and then runs around in the play and machat and and um gains what information he can but it is specifically the moments in which he is um performing a sacrament of the religion it's at the moment when he's supposed to be um keeping uh claudo from despair one of the Prime um functions that any cleric can perform is you know um coaching someone who's about to go into the great beyond to gain God's grace but instead he's using it as a manipulation to push him to the utmost to really put him into psychological despair it's at the moment when he's supposed to be acting as a Confessor that he's trying to extrapolate more information out of people and I do think that that would have been something that um I think it's something that's particularly queasy to us whether or not we agree or um you know we ourselves have particular faith in those sacraments there let's let's put this this scene next to the barnardine scene in which he imagines himself to be in the same position remember all these situations that we have in Shakespeare where there's a there's a scene and then there's another version of the same scene that that that that casts the first one into a slightly different light so the two messages of the nurse to Juliet and and the the two proposals of Richard the third to women one of whom accepts him and one of whom rejects him so here we have the Duke attempting to shrive somebody twice the first time you have this long encounter with Claudia in which he says be absolute for death and you have to look into yourself and so forth second one is the barnardine scene in which barnardine says I'm sorry I'm drunk I'm in no situation to be have my my my soul examined uh I'll certainly go to hell if you kill me today so I'm not playing you know I I I if you look for me find me in my ward try try me tomorrow this is not a good day for me to die um and the the two scenes are dramatically set up to function I think in this contrapuntal way um indeed it's creepy it is creepy um it's let's try to think about I don't know the answer to this but let's try to ask the question what does it achieve for claudo what does the the the never mind how what a bad cleric is uh what is what what happens what in the relationship between the Duke and claudo what is achieved by this torture kind of is is what the Duke's trying to achieve is uh Claudio pentant through this psychological suffering and that he really puts him takes him right to to the edge of death so so that he can purify himself in some way through his suffering or through his anxiety just controlling I mean everyone Wonder with his Blasphemous but it's just controlling behavior that he wants to watch this guy expose himself so that he can deal with the raw feelings that this man has or I mean I don't know I what if one one defense you might make of the Duke is that he's that he's trying to uh uh help claudo suffer through this thing and be a better man at the end of it but I'm not sure I buy that yeah well I wonder if the contrast in the way Bernard know what his name is uh receive the information is so Bernardine yeah Bernardine received the information is so entirely different uh he seemed to make fun of this person who he not going to let him tell him how to die and right and so it was in contrast with cl they're very contrast of course and I think making fun then of this priest in his power or frier in his power well I'll tell you if I can pick up on that a little bit so what you're seeing and this is this happens in in the Richard theii example it happens in in the nurse example what you're seeing is a loss of power on the part of this figure who began as being very powerful what you see is that that you thought the Duke could do this but in fact in another circumstance he and what happens toward the end of the play is that really he does lose control he we it before the play we learn that he abdicated control when he's in Disguise he mobilizes certain degree of control but he overshoots in a way and his the his his his attempt to manipulate in fact is is easy to reject if you if you don't have what claudo has which is self-reflection I mean the thing about barnardine is that that that he he's not interested in interrogating his own feelings and he's not he does doesn't have these extraordinary passages of poetry inside him about the imagination of death um yeah Larry uh but but the to dislike the duke or to feel that the Duke and to feel that the Duke gets his comeuppence uh is is one of the principle I mean there have been produk and anti- dukee readings of this play the produk readings move to the allegorical level very quickly they say aha it's gone God on Earth or it's a playright or so so that the things that we're describing as inhumane or uh against a certain social or religious code are explained away or excused by the fact that it isn't really a person it's really a function of some kind whether it's a a theological function or whether it's a playwright function or it's it's something so so that the the the human interaction drops away in that kind of reading and it's not sort of why do that to somebody but any more than you'd say well why does Red Cross run into despair in book one of the fairy queen it's it's it's an allegory and so functions on the level of an allegory and some readings do that um so to go back to your question about sort of whether we should on the basis of our evaluation of the Duke anticipate that Isabella who doesn't seem to have very many opinions about him one way or the other and doesn't know a lot about these I mean she does know about the Mariana plot and she agrees in it to it although she doesn't like the lot she doesn't like the lot she's still a good girl doesn't like the lot um but we don't have a lot of information about how she might respond toward him what we do have is the information that she doesn't respond and that in is in its own way another sign of the failure of his power if she said no to him that would that would have a different different function than if she she she had she made no response to him whatever let's take one more question and then look at one of these passages or response or commentary let's look for okay instead of set of questions let's do a division of the house um how many people um pick one of the following characters the Duke claudo Isabella um or Antelope and uh rank them in your own minds in terms of whether you admire them okay uh so how many admire the Duke most Isabella most claudo most Angelo most okay uh so no one admires the Duke everyone is resistant to the Duke is that right yeah well somehow I do like him but it's just somehow uh he seems like a god in this play and um he seems to know exactly what will happen and everything about every every single character uh and somehow this fits uh his position because he's the Duke and he supposed to know everything about his uh uh his people right but he's delegating the power to Angelo in order maybe in order to verify how the things really are right or maybe in order to change the things in a way he couldn't have done as a Duke as a Duke so I admire him because he is a to me he was able to to change the things um and um I think that in the end this is not or written in the in the textt of the play it's just my opinion so it's not so important I think in the in the in the end Isabella is saying yes just because uh he's the Duke he's the one who has um it's not written in the play um he has think she will say yes I think she will will say yes because uh he has the uh the power and uh she's not saying no well okay so so that's the I just I want to pick up on one thing that you said about his you know he looks at the world he sees this in disar he uses anal and he know every understands everything it is really true except this is the barnardine effect this is the one thing he doesn't know uh this is the the uh he knows about Mariana he knows about the the the various dollies he knows what a bad guy Angelo is he deliberately puts him up so as to fall and so forth he but but there's one thing out outside the control of the Duke and that is the and and it and it's interesting it manifests itself in this play as comedy the one thing that he cannot control is the comic the eruption of comedy and comedy always lives so that that that figures who are doomed to die who are comic like false sta you know he he he seems to die on the stage and then he rises up again uh that that there there's there there's always something outside of this this circle uh I'm going to turn us to a passage because I promised that we would um and let's so you have this piece of paper um and let's look at the first one first let's see what how far we can go so Angela is speaking to Isabella in act 2 scene 2 the law hath not been dead though it hath slept those many had not dared to do that evil if the first that did the edict that did the edict infringe and answered for his deed now is awake takes note of what is done and like a prophet looks in a glass that shows what future evils either raw or by remissness new conceived and so in progress to be hatched and born are now to have no successive degrees but air they live to end this is tough let's analyze it what's it about yes the deterrent effect of uh strictly enforcing the law in other words if you strictly enforce the law it will deter others before they uh commit the offenses okay um that's I think it's a good solid paraphrase of this what uh what does the Lang language that we see in front of us do to complicate that um is the personification of law ah okay okay what person what what what what what evidence do you see of personification well the law hath been dead so you're giving human qualities to an abstract notion now the law is awake um so it's almost like Angelo's uh saying it's not really about me it's about the law so the the the law is personified the law seems to have been dead now is alive uh what else does it do well the law is like a prophet it's like a person it's like a prophet who can see evil uh as it hatching and uh and stop it before uh it it grows what do it meant by glass looks or glass uh is that meant like a prophetic mirror or something yes it's both of these things I in the period there glass means mirror uh but glass also is precisely this kind of prophetic magic you crystal ball we would say uh that show we'll see one of these shows up in McBeth that uh it's and the idea is that it shows you the future um so that the the the glass both shows you yourself and also shows you the future uh and and that's part of the force of how it how it functions here uh and of course it's also brittle and can break what else what is the last yes please sin also seems to be personified here as in in a rather unattractive way um being described as either raw or in progress to be hatched and born personified or or as some sort of creature an animal or coming out of an egg and there seems to be some sort of like abortion esque imagery about things being stillborn things being stopped before they hatch well is it before they hatch or is it that they hatch in order to die so provers to be hatched and born or now to have no successive degrees but a they live to end so is it before or is it after I thought it is this this is you yeah I agree with her very much that it is abortive I mean it's both things it's either going to be brought all the way to term and then dead immediately after or even almost better yet that it it'll be killed in the womb so to speak before you know in the conception in the imagination wherever it is that it's half hatched it'll be strangled there excuse me this word conception excuse me which is not in the passage but that underpins the passage has that double meaning of uh imagination and so it's it's above and below it's like the Head trip which is both above and below so in a play which is about an illegitimate pregnancy and which is surrounded by these images like that very unaccustomed Lucho speech about your your brother and his lover have embraced and so forth how does this speech about stillborn or abortion or things that that are conceived in order to die before they come to fruition how does this speech function Visa those other even even Vis the fact that there's a pregnant woman in the playw stands opposition it's like the law stands in opposition to life uh it says who um that that would be my interpretation well that would be your interpretation of who's saying what oh that's the way Angelo SE Angelo of what Angelo says about the law uh of Angelo's law of Angelo's imagination of the law here uh what does it tell us about Angelo doesn't tell us anything about the law only tells us something about Angela it uh gives an impression of the meanness of his ideas about the law and of how it is to be affected and what do you say meanness uh because the uh well first of all the language that he uses it's obvious that he he he is talking about you know there are evil thoughts but if you have this strict interpretation of the law it's going to it's going to cut them all short right and uh but he takes a Relish in just the way he describes what those evil thoughts are let's go back to the context of the speech for a second okay do you have your texts with you can you look at act 2 scene two because the something of the dramatic irony of this speech is lost when we look at it out of context uh here's the dramatic situation Isabella and Angelo are having a conversation why are they having a conversation she's to's she's come to plead for her brother's life and in order to do that what argument does she have to make to him yeah please she has to make him care about she has to make him care about about human life and not so much about being so concrete with what the law is well she she indeed she wants Mercy rather than justice but but what what is what is her Claim about what claudo has done um nothing look at the passage oh exactly exactly that's sort of I mean her rhetorical position as the lawyer coming in to talk to Angelo pleading the case before the judge is to say it's okay premarital sex is okay sex is okay good thing it's not you know just human uh she didn't believe a of this this is not her view this is this is this this is this is and and we've got how do we know this we know this partly because Lucho is standing there saying well said that's well said that's well said uh the the uh the scenario is that she has got to maintain an argument to him that does not in fact reflect her own beliefs at all necessarily uh that they are both speaking in a way lines that they need to perform that that she indeed she believes that life is better than death indeed she believes Mercy is better than Justice she does believe those things but what she has to persuade him of U Angelo of is an attitude of about of of permissiveness about this particular law against sex that does not necessarily reflect her own attitude toward it at all she's been put in this position of advocate for her brother's behavior and what's what's what's astonishing about the way the scene unfolds and what's so interesting about this moment because it's in response to this whole question about should he die for having impregnated his almost wife that we get this speech that describes uh the the the law and what it will bring forward in exactly this this set of of abortive images um yes is the law though a projection of himself and his own fright uh if he were to be you know he's trying to seduce her and is it his spright about being alive I mean does he see himself as the law well he we don't yet know that we we've we um um at this point what we have from her is show some pity I show it most of all when I show Justice that great Shakespearean diet of mercy and Justice and so forth she then we hear from her he says Be Be You Know accept the fact your brother is going to die he dies tomorrow be content uh we get from her a a a wonderful line uh it's excellent to have a giant strength but its tus to use it like a giant it's it's actually and and and but man proud man dressed in a little brief Authority most ignorant of what he's most assured his glassy Essence and there's that glass again does it reflect or does it predict like an angry ape plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the Angels weep but we don't really have the full force of his own eroticism until a little bit later on she speaks my natural guiltiness what's this the tempter tempted and so forth the he he begins to speak to himself and to us increasingly as and again it's her it's partly her resistance and the ardor that she's showing towards something else toward her brother that is part of what it's as if she's FL she's You Know You're Beautiful when you're angry I there's something about her her her demeanor in this moment when she really is not interested in him at all she's interested in trying to make her case that is amazingly attractive to him and that she speaks back to him is I mean imagine King leer finding Cordelia appealing if she spoke back rather than than angry uh when she spoke back but but it's it I mean this that the this this image that we began with comes in the context of a whole discourse about physical pregnancy and bringing forth children and whether fornication is itself a venal sin or human nature uh and something that a human being because in fact what what do we know about Angelo in in reputation uh do is he described at all as a sort of non-human being he's he's ice yes he's he's his blood is congealed Ice uh when his urine is ice I mean all of his fluids are ice so that and remember that passage that we looked at before in which claudo imagined death as a hellish world of ice in a way Angelo the angel is already living in at least in these people's view in that that that hell that that place beyond emotion that place where where uh there are no feelings where where where where is a needed Cloud where one has no emotions at all uh and and so this this this paragraph that we're looking at um is is Angelo on pregnancy so to speak this is Angelo on this same thematic uh why like a prophet oh look at the time I'm so sorry I shouldn't keep you beyond your hour and they're waiting out there we we'll we'll have to pick up on prophets next time it's aell next time is that right is it okay um so keep your eye on sexual jealousy

Literature_Lectures

22_Edward_P_Jones_The_Known_World.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Today, of course I'm going to talk about The Known World, the second-to-last of our novels. In the two lectures that I have planned, I'm going to take up fairly abstract questions, because I think this novel, for all its wealth of detail, calls for an address to these couple of questions. And I'll tell you about those in a minute, but before I pursue that line of argument, which today will take a somewhat narrow scope and on Wednesday will take in the whole of the novel, I just want to hear from you, a little bit, about what reading this novel was like, just in a simple way. How did you respond to it? How did it make you feel as a reader? What was the experience like? What did you notice? So, who can tell me what they noticed? Yes.Student: I guess it found it a little disorienting, because of all the names that were introduced quickly at the beginning, and jumping around in a different time, and also referencing the dead people as being alive. So, that was really confusing and disorienting, but I also really liked it, mostly because of the descriptive language that was used, particularly when referring to--I felt like he captured the environment really well, so I enjoyed it.Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. So, was the natural description a kind of grounding, in that context of disorientation? That's a very, I think, perceptive take on what he's doing in the novel. Yeah. What else? What else did you notice? Yes.Student: Well, the lack of a strong sense of plot made it difficult for me to come back to the book, once I'd put it down, so that I thought that it was beautifully written, which meant that when I was sitting there reading it I had no trouble staying engaged with the book, but when I put it down I sort of forgot about it and had no interest in picking it up again until I did because I had to for class. Professor Amy Hungerford: It's terrible, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. It has an interesting effect that way. It's like, as I was saying, I think, to a friend in office hours, that it's totally committed to plot, but on the tiniest scale, in the local sense, that there are so many tiny narratives within this novel that there isn't one, or it's hard to detect the one that will hold you for the whole novel. And I'll definitely- I'll talk about that in my second lecture. Yeah, absolutely, so that's something we have to account for. Yes, Mary.Student: One of the things that I thought was really interesting was how suddenly the narrative would jump into the future or the past, saying a lot of things about one character--Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely: totally fluid chronological sense in the novel. So, we have to make sense of that. We have to know what to say about that. One thing I think we can say is--to put it in context--is that he's doing something quite different from Toni Morrison, just to take a point of context that is totally apparent, I think, that he's writing in the same vein as Toni Morrison; he's writing an historical novel about slavery. And, after Beloved in the mid '80s, you cannot do that without being in the realm of Toni Morrison. But what's interesting about the contrast in time travel between Morrison and Jones is that with Jones it works proleptically, into the future. With Toni Morrison, Beloved develops the concept of what she calls re-memory. Any of you who have read the novel or thought about it in a classroom probably have thought about this. Re-memory is that way for the characters that the memories of slavery exist independent of persons, so that the daughter of a slave who is living in freedom, if she goes back to the South, is imagined to be capable of walking into a memory of slavery even though slavery is, in that moment, gone. So, it's as if there is a free contact between the present and the past, but there is not this free contact between the present and the future, the way that you see in Jones. So, we want to ask ourselves: in what sense is he innovating on the aims of the historical novel, as Toni Morrison wrote it twenty years or so earlier? What else did you notice? What other feelings did you have about the reading experience? Is it like anything else we have read this term, and, if so, what? Is it like anything else? Yes.Student: Well, this is kind of an unfair comparison to make, because of the morality issues, but it reminded me of Blood Meridian, in the sense of its quality of lots of different thoughts and events.Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. That's an interesting parallel. So, it has a detailed attention to the particular, which ends up leeching significance out of the particular. Yes. Both novels do that, and it does call into question, I think, for both novels, how we're to read its morality, because both deliberately take up subjects that evoke in us moral responses. So, Jones' choice--if you think about Nabokov setting himself up with a problem (how can you make us love a pedophile?)--Jones' problem, his chess problem, is: what do you do with a black slave owner? How are we to understand the phenomenon of black slave ownership? So, that's the moral question he brings up, and we will have to see whether ambivalence finally gives away to critique, whether there is a strong moral critique of the situations that he sets up. Let me begin, then. I have some sense of how you're receiving the book, so that's helpful. I thank you for that.Let me begin, then, with my abstract question, and it really comes from the title of the book, The Known World. It raises in that title immediately the question of knowledge. How do you know anything? That is a central question for this book: How do you know anything? The abstract question I'm going to ask on Wednesday is how does anything exist, another extremely abstract question, how can anything exist? So, those are my two, sort of, governing questions. They will become much fuller and more detailed and concrete as I lecture. How do you know anything? A related question is, who is the knower? The Known World: known by whom? So, the question of the subject of knowing, the person who knows, is immediately also at issue. Who is that person? Is that person accessible to us? Can we know that person? History poses, in the contemporary period, all of those problems of knowledge, and I think this is one reason why this is a historical novel. And it's one reason why fiction turns to the historical in this period, because the practice of history at this time, in the second half of the twentieth century, begins to change. So, it used to be that historians felt that they could know the past; when they had gained a certain distance from it, it would become knowable, that objective distance. And so, any historian worth his salt would probably be loath to write about something too recent, because that wasn't what history was all about. History was about getting perspective, the perspective and objectivity that time provides. Well, in the mid twentieth century this vision of history began to change, and I'm going to mention a couple of figures here that are especially relevant to literary studies. One is Michel Foucault, a French historian and philosopher who in the 1960s began to argue that history was best understood as the evolution of discursive systems, systems, essentially, of language married to institutional power, and that those systems were properly understood as shaping what we could know and the social identities one could inhabit at any given time. So, in the early '60s he writes about the history of insanity; he writes about the history of sexuality; he writes about the history of prisons and discipline. And he argues that institutions like the asylum and the prison form modern subjectivities, form how it is that we think we can be people and know things. So, the argument goes something like: you can't be a modern madman without the asylum. It's not like madness existed, and then asylums got built to take care of it. He sees the rise of the asylum and the rise of clinical insanity as requiring one another; you can't have one without the other. So, it's the rise of the defining institution that maps directly onto the rise of any condition like that: similarly sexuality, laws that govern deviants, norms of behavior that stabilize gender. There are some wonderful stories from medieval French literature, for, example that Foucault talks about, that feature girls who jump over ditches and suddenly become boys. There is this sense of instability of gender that he brings out of some historical material, and then he talks about how we came to believe that gender was stable, and what discursive systems were required, what laws, what kinds of etiquette, what kinds of education were required to make us believe that gender was stable, among other things. So, this kind of history suggests a couple of things to those of us who study literature, and it did so very powerfully in the 1980s, and that is that discourse, language, is extremely powerful. It affects how we can know anything. It's not just the medium in which we can describe what we know. It's that very foundation through which we know anything. And I think some of the revisionist history that you see taking place in fiction-- and here I'll have recourse again to Beloved--demonstrates the belief in language's power to make history. Toni Morrison is, in Beloved, looking towards fiction to do something else, too, and that's to replace lost history. Another development, out of Foucault's work and the work of others, is an interrogation of the archive. What's in the archive? What kind of archive do we use? If you're interested in the history of institutions, that's a very different-looking historical archive than it would be if you just think that great men make history. So, then you go and you look at the lives of the great men over time who have made history. That's a very different-looking archive, or if you think that history is made by governments. So, there's a whole movement in the '80s and '90s, the new social history, that takes the archive to be much broader than it was before, to include all kinds of things that common people experienced. So, the letters of factory workers, the popular magazines and so on, all kinds of ephemera, what historians would call ephemera, came to be important in a new way. Morrison uses that to imagine a history that can't be told because there is no archive for it, and in the case of Beloved, it's the history of the illiterate slave woman. She finds a newspaper cutting about a woman who killed her children rather than have them return to slavery, and she lets fiction do the work that history cannot do, which is tell that woman's story. So, it's a kind of recovery that the new social history and the developments coming out of Foucault's work are making happen in the discipline of history. Here it's happening in literature and having its effects in literature. There's one other historian I want to mention, and that's Hayden White. Hayden White was a historian who argued that our notions of how history should be written are deeply informed by our understandings of how narratives work, so this is part of the overthrow of what you might call teleological history, the idea that history has a trajectory, that it has a goal. And this would be related to, history is about either the inevitable rise of certain kinds of humanist thought in the West, or about the decline of civilizations over time. Both of those versions of history are teleological. They suggest that history has a point. Hayden White read history like literature. He argued that historical accounts were emplotted, that they were shaped in their argument by the very expectations set up by literary works. So, we expect stories to go a certain way, and so that's how history gets written. I think that Jones is somewhat more interested in this second version of the new history, a history that's very aware of its plotting, and it's this question of the grand narrative of history that's very much at issue. How do you know where history is tending? This is certainly a question for Jones. And I'm going to now just say one small thing, and I'm going to come back to this question, in the course of this lecture, about postmodernism. So, one feature of what is called postmodernism is this decline of the grand narrative. So, when Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote something called The Postmodern Condition, he argued that we could have no overarching cultural narratives, religious narratives, historical narratives, social narratives, moral narratives, in the postmodern age, because in the postmodern age everything is fragmented. Fragmentation is the hallmark of the postmodern for him. It has to do with the rise of global capitalism, and this is an argument that is related to Fredric Jameson's argument about postmodernism, and Jameson and Lyotard are parallel in their analysis. They give different value to this tradition--to this condition (sorry). Lyotard celebrates it. It's a kind of freedom for him, the freedom from the grand narrative. Jameson is much more skeptical about its qualities, and sees it largely as damaging to persons. So, one question we want to ask is, if there are any grand narratives in Jones, are they seen as consolatory? Do they provide any compensation for the sufferings of the present? So, this is one question I want you to, sort of, hold in your mind. What is this novel's attitude toward narrative as such, both on the small level and on the grand level? On the small level it's a little more apparent. It's clear the novel values the tiny version of narrative. Does it value the large version? So, with all those sort of abstract questions in mind, I want to turn to the novel and look at how knowledge, especially knowledge of history, knowledge of the past, is generated. And the first example I want to turn to is that of Moses telling Caldonia the story of Henry's building the plantation. This is on page 209. So, this is after Henry's death, and Caldonia calls Moses in, and as a way of comforting, Moses begins to tell this story. Moses took his eyes from his lap and began to invent some early days when they were building the house and there was not much on the land except what God had put there. Caldonia was at the edge of the settee in her mourning dress. "Now, Master Henry always knowed what kind of house he wanted to build, Mistress. I don't even think he knowed about you that particular time, but he must have had some idea that you was out there somewhere waitin' in your own kind of way, 'cause he set up about building a house that you would want. He built it up from nothin'. I was there, but I wasn't there like he was there. He said to me that first day, he said, 'Moses we gonna start with the kitchen. A wife needs a place to fix her meals for her family. Thas' where we gonna start,' and he bent down and Mastah drove in that first nail, bam. That was a Monday, Mistress, 'cause Mastah Henry didn't believe in startin' somethin' on a Sunday, God's day." Caldonia, her hands clasped in her lap, leaned back and closed her eyes. The story about the first nail came a little more than a month after Henry had been in his grave. It was gospel among slaves that one of the quickest ways to hell was to tell lies about dead people, but Moses did not think about that as he spoke of the first nail, did not think about the dead needing the truth to be told about them. He did not think about it until that day Oden Peoples, the Cherokee patroller, said to the men around him about Moses, "Heft him on up here. I'll take him in. He ain't gonna bleed for long." There are all kinds of cues in this little, tiny passage to the production of knowledge. So, first of all, let me point out a literary resonance, and that's to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, which is the story of Henry Sutpen, another Henry, and the way he built a plantation out of nothing. And what's remarkable about Sutpen, his overarching and overwhelming characteristic, is that he had a plan, a plan that reached all the way down through his heirs, and part of that plan was the unblemished whiteness of the line he was establishing. So, this story about another Henry, another Master Henry, pulling a plantation out of the wilderness with his bare hands, echoes those literary stories that we have in our minds. Now, of course we aren't to believe that Moses has read Absalom, Absalom. It's not that Moses is taking that story in particular, but just that for Moses the story of a masterful creator is already in his vocabulary and for Jones that he wants to have us think about stories like that. So, this is what it calls to mind on two levels. He deliberately casts it, Moses does, as a godlike creation, having him start on a Monday as if it were the first day of God's seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis. Now, then you get warnings: "The quickest way to hell was to tell lies about dead people." That knowledge suggests a whole body of oral tradition among the slaves, so it is folk wisdom; it is a folk warning. What Moses does, then, is stand up against folk wisdom, and he takes on for himself the power of a masterful creator. So, he does himself what he assigns to Henry. He becomes a creator, here, in language. The warning from the collective wisdom stands at odds with his individuality at that moment. It's at odds with his seizing that power for himself, and we will see as the novel goes on the repercussions of his having done that for the slaves in the slave quarters. It will have serious repercussions, some good, some bad, and here we're told that there is something in the future for him, too, that is a repercussion, that involves blood and his disabling. This kind of knowledge is that old, familiar friend: foreshadowing, of course. So, this is yet another kind of knowledge that Jones puts in front of us. It's the proleptic knowledge, the knowledge looking ahead to the future, that the author of a grand narrative is in the sole position of giving. It's the prerogative of the maker to tell us what's coming next, because it's only the maker who knows what the whole is looking like, what the whole will look like, because it's the maker's intention that will determine everything that happens. And so, there's yet this other layer of knowledge and of voice. There is a narrator in the mix here who is not Moses, who is Jones, or the writer of this novel, whoever we want to imagine that to be--we'll call him Jones--who knows something that Moses doesn't. We are put in the position of being on the same plane as that creator, so it puts Moses in the tragic position of not knowing his fate. He's a little like Oedipus in this way, that the gods all know what the facts are about his life, and the life of the world, but he doesn't. He blunders along. There is that ironic distance between the knowledge of the audience and the knowledge of the character in the dramatic situation, so Moses is in that position here. Now, what is exactly he lying about? Well, we get other versions of Henry's beginning. On 122, we see a slightly different story, and I'm not going to read too much out of here. But if you turn there, you'll recall that early in the building of the plantation, Moses and Henry are tussling in the dirt, when William Robbins rides up. And Robbins makes a point of scolding Henry for thinking that he is somehow not different from his slave, and he advises him that he must make that a bright and enduring line between them. So, this plantation is founded on the white man's policing the divide between master and slave, even after his slave, Henry, has bought his freedom. So, it's perpetuated between Robbins and Henry, that seigniorial power, and Henry acquiesces and disciplines Moses in an arbitrary way. Moses, when he comes--when Henry comes--back from speaking with William Robbins, wants to continue working. Moses loves to work. He loves the completion of work. He is a very fine builder. We learn in the scene that he can build in the dark just by feel and by the sense of the place of things. And so, Moses is told not to work. Henry slaps him, and Moses then keeps on working anyway after Henry leaves. So, in that story, Moses is the maker, not so much Henry. And, if there is an origin, before that scene of Moses building in the dark, it's a scene of the two of them tussling on the ground. So, William Robbins is right. There is a blurring of the distinction between master and slave. It's that, and it's sundering, that is the origin of the plantation. And we're told also in this chapter that he hadn't even thought--he, Henry--hadn't even thought about Caldonia yet. Equally, we learn, in passing, on page 59, that very soon before that scene of him and Moses that Henry was already dreaming of his plantation. This is at the very bottom of the page: Moses made to go down the lane of cabins, eight on one side of the lane and eight on the otherside, laid out just the way Henry Townsend had seen them in a dream when he was twenty-one years old and without a slave to his name. It's not a kitchen for a future wife, but a line of slave cabins for his future slaves that Henry has in mind. That's the origin that Moses is lying about, so there are two layers of lies here. One is the lie about the plantation being built on a vision of slavery, and two is the lie on its being built by Henry alone. So, Moses, in telling his story, asserting his authority to tell history, effaces himself from that history, and also effaces the line of difference between slave and not slave. He doesn't say it was built on that distinction, and that serves his purposes, of course, because his stories to Caldonia will have as their final dream the effacement of the line between him and Caldonia. His dream is that she will see him as the next Mr. Townsend, and we'll see by the end of the novel what happens to that dream. So, how do you know about the past? Caldonia can only know about that past through Moses, and we've seen that it's an incredibly complex view backward, with all these layerings. And once again we're asked to stand in the position of knowing more, even, than Moses does. We know about Henry's dream of the line of slave cabins. Moses doesn't know that piece, so there is that difference cropping up. On page 75, you have another version of telling those stories. When Augustus and Mildred, Henry's parents, lay down and held each other after Henry's death, one of them started talking--they would not remember which one it was--all about Henry from his birth to his death, starting a weeks-long project of recalling all that they could about their son. If they had known how to read and write, they could have put it all in a book of two thousand pages. This is a very different kind of telling. If there is a literary model here, it's that of Odysseus and Penelope. I don't know if any of you have read The Odyssey. There's this beautiful scene, at the end, when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, and he and Penelope stay up all night telling each other stories; they talk all night. And so that's the vision you have here. It's a private exchange of history, and we're not told all the things that occur in their conversation. That is a kind of storytelling that is compensation for loss. It's history as compensation, and this is much more in the realm of what Toni Morrison is doing in her fiction, fiction as filling in the gaps of loss as best fiction can. Now there's no fantasy about how complete that could ever be, but there is the effort and the effort honors what's been lost, and here Augustus and Mildred honor their ambivalent love for their son. They completely disagree with what he has done in his life, and yet they honor that loss telling stories to one another and they blend together as people, as separate people, in that act. On 239, we can see yet a third version of how history and the world make sense, and this is when Counsel Skiffington rides into Texas after his plantation burns down. How do you know anything? Well, as he meets the sort of motley crews of people that he meets on the road, he continually thinks back to the burned library at his plantation. (And this is in the middle of the page.) He had seen a dark old man driving the wagon, not really a Negro, not really from any race that was recorded in any of the books in his destroyed library. [And then a little further down] When he turned from the wagon with the pregnant women, a boy smiling with perfect teeth was facing him. He knew the origins of this one from another of the destroyed books, someone from the Orient. Counsel brings with him from the destroyed library the categories of knowledge that he hopes will make the world make sense. It fails him, often, as in the brown man he can't quite categorize from the books. It gives him satisfactions on those occasions when its categories do apply. So, Counsel is a model for that person who takes the discursive knowledge of his culture and tries to fit the world he encounters into it, and he's troubled when it doesn't work. So, this is a mode of knowledge that fits quite nicely with what I've been telling you, in a sort of simplified way, about Foucault's understanding of how history works. And so, here, you have a version of that right in the character of Counsel. So, some of the problems that these scenes point up are: how can the knower know anything, when the knower himself or herself is a fragmented person? And, I think, the fragmenting of knowledge across layers--what do we know, what does Moses know, what does Caldonia know, what does the narrator seem to know--that fragmentation makes it impossible to imagine a subjectivity for any of these characters that can truly encompass a stable world view. So, that fragmentation of self is another layer of the problem of knowledge. How can you know anything, when you're not a stable knower yourself? And I just want to look back to some of the other readings on our syllabus, to think about how these problems have been addressed. So, how do you know about the past in Robinson, for Marilynne Robinson? For her, writing is the transcription of consciousness, of human consciousness. There is an endless present to her work and when she talks about writers from the nineteenth century for example--Hawthorne, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau--she calls them aunts and uncles. I think it's very telling. It's as if they were part of her family, part of her present, and I think that's indicative of how she thinks of writing and its access to the past. Because writing is continuous with consciousness, you can simply know the past by reading it. And if you read her essays on history, that's fully borne out in the assumptions that she makes. If you think about Cormac McCarthy, how can you know the past? Well, his trans-historical vision suggests that to know the past is simply to know human nature, or to know human nature is to know the past. So, remember those epigraphs about the ancient evidence of scalping. It suggests that the human tendency towards violence has no origin, has no end. It's a different kind of eternal present from Robinson's, and yet it is still one that gives him a seamless access to the past, so he can make modern U.S.-Mexico border look very much like, for example, the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1840s (and this is later in his Border Trilogy when you see the nuclear tests in this same landscape that we've seen all the action of Blood Meridian). So, he makes those two look very similar in that landscape. Philip Roth: how do you know the past? Well, this is a major theme of my lecture on Wednesday of last week. How does Nathan know any of Coleman's past? He has to rely on other narrators. We have to rely on him. I was questioning his credibility as a narrator, as someone who could tell us about the past, so there's that level of problem raised in that novel. At the same time, like McCarthy, he has a trans-historical understanding of what access to the past would be, through the trans-historical theme of desire. So, desire is the same now as it was in Hawthorne's time. The desire to purify the American libido in the Monica Lewinsky trial is not different, for Roth, from the spasm of purification that Hawthorne writes about in The Scarlet Letter. So, that is a different vision of what it means to be trans-historical, and I think it allows for Roth that fearless setting of the contemporary. He doesn't look to a historical setting that's distant from himself. He sees the present as history. And, if you believe in the trans-historical, you can make that move, 'cause you don't need the distance from history to get objective purchase on it. It's all, sort of, part of the same story. And then, if you think about The Woman Warrior: how do you get a usable past out of the layers and layers of secrecy, partial narration, fragmentation that you get from parents telling you stories about your past and about their past? Well, you have to stitch it together. So, her argument is that the past is what you make it usable for; the past becomes its use for you. She builds a self out of that past. In the face of these difficulties, empathy and sentiment come to be much more powerful, and I think the writers in this part of the syllabus, this last part of the syllabus, depend a lot on sentiment, and because of that they look back to the nineteenth century. Edward P. Jones is very busy using the tools of the nineteenth-century narrative. The omniscient narrator is very much characteristic of nineteenth-century novels. So, if you read Harriet Beecher Stowe for example, if any of you have taken English 127a and have read that novel, you'll remember all the very broad addresses to the reader about what's going on. There is that omniscient sense that the narrator has all the pieces under her control. Jones looks back to that tradition and borrows from it, also, fearlessly. This has been, since modernism, quite a less distinguished mode of narration. So he's trading modernist limitation of knowledge. If any of you have read Henry James, my favorite example is this novel called What Maisie Knew, which is told in free indirect discourse through the consciousness of a child, Maisie, who is the child of an aristocratic family, the parents of whom are always having extramarital affairs. It's a very confusing family to be living in, for this young girl, and the narrative is extremely confusing. Well, Jones will have nothing to do with that kind of partiality, that kind of limit on perception, so he has left behind those modernist experiments with transcribing the very limits of human consciousness, and he is up in the God consciousness of the nineteenth century. Is that God consciousness any consolation? Well, if we look at page 51, this is just one tiny example. They're all over the place. This is one of those tiny interpolated stories about the woman who opens the box of walking sticks and Rita is hiding inside. She's escaped from Robbins' plantation. So this is her little story, the bottom paragraph. Mary O'Donnell Conlon would never live comfortably in America. [She comes over from Ireland.] Long before the HMS Thames had even seen the American shore, America, the land of promise and hope, had reached out across the sea and taken her husband, a man who had taken her heart and kept it, and America had taken her baby, two innocent beings in the vastness of a world with all kinds of things that could have been taken first. She held nothing against God. God was simply being God. But she could not forgive America, and saw it as the cause of all her misery. So, God is seen, in this little, tiny snippet, to be totally arbitrary and I think that's the sense you get in most of these passages about the divine, that God allows violent actions to occur without seeming cause, without reason, and it's up to the human beings to try to stitch stories together that can make sense of them. And Mary, in this passage, chooses to be angry at America, instead chooses America as the story that will unify these deaths even in a negative way. It doesn't offer consolation, exactly, but at least it offers a target for her anger. And, now I just want to see on 176, to look at this with you. In addition to these tiny thematic visits to some of these questions throughout the novel, the question of stitching together--can you stitch together the events of the world according to some larger consciousness?--this becomes a question with formal implications. This is in the middle of 176. If you remember, this is about the trial of Jean Broussard, who has killed his partner. He is the original person who brought Moses into Manchester County, and this is what we learn. We've just--at the top of page 176--heard about what happened to Broussard's family in France. If Alm Jorgensen, [this is the partner] the murdered man, had any heirs, no one knew about them. [Now listen as we go on.] The records of the Jean Broussard trial, along with most of the judicial records of nineteenth-century Manchester County, were destroyed in a 1912 fire that killed ten people, including the Negro caretaker of the building where the records were kept, and five dogs and two horses. The Broussard trial took one day, actually part of a day, the trial itself all that morning and the jury deliberations a portion of the summer afternoon. One of the jurors was a man who had studied the law at the College of William and Mary where his father and grandfather had gone. When that man, Arthur Brindle, returned from college… Okay, and I'm not going to go into Brindle's story quite yet. Notice how, sentence by sentence, we get from the erasure of the past--there are no records for a whole century because of this fire--to historical detail that makes us ask where the details come from. "Destroyed in a 1912 fire that killed ten people, including the Negro caretaker of the building." It gets more and more specific: where the records were kept, "and five dogs and two horses," animals who you'd think, maybe, wouldn't be part of the public record, their loss wouldn't necessarily be recorded. We're told, even, in the absence of the trial papers, that it took one day, and then it gets even more specific, actually part of the day, and more specific still, which part of it was in the morning, the regular trial, jury deliberation in the afternoon. It was a summer afternoon. We know more and more and more, as we go from sentence to sentence. How do we know all that? How does this narrator know all that? Where does this knowledge come from? The knowledge becomes more and more intimate as this passage goes on, as we learn about Arthur Brindle, his insomnia, the way he liked to talk to his wife as a mode of relaxing himself before trying to sleep, and then we get his reflection, finally, on the trial and why Broussard was convicted, and this is on 177. He says it was not the insistence on his American citizenship that was the problem; it wasn't the fact that his partner wasn't an American citizen that was the problem; it was the accent. The accent gave him "the stench of a dissembler." You want to know where that quotation comes from. It feels like we're hearing Broussard's voice. Who is there with them in bed to tell us this? Everything Broussard said came out warped because of the accent, even when he spoke his own name. The jurors, the merchant told his wife, would have been able to accept why the partner was killed if Broussard had sat on the stand and told his whole story without an accent. Well, what's interesting here is that Jones and Brindle do tell the story without an accent. Brindle is convinced of the man's--not innocence--but the way he should not be convicted, and yet he votes with the others to convict him. He tells the wife this. We hear the case without accent, but when we do hear the accent it's very telling where we hear it. If you look back on 171, and sort of flip through this, when we feel most Broussard's alienness of voice, it's when he calls slaves humans. This is on 171. "See, see, Monsieur Bill," "finest humans, good humans, the finer of the slaves," Broussard said, "but, Monsieur Bill, they are finer human beings," and so on. It's in those moments that he speaks something closest to the truth, right, that we can hear him speaking to us the truth of slavery, and to his interlocutors the truth of slavery. It's the accent that actually reveals the truth. So, when we hear the accent, even though we're hearing it through the narrator that doesn't speak with an accent, we hear the critique of slavery shining through that the people in the situation living there and listening to his accent cannot hear, but why? Remember that little sentence I read at the beginning. "If Alm Jorgensen, the murdered man, had any heirs no one knew about them." What an odd caveat. If this narrator knows all this, why doesn't he know about Jorgensen's heirs, his family? So, what accounts for the lapses in knowledge? How do we know where this knower is situated? So, I'm going to stop there, but before you pack up, what I'd like you to think about for next time is what it means to make something so that it exists, and think about that in relation to the novel. If knowledge is this complicated to produce, what is the status of those things that are made with care and intention, and made as whole objects? So think about the art forms, the different art forms in the novel, and think about those individual small stories, and the whole novel itself.

Literature_Lectures

4_Flannery_OConnor_Wise_Blood_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: I started last time, and actually my whole lecture existed under the rubric of, this quotation from Sabbath Lily Hawks, and I'm just going to read it to you again. "I like his eyes. They don't look like they see what he's looking at, but they keep on looking." So, last time I suggested that what O'Connor asks us to see in her fiction is a theological structure and a religious message. What I started to suggest at the end of class--as I gave you the catalog of body parts lying around the text--what I began to suggest is, that if we actually see what we're looking at rather than, like Haze, not seeing what we're looking at, we begin to see something that's harder to assimilate to that neat theology that O'Connor's letters and essays point us towards. One kind of question, then, I was raising is: what context do you use to read any novel? And today I'm going to suggest two--actually, well, yes--two additional contexts that we can look to, to read the novel. And I will let you know what those are when they come, but be looking for that. So, two hundred people show up to see Asa Hawks blind himself. That's what we're told. That's what the newspaper clipping tells us. We show up to see O'Connor take her characters apart. I began that catalog of body parts. Today I'm going to extend and embellish the catalog of suffering and distortion that we see in this novel. And, just to remind you of that catalog, I just want to look at page 43 in your edition, 47 in mine. I noted that a lot of the body parts that we see in her prose are parts of women's bodies. Well, the sense of the body as grotesque goes beyond just dismemberment. There's a general ugliness of women that pertains in the novel. And if you look on that page, about in the middle, this is Enoch describing his foster mother: "'This woman was hard to get along with. She wasn't old. I reckon she was 40 year old, but she sho was ugly. She had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull.'" Okay. It's funny a little bit. It's a picturesque comparison, hair and gravy, but it emphasizes that ugliness. Now, if you look on page 80 (84 in my edition), this is a woman climbing out of the swimming pool. Remember when Haze and Enoch are in the middle of the park at the swimming pool. Enoch's hiding in the bushes, spying on the women. Here's one climbing out of the pool: First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands, until a large foot and leg came up from behind her, and another on the other side, and she was out, squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself and stamped in the water dripping off of her. She comports herself like a dog in this scene. Okay. So she shakes-- as if she had fur to shake--but register the weirdness of this sentence: "Then she rose on her hands, until a large foot and leg came up from behind her." It's as if they're sneaking up behind her. It's as if they're separate from her, not part of her body at all. So, even when you see O'Connor describing these emergence of a body from the water--a moment when you'd think the whole body would be most on view, or most pertinent to describe-- what you have is almost a distortion of our senses, a distortion of vision, so that we see--even in a woman climbing out of the water--her legs, her feet, as dismembered from the rest of her body. There is a critic at the University of Michigan. Her name is Patricia Yaeger. She wrote a very compelling argument about O'Connor's fiction--not about Wise Blood in particular, but about her stories. And in that essay she argues that O'Connor's grotesqueness, especially the grotesqueness of the women figures in her novels, is all wrapped up with the culture of southern womanhood. It's a culture of beauty that requires all kinds of grooming practices to form and shape the body in such a way that it can appear socially in a decorous way. So, Yaeger argues that what we see in scenes like this is the registration of the violence of those practices of beauty. So she does not let these things sit in the text to be assimilated to a theological structure, but she brings them out. And by reading things like contemporaneous autobiographies from southern women that she's chosen from the canon, and just accounts of what was required of women (etiquette and so on), she weaves a reading of passages like this into that kind of context to suggest that O'Connor's vision of violence has more to do with being a woman in the South than it does with the stated religious concerns that O'Connor talks about in her letters. Now, remember, as I mentioned, O'Connor suffered from lupus, and she was disfigured by this disease. Especially, she was on crutches for a long time, and for periods of time could not walk at all. Her legs would swell up. There's a lot of imagery of swelling, of distortion and distention of the body that some critics point to her biography to explain. They look at her experience of her own body and, when you think about Yaeger's argument--that kind of distortion of the body in the context of a social culture that really emphasizes the control of a woman's body--then you begin to see the power of the tension that we can read into moments like this. But I would suggest, and actually Yaeger suggests this too, that the violence of southern culture goes way beyond just the violence of the culture of femininity, the culture of the southern woman. And so, let's look a little bit and extend the catalog. Another category of violence we have is murdered children, murdered and also just generally neglected or abandoned children. Enoch, if you'll recall, was traded by his father off to the Bible woman with the gravy hair; so that bespeaks the pain. And last time I read you a passage where Enoch begins to tell that story in this very pitiful way, getting no sympathy from Haze. So, clearly he feels the abandonment from his father. If you look at page 120 in your edition (122 if anyone has mine), this is a little story that Sabbath Lily tells to Haze while they are supposedly seducing each other. (Don't try this on your next date; I don't think it works very well.) So this was her story: "There was this child once," she said, turning over on her stomach, "that nobody cared if it lived or died. Its kin sent it around from one to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was a very evil woman, and she couldn't stand to have it around because the least good thing made her break out in these welps. She would get all itchy and swole. Even her eyes would itch her and swell up and there wasn't nothing she could do but run up and down the road shaking her hands and cursing, and it was twicet as bad when this child was there. So she kept the child locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell fire swole and burning, and it told her everything it seen, and she got so swole until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well rope around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck. Would you guess me to be fifteen year old?" she asked [seductively]. Okay. Yes, very romantic story Sabbath tells to our friend Haze. These images of babies abandoned: here it's called an "it." Children are often called "it" in O'Connor's fiction. Especially, I would note, if they are female children, they're normally called "it." Lily herself is a child who is completely unloved by her father. Her father just wants to get rid of her and is willing to collude with her to try to make Haze take her off his hands. And remember the story of her naming. Her mother gave birth to her on a Sunday and right after she was born gave her the name Sabbath, then turned on her side and died. So poor Lily is also an orphan, at least in the emotional sense, if not in actual reality. Her father, of course, had run off from her mother right after she had gotten pregnant, and then I suppose he came back. So, children are deeply abused and neglected.What else do we have? On 231, just to add to this catalog--we have murdered, abandoned, neglected children--we also have police brutality. (231. Now, let me see. I may not have gotten the right page number for you guys for this one.) This is right when Haze has been found in the ditch by the two policemen, and maybe you recall it. Haze asks whether it's day or night. This is the bottom of 230: "It's day," the thinner one, the cop, said, looking at the sky. "We got to take you back to pay your rent." "I want to go on where I'm going," the blind man said. "You got to pay your rent first," the policeman said, "'ever bit of it." The other, perceiving that he was conscious, hit him over the head with his new billy. "We don't want to have no trouble with him," he said. "You take his feet." He died in the squad car, but they didn't notice, and took him on to the landlady's. She had put him in her bed, and when she had pushed them out the door, she locked it behind them and drew up a straight chair and sat down close to his face where she could talk to him. Here this image of a man--obviously an indigent found on the road and then gratuitously abused by the police--echoes the earlier moment when the policeman pushes his car off the road and down the hill. These are instances where police are using their power utterly on their own authority, with seemingly no checks, with excess force. Remember again: this is the South. We all know that these kinds of violence, official violence, were part and parcel of southern culture toward African Americans. What I think O'Connor is doing here is taking some of that reality and injecting it into Haze's narrative. So, these are the kinds of images that the Civil Rights movement really brought to light. Here we see them in relation to Haze. But overt racism is there, too, and if you look on page 67 in your book--and this is on 71 in mine--you will see that O'Connor does not hesitate to use the word "nigger" in the dialog of her characters. Now, the narrative voice does not use that word, but here it is on the bottom of 71. Her characters are perhaps typical poor southerners: "Well, what do you want to pay for it?" the man asks. [This is Haze buying his Essex.] "I wouldn't trade me a Chrysler for an Essex like that. That car yonder ain't been built by a bunch of niggers. All the niggers are living in Detroit now putting cars together," he said, making conversation. "I was up there a while myself and seen. I come home." She's invoking, in a very casual way, the southern racism of the poorer white working class. This is just part of her representation of the place, part of her representation of these characters. It's a kind of realism, of course. Nevertheless, there it is in front of us, and again I call you back to that quotation. What are we going to see when we look at the fiction? Do we see what's in front of us? So, this is one of the things that O'Connor puts in front of us. On page 174--Again, check and see if this is the same in your edition. Generally, annoyingly, it's sometimes four pages' difference earlier; sometimes it's two. So I tried to get them all, but I think I didn't look this one up; this is Enoch stealing the new Jesus: He had darkened his face and hands with brown shoe polish, so that if he were seen in the act, he would be taken for a colored person. Then he had sneaked into the museum while the guard was asleep and had broken the glass case with a wrench he borrowed from his landlady. Then, shaking and sweating, he had lifted the shriveled man out and thrust him in a paper sack, and had crept out again past the guard who was still asleep. He realized as soon as he got out of the museum that, since no one had seen him to think he was a colored boy, he would be suspected immediately and would have to disguise himself. That was why he had on the black beard and dark glasses. Okay. So, there's a certain sense of humor here. So, Enoch goes in black face to commit the crime, so that if he's seen he won't be taken for white, but then he realizes a black person--just by definition--is suspicious. So he has to now disguise himself from being a black person. This is partly Enoch's sort of craziness, but the joke relies on the fact of racial profiling. It relies on the fact that it's very plausible to think that at this moment in the South to walk down the street as a black person, to drive a car as a black person, would be a risky endeavor in some places in the city. So, it's a joke, but it's a joke that rests on a very dark reality. So, what you have, then, is a set of things that are put before us, that we are asked, in a way, not to respond to. Let's look at one more example. This is on page 159. This is a silly example. This is when Hoover Shoates--and note in connection with my lecture last time; I talked to you about pigs, and why there are pigs all over a landscape--well, Hoover Shoates: a shoat is a little pig, so she's continuing that metaphor with his name, or that trope with his name. This is Haze being approached by Hoover Shoates: "My name is Hoover Shoates," the man with his head in the door growled. "I know when I first seen you that you wasn't nothin' but a crackpot." Haze opened the door enough to be able to slam it. Hoover Shoates got his head out of the way but not his thumb. A howl arose that would have rended almost any heart. Haze opened the door and released the thumb and then slammed the door again. "A howl arose that would rend almost any heart." What you want to ask about all these things that I'm putting in front of you is, "Are these supposed to rend our hearts?" I don't think we're meant to feel much for Hoover Shoates here. He is a figure of critique. He's a figure of satire. He's the charlatan preacher. We're certainly not meant to identify with him or to sympathize with him, but here you can't help but thinking about someone getting their thumb smashed in a door. And then it gets more intense of course on page 206(and that's 204 in this edition), when Haze commits murder. So here we have the murder scene: "Take off that suit," Haze shouted and started the car forward after him. Solace began to lope down the road taking off his coat as he went. "Take it all off," Haze yelled with his face close to the windshield. The prophet began to run in earnest. He tore off his shirt and unbuckled his belt and ran out of his trousers. He began grabbing for his feet as if he would take off his shoes, too, but before he could get at them the Essex knocked him flat and ran over him. Haze drove about twenty feet and stopped the car and then began to back it. He backed it over the body and then stopped and got out. The Essex stood half over the other prophet as if it were pleased to guard what it had finally brought down. The man didn't look so much like Haze lying on the ground on his face without his hat or suit on. A lot of blood was coming out of him and forming a puddle around his head. He was motionless, all but for one finger that moved up and down in front of his face as if he were marking time with it. Haze poked his toe in his side, and he wheezed for a second and then was quiet. "Two things I can't stand," Haze said, "a man that ain't true, and one that mocks what is. You shouldn't ever have tampered with me if you didn't want what you got." The man was trying to say something, but he was only wheezing. Haze squatted down by his face to listen. "I give my mother a lot of trouble," he said through a kind of bubbling in his throat, "'never giv'er no rest, stole theter car, never told the truth to my daddy or give Henry what, never give--" "You shut up," Haze said, leaning his head closer to hear the confession. "Told where his still was and got five dollars for it," the man gasped. "You shut up now," Haze said. "Jesus," the man said. "Shut up, now, like I told you," Haze said. "Jesus hep me," the man wheezed. Haze gave him a hard slap on the back and he was quiet. How many of you when you read that felt like a character who mattered to you had died? Just a few; you guys are exceptionally, exceptionally sympathetic. I commend you. It's hard to feel too much for this prophet, and I would argue that his confession at the end is part of what makes it quite difficult. It's such a, kind of, trivial set of things that he begins to recite, or, at least, he recites them in such a cliched way: "I gave my mother trouble. I was a bad boy. I took some money to tell where the still was." These are such, sort of, clichéd southernisms that you start to see this character as a caricature. He is very hard to see as a human being. And yet, I would contend that the part about the Essex actually running over him is quite compelling. At least I feel it when I read it. In a more abstract sense, I feel the violence of it when I read those passages. So, there is a sense in which you have to ask: Is this meant to rend our hearts? If Hoover Shoates's thumb in the door doesn't quite do it, does this do it? Does southern racism do it? Does the dismemberment of women do it? What is the point of putting these on the page? And, if you think about the way some bodies literally explode, think of the new Jesus--remember when Haze takes that little, shriveled body from Lily and throws it against the wall, the head pops, and out comes dust and trash. If bodies are exploding here, why are we not asked to care? And, if we aren't asked to care, what is it that we're asked to do, or to think, in response to these things? Now, Patricia Yaeger, in her argument, rejects what has typically been offered up as a way to account for these things, and that's the religious reading. She says, to dismiss that violence into an old and comfortable theology is simply not to see it, not really to see it, not to notice that O'Connor put it there in such a sharp and compelling form. I want to change tack for a minute, and now I'm going to veer into that second kind of context that I said I was going to talk about today. There is something else I think we're meant to see that is neither theology nor southern context, and I want to show you that now by looking at chapter 7; it starts on 115 in your book (117 in this edition). I just want to read the opening. I'm going to treat this chapter as a sort of microcosm of the book, with respect to its craft. Let's look at how this opens: "The next afternoon when he got his car back, he drove it out into the country to see how well it worked on the open road. The sky was just a little lighter blue than his suit, clear and even with only one cloud in it, a large, blinding white one with curls and a beard." Notice that image of the cloud, the blinding white cloud. It's very hard not to see it as a symbol. What kind of symbol is it? Well, it's a God symbol. It's even got that typical children's book iconography of the curls and the white beard. Okay. So this is like your children's book representation of the Christian God, and there it is as a blinding white cloud. You wouldn't even need the curls and the beard if you just had the blinding and the white. And, of course, as we go on, as I'll show you, the curls and the beard are pared away, and you're left more with that blinding whiteness. So, the blinding white cloud begins this chapter. And what happens of course thereafter, as you'll remember, is that Lily pops up from the back seat: "Hi." He didn't know that she was there. And she's got a handful of dandelions, and she's painted her mouth red with lipstick, and she's trying to seduce him. And he had, in fact, given her this little sort of seductive note earlier suggesting that he wanted to seduce her, too. And he still has in his mind that he should do this, and his point is to do it so that he will prove that he needs no redemption and that there is no sin. The problem here is that Lily is interested in the seduction precisely because she sees it as a kind of sin. So, if the two enter into this seduction, they do so agreeing on the same act, but completely diametrically opposed on its theological meaning or its metaphysical meaning. And so, what you'll notice in this chapter is an extended example--in one of the only extended conversations of the book--of that phenomenon I talked about last time, where the characters just don't seem to register the existence of the other person at all. So Haze, as I argued last time, is kind of insulated. Even his senses are insulated. He can't hear things. He doesn't see what's in front of him. He doesn't seem to be in his context physically at all. He doesn't seem to register the pain of other persons. Sometimes, he doesn't even seem to register the existence of other persons. Well, this is an example--this conversation--of completely missed signals between the two of them. Sabbath Lily tells the story of wrestling with her identity as a bastard, and on 119 you get her account of her writing to the advice columnist Mary Brittle about the problem of being a bastard and what kind of sexual play is appropriate for a bastard, given the fact that the Bible says a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. So she's trying to figure out, really, whether she should sleep with someone, because what does she have to lose? She can't get in to heaven anyway. So she says: "Dear Mary: I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know. But I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not? I shall not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway so I don't see what difference it makes.'" And then she writes back, Mary Brittle: "Dear Sabbath: Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to reexamine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in life. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living, if you put it in the proper perspective and do not let it--[I think this is a misprint. Do you have "warf" there? I think it's "warp," "warp you."] Read some books on ethical culture." Clearly, O'Connor is offering us Mary Brittle as the butt of her critique, the shallow modern thinking of the "enlightened"--psychologically and ethically--modern person. Sabbath in this chapter is an odd Christ figure. She is a Christ figure. Remember how she hides and skips from tree to tree in this scene, when she's teasing Haze, towards the end of it. Well, that tree is also the image of the cross that is part of Christian tradition. There are lots of hymns that talk about the tree as the cross, or the cross as the tree, for example. But it's the figure, the ragged figure that moves from tree to tree in the back of Haze's mind, that's the Christ that won't let him get away. So Lily actually embodies that Christ-like figure. So, for all her impurity, O'Connor presents her in contrast to Mary Brittle as understanding something fundamental about the world, and what's important in the world that much more plausible people don't understand. So, this is a moment when Sabbath tempts Haze back to belief, and Haze's meditation on, or his wrestling with, the question in this chapter of whether a bastard can be in the Church without Christ. And he comes to that point where he says, "No. A bastard can't be part of the Church without Christ because the word 'bastard' would just simply not mean anything, so you can't say that." And it takes him a long time to wrestle with this, as Sabbath Lily talks to him, and he comes to this moment. And so, when he comes to that conclusion, he also rejects her advances. It's coming to that conclusion that so preoccupies him that he rejects her advances. Sabbath, if she had been able to seduce him--I want to suggest; O'Connor, I think, is suggesting--would have drawn him back into the realm of belief.What leads Haze on through this scene is that blinding white cloud. Here it is as they decide whether to turn off the road and enter the field where Sabbath will try to complete this seduction: The blinding white cloud was a little ahead of them, moving to the left. "Why don't you turn down that dirt road?" she asked. The highway forked off on to a clay road and he turned on to it. It was hilly and shady and the country showed to advantage on either side. One side was dense honeysuckle. The other was open and slanted down to a telescoped view of the city. The white cloud was directly in front of them. So, here the city is at a distance. We're in a pastoral space, a beautiful space, and this is all sort of under the guidance of this white cloud, this blinding white cloud. And of course, I don't have to say to you, I'm sure, "Blinding white cloud? Why is this the blinding white cloud?" Well, this is all about blinding, this book. It's about Asa's failed blinding of himself for Christ, and it's about, in the end, finally, Haze's successful blinding: a kind of blinding that, I would argue, we're meant to understand as a final clarity of vision, that to be blind is to see properly. So, the blinding white cloud has this clichéd God imagery--the curls and beard--in the beginning. It takes on this leading aspect in the middle of the chapter, and then, if you look at the end, this is at the very end of the chapter, a few pages on. This is after the man from the filling station has given Haze some gas and not charged him for it, a very unusual act of kindness in this novel. Haze drove on, leaving the man who has helped him: "The blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long, thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction." There's a perfect circularity to this symbolism. It's at the beginning; it changes in the middle, and arrives at the end. By the end it has changed from the clichéd image of the Christian God to a less farcically clichéd image of the Holy Spirit: the bird ascending, the white bird. It's moving in the opposite direction, suggesting that Haze in this scene has missed his chance. It was presiding over Sabbath Lily's attempts to seduce, and he was so absorbed in the question of whether a bastard could be in the Church without Christ that he doesn't follow her into the sin that would, in fact, be the catalyst for his redemption. And so, the cloud departs at the end. I have to say: this is incredibly heavy handed. If we think about the religious reading, and think about religious symbolism, this is hardly innovative. And I would suggest to you that O'Connor…well, I don't know. Did O'Connor know that it was heavy handed? It don't know. What is true about O'Connor is that she was trained to write stories like this. Flannery O'Connor--and this is, again, that context coming in--Flannery O'Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, a very prestigious writing program. Even then, it was a very prestigious writing program. There is a peculiarity for writing in the second half of the twentieth century, and here I'm drawing on another critic, from UCLA; his name is Mark McGurl. He has argued that what is historically novel about this period is that writers have consistently been located in universities. They have been trained at universities; they have taught at universities; they have gone to creative writing programs embedded within universities; they have held visiting positions; they've done readings; and they have written books whose primary readership is around a seminar table or in a lecture hall like this. His argument is that a kind of formal structure, characterized by the principle of unity, a formal structure that was (in that simplified version) at the very heart of the most powerful critical movement of the early twentieth century, and that is the New Criticism. The New Criticism is a way of reading that has its roots in high modernism, and it emphasizes the writer's--usually the poet's--ability to create a beautiful, whole, consistent, internally structured literary object that stands outside of history in a certain way, that is autonomous. And so, this view of the artwork--probably you have experienced it if you've taken other English classes, and in fact I've been producing it for you in my readings--this mode of reading looks for those tropes that unify a work. It looks for that circularity that I've described in this little chapter, tracks the symbols. There's more to it than that. It also looks for ambiguity. O'Connor says about her symbols that they should "keep on deepening," that they should never be reduced to a simple equation, X equals Y, cloud equals God, that they should have a sense of mystery about them. Well, this was part and parcel of what a New Critical reading practice would look like, and it's still extremely powerful in our classrooms. We do a lot of close readings. Now, we put our close readings to different kinds of uses, and Mark McGurl has done readings of lots of different novelists that reveal (or, his argument is that they reveal) how the writing program and its tenets have shaped contemporary fiction in a profound way. The implications of this are large and important for how we understand the period. So what you see in O'Connor is, to borrow a phrase from McGurl's title of his essay on this, "Flannery O'Connor, B.A., M.F.A.," the product of a mid-century American institution, the writing program. I would suggest -- and this is the third kind of context I want to give you today -- that the three I've given you--O'Connor's letters, her theological commitments, southern context, southern social context, the New Critical writing program, the institutionalization of modernism--these things are not in fact separable from one another. Because in my own work, I'm writing a book on religion and fiction since 1960; now, this is a little bit before this period. But what I have discovered--what has really been known for a long time, but nobody's really made much of it--is that the New Criticism is deeply religious in and of itself. New Critical writers of theory: many of them were, in fact, Catholic, and many of them were southern. There are social and religious elements that infuse their literary theory, so that to argue that the poem is this unified whole, and that what you should do with the poem is show its wholeness-- read it in order to see its wholeness, see how it embodies a formal beauty, a formal order--this looks very much like the kind of metaphysical order that I was drawing out of the Catholic version of what O'Connor's doing in her novels, her version of what she's doing in the novels, where you have that transcendent sky, and there is this sense of an ordering that seeps down in to the material world, that moment when Haze thinks that he's somehow seeing broken-off pieces of something that once happened to him. There is this latent order everywhere. And, for O'Connor, it's part of this moral religious order, this redemptive order, that Catholicism is for her. The New Criticism sits in a kind of deep analogy to that way of thinking about religion. That's why, I think, O'Connor found it so comfortable to learn and practice the New Critical tenets of formal construction of the literary. That's why she produced story after story after story that can be read in these formal ways with these symbols that accrue meaning and deepen and change over the course of the novel or the story. So her commitment to the New Criticism: McGurl argues that O'Connor found the New Criticism comfortable because Catholicism had taught her to be obedient, that it was a matter of obedience to a formula that allowed her to produce what she produced on the page. I would argue it differently: that there is something, in fact, religious about the New Criticism that made it particularly comfortable for O'Connor to inhabit. Now, I want to conclude by pointing you towards Lolita. Today the question of torturing your own characters has come up. Yaeger calls it, with respect to O'Connor, an "aesthetics of torture." I want you to think hard about whether this is a way of understanding Lolita when we read it. So, have that in your mind, and think about the ways that violence is or is not presented to us in Lolita, the way that we're asked either to attend to language or to see through it. Ask those questions about whether we're being asked to identify with certain characters or not. How is the distance between reader and character, between reader and what's on the page, how is that mediated? How is that policed? How is that structured? So, think about that as you start to read Lolita. I'm going to stop there.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_6_Biblical_Narrative_The_Stories_of_the_Patriarchs_Genesis_1236.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: So last time we started discussing the historical merits of the biblical stories of the patriarchs and the matriarchs. These are contained in Genesis 12 through 50. Scholarly opinion on this matter is seriously divided; something you need to know. Some scholars will point to internal biblical evidence for the authenticity and the antiquity of the patriarchal stories. So for example, Nahum Sarna argues that representing Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as foreigners and strangers in Canaan is hardly a convenient tradition for a people who are seeking to establish their claim to its homeland. And if this myth of origins were the fabrication of a later writer, then surely they would have written the story in such a way as to give their ancestors a less tenuous hold or claim, connection, to the land. He also notes that some of the material in the patriarchal stories would be offensive to later religious sensibilities. Jacob is married to two sisters simultaneously. That is something that is explicitly forbidden in the book of Deuteronomy. Wouldn't a later writer have cleaned up this ancestral record if this were in fact something composed at a later period? Also, he notes that the representation of inter-ethnic relationships in the patriarchal stories does not accord with the reality of a later period. So for example, the Arameans are considered close kin to the Israelites. "A wandering Aramean was my father," it says. And spouses are always chosen--daughters for sons are always chosen by going back to the Aramean people and choosing someone from close kin. But in the period of the monarchy--that's going to be after 1000--in the period of the monarchy, there were very poor relations with the Arameans. They were bitter enemies. So why, according to scholars like Sarna, would a biblical author from that period portray the Arameans as close kin, unless they had some older tradition, established tradition that reflected that fact? So Sarna and other scholars hold that the patriarchal traditions are not entirely fabricated retrojections from a later period. They contain authentic memories of an earlier historic situation. The patriarchs, it's maintained, were semi-nomads. They lived in tents. From time to time, they wandered to Egypt or Mesopotamia often in search of pasture for their animals. And various details of their language, their customs, their laws, their religion, it's argued, seem to fit well into the period of the Late Bronze Age. I've given you the periods at the top of the chart: early Bronze Age; middle Bronze Age from about 2100 to 1550; we date the late Bronze age from about 1550 until 1200--the introduction of iron and the beginning of the Iron Age in 1200. Prior to that, the Bronze Age, which is divided into these three periods. So that's on the one hand: scholars who see these stories as reflecting historical memories and having a certain authenticity to them. Then on the other hand, at the other extreme, you have scholars who see the patriarchal stories as entirely fabricated retrojections of a much later age. And they vary significantly as to when they think these stories were written: anywhere from the period of the monarchy all the way down to the fourth century, some of them. Works published in the 1970s by authors like Thomas Thompson, Jon Van Seters, take the position that these stories are filled with anachronisms, their chronologies are confused. These anachronisms and confused chronologies in the patriarchal stories are the rule rather than the exception in their view, and they are evidence of a very late date of composition. So you have these two extremes based on the internal evidence of the Bible itself. But you also have the same two extreme positions reflected in the discipline of archaeology. In the early days, archaeology of the region tended toward credulity. And it was explicitly referred to as biblical archaeology--an interesting name, because it suggests that the archaeologists were out there searching for evidence that would verify the details of the biblical text. We're doing biblical archaeology; archeology in support of the biblical text. I mentioned last time William F. Albright, an American archaeologist. He believed strongly that archaeological findings were important external evidence for the basic historicity and authenticity of, for example, the patriarchal stories. And certainly some archaeological findings were quite remarkable. Scholars of the Albright school pointed to texts and clay tablets that were discovered in second millennium sites. So you see down on the bottom the second millennium BCE, obviously going down to 1000; first millennium: 1000 to 0. The second millennium really wasn't longer than the first millennium, it's just that I ran out of board! But specifically sites like Nuzi and Mari--I've placed them in their approximate places on the timeline--Nuzi and Mari are sites that are near the area that's identified in the Bible as being the ancestral home of the patriarchs in Mesopotamia or on the highway from there to Canaan. These texts and clay tablets were believed to illuminate many biblical customs and institutions. So in the Nuzi texts from about the middle of the second millennium, we learn of the custom of adoption for purposes of inheritance, particularly the adoption of a slave in the absence of offspring. Biblical scholars got very excited about this. They point to the biblical passage in which Abraham expresses to God his fear that his servant, Eliezer, will have to be the one to inherit God's promise because Abraham has no son. Also according to the Nuzi texts, if a wife is barren, she is to provide a maidservant as a substitute to bear her husband's children. And this is something that happens with three out of the four matriarchs, who are afflicted with infertility: Sarah, Rachel and Leah. There are other parallels in family and marriage law that correlate with certain biblical details. In the eighteenth century, the texts from Mari. They contain names that correspond to Israelite names: Benjamin, Laban, Ishmael. So biblical scholars, buoyed up by these correlations between the archaeological finds, the texts found by archaeologists, and biblical stories, asserted that the patriarchs were real persons and their customs and their legal practices and their social institutions could be verified against the backdrop of the second millennium as revealed by archaeological findings. However, it's been argued that some of these ancient sources have been misread or misinterpreted in an effort to find parallels with biblical institutions. A lot of gap-filling is going on to make these texts look as though they correspond to biblical institutions. And skeptics like Thomas Thompson and John Van Seters point out that many of the biblical customs which are paralleled in Ancient Near Eastern sources were still alive and well down in the first millennium. So reference to these customs in the patriarchal stories really doesn't tell us anything about dating. They could derive from anywhere in the second or first millennium. And for other reasons, they think it is much more reasonable to date the composition of these stories to the first millennium, in some cases, quite late first millennium. Furthermore, over time, many discrepancies between the archeological record and the biblical text became apparent. Increasingly, practitioners of what was now being termed Palestinian archaeology, or Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, or archaeology of the Levant, rather than biblical archaeology--some of these archaeologists grew disinterested in pointing out the correlations between the archaeological data and the biblical stories or in trying to explain away any discrepancies in order to keep the biblical text intact. They began to focus on the best possible reconstruction of the history of the region on the basis of the archaeological evidence regardless of whether or not those results would confirm the biblical text, the biblical account. In fact, this reconstruction often does contradict biblical claims. We're going to see this quite clearly in a few weeks when we consider the book of Joshua and its story of Israel's lighting invasion of the land of Canaan. The archaeological record just doesn't support such a story. Still, many people have clung to the idea of the Bible as a historically accurate document, many times out of ideological necessity. Many fear that if the historical information in the Bible isn't true, then the Bible is unreliable as a source of religious instruction or inspiration. And that's something they don't want to give up. This is all really a very unfortunate and heavy burden to place on this fascinating little library of writings from late antiquity. People who equate truth with historical fact will certainly end up viewing the Bible dismissively, as a naive and unsophisticated web of lies, since it is replete with elements that cannot be literally true. But to view it this way is to make a genre mistake. Shakespeare's Hamlet, while set in Denmark, an actual place, is not historical fact. But that doesn't make it a naive and unsophisticated web of lies, because we accept when we read or watch Hamlet that it is not a work of historiography, a work of writing about history. It is a work of literature. And in deference to that genre and its conventions, we know and accept that the truths it conveys are not those of historical fact, but are social, political, ethical, existential truths. And the Bible deserves at least the same courteous attention to its genre. The Bible doesn't pretend to be and it shouldn't be read as what we would call "objective history"--and see the scare quotes, you should be looking up here so you'll see the scare quotes: "objective history"--in other words perhaps, a bare narration of events. To be sure, we do find that some events that are mentioned in the biblical texts correlate to events that we know of from sources outside the Bible. So for example, Pharaoh Shishak's invasion of Palestine in 924. This is mentioned in the biblical text, it's mentioned in the Egyptian sources--there's a nice correlation. The destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722, the capture of Jerusalem in 597, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 586--these are all recorded in the biblical text and they are in Assyrian and Babylonian records as well; as well as other events from the period of the monarchy. So as a result, because of these correlations, many scholars are willing to accept the general biblical chronology of the period from the monarchy on: starting about 1000 on, they accept that general chronology; the sequence of kings and battles and so on. But ultimately, it is a mistake, I think, to read the Bible as a historical record. The Bible is literature. Its composition is influenced and determined by literary conventions and goals. Now, of course we all know that there is no such thing as purely objective history anyway. We have no direct access to past events. We only ever have mediated access in material: archaeological remains that yield information to us only after a process of interpretation, or in texts that are themselves already an interpretation of events and must still be interpreted by us. The biblical narrative is an interpretation of events that were held by centuries' long tradition to be meaningful in the life of the people. And to the biblical narrators, these events known perhaps from ancient oral traditions pointed to a divine purpose. The narrative is told to illustrate that basic proposition. The biblical narrators are not trying to write history as a modern historian might try to write history. They're concerned to show us what they believed to be the finger of God in the events and experiences of the Israelite people. One scholar, Marc Brettler, whose name I've also put up here, Marc Brettler notes that in the Bible, the past is refracted through a theological lens if not a partisan political, ideological lens . But then all ancient historical narrative is written that way, and one could argue all contemporary historical narrative is written that way. With due caution, we can still learn things from texts ancient and modern. We can still learn things about Israel's history from the biblical sources, just as classical historians have learned a great deal about classical history, Greece and Rome, despite or through the tendentious, partisan and ideologically motivated writings of classical writers. So our discussion of the patriarchal stories is going to bear all of these considerations in mind. We're not going to be asking whether these stories are historically accurate. I'm going to assume they are not. And once we rid ourselves of the burden of historicity, we're free to appreciate the stories for what they are: powerful, powerful narratives that must be read against the literary conventions of their time, and whose truths are social, political, moral and existential. So what are these truths? We'll begin to answer this question--begin to answer this question, you'll spend the rest of your life finishing the process of answering this question. But we'll begin by identifying some, by no means all, of the major themes of Genesis 12 through 50. And we're going to begin with the story of Terah and his family. This is a story that's marked by the themes of divine command and divine promise. Now, the biblical writer represents the emigration of Terah's son Abram, whose name will be changed to Abraham, so sometimes I'll say one and sometimes the other. But they represent this emigration as divinely commanded. It's the first step in a journey that will lead ultimately to the formation of a nation in covenant with God. First we meet our cast of characters. This is in Genesis 11:27 on through chapter 12:3. Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begot Lot. Haran died in the lifetime of his father Terah, in his native land, Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abram and Nahor took them wives, the name of Abram's wife being Sarai [who will become Sarah]; and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah.... And Sarai was barren; she had no child. Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai, his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; [getting confused yet?] and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. And the days of Terah were 205 years: then Terah died in Haran. Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred, and your father's house, to the land that I will show you." I will make of you a great nation, And I will bless you; And make your name great So that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you, I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves [source unknown]. So Abram is commanded to go forth from his home and family to a location to be named later, a location that remains for now unspecified. And this is a fact that has caused commentators for centuries to praise Abram for his faith. That is a virtue--faith is a virtue--that is connected or associated with Abram/Abraham in other biblical contexts and also in later religious tradition. He is seen as the paradigm, the paradigmatic exemplar of a man of faith. The command is coupled with a promise: "I will make of you," God says, "a great nation, and I will bless you." But, we have just learned in chapter 11 that Sarai is barren. It was a seemingly irrelevant detail, whose import is suddenly clear. How clever of the narrator to plant the information we need to realize that Abram has to take God's word on faith, and how perfectly the narrator sets up the dramatic tension and the great confusion that is going to run through the next several chapters, because Abram doesn't seem to understand that the progeny will come from Sarai. You have to read these stories as if you're reading them for the first time. You have the great disadvantage of knowing the ending. It's a terrible disadvantage. You have to discipline yourself to read these stories as if you don't know what's coming next and put yourself in the position of the character. Abram's just been told he's going to be the father of great nations and he has a barren wife. He doesn't seem to understand that the progeny is going to come from Sarai, and why should he think that it would? God wasn't specific. He simply says, "I shall make of you a great nation." He says nothing of Sarai, and after all she's barren. So Abram may be forgiven for thinking that perhaps some other mate awaits him. And so he surrenders her easily to other men, to Pharaoh of Egypt immediately following this scene in chapter 11; immediately after that, in Egypt, he surrenders her. He willingly accepts Sarai's offer of a handmaid, Hagar, to bear a child Ishmael, in Sarai's place. How cleverly the narrator leads us with Abram to pin our hopes on Ishmael as the child of the promise. And how cleverly is the carpet pulled out from under our feet in Genesis 17, when God finally, perhaps impatiently, talks specifics: No, I meant that you would father a great nation through Sarah. And Abraham, as he's now called, is incredulous: "She's past the age of bearing, Lord." And he laughs. And God is silent. And in that silence I always imagine that this light goes on: this click, this awful, sickening light. And Abraham says, O, that Ishmael might live in your sight! Or something like that. I think I probably misquoted. "O, that Ishmael might live by your favor"-- sorry, that's the actual words. But God is determined. Sarah will bear Isaac and with him God will make an everlasting covenant. All of this drama through the first five chapters made possible by a seemingly irrelevant line in 11:30, a sort of throw-away datum in a family list that one might gloss over: "and Sarai was barren; she had no child." And that's the power and beauty of biblical narrative. You have to get yourself into the mindset to read it that way. A few verses later, when Abram and his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot and those traveling with them all reach Canaan, God makes an additional promise. He says in verse 7, "I will assign this land to your offspring." So in just a few short verses--we've just gone from 12, we've just gone seven verses now into chapter 12--in just a few short verses, the writer has established the three-fold promise that underpins the biblical drama that's about to unfold: the promise of progeny, of blessing, and of land. And that establishes a narrative tension for the stories of the patriarchs, but also for the story of the nation of Israel in subsequent books. Because in the patriarchal stories, there is this suspenseful vacillation between episodes that threaten to extinguish God's promises and episodes that reaffirm them. Israelite matriarchs seem to be a singularly infertile group. The lines of inheritance defy our expectations: it doesn't seem to go to the person that we think that it's going to go to. The process by which the promise is fulfilled is halting and torturous at times. We're going to look at one example of an episode in which the promise is affirmed--or confirmed, reaffirmed--and an example of an episode in which the promise is supremely threatened. In Genesis 15, God's promise to Abraham is formalized in a ritual ceremony. God and Abraham are said to "cut" a covenant--that's the verb that's used in making a covenant--and "covenant" is a central biblical concept. The Hebrew word for covenant, which I've written over here is berit. It means vow, promise, perhaps contract, agreement or pact. Parallels to the biblical covenant have been pointed out by many Ancient Near Eastern historians and scholars. We have in our Ancient Near Eastern texts--and we'll come back to these in more detail when we get into Exodus--we have in our Ancient Near Eastern texts, two types, two main types of covenant: the suzerainty covenant and the parity covenant. As you can imagine from the name, a suzerainty covenant is a covenant in which a superior party, a suzerain, dictates the terms of a political treaty usually, and an inferior party obeys them. The arrangement primarily serves the interest of the suzerain, and not the vassal or the subject. In a parity covenant, you have really two equal parties who both agree to observe the provisions of some kind of treaty. Now, there are four major covenants in the Hebrew Bible. They're initiated by Yahweh as expressions of divine favor and graciousness. And two of these appear in Genesis. We've already seen one, the Noahide covenant; and the Abrahamic covenant, which we're looking at now. Now, the Noahide covenant in Genesis 9:1-17 is universal in scope. It encompasses all life on earth. It stresses the sanctity of life and in this covenant, God promises never to destroy all life again. By contrast, the Abrahamic covenant is a covenant with a single individual. So we've gone from a covenant with all of humanity to a covenant with a single individual. And it looks very much like an Ancient Near Eastern suzerainty covenant. God appears as a suzerain. He's making a land grant to a favored subject, which is very often how these work. And there's an ancient ritual that ratifies the oath. In general, in this kind of covenant, the parties to the oath would pass between the split carcass of a sacrificial animal as if to say that they agree they will suffer the same fate as this animal if they violate the covenant. In Genesis 15, Abraham cuts sacrificial animals in two and God, but only God, passes between the two halves. The striking thing about the Abrahamic covenant is its unilateral character. Only God seems to be obligated by the covenant, obligated to fulfill the promise that he's made. Abraham doesn't appear to have any obligation in return. And so in this case, it is the subject, Abraham, and not the suzerain, God, who is benefited by this covenant, and that's a complete reversal of our expectation. Note also that the biblical writer goes out of his way to provide a moral justification for this grant of land to Israel. In the biblical writer's view, God is the owner of the land, and so he is empowered to set conditions or residency requirements for those who would reside in it, like a landlord. The current inhabitants of the land are polluting it, filling it with bloodshed and idolatry. And when the land becomes so polluted, completely polluted, it will spew out its inhabitants. That process, God says, isn't complete; so Israel is going to have to wait. The lease isn't up yet, and the Israelites will have to wait. He says in Genesis 15:16, the iniquity of the Amorites will not be fulfilled until then. So here, and in other places in the Bible, it's clear that God's covenant with Israel is not due to any special merit of the Israelites or favoritism: this is actually said explicitly in Deuteronomy. Rather, God is seeking replacement tenants who are going to follow the moral rules of residence that he has established for his land. Genesis 17 seems to be a second version of the same covenant. This time, scholars attribute it to P--the Priestly writer, the P source. There are some notable differences, emphasizing themes that were important to the Priestly writer. God adds to the promises in Genesis 17 that a line of kings will come forth from Abraham, and then, that Abraham and his male descendents be circumcised as a perpetual sign of the covenant. So here there is some obligation for Abraham. "Thus shall my covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact" . Failure to circumcise is tantamount to breaking the covenant, according to the text. Now, circumcision is known in many of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. It's generally a rite of passage that was performed at the time of puberty rather than a ritual that was performed at birth, eight days after birth. So that's unusual in the Israelite context to have it occur with infants. But as is the case with so many biblical rituals or institutions or laws, whatever their original meaning or significance in the ancient world, whether this was originally a puberty rite or a fertility rite of some kind, the ritual has been suffused with a new meaning in our texts. So circumcision is here infused with a new meaning: it becomes a sign of God's eternal covenant with Abraham and his seed. These texts are typical of affirmations of God's promise. But despite them, the patriarchal episodes or stories are peppered with episodes in which the realization of the promise and the blessing is threatened. In chapter 12, Abram surrenders his wife Sarai to Pharaoh in order to advance his position among the Egyptians, plausibly not knowing that it is Sarai who is supposed to bear the child of God's promise. As I said, that's left unclear until chapter 17, when God says: No, no, no, you misunderstood. I meant Sarai. God intervenes, however, and returns Sarai to Abraham. Sarai's barren state really casts a shadow over the promise from the very beginning of the story of Abraham and Sarah. Desperate, Sarah takes advantage of the custom that is attested in the ancient world of giving her Egyptian handmaid, Hagar, to Abraham to bear a child in her stead. But Hagar apparently lords this over her mistress, and an embittered Sarah forces her from the house. Hagar and her child Ishmael cry out to God in the wilderness and God assures Hagar that Ishmael, who's regarded by Muslims as the ancestor of the Arabs and the inheritor of the blessing and the promise, that Ishmael shall become a great nation too. But really the greatest threat to the promise comes from God himself, and that is in Genesis 22 when God tests Abraham with the most horrible of demands. The child of the promise, Isaac, who was born miraculously to Sarah when she was no longer of child-bearing age, is to be sacrificed to God by Abraham's own hand. And the story of the binding of Isaac is one of the most powerful, most riveting stories not only in the Bible but, some have claimed, in all of world literature. The story is a marvelous exemplar of the biblical narrator's literary skill and artistry. This week's assigned reading includes selections from Robert Alter's book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, which I heartily recommend to read in its entirety. Alter describes the extreme economy of biblical narrative, economy in the description of physical settings and character as well as speech. Rarely does the narrator comment on or explain a character's actions or thoughts or motives. There's only the barest minimum of dialogue. And on the few occasions that the Bible will violate this principle of verbal economy--for example if two characters converse at length--you can be sure it's significant. You'll want to pay extra attention. The biblical narrator's concealing of details and the motives of the characters, God and Abraham and Isaac, leads to ambiguity, and the possibility of very many interpretations. And that is a striking characteristic of biblical prose: its suppression of detail, its terse, laconic style. That makes the little that is given so powerful, so "fraught with background" to use the phrase of Eric Auerbach, whose article you are also to read this week. Auerbach contrasts the literary style of Homer with the biblical writer's style specifically in connection with the story of Genesis 22. The ambiguities and the indeterminacy of this story make it one of the most interpreted texts of all time. Why is God testing Abraham? Does God really desire such a sacrifice? What is Abraham thinking and feeling as he walks--for three days, already--walks with his son, bearing the wood and the fire for the sacrifice? Does he fully intend to obey this command, to annul the covenantal promise with his own hand? Or does he trust in God to intervene? Or is this a paradox of faith? Does Abraham intend faithfully to obey, all the while trusting faithfully that God's promise will nevertheless be fulfilled? What's Isaac thinking? Does he understand what is happening? How old is he? Is this a little boy or a grown man? Is he prepared to obey? He sees the wood and the firestone in his father's hand. Clearly a sacrifice is planned. He's got three days to figure that out. He asks his father: Where is the sheep for the burnt offering? Does he know the answer even as he asks? Does he hear the double entendre in his father's very simple and solemn reply, which in the unpunctuated Hebrew might be read, "The lord will provide the sheep for the offering: my son." Does he struggle when he's bound? Does he acquiesce? The beauty of the narrative is its sheer economy. It offers so little that we as readers are forced to imagine the innumerable possibilities. We play out the drama in countless ways, with an Abraham who's reluctant and an Isaac who's ignorant. Or an Abraham who's eager to serve his God to the point of sacrificing his own son, and an Isaac who willingly bares his neck to the knife. Read the story one verse, one phrase, one word at a time. There are so few words that you can be sure that they were chosen with care. You'll be looking at Genesis 22 closely in your section discussions. And as you read the story, remember its larger context: God's promise to make Abraham the father of a great people through his son, Isaac. It's this context, this promise, that gives the story its special power and pathos. But of course the story can be contextualized in a number of different ways. For example, one can read the story in its historical context of child sacrifice in the Ancient Near East. Although child sacrifice was adamantly condemned in various later layers of the Bible, there's plenty of evidence that it was probably practiced in different quarters throughout the period of the monarchy. Does Genesis 22 assume or reject the practice of child sacrifice? Some scholars argue that a core story promoting child sacrifice has been edited so as to serve as a polemic against child sacrifice now in its final form. Do you think so? Can you see the seams and feel the narrative tensions that would support such a claim? Does the story pull in more than one direction? Or we can read the story in its immediate literary context. Abraham has just permitted the expulsion of Ishmael, the only beloved son of Hagar. And now God demands that he sacrifice his beloved son. What might he be trying to teach Abraham? Is this a trial in the sense of a test or a trial in the sense of a punishment? The Hebrew term can tolerate both meanings. Or Genesis 22 can be contextualized another way. And at this point, we need to backtrack a little bit to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is in Genesis 18 and 19, to contextualize the story a little bit, in terms of Abraham's character development. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in Genesis 18 and 19, Yahweh tells Abraham of his plan to investigate reports of the wickedness of the city, the Canaanite city of Sodom--its violence, its cruelty to strangers--and to destroy it. And Abraham's reaction comes as something of a surprise. He objects to the plan, and he starts to argue with God. "Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?" That's in Genesis 18:23-25. The question is of course rhetorical. Abraham is evidently quite confident that God would not act unjustly, would not destroy the innocent along with the wicked. Indeed, Abraham is banking on the fact that God is merciful and will overlook evil for the sake of righteous individuals. And so Abraham haggles with God for the lives of the innocent: "...Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" And the Lord answered, "If I find within the city of Sodom fifty innocent ones, I will forgive the whole place for their sake." Abraham spoke up, saying, "Here I venture to speak to my Lord, I who am but dust and ashes: What if the fifty innocent should lack five? Will You destroy the whole city for want of the five?" And He answered, "I will not destroy if I find forty-five there." But he spoke to Him again, and said, "What if forty should be found there?" And He answered, "I will not do it, for the sake of the forty." And he said, "Let not my Lord be angry if I go on: What if thirty should be found there?" And in this way, Abraham manages to whittle the number down to ten: "And God answers, 'I will not destroy for the sake of the ten.'" But ten innocent men are not found. The narrator makes that very clear. He takes pains to point out that the mob that comes to abuse the two divine visitors includes all the people to the last man: very clear statement. So Sodom and its four sister cities of the plain, around the Dead Sea, are destroyed. But out of consideration for Abraham, Abraham's nephew Lot is saved. Genesis 19:29: "God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval." Now, this text is often identified as the source for the doctrine of the merit of the righteous, which is the idea that someone who is not righteous is spared for the sake of, or on account of, the accrued merit of one who is righteous. So Lot himself is no prize, but he is spared on Abraham's account. This is an idea that will have repercussions in later biblical thought. In this story, we see Abraham rising to the defense of a thoroughly wicked and reprehensible group of people, arguing quite pointedly that the innocent should never be wantonly destroyed. Can this be the same Abraham who a few chapters later, when told to slaughter his only son, his perfectly innocent and presumably deeply loved son, not only makes no objection, but rises early in the morning to get started on the long journey to the sacrificial site? What are we to make of the juxtaposition of these two stories? Which represents behavior more desirable to God? Before leaving this story, I just want to make two quick comments. First, I've included in your reading packet, and it's uploaded on the website, a very interesting article by a writer who relates her efforts since childhood to understand why Lot's wife should have been turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for looking back as she fled from her burning home. It's not a biblical scholar, but someone who's simply reacting to the text. Was this, in fact, a punishment, or was it a mercy? Second, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has often been cited as a biblical condemnation of homosexuality, as if the Sodomites were condemned to destruction because of homosexual behavior. In fact the very terms "sodomy" and "sodomize" represent this interpretation. But the idea that the fundamental sin of Sodom was homosexual behavior is not present in the Hebrew Bible. It appears only in later documents. It's found in the Christian New Testament, in the book of Jude 7:2; the book of Peter 2:6-10; and subsequent interpretations. The Sodomites, like the generation of the Flood, stand condemned by the "outcry against them," a particular Hebrew word that's used to refer to outcry. It's a term that's generally associated with the appeal of victims of violent oppression, bloodshed, injustice. God hears this outcry of victims, against the Sodomites: the Sodomites' violation of the unwritten desert law of hospitality to strangers, their violent desire to abuse and gang rape the strangers that they should have been sheltering. This is merely one instance of a pattern of violent brutality. Now, Isaac, who is the child of God's promise to Abraham, is often described as the most invisible of the patriarchs or the most passive of the patriarchs. Perhaps his passive acceptance of his father's effort to sacrifice him serves as the key to the biblical narrator's perception of his character. By contrast, his wife Rebekah is often described as the most determined and energetic of the matriarchs. She runs to extend hospitality to a stranger. She quickly draws water for him. She quickly draws water for his camels and waters them all. She seems to run everywhere, and she does all this not knowing that the man she greets is the servant of Abraham who has come to seek a wife for his master's son, Isaac. Rebekah herself personally, accepts the offer of an unknown bridegroom in a far away land and overrides the urgings of her mother and her brother to delay her departure. No, she says, I'm ready to go. I'll go now. There's a very moving conclusion to the betrothal story. We read in Genesis 24:67 that Isaac brought Rebekah "into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her and thus found comfort after his mother's death." But like the other matriarchs, Rebekah is barren. So Isaac pleads with the lord for a child on her behalf. And Rebekah becomes pregnant with twins. The older child is Esau--Esau will be the father of the Edomites--and the younger is Jacob, who will be the father of the Israelites. Now, Jacob is the most fully developed, the most colorful and the most complex of the patriarchs. Jacob has long been identified by commentators as the classic trickster, a type that we know from folklore. Marc Brettler has described the Jacob stories as a kind of morality tale, the main message of which is "trick and you shall be tricked". Jacob tricks his brother out of his birthright, and in turn is tricked by his brother-in-law, his wife and later his own sons. How much of Jacob's trickery is really necessary? After all, Rebekah, who suffers tremendous pain during her pregnancy, is told by God that the twins who are fighting and struggling for priority in her womb will become two nations, the older of which will serve the younger. That happens in Genesis 25:23. "Two nations are in your womb; two separate peoples shall issue from your body; one people shall be mightier than the other; and the older shall serve the younger." And indeed, the real life nations of Israel and Edom were long-time enemies--Esau is the father of the Edomites according to the biblical texts--and for a time, Edom was subjugated by Israel, according to the biblical texts, under King David. Some scholars, like Nahum Sarna have argued that this announcement, that the older shall serve the younger is the narrator's way of establishing for the reader that the younger child, Jacob, is the son who will inherit the divine blessing, and that that then raises serious questions about Rebekah and Jacob's morally dubious efforts to wrest the blessing and birthright from Esau. Are we supposed to be comforted by the fact that they are fulfilling a divine plan? Are we supposed to conclude that it's alright to fulfill a divine plan by any means, fair or foul? Or are we to conclude, as Sarna and others suggest, that Jacob's possession of the birthright was predetermined, it was disengaged from all of his acts of trickery? And if so, then Jacob's efforts are indicative of a deceitful and narcissistic personality? He takes advantage of Esau's hunger, offering him a pot of lentil stew in exchange for the birthright. He and Rebekah plot to deceive Isaac in his dotage into bestowing the blessing of the firstborn on Jacob instead of Esau. So perhaps by informing us that Jacob had been chosen from the womb, the narrator is able to paint a portrait of Jacob at this stage in his life as grasping and faithless: a great contrast to his grandfather, Abraham. Now, Jacob's poor treatment of his brother, Esau, earns him Esau's enmity and Jacob finds it expedient to leave Canaan and remain at the home of his mother's brother, Laban. On his way east, back to Mesopotamia from Canaan, where Laban resides, in Mesopotamia, Jacob has an encounter with God. At a place called Luz, Jacob lies down to sleep, resting his head on a stone. And he has a dream in which he sees a ladder. The ladder's feet are on the earth, it reaches to heaven and there are angels ascending and descending on the ladder. In the dream, God appears to Jacob and reaffirms the Abrahamic or patriarchal covenant. He promises land, posterity and in addition, Jacob's own safety, his own personal safety until he returns to the land of Israel. Jacob is stunned: we read in Genesis 28:16-17: "Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.' / Shaken, he said, 'How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.'" The stone that served as his pillow, he then sets up as a cultic pillar, some sort of memorial stone. He sanctifies the stone with oil and he renames the site Bethel, Beyt El, which means the house of God. But it's significant that despite this direct vision, Jacob, so unlike Abraham, is still reluctant to rely on God and his promise. And he makes a conditional vow: If God remains with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father's house--the Lord shall be my God. And this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God's abode; and of all that You give me, I will set aside a tithe for You. So where once God had tested Abraham, it seems now that Jacob is almost testing God. If you can do all this, fine: you can be my God. Well, Jacob spends some 14 years in the household of his uncle, his mother's brother, Laban. And Jacob meets Laban's two daughters: Leah is the elder daughter and Rachel is the younger. And he soon loves Rachel. He agrees to serve Laban for seven years for the hand of the younger daughter Rachel. When the seven years pass, Laban deceives Jacob and gives him the elder daughter, Leah. Jacob, the trickster, is furious at having been tricked himself, and in much the same way--an older and a younger sibling, one disguised as the other or wearing the covering of the other, just as he tricked his own father. But he is willing to give seven years more service for Rachel. Rachel, Leah, and their two handmaidens will conceive one daughter and 12 sons, from whom will come the 12 tribes of Israel. But it's the two sons of Rachel, the beloved wife, the two sons of Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin, who are the most beloved to Jacob. Jacob determines finally to leave Laban and return to Canaan. There's one final remarkable incident in Jacob's life that occurs on his return journey. It's an incident that most readers associate with a significant transformation in his character, and that is Jacob's nighttime struggle with a mysterious figure, who in some way is representative of God. This struggle occurs as he is about to cross the river Jabbok and reconcile himself with his former rival and enemy, Esau. Jacob has sent everyone on ahead: his wives, his children, his household, his possessions. He's standing alone at the river. And we read, Genesis 32:25-33.: … a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he wrenched Jacob's hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for dawn is breaking." But he answered, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." Said the other, "What is your name?" He replied, "Jacob." Said he, "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men, and have prevailed." Jacob asked, "Pray tell me your name." But he said, "You must not ask my name!" And he took leave of him there. So Jacob named the place Peniel, meaning, "I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel, limping on his hip. Many scholars, Michael Coogan and others, see this story as an Israelite adaptation of popular stories of river gods who threaten those who wish to cross a river, or trolls or ogres who guard rivers and have to be defeated by a hero, making the river safe to cross. In its Israelite version, however, this story is historicized. It serves an etiological function. It's associated with one particular character at a historical time and it serves to explain why the Israelites abstained from eating the sciatic nerve of an animal even to this day. We also learn how Peniel gets its name. We learn how Israel gets his name. Names are an important theme of this story. In the biblical context, names encapsulate the essence of their bearer. Naming something or knowing the name of something gives one control over, or power over, that thing. And that's why the stranger will not reveal his name to Jacob. It would give Jacob power over him. Jacob's own name is the occasion for some punning in this story. His name is built on this root Y.'.Q.B: Ya-'a-qov It means to supplant or uproot. He emerges from the womb grasping his brother's heel. 'aqev here, the word for "heel," is based on that root. It's part of his effort to supplant Esau right at birth, and he continues that effort at supplanting through his early life. The writer makes that explicit in Genesis 27:36 when Esau cries out, "Was he then named Ya'aqov that he might supplant me these two times?" Yes. And in this chapter, Jacob wrestles. The word for wrestle is built on this root, just switching two letters. He wrestles with the mysterious, divine being at the Jabbok river. So you see all of this punning with the name. Jacob's very name hints at and foreshadows the struggling, the wrestling, the trickery that are the major themes of his life. But his striving has reached a climax here. And so the angel names him Yisra'el, Israel, which means he who has striven with God. Because as the stranger says, he has striven and wrestled all his life with men, particularly his brother, and now with God. El means god. It's the name of the chief god of the pantheon of Canaan. Yisra'el, he who has struggled with God. We'll talk about the way in which the change of name means a change of character, change of essence for the patriarch when we return.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_21_Biblical_Poetry_Psalms_and_Song_of_Songs.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: Okay, so having studied Job, we've seen that the Bible is not a book with a single uniform style and message. It's an anthology of diverse works that may have different, conflicting points of view. So the conventional religious piety of Proverbs, the firm belief in a system of divine reward and punishment, that's so important to the Deuteronomist--this is challenged by the Book of Job. Job concludes that there is no justice--not in this world, not in any other world. Nevertheless, Job feels that he is not excused from the task of righteous living. And it's a wonderful and fortuitous fact of history that Jewish sages chose to include all of these dissonant voices in the canon of the Hebrew Bible without, for the most part, striving to reconcile the conflicts. I mention this because I hope it will help you in writing your final paper. Careful exegesis of the biblical text--which is part of your task in these papers (I'll come back in a minute to the other part of your task)--careful exegesis of the biblical text requires you to set aside your presuppositions and to attend to the many, complex and often conflicting details of the text. Some of the other presuppositions that you need to set aside when you write this paper are presuppositions that I mentioned at the very outset of the course, but it might be wise to mention a few of them again. The first is, and I hope you've seen by now, that the Bible is not a set of stories about saints or pious people who always say and do what is right or exemplary. Even the Bible's heroes are human, they're not superhuman. Their behavior can be confused, it can be immoral; and if we try to vindicate biblical characters merely because their names appear in the Bible, we can miss the moral dilemma that's being set out by the writer. We can miss the psychological complexity of the stories. So when you do these papers, put yourself in the place of the character. In other words, humanize them. Think of them as acting in ways you might act. Think about their likely feelings, their likely motivations as human beings. Secondly, remember that the Bible isn't a manual of religion. It's not a book of systematic theology. It doesn't set out certain dogmas about God, and you need to be careful not to impose upon the Bible, theological ideas and beliefs that arose centuries after the bulk of the Bible was written--for example, a belief in a heaven and a hell as a system of reward or punishment, or the belief in a God that doesn't change his mind. The character Yahweh in the Bible changes his mind; it's just a fact of the text. If we wish to understand the Bible on its own terms and in its own context, then we have to be prepared to find ideas in it that may conflict with later theological notions that we hold dear. Don't assume you're going to agree with the Bible. Don't assume that the Bible will agree with itself. So then, coming to your paper assignments--You've been asked, in the final paper assignment, to develop an interpretation of a passage, and the task of interpretation for the purposes of this class is not excavative. In other words, you're not asked to analyze sources or to account for how the text reached its final form, right? Source criticism. You're to look at the final form of the text and give a plausible reading that makes the best sense that you can out of the details. Whether you like the meaning or not, whether you agree with the meaning or not, try to argue from the evidence in the text itself. So you're going to be doing what you're probably quite accustomed to doing in an English class. You're going to study the text's language, its vocabulary, its structure, its style, all of the clues. Look at the immediate context, the larger context, the way vocabulary is used elsewhere in the Bible, similar vocabulary, anything that might shed light on the passage's meaning or a character's motivation, and then you're going to weigh the evidence and present your reading. As in an English class, you'll want to minimize any external assumptions that you bring to the text, anything that's not supported by the text. Often the text will be truly ambiguous, precisely because there are gaps of information or there are hints that pull in two different directions at times. That's part of the great artistry of the biblical text. That's what makes it so interpretable. If that happens, then you may want to present various, dueling interpretations, various plausible interpretations of the passage based on the evidence in the text and say: these sorts of things would lead one to suppose that this is going on; but on the other hand, these textual clues lead to the following plausible interpretation of what's going on. You'll find that the task of interpretation is easier if you keep in mind the following point: Not all statements in the Bible are equal. When a story is being told, information conveyed by the narrator is reliable. Speech attributed to God is reliable. The words of individual characters are not necessarily reliable. Characters can be wrong, they can be misguided, they have limited perspectives and sometimes the narrator hints as much. But the voice of the narrator is privileged and that's part of the game we play when we read works of literature; we accept facts that are established by the narrator as facts that guide our interpretation. So it was with the story of Job. The narrator established, as a fact of the story, that Job is perfectly righteous. That's in the narrator's voice in the prose introduction. He states it explicitly; he bolsters his statement by attributing the same assertion to God. And the narrator also establishes as a fact of the story that Job is afflicted with horrendous suffering that he didn't deserve. It's not a punishment for sin. And then he leaves the characters to struggle with the implications. Job's friends cling to the idea that God rewards and God punishes and so anyone who suffers must have sinned. We, as readers, know that they are wrong because of the narrative facts established at the beginning of the story. Job takes the other route. He knows, as we do, that he is innocent, that he is not being punished for sin and therefore he concludes that God doesn't punish and reward at all--and that's a radical idea. That God punishes the wicked and rewards the good in this life, even if a little delayed sometimes is a fundamental idea in much of the Bible that we have studied so far. It's going to get weaker in some of the books we'll be looking at. But Job denies this idea and in doing so, he arrives at a radical moral conclusion. The truly righteous man is righteous for its own sake even if his righteousness brings him nothing but suffering and pain in this life or in any other. Remember that at the end of the book the narrator has God state that Job is the one who has spoken rightly and not his friends. So be sure to consider point of view in your interpretation. You wouldn't want to go in and just lift something out of Bildad's mouth and say this is what the Bible thinks, right? Taking a verse right out of context that way. Don't assume that every character in the Bible is reliable, look to the surrounding framework as you evaluate their deeds, and their actions, and their speech, and their views. Finally, don't be surprised if after carefully looking at all of those things a passage remains ambiguous. Again, in those cases you might want to detail the features that would support interpretation A, the features that would support interpretation B, or you might plump for one interpretation over the other. That's the first part of your task. It will help you enormously--if you do that right, it will help you enormously (and by "right" I mean thoroughly, I don't mean "correct")--I mean "right" in the sense that if you do it well and thoroughly then it will help you enormously in the second part of your task, which is to analyze a Jewish and a Christian, (and a Christian, not or; a Jewish and a Christian) interpretation of the passage particularly of whatever key ambiguous point you might have found in it, and try to understand how they are a reading of the text, a genuine effort to deal with, to grapple with, probably the very points of ambiguity that you yourself found when you really delved into the text. And as much as their answers may not be answers that you would come up with, they are still genuine readings of the exact issues that bugged you when you analyzed the text closely. Try to give an account of that. What is it that this interpretation chooses to develop as it presents its interpretation? What is it suppressing? What is this interpretation suppressing? What is it picking up on and developing? You'll be sensitive to those things because you will have invested the time yourself in appreciating how complex the passage is. So do understand that you need to do all of those things for any of the four questions. Develop your own interpretation; analyze a Jewish and a Christian interpretation of the same passage, okay? Now, there is debate among scholars over the date of the Book of Job, as well as some of the other books of the Ketuvim. Ketuvim is a Hebrew word that simply means writings, and it's the label or the name that we use to refer now to the third section of the Bible. So we've talked about Torah, Neviim or prophets, and now we're moving into the Writings or we have already really moved into the Writings, the third section of the Bible. Most scholars would concur that many of these books contain older material, but that the books reached their final form, their final written form, only later, in the post-exilic period. Now, if these books contain material that predates the exile, is it legitimate for us to speak of them and study them as a response to the national calamities, particularly the destruction and defeat and exile, 587/586. In answer to this question, we'll consider a relatively recent approach to the study of the Bible. It's an approach known as canonical criticism. Canonical criticism grew out of a dissatisfaction with the scholarly focus on original historical meanings to the exclusion of a consideration of the function or meaning of biblical texts for believing communities in various times and places--a dissatisfaction with the focus on original context and original meaning to the exclusion of any interest in how the text would have served a given community at a later time, a community for which it was canonical. At what point did these stories and sources suddenly become canonical and have authority for communities? And when they did, how were they read and understood and interpreted? So the historical, critical method was always primarily interested in what was really said and done by the original, biblical contributors. Canonical criticism assumes that biblical texts were generated, transmitted, reworked, and preserved in communities for whom they were authoritative, and that biblical criticism should include study of how these texts functioned in the believing communities that received and cherished them. So emphasis is on the final received form of the text. much less interest in how it got to be what it is; more interest in what it is now rather than the stages in its development. There's a greater interest and emphasis in canonical criticism on the function of that final form of the text in the first communities to receive it and on the processes of adaptation by which that community and later communities would re-signify earlier tradition to function authoritatively in a new situation. So a canonical critic might ask, for example: what meaning, authority, or value did a biblical writer seek in a tradition or story when he employed it in the final form of his text? What meaning, authority, or value would a community, would his community have found in it, and what meanings and values would later communities find in it when that text became canonical for them? How did they re-signify it to be meaningful for them? Why did religious communities accept what they did as canonical rather than setting certain things aside? Why was something chosen as canonical and meaningful for them when it came from an earlier time? So I propose that we adopt this approach for many of the books in this third section of the Bible. We look at the Bible through the eyes of the post-exilic community, for whom they were canonical--at least in part. We won't do this for everything but I'm going to be coming back to this approach many times in the last few lectures, because in this way it becomes possible for us to understand these books as a response to the national history. Not in their genesis or origin (they weren't written necessarily as responses to the national history--some of them may even pre-date the exile) but in the fact that they were adopted or cherished as meaningful by the post-exilic community. So whatever the circumstances of their origin and final redaction might have been, many of the books of the ketuvim, of the Writings, eventually would serve the post-exilic community as a prism through which to view Israel's history. Interestingly, many of the books in this section of the Bible explore questions of suffering and evil, and challenge some of the ideas that we've seen as more fundamental in the Torah and in the Prophets. They explore the very questions that are raised by the events of Israel's history, and so they were appropriated by the community in its quest for meaning in the midst of suffering. Let's turn to the Book of Ecclesiastes or Qohelet. The Hebrew name is Qohelet, Ecclesiastes. It's a second attack on the optimism and piety of conventional religion. The book is mostly in the first person. There's a third-person introduction and a little epilogue. The introduction reads "The words of Qohelet, Son of David, King in Jerusalem." Now, Qohelet may mean preacher and that's why the Greek translation Ecclesiastes, which means preacher (it's hard to know): "one who assembles or gathers others." But tradition attributes the work to David's son Solomon, known for his wisdom. This attribution is fictive. The writer speaks of kings reigning before him. That implies there were many. But more important there are linguistic and literary features that suggest a later, probably or perhaps, a fourth-century date. So, as such, the work can be understood as a post-destruction and a post-exilic work. It was available to Israelites who were struggling to make sense of their history and their God, even though no reference is made to that history at all. In fact, God is not referred to by his personal Israelite name Yahweh in the book at all; he's only referred to with the general term Elohim. The prominent tone of the book is one of alienated cynicism and a weary melancholy; it's the prominent tone. The theme that's repeated throughout is the idea of the emptiness of human effort. All is vanity, which means futile, it's all for naught. Qohelet 1:1: "Utter futility!--said Kohelet--/ Utter futility! all is futile! / What real value is there for a man / In all the gains he makes beneath the sun? / One generation goes, another comes, / But the earth remains the same forever." and in verse 9, "Only that shall happen / Which has happened, / Only that occur / Which has occurred; / There is nothing new / Beneath the sun!" The endless repeated cycles of the natural world, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, the ebb and flow of the tides--this leads the speaker to the conclusion that nothing is permanent. All is fleeting, change constantly. We don't find in Qohelet the linear view of time or the sense of progress in history that scholars rightly or wrongly associate with the Hebrew Bible. We find here instead the cyclic view of time which scholars, again rightly or wrongly, associate with myth. There are also the endlessly repeated cycles of the human world: birth and death, breaking down and building up, weeping and laughter, love and hate, killing and healing. In one of the most famous passages from this book, Qohelet expresses the idea that everything has its season or time with the consequence that the effort of humans to alter or affect anything is meaningless. I'm going to be reading from the RSV translation, and in fact, many of the things I'll be reading today will be from the RSV, Revised Standard Version, because I think many of these passages will be familiar to you, and I'd rather read versions that will catch your ears as familiar, than the more accurate translations of the Jewish Publications Society, but which may not ring that familiar note for you. So this is the RSV translation. But notice how in context it has a very different meaning from the meaning that's been granted it by folk singers: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sow; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. Switching now to the JPS translation, "What value, then, can the man of affairs get from what he earns? I have observed the business that God gave man to be concerned with: He brings everything to pass precisely at its time;" In other words, everything comes to pass and returns in endless cycles, we add nothing by our efforts. It's not quite the comforting passage that it's often quoted to be. So the writer has tried everything in his search for something that's permanent and not evanescent. Physical pleasure, he says, is unsatisfying. It's transient. Wealth just brings anxiety. Wisdom is better than power, but even knowledge brings great pain. 1:17 and 18: "And so I set my mind to appraise wisdom and to appraise madness and folly. And I learned--that this, too, was pursuit of wind: For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; / To increase learning is to increase heartache" (Don't believe him!) Even if we concede that wisdom is superior to ignorance, we must still face the fact that ultimately death obliterates everything. Death is the great equalizer. Qohelet 2:13-17: I found that Wisdom is superior to folly As light is superior to darkness; A wise man has his eyes in his head, Whereas a fool walks in darkness. But I also realize that the same fate awaits them both. So I reflected: "The fate of the fool is also destined for me; to what advantage, then, have I been wise?" And I came to the conclusion that that too was futile, because the wise man, just like the fool, is not remembered forever; for, as the succeeding days roll by, both are forgotten. Alas, the wise man dies, just like the fool! And so I loathed life, For I was distressed by all that goes on under the sun, because everything is futile and pursuit of wind. So even more explicitly then Job, Ecclesiastes attacks the principle of divine providence or distributive justice. There's no principle of reward or punishment; the wicked prosper while the innocent suffer. Even the principle of delayed punishment which is so important to the Deuteronomistic historian is attacked as unjust. In Qohelet 8:10b to 14, And here's another frustration: the fact that the sentence imposed for evil deeds is not executed swiftly, which is why men are emboldened to do evil--the fact that a sinner may do evil a hundred times and his [punishment] still be delayed… sometimes an upright man is requited according to the conduct of the scoundrel; and sometimes the scoundrel is requited according to the conduct of the upright. I say all that is frustration. In a more famous passage, chapter 9:11-12, I have further observed under the sun that The race is not won by the swift, Nor the battle by the valiant; Nor is bread won by the wise, Nor wealth by the intelligent, Nor favor by the learned. For the time of mischance comes to all. And a man cannot even know his time. Again, a passage which is often used as a comforting exhortation--the race is not won by the swift and so on--is here actually in context a lament of the great injustice of the way things occur. But really for Qohelet it is the inexorable fact of death that makes life entirely meaningless, and that is in fact the starting point of modern schools of existentialist philosophy. Death is the bottom line; he rejects the idea of any life after death. Chapter 9:2-6: "For the same fate is in store for all: for the righteous, and for the wicked; for the good and pure, and for the impure; for him who sacrifices, and for him who does not; for him who is pleasing, and for him who is displeasing; and for him who swears, and for him who shuns oaths. That is the sad thing about all that goes on under the sun: that the same fate is in store for all. …For he who is reckoned among the living has something to look forward to…since the living know they will die." [That was ironic.] "But the dead know nothing; they have no more recompense, for even the memory of them has died. Their loves, their hates, their jealousies have long since perished; and they have no more share till the end of time and all that goes on under the sun." Nevertheless, despite all of this despair and cynicism, there is a positive note in Qohelet. The writer, after all, doesn't recommend nihilism or suicide, despite the lack of purpose or meaning in life, and in fact he does quite the opposite. He states that every life does have its moments of happiness and these one should seize while one can. Qohelet 9:7-10, Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun--all your fleeting days. For that alone is what you can get out of life and out of the means you acquire under the sun. Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going. Again, Sheol refers to this shadowy place beneath the soil, that the shades of the dead just inhabit. It's an ancient notion in Israel. It's not connected with the idea of a reward or a punishment after death. A similar exhortation is in Qohelet 5:17, "Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life which God has given him, for this is his lot,". Or 3:13: "…whenever a man does eat and drink and get enjoyment out of all his wealth, it is a gift of God." We have to be sure not to delude ourselves. There is no grand plan, there's no absolute value or meaning to our toil, Qohelet says. There's no life in the hereafter that we are working towards. Here he seems to be polemicizing, I think, against a belief in the afterlife, or reward or punishment, that was taking root at this time in some parts of the Jewish community under the influence of Greek thought. But one can still find happiness and love, and with these, one should be content. Striving after anything more is a striving after wind that leaves one frustrated and weary, and bitter. Accept the reality of death and then enjoy what you can in the short time you have. Indeed, it's precisely the reality of death that makes life precious. Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might because you have only this one brief chance. Eternal, unlimited life with endless opportunities to act would make any one act meaningless. So given the fact of death and the limitations that it places upon us, taking pleasure in the ordinary activities and labors of life becomes not meaningless, but meaningful. Qohelet is an unusual, if not subversive book, and its inclusion in the canon was apparently a matter of some controversy. Its controversial character is reflected in the pious editorial postscript that appears at the end of the book. At the very end, chapter 12, verses 11-13 we read the following, The sayings of the wise are like goads, like nails fixed in prodding sticks. They were given by one Shepherd. A further word: Against them, my son, be warned! The making of many books is without limit / And much study is a wearying of the flesh. The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments! For this applies to all mankind: that God will call every creature to account for everything unknown, be it good or bad. To fear God and obey his commandments because he will reward the good and punish the evil is simply not the message of the Book of Qohelet and it's very likely (in my view; people will disagree) but it's very likely that this line comes from a later hand, which was disturbed by the theme of Qohelet's preaching. So we have juxtaposed then two responses to the suffering and pain in the world, and specifically the tragedy that befell Israel. One, an assertion of God's providence and justice, urging obedience, and the other an assertion of the lack of justice and providence in the world, preaching simple existential pleasures as a source of life's meaning, and the frustration of trying to make sense out of what has happened. The richness of the Hebrew Bible derives precisely from its placement together of radically diverse points of view like these. I'm going to turn now to the Book of Psalms, which we will probably not quite finish today. But the Book of Psalms contains the principle collection of religious lyric poetry in the Bible. It consists of 150 poems, most of which are prayers addressed to God. In a very nice little essay on the Psalms, there's a woman, Margaret Anne Doody, who recounts a wonderful dialogue that takes place in Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre. You have the ten-year-old Jane--she's a very honest, but mistreated child, and she's being interviewed by Brocklehurst, who is this very harsh schoolmaster. And Jane recounts the conversation like this: "Do you read your Bible?" "Sometimes." "With pleasure? Are you fond of it?" "I like Revelation, and the Book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job, and Jonah." "And the Psalms? I hope you like them?" "No, sir." "No? Oh, shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart; and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: 'Oh! the verse of a Psalm! Angels sing psalms,' says he; 'I wish to be a little angel here below'; he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety." "Psalms are not interesting," I remarked. "That proves you have a wicked heart." [Doody 1994] Margaret Anne Doody has pointed out I think several interesting aspects to this dialogue. First, she points out the literary authority and individual taste that's exhibited by Jane. She likes prophetic books with dramatic apocalyptic imagery. She likes Revelation and Daniel which we'll see soon is very dramatic and apocalyptic; and then she likes rich, narrative texts and histories--Genesis, Samuel, parts of Exodus (I can probably pick out which parts!) Kings, Chronicles and then she likes the stories of the trials of great survivors of tribulation like Jane herself--Job and Jonah. Brocklehurst is looking for evidence of her piety and instead he finds evidence of her distasteful love of drama and story, and imagery and suffering, and he's quite shocked. A pious child would naturally love the Psalms which in Brocklehurst's mind are the songs of angels; they teach humility and reverence and his own pious child knows how to recite the Psalms. Jane's not impressed. She obviously sees through the son's little game even if Brocklehurst doesn't, and she says Psalms aren't interesting, and he's mortified. Jane's lack of interest in the Psalms, her preference for what Doody calls the raw and the real, is proof of her wickedness. But Brocklehurst's perception of the Book of Psalms, which I think many people share, is not an entirely accurate one. If Jane were to look closely she would find plenty of emotion and drama and suffering in the Psalms as well. The title Psalms derives from the Greek, psalmoi. It denotes religious songs that are performed to musical accompaniment; the musical accompaniment of the psalterion. That's a stringed musical instrument. So they imagined that these were performed to this accompaniment, hence psalmoi. And it's the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew title tehilllim; the Hebrew title tehillim means "praises." The Psalms were only collected into a large anthology in the post-exilic period. We can be pretty sure of that--the fifth or the fourth century. But many, many--particularly those that are attributed to professional temple musical guilds--are thought to have been used in the temple service. Many of them date from very early pre-exilic times. The temple staff provided the Psalms with musical and liturgical notations. I don't mean musical notes but I mean words indicating some sort of musical or liturgical use, and those are preserved for us in the text. We don't, for the most part, really know what they mean. They're technical. Some superscriptions and notes seem to be telling us the tune or the kind of musical accompaniment for the Psalm, whether it was on stringed instruments, or flutes. Most of the Psalms really tell us very little, however, about the time and circumstance of their composition. Several, it seems, were to be used at royal coronations which would mean that they were written when Davidic kings still ruled in Jerusalem. Psalm 45 is an example of a love song that's written in celebration of the king's marriage with a foreign bride, so this is also a pre-exilic date. So Psalm 45:11-18; this would have been sung probably at a royal wedding: "Take heed, lass, and note, incline your ear: forget your people and your father's house, and let the king be aroused by your beauty; since he is your lord, bow to him. O Tyrian lass," [so she's from Tyre to the north], "the wealthiest people will court your favor with gifts, goods of all sorts. The royal princess, her dress embroidered with golden mountings is led inside to the king; maidens in her train, her companions, are presented to you. They are led in with joy and gladness; they enter the palace of the king. Your sons will succeed your ancestors; you will appoint them princes throughout the land. I commemorate your fame for all generations, so peoples will praise you forever and ever. So clearly, some of the Psalms date to the period of the monarchy, and scholars divide the psalter into five main collections. Each of them concludes with a little doxology that indicates that it's the end of a section. So I've listed the sections down here--five books within the larger book of Psalms. The latest of these--they probably go somewhat in chronological order. So we think number five, for example, is probably the latest of the group because it's the one where the manuscripts that were found at Qumran show the greatest variation, which suggests that they continued fluid for some time before being finally fixed. The second book, Book Two (so about halfway through the Psalms; the end of number 72)--Book Two concludes with this postscript: "The prayers of David, the Son of Jesse, are ended." So at one time the Davidic Psalms were thought to end there. Almost all of the Psalms in Book One are prefaced with the phrase to, or of, David. The particle in Hebrew can be ambiguous; probably "of David." To this old First Temple nucleus, you had other collections then gravitating. So, for example, all of the Psalms between 120 and 134, they all bear the same title: A Song of Ascents. They were songs that were probably sung by pilgrims on pilgrimage to Jerusalem because from any direction you go into Jerusalem, you have to go up, and so you go up to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, tradition attributes the entire book of Psalms to King David and that attribution stems from the fact that 73 of the 150 Psalms are explicitly said to be psalms of David. And David is also in the historical books said to be a man of musical talent. The superscriptions, however, are in many cases late additions. So perhaps the Psalms can only be said to be of David or Davidic if by that term we mean that they are the result of a royal patronage of poetry by the House of David in general. The biblical text itself lists other authors for some of the Psalms, so 72 is ascribed to Solomon. Number 90 is ascribed to Moses, others are ascribed to Assaf and the Sons of Korah. Korah is an ancestor of a priestly family. Some of them are clearly post-exilic. Number 74 laments the destruction of the temple. Number 137--"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept as we thought of Zion" is clearly from the perspective of the exile. So what we have is an anthology, an anthology of religious expressions deriving from many centuries of Israel's history. So despite the claim of religious tradition that the Psalms were penned by David, it's clear that they were not all penned by David. Some of the Psalms are oriented toward community worship. Some of them are oriented more to individual worship. But in ancient Israel there really isn't always a sharp distinction between the two. The ancient Israelite in the temple prayed to God as a member of a larger community bound by a covenant and not as a lone individual. So in the words of Psalm 34:3 we read, "Exalt the Lord with me, let us extol His name together." So there was a communal aspect to much worship. A good deal of form critical work has been done on the book of Psalms. We haven't spent a lot of time on form criticism. It's another tool, another approach that is used in studying the text. But the pioneer in this area was a man named Herman Gunkel (I think I've mentioned him before). His work, particularly in the book of Psalms, was forwarded by Sigmund Mowinckel. Form critics look at the forms that are used in the construction of psalms, and they classify psalms according to their forms or their literary genre, if you will. And then they attempt to place these literary types or genres within the cultic setting or their Sitz im Leben: what would have been the circumstances under which such a psalm would have been written or performed. In general, the psalms can be categorized formally and thematically in a number of different ways and I've given you a handout which presents some broad classifications of form or genre. I've actually collapsed many of the main forms into several broader groupings, but the very serious form critics will give you upwards of 13,14, 15 or more different forms for the psalms, and as I say, I've grouped many of them together, as you see on the sheet. I'm going to go through each one of these and give you some examples and talk about some of the themes as well as the formal characteristics in the Psalms, so you'll see the variety that's contained in this anthology. First looking at some hymns of praise--these include creation hymns praising God as the creator of the natural world: psalms of thanksgiving and psalms of trust. These are really the largest category of psalms and probably are what give Brocklehurst the impression that he has. Many of them celebrate God's majesty, God's wisdom, his power, such as this creation hymn. This is 8 (and by the way, the numbers are just giving you some examples. This is not exhaustive. I didn't go through and put every one of the 150 Psalms. But to give you an idea of an example of each category I'll be drawing from these numbers). So number 8: O Lord, our Lord, How majestic is Your name throughout the earth, You who have covered the heavens with Your Splendor. …When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that You set in place, what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him, …and adorned him with glory and majesty; You have made him master over Your handiwork, laying the world at his feet, sheep and oxen, all of them, and wild beasts, too; the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever travels the paths of the seas. O Lord our Lord, how majestic is Your name throughout the earth! It's a tiny little Psalm, Psalm 117, that's just two verses long contains really all of the classic formal elements of a Psalm of praise or thanksgiving. You have an opening invocation to worship, calling others to worship or praise God. Then you have a motive clause, which is giving the reason and then a recapitulation or a renewed call to praise. So all of Psalm 117 follows this form: "Praise the Lord all you nations, extol Him all you peoples." There's your invocation. "For great is His steadfast love toward us, the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever," there's your motive clause, "Hallelujah," Hallelu is a Hebrew imperative "praise Yah," short for Yahweh, God. So Hallelujah means "praise God." So it's a recapitulation of the call to praise, the imperative to praise God. It's a classic--tiny, little--but it has all of the elements of the form of a psalm of thanksgiving. Psalm 136 punctuates a recitation of God's great deeds, the creation, the Exodus, the conquest of the Promised Land and so on with the phrase, "His steadfast love is eternal." It's an excellent illustration of how Israel's praise is inspired by remembering what Yahweh has done in history. Still other Psalms extol God in His role as Creator; 104 is another of those and we've already seen one, or as law giver, so there are various reasons to praise God: creation, his role in history, his giving of the law. A striking characteristic of this category of Psalms is the variety of metaphors that are used to describe God: King, shield, stronghold, rock, refuge, shelter, many more metaphors as well. The paradigmatic psalm of trust is contained in the 23rd Psalm. This is a Psalm that employs the metaphor of a shepherd to describe God guiding the individual in straight paths through a frightening valley. The speaker's trust creates a sense of tranquility even in the presence of enemies and here I'm going to use the RSV translation which will be more familiar to many of you. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord for ever. The short Psalm 131 is another psalm of trust that invokes the image of a mother and a child to express an even greater tranquility. Again, the RSV translation, "O God my heart is not lifted up, / my eyes are not raised too high," that's a metaphor for arrogance in Hebrew. "I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. / But I have calmed and quieted my soul, / like a child quieted at its mother's breast; / like a child that is quieted is my soul. / O Israel, hope in the Lord / from this time forth and for evermore." These and similar psalms contain some of the most personal depictions of biblical faith, of confidence or simple trust in God. The second category I've got listed there for you are psalms of divine kingship or royal psalms. These are not quite the same; they're two distinct things. Enthronement or kingship psalms celebrate Yahweh as the enthroned ruler, the sovereign ruler of the heavens and as sovereign over foreign nations--so sovereign over nature, sovereign over the human world. And their descriptions of God employ the language and themes that are associated with deities of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, particularly, the language associated with Baal, the Canaanite storm god. Some even allude to the defeat of a sea monster as key to God's role as creator and enthroned king. In Psalm 29, the assembly of the gods praises Yahweh for defeating the water monster. And although some psalms fully personify nature at the time of creation, in others, the old Ancient Near Eastern combat creation myths are demythologized. So we see both of these tendencies within some of these psalms. So, for example, Psalm 93, "The Lord is King, He is robed in grandeur," (most of these enthronement or divine kingship psalms will begin with "The Lord is King"): The Lord is King, He is robed in grandeur; the Lord is robed, He is girded with strength. The world stands firm; it cannot be shaken. Your throne stands firm from of old; from eternity You have existed. The ocean sounds, O Lord, the ocean sounds its thunder, the ocean sounds its pounding. Above the thunder of the mighty waters, more majestic the than the breakers of the sea is the Lord, majestic on High. Your decrees are indeed enduring; holiness befits Your House, O Lord, for all times. See here, the mention of the sea, the ocean pounding, but it's completely demythologized. It appears here as a natural entity and not a divine antagonist. By contrast there are psalms in which God is battling with the sea in the form of a monster. Royal psalms are psalms that praise God's anointed King. Some scholars believe that these were coronation psalms. These would have been used at the time of the coronation of a Davidic King, for example. So Psalm110, "Yahweh said to my lord," my Lord now meaning the king: "Yahweh said to my lord, "Sit at My right hand while I make your enemies your footstool." The Lord will stretch forth from Zion your mighty scepter; hold sway over your enemies! Your people come forward willingly on your day of battle." [I guess that's what every king wishes for.] "Your people come forward willingly on your day of battle In majestic Holiness, from the womb, from the dawn, yours was the dew of youth. The Lord has sworn and will not relent, 'You are a priest forever, a rightful king by My decree.' The Lord is at your right hand." [Yahweh is at your right hand.] "He crushes kings in the day of His anger." But not all of the royal psalms were concerned primarily with military success or guaranteeing military success. Some seek to ensure that the king, the anointed king is bestowed with other qualities necessary for good stewardship. So we find in Psalm 72, O God, endow the king with Your judgments, the king's son with Your righteousness; that He may judge your people rightly, Your lowly ones, justly. …Let him champion the lowly among the people, deliver the needy folk, and crush those who wrong them. Let them be like rain that falls on a mown field, like a downpour of rain on the ground, that the righteous may flourish in His time, and well-being abound, till the moon is no more. A third category I've got listed for you are psalms of lament and petition and indebtedness, and these can be voiced in the plural (a communal supplication) or in the voice of the individual. Although individual laments may open with an invocation to or praise of God, some launch immediately into a desperate plea for deliverance from some suffering or crisis. It's often expressed metaphorically. Or they might launch into a plea for vengeance on one's enemies. After presenting his complaint, the psalmist will usually confess his trust in God, then ask for help or forgiveness and conclude with a vow that he will praise God again. We sometimes even see an acknowledgement of a divine response, perhaps a thank-you in advance. Psalm 13 has many of these features, How long, O Lord; will You ignore me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long will I have cares on my mind, grief in my heart all day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Look at me, answer me, O Lord, my God! Restore the luster to my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death; lest my enemy say, "I have overcome him," my foes exult [when I totter. My heart will exult] in Your deliverance. I will sing to the Lord, for He has been good to me. Psalm 55 asks for deliverance from the treachery of a deceitful friend: It is not an enemy who reviles me -- I could bear that; it is not my foe who vaunts himself against me -- I could hide from him; but it is you, my equal, my companion, my friend; sweet was our fellowship; we walked together in God's house. Let Him incite death against them; may they go down alive into Sheol! For where they dwell, there evil is. …He harmed his ally, he broke his pact. his talk was smoother then butter, yet his mind was on war; his words were more soothing than oil, yet they were drawn swords. Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous man collapse. Very personalized laments. Some laments are pleas for forgiveness of personal sins. This one is attributed in the psalm itself, the superscription to the psalm; it's attributed to David after the prophet Nathan rebukes him for his illicit relationship with Bathsheba. Listen to the striking parallelism--you hear the poetic parallelism in this psalm, Psalm 51, again using the RSV translation: Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy steadfast love; according to Thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight, so that thou art justified in thy sentence and blameless in thy judgment. …Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. The communal laments, a lot of these are individual, but communal laments, bewail Israel's misfortunes and urge God's vengeance upon Israel's oppressors, sometimes reminding God of his historic relationship with Israel and his covenantal obligations. Let me just finish by reading Psalm 74 as a case in point. It makes explicit reference to the destruction of the sanctuary so it's clearly post-exilic. And as a response to the catastrophe, it gives expression to despair and bewilderment and even anger that God has forgotten His obligations to Israel: Why, O God, do You forever reject us, do You fume in anger at the flock that You tend? Remember the community You made Yours long ago, Your very own tribe that You redeemed, Mount Zion, where You dwell. Bestir Yourself because of the perpetual tumult, all the outrages of the enemy in the sanctuary. Your foes roar inside Your meeting place; they take their signs for true signs. It is like men wielding axes against a gnarled tree; with hatchet and pike they hacked away at its carved work. They made Your sanctuary go up in flames; they brought low in dishonor the dwelling place of Your presence. They resolved, "Let us destroy them altogether!" They burned all God's tabernacles in the land. No signs appear for us; there is no longer any prophet; no one among us who knows for how long. Till when, O God, …will the enemy forever revile Your name? Why do You hold back Your hand, Your right hand? Draw it out of Your bosom! …Do not deliver Your dove to the wild beast; do not ignore forever the band of Your lowly ones. Look to the covenant! …Rise, O God, champion Your cause; The psalmist is bewildered: why has this happened, why doesn't God act? There's no mention of Israel's sin; there's no indication that the destruction was just punishment. Psalm 44, which we'll start with next time, goes even further and states flatly that the people haven't sinned. It's God who's been faithless.

Literature_Lectures

17_The_Frankfurt_School_of_Critical_Theory.txt

Prof: As we get into social perspectives on literature and art, you may ask yourself out of idle curiosity, or perhaps even peevishly, "Why Marx? Why so much Marx? Why is it Marx who seems to stand behind the idea that the social criticism of art is the best and most relevant way to approach this subject matter?" Well, it's because whatever the outcome of Marxist thought may have proven to be historically, it's nevertheless the case to this day that the most devastating critique of existing ideas about things, of states of affairs that, as it were, meander along without too much self-consciousness, remains the Marxist one, together perhaps with the Freudian one. When we turn to Jameson next time, we'll see that in both cases--and we'll be working a little bit with this today, too, when we turn to Benjamin--we'll see that in both cases it has to do with the way in which we are brought up short by the kind of criticism which argues that somehow standing behind our conception of reality and our understanding of our place in the world, there is one form or another of the "unconscious." We have, arguably, in this course in literary theory first taken up notions of a linguistic unconscious, or in any case linguistic preconditioning, then taken up notions of a psychoanalytic unconscious; and now, in the very title of Jameson's book from which we'll be considering an excerpt in the next lecture, we have the notion of the political unconscious. There are other ways of effecting a social criticism of literature and art. From the right, there is an extraordinary book by Leo Strauss on Aristophanes, together with his great readings of the traditional texts of political philosophy. There is, of course, a very strong liberal tradition of criticism, particularly in the public sphere, in the journalism of the public sphere. Perhaps the most notable proponent of a liberal criticism of art undertaken from a social point of view is the work collected in Lionel Trilling's The Literal- The Liberal Imagination. So there are options, but by far the most pervasive mode of social critique in literary theory and in the modern history of thinking about literature remains the Marxist one. As much as we can be in working through these materials, our concern is of course primarily with Marxist aesthetics. What are the options for a Marxist critic in aesthetic terms? That's, of course, what we're going to be taking up in a moment and also when we turn to Fredric Jameson on Thursday. In the meantime, what about Marx? I think I can take it for granted in a course of this kind that most of you have some familiarity with the history of ideas and with Western culture. I think I can take it for granted that most of you have some notion, just as you have some notion about Freud, of what Marx is all about. Of particular importance for the kinds of criticism we undertake to read in this moment of the course is, of course, the idea of ideology. Now ideology in the writings of both Marx and Engels, and in all the complex history of the writings that have succeeded them-- they were "founders of discursivity" and there has been great debate within the Marxist tradition!-- "ideology" is a term about which there has never been wholehearted agreement. Primarily, the disagreement concerning ideology in this tradition has to do with whether or not ideology ought properly to be ascribed to conscious as well as to unconscious preconceptions about the world. In other words, if I know really to the core perfectly well that the moon is made of green cheese-- I can prove it, I have no doubt about it, and it's not something that I'm unaware that I think-- but if at the same time, if my opinion, my belief, my expression of fact to the effect that the moon is made of green cheese, can be demystified as ideology, the question is: well, is it still ideology if I'm quite conscious > of knowing that the moon is made of green cheese and prepared to defend my position?-- just as a kind of belated aristocrat, prepared to defend the idea that hierarchy and privilege is appropriate in society, is perfectly conscious that this is an unpopular idea but nevertheless fully committed to it and prepared to defend it? The question sometimes in Marxism is, "Is this still ideology?" Particularly in the writings of Engels, perhaps more than in the writings of Marx, the answer by and large is, "It is." Ideology is essentially the belief that perspective is truth. That is to say, that the way in which things appear from the material and economically grounded standpoint of my own consciousness is not just the way they appear to me, but the way they actually are. Now this is a mode of belief which in various historical periods, according to Marx, has characterized each dominant class in turn. With the rise of capitalism, the evolution of capitalism into what's called late capitalism, of course this ideology is primarily what's called "the bourgeois ideology." In other words, the idea that the various premises on which bourgeois, middle class, existence is based--the premises that have allowed for the rise and appropriation of power of the middle class; the idea, for example, of the work ethic; the idea of family; the idea of certain forms of moral behavior-- all of this is "ideological" insofar as it is supposed to be valid and equally the case for all in all circumstances at all historical times: in other words, the belief that what I see the world to be is just universally the way the world is. That is the general characterization of ideology. Now we've seen this, of course. We began the course with the quotation from Marx, from Marx's Kapital, on commodity fetishism. We've seen this in the way in which it is just spontaneously supposed reflexively, without reflection, that the labor properties of something that's produced-- that is to say the value that can accrue to it because of the amount of labor that's gone into it-- is actually something that inheres in the product itself of labor. This, of course, applies as well to art, and it's something that Benjamin is fully aware of alluding to when he talks about "the aura." If I forget that art is produced-- that a certain quantum of labor, in other words, has gone into the emergence of the work of art-- and if I simply, in rapt contemplative attention, address myself to the work of art itself as though it had objective value apart from having been produced, in a mode of production, then what I'm doing is "commodifying" the work of art. From Benjamin's point of view, in other words, to be seduced by the aura of the work of art is, in a certain sense, to experience the work of art ideologically as a commodity. All right. Now returning then to the whole question of the aesthetic objectives of Marxist criticism, there are basically four options. In other words, Marxist criticism has not consistently agreed-- particularly in its more sophisticated versions-- about what the aesthetic of art ought actually to be. In other words, how should art reflect society? How should it constitute a critique of society? How should it predict an ideal, emergent, utopian society? All of these questions are questions of aesthetics, because the way in which art does express the social is necessarily aesthetic. It's done through form. It's done through genre. It's done as a matter of style. It's done ultimately, as the Marxists would say, in this or that mode of production. All of these mediations of what you might call the expression of society, then, are understood as the aesthetic in Marxist thought and need to be understood in terms of possible options. The aesthetic of Marx and Engels themselves was realist, but it was a kind of realism that was really rather sophisticated. When aspiring writers, already with the idea that they ought to be writing for the advancement of the proletariat, would write Engels--I'm thinking of Ferdinand Lassalle, Mina Kautsky, other people--would send Engels manuscripts of their sort of "socialist realist" novels, Engels hated them. He > just couldn't stand that kind of literature, and he said in effect, No, no, no, no. You don't have to glorify the proletariat. You don't have to project a future in this way. What you want to do is see, in a way that exposes it, the social dynamic as it exists. What you want to do is understand the world realistically but not tendentiously--that is to say, not from an open point of view. Engels' literary hero was Balzac, who was a royalist reactionary but who nevertheless, in Engels' view, was so brilliant in evoking society in all of its manifold complexities, particularly in the complexity of its class structure, that this was the appropriate model for people hoping to engage in the business of realist writing. Now this was a mode of thought that prevailed largely in Marxism through its early energetic years, including the early energetic years of the Revolution itself. In 1927, the literary philosopher Georg Lukacs, L-u-k-a-c-s, who had been a kind of Hegelian theorist of literature-- he'd written a very brilliant book called The Theory of the Novel before he turned to Marxist thought-- in 1927 still, and notice that this is the same year in which Eichenbaum is writing his "Theory of the Formal Method" and the same year in which Benjamin visits Moscow-- in other words, a period of real continued social and intellectual ferment within the framework of Marxist government-- in 1927 he wrote a book called The Historical Novel. This book reads as though it were taken from Engels' letters. It's partly an attack on what Lukacs took to be the sort of narcissistic inwardness of High Modernism, particularly Joyce and Proust. It's a tendentious attack and certainly subject to criticism on all sorts of grounds. It's partly that, but it's also argued just in the way that Engels championed Balzac in his letters. It's a book that champions the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, too, was a political reactionary, a Tory, but one whose great dialectical balances in his novels between highland and lowland, feudal and mercantile, Scotland and England-- whose balances of an old social order with an emerging social order Lukacs took to be perfect exemplifications of what realism, of seeing class relations as they really are, can do. So this is the tradition of realist aesthetics in Marxist criticism, but then as--really dating from 1927, precisely with the rise of Stalin--things began to change, at least in the Soviet sphere, the original ideas of all these people who used to write to Engels-- Mina Kautsky, Ferdinand Lassalle, writers of that kind-- began to prevail in Soviet thought. There was a literary critic named Zhnadov who articulated a doctrine of socialist realism. Even Marxist critics themselves in those days devised a sort of joke about the sort of novel that Zhnadov had in mind. You probably know the joke: Boy meets tractor, boy loses tractor, boy goes to the city to find tractor, finds tractor, continues to be in love, takes tractor back to the countryside and lives happily ever after. This fundamental plot, obviously a variant on the marriage plot that very much engaged also in what > Benjamin would call "the mechanical aspect of reproduction"-- > > this sort of plot as the characteristic plot of socialist realism began to take hold officially, so that in 1934 the Soviet culture minister, Bukharin, convened an International Soviet Writers Conference in which it was simply decreed from on high that henceforth literary practice would consist in the promotion, of an exemplification of, socialist realism. This continued really right up until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, since until then there really was a form of censorship abroad in Soviet and Soviet sphere societies to the effect that literature was subject to challenge, possibly to suppression, if it didn't adhere to socialist realist tenets. So those are the forms of realism that I think are most often identified with Marxist criticism and its possibilities; but as a matter of fact, probably the most dynamic criticism since Lukacs of the twentieth century has recognized that realism is something that, after all, from a Marxist perspective can easily be shown to have been commandeered by the bourgeoisie. Who else "tells it like it is"? Who else insists that reality is just one drink below par? Who else insists that he or she is a realist?-- other than the characteristic sort of middle class person who tells you that they've been there, done that and know everything that there is to know? The middle class in other words, from the standpoint of much Marxist thought since Lukacs, has commandeered for itself--just as it commandeers everything else for itself-- has commandeered for itself the idea of realism which has therefore become, in these views, outmoded aesthetically. Now Benjamin is himself acutely conscious of this problem, and he insists that realism in a variety of ways is a kind of late capitalist form of commodifying the aura. It is the last gasp of bourgeois art in a variety of ways, he says hopefully. It needs to be counteracted with what he takes to be a participatory aesthetic: an aesthetic of the fragment, an aesthetic of intermittent attention of participation, which does not, nevertheless, in any way involve a sense of persistently contemplating that which is real, but emphasizes rather the idea that one is oneself in a communal spirit engaged with the very mode of production of the work of art and somehow or another involved in that. That's what we'll come back to when we turn to Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay. Perhaps the most unusual aesthetic move for a Marxist critic is the one that you will find in Adorno. Adorno was devoted to precisely what Lukacs had attacked in The Historical Novel, namely the High Modernist aesthetic. He admired Beckett in literature. He admired Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in music. Adorno was by training a musicologist, and he devoted much of his writing career to producing essays and treatises on music and the history of music. These were heroes in Adorno's pantheon, and of course, the question arises: how can these people who have nothing to say about society, who are totally preoccupied with form, and who seem to be indifferent to the whole course of history-- how can these people be the aesthetic heroes of a Marxist critic? This is something you see much more clearly in the "Fetish Character" essay, from which I've given you the two excerpts which I hope you have. I want to pause over them because I think Adorno's essay-- while perhaps a little quixotic, because after all, who ever could profit from a concept of this kind?-- Adorno's essay is nevertheless rather brilliant in its distinction between the totality, or wholeness, that's offered to you by artistic form and the mere totalization or totalitarianism that's offered to you by modern hegemonic forms of government-- whether truly totalitarian or insidiously totalitarian like, for example, the "culture industry" to which he devotes the essay that you've read. So this is what Adorno says in these two passages. He's talking about the way in which people in the culture industry who appreciate music are completely victimized by the coloratura local effect, what you might call--this is a conductor whom Adorno hated-- the Toscanini effect: that flourishing of a particular moment in a concerto, the riding it into the ground at the expense of the whole, and everything that has what Adorno elsewhere calls "lip-smacking euphony"; in other words, a kind of cultivation of perfection of local sound, as opposed to an awareness of the total composition. So he says in the first passage: The delight in the moment and the gay façade become an excuse for absolving the listener from the thought of the whole, whose claim is comprised in proper listening. The listener is converted along his line of least resistance [because after all, it's so beautiful to listen to] into the acquiescent purchaser. No longer do the partial moments serve as a critique of the whole as they sometimes do in Modernism. [Dissonance, in other words, is in and of itself a critique of that overarching harmony with which we associate wholeness, right? So there's a real sense in which the parts can be understood as a critique of the whole without challenging or breaking down the whole.] No longer do the partial moments serve as a critique of the whole. Instead they suspend the critique which the successful aesthetic totality exerts against the flawed one of society. In other words, nothing can criticize the inauthenticity of the bad totalities of society except the authenticity of a genuine achieved wholeness in a work of art. The difference between these senses of the whole is precisely the zone of critique which in Adorno's view might-- just might--awaken the victim of the culture industry from the slumbers of happy conformism and acquiescence. Now in the second passage, just to reinforce this: Great Modernist composers like Berg, Schoenberg and Webern are called individualists by other Marxist critics [in other words, by people like Lukacs who don't like what Lukacs would call "fetishization of form," reification of form at the expense of social reference and expression], and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers that destroy individuality, powers whose formless shadows fall gigantically on their music. In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity. In other words, the totality--the achieved, successful, authentic totality--of the work of art models the totality of a collective state in ways that none of the false totalities of current hegemonies can possibly do or even approximate. In other words, there is an implicit politics--in Adorno's argument--in pure form. The achievement of pure form, which is after all a collection of parts, is an implicit politics modeling the achievement of a collective society. So that is the argument of Adorno. It's a fascinating one. As I say, it's perhaps somewhat quixotic because it's kind of hard to imagine anyone actually listening to Schoenberg and saying, "Gee. Maybe I should be a communist." > Actually putting this to work, in other words, entails a certain amount of difficulty, but at the same time, intellectually, it seems to me to be a fascinating turn of thought and one that certainly does give one pause, if only because Marxist criticism is so often engaged in a critique of what it takes to be the mainstream aesthetic of Western civilization, which is a kind of fetishization of wholeness. Think of the New Criticism, the unity of the poem, the discrete ontological object as a unified whole. This is, of course, commonplace in being attacked by Marxist criticism, and it's very interesting to see a figure like Adorno, a champion of this very wholeness, who sees it as a model not of narcissistic individuality, but rather of collectivity. All right. Finally--and I won't pause much over this because it's going to be the subject of Thursday's lecture-- the last aesthetic option for Marxism is a surprising one. It actually goes back to a book by Ernst Bloch called The Principle of Hope, in which Bloch essentially argues that in the world as we have it-- in other words, the grinding down of hope, the grinding down of possibility for all in late capitalism-- there is no longer any hope available. This is a kind of gloomy prognosis with which Bloch counters the idea that especially in folk art, folkways, oral culture and in popular culture-- in other words, in the expressions of longing one finds in the work of the dispossessed and the oppressed-- there is a kind of utopianism, a romance, and a sense not so much of wishing for something past, even though it seems to take the form of nostalgia, but rather a projection of a possibility on the future which is simply unavailable in the real world. Of course, the best example I can think of is "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." This is a song sung by people on chain gangs about liquor running down the sides of mountains in rivulets and everything just as it should be. "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," in other words, is a perfect example of the "principle of hope" as Ernst Bloch understands it. This is something that's picked up and taken very seriously by Fredric Jameson, not so much in the excerpt from The Political Unconscious that you'll be reading for the lecture but in an earlier part of that introductory chapter in which he talks about the importance of romance replacing the bankrupt aesthetic of realism-- the aesthetic of realism that has been appropriated by the bourgeoisie-- and as expressing in a seemingly hopeless world the hopes of the oppressed and the dispossessed. So this too, the idea of romance, the idea of utopian evocation, is a last, viable aesthetic for a certain turn of Marxist thought which has been interesting and productive in the twentieth century. All right. So today we take our numbers two and three, the participatory aesthetic of Benjamin and the Modernist totality of Adorno. We see the way in which they conflict with each other. Now in some ways I wish we were still reading the "Fetish Character" essay because it has more to do with aesthetics than the excerpt you have in your book by Adorno and Horkheimer called "The Culture Industry"; but "The Culture Industry," too, is a response, as was the "Fetish Character in Music" which was published 1938, to Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Adorno was a close friend of Benjamin's and exchanged letters about Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay with him-- letters, by the way, which were republished in The New Left Review of 1973, for those of you who are interested in looking at them, because this is another source of ways of seeing how Benjamin and Adorno were in conflict over this matter. Adorno and Benjamin, as I say, were very close friends. Benjamin was only for a relatively brief period in the 1930s a Marxist critic. He had hitherto been much more interested in cabalistic literature and in the Hegelian tradition of philosophy, and even in the 1930s he was famously torn between two possibilities. He had visited Moscow in 1926, '27. He had become interested in what was still, after all, as I've said, a vibrant culture in the Soviet world. At the same time, he had become very close friends with the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht and had fallen also very much under his influence. But another very close friend, a friend equally influential, was the Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem, who had emigrated to Jerusalem, who was a Zionist, and who wanted Benjamin to join him studying the Torah in Jerusalem and to engage himself in that community, as opposed to the sort of international Marxist community toward which Benjamin was perhaps more leaning, especially owing to his friendship with Brecht. So even in the 1930s, even in the period when Benjamin wrote his "Work of Art" essay and also a shorter, even more tendentious essay called "The Author as Producer," 1936, an essay in which he actually takes up at length something he mentions in passing in "The Work of Art" essay-- that is to say, the way in which in Russia everybody is judged not just for being able to do a job but for being able to talk about doing a job, to be able to write it up, to describe it, to write a brochure about it, to write a letter to the paper about it, and in other words to participate, to be engaged not just in the labor force but also in reflections on the labor force in a way that really does mean that everyone can be an author and also that every author is a producer-- that is to say, engaged in writing, which is part and parcel of the productions of labor, all of this was a focus of Benjamin's-- at the same time, even within this focus, part of him is being torn in another direction. No one can for a minute, in reading the "Work of Art" essay, fail to notice that Benjamin evinces tremendous nostalgia for the "aura." It's not an easy thing for Benjamin to say we have to tear down the aura and replace it with a kind of participatory mode that engages with and is involved in mechanical reproduction. I don't know: when I was a student I worked on and off-- I did this for years--in an art supply and picture framing store on the Berkeley campus, and of course, every student needed a picture to put in his room; so we had huge stacks of Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Matisse's Dancers and certain other paintings, all of them eighteen-by-twenty-four, which we called "brushstroke prints." They were mounted on cardboard, and a huge-- whhhhoooom!--cookie-cutter of some kind would come down on top of them, actually laminating into the print the appearance of brushstrokes. These things, if you squinted at the beginning of a semester you saw the stack going down like this. [Gestures.] Then before you knew it, the stacks were gone, and so you knew for a fact, because you knew how many prints were in that stack, that 240 students' rooms were festooned with Van Gogh's Sunflowers and > > Matisse's Dancers. You said to yourself, This is the fruit of mechanical reproduction? You asked yourself, again, Just what is the value of this as an aesthetic? Yeah, it takes it out of the museum. Yeah, it means that nobody has to pay fifty bucks in order to wait in a long line in order to get a peep at the Mona Lisa. Yeah, it really does bring it home to the people, but how and in what way and at the expense of what genuine knowledge of art history, and even of Van Gogh and Matisse, does the fetishization-- because it is, after all, > fetishization--of these little mechanically reproduced brushstroke prints amount to? Obviously, this introduces complications, and they're complications--the whole point of my anecdote-- they're complications of which Benjamin is far from being unaware. He knows extremely well that, after all, the greatest threat to an aesthetic of the kind he propounds is that it can be commandeered by capital. Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself, because that's precisely what Adorno says in opposition to him, but in the meantime that was the situation of Benjamin in the 1930s. Adorno, in the meantime, had gone to the United States. Benjamin was living in Paris ever since 1933. Adorno had gone to the United States, which he hated. The gloom of Adorno's view of the world is not so much the result of his experience of the weak forms of democracy in the Weimar Republic, sort of ominous as those experiences were; not even perhaps so much the rise of Nazism, because like Benjamin he was able to flee that. The gloom that he felt and the gloom that pervades his writing, which after all starts in the mid 1940s, is the result of his exposure to American culture. He simply could not stand us or our culture. He couldn't stand "jazz." Remember this was not yet the age of bebop, and I've always felt that maybe if Adorno had hung around a little longer he could have been reconciled. It was no longer the jazz of the aptly named conductor Paul Whiteman. It was jazz that was somewhat more serious. He couldn't stand the movies. I have just been, for purposes I won't go into, watching a film called "Broadway Melody of 1940" with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell tap dancing. Fred Astaire and his sidekick, George Murphy, are grabbed out of obscurity in order to be the leading gentlemen of Eleanor Powell. It's a perfect sort of Samuel Smiles success story, replete with the necessity of occasional self-sacrifice on the part of both of them. It is made for the wrath of Adorno, this film. > It's nevertheless, in ways that Adorno could not possibly ever come to feel, quite charming. But Adorno wanted no part of American culture. He was in anticipation of that whole trend of American sociology obsessed with the way in which American society is dominated by conformism. He takes this to be the effect, the result, of the pervasive, oppressive thumb of the culture industry, so that our very eccentricities, our very quirks and little originalities, all of them are assessed carefully by the culture industry. A niche is found for them, and the next thing you know, we're suborned just like everybody else. There is for Adorno no sideways escape from the monolithic, ubiquitous surveillance and dominance of the culture industry. All right. Now the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is influenced obviously by the promise of Russian art before 1934: the films of Vertov in particular, and other ways in which it's possible for Benjamin to say that the spectator really can be a participant. It's possible for Benjamin to say that in such contexts it's a good thing that the pedastaled aura of the work of art has been successfully torn down, that we no longer stand in rapturous attention and in contemplative postures before works of art but that we reach out to them and they reach out to us. We meet halfway and we become engaged with them; we become part of them. Now how does this work in this essay? Primarily through the insertion of the labor function of the apparatus in the represented field. Now this is a complicated idea that Benjamin develops in various ways. What he means by this is that the spectator sees the object, sees whatever the field in question is, from the perspective of the mode of production-- that is to say, the spectator participates by joining the process of production. Most obviously this means that when I watch a film, I see the film, necessarily of course, from the standpoint of the camera eye; my eye, in other words, joins that of the camera. Very interesting that in Berlin in the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories wrote one story called "I Am a Camera" that took place in Berlin. I have often thought there's some sort of symbiosis between the notion of "I Am a Camera" in Christopher Isherwood and the way in which it may be appropriated-- or it may simply be a happy coincidence-- in the work of Benjamin. But in a certain sense for Benjamin, the spectator, in order to be a participant, is the camera, is in other words the camera's eye. What is the consequence of this? Well, the spectator is, in a certain sense, then, a critic. Benjamin keeps comparing the eye of the camera with a "test." He even compares it with the vocational aptitude test. It's as though what in the theater would count as an audition-- I appear before the director, I recite certain lines of the script, and I'm either told to come back another day or I'm given the part-- it's as though to substitute what counts as an audition with the perpetual audition of the film actor before the camera, because after all, there is the camera recording what the film actor is doing-- not this camera up here, by the way-- but ordinarily, the camera has the option of later on throwing out what isn't any good. > Would that they [gestures to film crew] could, but the film camera can edit. The film camera is part of an editing "process, so that the actor in front of the camera is perpetually being tested and auditioned in just the way that you might be tested or auditioned if you took a vocational aptitude test for a job. That's Benjamin's point, and what he means to say is that if the spectator then takes the camera's eye position the spectator, him- or herself then becomes a critic, like a sports fan. Benjamin doesn't pretend for a moment that to become a critic of this kind is to be a good critic--not at all. Benjamin agrees with people who say, "Well, we go to the movies when we're tired. All we want is to be entertained." In fact, we are distracted. We are critics, as Benjamin argues, in a state of distraction. The German word is Zerstreutheit. We are zerstreut. We are perpetually, in other words, not quite paying attention even while at the same time we are seeing things from the camera-eye point of view. To see things from the camera-- I'll come back to distraction in a minute-- from the camera-eye point of view is a position of privilege because it exposes, as Benjamin tells us again and again, things about reality that we wouldn't otherwise notice. The camera is capable of slow motion, and it's capable of angles of incidence that we couldn't otherwise see. It's capable of all kinds of effects. Let me enumerate them. I think it's on page 1235 at the top of the left-hand column: "…photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision." Then on page 1245, he gives this process a name. He says, "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics just as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." In other words, the camera's-eye point of view is a privileged perspective. It does show us things as they are or, perhaps if not as they are, at least it reminds us that things as we see them with the naked eye aren't necessarily "as they are." It's not, perhaps, so much a notion of privileging what the camera sees as real over against what I see. It's a question of the camera reminding us-- demystifying our ideology, in short-- reminding us that things as we see them aren't necessarily the way things are. The camera, too, may have its bias. Slow motion is an obvious bias, speed-up is an obvious bias; but the speed at which we see things may be a bias, too. It's not that the psychoanalytic unconscious is telling the truth. Dreams are crazy, right? > That's the whole point of dreams. It's not that it's reality over against a mystified world seen in consciousness. It's a challenge to consciousness by the world evoked in the unconscious, not a question of what's real and what isn't real. Well, it's the same with the camera's-eye point of view, and it's all of this which, in a certain sense, awakens the spectator from the complacency of supposing his or her own perspective to be the truth. At the same time, admittedly the spectator is distracted--remember Zerstreutheit. Well, what then? The point is this: there is a kind of dialectic between distraction and shock which is crucial, Benjamin thinks, to a genuine aesthetic revelation. Perhaps the best analogy is with Saul on the road to Damascus. You know how the story goes: Saul is trotting along on his horse and not paying a lot of attention. He's distracted, daydreaming, whatever, and whhoooop! All of a sudden he falls off his horse, right? That's a shock, and it's such a shock that he's converted to Christianity, and he stands up and he brushes himself off and his name is Paul, right? He's a completely different person as a result. This couldn't have happened, in other words, if he hadn't been distracted. Right? That's Benjamin's point. Distraction is the atmosphere or medium in which the shock of revelation can take place, and that's the advantage of distraction. He gives a wonderful example of the way in which we do receive works of art in distraction even if we're the kind of person who does pay a lot of attention when they go to the movies. "Oh, that's not me," we say. Nevertheless, there is one way in which all of us receive works of art in a state of distraction, and that's in our reception of architecture. We pass through architecture. I work in the British Art Center every day. I have long since ceased to pay any attention to the British Art Center as a building. I receive the British Art Center, in other words, in a state of distraction, but that doesn't mean that it's not part of my aesthetic experience. It does, however, show that the aesthetic and the ways in which we process the forms of the world can be assimilated in more than one kind of state of attention. It is in one's bones, in a certain sense, to receive architecture; and yet at the same time, unless we are sort of tourists gaping in front of the Taj Mahal with a camera or something like that-- and Benjamin does take that into account-- unless we are in that particular mode, we receive the forms of our dwellings in a state of what you might call constructive distraction. All of that goes into Benjamin's aesthetic of participation. Now I am out of time. Perhaps I have said just about as much about Adorno as I need to say, although admittedly I haven't said much about the "Culture Industry" essay. Maybe I'll come back to that briefly before launching into Jameson on Thursday. On Tuesday of next week, we'll be talking about the New Historicism. Then we'll bring Tony back and we'll go through all of these various perspectives that we will have been rehearsing to see what we can do with them when we read Tony.

Literature_Lectures

21_AfricanAmerican_Criticism.txt

Prof: So I'm not sure how long this lecture is going to be. We could be finished in ten minutes, though I doubt that, and if we're not finished at the end of the fifty, there are some things that I've reserved for the end of the lecture that I definitely do want to get said. I don't know if you've noticed that there are times when the last point or two that I appeared to have been preparing to make never get made, but in this case I want to make sure that they are made so that if I don't finish today, or if I still have a point or two to make, I'll definitely be taking up those points at the beginning of Thursday's lecture. All right. Now the African-American tradition of literary production is rich and long standing. As Henry Louis Gates tells you, the first really rather important poet in the tradition, Phillis Wheatley, is an American colonial writer. The flourishing of the slave narrative form begins in the eighteenth century, continues into the nineteenth, the nineteenth century witnesses extraordinary works of fiction, and in the twentieth century, of course most conspicuously in the Harlem Renaissance, but throughout the century there has been extraordinary work done in the African-American literary tradition. It's a very rich tradition--in other words, somewhat in contrast with the very rich but also very recent tradition of African-American literary theory and criticism. It's possible to argue that the development of theory and criticism in this tradition was somewhat balked by a preliminary way in which it found itself at odds with itself. Black criticism and black feminist criticism from the beginning saw that they didn't have quite the same agenda. This is something that can resonate, perhaps, later in this lecture when we move to other topics, but in the meantime critics like Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, Hazel Carby, and Bell Hooks were in their variety of ways working with emphases that other, male African-American critics weren't quite comfortable with. So while work, especially beginning in the eighties, proliferated, there was, as I say, a kind of internal divide which has been a complex matter to negotiate and which is, I think, now largely sort of--well, détente has been achieved, and African-American literary theory is moving forward unfettered any longer by these concerns, or at least by any excess of these concerns. But in the meantime that may partly account for a certain delay in the emergence of theory and criticism given the long-standing richness of the literary tradition. Now the role of Henry Louis Gates in African-American criticism is, it seems to me, exemplary, although there are some rather harsh moments in this essay, moments that I wish to take up, that would suggest an element of-- what shall I say?--extremism or overkill in Gates's thinking. This is actually not at all the persona that he has projected. Indeed what's extraordinary about Gates, whose administrative power and whose abilities as a program builder are remarkable. After he left Yale to go to Harvard, he was able to gather to Harvard Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and others who have since departed from Harvard, but Gates is in a way an empire unto himself and he has been an extraordinary figure. The earliest work, which is actually among the earliest work in African-American criticism, is what you've been reading for today, and it established his reputation together with-- not so much discovery of, but authentication of-- a manuscript by Harriet Wilson which he published, an important contribution to our knowledge of nineteenth-century African-American literature. In any case, what happened then was that Gates who by some miracle or other-- he was a perfectly good writer in the first place but gradually became a marvelous writer-- began writing for The New Yorker, and during this phase of his career, when among other things he produced a remarkable autobiography about growing up in West Virginia, during this phase Gates really became a spokesperson for a détente among races and racial factions. In other words, he was a voice of moderation without incurring any imputation of Uncle Tom-ism or anything of the sort. His sheer urbanity as the remarkable writer that he is in those years when he wrote under Tina Brown for The New Yorker was just a remarkable achievement, and his career is still going strong. Now for Gates, as for Elaine Showalter last week and for Woolf before her, the problems surrounding the concept of identity persist. Identity--which of course is an important anchor for the thinking of people who feel the need for voices, for a place in the literary and cultural horizon-- is nevertheless at least potentially, as we've begun to notice already, a kind of quicksand. There are two problems really that dog the issue of identity. One of them is the problem of "essentializing" which I'll take up now, and then, as I'll take it up next, also the problem of what might be called the identity queue. In other words, I am a lower-class black lesbian feminist whose nation is Palestine. Needless to say, I have a variety of identity options to choose from, but the result is I've got to figure out which of them has priority. In other words, which of those identities do I suppose has the underlying integrity and essence, essentiality, that can motivate, as it were, the characteristics of my other identities, which are therefore somehow or another placed further down in the queue? So this is a topic that I'll come back to in a minute, but in the meantime the problem of essentializing, as we call it: for example, as Gates describes it on page 1893 in the right-hand column, where he's very clear on the dangers of ascribing, whether positively or negatively, attributes to any group that is constituted as or thought of-- because of course, the notion of race and whether there is race is in itself according to Gates problematic-- the problem of ascribing attributes even honorifically to a race is, as he describes it on page 1893: The sense of difference defined in popular usages [finally my voice is changing] > > of the term race has been used both to describe and inscribe differences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, "gene pool," and all sorts of supposedly "natural" attributes such as rhythm, athletic ability, cerebration, usury, and fidelity. In other words, obviously, apportioning out stereotypes to the various groups that may come forward as candidates to be races-- he's pointing out that all of these stereotypes do nobody very much good. So the problem of essentializing, which undergirds the wish to make manifest the existence of race gives pause. Think about it. On the other hand, Gates seems to be divided at the beginning of his essay between a certain candor about race, as in the work of Hippolyte Taine that he describes, in which "race," "milieu" and "cultural moment" are considered the key determining issues of any kind of artistic or cultural production. He says of that in effect, "Well, at least race is being talked about," while at the same time obviously wincing away from the implications of race and from the belief that there is such a thing as race, which goes all the way back to Montesquieu and others from Taine. Nevertheless, as I say, he's rather cheerful about the fact that at least race is being discussed, unlike the twentieth century when the whole thing is swept under the rug and a kind of ersatz and hypocritical politeness prevents anybody from talking about such categories at all, and gives rise to the idea that we all exist in the same Great Tradition, that work either belongs to that tradition or, if it for some reason seems egregious or outside the tradition, it just can be shoved aside and neglected. That's the supposition of the twentieth century when folks don't talk about race. So the very question whether it is an issue is part of this problem that is dogged by the more complicated issue of essentializing. For example, suppose--and of course, you've been reading about this in Showalter as well-- you ascribe positive value to what another person might call a stereotype. This is what the important Francophone African poet Senghor does, as Gates says at the top of page 1901, the right hand-column. Gates says: When we attempt to appropriate, by inversion, race as a term for an essence, as did the Negritude movement, for example ("We feel, therefore we are," as Senghor argued of the African), we yield too much, such as the basis of a shared humanity. Such gestures, as Anthony Appiah has observed, are futile and dangerous because of their further inscription of new and bizarre stereotypes. So you can see there are a lot of landmines to be avoided in negotiating the discourse of race, and certainly Gates is aware of them. Now there's also the problem, as I say, of the identity queue, and Gates himself may have a little difficulty with this, at least from time to time, because as I said at the beginning, he does have this sort of uneasy détente with feminism in the African-American critical tradition still to work within. So for example, on page 1894, a somewhat problematic passage in which the identity queue seems to be at issue, about a third of the way down, the left-hand column, he says: The sanction of biology contained in sexual difference, simply put, does not and can never obtain when one is speaking of "racial difference." Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. So what he's saying is in biological terms there's definitely a difference between the sexes, but in biological terms there is not necessarily a difference among the so-called primary races. The result is that at least when one speaks of women and men in the feminist tradition, one has to come face to face with the problem of actual difference; whereas when one speaks of black and white in the traditions of discourse about race, one isn't actually talking about a genuine difference at all. Therefore the discourse with the greater integrity of the two is the one which is about differences that are absolutely ephemeral, as opposed to the one which is about differences, which, whatever one thinks of them and whatever one wants to make out of them, are nevertheless essential. Now plainly when we go back to feminist criticism, particularly the gender theory of Judith Butler, we'll see of course that the whole question of the biological basis of sex, the biological difference between the sexes which essentializes what we will be wanting to talk about, is of course something that is profoundly in question, and not just because of so-called trans-gender issues but also, at the same time, because of the way in which our very sexual identity is something which, according to Butler, we construct. So there is an insistence here on a biological difference between these two forms of discussing identity which may or may not seem to us to be problematic. Now I think this is the point at which we can see the importance of the extraordinary essay that I've also asked you to read, by Toni Morrison. We know her best, of course, as a novelist, but she's also a distinguished critic, as she has been a distinguished editor of other important work. Here it seems to me that her reflections in some ways give us a sideways exit from the predicaments that I have been talking about, the problem of essentialism and the problem of the identity queue, because what Morrison wants to say-- and I think she borrows here particularly from the famous discussion of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind-- what Morrison wants to say is that identity isn't so much a question of what something is but rather a question of what it is not. She says not that we should be so much preoccupied with what it is to be black, but rather that, as we think about the way in which being black is inscribed within the white tradition-- as we think about that, we need to think about what white is not: in other words, as she says repeatedly, about black as absence, as negation, as negativity. We have to understand the absolute-- and this is where she drives her argument from the master-slave dialectic-- the absolute necessity in the construction of white identity for there to be, as an absence and as a lack over against white identity, the existence of the African American and, more particularly, for the better part of the American cultural tradition, of the slave. Let me quote then from her essay on page 1795, the left-hand column, where she says: In that construction of blackness [this is a third of the way down] and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. And what rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation was an Africanism-- a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm and desire--that is uniquely American. Then she points out that although her subject is the American tradition, there also exists a European Africanism with its counterpart in its own colonial literature. To reinforce this, she takes a remarkable example which must have reminded you, those of you who know Faulkner, of Thomas Sutpen or at least reminded you in some ways of Thomas Sutpen-- the example of this character Dunbar, who actually rose up not so much out of the swamp as out of the Scottish Enlightenment and came to the United States and-- according to Bernard Bailyn, the historian from whom she cites her information-- became a completely transformed character. I won't quote to you the long passage from Bailyn's text which makes what Morrison wants to take from it clear, but rather from what Morrison summarizes of it on page 1796, the top of the right-hand column: I take this [William Dunbar] to be a succinct portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is a formation that has several attractive consequences, all of which are referred to in Bailyn's summation of Dunbar's character and located in how Dunbar feels "within himself"-- "a power, a sense of freedom he had not known before." This is uncannily parallel by the way to the rationalization for slaves in Greek culture. The Greeks always said that the reason they had slaves was so they could be free: in other words so that the home or ruling population was liberated in the case of the Greeks from performing the daily necessities that are life sustaining and keep us going. In other words, to be free according to the citizen of the Greek polis is to be free from work. Now in a certain way, this is still a rationalization that Tony Morrison sees in the American slave-owning tradition, but it's not so much in the case of this Dunbar a freedom from work. It's a more broad and insidious idea of freedom: freedom from responsibility, freedom from the need to acknowledge otherness as human-- freedom, in other words, from the sorts of constraint imposed by old world civility in Scotland and in London; freedom on this frontier, in this wilderness, in this swamp, simply to be whatever one wants to be. That freedom is achieved on the backs of the black slaves. It is in some ways similar, as I say, to the rationalization for slavery in Greece, but it is in a way more insidious and certainly more-- in the terms that Morrison's giving it to us in-- more dialectical. That is to say, it is the question of whether a person could become white without the availability of a black absence, of that which can be oppressed-- like a kind of spring for the jack-in-the-box-- which allows the white jack-in-the-box to leap out of the box because of that which has been suppressed down below. All of that is part of Toni Morrison's concern, and it colors her, well, certainly controversial reading of Huckleberry Finn-- which nevertheless, it seems to me, has a quite profound interest. Now my own first instinct when people single out Huckleberry Finn for blame is to wince away, because it's an extraordinary novel. The controversy about it in the school districts which made it a banished book had mainly to do with the "N-word," to which we'll return, and the question of who has the right to use the "N-word," which is not an easy question to answer, as we'll see. But that controversy, while it had an authentic basis, was nevertheless certainly in literary terms and in terms of the imagination perhaps rather limited. Morrison gives rise to another equally and intensely critical way of thinking about Huckleberry Finn. She argues that to liberate Jim-- which of course is the tremendous failure at the end of the novel, a failure of imagination on the part of Tom Sawyer and a failure of will or independence of mind on the part of Huck himself-- that the failure to liberate Jim, which would have been the easiest thing in the world, because all they had to do was point out the right fork in the river, is an absolute necessity for the ongoing self-definition of whiteness as it's available both to Tom and to Huck and, after all, by implication, to Mark Twain himself. He couldn't figure out how to end the novel. He wrote it, then it lay on his desk for a long time because he just couldn't figure out what to do with it, and he finally comes up with this--as we all agree-- appalling ending. Toni Morrison says it's the only ending available because in ways that the, as she sees it, sentimentality of the novel and the sentimentality of the relationship between Huck and Jim, which is so strong that it caused another critic named Leslie Fiedler to talk about a homoerotic relation between them-- the title of Fiedler's famous essay is "Come Up on the Raft, Huck, Honey"--with all of that in the background, Toni Morrison says the basic structure of consciousness in Twain's novel is obscured, a basic structure which makes it absolutely imperative that Jim not be free. If Jim is free, then there is no Other over against which whiteness can define itself. That's the way in which she makes use of the general argument about the traditions of American literature in culture in applying it to Huckleberry Finn. All right. Let's go back to Skip Gates--Henry Louis Gates's nickname, sorry--another person who was at Yale and whom I knew very well. I actually had a little bit to do with the origin of the notion of the signifying monkey; I'll come back to that later. Barbara Johnson, also now at Harvard, and I had a lot of conversations with Skip at that period about this, and so it's not that I feel proprietary-- it's Skip's idea--but I was in on that, and so it's not just name dropping. I get to call him by what his friends call him. However, I'll try to remember to say Henry Louis Gates, and in any case to return to him now. I want to talk a little bit simply about his understanding and the understanding of others of the African-American tradition-- both of the critical tradition and of the literary tradition. First of all, the grasp of the critical tradition as basically a two-step or two-part progression is something that he shares with Elaine Showalter from last time. You remember Showalter says that the important movement of feminist interventions in literary criticism begins with the moment that she calls "feminist": that is to say, the moment of Kate Millett and other authors who talk about the degradation and unfair treatment of women in male books, and then what Showalter prefers and supposes to have supervened and to have become more important, "gynocritical criticism," which is women's appropriation of literary traditions for themselves, the archival work that makes the canon of women's literature not just leaping from great name to great name, but an actual unfolding and continuous development from decade to decade, as Showalter puts it. Now Gates on page 1896, the right-hand margin, sees it in much the same way for the development of African-American criticism. You can do two things basically, says Gates. He doesn't put them chronologically, but you could map onto what he's saying here the same chronological sequence. He says: What I mean by citing these two overworked terms [he's talking about "the other" in particular] is precisely this: how blacks are figures in literature [that is to say, how they're represented in literature, demeaningly, even perhaps honorifically], and also how blacks figure, as it were, literature of their own making. [You can see, in other words, the same movement in his thinking about these issues.] As Showalter argued too, the question of the literary tradition is more complicated; it has more steps. In other words, the powers of self-expression available to women from the beginning of their creative expression passed through more than just two stages, and the same thing is true of African-American literature. Now I think that Gates simply takes for granted as an implicit premise of the work that was done the year before he published this essay in Critical Inquiry by another colleague of ours here at Yale-- who died tragically not too long thereafter-- named Michael Cooke, who in 1984 wrote a book called Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. Cooke argued in this book that the history of African-American literature passes essentially through four stages. It begins with what Cooke calls "self-veiling": the period, in other words, in which people attempting for the first time to write-- and of course Gates talks about the way in which writing is really writing oneself into the human community for black people-- the people who first attempted to write used white models. Phillis Wheatley, the poet whom Gates talks about, a remarkable poet and a very interesting one, nevertheless wrote in the manner of Alexander Pope, so much so that a great deal of her work is almost impossible-- which is course a point of praise--to distinguish from that of Alexander Pope. She is an instance of the first phase, which Cooke calls "self-veiling." The second phase, which Cooke calls "solitude," involves continuing to use white models, a white prose style, a way of narrating which is obviously derived from white teachers and white models but which nevertheless involves, as its central theme, self-definition. Here you might want to think of Douglass and of slave narratives in general, where the emphasis is on being taught by white people, but nevertheless there is a tension which exists and which founds and governs the possibility of self-liberation and self-freedom. In other words, the slave narrative as an ongoing form partakes of this second phase in the development of African-American literature as Cooke understands it. Thirdly, there is what Cooke calls "kinship," a literature in which African Americans reach out to each other, identify themselves as a community, not as individuals struggling to be free but rather as a community. Cooke identifies this phase with the experimentation with dialect and a way of narrating and poetizing which involves a self-conscious insistence on verbal and linguistic difference. You can think of many of the poems, for example, of Langston Hughes in this regard and of a great deal else that goes on in the Harlem Renaissance; so that's the third phase, kinship. Then the last phase--and what I'm going to want to say is that Gates doesn't think we've reached this. In other words, the point of disagreement between Cooke and Gates is precisely about this. The last phase, which Cooke calls "intimacy," is the freedom to expropriate any and all models, not in other words to insist necessarily on one's own creative paradigms as a racial tradition but to expropriate anything that comes ready to hand. Ellison's Invisible Man, for example, is a masterpiece of High Modernism. It takes freely, in other words, from whatever traditions come to hand and are most readily available for the kind of work that Ellison wants to do. Cooke identifies this perhaps rather optimistically with what he calls "intimacy": in other words, a merger, a finally achieved merger of traditions such that-- and this is plainly the ideal of Virginia Woolf as well-- such that one no longer has to write as a spokesperson. One no longer needs to be concerned with thematizing the kinds of identity out of which one's writing has arisen. One can write just anything one wants to-- in other words, the utopian vision of "no matter who I am, I have access to absolutely any forms and themes I care to work with." That is the vision of Michael Cooke, which Gates, I think, unfortunately, rightly feels that we haven't quite arrived at, and that's why I deliberately used the word "expropriate" in talking about Cooke's fourth phase. If I use models other than models made available by my own tradition, I'm not just kind of pulling them out of the air. I'm using them with a calculated purpose. I always have something in mind in choosing the model that I choose. We're not really quite at intimacy because self-definition is still at issue. You can talk about the High Modernism of the Invisible Man all you like, but think of what the Invisible Man is about. The Invisible Man is still about what it means to be black. What is "passing"? What does it mean in other words to have this racial identity? So that, yes: traditions, manners, styles have been expropriated, but at the same time the business of writing as an African American continues, and it is as much, after all, a question of self-definition as it has been hitherto. As Gates sees it, it continues to be the issue. We use other models. We need to make them our own. Otherwise we're just colonized by them, and then after all we're back in phase one, right? We're back in self-veiling because, after all, Phillis Wheatley used other models. Phillis Wheatley actually aspired to the idea that she was just a poet. She could write about anything she wanted to write about-- the tears of Niobe in the painting by Richard Wilson-- whatever it might be, she could write about it because she was just a poet. That was her great aspiration, to be received not as that amazing thing, a young black slave woman who could write. She wasn't interested in that. She wanted to be a poet, and so in a certain sense you can see the problem. If intimacy is achieved in the fourth phase, well, then that's finally just the realization of what Phillis Wheatley wanted in the first phase, > and we have to admit, for all of the complicated reasons that these critics go into, that this is not a moment which can be said yet to have been achieved. Okay. Now this brings us to Gates's key concept: what does it mean to expropriate other people's traditions, more particularly the white tradition, Here Gates is after all thinking primarily about criticism. How can we do theory and criticism in the white man's language? How can we appropriate or expropriate for ourselves the white man's language? The necessity of bending language to one's own purposes is what is emphasized in the remarkable epigraph on page 1891 that Gates takes from Bakhtin. This is, it seems to me, as central a passage in Bakhtin, by the way, as anything that we studied when we were actually reading Bakhtin, and I'd like you to make note of it because I think it really can illuminate a great deal that's going on in Bakhtin that we didn't perhaps fully articulate at the time. This is what Bakhtin says: … language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent [and you can hear Gates wanting to emphasize that word "accent"], when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!) [how true], but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it "one's own." Now actually during the course of his essay, Gates echoes this sentiment of Bakhtin by quoting Derrida at the very top of the right-hand column on page 1901, where he says, "We must master, as Derrida wrote, 'how to speak the other's language without renouncing (our) own." Now how do you do this? How do you set about talking the language you are given? This isn't, of course, just a question of the difference between the races. It's a question of all of us in relation to each other. As Bakhtin says in what you have already read, most of the time we're speaking other people's languages. It is rare indeed that we can say, feeling very much like creative writers when we do so, that we have somehow wrenched other people's language out of its conventional usages and made it our own, slightly rewritten it so that it is truly our own. So more broadly speaking, this is the challenge that faces a theoretical tradition or a theoretical enterprise, I should say, that doesn't want to be just derivative from what other folks have already said. The concept that Gates brings to bear on this, because after all he recognizes, as does Showalter too, that the notion of the sign is probably the cornerstone of white male literary theory-- he recognizes that in order to perform this expropriative act, he's got to do something with the notion of the sign, and so he talks about the way in which one can signify on something. He introduces it very quietly on page 1900, the right-hand column, just seemingly in passing, near the top of the right-hand column: Since writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human, these writers implicitly were Signifyin(g) upon the figure of the chain itself… Notice the accent. You don't necessarily pronounce the g: they were signifyin' on the chain. Of course, the great chain of being, which is hierarchical, is very different from the vertical chain of the chain gang, isn't it? It's very different from the chain that holds slaves together. That's part of what it means to "signify on" something. At least allegedly, the "signifier" in the white male theoretical tradition is just a kind of placeholder in a play of linguistic differences. The question of the underlying sociological and cultural basis of this play and of the way in which this play takes shape isn't taken into account-- again, allegedly-- because--well, in ways that you can probably grasp from what we've said all along, this is slightly to oversimplify, but this is the position taken up. In any case, you therefore need to take the signifier and signify on it. Well, what is it to signify on something? This is an expression that Gates takes from the trickster tradition, the tradition of African storytelling in which the weaker is also the smarter, and the monkey or Anansi the Spider-- some of you may remember the songs of Rafi from your childhood about Anansi the Spider-- in which the monkey or the spider tricks the big, bad guys, the elephant, the lion. All of the bad guys get tricked because they are stupider, and the little guy is always able to signify on them, to trick them, and to lie to them without their realizing what's going on. This way of talking about signifying is very much in the tradition of African-American folklore and first comes to public consciousness in a song by the scat singer Oscar Brown, Jr., written by Oscar Brown, Jr., called "The Signifyin' Monkey." If I could sing, I'd sing it to you. Fortunately, I can't sing, but it became extremely popular and was picked up by various instrumental jazz groups and was a staple in the jazz tradition of the fifties and sixties. In any case, Oscar Brown Jr.'s notion of the signifying monkey is where Gates takes his essay's title from and which is where also he gets this idea of taking somebody else's discourse out of its context and insisting on bending it into an African-American context-- in other words, a context which is one's own and not just the context one is given. Now the other example of "signifyin' on" that Gates gives is the culminating example of The Color Purple, and the conversation about "gettin' the man out of your eye," which is a way of taking back a problem that exists even within the African-American tradition. As Gates has been pointing out, Wheatley and later Rebecca Jackson take their models of education and self-development from white male figures who have taught them how to read. In each case of course, this is pernicious because the existence of the white male figure is very much still in your eye. You got to get the man out of your eye, at least according to the dialogue Gates quotes from The Color Purple. Well, the interesting thing there is that in a way the issue of feminist criticism comes back to haunt Gates's argument because plainly Shug doesn't just mean the white man when she says "the man." A big issue in The Color Purple, of course, is the emergence of a possible feminism from social constructions that aren't just defined by race; so that when Gates says "the man," which all of us recognize as shorthand for "the white man," can be signified on by an African-American tradition, making it a term of opprobrium, right?-- "get the man out of your eye"-- at the same time it can be signified on by the feminist tradition, making it a term of opprobrium not in a completely different way, but in an overlapping and partially different way. Gates, in emphasizing the one as opposed to the other, is perhaps tilting again toward a certain imbalance. Now finally I want to take up the example, the most controversial example in his essay, one which is a source of outrage for most readers, at the bottom of page 1893 in the left-hand column. He's been talking about the New Agrarian moment out of which there emerged a number of figures associated with the New Criticism, including Robert Penn Warren, who very early on repudiated the New Agrarians and became a politically progressive figure in his own writing. Many of you have probably read All the King's Men, certainly, and his poetry as well. He was an avatar, a central figure, in the development of the thinking of the New Criticism, which we have briefly studied. Now Warren wrote a poem called "Pondy Woods," which is quoted completely out of context by Sterling Brown and unfairly out of context in the passage which I'm not going to read because I don't think I have the right to speak the "N-word"; so I'll just have you look at it--and I'll come back to that in a minute. Sterling Brown's response is also recorded there for you. Well, the problem is, from the standpoint of anybody who's actually read the poem-- but remember in some ways it's a problem raised by a New Critical perspective, and I'll explain what I mean in a minute-- that expression is spoken by a buzzard or vulture from-- I forget whether it's Tennessee or Kentucky. The episode takes place in northern Louisiana, and the buzzard is sitting expectantly on a tree waiting for a fugitive slave who has been chased into the swamp by his white pursuers to die. The vulture is sitting there--well, if it could it would be--rubbing its hands with glee waiting for this to take place. It's the vulture that says it in the poem: nothing to do in other words, as we say, with the author of the poem, Warren, who is writing a completely sympathetic evocation of what it's like to be a fugitive slave in this state of terrible and overwhelmed panic. So it seems completely unfair and it is, I think, unfair as Sterling Brown took it up and as Gates then perpetuates the idea in his own reference. The one thing I would add, however, is that it's a New Critical idea that we invoke to say that it's unfair. It's the New Criticism, in which Robert Penn Warren was a participant, that tells us we shouldn't confuse speakers in poems with authors. In other words, an author is someone, according to the New Criticism, who is dispassionate and who introduces dramatic voices even in lyric poems, voices with which we are merely confusing ourselves if we associate them with an author. Now this is something that we just take for granted when we read poems. All poems for us are to some degree dramatic monologues on the model of Browning and others in the nineteenth century. We read them that way now, but it is, as I say, a New Critical idea, and it comes back to the question, "Who has the right to use the 'N-word'?" It's a frequent term used on the street, as you know, in African-American culture, used almost with a certain fondness as a form of mutual greeting, but at the same time it is a term that continues rigorously to be rejected as available to anyone other than someone who belongs within this community. And so that issue lingers. It's an issue that Warren--because of course he wrote long before this controversy began to arise around the word-- the controversy really boiled over precisely at the time of the banning of Huckleberry Finn from public schools, much later, and so there's a kind of innocence perhaps in Warren's use of the word. Nevertheless, in the critical tradition it's a question, "Who has the right to use it?" This gives rise perhaps to the suggestion of a certain insularity in the thinking of the New Criticism. Use any model you like: the model of the Freudian unconscious, the model of the political unconscious. In other words, we've been reading a lot in this course about our never quite saying what we mean to say, of our never quite being fully in control of our discourse because it bubbles up from the unconscious, right? Now if you take a model like this, even though it's a nasty buzzard from Kentucky that's saying what Gates quotes, nevertheless there is an author, and it has bubbled up from the unconscious of that. Well, what are you going to do with that? There's a kind of impasse there. We feel distinctly and vividly and even bitterly-- because I love Warren, I love "Pondy Woods" and I also am something of a New Critic-- so we feel a bitterness about the expropriation, the "signifying on" what Warren says in this fashion. At the same time, we have entertained these ideas of a subliminal author, not an authority but an author welling up from below. If that's the case, then we have to worry a little bit about how an expression like that got into the poem after all. I call it a lingering problem because it strikes me as one of those moments when probably it would have been better if Gates hadn't followed Sterling Brown, one of those moments when there is a kind of overkill in the zeal of argumentation, but which at the same time we can't absolutely dismiss out of hand for the variety of reasons that I have mentioned. Okay. I'll leave it there, and we'll return to many of these issues in a new vocabulary and in new forms when we read the examples of post-colonial criticism on Thursday that you've been assigned.

Literature_Lectures

7_Russian_Formalism.txt

Prof: All right. So today we start a sequence which takes us through deconstruction, and it's a sequence which has genuine coherence. That is to say, these are figures all of whom are attentive to each other's thought, draw on each other, and build from the materials that we're going to start covering toward a certain-- not a certain end, but toward a moment in which the materials of the tradition seem to be undermined, actually, in deconstruction, but in which they are still prominent and set the terms of debate. The relationship between the Russian formalists and the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, which we'll be taking up on Thursday, is a complex one. I'm going to say certain things about it, and you may find yourselves discussing this relationship in section. I think much will come clear when we actually get into what's called "structuralism" and you read the essay by Roman Jakobson called "Linguistics and Poetics," Jakobson having spent the early part of his career as a card-carrying member of OPOJAZ, the journal of the Russian formalists; and then who, owing to various forces that I'll be talking about, emigrated first to Prague, Czechoslovakia where he joined a linguistic circle, which in a variety of ways proved to be the origin of what's called structuralism. Then, of course, he moved on to Paris where he knew Claude Levi-Strauss and influenced him and, ultimately, to the United States. The essay, "Linguistics and Poetics," which you'll be reading next week, I think will give you perhaps a clearer sense of the way in which the Russian formalists' work, and the work of Saussure--the foundational work of Saussure-- in the General Course in Linguistics amalgamates in ways that are profoundly fruitful and influential for the subsequent course of structuralist and deconstructionist thinking. So today we begin thinking about the Russian formalists, but I also do want to think of them as kicking off a tradition which, just in order to place them--vis-à-vis what you've been reading and hearing about already, one can say something like this about this tradition: it differs markedly from, and it's opposed to, hermeneutics in this one particular. It's one that is maybe initially counterintuitive but actually, I think, is rather important once you begin to think about it. Hermeneutics is, well, more or less by nature and by definition, interested in meaning. That is to say, the arts of interpretation are used for the purpose of discovering, uncovering, and arriving at meaning. Very frequently, as is the case in Gadamer, this meaning is called "the subject matter": that is to say, what--in thinking about literature in terms of form and content, let's say--we'd call "content." So in any case, hermeneutics is devoted to the discovery of meaning, and the art that it's concerned with is the art of interpretation. Well, the Russian formalists differed very sharply in this regard because what they're interested in is precisely the way in which "literariness," as they call it-- the devices of literariness--can be deployed so as to impede, to interfere with, and to hinder our arrival at meaning. If, in other words, hermeneutics is devoted to the possibility of communication and of understanding, the Russian formalists are interested in that special aspect of verbal communication called "literariness," which actually interferes with these very processes of communication and understanding. The roughening of the surface--celebrated by Shklovsky as a form of "defamiliarization"-- is what slows us down, what gets in the way of our arriving at meaning, and does so for a variety of reasons that the formalists are engaged to attend to. Now you may take note of the fact that what I'm saying isn't completely convincing, perhaps, to those who have been reading the New Critics and Wolfgang Iser and have noticed that they, too, are very interested in the ways in which literariness does involve special techniques and devices that slow us down. In other words, replacing the shortest distance between two points that we experience in a practical message, "literariness," as the formalists call it, or "poetic language," as they also sometimes call it and as the New Critics certainly call it, slows us down. It creates as a distance between two points, rather than a straight line, an arabesque. In other words, it makes us pause over what we're reading. It gets in the way of arriving too quickly at meaning, if indeed one arrives at meaning at all. The formalists are uniquely concerned, however, with the way in which literature is put together. Those titles that Eikhenbaum keeps talking about-- How Don Quixote was Made, How Gogol's Overcoat was Made-- reflect the preoccupation of the Russian formalists with how literature is put together. In other words, whereas the New Critics and Wolfgang Iser are interested in the roughening of form, they're interested in it for hermeneutic purposes. It slows us down, yes, but this slowing down is a means of enriching what we finally grasp to be the meaning of a text. So they are still engaged in the hermeneutic enterprise in interpretation. The formalists are really relatively indifferent to questions of meaning and to questions of interpretation. They're interested in what they call "science." They're interested in structure. They're interested, in other words, in the way a text is put together. That is, I think, essentially the difference between what we have been talking about so far, even though there have been a variety of outlooks, and what we are talking about now. Temporarily, as we advance through the syllabus, we're bracketing or suspending our interest in meaning and focusing instead on how something is made. Take, for example, Tony the Tow Truck. I mentioned that an interesting phenomenon in Tony, the text of Tony, is the tripartition of the "t" sound: "Tony," "tow," "truck." Just after we read in the text, "Tony the Tow Truck," we encounter a triadic or triple encounter with vehicles: Neato, Speedy, Bumpy. In other words, there's a three-ness which appears at a variety of levels in the text of Tony the Tow Truck which exactly corresponds to the aphorism of Osip Brik quoted by Eikhenbaum in your text: "repetition in verse is analogous to tautology in folklore." Now we have uncovered something about the form, the structure, of Tony the Tow Truck in saying this, but we haven't discovered or uncovered a thing about the meaning of Tony the Tow Truck. Nothing follows from this really--I think--rather interesting observation that there's a kind of pervasiveness of triadicity. Nothing follows from this observation about the actual meaning of the text. Now if you're clever enough maybe you could > parlay it into a sense of the meaning of the text. Who knows? Maybe we'll try on some other occasion, but for the moment I think you can see that in making remarks of this kind about a text one has shifted the attention from meaning to structure. It's in that context that most of the observations we encounter in Russian formalism need to be understood. Now the stress on taxonomy--in other words, the stress on the relationship among parts, the understanding of the various parts of the literary texts as "devices," which is to say, interrelated one with the others--this emphasis on taxonomy is one of the ways in which the formalists insist that what they're doing is scientific. Nobody can possibly miss in reading Eikhenbaum's rhetorically rather bizarre essay his obsession with struggle, with the fight, and with doing battle. You go on and say to yourself, "Good heavens. It's just talk about literature. > Relax. > It can't be that important." But for Eikhenbaum, there's obviously a lot at stake. I'll try to give you some social and historical reasons why this is the case, but in the meantime what he's struggling for is important to recognize, too. In the very first sentence of the essay, you read the expression "the struggle for science"-- an interesting formulation, "the struggle for science." Now obviously, the struggle takes place against the backdrop of completely undisciplined and unsystematic thinking which Eikhenbaum identifies as the typical thinking of the universities, of the academy. It's a pretty state of affairs, in his view, when the most rigorous thinking that's being done about literature is being done in popular journals. That's part of the struggle, undoubtedly, but another part of the struggle is simply to reach some means, to break through to some means of understanding the thing that you're talking about. You want to talk about it systematically, but how can you talk about anything systematically if you don't know what it is? You need to pin down an object of study, a first principle from which other principles can emerge, and part of the process is to say, "Hey, it's not literature we're talking about. Who knows what literature is? Nobody's really ever known what literature is." What we're talking about is literariness-- that is to say, certain devices that we can identify that perform a certain function-- and maybe out of the identification of these devices, to evolve a theory that's more widespread. Now I use the word "evolve" deliberately. In the backdrop, in the background, of that expression, "struggle for science," there are two key figures. The first is obviously Marx against the backdrop of the first great Socialist Revolution which eventually resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when the Russian formalist movement was at its height. Against the backdrop of Marx's thought pervading not just Russian life but beginning to pervade Russian government-- against this backdrop, the idea of struggle, as in class struggle, is going to predominate. Eikhenbaum in this culture will be using such a word advisedly, almost familiarly, but at the same time it's very interesting that the kind of science he's thinking about is not just any science. You'll see this more and more clearly as you read through the text and as we talk about it. It's Darwinian science and it's very interesting that Darwin, as much as Marx, is all about struggle: the struggle for survival, the struggle for dominance. Notice the importance--and we'll come back to it-- of the word "dominant": "the dominant" in the thinking of the Russian formalists and the struggle for dominance among species in a habitat. So in literature you have something like-- if you think in terms of literary evolution as Jurij Tynjanov does in the essay that the passage on your sheet concludes-- if you think in those terms, you think about literary history itself as a sequence of changes in which devices and aspects of the literary text struggle for dominance within and over against other devices. So it is simultaneously in his very first sentence a Marxist and a Darwinian vocabulary that Eikhenbaum is invoking, and that's what partly accounts for the strenuousness of his rhetoric. There is the backdrop of class struggle which is understood as crucial. There is the fermentation of Darwinian thought, which at the same time is understood as crucial. A great deal is at stake, and if those disorganized, unsystematic academics aren't attuned to the importance of these struggles-- right, class struggle, the struggle for science, science as the science of struggle-- if they aren't attuned to these currents, these contemporary currents, that's just another way of showing how irrelevant and obsolete they are. Now "The Theory of the Formal Method," Eikhenbaum's essay that you've read for today, was written in 1927. In other words, it was written directly in the aftermath of a bombshell published by Leon Trotsky called Literature and Revolution in 1926. Trotsky's Literature and Revolution is a brilliant book, an attack on many things and a defense of certain other things, but in particular and very painfully an attack on the formalists. Trotsky argues that the preoccupation with form in and for itself is a kind of aestheticism-- something, by the way, which Eikhenbaum denies during the course of his text-- a kind of aestheticism, turning its back on history and turning its back precisely on class struggle. Trotsky is not simple-minded in his literary taste, and he doesn't just sort of spontaneously insist that everybody has to write socialist realism. That doesn't, by the way, happen until 1934 when it became a kind of pronouncement of necessity at the International Soviet Writers Conference on that occasion. In the meantime, Trotsky's book is a shot fired across the bow of those forms of "aestheticism"-- quote, unquote--which can be understood as self-involved, self-preoccupied, and indifferent to history and class struggle. It's 1927. Things are changing. It's been ten years since the Revolution. There is a kind of taking hold of society and government by increasingly bureaucratized and strict forms of surveillance and management of social matters. Whether and to what extent the Russian formalists and their allies, the Futurists--among them Mayakovsky and others-- felt a kind of antagonism or growing threat from the government is not wholly clear to me. It's been disputed and one doesn't know for sure. There is still a tremendous amount of intellectual ferment and excitement in the capitals of Russia. This is not a wasteland of thought by any means, and the Russian formalists are an important part of what's going on. Nevertheless, Trotsky's book is a provocation. It's a challenge, and Eikhenbaum's essay that you read for today is in part-- to a degree that it can't really come out and talk about, or doesn't want to come out and talk about it-- a response to Trotsky's book. So there were criticisms in the air--but obviously he doesn't want to say much about that. There's one way in which he does talk about it, though. That is the marvelous exchange between the ethnographic critic Veselovsky and Shklovsky of 1917, which I'll return to; but for the most part, he stays away, seems at least to stay away, from the provocation and simply defends the right of the formalists to exist and the integrity of what they're doing. The obvious "enemies"-- and of course, this is Eikhenbaum's language, so one needn't wince away from using it-- the obvious enemies, in this case, are figures like Potebnya the academician, who in a way defended the premises of the Symbolists, which was the other very lively group of antagonists to the formalists-- to the effect that poetry is all about imagery. It's all about patterns of thought. In the case of the Symbolists, it's thought arising from the unconscious and being reinforced by sound and by language; so that language is subsidiary to imagery and thought, a kind of handmaiden of it--the vessel, in other words, into which the energies of symbolic thought are poured. It's this basic antagonism, this difference of opinion, that Eikhenbaum wants to focus on and, indeed, does focus on. At the same time, there is a feeling, somehow there is a feeling--and it's very clear in an essay by Jakobson called "The Generation that Squandered its Poets"-- of something like bureaucratization that's taking hold, something like the an atmosphere in which our perceptions of the things around us become automated. Shklovsky in particular is very much preoccupied with the sense of the automatization or automism-- I much prefer the latter word--of perception, the way in which we no longer really see what's around us. I quoted the other day Wallace Stevens saying that poetry should "make the visible a little hard to see." By the same token, Shklovsky insists, and his colleagues insist, that the business of the roughening of surface by means of various modes of literariness is to defamiliarize automated perceptions; to make us suddenly see again, to see the nature of the language that we're using, and, indeed, also to see--this is very clear, by the way, in the essay "Literature as Technique" in your anthology that I recommended that you read-- at the same to see the world itself anew by means of devices of language that tear the film away from our eyes. So defamiliarization, against the backdrop of a kind of gray uniformity that Jakobson in his essay on "The Generation that Squandered its Poets" called "byt"-- I don't know how to pronounce that. I don't know a word of Russian, and so I actually try to avoid using the rather well-known Russian equivalents for these terms because I feel like an idiot. Yes, I see them in the text just as anybody else does, but since I don't really know what they mean except by means of the translation, why should I use them? But in any case, this is a well-known term used by Jakobson in this essay which is, like all such terms that somehow wander into other languages, difficult to translate. That's why they wander into other languages. It means something like a kind of dulled grayness or ordinariness of life. It's that backdrop--it's that sense of bureaucratized existence-- that defamiliarization has, to a certain extent, the ideological purpose of dispelling and undermining. One has to recognize, in other words, that this motive, this motive force, stands behind the work of the Russian formalists, so that the claim to be strictly scientific needs to be hedged a little bit as a return of the aesthetic, or a return of value, understood as the insistence that life doesn't need to be all that dull. That really is implicit > in the Russian formalist viewpoint. Literariness, then. What is literariness? It is those aspects of a text, the way in which those devices of a text that call themselves to our attention, are new: that is to say, the way in which they shake up perception through the fact that we're not used to seeing them. In a way, this call for that which is new is worldwide; at the same time you have Ezra Pound among the high Modernists in the West saying, "Make it new," as his slogan. You have the various observations of Eliot and Joyce and others, whom I cited last time in talking about the background to the New Criticism-- all of them insisting on the necessity of difficulty, of novelty, of coming to terms with the immediacy of one's particular circumstances, and of getting away from that which is familiar and ordinary and vague. It is a transnational idea, in other words, which nevertheless has, obviously, certain specific applications depending on where it is. The newness that the Russian formalists are interested in is not just any newness. It has to do particularly with the palpable or roughened form of that which defamiliarizes. Now how do we understand this form? "Form" as opposed to what? This is a crucial issue for the Russian formalists, which they handle very boldly. Part of their platform is that everything is form. There is no distinction, in other words, between form and content. That's the fundamental mistake, as they see it, that their enemies of various kinds make in their understanding, in their approach to literature. But, you know, the formalists' own basic distinctions are dualistic, aren't they: the distinction between poetic and practical language, the distinction between plot and story, the distinction between rhythm and meter? In all of these cases, you're tempted to say, "Well, gee. One of those must be form > and the other must be content--in particular, obviously "plot" and "story" where "plot" is the constructedness of the text and the "story" is what the text is about. Doesn't that sound a lot like form and content?" Well, I actually think the Russian formalists can be defended against the charge that, unbeknownst to themselves, they fall back in to form-content distinctions by insisting on this variety of dualities. I want to spend a little time suggesting and developing the way in which that defense could be undertaken. Poetic and practical language: you've already been hearing this in I.A. Richards and in the New Critics. While the New Critics, in a variety of ways, insist that form is meaning, form is content and so on, they're still not really breaking down the distinction between form and content. There's an obvious sense in which they understand poetic language to be that in which form is predominant and practical language to be that in which content is predominant, but the Russian formalists see it in a slightly different way. Content is a function--or let me say practical language, the purpose, in other words, of communicating facts or of communicating at all, which we associate with practical language-- is a function of poetic language. That is to say, it coexists with poetic language. It is an aspect of a text, the way in which it does communicate in other words, which has to be understood as existing in a dynamic, functional relationship with those aspects of the text in which literariness is dominant. It's not a question, in other words, of poetry or of a novel being somehow or another strictly a matter of poetic language. In poetry or the novel, you can argue that the poetic function-- and this is the term Jakobson will ultimately use for it in his essay, "Linguistics and Poetics"-- that the poetic function is the dominant; but that's not to say that practical language is absent or that it doesn't have its own function. By the way, if we begin by talking about poetic and practical language, we're beginning where the Russian formalists began. As Eikhenbaum explains, in 1914 the first publication of their journal was entirely devoted to poetic sound, to the way in which sound seems, indeed is, not merely subservient to the elaboration of sense. One of the things, by the way, that Eikhenbaum does in passing is remind us that we should be on our guard against thinking that sound is onomatopoetic-- that is, that it reflects the meaning of what it's talking about. When I say "pigeon," I don't really seem to have any particular sense of an onomatopoetic word, but if I use the Latin, pipio, which means "to chirp," all of a sudden I say, "Oh, that's onomatopoetic." Well, the formalists and also Saussure-- this is one of the most important links between the formalists and Saussure-- are very carefully on their guard against supposing that sound, that the ways in which we hear language, is onomatopoetic because that would suggest once again, in keeping with Symbolist ideas, that sound was subservient to meaning. The importance of the earliest work of the Russian formalists was the establishment of the idea that sound goes its own way and is not subservient to anything, that it is a device independent of, though interacting with, other devices, and that it doesn't exist for the purpose of elucidating anything. In fact, it exists, amazingly, in order to hinder understanding in the kinds of texts that we're inclined to call "poetic." It's repetitive; it's anti-economical; it's retardant. Language of this source is a device, and in relation to other devices it's called a "function." We call it a function. That is to say it has a function; it has a function within our understanding of the way in which a text has structure. Every aspect of the structure of the text can be understood as having a function. Take, for example, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." Now this is an example of a text in which alliteration is plainly predominant. It is repetitive, and we understand it to be somehow different from the ordinary way in which a fact is communicated; but if we are not Russian formalists, we're tempted to say, "Well, it's a mnemotechnic device introduced for the purpose of-- that is to say, it's subservient to-- the communication of a fact." By the way, I've never known whether it is a fact. > A lot of mountains are rainy. > The Pyrenees I suppose are dry. I really have no idea whether it's a fact, and it's not important in My Fair Lady whether it's a fact. What's important in My Fair Lady is to repeat the repetitiousness of verse-- [spoken with heavy emphasis on rhythm] "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain"-- in terms of the tautology of the plot. Eliza Doolittle tries repeatedly to say that but, just like Neato and Speedy failing or being unwilling to push Tony out of his problem, so Eliza repeatedly says [with a cockney accent], "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain." That's not good enough, and so the repetition in the plot reinforces the repetition of the sound in question. Whether or not it's a fact is completely immaterial to Eliza, it's completely immaterial to Henry Higgins, and it's completely immaterial to the outcome of My Fair Lady. What's important in My Fair Lady is the functionality of repetition in the transformation of the principal character into a lady, right? So in formalist terms, that's the way we have to understand what, if we weren't formalists, we would suppose, as I say, to be a mnemotechnical device for the purpose of communicating something about the weather in Spain. Right? I think it's interesting to think in those terms about the relationship among devices. Now the point is that yes--and this is what emerged from subsequent thought in the Russian formalist movement-- the first wave or phase had to do strictly with sound, but then they began to say, "Well, what about this notion of device? What about the way in which--maybe the best thing to do if we're going to avoid keeping once and again and again and again falling in to the trap of making one aspect of the text subservient to other aspects, merely there for the purpose of reinforcing content-- if we're going to avoid doing this, if we're going to see the text as a text that has a structure, hadn't we better say that everything in it is form, that everything in it is a device? How are we going to do that? Because it would certainly seem that texts refer to things." Well, yes, they do, so why don't we call that to which they refer-- for example, in the case of socialist realism or indeed realism of any kind, why don't we call that to which they refer the "society function"? Why don't we say, "Oh, yeah, in a certain kind of text, the dominant device in that text is referentiality, is the way in which the real world is hooked onto and that can be understood as a device with respect to other devices." It becomes, at certain moments in the evolution of forms according to the Russian formalists, the dominant. You see, this is the way in which you avoid the form-content distinction. You say, "Oh, so-called content. What other people call content is a device like any other, and it engages in the struggle for dominance with all the other devices that one can identify as aspects of literature." Take the distinction between plot and story. There you would really think the formalists are on thin ice. Plot, yes, we all agree that's the constructed-ness of the story. That's the way the story is put together, how the overcoat is made, and so on. But story, that's what the plot is about, and if that's what the plot is about, how can we avoid calling it content? Well, it's very interesting. In the first place, notice that sometimes story can be the dominant in obviously formal terms. I think of that story that all of you have probably read in school, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. It's a list of the contents of the knapsack of a soldier during the Vietnam War, just a list of the contents. Of course, all these items in the knapsack are evocative and what they do is they suggest a plot. By the end of the story, in other words, there is implied a plot. It's just the opposite of the usual relationship between plot and story. Ordinarily, a plot constructs something which is implied-- that is to say, that which happens, that which we can talk about in paraphrase or as a subject matter outside the text-- but here in O'Brien's story, you're given the subject matter. The subject matter itself becomes the dominant device, and it implies in your imagination a way to construct it, but the way to construct it is not the dominant. The way to construct it is something that's up to you. What's the dominant in the text is just the stuff, the stuff in his knapsack listed with as little implication as possible. So that's an instance of the way in which you can see the relationship between plot and story as a relationship of devices, even though it's awfully tempting to say, "Oh, the story's just the content and the plot's the form"-- but no. The formalists don't want to keep that distinction for the reasons that I have been trying to develop. Any device can be the dominant at a given moment in the development of literary history. Any device can be the dominant. In Hiawatha, Longfellow's Hiawatha, meter is the device. You know how it goes. Well, in Tennyson sound is the device, "the murmurous haunt"--oh, I have no memory at all today. I'm mixing it up with a line of Keats, and I'm going to say something else about Keats. I'll just tell you that Tennyson thought the two most beautiful words in the English language were "cellar door" and that audible beauty was his preoccupation in the making of poetry. So we can say that the dominant device in Tennyson's poetry, as in much Victorian poetry--certainly Swinburne's-- is sound, and in Keats we can say that the dominant device is imagery, with his famous emphasis on synesthesia and the way in which the various senses merge in the evocation of images. In other words, of course the academicians and the Symbolists were obsessed with imagery, but that's not to say that a Russian formalist can't deal with imagery. In a certain poet, the image, the image patterns, can certainly be recognized as the dominant device. That would probably be the case, for example, with Keats. In Gertrude Stein, the dominant is repetition undoubtedly. In Wordsworth or Joyce or Woolf, the dominant is perhaps not formal. Think of the feeling that Wordsworth's blank verse just kind of disappears into prose. I don't think that's quite true, but there's a general feeling that, as Matthew Arnold said, Wordsworth has no style. In Wordsworth or Joyce or Woolf, the dominant is the interiority of consciousness-- that is, the way in which what we call stream of consciousness or the inwardness of thought motivates-- this is another word that you encounter in Eikhenbaum's essay-- motivates everything else that goes on in the text. In other words, an enormous variety of aspects of literature, understood as "literariness," can become the dominant. Now as soon as we start talking about things like the dominant, we are also aware of the evanescence of dominance. What is culinary in one generation-- and here I'm alluding to a passage quoted by Eikhenbaum-- for example, the devices of crime fiction prior to the work of Dostoyevsky, become absolutely central. He's thinking primarily of Crime and Punishment, but this is true of other works of Dostoyevsky as well, so that the devices of the dime-store detective novel actually then become the motivating dominant of a mainstream literary form, but then they in turn run their course and are replaced by some other dominant. In other words, once you start thinking about the evanescence of dominance, you're also thinking about literary history. One of the most false charges--and it was a charge leveled by Trotsky among many others against the Russian formalists-- is that they ignore history, the same charge so often leveled against the New Critics. They don't at all ignore history. Almost from the beginning, but increasingly during the twenties, they turned their attention to the problems of literary historiography, and they said some rather bracing things about it. In your text on page 012, the left-hand column-- I'll keep referring to those stamped numbers, the left-hand side of your Tyco [copy center] text-- we find Eikhenbaum evoking an exchange of opinion between the ethnographic critic Veselovsky and Victor Shklovsky: He [Shklovsky] [Eikhenbaum says, a third of the way down] had encountered Veselovsky's formula, a formula broadly based on the ethnographic principle that "the purpose of new form is to express new content [new content, in other words, being those social and historical and environmental forces that oblige literary techniques to change]… That's the "ethnographic" position. That's the word used. It is obviously also the materialist, or, social position. History produces literature; and not just literary history, but social history, produces literature. Shklovsky disagreed and he decided to advance a completely different point of view. The work of art arises from a background of other works and through association with them. The form of a work of art is defined by its relation to other works of art to forms existing prior to it… Not only parody [parody, by the way, is a very, very broad term in Russian formalist thought, in a way simply meaning change--that is to say, the way in which one text inevitably riffs on another text in elaborating its own devices and emphases and in search of a new kind of dominance], but also any kind of work of art is created parallel to and opposed to some kind of form. The purpose of new form is not to express new content, but to change an old form which has lost its aesthetic quality [that is to say, lost its power to defamiliarize, lost its power to take the film away from our eyes]. Now this--as you think about it, you say to yourself, That's all very bracing and daring but Veselovsky is right. > We know literature is produced by historical forces. What does it mean, a new form comes about only to replace an old form which has ceased to be aesthetically viable? How does that happen? You know, you've got to appeal to social forces if you're going to talk about change. That really does seem to me to be the spontaneous conclusion we are inclined to draw. That's why I gave you (to offset this conclusion) the extraordinary passage on your sheet, the end of Tynjanov's "On Literary Evolution," written also 1927, written also, in other words, in response to Trotsky's Literature and Revolution. This is what Tynjanov says: In formalist historiography, the prime significance of major social factors is not at all discarded. [In other words, we're not just playing a game here. We, too, understand the relevance of what we call "the society function."] Rather it must be elucidated in its full extent through the problem of the evolution of literature. This is in contrast to the establishment of the direct influence of major social factors [and here comes the amazing part of this utterance, which I think is truly remarkable] which replaces the study of evolution of literature with the study of the modification of literary works, that is to say their deformation. You see the distinction. In natural selection, certain things happen. There is mutation. New genes emerge as dominant, no longer recessive or latent, and organisms change. That's evolution, but organisms change against a backdrop--you know, organisms are changing like crazy. In comes the prehensile thumb, and the next thing you know you get a colossal earthquake, and the possessor of the prehensile thumb disappears from the earth-- which is to say, very possibly the human species will never develop. That's the modification of a form. It strikes me that it's a remarkable distinction. You will get in any period spontaneously the sorts of impulses that bring about socialist realism, but if you have a ukase from above telling you that if you're going to write, it has to be socialist realism, that's a modification. That is the modification of what would and does evolve in and of itself within an understanding of literary historiography. The distinction, it seems to me, is compelling. The only objection to be made to it perhaps indeed is that much of the time, it's just more trouble than it's worth to enforce it. It would drive us into such baroque circumlocutions and avoidances of the obvious to say, "Oh, social factors have nothing to do with this," > that we might as well just sort of--not give the distinction up, because I think it's very important always to have it in the back of our minds. It's important in Darwinian terms to have it in the back of our minds, and that's what Tynjanov is insisting on. That's why he calls his essay "On Literary Evolution," not literary "revolution" but literary "evolution." I think it's terribly important to keep the distinction in the back of our minds even if we find it, in practical terms, well nigh impossible and possibly even in many contexts a waste of time to be perpetually enforcing it. It is nevertheless a distinction that does exist, once you think about it, that deserves to exist and deserves to be remembered when we think about the variety of ways in which literary history can be written. Now I'm going to stop there. Time's up. There is a little more to say, I think, and certainly the possible ways in which Russian formalism is subject to critique need quickly to be passed in review. We'll do all this next time before we get into Saussure.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_6A.txt

[Music] all right good okay uh okay we're talking here by the way for those of you who can't hear us uh we've been talking here about uh prices of books so and any way that you can uh manage to save a little bit on the price of books is is fine with me so okay this evening we're going to be talking about Charles Dickens hard times but before we get to that let me give you an opportunity those of you who are with me here uh and remember that you're doing this also on behalf of people who are not physically present with us right now but who are watching this on vide tape or on DVD do you have any questions about what we talked about last time we were talking about the Victorian issues plus the fourth optional topic for the term paper so do we have any questions about these things you know each class period I'm going to set aside a little bit of time at the beginning if you want to ask questions yeah okay we spoke last week about I'm totally GNA get the name Mar won CRA right but since she was before 1800 can she still be included yeah that's that's fine yeah yeah yeah yeah right I mean normally I would say well you know I mean this is really 19th and 20th centuries except that uh she spans the taale end of the 18th century and then uh is very active continuing into the 19th century so that's fine and if anybody has any questions of that kind just ask me and for those of you who are taking this as a distance education class you can just uh call Orem email me or the assistant instructor for the class and you should have full instructions on how to do that in the packet of materials that you received at the beginning of the course and that are available on uh the web so okay anything else all right Charles Dickens so let's go to the screen please as you can see Dickens was in his early 40s when he wrote this novel so he was definitely a mature man and a mature writer he had already written a fair amount of fiction um first became popular with his work pck papers and uh then went on to write more formally structured novels such as the one that we have before us this evening and let me just say a little bit about the development of the novel because we haven't really touched on that we've mainly been talking about poetry and uh yet at the same time one of the most important developments that was taking place in literature in general in the west and by that I mean not only England but also Continental Europe and also over here in North America as well was the development of the novel most historians of literature will uh say well the first real novel in our modern sense of Novel was Cervantes donot and Don kot is not only one of the great Classics of our literature but it also was one of the most influential one of the most influential certainly in its own time but also in the 18th and 19th centuries uh people were continuing to read it people continue to read it today of course uh and were learning from it in the kinds of narrative experiments that cantes was undertaking in that novel and many writers uh English writers and American Writers as a matter of fact would uh would refer to Cervantes as a kind of lit AR father and uh of course the tradition having begun gained uh rapid momentum in the latter part of the 17th century and then in the 18th century we have Daniel defo uh we have one of our distinguished women writers aler Bane and then uh by the middle of the 18th century people like Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson Fielding of course best known for Tom Jones so he wrote other novels as well particularly Joseph Andrews and uh Samuel Richardson who became very famous for his epistolary novels that is to say novels which are written entirely as letters written by different people to one another uh the first of these was Pamela and then he wrote a very large novel called Clarissa uh the history of Clarissa harlo and then I won't go through all of these authors because uh you know you can find this information out easily Enough by looking at any literary history and uh the novel of course became a very popular literary form and by the early to Middle 19th century had simply taken over the readership of literature to a very very large extent that doesn't mean that there weren't still readers of poetry and poetry continued to be very popular in the 19th century but the novel really really really became the major popular literary form in the 19th century and we have before Dickens we have people like Sir Walter Scott who of course was just enormously enormous ly popular particularly for his historical novels especially those that dealt with Scottish themes that became very popular in part through Scott's popularity and of course Jane Austin who also uh became very popular uh to some extent well received during her lifetime but even after her death became far more popular and uh Zachary and uh some of you may be aware of the film versions that have been based on some of these novels by the way Scott a number of his novels have uh been made into films Jane Austin of course has had quite a run of films in the uh 1990s in particular uh films based on her novels and uh thary has had Vanity Fair uh filmed at least a couple of times maybe more than a couple of times one of those versions being very recent to us so uh in film form as well as in book form these writers are still very much with us and then of course Along Comes Charles Dickens and there had been nothing really like Charles Dickens before popular as Fielding was popular as Scott was popular as zakary was popular as Austin became nobody really took over the literary scene in the same way that Charles Dickens did and uh he just had an enormous audience and he sometimes has been misunderstood and uh sort of trivialized and even sentimentalized you know around Christmas time you know there will be be various deenan scenes that you'll see in advertisements on television uh with people in top hats or women wearing these long gown like dresses and uh often wearing bonnets well uh and and by the way you've got uh you know Christmas songs in the background and then we have endless endless showings of different uh fil versions of A Christmas Carol and people often forget the serious side of Dickens and that's something that we're going to talk about a good deal this evening because hard times is clearly one of his most serious novels but even in something like the uh Christmas Carol notice what it really is it's a it's a critique of the harshness of an economic and social system in which somebody like a scrooge can treat a bob cratchet and Bob cratchit's family the way he does in the in the cold-hearted way that he does especially in the early stages of that work but then of course Scrooge undergoes a kind of conversion so that by the end he's become uh very generous he has the proverbial Heart of Gold he wants to take care Terror of Bob cratchet and Bob ket's family and so we have a nice happy ending we don't always have nice happy endings in uh in Dickens works and one could certainly argue that in the case of Hard Times whose conclusion we'll be talking about later on in this period we have a an ending that is really kind of mixed isn't it but uh let's let's postpone that discussion until we've had a chance to talk about the uh the work in some detail this is actually a good deal shorter than many of his other novels I don't know how many of you have you know tried your hand at some of his other novels but uh in modern editions they sometimes will run up over 800 pages long and the victorians loved that now remember they're talking we're talking about a time when this was one of the primary forms of popular entertainment it's true that you could go to things that were more or less like Vaudeville shows and there were public theaters that not only had uh regular drama you know uh but also there were popular theaters where they would have all kinds of shows they'd have dancers and they'd have Comedians and they'd have anal animal that would come out uh there were other forms of popular entertainment such as the circus which is mentioned here at the beginning and then at the end of this novel here hard times but much of popular entertainment focused on the reading of novels there were circulating libraries that had begun in the 19th century so that uh you could go to the library could take out these books if you couldn't afford them there were even uh traveling libraries that were somewhat limited but nonetheless they did move around from one place to another so that people would have an opportunity to to take out books if they wanted to and literacy rates were Rising relatively quickly in the 19th century not everybody was literate but there still was a very large popular audience even among people who were non-literate or even only marginally literate the novels were typically serialized so that they would come out a chapter at a time in a magazine and so what often would happen is that people in a small village or small town would wait for the weekly post and the carriage with the post would come along and uh the magazine of course would be brought out and some member of the community perhaps a school teacher would get up and read in a public forum from the latest uh installment in Mr Dickens novel say hard times or Bleak House or whatever it was and so over the weeks even people who didn't know how to read or couldn't read very well would have experienced the Dickens novel and that very mode of serialization tended to affect the structure of the novel so that you'll notice that each chapter tends to have a certain kind of narrative line of its own now that doesn't mean that each chapter isn't related to the other chapters in a larger plot structure but nonetheless each chapter just like the episodes in a television series that may be ongoing will have some kind of central focus and dramatic action which is particular to it the novels also typically were written as this one was in three books or three volumes and that was so that the Publishers could make more money instead of being able to go I mean if you wanted to go and buy Dickens novel uh you wouldn't be able to buy it between two covers as as a single book as you could nowadays but you would buy it a volume and then another volume and then another volume so you would really pay three times for it so uh that too tended to influence the structure of the novels because authors knew that that was what they were writing for and that's the way they were paid to write their novels so uh we have some very interesting cases by the way in which uh a novel would have achieved considerable popularity when its first two volumes had come out and there was a lot of of of popular interest in well what happens next to these characters and so the publisher would go to the author and say well you've got to come out with the third volume you know because you know I've got all these people who want to know what's going to happen to these characters 20 years later and so the author would uh sit down and write yet another volume in which uh he or she would pick up the story of these characters a little bit later on in their lives so uh this is a different kind of publishing world than we would experience in our time and it affects the actual as I've said the actual form of the The Narrative itself Dickens as I mentioned uh at the outset of my talking about Dickens became popular first of all with the pck papers and then with some fairly Loosely constructed narratives until his good friend wilky C got a hold of him now some of you may know wilky Collins was a very popular and very good mystery writer in the Victorian period he wrote uh novels like the Moonstone and the woman in white which are still very much read and uh have had oh television films you know based on those novels as well on things like Masterpiece Theater and Wii Collins as you can imagine with a mystery writer had a very good sense of plotting I mean think about that for a moment a mystery story or a mystery novel must have a very strong plot or it's just not going to work right so uh Collins got a hold of Dickens and said you know you really need to work on your plots and so he gave Dickens some suggestions and Dickens took these to heart and uh actually began to construct his novels in a much more well integrated way and so in something like hard times which is not a particularly long novel you'll notice how he will introduce in the beginning we're going to trace this in just a moment he will introduce in the beginning certain kinds of themes that are going to run throughout the novel and certain characters certain actions and certain relationships among characters that are going to be developed in one way or another throughout the novel and then when we get to the conclusion as we'll see there's a sense in which we come full circle with the potting of the narrative so yeah question don't don't forget your your button there can you repeat the name ofy yeah wilky Collins wilky Collins w i l k i e I believe colins c o l l i ns and uh he wrote a couple of very famous mystery novels as I mentioned before but if you'd like to uh have the exact references the moonstone is one and the woman in white is another so let's go back to the screen here okay chapters 1 through three are going to deal largely with utilitarianism especially in education let me say a few words about that Jeremy benam was a very important thinker in the early 19th century and he was the one who really not only CED the term utilitarianism apparently but also developed the popularity of utilitarianism as a more or less philosophical conception or system which had enormous implications for society and for views of society especially ethical views of society one of his greatest followers was James Mill who picked up many of bentham's ideas and furthered them as did his son John Stewart Mill though John Stewart Mill eventually rebelled against them and claimed in his autobiography that he underwent a kind of oh what we would call perhaps a kind of nervous breakdown which he attributed at least in large part to the restrictedness and the on sidedness of his Early Education particularly at the hands of his father but that's something we can talk a little bit more about uh as we go along benthamism or utilit arianism in the 19th century meant basically that benam wanted to build on what he felt were the astounding successes of modern science and one of the things that modern science had been able to do is to discover ways of discovering and verifying or falsifying facts or things that were claimed to be facts obviously that's fundamental to the development of a science in addition science had turned early on to mathematics as a model for quantifying the information that one deres from one's research and so Along Came benam who first of all wanted to have a system that was based upon hard proved or at least provable scientific fact and then develop a system for quantifying literally quantifying in mathematical ways the kinds of decisions that we would make not only in scientific matters or in applications of science but in questions of values including questions of Ethics or morality and that was very very interesting you know he came up with something that uh he called a kind of calculus a kind of calculus and um in this calculus let me go back to the screen in this calculus he would give numerical scores to different kinds of of actions or potential actions according to how much pleasure or pain one would get in performing the action and on the basis of this numerical system you were supposed to be able to calculate whether a particular action was desirable or not whether it would increase your Felicity or happiness or or not and thereby you would have a scientific basis for making value judgments now one of the applications Beyond Bentham was the whole notion of the you know the the greatest happiness or the greatest good of the greatest number everybody here I'm sure has heard that before you know the greatest good for the greatest number well notice that that's based on quantifying right you know you you calculate if you've got a policy and you're going to try to figure out well you know what would the effect be of of instituting a particular policy well you know whom would it serve how many people would it serve would this serve the good of the greatest number now the problem with that kind of thinking of course is that there may be others who get left out of the equation and who may even get left behind and while one may feel that that's too bad nonetheless if one goes about rigidly and with a kind of of Iron Will imposing this system then one would simply go for the benthamite solution which would be the greatest good for the greatest number okay so that's that's one aspect of this another aspect of this of course is what we find at the very beginning of hard times because we enter into the school room don't we and let's just take a look at the very beginning of the novel and we have Mr grad grind notice by the way that the the names of people are often significant in Dickens novels so here we have Mr grad grind Mr grad grind grinding people down here grinding down the children with his insistence on facts facts facts and not letting them even read uh fairy tales or any kind of fictional work or any kind of poetry now what I want is facts teach these boys and girls nothing but facts facts alone are wanted in life plant nothing else and root out everything else you can only form the minds of reasoning animals that's interesting isn't it reasoning animals what he's invoking of course is the classical philosophical definition of a human being as a Ral animal you can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts nothing else will ever be of any service to them this is the principle on which I bring up my own children and this is the principle on which I bring up these children stick to the facts sir these children of course referring to the children in front of him in the schoolroom the scene was a plain bare monotonous Vault of a school room okay plain bare monotonous Vault of a school room now already we've got the authorial voice coming in right the first voice we hear is the voice of grad grind we don't know who grad grind is yet but it's his voice speaking then we go into the next paragraph and we have have the voice of the authorial narrator the authorial narrator the scene was a plain bare monotonous Vault of a school room and the speaker's Square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the school Master's sleeve so he apparently is not the school Master himself the emphasis was helped by the speaker Square wall of a forehead which had his eyebrows for its base while his eyes found commodious cage in two dark caves overshadowed by the wall the emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth which was wide thin and hard set the emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice which was inflexible dry and dictatorial now what do you think this authorial voice thinks about the speaker who's being described right I mean obviously the very terms that are being used here are being used to criticize him the emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair which bristled on the skirts of his bald head a plantation of Furs to keep the wind from its shining surface all covered with knobs like the crust of a plum pie as if the head had scarcely Warehouse room for the hard facts stored inside the speaker's obstinate Carriage Square coat Square legs Square shoulders nay his very neckcloth trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp like a stubborn fact as it was all helped the emphasis now does everybody know what caricature is what's what what does caricature mean what does the word mean any ideas it's an exaggerated portrayal an exaggerated portrayal in which typically as in cartoons you know like political cartoons you will exaggerate some physical qualities of a person you know for example uh President Bush they'll often focus on his ears I mean actually his ears don't look particularly funny but they you know the cartoonist will will focus on some feature like that or with uh uh President Clinton they would often focus on his nose you know and and he'd be depicted with bulbous nose or former President Carter you know would always have a great big smiling mouth with lots and lots and lots of teeth in it uh and so on and so on and so on so political figures can often be caricatured in that way by cartoonists so also in literature and one of the things that Dickens is most famous for is the way in which he can provide us with caricature of the physical features of the characters and in his works and how those physical features then can help to reinforce our sense of the personalities and the values and the attitudes and the thinking of those characters so in this life we want nothing but facts sir nothing but facts the speaker and the school master and the third grown person present all backed a little and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim so here are the the children out there now they're all in order you see they've got their their desks all arranged in ranks and files like a uh a military plon so that the the teacher can keep everybody in order and can observe everybody at the same time if need be and notice how they're described as little vessels ready to have gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim notice in this educational system there's no sense that the children themselves might have something interesting to say or to think about or to feel or to express but they are little vessels to be filled up with the facts disseminated by the school master so then let's look at just a little bit more of the this together I'm not going to sit here and read the entire novel to you so don't don't worry but uh I think that if we look at the first few paragraphs we're going to get a strong sense of what Dickens is setting up and then we'll be able to to move more rapidly through the rest of the novel Thomas grad grind sir a man of realities a man of facts and calculations a man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four and nothing over and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over Thomas grad grind sir perm Thomas Thomas grad grind with a rule and a pair of scales and the multiplication table always in his pocket sir ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature Not Just Goods but he's there to measure any parcel of human nature and tell you exactly what it comes to it is a mere question of figures a case of simple arithmetic remember what I said about benam and benthamism you know with its efforts to reduce not only human nature but decisions of value to questions of math Ma atics you might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George grad grind or Augustus grad grind or John grad grind or Joseph grad grind all suppositious non-existent persons but into the head of Thomas grad grind no sir well okay uh and of course again the uh children are going to be referred to his little pictures and then notice what he does when he decides to question the children by the way he's a visitor in school but he's a prominent person in the town as is the other person with them as we shall see in a moment I don't know if you experienced this or not when you were in uh in grade school but every once in a while there would be some visiting D dignitary who would come into the classroom and often would not only want to speak to the children but perhaps ask questions of the children well that's the kind of thing that's going on here girl number 20 of course she has a name you know girl number 20 remember now they're all in these uh rows and files so that they could be numbered girl number 20 said Mr gr grind squarely pointing with his Square forefinger I don't know that girl who is that girl see she's new to the school jupes her explained number 20 notice the narrator even you know refers to her as number 20 and of course all this is tongue and cheek say he jup sir explained number 20 blushing standing up and curtsying curtsying girls would be would be taught when called upon them when called on in school to stand up into curtsy is not a name said Mr grad grind don't call yourself call yourself Cecilia it's father has calls me sir returned the young girl in a trembling voice and with another curtsy then he has no business to do it said Mr GR grind tell him he mustn't Cecilia jup let me see what is your father he belongs to the horse writing if you please sir Mr grad grind frowned and waved off the objectionable calling the objectionable calling with his hand we don't want to know anything about that here you mustn't tell us about that here your father breaks horses don't he if you please sir when they can get any to break they do break horses in the ring sir you mustn't tell us about the ring here very well then describe your father as a horse breaker he doctors sick horses I dare say oh yes sir very well then he is a Veterinary surgeon a farer a horse breaker give me your definition of a horse jup thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand girl number unable to define a horse Mr grad grind said for the general beho of all the little pictures girl number 20 possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals some boys definition of a horse biter yours well of course here we have biter now a little bit further along after we have a an amusing little description of him uh bit said Thomas greed grind your definition of a horse and here's biter who's you know falling in line with what he is supposed to do according to Mr grad grind quadraped graminivorous 40 teeth namly 24 Grinders four ey teeth and 12 incisive sheds coat in the spring in Marshy countries sheds hooves too hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with Iron Age known by marks in mouth thus and much more biter now girl number 20 said Mr grad grind you know what a horse is well of course this is all absurd uh and it's supposed to be absurd and we're going to meet biter at different times later on in the novel by the way so of course she blushes and uh then we simply go on and and there's more uh attention given to girl number 20 as we go along because uh Mr Greg grind wants to know well what would you what would you do you know uh and and of course the you know the other guys get into this too uh one of them being Mr machum child machok child choke them with facts choke them with this kind of educational system choke off all of their imagination and creativity and of course Mr bounderby who is a Bounder I don't know if you've ever heard that expression or not but somebody who is a Bounder in uh in English speech at any rate that's not a good thing to be uh we'll talk more about Mr bounderby as we go along of course so uh the question put next is what about putting pictures of horses on the wall right here in the classroom and of course as you know I mean that's the kind of thing that we often do in in children's classrooms but no no no no no you see because horses would not be walking on walls so why would you put pictures of horses on walls and then uh you know girl number 20 Ventures to suggest that uh you know if she had a carpet in her room she would like to have flowers on it which of course then is treated most scornfully well I mean would you put your furniture on flowers in a flower bed would you walk over Flowers while you'd be crushing them and of course she's trying bravely to defend herself but she keeps being put down well okay uh but not forever because she actually becomes one of the good people in the novel so facts facts facts facts facts and we have Mr machum child towards the end of chapter 2 and notice how he has been educated this is in the second to last paragraph in the uh in the chapter and I know that not everybody is is working with the same addition that I am and that's fine if you can find a a less expensive text so Mr machok child began in his best manner he and some 140 other school Masters have been lately turned at the same time in the same Factory on the same principles like so many panforte legs okay in other words all of these teachers had simply been manufactured as on a kind of assembly line he had been put through an immense variety of paces and had answered volumes of head breaking questions orthography atmology syntax and pro biography astronomy geography and general cosmography The Sciences of compound proportion algebra land surveying and leveling vocal music and drawing from models were all at the ends of his 10 chilled fingers you know we talk about you know having information at our fingertips a common enough metaphor notice he has all this information but at the ends of his chilled fingers he had worked his Stony way into Her Majesty's most honorable privy Council schedule B which was the educational program for teachers or would be teachers and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science French German Latin and Greek noce he'd taken the bloom off of them I mean after all those subjects could be very interesting and very rich but he's taken the bloom off of these subjects he knew all about the watersheds of the world whatever they are says the narrative wrer and all the histories of all the peoples and all the names of all the rivers and mountains and all the Productions manners and customs of all the countries and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and 30 points of the compass ah rather overdone the chukum child if he had only learned a little less how infinitely better he might have taught much more you see his whole education has filled him with information but with little else so he doesn't know what to do with that information and he certainly doesn't have any kind of real Humanity that he can bring to the classroom and to his relationships with his students so uh so we move along and as as we get up to chapter 3 we have the dangers of the circus the dangers of the circus and that's introduced by the secret and suppressed desire for a world of fancy beyond the world of facts even among the grand grandchildren so that grand grind he walking home and he sees guess what his children who are actually watching through a loose board or a hole what little they can see of a circus which of course provides him with a great opportunity to talk about how awful the circuses are and how they must be forbidden because they are dangerous why would they be dangerous because people can indulge in imagination and fancy when they go to the circus but notice even his own children now have been drawn to the circus because of a secret and suppressed desire for something beyond their world even Tom his son a little bit later on is going to admit to his sister Louisa that he just you know he's just tired all the time it's not just that he's bored he's tired all of the time well of course he's tired all of the time he's not really permitted to grow up as a child notice how these children have grown up as soon as they're able to walk they are marched into a lecture hall and they're on the chalkboard they're getting all kinds of information and calculation so that that's what they're learning from their very earliest years on all well and good in one sense but what does that have to do with being children and being allowed to grow up as children so the suppressed desire for a world of fancy beyond the world of facts can affect even Louisa and Tom gradr okay then in chapter 4 we have one of the most interesting of these characters uh Mr bounderby Mr bounderby well let's look at the description of Mr bounderby he's the best friend of Mr grad grind well look at the uh the first long paragraph in Chapter Four he was a rich man Banker Merchant manufacturer and whatnot a big loud man with a stare and a metallic laugh a man made out of a coarse material which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him a man with a great puffed head and forehead swelled veins in his temples again we're getting a caricature AR and such a strain skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open and lift his eyebrows up a man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon and ready to start a man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man and that's what we're going to hear from him all the way through this novel how he is a self-made Man how he came from nothing how he came from the lowest forms of poverty but he was able through his own strength in his own competitiveness in his own gifts to raise himself up to become the the rich and famous man that he is today a man who was always proclaiming through that brassy speaking trumpet of a voice of his his old ignorance and his old poverty a man who is the bully of humility the bully of humility it's false humility it's false humility he claims to be nothing he claims to have come from nothing except now he has succeeded by Dent of his his Enterprise well okay um let's see what he says about himself in the formal drawing room of stone Lodge standing on the hearthrug warming himself before the fire Mr bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs grad grind on the circumstance of its being his birthday he stood before the fire partly because it was a Cool Spring afternoon though the sun Shone partly because the shade of stone Lodge was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar partly because he thus took up a commanding position from which to subdue Mrs gr grind as he tries to put everybody down I hadn't a shoe to my foot as to a stocking I didn't know such a thing by name I passed the day in a ditch and the night in a pig's diey that's the way I spent my 10th birthday not that a ditch was was new to me for I was born in a ditch and so he goes on and on and on and on I was born with inflammation of the lungs and of everything else I believe that was capable of inflammation for years ma'am I was one of the most miserable little wretches ever seen I felt so sickly that I was always moaning and groaning I was so ragged and dirty that you wouldn't have touched me with a pair of tongues and so he goes on a little bit further along here about 10 12 15 lines further along my mother left me to my grandmother said bounderby that's something to keep in mind because that's going to become important to the plot later on and according to the best of my remembrance my grandmother was the wickedest and worst old woman that ever lived if I got a little pair of shoes by any chance she would take them off and sell them for drink why I have known that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her 14 glasses of liquor before breakfast and of course Mrs Grand grind you knows my God you know this what is this all about she kept a Chandler shop pursued bounderby and kept me in an egg box that was the cot of my infancy an old egg box as soon as I was big enough to run away of course I ran away then I became a young Vagabond and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me they were right they had no business to do anything else I was a nuisance an encumbrance and a pest I know that very well his pride in having at any time in his life a achieved such a great social distinction as to be a nuisance an encumbrance in a pest was only to be satisfied by three Sous repetitions of the boast I was to pull through it I suppose Mrs grad grind whether I was to do it or not ma'am I did it I pulled through it though nobody threw me out a rope Vagabond Aaron boy Vagabond laborer Porter K Chief manager small partner Josiah bounderby of cop toown those were the antecedants in the culmination Josiah BBY of kok toown learned his letters from the outsides of the shops the signs on the shop windows on the from the outsides of the shops Mrs grad grind and was first able to tell the time of upon a dial plate from studying the steeple clock of St giles's church under the direction of a drunken who was a convicted thief and an encourageable vagrant tell Josiah bounderby of K toown of your district schools and your model schools and your training schools and your whole kettle of fish of schools and Josiah bounderby of kok toown tells you plainly all right all correct he hadn't such advantages but let us have hard-headed solid fisted people the education that made him won't do for everybody he knows well such and such his education was however and you may force him to swallow boiling fat but you shall never force him to suppress the facts of his life well he just goes on and on and on and on um and uh so Mr bounderby keeps you know blustering along uh what's young Thomas in the dumps about and he looked at Louisa and Louisa says we were peeping at the circus uh and father caught us and Mrs grad grind said and Mrs grad grind said her husband in a lofty manner I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry oh my God how awful had they been reading poetry dear me and so forth well okay um and this goes on and on and on and on through this whole chapter and we're learning more about the rearing of the children and of course the uh the status of Mr grad grind which he is constantly trying to puff up with his rags to riches story about his own life later on one of the things we're going to realize is that that becomes his justification for not caring about the working people in his factories you see why if I could do it anybody who has a sound character should be able to do it look where I came from I had nothing I was born in a ditch you know and here are these people who are still languishing in poverty it's because of their weakness of character so uh remember social Darwinism we talked about that a little bit last time we're going to talk a little bit more about it this evening okay so we have the ethic of the entrepreneur rising out of poverty to wealth and power so uh at the end of this chapter by the way notice that he wants a kiss from Louisa now remember how old is Louisa at this point in her life remember anybody remember the narrator says she's somewhere between 15 and 16 years old so she's still a girl but she's obviously on the verge of becoming a young woman and here is bounderby who wants her to come over and give him a kiss as he's leaving well she does so by the way uh but then and of course he gives her a kiss on the cheek and uh then she tries to scrub it off with her handkerchief so in chapter five we have the famous description at the beginning of that chapter of kok town you know Coke is is one of the uh the products of Mining and then manufacturer look at the second paragraph in Chapter 5 we're still in the first book it was a town of red brick this is a very very very famous passage by the way it was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the Smoke and Ashes had allowed it but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a Savage it was a town of machinery and Tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled serpents of smoke again notice the attitude of the authorial narrator here when we're listening to his voice it had a black canal in it a black Canal of course from the soot and a river that ran purple with ill smelling dye and vast piles of buildings full of Windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long and where the Piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy mad it contains several large streets all very like one another and many small streets still more like one another inhabited by people equally like one another who all went in and out at the same hours with the same sound upon the same pavement to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow and every year the counterpart of the layout and the next okay uh how would you like to live in COK town but this is the kind of condition that many many many many of the urban poor were trapped in these attributes of kok toown were in the main Inseparable from the work by which it was sustained against them were to be set off Comforts of life which found their way all over the world and elegancies of Life which made we will not ask how much of the fine lady who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned the rest of its features were voluntary and they were these okay so we go on with this description you saw nothing in kok town but what was severely workful if the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there as the members of 18 religious Persuasions had done they made it a Pious Warehouse of red brick with sometimes but this is only in highly ornamented examples a bell in a bird cage on the top of it the solitary exception was the new church a stuck OED edifice with a square steeple over the door terminating in four short Pinnacles like fluid wooden legs all the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike in severe characters of black and white the jail might have been the infirmary the infirmary might have been the jail the town hall might have been either or both or anything else for anything that appeared to the contrary in The Graces of their construction fact fact fact and by the way everything the same fact fact fact everywhere in the material aspect of the Town fact fact fact everywhere in the immaterial the mokum child school was all fact and the School of Design was all fact and the relations between master and man were all fact and everything was fact between the lying in hospital lying in hospital being the place where women would have their their babies and the cemetery and what you couldn't state in figures or showed to be purchasable in the cheapest market and sailable in the dearest was not and never should be World Without End Amen okay uh which is a nice ironic touch here okay so what do we have notice the churches by the way are trying to regulate the poor no dancing no singing in public unless you're singing A Hymn uh no singing no going off to theaters or shows no drinking and notice from Dickens point of view these are all efforts not only by the Bounder and the grad grinds and the machok Childs but also by the churches themselves to regulate and to control the people okay so um we go on we have more girl number 20 business and and so forth and notice that K toown is totally marked by drabness and endless monor monotony and it's the kind of thing that happens on an assembly line I don't know if any of you have ever worked at a job like this where you're doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again I actually had a job like that one time uh years ago when I was a student and uh sort of in between times and uh you know where at at its worst I'm not talking about my job now but at its worst you can go to an assembly line and I visited some of these where somebody's job is simply to put one part on one object every 15 seconds and maybe turn two screws every 15 seconds and that's what you do all day long there are some jobs for example that are so monotonous that that people can't keep up their concentration and they've actually before the days of of mechanizing them they actually turned them over to animals you know for example uh in uh in in a Brewery you know where you have to measure the level of the of the beer in the bottles and uh the bottles all pass in front of a screen that has two horizontal lines on it and the bottle has to be filled to a position between those two lines so it's neither underfilled nor overfilled well if you have a human being doing that the human being can't concentrate on that job for a very very long period of time so you either rotate people in and out of that job on a regular basis every few minutes or what One Brewery tried one time was actually to train chickens to do it where you could train a chicken and if the you know the beer level were above or below the line the chicken was taught to hit a button and of course then the chicken would get some you know little treat here periodically uh so this is the kind of thing that people were confined to and consigned to in the new Industrial Revolution so for all of the great things that the Industrial Revolution brought there's also this Underside to it and that's the kind of thing that Dickens and others want to draw our atten mention too now we talked last class about the great Victorian issues this being one we looked at some other writers who were talking about industrialism and the question is it progress or is it decline decline not in material terms but in human terms what is the cost in human terms when you create coch towns and have people people not only working but living their lives out in C towns okay so now we know where Dickens stands on the issue chapter six we actually go now to the circus we learned a little bit about the circus through uh Mr grad grind's attitudes towards the circus when he found his children peeking through the the holes so that they could try to see at least a little bit of what was going on in the circus but we didn't actually see the circus as such we also learned just a little bit about this when girl number 20 was talking about her father her father by the way worked in the circus and Mr grg Grind did not want to hear any he talk about horses in the ring but now we actually go to the circus company and uh the circus is run by a certain Mr slur and we have the whole pathetic story of girl number 20 jup who has been left by her father and she doesn't really want to believe that he has left her and so she keeps waiting for him and waiting for him and waiting for him she had been sent out to get a particular kind of oil which probably was a linament to rub on his sore muscles which had become sore apparently as a result of being knocked around in his circus job falling off a horse or something rather like that and so she is sent out to get the linament for him and while she goes he takes off and simply abandons her now here she is an abandoned child she doesn't want to believe that her father has abandoned her of course and the circus people it turns out are very kind Humane genuinely good people and no doubt would take care of her but after all these people are themselves poor and this is yet another mouth to feed so now we have grad grind stepping in and under his own conditions of course he's going to offer to take in into his household so we have uh the the scene of pathos with talking about her father followed by passages in which we have the opposition between sentiment or real emotion real feeling versus cold fact especially in the contrast between the supposedly unrespectable circus people and the respectable boundary bound boundar B and gr grind but one thing that is important before we let me just go back a second so that we don't uh get the screen ahead of where we are is the very fact that bound excuse me that grad grind will offer to take in is at least a sign that there's more to grad grind than you might think at this point and that's going to make plausible his change of heart later on in the novel where he actually does change and he changes his whole way of life as we shall see so here's just a little bit of a hint that you know Greg grind does have a heart okay so we move on to chapter S and we have Mrs sparset and Mrs fars it is another one of those wonderful characters in Dickens she too is a caricature and she is living in the house of Mr bounderby as his housekeeper but they maintain a fiction that she's not really employed by him even though he gives her a pretty considerable amount of money each year as if it is a here and present so that both of them can maintain the fiction that she is as it were oh this elegant lady who is simply residing in his house and sharing the house with him uh as a relative might or perhaps a close friend might well uh we have all of this affectation about her background and where she comes from and uh her aunt is a great lady and she comes from a line of of aristocrats and notice that the affectations of bounderby and of Mrs sparset are exactly opposite but complimentary to one another he claims that his background was to be born in a ditch but now he has risen to become one of the great men not only of Koch town but of the nation she claims on the other hand to have come from great and aristocratic background but of course now she no longer has the kind of wealth and power that she claimed her family once had uh and so of course she lives in the household of Mr bounderby but in both cases we have a great deal of pretense and of affectation and we're going to be following these characters now as they become increasingly agents in the PLT important agents in the pot and part of what we're going to be doing is is looking at how Dickens not only is setting up things in book one but then how he is bringing things to a head in books two and unraveling the knot of the pot in book three after the break

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_23_Visions_of_the_End_Daniel_and_Apocalyptic_Literature.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: All right, let's go ahead and get started; there's a lot to cover. But I want to try to unite a lot of these disparate parts of the Bible, the many small books clustered here at the end that we'll be considering. I'm going to try to unite them by elaborating certain themes as we move through them. But as you can see, from this giant chart, there's quite a bit. First, let's begin with the Book of Ruth. The Book of Ruth is set in the days of the Judges; that's the opening line of the book. It tells you that this happened in the days of Judges, but it was certainly written later, and whether it was post-exilic or pre-exilic is not certain, so we're going to be asking the questions of a canonical critic. Whatever its origin, how did this book function for Second Temple Jews? As the story of a foreign woman, whose foreign status is continually emphasized throughout the book, (Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the Moabitess)-- as a foreign woman who acts nobly and enters the community of Israel by choice, this story would have stood in opposition to the negative view of foreigners, the ban on intermarriage and the purely genealogical definition of Israelite identity that was promulgated by Ezra and Nehemiah in the post-exilic period. So in the story you have a famine in Judah and that causes a Bethlehemite man, Elimelech and his wife Naomi, and their two children to leave Judah. They're going to reside in the country of Moab, where the Moabites live, and their two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. You have to consider the effect that these opening verses would have had on an ancient Israelite listener or reader. Moab was a hostile neighbor on Israel's southeastern border. And the Moabites were hated for their ill-treatment of the Israelites when they were traveling to the Promised Land. Their lack of hospitality had already led to a prohibition of intermarriage in the Torah itself. So the Moabites and Ammonites are two foreign groups that are explicitly prohibited from entering the congregation in Deuteronomy 23. The Israelites' low opinion of the Moabites is also expressed in Genesis in the very degrading story of Moab's descent from the incestuous relationship between Lot and one of his daughters, after the fall of Sodom. And yet here we read, in the opening lines of this story a man from Bethlehem, who travels to Moab, and his two sons marry Moabite women! Then in short order Elimelech and his two sons (who are appropriately named Sickness and Death, by the way, in Hebrew) they die. And the Israelite widow, Naomi, is left now with no blood relation, no blood male relation, only her two Moabite daughters-in-law. And Naomi weepily tells the girls that they should return to their father's home. She's poor, she'll never be able to support them as a poor widow, she has no further sons to give to them, and clearly they have no legal or moral obligation or tie to Naomi. And we'll pick up the story then in chapter 1:11: But Naomi replied, "Turn back, my daughters! Why should you go with me? Have I any more sons in my body who might be husbands for you? Turn back, my daughters, for I am too old to be married. Even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I married tonight and I also bore sons, should you wait for them to grow up? Should you on their account debar yourselves from marriage? Oh no, my daughters! My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord has struck out against me." They broke into weeping again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law farewell. But Ruth clung to her. So she said, "See, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and her gods. Go follow your sister-in-law." But Ruth replied, "Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if even death parts me from you." When [Naomi] saw how determined she was to go with her, she ceased to argue with her; and the two went on until they reached Bethlehem. All of the names in this story are wonderfully symbolic. Sickness and Death – it's like they walk on the stage with a big sign saying "I'm in a bit part and I'm ready to die." Orpah's name means the back of the neck because she turns her back on her mother-in-law as well. It's a wonderful story with lots of name symbolisms. But by the force of sheer conviction, Ruth joins herself to the people of her mother-in-law. Back in Judah, Ruth supports her mother-in-law and herself by gleaning the fallen sheaves behind the reapers in the field. Because according to the Pentateuch, the sheaves that fall behind the reapers must be left for the poor to collect; you don't go back and collect them. So Ruth gleans, and she gleans in the field of a kinsman named Boaz, and he's described as a man of substance and she's very diligent and she soon comes to his attention. He's very kind to her, he looks out for her safety among the rough field workers. He provides water for her. He's heard of what Ruth has done for Naomi; how she left her home and left her family to come to a people that she really didn't know, and he blesses her. He says, "May the Lord reward your deeds. May you have a full recompense from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have sought refuge!" chapter 2:12. He increases his generosity; he shares his meal with Ruth and gives her from the heaps of grain in addition to the gleanings that she's collecting. So Naomi is very delighted with Ruth's gleanings, they more than suffice for their needs. But she's even more pleased to learn that Ruth seems to have found favor in the eyes of Boaz. He's been very kind and generous, and she points out: you know he is among our redeeming kinsmen. Now the term here, the Hebrew term is goel. Goel means redeemer. In fact, in a lot of the Christian language later, this is the word they're using when they talk about "my redeemer liveth." It's simply this word goel, and the goel is a person who as the nearest relative or as a close relative, has certain legal obligations to another person. Those obligations--the primary obligations are three: (1)To redeem the person or their property if they've been sold to a stranger due to poverty. So to redeem them from debt servitude essentially. So your goel should do that for you. (2)To marry a childless widow. So if a man dies and his wife is childless the goel is supposed to marry her, provide seed, and the firstborn son will be named after the name who is dead. So he's supposed to marry a childless widow and produce offspring for the deceased; usually, that falls first to the brother; And then (3) in the case of the blood redeemer, also the redeemer is supposed to avenge the blood of a kinsman. So if you are killed your redeemer is supposed to seek vengeance for you. Boaz is a somewhat distant relative, but Naomi believes he's the answer to their dual problem of poverty on the one hand, and Ruth's widowhood on the other hand. So in chapter 3 she urges Ruth to make a visit to Boaz. He's winnowing barley on the threshing floor and Ruth is supposed to bathe herself, anoint herself, dress up and go out at night to the threshing floor. You should know that biblically, threshing floors tend to be places of revelry at the end of the harvest time and they are often frequented by prostitutes. But Naomi seems to be planning Ruth's seduction of Boaz. She instructs Ruth not to reveal herself until Boaz has finished eating and drinking, and when he lies down, Ruth is to approach him and uncover his feet--this is possibly a sexual euphemism--and lie down, and he will tell her what she is to do. So Ruth follows these instructions exactly. In 3:7-11: Boaz ate and drank, and in a cheerful mood went to lie down beside the grainpile. Then she went over stealthily and uncovered his feet and lay down. In the middle of the night, the man gave a start and pulled back--there was a woman lying at his feet! "Who are you?" he asked. And she replied, "I am your handmaid Ruth. Spread your robe over you handmaid, for you are a redeeming kinsman." [a goel] He exclaimed, "Be blessed of the Lord, daughter! Your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first, in that you have not turned to younger men, whether poor or rich. And now, daughter, have no fear. I will do in your behalf whatever you ask, for all the elders of my town know what a fine woman you are." So Ruth's request is that Boaz act as her redeemer and spread his robe over her, which is a formal act of protection and espousal. And Boaz assures her that he will redeem her. He then goes on to point out, however, that there is another kinsman who is actually a closer relation, and therefore has the first right of refusal, and Boaz will settle the matter legally in the morning. And we're left wondering what transpired in the night. In chapter 4 we read the legal proceeding by which the other kinsman is freed of his obligation and his claim to Ruth and this then clears the way, enables Boaz to marry her. But the punchline to the whole story is yet to come and that occurs in chapter 4, verses 13-17, So Boaz married Ruth; she became his wife, and he cohabited with her. The Lord let her conceive, and she bore a son. And the women said to Naomi, "Blessed by the Lord, who has not withheld a redeemer from you today! May his name be perpetuated in Israel! He will renew your life and sustain your old age; for he is born of your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons." Naomi took the child and held it to her bosom. She became its foster mother, and the women neighbors gave him a name saying, "A son is born to Naomi!" They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, father of David. So David, God's anointed king over Israel; David, with whom God covenanted that his house should reign forever; David, from whose line would come the messianic king to rule in the final age--This David is said to be the direct descendant, the great grandson of a foreign woman from a country of idol worshippers, and a Moabitess no less. So it seems that this very short and very moving story represents a strand of thought that stood in opposition to the line of thinking found, for example, in Ezra's call for a ban on intermarriage as the only means of insuring faithfulness to Israel's God. Not only is Ruth, the Moabitess, not guilty of abominable practices, she is the ancestress of Yahweh's chosen monarch. And she's praised in the story by all who know her as a paragon of hesed, this quality of steadfast love and covenantal loyalty that binds the members of the covenant community to one another and to God. Ruth, the Moabitess, stood by an elderly widow to whom she had no real legal obligation and she was accepted into the covenant community. The acceptance of foreigners is well documented in post-exilic Judaism, despite Ezra's polemical efforts to exclude foreigners from the community. It's important to remember that Ezra's reforms never became normative for the entire community. Post-exilic, and later rabbinic Judaism, never adopted the purely genealogical definition of Jewish identity. They allowed for the phenomenon of conversion and marriage into the covenant by persons of foreign birth who accepted the God of Israel; a possibility that Ezra completely forecloses. Ezra's extreme views were popular among sectarian groups, so Ezra and exclusivism is championed, for example, in writings that are found at Qumram. It exerted some influence on early Christian bans on marriage, absolute bans on marriage between believers and unbelievers, but it's the Book of Ruth that features prominently in the Jewish conversion ceremony to this day. We have a different kind of acceptance of foreigners that's voiced by prophets of the restoration period. So these are prophets, fifth century--late sixth and fifth century. We're going to look now briefly at some of the last prophetic books, and these are writings that date to the time of the first generations of returned exiles and on. Earlier prophets in the pre-exilic period--the classical prophets we've already looked at--they had spoken of a remnant that would be restored and would be restored gloriously to its land, but the returned exiles faced a life of great hardship. The reality of poverty and the difficulties in rebuilding the temple, and the hostility of the Judeans who had remained behind, as well as the hostility of the surrounding peoples, the absence of any real political independence under a Davidic King--all of these things fell far short of the early prophets' glorious descriptions of this restored remnant. So new prophets in the period of the Restoration have to address the community's disappointment. The short Book of Haggai contains the words of the Prophet Haggai, spoken primarily to Zerubabbel, (Zerubabbel is the governor of Judea). Haggai prophesies around 520, and he declares that all of the difficulties the community was facing, the agricultural setbacks and the famines, these were all signs of God's displeasure that the temple hadn't been completed. Zerubabbel is convinced by this, the people return to their task enthusiastically, and as we know, the temple is rebuilt as Haggai promised. He says it's a humble structure but soon it's going to be filled with treasures flowing in from all nations. And the promises of the Restoration that were made by the prophets of old are just around the corner. So Haggai longed for a rebuilt temple. But not only that, also for the re-establishment of Judah's independence under a Davidic King. And he held out hope for Zerubabbel, the governor, who was, after all, a descendant of David, through the last king that went into exile. He hoped that he would serve as God's messiah, or appointed king. That hope is even stronger in the work of Haggai's contemporary, the prophet, Zechariah. Zechariah is 14 chapters long, and the first eight chapters contain the prophecies of the historical Zechariah around 520 or so. The last chapters--chapters 9 through 14, this is known as Second Zechariah--these chapters contain obscure writings from a later hand and they are of a very different type or genre. They are written in the apocalyptic vein, so we won't talk about those now, we'll consider those momentarily. I'm going to be talking about apocalyptic for the last half of the lecture. So for right now I'm interested, however, in the first eight chapters which represent the oracles of the historical prophet Zechariah around 520. He preached and prophesied for about two years. He urges in these chapters the rebuilding of the temple. The first six chapters contain a series of elaborate and symbolic visions, eight different visions that are revealed by an angel and/or a divine messenger. That's a mode of revelation that's going to be standard in apocalyptic literature, as we'll soon see. Earlier prophets received a word or a vision but as we move towards apocalyptic literature and later literature, prophets often receive messages from God through an angel or a messenger. These visions focus hope on Zerubabbel, the governor, and on the priest Joshua, the high priest Joshua. And the idea is that they'll rule in a kind of diarchy as monarch and priest. At the same time, however, it seems that the Persians got rid of Zerubabbel. He was ousted perhaps because messianic hope was starting to gather around Zerubabbel. So Zechariah's prophesies seem to be adjusted to refer solely to Joshua. Although they originally referred to Zerubabbel, and although chapter 6 in particular seems to refer originally to Zerubabbel, it is altered so that it now depicts Joshua as a shoot or a branch from Jesse's stock--Jesse's stock, meaning a Davidide. (David's father was Jesse; so to say a root from Jesse's stock is to say a Davidide.) It says that Joshua will rebuild the sanctuary; he will wear the royal insignia, although he is the priest. The elevation, however, of the high priest is a feature of the post-exilic period. It's a feature of Judah in the post-exilic period, the high priest coming to take some of the trappings of royal office. Chapters 7 and 8, declare God's promise to turn and to do good things in Jerusalem and the House of Judah, so long as the people will turn from their unjust and evil ways. And Zechariah points forward to the glorious day when all the nations of the world will eagerly come to seek the Lord in Jerusalem and to entreat his favor. So we read in Zechariah 8:23, "Thus said the Lord of Hosts: In those days, ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold--they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, 'Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you,'" and thus this Restoration period, you can see, features prophets who envision other nations joining Israel in the worship of Yahweh. They will come to rally around and join Israel in the worship of God in Jerusalem. The last wave of prophetic writings that we have addresses the disappointment and the disillusionment of late sixth- and fifth-century Judeans. What was the message of these writings? The basic message was that the earlier prophets, their promises of future glory for the restored remnant--these were all true. The future just isn't now. It's only going to happen in the eschaton, the final day. Only then will the glory of Jerusalem and a messianic ruler be restored, and the hope that has to sustain the community through the bleak present is therefore an eschatological hope, a hope that focuses on an ideal account of the end, (eschatology = an account of the end). Because in the end of days everything will be set right. So as we move later into the period, we find increasingly the hope for the community is thrust off into the future, in an eschatology. Parts of Third Isaiah depict the bitter reality of life in post-exilic Judah and advance in eschatology. You remember the Book of Isaiah, which is 66 chapters, we divided into three parts: 1 through 39, which is the historical Isaiah; then we have Second Isaiah; and then ThirdIsaiah, we're dealing with now--that's chapters 56 to 66. The anonymous prophetic author of these chapters denounces the failings of the exiles, but does hold out an eschatology; a doctrine of final things that depicts what's going to happen in the end of days. This kind of eschatology differs from the depiction of Zion's future glory that we had in the early classical prophets. The earlier prophetic pronouncements generally referred to a re-establishment of Judah's fortunes in historical time, but eschatological works like Third Isaiah look beyond historical time. They're looking to a time of a new heaven and a new earth, when Judah's sins will be forgotten. The land will become an earthly paradise transformed, and blessed with peace and prosperity and length of days. This is from Isaiah 65:17-25, For behold! I am creating A new heaven and a new earth; The former things shall not be remembered, They shall never come to mind. Be glad, then, and rejoice forever In what I am creating. For I shall create Jerusalem as a joy, And her people as a delight; ... Never again shall be heard there The sounds of weeping and wailing. No more shall there be an infant or graybeard Who does not live out his days. He who dies at a hundred years Shall be reckoned a youth, And he who fails to reach a hundred Shall be reckoned accursed. …For the days of My people shall be As long as the days of the tree, My chosen ones shall outlive The work of their hands. They shall not toil to no purpose; They shall not bear children for terror, But they shall be a people blessed by the Lord, And their offspring shall remain with them. Before they pray, I will answer; While they are still speaking, I will respond. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, And the lion shall eat straw like the ox, And the serpent's food shall be earth.In all My sacred mount Nothing evil or vile shall be done--said the Lord. See this interesting notion of a completely new, transformed heaven and earth. The lion is vegetarian again, the serpent no longer is--there's not this animosity between the serpent and humans as was decreed at the end of Genesis with the curse on the serpent. They're going to just be eating earth and there will be no danger. Third Isaiah also sounds this theme of openness, reassuring foreigners and eunuchs who have joined themselves to Yahweh that they'll be welcome in the Holy Temple to serve God and to offer sacrifices. Now, this is significant. Again, remember that Deuteronomy 23 right in the heart of the Pentateuch, bans eunuchs specifically, and certain foreigners--Moabites, Ammonites--from entering the congregation. Remember also that Ezekiel explicitly excluded foreigners from the restored temple in his visions at the end of the book. This is also clearly the policy of Ezra and Nehemiah. They had an Ammonite who had his lodgings or office or room in the temple--they had him thrown out of that area in the temple. Third Isaiah seems to oppose such restrictions. Isaiah 56:3-7: Let not the foreigner say, Who has attached himself to the Lord, "The Lord will keep me apart from his people"; And let not the eunuchs say, "I am a withered tree." For thus said the Lord: "As for the eunuchs who keep My sabbaths, Who have chosen what I desire And hold fast to My covenant-- I will give them, in My House And within My walls, A monument and a name Better than sons or daughters. I will give them an everlasting name Which shall not perish. As for the foreigners Who attach themselves to the Lord, To minister to Him, And to love the name of the Lord, To be His servants-- All who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it, And who hold fast to my covenant. …I will bring them to My sacred mount And let them rejoice in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices Shall be welcome on My altar; For My House shall be called A house of prayer for all peoples." So on this issue clearly the post-exilic community was quite divided. Now, there's only one biblical book, which pretty much in its entirety, belongs to the genre of literature known as apocalyptic. Not in its entirety, but it is the most significant and through-going apocalyptic book in the Bible. The term apocalyptic derives from the Greek word apocalypsis. An apocalypsis is a revealing, so something that's apocalyptic is a revealing. Apocalypse is a revelation of things to come, and as apocalypses generally predict the end of historical time and the beginning of a new world order, they are generally concerned with eschatology; so apocalyptic works tend to be eschatological. That doesn't mean all eschatological work is apocalyptic. Apocalyptic literature within the Bible, and then much more significantly outside the Hebrew Bible, is characterized by certain distinguishing features which I've thrown up in brief note form over here. So apocalyptic literature is always eschatological, deals with the end of time. But to be apocalyptic a work has to have certain kinds of features and not all eschatologies have these features. This is what they are. Most apocalyptic writings are pseudonymous. They're generally attributed to important figures of the past, Enoch or Abraham or someone. They tend to also feature a revelation by a heavenly messenger, an angel who comes in a vision or a dream to deliver some sort of message. In general, the message is highly symbolic. It's coded and often the symbolism is quite bizarre. You'll have surreal images of beasts and monsters and usually these depict foreign nations. The visions tend to be chronological. They tend to be a systematic chronology of past, present and future events that represent the march of history, in coded form again, and so it tends to require interpretation. And that's usually given by the divine messenger, who reveals the symbolic chronological code. Fourthly, apocalypses tend to predict a series of catastrophes. These are signs of the coming of the end, that final point in the march of history that's being laid out. You have motifs from ancient myths very often used to describe these catastrophes. I'll come back to that in a minute. Apocalypses also tend to be what I call morally dualistic. They tend to divide humankind into two mutually exclusive groups; the righteous which is always a tiny minority, and the wicked, which is always the vast majority. There's going to be some final public judgment and the righteous will be saved and the wicked will be destroyed. In this respect, especially later apocalypses show the influence of Persian thought. Persian thought is also quite dualist in nature, with oppositions of light and darkness, or good and evil, and life and death and so on. So there does seem to be some Persian influence and of course we're well into the Persian period at this point. A sixth feature is that God generally appears in apocalyptic literature as an enthroned king. He brings all of history to a crashing end, and demonstrates his sovereignty. He confounds the wicked; he does all of these things at the same time. He confounds the wicked and establishes himself as the sovereign and enthroned king, in control. Seventh, apocalyptic literature, as I briefly mentioned before, often incorporates mythological motifs and imagery, especially the motif of a battle between God and primordial, chaotic elements. And that will often be the imagery that's used in depicting the final battle with the godless or the wicked. Apocalypses also generally depict a judgment of the individual dead, followed by everlasting life or punishment. So again, apocalypses develop quite substantially outside the writings of the Hebrew Bible; and in the Bible, we have a few scattered apocalyptic elements and then much of the Book of Daniel. And so we don't see the idea of life after death really in the Hebrew Bible until this very late apocalyptic book of Daniel. The idea is very influential in the Dead Sea Scrolls (they are very dualist) and in the writings of the New Testament of course. So a belief in personal immortality, a belief in a general resurrection of the dead--these arise from a negative view of this world as a place where justice can be obtained. So apocalyptic writers examined the world they lived in; they drew the conclusion that reward and punishment were going to be made in an afterlife. They were certainly not doled out in this life, as Israel suffered. This is a marked break from the general conviction of the Hebrew Bible that human life is limited to this world, and that the fundamental concern of humans and God is morality in this life and not immortality in another. I think apocalyptic literature can be described as a literature of hope and despair. It's a literature of despair or pessimism because its basic premise is that this world holds out no promise for the righteous. It's a literature of hope or optimism because it affirms that God will intervene. He will intervene in human history, he'll set everything right, he'll interrupt the natural order, he's going to destroy this broken world as we know it, and he'll do so in order to rescue the righteous and humiliate the wicked, and if you've already died don't worry there will be a resurrection, it will all be made right. But this hope for supreme and ultimate vindication is thrust off into the future. So apocalyptic constitutes yet one more response to the traumatic events, the crises, and the disappointments of Israel's history. In a second we'll get to Daniel, but there are a few apocalyptic passages of varying length in other post-exilic books. I'll just touch on them very quickly. SecondZechariah and, a little bit, the book of Joel, just to prepare us for Daniel. Second Zechariah. Now, these are chapters 9 through 14. We talked about the historical Zechariah, chapters 1 through 8, so this is Second Zechariah, chapters 9 through 14, and it's a collection of diverse oracles, probably fifth-century or later, that contain these strange visions and predictions. Their meanings cannot always be fathomed, but they seem to focus on the Day of the Lord, and the restoration of Jerusalem, and the rise of a new and humble king who will reign in peace, really over a new world order. Chapter 14 is a vision of this global battle that will bring history to an end. God is going to bring all the nations to Jerusalem where they will plunder the city, they will kill almost all of the inhabitants and then at the last moment when things look the most desperate, God will intervene and he'll fight for Israel and exact revenge on her enemies. And it's after this final battle that God will transform the earth into a paradise. So Israel's enemies will rage against one another, the surviving nations will pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Again, Jerusalem now is elevated above all cities, and these nations will come to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh at his temple, and Yahweh will be sovereign over the world. Joel, a very short little book, probably the latest prophetic book, also contains apocalyptic material. The versification of Joel varies tremendously in different English translations, so I'm using the verse markings that are in the Bible you have. But if you consult another Bible some of them only have three chapters, some have four--it can be confusing. But we can divide Joel into two parts. Up to chapter 2, verse 27--that's the first part, from 1:1 to 2:27 (or 1:2 really). And that contains a description of a military invasion. It's symbolized by an army of locusts. And this invasion--this army of locusts--is interpreted as a divine punishment that is necessary or that must come before the day of the Lord. The second part of Joel which begins in verse 28 of chapter 2 is a fully apocalyptic description of the final day of terror. Reading from chapter 3:3-4, Before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes, I will set portents in the sky and on earth: Blood and fire, and pillars of smoke; The sun shall be turned to darkness And the moon to blood. Before the great and terrible Day of the Lord comes--but the righteous are going to survive. This is pointed out in chapter 3:5, "But everyone who invokes the name of the Lord shall escape; for there shall be a remnant on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, as the Lord promised." As we move into chapter 4 of Joel, the Day of the Lord is envisaged as a judgment day for all peoples. So this is increasingly the view of the eschaton: a final battle and also a judgment day, and that judgment day will then issue in a new age. This is an idea that the book of Daniel will elaborate on in a minute, not to mention the apocalyptic writings that are outside of the Hebrew Bible. In this judgment day, God will summon all of the godless nations to the valley of judgment, Jehosaphat which means "God will judge", so the Valley of Jehosaphat. And here the final battle between good and evil will take place, and after that God's people will be blessed and the Holy City will never again suffer shame.: For lo! in those days And in that time, When I restore the fortunes Of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations And bring them down to the Valley of Jehosaphat, There I will contend with them Over My very own people, Israel, Which they scattered among the nations. Towards the end, then, of the book we read, Let the nations rouse themselves and march up To the Valley of Jehosaphat; For there I will sit in judgment Over all the nations roundabout. Swing the sickle, For the crop is ripe; Come and tread, For the winepress is full, The vats are overflowing! For great is their wickedness. … But the Lord will be a shelter to His people, A refuge to the children of Israel. … And Jerusalem shall be holy; Nevermore shall strangers pass through it. And in that day, The mountains shall drip with wine, The hills shall flow with milk, And all the watercourses of Judah shall flow with water; A spring shall issue from the House of the Lord And shall water the Wadi of Acacias. … But Judah shall be inhabited forever, And Jerusalem throughout the ages. So we see a lot of eschatological features in the Book of Joel. You have, first of all, the series of disasters; they signal the impending wrath of God. You have a cosmic battle in which Yahweh triumphs over Israel's enemy. And we see in apocalyptic literature in general, a facile equation of the righteous and the wicked with Israel and other nations. Then also we have this outpouring of blessings on God's people, city, and land. And finally, God's continued protection and presence; and nations who are not Israel's enemies join in the worship of God in that final time. Again, note the important difference between classical prophecy and the apocalyptic literature. Both of them speak about final things; both of them speak about an end-time. But the classical prophets did not in general expect that the course of human affairs would come to an end. Only that Israel's rebellion would end or that Israel would live under a perfect king anointed by God. In the apocalyptic imagination history itself is a closed process; it will end, and then a new age, a new world order would begin. And the present age and the new age are qualitatively distinct. The present age is under the dominion of evil powers. We see it particularly in the apocalyptic writings outside of the Bible and in the New Testament. That power that has dominion over the present age is Satan. Satan is the arch enemy of God. The age to come will be free of all evil, moral corruption, and death; Satan will be defeated. But God himself is the one who has to do this. God must intervene to bring the present age to a crashing halt and initiate this new world order. So let's turn now to Daniel for a full apocalyptic work. Daniel also can be divided really into two parts and the first six chapters have often been described as heroic fiction. They're a bit like the book of Esther that we'll be talking about on Wednesday. Just a good story. (Esther particularly has a lot or irony and is very, very funny.) But like the book of Esther, Daniel features a Jew who lives in a Gentile court and he's saved from disaster. I've listed the kings who are discussed in the Book of Daniel. These chapters tell of Daniel's adventures under two Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; the text says two Babylonian kings, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; a Median king Darius who happens to be unknown to history, a Persian king Cyrus--that's a whole lot of years! The historical inaccuracy of the work, right? You have the chronology of more than a century being telescoped here! There're other inaccuracies. Belshazzar was actually never a king; he was sort of a prince regent. He was defeated by Cyrus, not by Darius, so there are tremendous historical inaccuracies and this is a sign that this was written at a much later time, looking back when the history of a period 300 years ago was very confused. There's no clear historical knowledge of the Babylonian and Persian period. So the book, we know, was written quite late, perhaps the end of the third century, those first six chapters. We have a better idea about the remainder of the book. Chapters 7 through 12 are fully apocalyptic in genre and they were composed between 167 and 164--I don't know if I wrote that up there, yeah, 167 and 164 BCE. This was a time when Jews were suffering intense persecution at the hands of the Seleucid King of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus IV. And so Daniel is the latest book of the Hebrew Bible. It was chronologically the latest book, written between 167 and 164 BCE. But the author writes in code. He writes in code so that some hostile person would not be able to understand. The author disguises his references to contemporary historical events and personalities in these visions, these symbolic visions that are attributed to a remote era of the past. Let's go back and look at the contents of these two sections. In chapters 1 through 6, Daniel is represented as a loyal Jew who's living in the exile in Babylonia, sixth-century exilic period among idol worshippers. He refuses to bow down to any other god. He observes the dietary laws and he prays facing Jerusalem. He seems to occupy a position of some honor in the court. He has the power to interpret dreams and to predict the future, and although he's severely tested he remains true to Yahweh and Yahweh aids him in more than one miraculous escape from danger. The main themes of this first section of the book of Daniel are Daniel's interpretations of the dreams of these kings (Nebuchadnezzar) and his allegiance to his God. In chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of a huge statute. It has a head of gold, has a torso and arms of silver, the belly and the thighs are of bronze, the legs are of iron, and the feet are of mixed iron and clay. I've kind of given you a little grid and in a minute we're going to have another symbolic dream that's going to use animals to represent the same things that are being represented here by the metals. So you have this statue with these metals and iron and clay feet. Then a great stone that's uncut by human hands flies from heaven and smashes the clay feet of the statue, and the statue crumbles and this stone becomes a mountain that fills all the earth. Daniel decodes the dream's symbolism; and it's a historical symbolism, the march of history. Each metal represents a kingdom that ruled the Ancient Near East. Daniel only explicitly mentions gold as Babylon, but we can figure out the rest. Silver is Media, bronze is Persia, and iron is Alexander's Greece, right, Macedonian Greece that conquered the Ancient Near East in the 330's, and brought Hellenism, and introduced the Hellenistic period into Ancient Near Eastern history. After Alexander's death, his empire was divided into smaller Hellenistic kingdoms. The ones of greatest relevance to us are Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria because as you can imagine Palestine is caught between those two great powers. So it's going to be fought over by those two great powers. So you have Egypt ruled by the Ptolemies; you have Syria ruled by the Seleucids; they're wrangling for control of the land of Israel that's lying between them. So the iron and clay feet of the statue in Daniel's dream represent these lesser Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt and Syria that succeeded Alexander's empire and are a mix of Hellenistic and Eastern elements. The stone from heaven represents the future kingdom of God. It's going to come and destroy these godless kingdoms and fill all of the earth forever. Chapter 3 tells the story of Daniel's three companions who refuse to worship a giant gold statue and they get themselves thrown into a fiery furnace. When they emerge unscathed the king is greatly impressed and so he acknowledges the God of Israel. In chapter 4 there's a second dream. It's interpreted by Daniel as a sign that Nebuchadnezzar will be struck down seven times. He's going to lose his reason, he's going to lose his throne, until he realizes that God is the source of all divine and human power. When this in fact comes to pass--Nebuchadnezzar seems to suffer a fit of insanity that drives him from society--the king then praises the God most high as the universal king. In chapter 5, Daniel's enemies at court trick the Median king (now Darius, so we're moving to different kings). They trick him into issuing an edict against those who pray to anyone but the king. This is a problem for Daniel. Daniel violates the edict, of course, and he's arrested and he's thrown into a den of lions. But he emerges unharmed, and the result is, again, that the foreign king, in this case Darius now, recognizes the supremacy of Yahweh and orders all in his kingdom to revere the Jewish God. There is, of course, no historical merit to these stories of Babylonian and Persian kings acknowledging or adopting the God of the Jews who lived in exile among them. These stories seem to give voice to the hope or the fantasy that a cruel and impious monarch might be taught humility by Yahweh. They also provide a model for life in the Diaspora. Jews can live in the Gentile world but they must never forget God and his laws. Then we move into the second half of the Book of Daniel, chapters 7 to 12. As we move into this part of Daniel we switch from the third person into the first person, so Daniel 7 to 12 is written in the first person and it's fully apocalyptic. Here Daniel has a series of visions and dreams that are interpreted for him by an angel, and again, that's a classic feature of the apocalyptic genre. And these visions, again, survey Ancient Near Eastern history from the sixth to the second centuries. Chapter 7 again represents the succession of kingdoms, the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, the Macedonian Empires, but this time as beasts. So you have a lion, a bear, a winged leopard and an ogre. The ogre has horns and the horns of this ogre then represent these two lesser Hellenistic kingdoms, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. The boastful little horn is the Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanies, himself. In a second vision, the "ancient of days,"--this is the term that's used, it seems to be God in a white robe and a beard seated on a fiery chariot throne, but--"the ancient of days" confers glory and kingship on one like a Son of Man. Now in Daniel, this phrase, the Son of Man--which generally means mortal as opposed to divine in the Bible, but--in Daniel the phrase seems to refer to a figure that's in human form, but more than a human. Probably an angel like Michael or Gabriel. (Both of them are represented as leaders against the forces of Persia and Greece.) And this figure establishes an everlasting kingdom to replace the bestial kingdoms that have preceded it. So the Son of Man overwhelms the little horn Antiochus, who is said to be making war on saints (that's a code for loyal Jews), who is said to have been trying to change their law and abolish their religion--and we know that these were parts of the persecution in 167 to 164 by Antiochus. He tried to stop worship in the sanctuary and so on. In a third vision then, the horn that represents Antiochus is said to trample the land of splendor (Israel), to challenge the army of heaven, to remove the perpetual sacrifice (Antiochus did halt the sacrificial service in the temple) and to set up an "abomination of desolation" on the sacrificial altar (and we know that Antiochus set up some kind of pagan altar on the sacrificial altar in the temple in Jerusalem and erected a statue of Zeus in the sanctuary). So this depiction of the persecution under Antiochus is presented here, but it's presented in veiled form for reasons of safety. In chapter 9 we have a moving prayer for deliverance. The Angel Gabriel assures Daniel that the end is near, and that the end was even predicted by Jeremiah who had said that Jerusalem would lie desolate 70years, you will recall. Now, Jeremiah prophesied--I'm going to do some math now, so this is dangerous. Jeremiah prophesied in the early sixth century and the chapters of Daniel were written many centuries later, someone can figure it out, in the 160's. So was Jeremiah prophesying falsely when he said that God would deliver Israel from her enemies and establish a kingdom in Judah in 70 years? No, not according to the book of Daniel, because in the book of Daniel it's said that Jeremiah also was speaking in a code. Jeremiah meant that 70 weeks of years, which is to say 490 years, would pass before the consummation of all things. And the last week was the reign Antiochus Epiphanes: we are in the last week of these years now. So the writer is maintaining that he is living in the last days, in the final moments of the last week of years, and this is very typical of apocalyptic literature. The time is at hand, we are in the final stage, this is now all the birth pangs of the Messiah, these terrible things that are being visited upon us, and God is soon going to win victory through a mighty act and introduce the Messianic Age, ending Israel's long years of desolation. So apocalyptic literature sees history as determined. It's a closed drama that must be played out, requiring no action on the part of humans except faithful waiting. God's kingdom will come solely by God's power, but it has to be preceded by this time of trouble. These troubles are nothing but the birth pangs of the Messianic Age and the faithful whose names are recorded in God's book will be rescued. Chapter 12 imagines a resurrection of the dead as a compensation to those who died under the persecutions of Antiochus. It's a clear attempt to deal with the injustice that mars this world, and it's the only passage of the Bible to explicitly espouse the idea of an individual life after death, and as I say, breaks with a longer Israelite tradition that's vague or silent on this issue. Not all Jews accepted the idea, but it would be essential to the rise of Christianity which is deeply indebted to apocalyptic thinking. And through Christianity, it came to have a very far-reaching impact on Western civilization. The Book of Daniel is a response to specific historical circumstances. It's a response to the crisis of persecution and martyrdom that was going on in the second century. That was a new kind of crisis that led to a new kind of response, because the earlier crises of 722 and 586--they could be explained as punishment for sin and faithlessness. But now in the second century, Jews were dying not because they were faithless but precisely because they were faithful; because they refused to obey the decrees of Antiochus and to violate their law and covenant and they were dying. So this new phenomenon of martyrdom, really for the first time, required new responses and the book of Daniel provides a fully apocalyptic response. Remain faithful, wait, Daniel urges, know that this will all be set right by God, not in this world but in an ultimate and cataclysmic triumph of life and faith over death and evil, and it will be soon. Daniel emphasizes God's firm control of history and so bolsters loyal Jews who are suffering indignities and torture and even death all around him because of their faith. So we've seen the zealous fifth-century response of Ezra and Nehemiah to the fateful events of Israel's history. They believed Israel's rededication to God and the covenant involved as a first step, cessation of intimate relations with foreigners, separation from their abominable practices. We've seen very different views that would integrate foreigners in the worship of Yahweh. We've seen also the later emergence of apocalyptic as an expression of present despair and future hope that entailed the divinely orchestrated and cataclysmic defeat of the wicked enemies who persecuted Israel. And in the last lecture we're going to look at two books of the Hebrew Bible that take very different approaches, the Book of Esther and the Book of Jonah.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_5B.txt

all right he's back there saying that we're on good okay so we're back um all right let's flip over now to angles talking about the great towns and obviously if you know anything about Engles uh the the great uh partner with Carl Marx uh clearly he is not going to agree with McCall especially with the kind of argument that we just heard from mcau and he's going to take a very interesting tack by drawing our attention to a lot of oh the facts about poverty and the facts about the poor one of the things that mcau wants to do is to stress the progressive view of history and if we can go to to the PowerPoint please what we have then is industrialism as progress and this is what is often called the progressive view of history that is to say that history itself is a record of more or less continual progress towards higher and higher levels of civilization and that as mcau says yes you can have setbacks such as the collapse of the Roman Empire or the kinds of defeats that the Italian city states underwent in the 16th century but that if you look at the long stretch of History what you see is more or less continual progress that's the progressive view of History here of course we're going to have a critique we've already talked about the fact that a critique is largely implied in Romanticism that the romantics are going to argue that as we have been squeezed into big cities and particularly the the poor have been squeezed into the most squalid parts of big cities that the price we have paid for the progress we have made has been far too high in human terms and that we have been cut off from nature which is as Wordsworth and others would have said the true source of all our moral being here however we have other kinds of critiques explicit descriptions of working and living conditions of the Working Poor in angles lock and Dickens so let's look and see what angles has to say here actually that's not lock the writer for some reason or another that was a little slip on my part it's Kingsley Kingsley is the name of his work Kingsley Engles Kingsley and Dickens Kingsley is also in our text yeah oh well um so this is beginning in the seventh edition on page 1706 and for those of you not using this Edition it is about one two three four pages into the uh the text I will now give a description of the workingclass districts of Manchester of Manchester uh a large industrial city in England the first of them is the old town which lies between the northern limit of the commercial quar and the river irk here even the better streets such as Todd Street Lord mgate Long millgate withy Grove and Shu Hill are narrow and torturous the houses are dirty old and Tumbl down the side streets have been built in a disgraceful fashion if one enters the district near the old church and goes down long millgate one sees immediately on the right hand uh on the right hand side a row of antiquated houses where not a single front wall is standing upright this is a remnant of the old Manchester of the days before the town became industrialized the original inhabitants and their children have left for better houses in other districts while the houses in Long mgate which no longer satisfied them were left to a tribe of workers containing strong Irish element the Irish having uh all kinds of economic difficulties at home and uh migrating to England as well as to the United States and Canada and Australia and so forth here one is really and truly in a district which is quite obviously given over entirely to the working classes because even the shopkeepers and the publicans that is to say the the barkeeps of long milate make no effort to give their establishment a semblance of cleanliness the condition of this street may be deplorable but it is by no means as bad as the alleys and courts which lie behind it and which can be approached only by covered passages so narrow that two people cannot pass anyone who has never visited these courts and alleys can have no idea of the Fantastic way in which the houses have been packed together in disorderly confusion in impudent Defiance of all reasonable principles of town planning and the fault lies not merely in the survival of old property from earlier periods in Manchester's history only in quite modern times has the policy of cramming as many houses as possible onto such a space as was not utilized in earlier periods reached its climax the result is that today not an inch of space remains between the houses and any further building is now physically impossible to prove my point I reproduce a small section of a plan of Manchester It Is by no means the worst slum in Manchester and it does not cover one/ tenth of the area of Manchester well then skip down about 10 lines or so into the next paragraph let's just look at a couple more sentences the worst courts are those leading down to the IR that's the river in one of these courts just at the entrance where the covered passage ends there is a privy without a door this is a public bathroom without a restroom without a door this privy is so dirty that the inhabitants of the Court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to waigh through puddles of stale urine and excrement anyone who wishes to confirm this description should go to the first court on the bank of the irk above duy Bridge see see what this is it's it's a piling up of facts one fact after another fact after another fact several tanneries are situated on the bank of the river and they fill the neighborhood the neighborhood where the people live of course with the stench of animal putri faction the only way of getting to the courts below Ducey Bridge Is by going down fights of narrow dirty steps and one can only reach the houses by treading over heaps of dirt and filth well clearly from his point of view history for the people at least of this area in Manchester has not been one of great progress and unlimited possibility uh to which people can uh can can cheer or for which people can cheer with hope so uh this is to point to the dark underside of her bban life and the squalor of urban life is lived by the urban poor and in the 19th century this was a terrible terrible problem not that it doesn't continue to be a problem but it was an even greater problem in the 19th century in places like Manchester so that's part of the critique of industrialism going Hand in Hand by the way with urbanization there were if we can go back to the screen please there were efforts at reform you've probably heard of the chartists in the chartist movement which was a movement to try to democratize England and then of course the suffrage movement which obviously was a further effort to democratize England because the suffrage movement was arguing not only for full rights of citizenship for men but also for women including the right to vote whereas the earlier charest movement had uh not only advocated various kinds of democratic reforms but also had advocated that all men whether working men or not have the right to vote but that obvious viously was not enough so that the suffrage movement really became an effort to try to have the same kinds of rights for women including the right to vote and in the 20th century when the suffrage movement succeeded at first in England it was only allowable for women at the age of 30 or above to vote I mean men could could vote at 21 but women could not vote until they were 30 uh but of course that ultimately was changed too and another movement for reform was Labor organizing and we're going to come back to this when we look at Dickens because Dickens in particular is looking at the conditions of the mining in mil towns and the horrible conditions to which working people were subjected rejected carile also wants reform but he wants reform of a different kind and coming from a different direction than somebody like angles does or even Dickens does carw in past and present has a section entitled in our text captains of industry and we don't need to go through that in in detail here it except to note and you can look at it for yourselves but except to note that what he does is he argues that the new aristocracy consists of what he calls the captains of industry that the old monarchy and the old aristocracy are really dead or at least dying and of course there were still in various places in England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales I'm talking about the British Isles alone now uh there were the old Aristocrats with the old money and of course there was the old landed gentry as well but increasingly wealth was now being passed into the hands of those who were the captains of industry the the new capitalists uh who were becoming in many cases extravagantly wealthy and many of them far more wealthy than the old Aristocrats so that one might hold a title but actually be relatively poor I don't mean poor poor in the sense of Engles Manchester but uh but but relatively without means whereas people who did not have any kind of aristocratic background might very well have risen in the new capitalist system to become de facto Aristocrats or what Carlile calls captains of industry and he calls upon this new moneyed class this new powerful class which really was coming into far more power than the old regime he calls upon them to take the leader ship in reform to accept their responsibilities social and moral responsibilities to bring about reforms that would be reasonable and Humane in the system and uh so that's the kind of thing that carile is advocating and then we're going to see that there are other people like Arnold and rusin who are going to make similar Arguments for reform based upon the dehumanizing conditions to which many working people were being reduced so okay this becomes also one of the great themes of the victorians and of course uh continues as I've said over and over again uh on well beyond the Victorian period as such now what I'd like to do is I'd like to turn to what the victorians called the woman question and first of all I would like to go back to Mary Walston craft and her vind ation of the rights of women okay and we're talking about a work that was uh was done in 1792 in 1792 and you're going to be hearing arguments that are still very very familiar to us today 1792 talk about somebody who was ahead of her time Mary Walston craft remember was also married to William Godwin I talked about this last time who is a very famous political thinker radical political thinker in England in the late 18th and early 19 centuries and uh their daughter Mary married uh the poet Shelly became Mary shell uh probably best known as the author of Frankenstein but also a uh a very interesting person in her own right and and a uh very interesting person even over and above her having authored Frankenstein and uh you know they were part of an extraordinary group both in England and then when Mary and Percy Shelly went into Exile they were joined by Byron and various other artists and intellectuals and had a uh a really very creative group of people in Italy who inspired one another in their in their Artistic Endeavors well here's Mary Walston craft and uh once again in the seventh edition I'm beginning on page 168 she has said that she's paying special attention to women in the middle class uh she does so because she thinks that the best hope for women is in the middle class lower class women were exploited but they were exploited in in ways that probably Society was not going to get Beyond very soon should get Beyond but probably was not going to get Beyond very soon and aristocratic women she really was not concerned about them so she's going to attend mainly to women in the middle class and so beginning in the middle of that page she says my own sex I hope will excuse me if I treat them like rational creatures obviously she's being ironic I hope that my fellow women will excuse me if I treat them like rational creatures instead of flattering their fascinating graes and viewing them as if they were in a state of Perpetual childhood unable to stand alone I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists I wish to persuade women to Endeavor to acquire strength both of mind and body and to convince them that the soft phrases susceptibility of heart delicacy of sentiment and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love which has been termed its sister will soon become objects of contempt dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence I mean she's pulling no punches here right and despising that weak Elegance of Mind Exquisite sensibility and sweet docility of manners supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel I wish to show that Elegance is inferior to Virtue that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being regardless of the distinction of sex and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchdown I know this is this is strong stuff and uh you know I know I've said this before but this is also 1792 okay so let's flip over a page and I'm now on 170 up at the top but this is about a page later for those with other additions women are in fact so much degraded by mistaken Notions of female Excellence that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize and gives birth to cunning and natural opponents of strength which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine erors that undermine esteem evens whilst they excite desire well and of course what she's saying is you know let men change she wants women to change but she also wants men to change and then over on the next page naturally enough she's going to take on Milton yeah she right she's going to take on Milton we've got one of our women colleagues who's raising her wrist and saying yes yes okay um so uh many of you will remember that Milton in Paradise Lost uh regards Eve the mother of us all but especially the representative of all women in Paradise Lost is the the sweet little thing you know who uh uh bends her will towards her her male husband Adam and of course everything goes wrong only when and because she disobeys her husband and therein commits the original sin and then even beyond that she seduces her husband into committing the original sin with her and lures him into uh what shall we say confirming their sin by going out and making love together okay so here we have some quotations to whom thus Eve with perfect Beauty adorned my author and disposer what thou bidst unar argued I obey so God ordains God Is Thy law thou mine this is Eve speaking by the way uh you see God Is Thy law God is Adam's law and Adam is her law to know no more is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise okay and this goes on by the way well let's flip over three to four more pages and about 2third of the way down that page which here is 175 she's referring to rouso who of course was a famous French philosopher of the day and philosopher of the Enlightenment rouso see this is even rouso not somebody else who's unenlightened but this is even rouso declares that a woman should never for a moment feel herself independent that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning and made a CSH slave it's interesting a CSH slave what does that mean cetes what's the word cetes mean flirt yeah it's flirtatious right in order to render her a more alluring object of desire a sweeter companion to man whenever he chooses to relax himself he carries the arguments which he pretends to draw from the indications of nature still further and insinuates the truth and fortitude the cornerstones of all human virtue should be cultivated with certain restrictions because with respect to the female character obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting Vigor and look at her reply what nonsense what nonsense when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to Puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject if women are by Nature inferior to men their virtues must be the same in quality if not in degree by virtue or virtue is a relative idea consequently their conduct should be founded on the same principles and have the same aim connected with men as daughters wives and mothers their moral character may be estimated by their manner of fulfilling those simple duties but the end the grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the Dignity of conscious virtue okay over on the next page age down toward the bottom she now is responding to a certain Dr Gregory and uh talking about his errors in his celebrated Legacy to his daughters and she says this Dr Gregory advises them his daughters to cultivate a fondness for dress because a fondness for dress he asserts is natural to them a fondness for dress I am unable to comprehend what either he or Russo mean when they frequently use this indefinite term of course natural if they told us that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress and brought this inclination with it into a new body I should listen to them with half Smile as I often do when I hear a rant about innate Elegance but if he only meant to say that the exercise of the faculties will produce this fondness I deny it it is not natural but arises okay what is not natural a fondness for dress for pretty clothes is not natural but arises like false ambition in men from a love of power Dr Gregory goes much further he actually recommends dissimulation and advises an innocent girl to give the lie to her feelings and not dance with Spirit when gity of heart would make her feel eloquent without making her gestures immodest well in the name of truth and common sense why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another and so on and so on okay she goes on in the third paragraph on that page in a saglio I grant that all these Arts are necessary what is a saglio yeah a hero okay all these Arts are necessary you know obviously she's not saying that for the women of England or any you know free country that uh these Arts are necessary The Epicure must have his pallet tickled or he will sink into apathy in other words the sensualist man must have his pallet tickled or he will sink into apathy but have women so little ambition as to be satisfied with such a condition can they supinely what do supine mean what is the word supine yeah lie on your back yeah lying back right can they supinely dream life away in the lap of pleasure or the ler of weariness rather than assert their claim to pursue reasonable pleasures and render themselves conspicuous by practicing the virtues which dignify mankind surely she has not an immortal Soul who can loiter Life Away merely employed to Adorn her person then she may that she may amuse the languid hours and soften the cares of a fellow creature who is willing to be enlivened by her smiles and tricks when the serious business of life is over besides the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will by managing her family and practicing various virtues become the friend and not the humble dependent of her husband it's a very interesting argument you see that she's actually going to enter into a new and better relationship with her friend with with her well with her friend yes with her husband as her friend rather than simply to be dependent upon him as in a kind of childlike State okay and then skipping the next page and going down to the one after that which here is 180 down at the bottom she says Noble morality Noble morality and consistent with the cautious Prudence of a little soul that cannot extend its views beyond the present minute or excuse me beyond the present minute division of existence if all the faculties of a woman's mind are only to be cultivated as they respect her dependence on man if when a husband be obtained she have arrived at her goal and meanly proud rests satisfied with such poultry Crown let her gravel contentedly scarcely raised by her Employments above the animal kingdom this is pretty strong stuff here scarcely raised by her Employments above the animal kingdom but if struggling for the prize of her High Calling she looked beyond the present scene let her cultivate her understanding her mind right without stopping to consider what character the husband may have whom she is destined to marry let her only determine without being too anxious about present happiness to acquire the qualities that inoble a rational being and a rough inelegant husand husband may shock her taste without destroying her peace of mind she will not model her soul to suit the frailties of her companion but to bear with them his character may be a trial but not an impediment to Virtue well okay and then over on the next page down toward the bottom she says that by the way she's been saying that she is thinking and writing as a philosopher in the pre in the second to last paragraph but then look at the last paragraph This is on 182 but to view the subject in another point of view do passive indolent women make the best wives confining our discussion to the present moment of existence let us see how such weak creatures perform their part do the women who by the attainment of a few superficial accomplishments have strengthened the prevailing Prejudice merely contribute to the happiness of their husbands do they display their charms merely to amuse them and have women who have early embi Notions of passive obedience sufficient character to manage a family or educate children so far from it that after surveying the history of woman I cannot help agreeing with the severest saturnist considering the sex as the weakest as well as the most oppressed half of the species but of course what she wants now is for women to grow and to assert themselves so uh one once again as I've said this is really really not only just strong stuff but it's it's truly remarkable especially when you consider how long ago this was written okay now let's see how one woman responded to this um let's go back to the Victorian issues and let's look at the first of the of the women here this is Sarah Stickney Ellis okay her book originally published in 1839 was a runaway bestseller and sold out 16 editions in two years okay I mean this this is just fantastic it was so popular it was popular not simply among men but also among women that's part of the story here okay the women of England their social duties and domestic habits she's writing also from the perspective of being a teacher of being a teacher to men belongs to potent I had almost said the omnipotent omnipotent is the word we use for God right all powerful consideration of worldly a grand ment you know men are the ones who go out and seek worldly success not women and it is constantly misleading their steps closing their ears against the voice of conscience and beguiling them with the promise of Peace where peace was never found see part of her argument is going to be men go out into the grand World seeking success but in the process they lose their moral Direction and that's the role of women is to provide moral direction for men how often has man returned to his home with a mind confused by the many voices which in the mark the market The Exchange the stock exchange or the public assembly have addressed themselves to his inborn selfishness or his worldly pride and while his integrity was shaken and his resolution gave way beneath the pressure of apparent necessity or the Insidious pretenses of expediency he has stood corrected he has stood corrected even if he was weak he has stood corrected before the Clear Eye of woman as it looked directly to the naked truth and detected the lurking evil of the specious act he was about to commit May so potent may have become this secret influence secret influence that he may have borne it about with him like a kind of second conscience for mental reference and spiritual counsel in moments of trial and when the snares of the world were around him and temptations from within and without have bribed over the witness in his own bosom he has thought of the humble The Humble monitress what's a monitress it's the female version of monitor right the one who is a kind of overseer kind of Watchdog The Humble monitress who sat alone guarding the Fireside Comforts of his distant home and the remembrance of her character clothed in moral Beauty has scattered the clouds before his me Al vision and sent him back to that beloved home a wiser and a better man see the point that that she's getting at is that that women have the responsibility for being the the moral centers of the family and the moral guides for men you know one of the uh the arguments in favor of co-education schools in the 19th century was do you know not simply that boys and girls should get equal education I mean there was that there was that argument of course the other argument which was considered a very forceful and compelling one was that if you put girls in the same classroom with boys they would have a kind of morally restraining influence on the boys so that the boys would behave better because the girls were present okay and and their characters would be improved as a result of the presence of the girls well okay see it's always the responsib I mean you know men are just rough hairy-legged beasts right we all know that so you know and boys will be boys and all the rest of it you know so they have to have a good woman who will guide them and that's the responsibility according to Mrs Ellis of woman the women of England possessing the grand privilege of being better instructed than those of any other country in the minuti in what by the way in Al albra in calculus in philosophy in languages it better instructed than those of any other country in the mintier of domestic comfort of domestic Comfort okay of embroidering for example have obtained a degree of importance in society far beyond what they're unobtrusive virtues see watch these adjectives they're very interesting they're unobtrusive virtues would appear to claim the long established customs of their country have placed in their hands the high and holy duty of cherishing and protecting the minor morals of life see how she qualifies everything the minor morals of life not the big things from when Springs all that is elevated in purpose and glory is in action the sphere of their direct personal influence is Central and consequently small but its extreme operations are as widely extended as the range of human feeling not human thinking but human feeling they may be less striking in society than some of the women of other countries and they feel themselves on brilliant and stirring occasions as simple rude and unsophisticated in the popular science of excitement this is with a view to Guess Who the scandalous French remember this is an English woman who's writing this but as far as the noble daring of Britain has sent forth her adventurous sons and that is to every point of Danger on the habitable Globe they have borne along with them a generosity a disinterestedness and a moral courage derived in no small measure me from the female influence of their native country it is a fact well worthy of our serious attention and one which Bears immediately upon the subject under consideration that the present state of our national Affairs is such as to indicate that the influence of women in counteracting the growing evils of society is about to be more needed than ever she doesn't mean by the way giving women the vote she just means for women to exercise their moral influence within their own domestic spheres see one of the reasons why I'm going through this in such detail is you know lots of times people will have arguments about you know uh relations between you know men and women and social roles and gender roles and so on and so on and sooner or later some is going to say well you know what they used to say about women and about women's roles who said these things where when under what circumstances in what books in what forums okay you want to know you want to see evidence right here this is evidence this is something you point people to as evidence for what were regarded popularly as conventional roles for women in the middle of the 19th century and once again one of the things that gives support to the claim I just made is the very fact that this was just an absolute runaway bestseller a runaway bestseller we continue in order to ascertain what kind of education is most effective in making woman what she ought to be what she ought to be now notice this is all going to be aimed towards the development of her character and fulfilling her domestic responsibilities not towards making her into a madame cury you know who is Madame cury by the way yeah right right right exactly she's the person the scientist who who discovered radium and radiation and x-rays I mean that that whole technology and our knowledge of it would not have existed without her in which she was assisted by by her husband it was really though she who was the principal uh investigator and and the you know the great uh discoverer in order to ascertain what kind of education is most effective in making woman what she ought to be the best method is to inquire into the character station and peculiar duties of women throughout the largest portion of her Earthly career and then ask for what is she most valued admired and beloved in answer to this I have little hesitation in saying for her disinter interested kindness for her disinterested kindness disinterested here means not interested in herself only interested in others for her disinterested kindness that's what she is most valued admired and beloved for look at all the heroins whether of romance or reality at all the female characters that are held up to Universal admiration at all who have gone down to honored Graves among the tears and Lamentations of their survivors have these been the learned the accomplished women the women who could solve problems and elucidate systems of philosophy no or if they have they have also been women who were dignified with the Majesty of moral greatness let us single out from any particular Seminary school by the way this doesn't mean a seminary in our modern sense of a training place for the clergy but in the older sense of of a uh well actually kind of a uh a prep school let us single out from any particular Seminary a child who has been there from the years of 10 to 15 and reckon if it can be reckoned the pains that have been spent in making that child proficient in Latin have the same Pains been spent in making her disinteresting kind or disinterested L kind and yet what man get this and yet what man is there in existence who would not rather his wife should be free from selfishness than be able to read Virgil without the use of a dictionary and by selfishness what she means is self-interest okay she doesn't mean selfishness in the derogatory sense of selfishness I still cling fondly to the hope that some system of female instruction will be discovered by which the young women of England may be sent from school to the homes of their parents habituated to be on the watch for every opportunity of doing good to others making it the first and the last inquiry of every day what can I do to make my parents my brothers or my S sisters more happy I am but a feeble instrument in the hands of Providence but as he will give me strength I hope to pursue the plan to which I have been accustomed of seeking my own happiness only in the happiness of others well um you know guess what Oprah Winfrey would probably have to say the uh you know this is totally totally totally opposed to any conception of a woman cultivating herself and her own abilities and her own talents and her own gifts simply in order to cultivate herself because that is a value in and of itself yeah don't forget your button but it's really funny because I don't know how many people ever heard of Sarah sney Ellis but I've heard Virginia wolf he g go down Chris is saying oh no one remembers people who are like that here we have Virginia wolf who's the vast opposite of that right right going down history absolutely and nowhere more than in what work well Mrs staway yeah and and some of the other novels but uh what else anybody know long Pros work pical Pros work A Room of One's Own that that what a woman needs is enough money so that she's not dependent on others enough money of her own so she's not dependent on others and A Room of One's Own you know some place where she can go and that's her room and that doesn't mean just literally room by the way but but some space you know that she can go to that is her space okay um by the way at Virginia wolves well the Wolves because she and Leonard uh used to go out to the uh to the country in the summertime to rodnell and uh it's Little Village outside of Lewis which is down close to the Southeastern coast of England and uh you can still go in there by the way it's called Monk's house which has nothing to do with the Wolves because it was called Monk's house before they ever you know took the uh the lease on it and uh she had set up for herself a little structure a little kind of house by itself kind of a cabin in the back Garden you know which was far enough away from the house that you couldn't even hear anything going on in the house if there were visitors or people walking around the garden and so forth and that's where she used to go and do her writing at least during the summertime so then we have centry patmore's poem The Angel in the house and this is something by the way that Virginia wolf directly refers to directly refers to where she scornfully says as we shall see later on you know why should a woman simply be the angel in the house the one who in her disinterested kindness puts her chair in the place of a draft a cold draft so that her husband and children can pull their chairs up closer to the fire well here's Coventry patmore a poem who was a poet who was very famous in his own time when I behold the skies aoft passing the pageantry of Dreams the cloud whose bosom Signet soft a couch for nuptial Juno scenes nuptial Juno Juno the God is the highest of the goddesses the ocean broad the mountains bright the shadowy veils with feeding herds I from my liar the music Smite nor want for justly matching words all forces of the sea and air all interests of Hill and plain I so can sing in season feir that who ha felt may feel again elated of by such free songs I think with utterance free to raise that Hymn for which the whole world Longs a worthy hymn in woman's praise all this has been leading up to you know if I were you know a good great poet and I could do this and I could do that and you know I could strike my liar and I could sing great uh poem what would I do I would sing a worthy hymn in woman's praise but what is that worthy poem in women's praise or hymn A Hymn bright noted like a birds arousing these song sleepy times with rap cidies of perfect words ruled by returning kiss of Rhymes but when I look on her and hope to tell with joy what I admire my thoughts lie cramped in narrow scope or in the feeble birth expire no Myster of well-woven speech no simplest phrase of tenderest fall nor likened Excellence can reach her the most excellent of all the best half of creation's best its heart to feel its eye to see the crown and complex of the rest its aim and its epitome see this is the notion that obviously some feminists criticize of putting the woman up on the pedestal you've heard that expression right putting the woman up on the pedestal and many women will say that's no favor to me okay nay might I utter my conceit to her after all a vulgar song for she's so simply subtly sweet my deepest Rapture does her wrong yet is it now my chosen task to sing her worth as maid and wife nor happier post than this I asked to live her laurate all my life on wings of love uplifted free and by her gentleness made great and by her gentleness made great see this is the sort of thing that Mrs Ellis was talking about I'll teach how noble man should be to match with such a lovely mate see that's EXA ly the same argument that Ellis was making and then in her may prove the more the woman's wish to be desired by Praise increased till both shall soar with Blissful emulations fired and as geranium pink or Rose is Thrice itself through Power of art so may my happy skill disclose new fairness even in her Fair heart until that churl shall nowhere be who bends not odd Before the Throne of her affecting Majesty see Before the Throne of her affecting Majesty so Meek so far unlike our own until for who may hope too much from her who wields the powers of love our lifted lives at last shall touch that happy gold to which they move until we find as Darkness rolls away and evil Mists dissolve the nuptial contrasts are the poles on which the Heavenly spheres revolve well okay um there we are you know these are very very popular attitudes towards women and as I've said towards the the gendered roles that women were supposed to fulfill we have various other selections here but one I'd like to draw your attention to is anonymous has anybody here read this Anonymous okay um this is from a letter to the times this is from a letter to the times but before I do that let's go back to the screen just a minute please um we've seen the feminist critique in Mary Wilston crafts of indication of the rights of women in 1792 but I think in In fairness to our our male uh friends and colleagues including myself I suppose uh I should mention that uh John Stewart Mill himself a man and one of the great thinkers of the uh 19th century also wrote a very important feminist critique entitled The subjection of women which of course he argued against the subjection of women so let's let's talk first about this Anonymous the the great social evil from a letter to the times that is to say the London Times in January of 1858 who is this person who's readed I no longer see the hand okay yeah uh yeah go ahead she's basically a prostitute but she's not one from the real lonely poor family she just ended up that way but she describes how uh how she became that way because uh she never had any virtue how could she lose her virtue if she never had any to begin with she was never taught what virtue was yeah okay uh basically what she's doing is she's talking about uh what it is to be a woman but a woman who was scorned by all of the conventional moralists and all of the proper people of the time this is not by the way an argument in favor of prostitution what it is is it's a condemnation of the hypocrisy of a lot of the moralists of the time because one of the things that she's saying is that there are many women who either are unfairly accused of being prostitutes or like prostitutes moreover there are women who are forced into prostitution by economic necessity that there were many women who really had very little choice and so she's saying you know in effect don't go about criticizing me unless you live where I have lived and you experience what I have experienced and the world is very very very hard for poor people workingclass people and especially for women of that class and if a few of them have become prostitutes in order to improve their economic conditions who are you moralists to criticize them and it's an interesting argument and again she's not trying to apologize for herself as you say and as you pointed out and she also is not saying that women ought to become prostitutes that's not her point at all it's simply to condemn first of all a society which not only pushes many women into this kind of prostitution but then turns around and condemns them morally for having done so so uh uh it's an unusual kind of of inclusion in uh in anthology of this kind and we have various other works in here by women mainly women uh though we do have one uh by another man Walter bad and you will probably be interested to doe that one of the works that we have is by forence Nightingale who is better known for what she was a novelist but she's yeah she she Not only was a nurse but what yes she was a nurse well sort of what preceded yeah yeah the what she really did was she professionalized the profession of nurses and of nurseing okay um in earlier times and even down to forence nightingale's times the the women who became nurses were really people who had no other options you know it was a very very difficult occupation we're not talking about what nurses are today by the way what nurses have become is large as a result of the work of Florence Nightingale and of course obviously many others since Florence Nightingale but under her inspiration ultimately that uh what nurses did in this time was basically just go around and try to clean people up you know uh and I don't know how many of you have been in hospitals or have worked in hospitals I worked in hospitals for 3 years and uh let me tell you that that hospital workers are the real heroes and the real saints of the world in many respects uh because they deal with people at their most vulnerable with all of their physical and often psychological weaknesses and um you know and and nurses were very much looked down on they were not considered to be professionals they were simply considered to be people who uh cleaned people up you know and uh you know to some extent dressed wounds and you know if they had any responsibilities at all beyond that they were clearly under the supervision of male superiors who were usually doctors and of course most doctors were male uh as a matter of fact it was was n until fairly late in the 19th century that women not only were admitted to go and sit in medical school lectures in the lecture Halls at the universities in England but they couldn't sit for examinations so they were finally allowed to go and sit in the lecture halls but they couldn't sit for the examinations which meant of course that they could never receive received degrees and therefore could never be certified as medical doctors or other medical professionals and it was fairly late in the 19th century when the first women were actually allowed to sit for examinations so uh and that you know in the course of history is not that awfully long ago so uh one of the things that for Nale did was she professionalized nursing she came in and uh said that hospitals were really filthy pig sty for the most part and that uh they had to be cleaned up she went out of the hospitals into the neighborhoods and said that people had to not only clean up their houses and themselves and their children but also taught people people at least the basics of Public Health of Sanitation and of good hygiene and she made tremendous advances in improving uh the hygiene of people in the society in general you know teaching people fundamental things like uh you know when to bathe and how to bathe and uh when to wash one's hands and how to do that effectively to kill germs you know and uh all kinds of things like that that that vastly improve the conditions of Public Health and in the hospitals and I don't know how many of you are aware of this or not but in the hospitals it's it's very easy for infections to spread you know that's why one of the not very good jokes around hospitals is you know the last place you want to be if you're sick is in a hospital well there's an element of Truth in that it's not true in a lot of cases but it's there's an element of Truth in that um let me just give you one example post-operative ex uh uh infections you know there are people who will have operations you know you have to have an operation because of you know some physical problem you're having and naturally enough you assume not only that the operation will be competent but that you will improve after you've had your surgery Maybe not immediately because it's it's tough going through surgery but you know after a little while you're going to improve well what if you get a wound infection that's not as uncommon as you might think and it's something which is totally 100% preventable because the post-operative infection in surgical wounds occur as a result of somebody carrying the dangerous microbes into that room and infecting the person at the person's most vulnerable Point that's the kind of thing that forence Nightingale was so concerned about not just that but that was one of the kinds of things uh to improve the conditions of obstetrics I mean women had their babies in just any place that the baby decided to come right and if you're lucky maybe you could be in a clean home but if you weren't lucky uh you might be having your baby under the most deplorable conditions and without the attention of people who were even marginal Ally competent to help you if anything went wrong and so forence Nightingale took a very very active role in that kind of thing as well now many of these had to do with Women's Health but she was just as concerned about Men's Health as well and uh she went off to uh to the war at one point and was actually professionalizing the Army nurses to uh to better take care of the uh the soldiers you wartime and she also was like Margaret Sanger very much interested in Family Planning and uh which of course among other things meant uh contraception and and giving advice I mean real advice to uh to women and to men about Family Planning and of course got they got themselves into terrible trouble and uh women and men who worked with them because they often would have men working with them as well some of them would be doctors but some of them would be you know other men who were helping out uh would simply be thrown into jail sometimes they were simply beaten by the police there are stories well attested stories of women in such circumstances and on suffrage marches who were perfectly Peaceable women and some men and the police police would come in on orders from their superiors with clubs and just start literally beating the women and and the men and children literally beating them in order to drive them from the streets well I mean this happened in places like London you know and these stories are well attested this is not you know just something that uh you know some wild person is is fabricating okay so the other thing if we can go back to the screen very briefly uh we're running out of time today but you might look at it's very short is a poem by Anna Leticia Barbo called the rights of woman the first few stanzas you'll think well there's a woman writing just right about the same time as Mary won craft until you get to the last two stanzas of her poem in which she does a turnabout and claims that the only way for a woman really to survive and even to thrive is by being submissive and obedient to her man well okay the other if we can go briefly back to the screen our remaining our remaining seconds is the optional paper topic about Colonial and postcolonial experiences in the old British Empire and what I'm showing up here is mainly for the people who are watching this at a distance because they'll have the technical ability to stop this frame by frame if they want to uh but this is essentially what for those of you who are here with me right now I was talking about at Great length at the beginning of our class period today so we will next time be going on further with the victorians see you there

Literature_Lectures

15_The_Postmodern_Psyche.txt

Prof: So today we're still focused on individual consciousness. "Why?" you might ask. Well, we can speak of the psychogenesis of the text or film as the site or model for symbolic patterning of one sort or another, perhaps in the case certainly of Žižek, to some extent also of Deleuze. Therefore we can still understand today's readings, unlike Thursday's readings, as belonging to the psychological emphasis in our syllabus. This is actually our farewell to the psychological emphasis, and it is so arranged because there are intimations in today's authors that there are political stakes. That is to say, in one way or another we are to understand their argument about the way in which the psyche functions as having political implications. Žižek is fascinating, it seems to me, in his brilliant reading of The Crying Game at the very end of your essay, in the moment when he says in effect, "Look. This isn't just a kind of abdication from responsibility for the Irish Republican Revolution. The soldier has not merely walked away from his role in revolutionary activity; he has discovered in his private life--that is to say, in the erotic dimension of his consciousness--the need for revolution from within. He has necessarily disrupted his own thinking in ways equally radical to and closely parallel to the disruption of thinking that's required to understand one's relationship with the emerging Republican status of Ireland. And so," says Žižek in effect, "there are political implications for the upheaval in consciousness that an ultimately tragic encounter with the Big Other entails. I should say in passing also about Žižek that -- and your editor, I think, goes into this a little bit in the italicized preface-- that there are temptations, political temptations, entailed in this fascination with an obscure or even perhaps transcendent object of desire for the individual, but also for the social psyche. In religious terms, there is a perhaps surprising or counterintuitive friendliness toward religion in Žižek's work on the grounds that faith or the struggle for faith, after, all does constitute an effort to enter into some kind of meaningful relationship with that which one desires yet at the same time can't have. By the same token--and this is where, in certain moments, he confesses to a kind of instability in his political thinking, even though he is by and large on the left and partly needs to be understood as a disciple of Marx-- nevertheless, he recognizes that in politics there is a kind of excitement but also, perhaps, potential danger in fascination with a big idea. It could be, of course, some form of progressive collectivity. It could, on the other hand, be the kind of big idea that countenances the rise of fascism. Žižek acknowledges this-- that public identification with a kind of almost, or completely, inaccessible otherness, either as a political idea or as a charismatic political leader, can, after all, open up a vertigo of dangerous possibilities. I use the word "vertigo" advisedly because I'm going to be coming back to Hitchcock's Vertigo in just a minute, but in the meantime there are also obviously political stakes in Deleuze. Deleuze, of course, presents to us in this first chapter of his book, A Thousand Plateaus, he presents to us a kind of thought experiment, both as something recommended to the reader-- see if you can think in this new, radically innovative way-- but also providing a model for thinking of this kind in the style and organization and composition of the chapter itself. So in making a thought experiment, once again, Deleuze has to perform in thought what you might call a revolution from within, but the implications once again in politics, as indeed also for Žižek, are somewhat ambiguous. That is to say, the rhizomatic mode of thinking-- and we'll come back to the rhizomatic mode of thinking as we go along-- which is radically de-centering and which lends itself to identification with, as it were, the mass movement of collectivity, can plainly be progressively democratic: that is to say, democratic beyond even what our social and cultural hierarchies accommodate. But at the same time it can once again be fascistic, because the organization of fascistic culture, while nevertheless a kind of top-down arrangement with a fervor involved as the mass is mobilized, nevertheless is, in this mobilization, rhizomatic. Deleuze is careful to point out that rhizomes are, and rhizomatic thinking is, as he says repeatedly, both for the best and worst. > Rats are rhizomes. Crabgrass is a rhizome. In other words, everything which organizes itself in this fashion is rhizomatic; much of it, though, as I'll be coming back to try to explain with a little more care, is for the good in Deleuze's view. By the way, I say "Deleuze" in the same way I said "Wimsatt." Guattari is an important colleague and ally. They wrote many books together including one that I'll mention later. They also wrote things separately, but "Deleuze," simply because his oeuvre is more ample and people feel somehow or another that he's more central to this work, is a synecdoche for "Deleuze and Guattari." So I'll be saying "Deleuze," but I don't mean to slight Guattari. In any case, so we'll be examining the Deleuzian rhizome a little bit more closely, but in the meantime, as to its political implications-- and we are moving closer to the political as we begin to think about figures of this kind-- they're really on the admission of both of them somewhat ambiguous. In other words, they're introducing new possibilities of thought and they're very different from each other, as we'll see. They're introducing new possibilities of thought, but they are candid enough to admit that they don't quite know where these possibilities are going-- that is, what the implications or consequences of successfully entering the thought world of either one of them might be. All right. So yes, they certainly have very different ideas. I wouldn't blame you for saying, "Why on earth are we reading these two texts together?" The overlap isn't altogether clear. I'm going to suggest what it is in a minute, but in the meantime they are certainly on about very different things. Deleuze is concerned with, as I say, introducing a kind of thought experiment which has to do with the de-centering of thought, getting away from the tree or arboresque model of thought-- we'll have more to say about that; and Žižek, on the other hand, following Lacan's distinction between the object, ready to hand, that you can have if you want, and the object of desire which--such is the chain of signification-- is perpetually something that exceeds or outdistances our grasp-- in developing this idea, and thinking about what the object of desire, in all of its manifold forms, might be, he develops this curious idea, which is at the center of his thinking, of the blot--the element in narrative form, the element in the way in which our storytelling capacities are organized, which really can't be narrated, which really can't lend itself to meaning. That sort of meaning is, of course, concrete, specific meaning, that which can be tied down to an accessible object. So the central idea that Žižek is attempting to develop in his essay has to do with this notion of the relationship between the Big Other and the blot, as we'll see. So these strike one as being extremely different ideas, and as I say I wouldn't blame you for wondering just what overlap there can be. Well, at the same time I would think that as you read the somewhat bouncy and frantic prose of both of these texts, you did see that they had a kind of mood, stance, or orientation toward the critical and theoretical project in common. They seem, in other words, to be of the same moment. Even though their ideas seem to be so very different-- that is, the basic ideas they're trying to get across seem to be so very different-- you could perhaps imagine these two texts as being written, if it was just a question of considering their style, by the same person. Actually, I think that's not quite true, but at the same time the kind of high-energy, too-caffeinated feeling that you get from the prose of both is something that might give you pause and make you wonder: well, just what moment does this belong to? The answer is important and, in a way, obvious. I'm sure all of you are ready to tell me what moment it belongs to. It belongs to Postmodernism. These are two exemplars of what is by far the most slippery--if one likes it, one wants to say versatile, > and if one doesn't like it, one wants to say murky--concepts to which we have been exposed in the last twenty or thirty years. I think that, in a way, we can bring both essays into focus as a pair a little bit if we pause somewhat, simply over the concept "Postmodernism." Maybe that's one of the things you wanted to learn in taking a course like this, so I'm just providing a service. > So Postmodernism. What is Postmodernism? I think we know what it is in artistic expression. We have encountered enough examples of it. We have, perhaps, even taken courses in which, in the context of artistic form and expression, it has come up. Postmodernism in artistic expression-- particularly in the visual arts, but I think this is true of certain movements in both narrative and poetry as well-- postmodernism is an eclectic orientation to the past. In a certain sense, it's a return to the past; it's an opening up of textual possibility to traditions and historical moments of expression which Modernism had tended to suppose obsolete and to have set aside; so that in artistic expression, as I say, Postmodernism is an eclectic return to possibilities thrown up by the history of art and literature; in architecture, many examples are quite extraordinary and many, unfortunately, are also hideous. You know that there was a certain point fifteen or twenty years ago when every strip mall, every shopping mall, was redecorated or-- what's the word I want?--renovated. Every shopping mall was renovated, and how did they renovate it? They'd been flat. They'd been sort of Mies van der Rohe, sort of sixties-modern before then. They just sat there flat, and so the renovators came along and put little gables on the shopping mall so that each little shop in the mall now has a gable, and this is postmodern. The most awful things were done with suburban houses, also in the name of a kind of blind, completely tasteless return to the neoclassical and certain other aspects of tradition. So the postmodern in what you might call suburban culture has been pretty awful, but at the same time it has entailed a great deal of interesting work in painting. All of a sudden, the New York scene isn't just one school, and that's the sign of it. It's not just a certain kind of abstraction. It's not just a wholesale return, agreed on by everyone, to Realism. It's a mixture of everything. Artists are always just completely obsessed with their place in art history, but it's not just groups of artists together wanting to identify a certain place for themselves in art history. It's every artist in a kind of anarchic independence from the thinking of other artists coming to terms with art history in his or her own way so that the scene-- the art scenes of New York and Berlin and Los Angeles and so on-- the scene isn't something that you can identify as having a certain character anymore. It's postmodern precisely in that it's gone global, it has a million influences and sources, and there is very little agreement among artists about how to amalgamate and put these sources together; so that in terms of artistic expression, the postmodern moment--after Modernism, in other words--the postmodern moment presents itself, and I put it deliberately, as a medical symptom, the bipolar way the postmodern moment presents itself in artistic expression. Now philosophically, Postmodernism can be understood as doubt not just about the grounds of knowledge or the widespread sorts of doubt which we have been talking about more or less continuously in this course, but as doubt in particular about the relationship between or among parts and wholes. In other words, can I be sure that my leg is part of my body when plainly it is at the same time a whole with respect to my foot? How is it that I know in any stable way what a part or a whole is? To take a more interesting example-- this is in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations-- there is the flag, the French flag, which is called the tricolor, right? Now the tricolor is made up of three strips of color: white, blue, and red. I'm sorry if I've gotten the order wrong. In fact, I am almost positive that I have, > but there are those three strips of color existing in relation to each other, and plainly those three strips of color are parts of the flag, and they have a certain symbolic value. That is to say, each color represents something and enters into the symbolic understanding of what the flag is. But at the same time red, white, and blue--sorry--yes, red, white, and blue aren't confined to this piece of cloth. The little strip of white is obviously part of whiteness. It can't be understood simply in and of itelf. These strips of color are parts of other things as well; and what's more, if you look at the tricolor without knowing what you're looking at, how can you say that it's the part of a whole? You say, "Well, they're just parts," or "They're wholes unto themselves which somebody happens to have laid side by side." By the same token, if you look at the part of the tricolor which is white and you say, "White," well, obviously with respect to the vast universalizing concept "white," a little flag is simply a kind of metonymic relationship with that sense of white. But, in short, to concretize this idea of the problematic relationship between part and whole in a different way, why are we so confident about what we see? As most of you know, I'm sure, philosophical thinking tends to be tyrannized by metaphors of vision. We assume that we understand reality because-- not altogether as consciously metaphorically in speaking about this as perhaps we might be-- we say that we can see it; but how do you see it? You see it because of the lensing or focusing capacities of the eye, which exercise a certain tyranny over the nature of what you see. If you look too closely at something, all you can see is dots. If you look at something and close your eyes, that, too, becomes a kind of vast retinal Mark Tobey painting. It has a relation to what you see but is at the same time something very different. And if you get too far away from objects, they dissolve. What you thought was an object dissolves into a much vaster, greater space which seems to have another objective nature. If you're in a jet and you're looking down, what you're seeing certainly looks like it has form and structure, but the form and structure is not at all what you're seeing if you're standing on the ground looking at exactly the same, shall we say, square footage insofar as you can. You're simply seeing different things, and if you recognize what might be called the tyranny of focus in the way in which we orient ourselves to the world, you can see this perpetual dissolve and refocus constituting objects perpetually in new ways. This happens, too, in the history of science. The relationship between subatomic particles sometimes turns itself inside out, and the particle that you thought was the fundamental unit turns out, in fact, to have within it a fundamental unit of which it is a part. I'm just referring to what happened during the golden age of the linear accelerator when all sorts of remarkable sorts of inversions of what's taken to be fundamental seemed to be made available by the experimental data; so that in all of these ways, ranging from scientific to the most subjectively visual ways of understanding the world, there are possibilities of doubt that can be raised about part-whole relations. What is a whole? How do we define a unity? Should we be preoccupied with the nature of reality as a set of unities? Obviously, Deleuze is extremely upset about this. He doesn't want anything to do with unity. The whole function of his thought experiment is the de-centering of things such that one can no longer talk about units or wholes or isolated entities. It's the being together, merging together, flying apart, reuniting, and kinesis or movement of entities, if they can even be called entities, that Deleuze is concerned with. Now another aspect of the postmodern is what the postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, in particular, has called "the inhuman" or the process of the dehumanization of the human. Now this is a weird term to choose because it's not at all anti-humanistic. It's really a new way of thinking about the human. Deleuze, you'll notice, talks--not just here in this excerpt, but repeatedly throughout his work, which is why he has so little to say about it here that's explanatory-- about "bodies without organs." That might have brought you up short, but what it suggests is that we are, as Deleuze would put it, machinic rather than organic. If the problem with centered thought is that it thinks of everything as arboreal, as a tree, that problem has to do with the fact that a tree is understood in its symbolic extensions to have organs. The roots are muscles and circulation; the blossoms are genital in nature; the crown or canopy of leaves is the mind of the tree reaching up to the sky, the mentality of the tree. By the same token, if we think of our own bodies as arboreal, we think of certain parts of those bodies as cognitive, other parts of those bodies as having agency, as doing things. If that's the case, then we think of a centered and ultimately genital or genetic understanding of the body as being productive. Deleuze wants to understand the body as being interactive, as being polymorphous perverse, among other things. He wants to understand it as being everywhere and nowhere, an un-situated body among other bodies. In order for this to happen, its interface with other things has to be without agency and also without cognitive intention on the model of "I think, therefore I am; the world comes into being because I think," without any of this in play. In other words, the dehumanization of the postmodern has to do not at all with denying the importance of the human but with this radical way of rethinking the human among other bodies and things. Plainly, this emphasis involves a kind of dissolving into otherness, a continuity between subject and object in which the difference, ultimately, between what is inside me, what is authentic or integral to my being me, and what's outside me become completely permeable and interchangeable. The late nineteenth-century author and aesthetic philosopher Walter Pater, in the conclusion to a famous book of his called The Renaissance, had a wonderful way of putting this: he said in effect, "We are too used to thinking that we're in here and everything else is out there and that, somehow or another, our perspective on everything out there is a kind of saving isolation enabling our power of objectivity." Then Pater says, paraphrased, "How can this be, because we're made up of the same things that are out there? We, too, are molecular, in other words. What is in us ‘rusts iron and ripens corn' [his words]. There is a continuousness between the inside feeling we have about ourselves and the exteriority with which we are constantly coming in contact." Deleuze and Guattari, of course, have their own excited, jumpy way of putting these things, but it's not really a new idea that we exaggerate the isolation of consciousness from its surroundings. There is a permeability of inside and outside that this kind of rhizomic, or de-centered, thinking is meant to focus on. Now you could say that what Deleuze is interested in-- if you go back to our coordinates that we kept when we were talking about the formalists, Saussure through structuralism, through deconstruction-- if you go back to those coordinates, you could say that what Deleuze is interested in, like so many others we've read, is a rendering virtual, or possibly even eliminating, of the vertical axis: in other words, of that center or head or crown of the tree which constitutes everything that unfolds on the horizontal axis-- be it language, be it the unconscious structured like a language, be it whatever it might be. You could say that the project of Deleuze, too, is the undoing or rendering virtual of this vertical axis. Well, in a way, I think that's true, but then what is the horizontal axis? That is where the relation of Deleuze to, let's say, deconstruction becomes a little problematic and where we can actually see a difference. I'm going to compare him in this one respect with Lacan, but I want to hasten to point out, as I will in a minute, a divergence from Lacan as well. You remember that in Lacan's "Agency of the Letter" essay, he doesn't just talk about the axis of combination as a series of concentric circles, each one of which is made up of little concentric circles. He doesn't just talk about that. He also talks about the way in which the combinatory powers of the imaginary in language, or desire in language, take place is like a musical staff, so that the organization of signs, in their contiguity with each other, can be either melodic or harmonic; but in any case, you can't just think of the axis of combination as a complete linearity. It has dimensionality of different kinds. That's why Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of plateau. The book in which your excerpt appears is called A Thousand Plateaus. Ultimately, the concept of plateau is even more important to them than the concept of rhizome, but when they introduce the concept of plateau they're doing exactly the same thing. They are saying, "We jump from sign cluster to sign cluster and not all sign clusters are linear and uniform." This is where there is perhaps a difference from deconstruction. Deleuze and Guattari are interested in "multiplicity of coding," as they put it. They're interested in the way in which when I think, I'm not just thinking in language, I'm not just thinking pictorially, and I'm not just thinking musically, but I am leaping around among codes so that the actual thought process is eclectic in this way. Now you could say that this is something actually anticipated also by Lacan. You remember also in the "Agency" essay that Lacan reminds us, true inheritor of Freud which he takes himself to be, that at the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud said that the decoding of the dream work is like figuring out the puzzle of a rebus-- a rebus being one of those trick sentences which are made up not exclusively of words but of the odd syllable or of pictures: for example, "I 'heart' New York." "I 'heart' New York" is a rebus. The dream work functions constantly, in Freud's view, as a rebus. So you could say that Lacan already introduces for Deleuze the possibility of thinking of a multiple coding that needs to be decoded on a variety of plateaus if it's going to make any sense. Now Deleuze's relationship with all the figures we have been reading is rather problematic, really. The book preceding A Thousand Plateaus was called Anti-Oedipus, and it is a continuous systematic attack on-- he always calls Freud "the General"-- the idea that Freud feels that the whole of our psychic lives is completely saturated and dominated by the Oedipus complex. Deleuze with his idea of de-centered thinking, of the rhizome, sets out to show in a variety of ways how limiting and how unfortunate for the legacy of psychoanalysis this kind of focus on a particular issue turns out to be-- this is Deleuze's critique of Freud, not mine. You would think that Deleuze, then, would be a lot closer to Lacan just for the reasons that I have just described, but Lacan, too--at the very bottom of page 034 in your copy center reader, on the right-hand column--he says: "…[I]t is not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics…" Now it's impossible to say-- I think quite by design--it's impossible to say whether Deleuze is referring to Freud or Lacan in saying that, because it's Lacan who claims that Freud said it: in other words, that The Interpretation of Dreams is the text in which we discover that the unconscious is structured like a language; but at the same time, posterity has taken Lacan's focus on linguistics to be a massive, perhaps inappropriate revision of Freud and to be a very different matter. So it's interesting that Deleuze quite ambiguously seems to suppose that Freud and Lacan are part and parcel of each other. The reason he can do that is that he is interested in a form of thinking about language which no linguistics has successfully accommodated, as far as he's concerned. In other words, he keeps talking about Chomsky. Chomsky seems to be, in a way, the villain of your essay. But I think, in a way, that's just a way of evading talking about Saussure, because you wouldn't want to get in trouble with all those structuralists; because the problem with Saussure, too, is that there is a certain tyranny or arboresque tendency in Saussurean thinking to be focused on the binary-- that is, the relationship between the signified and signifier as fixed, as inflexible, and as lacking in what Derrida would call "free play" and therefore, too ,a kind of tyranny. So, very quickly, on the rhizome. How do we know a rhizome when we see it? Whatever frustrations Deleuze's essay puts in your path, I think probably in the long run you're pretty clear on what a rhizome is, but if there is any lingering doubt just think about the flu. There is what Deleuze calls "rhizomatic flu." That's something we get from other people, the circulation of disease. As we all come down with it around midterm period, the circulation of disease is rhizomatic. It's a perfect example of--to use another instance from Deleuze--the relationship between the wasp and the orchid. The wasp, like the virus, sort of flits about from blossom to blossom, descends, and then constitutes the flu. By contrast there is hereditary disease-- that is, that which is lurking in us because we're programmed for it, we're hard-wired for it, and it is genetically in our nature. This Deleuze associates with the arboresque. It comes from an origin. It is something that is a cause within us or a cause standing behind us, as opposed to something coming out of left field in an arbitrary and unpredictable fashion and descending on us-- perhaps this is also not unlike Tynjanov's distinction between modification and evolution. The arboresque evolves; the rhizomatic is modification. The give and take of tensions among entities-- the rats tumbling over each other, the maze of the burrow, the spreading of crabgrass--all of this has a kind of randomness and unpredictability. The power of linkage at all conceivable points without any predictability--all of this is entailed in the rhizomatic. Now as to what's being attacked--and again, the value system surrounding these things is not absolute, Deleuze is not going so far as to say "arboresque bad, rhizomatic good." He's coming pretty close to it, but he acknowledges the perils, as I say, of the rhizomatic--but in the meantime just one point in passing-- because I'm running out of time to talk about Žižek-- just one point in passing about the arboresque. There are actually, in the first pages of your essay, two forms of it. One is what he calls the "root book," the traditional classical book which presents to you a theme: "I am going to write about so-and-so, and I'm going to do so systematically, one thing at a time in a series of chapters." That's the root book. Then there is what he calls the "fascicle book," a book which consists of complicated offshoots of roots but nevertheless entailing a tap root. This is what he associates with Modernism, precisely, in your text. He says in effect: "The fascicle book is like Joyce's Ulysses. Everything including the kitchen sink is in it. It looks as though it were totally rhizomatic, but it is, of course, controlled by, unified by, and brought into coherence by a single focusing authorial consciousness so that it is not truly rhizomatic; it's a fascicle book." And here, now, A Thousand Plateaus is going to be a rhizomatic book. So you have not just two kinds of books in this idea but three. All right then, very quickly about Žižek. I think he can help us understand Lacan. I hope you agree with this in having read it, but I think in a way, it also takes us back to, or allows us to revisit, Peter Brooks. The best example, it seems to me, of the way in which the tension of desire in narrative works for Žižek is-- although these are splendid examples and I think largely self-explanatory-- the best example is actually in another book by Žižek called Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. In that book, of course, you get a lot of attention paid to Vertigo. Just think about Vertigo as an instance of the kind of plot Žižek is talking about. There is that--I've forgotten her name--really nice woman. You remember, the painter, and Jimmy Stewart just pays absolutely no attention to her. She's right there. She's available. She's in love with him. He doesn't even see her except as a confidante: "Oh yes, you; I'm so glad you're here." But he is, on the other hand, obsessed with a woman whose identity he can't even be sure of. It's not just that she's inaccessible for some reason or that she's a distant object of desire. Her identity and the question of whether or not she's being play-acted by somebody else remains completely unclear-- unclear for many spectators even as they watch the ending of the film, completely unclear. That is an obscure, not just a distant but an obscure object of desire. Of course, the premise of her inaccessibility is what drives the plot. Now I think that it's interesting to think about the relationship between the element of detour and delay, as Žižek implies it, in understanding narrative and what Peter Brooks is talking about. Peter Brooks is talking about the way in which middles in plots protract themselves through episodes, all of which manifest some sort of imbalance or need for further repetition in a new key. Much of this--because the characteristic plot of the kind of fiction Brooks is mainly thinking about is the marriage plot-- much of this has to do with inappropriate object choice. That indeed can also in many cases, à la what I began by mentioning in Žižek, lead to inappropriate political object choice. Think, for example, about the plot of Henry James' Princess Casamassima in that regard. Poor Hyacinth Robinson strikes out on both counts in rather completely parallel ways. He ends up on the wrong side of politics, and he ends up on the wrong side of love. In a way, the Princess Casamassima is an exploration of these two sides of the issue. So in any case, for Brooks the resolution of the plot is a way in which closure can be achieved. It is a final moment of equilibrium, as one might say, or quiet or reduction of excitation, such that the Freudian death wish can be realized, as we know, in the way we want it to be realized, as opposed to our being afflicted by something from the outside. So in Brooks, whose closest ties are to structuralism, there is an achieved sense of closure which is an important aspect of what's admirable in fiction. Žižek is more postmodern. Žižek sees, following Lacan, the object of desire as asymptotic, as being ultimately and always inaccessible; or if it becomes accessible-- as, for example, on page 1193 in the right-hand column-- or one might say, almost accessible, this gives rise to as many problems as it seems to eliminate. At the bottom right-hand column, page 1193, Žižek says: … [P]erhaps, in courtly love itself, the long-awaited moment of highest fulfillment, when the Lady renders Gnada, mercy, to her servant is not the Lady's surrender, her consent to the sexual act, nor some mysterious rite of initiation, but simply a sign of love on the part of the Lady, the "miracle" that the Object answered, stretching its hand out towards the supplicant. The object, in other words, has become subject. In this moment of exchange, mutuality of recognition, or becoming human on the part of the lady-- whom of course Žižek has associated with the dominatrix in a sadistic relationship-- in this moment of becoming human and of offering love, the object becomes more accessible. That is to say, there is now the possibility of some form of mutuality, but in her becoming more accessible, the energy of desire is threatened with dissolution. In other words, closure in Žižek is a threat to the energy of desire. Desire is something which inheres in our very language, according to Žižek, and which, were it to be understood as brought to closure, the lady--Žižek gives lots of examples of the lady, after all of this sort of seeming inaccessibility-- the lady says, "Sure, why not? Of course." The person is completely upset and then refuses the act because there's nothing more to desire. All of a sudden, the whole structure of that energy that drives language and consciousness comes tumbling to the ground, and desire has become need. It's become merely a matter of gratification through what's ready-to-hand and no longer a question of sustaining a dream. This, generally speaking, is what Žižek wants to focus on in talking about these plots. The object of desire must be not just distant but also obscure. I'm going to make two more points. First of all, as you can no doubt tell, this is a perfect replica of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. I'd be amazed if anyone in the room hadn't recognized it, > but there it is. [Gestures to drawing on the board.] There's two guys. There's a table between them. They are negotiating probably over one of Henry the Eighth's marriages, and this I think is not insignificant. They are there in the service of Henry the Eighth negotiating one of those extremely complicated marriages, possibly even the one that led to the abdication of the Anglican Church from the Roman Catholic Church-- who knows? But the lore about the painting is that it has to do with the negotiation for an object of desire, and that object is absent. In other words, it's something really only implied by the painting. In the foreground of the painting, notorious to art historians, there is this thing. [Gestures to drawing on the board.] Now this is pretty much what's in the painting. This is not a replica of the two guys standing there, granted but this is pretty much what you see when you look at the foreground of the painting. If you look sort of from the side, it turns into something very much like a skull. Generally speaking, there's a kind of consensus among scholars that it may be a weirdly distorted shadow or representation of a skull, although what a skull is doing in the foreground, of course, causes us to wonder as well. Obviously, you can have some ideas on the subject, but it's still not exactly realist painting we're talking about if he sticks a skull in the foreground. Well, it also has a certain resemblance to other things we could mention, but the main point about it is that we don't really know what it is. It is, in other words, something we've already become familiar with in thinking about Lacan. It is that signifier, that ultimate signifier, which is the obscure object of desire called sometimes by Lacan "the phallus," and it seems simply to be there before us in this painting. Now both in the book on Hitchcock, where he finds something like this in just about every film Hitchcock ever made, and also in Holbein's painting, Žižek calls this "the blot." We have nothing else to call it. It's a blot. What's it doing there? In fiction, we would call it irrelevant detail. We can find a way of placing formally absolutely everything in fiction. The weather, the flowers on the table, whatever it might be: we can place these formally, but there may be something in fiction which is simply unaccountable. We cannot account for it, and that's the blot for Žižek. All right. Now finally, on desire on language: there's a part of Žižek's essay which you may have thought of as a digression. He's suddenly talking about J.L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy. He's suddenly talking about the linguist Ducrot's idea of predication. What's important about, in the one case, the element of performance in any utterance and, in the other case, the dominance of an entire sentence by predication-- what's important in both of those elements is that they take over an aspect of language of which they were only supposed to be a part. In other words, in Austin there are both performatives and constatives; but in the long run, the argument of How to Do Things with Words suggests that there are only performatives: I thought this was a constative, he says in effect, I thought this was just straightforward language, but I can now see an element of performance in it. That's the way that there's a gradual changing of his own mind in Austin's book to which Žižek is sensitive. By the same token, Ducrot talks about the way in which the predicate element of a subject, the predicate relation, has a kind of energy of agency that simply takes over the grammatical subject and constitutes a kind of performance in the sentence-- performance in both cases meaning "desire." When I promise to do something, I also desire to fulfill the promise. When I predicate something, I'm also evoking a desire that that something be the case possibly through my own instrumentality. This is the argument. That's what Žižek means by "desire in language," by the inescapability of desire in language, and the way in which it permeates everything we can say to each other-- most particularly, the way in which it permeates the plot or, as they say in film studies, the "diegesis" of the kinds of film examples that Žižek gives us. I'd better stop there. I hope that this somewhat rapid-fire survey of some key ideas in these texts are helpful. I think in the long run perhaps, I hope, mainly that you see these two energetic authors as exemplars of what we call Postmodernism and see the relevance of the concept of the postmodern to the study of literary theory. Thanks.

Literature_Lectures

Harvard_ENGL_E129_Lecture_4_Othello.txt

um so our text for today is a fellow before we come to talk about it let's uh let me make sure that you all have copies of the information about the paper topic anybody who doesn't have this document this has been a a very carefully crafted exercise that is designed we hope to get you working as close to the text of the language of the plays as is possible uh and we are happy for you to expand your Thinking Beyond these passages in fact we we invite that in our description but we we very much want uh everything you argue to have its basis in the language of the plays and so we also felt that this would be uh a kind of paper and we discussed this a little bit last time which uh since it is so focused and the passages are presented to you will take you we hope less time to assemble than would be something where you had to sort of go out and hunt down the the selected passages that you're going to work with so there you'll see that there's a an the expectation here that you're going to partner this with some some other passages That You observe from the plays so um have a look at this uh maybe at the beginning right after break we can see if we there are questions about this this document um and when it says here 3 to five pages that's double spaced with normal margin okay which means margins uh not no not no margins questions about this at all okay okay so we move on to a fellow and um do I I I'm guessing that this is a play with which you are more familiar than you have been with the previous two or at least more culturally familiar that it's a play that you have perhaps seen perhaps heard about or heard of and that it's a play to which you are willing to Grant some uh degree of what used to be called greatness that is to say that it's it's an important play it's a play that has had uh an effect upon upon culture and institutions I thought we might Begin by uh just listing some topics that you think this play brings up or ought to bring up so the floor is open yes race race indeed okay others evil evil excellent what else okay I'm going to call that loves okay loves with a cool okay sir jealousy jealousy indeed okay and what else so a theme familiar from the plays that we have already been looking at indeed yes whatever the opposite of honesty turns out to be falsity would be one of the many many many options here yes introspection say more about what you mean by introspection well um knowing knowing by s ah can we call it self- knowledge okay okay uh because intr I mean introspection is also a very so sorry self knowledge uh introspection is also a a very pertinent notion here since there are the a fell in particular uh spends some time thinking about how he's thinking about himself thinking the the great introspective figureing this play is who who is it who spends a lot of time Yago Yago exactly and the degree to which self-knowledge is or is not itself a sufficient good or an indication of either trustworthiness or virtue or anything like that is obviously a set of issues at this place brings up anything else that you yes class class class very good okay and maybe we want to partner that with nation a little bit or nationality or or or uh I don't know what exactly what what one wants to call the difference between Florence and Venice or the difference between uh morania and Venice or whatever it is but let's call it Nation or place just as a placeholder something else yes I think I think maybe yes that it will but but honor of course is uh honor and honest both have a kind of physiological we still have honor killings today in today's news which are all about the supposed sexual violation of a woman who is thought of as the property of a man and this question of your honor as a as as as actually the physical sign of virginity or virginity as the the women have physical honor and men have uh spiritual honor so to speak uh this this physical metaphorical issue is actually quite germine yes okay great great yes please I'm sorry women's okay good good good so women women's rights great great okay uh so uh let's imagine that you all leave the room and then you come back in and you see these things on the board uh do are you easily able to guess which Shakespeare play it is that we are discussing yeah I think so I mean I think there yes yeah well okay so let's talk about that let's talk about that because uh there have been decades and decades in which people deny that this play had anything whatever to do about race the the first half of the 20th century uh almost I mean even though we can talk about how about about what kind what is a Moore and what did Shakespeare think a mo was and we'll talk about that in just a second but there there have been many critics especially oh say from postor War II period through the 60s through the early 60s who wanted to claim that ao's race was an incidental issue that he was a sign that that that to talk about his race was to take away something about his Universal humanity and that it in fact aligned you with the bad readers or the Prejudice readers Within the play now obviously it to to us this seems like a very very narrow reading uh but it was thought of as a very liberal reading at the time that looking past his race that a colorblind reading of a fellow uh was for some critics thought of as a more elevated you didn't get them in the Trap of being like brabantio or being like Yago uh that one should should like like desona see A's Visage in your mind and that that you wouldn't see color you would see his his his generosity or his majesty or his magnificence or something like that so that even I me it seems to us the most obvious thing is precisely that this is a play about race about color about racial difference uh but I assure you that ve very many great critics in the middle of the last century wanted to say that that was a an incidental issue and not a central issue and that the central issue was to look past the surface at the with desona as your model here yes well the whole with the whole uh dichotomy between honesty and falsity and um also the reputation versus you know what really happens in private um is aren't they kind of inter like intertwined you can't really separate the you know you can't really separate a fellow's skin from what's inside of him because uh the the two things the the outside and inside of a person um in interact so much in the play they're both equally important in the play well that I mean it's I think that you could make an argument to that uh to that point but I I I really I can cite you chapter and verse of people who say that that is a Surface reading of the play the play is really about you know manhood or Humanity or seeing through the surface rather than seeing the surface uh the again just to give you a little bit of of kind of stage history in connection with this uh the there's a difference between how the play is read with the eye and performed as well uh people like um John Quincy Adams and Abigail Adams for example famously uh found that seeing the play performed and of course in in in England and in the 18th century the actor playing a fellow was a white man in black paint not not a not a a a an African or man of African descent but seeing the black man kiss the white woman was for these liberal speakers intolerable they they found themselves unable to watch this or unable to be comfortable watching it even though in their reading of the play they found liberality and generosity and virtues of all kinds in a fellow nonetheless being confronted with the physical fact of an interracial marriage of an interracial love affair their response as viewers was different from their response as readers where the color is a piece of information rather than a an often often an epithet often something that is thrown out a fellow from outside who talks about a fellow's color desimone's father does what's his name rabano rabano uh what does he have to say about it a maiden never bold to fall in love with what she feared to look on uh the idea I mean his his fantasy of his daughter uh about as uh as much at odds as a fellow's fantasy of why it is that desona fell in love with him uh everybody seems to sort of underere desona but his fantasy of desona is that she what do we know about desdemona's uh past history as a as a um an adult woman with suitors is this her very first romance is it she's turned down other people and and do we have any description of the other people that she's turned down the curled Darlings of the nation so the idea here is that these are the sort of matina Idols the the the the the dandies the I think we have to assume that these are Venetian princes that these are are are are insiders uh who are very stylish and very you know the this is again brabantio's language so he wants to oppose uh this this this Outsider of fellow to the curled Darlings of the nation that she's she has refused or declined the suits of other men and then she picks this one and one why would she pick this one so we talk in a second about why she would pick this one who else though talks about about A's color Yes AOW a fellow does what do he say about it his Blackness his black face what do you remember any lawn that he he speaks yeah in the back I'll I'll repeat it Larry that's right good well there's a uh there's a line at the end I can't remember it exactly but something along the lines of my soul has become as black is my skin after his murder of Desdemona well even earlier happily for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberer have uh what are chamberer in this in a sentence like that happily for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberer have what's a chamberer do you think what's a chamber chamber is a room chamber is a room so what is a chamberer exactly exactly so it's it's it's it's a it's again a diplomat or a corer or somebody who's indoors rather than outdoors I think the the the have have not those soft parts of conversation I'm not good with now of course he's fabulous with language this is this is the contradiction that all critics find that what what um uh who is it uh Wilson knight uh once famously called the othell music this wonderful flowing language that belongs to aell is something that he disparages and says I can't talk good cor here or speak uh so his his self-doubt if it is self-doubt is connected to happily means you know perhaps uh because I'm black or because I don't have the right courtly language this might be one reason why she might in fact be unfaithful to me so somewhere in him is this self identification as black but it doesn't of course come out at the very very beginning who at the very beginning of the play talks I mean bra we have bantia who else Yago uh and and who's Yago talking to at the beginning of the play Rodrigo Rodrigo so so look at the frame of the play play begins and this is so true of many many Shakespeare plays altogether particularly the tragedies it begins with an intimate conversation before a big public scene and in this intimate conversation uh you learn something of the backstory of what you're about to see so before you see the hero before you see aell before you see King leer before you see MCB Beth you're going to hear Yago and Rodrigo in this case in the case of King leer you're going to hear uh the Gloucester Brothers talking in the case of U MC Beth you're going to hear the witches talking in each case you some expectations are are you know true ones or false ones uh are are going to be set up for you before the stage brightens and you see the hero and in this case when I say the stage brightens I mean this very very advisably I could have put night and day on this list too because so much of the play takes place in the dark the the it's why is it important that the opening scenes of the play take place in the dark why why are they most dramatically effective because they take place in the dark sir don't know quite what's going on there this mystery that's that's drummed up I think especially in those this the scenes where um everything happens very quickly well there's several scenes like that but but yes you're quite right that that it's that because yongo and Rod yo does this several times he wants to create a kind of tumult he does this with Rodrigo at the beginning of the play where he gets him to shout under ranti's window and its confused noise its epithets it's your old an old black R is tupping your white cu the the idea that awake awake awake go to your money bags and so forth same thing will happen in Cyprus when he wants to create this this fight between Rodrigo and Casio again that it's at night the Bell is clanging that there's there's confusion because it's night and these voices come out up out of the dark and they seem to be when Bono says so chillingly this accident is not unlike my dream what you're telling me about this idea that my my daughter has left the house and is actually in bed with a fellow he's already dreamed it he's already imagined it he that that it's night and this is like a dream for him but it's the the nightmare come true and of course it's described in the most Vivid and aversive animal imagery now when Rodrigo talks about ael's color how does he describe him does anybody remember Rodrigo who's not an elegant person at all calls him among other things a thick lips that he is particularly pointing at his race as well as his color and this phrases like that and Rodrigo is what you would call in a novel an unreliable narrator not necessarily somebody who who speaks the truth here because he may be lumping together all persons of color and picking physiological characteristics because he does not distinguish among them the big a a big debate uh about among critics of this play has been you know where does a fellow come from is he a Northern or a southern African is does he look like a Moore uh with with with caucasoid features does he look like a subsaharan African Siri thick lips is what he says yes but the so the question is uh do you do we believe rodrig I mean Rodrigo is in many many way is an untrustworthy and unsophisticated person when he says the thick lips when he uses this as an epithet do we actually think that a fellow uh has a particular kind of physical formation or does this just belong to a kind of grab bag of terms that Yago that sorry that Rodrigo is using to distinguish a race other from other than his own or a nation other than his own but because there there are confusing different uh the I mean where where for example uh does the handkerchief come from Egypt from Egypt yes an Egyptian charmer gave us quite far away from from from Southern Africa uh so so get different kinds of signals in this play as to to where black aello might come from and there are at least two strong theatrical traditions of the black aello and of the Tony Moore Tony here being Brown rather than black and and two very distinct acting Traditions have emerged out of this if you've seen the the uh Olivier film and before that the play of athow he's very blacked up uh and he uh it's a caricature really of of a Kind it's almost like a minstral show uh but there are portraits in the period for example of the moish Ambassador uh very elegant portraits uh in which he's quite lightskinned uh Moors uh are this is this is is morania it's Libya it's this the very northern part of Africa it's the southern part of the Mediterranean so the the question of A's race even if we acknowledge that race is important is not fully determined in this play that there are lots of different ways of performing it and lots of different ways of understanding it whether it matters or not how black a fellow is since they describe him constantly as black and he calls himself black is another question uh but the the the the location from from which he comes uh and the the his connection to morish is somewhat in dispute it's one of the mysteries of these plays in fact what is a fellow's own background where does he come from what is he how is he described rrio calls him famously an extravagant and Wheeling stranger of here and everywhere and what is stranger mean in this case what's the what's the the force behind a word like stranger yes it's exactly right a Florentine practically was a stranger or or absolutely it's a strong word it doesn't merely mean uh someone new to town it means not us uh it means someone estranged from us someone strange as well as a stranger uh we might put a slightly different positives spin on it and say exotic I mean indeed this is a moment in in early modern history in which there is a lot of exploration in Discovery in which people uh from North American Indian tribes are brought and from Africa are brought to England and put on display and integrated into society and so forth there's a kind of a cultural plus to being a stranger as well as a cultural minus to being a stranger but the the idea is that this is not us that this is and and and indeed the uh AOW a lot of a fellow's power comes precisely from his mobilizing both his stranger and also his capacity in the service of the state because what is his rank what is his his role what's his job his General I mean they need him they need him more than they they do not have a general who is not a stranger they do not have a Venetian General indeed do they have a Venetian Army as far as we can see who is his Lieutenant Casio where's Cassio come from from Florence quite different from Venice uh what's what what what are venice's attributes in this period or as you can extrapolate it from the play Merchants yes okay so it's it's it's on the water it's a Crossroads they are Merchants it's a Mercantile culture it's a Cosmopolitan culture it's a place where people come and go uh but it's very much a place of exchange uh and it's very much a place of of change as a result uh so that that and in this play uh as in what is Shakespeare's other Venice play Merchant of Venice also has a black figure the the the U uh is he the Duke of Morocco no Prince of Morocco uh and also the same question about women and money women and worth women exchanged for other women and and so forth in the exchange among men uh that so Venice has its own particularities and we learned something about about Venice at the beginning of the play in this question of venice's uh enemies venice's War who is Venice at war with with the Turks okay um and the the the Turks are making for Cyprus is my one of my favorite moments in the play is the moment in which somebody comes in and says the Turks are headed for roads and the answer is this cannot be by no essay of Reason roads is a tougher enemy and less desired than Cyprus so it must be for Cyprus that they are headed and so indeed new messenger comes in says no no that was a faint their their their ships have turned around and now they're headed frankly for that is you know openly for Cyprus so this this and is a pageant to keep us in false gaze that's what they have to say about the fact that the Turks seem to be going to roads and then they turn around and they go back to Cyprus and this this notion of the whole play as a pageant to keep us in false gaze as a set of plays Within the play set of spectacles to have us looking in the wrong direction or gathering the wrong information or coming to the wrong conclusion uh for me that happens in scene after scene after scene so many of these scenes are set up uh as plays Within the play with onstage Spectators watching something happen watching but not being able to hear what what scene might one think of in that connection yes set up CIO and a fellow to talk about uh desd deona but he's really talking to cassier about uh Bianca exactly exactly so so by this time about two-third way through the play uh Iago has has got AOW to think that Casio is making the running with with with desona that he's been having an affair with her that he is much more elegant more beautiful he's a cur and darling and so forth and that it was logical that somehow she might be interested in CIO but but a fell wants the ocular proof he wants to see and then there's this wonderful scene which which uh Yago says you know would you behold her would you the supervisor behold her topped would you actually want to watch them having sex together uh so you you get as you doing that opening scene with the old black Ram uh tupping the white youu it's that same tupping topping word uh this Vivid image of what is not happening this Vivid image of of the the sex between Casio and desona that is not taking place and so what he sets up is a little false scene in which a fellow like uh uh tus watching with CR with with with ulyses the little scene between diid and cres uh a fellow is watching a scene among Yago or between yo and Casio in which you're quite right uh C Yago sets it up so that they're it's clear that they're talking about a woman but we can tell that it's about Bianca uh who is Bianca she's a cortisen she's a prostitute she's has she's in love with CIO she's the one to whom he gives the handkerchief to take out the work and her name means White so here we have a play in which the has the name that means white and in which black aell is the figure of of outraged virtue or of steadfastness or or of whatever you think he is because we're going to come and talk a little bit more about what you think about AEL but but in this scene precisely they a fellow is positioned so he can see but he cannot hear and we can't hear everything that's being said he can't hear the word Bianca when it's whispered and so he interprets he misinterprets what he said as two men joking about coarsely about a woman whom he thinks is his wife whom he thinks is desdamona and scene after scene in this play gets set up in that way so that there is a pageant to keep us in false gaze there's a spectacle that we see and don't fully or are enabled to misinterpret and the very first scene is exactly such a scene the scene in which uh Yago first gets Rodrigo on his side and then stages this outcry underneath the doors of brabantio's Palace in Venice uh why is Rodrigo a good Confederate for Yago GLI he is certainly gullible uh what's his what's his interest though he in love he desires desimon he's in love with her he has not succeeded with her and what does Yago promise him prom have he's yes and have her in the most most physical way that she may not love him but but yo is going to work it out so that that they have sex or that at least we can get rid of this because to Rodrigo a Venetian Again The Stranger aelo is the worst possible rival here because nominally unworthy Why not pick Rodrigo uh and what why does why is Yo um why does yo have such strong feelings about a fellow anyway gives us a lot ofas wa okay let's get the the microphones working here yes he gives us a lot of reasons okay what are some one of them is that Casio has been chosen over him to be A's Lieutenant yes that that that uh Casio has been preferred to him uh and what what uh what attributes does Casio have that Yago resents he's a mathematician maybe what does mean he educated arithmetician is what what says what does it mean is he just educated I mean is he he's educated he's a book Soldier he's a desk Soldier we would say he's not a fighter he's not somebody who's who has earned his place on the battlefield he is a a tactician he's a theoretician uh he's an intellectual uh he's also a Florentine and what are the attributes of Florence that you can deduce from this play yes Elegance okay so uh but name me a famous Florentine of this period sorry the medi absolutely absolutely but let's not forget makavelli either uh that that uh Florence is a place of policy uh and also a place of wealth and of art um and Yago himself this is where the word class may come in certain Productions that you may have seen of this play uh 20th century production 21st century Productions uh the the Yago figure is a kind of working class Soldier if you've seen the uh Lawrence Fishburn film uh with Kenneth BR in the place of Yago uh he it's it's a he's a plain speaking rough Hune um underclass figure the same is true of the Frank Finley figure in the the uh the the Olivier aell that they attempt is made to make a distinction of of class as well as of of nation among these figures so so this is so jealousy of Casio uh is and and the idea that his proper place has been given to Casio is one motive that he speaks what are his other supposed motives please tho believes that aello had it with his wife yes he's it is said that he has leapt into my seat notice all the again what what kind of a figure is that I mean what what what's it's an animal figure exactly it's maybe the horsemen getting into the horse or whatever it is but but it's it's it's uh the and and and I fear Casio with my night cap too he says that that the sexual jealousy is another claim that he makes that that somehow a has had had an affair with Amelia uh how many of you believe that A's had an affair with ailia um no evidence into play about this any other other things that Yago suggests about yes well at one point he says I just hate fellow yes I hate the more I hate the more exactly there there are these moments when he says when he says you know I am not what I am and I hate the more he says it twice in that opening scene I hate the mo um it's it's as if the reasons are uh either spoken for himself or spoken for us uh kidge very famously Once Upon a Time said about Yago that he had motiveless malignity that his evil was unmotivated or that it exceeded uh any particular motive that he was an in incarnate figure of evil uh some people have written about this play with a fellow with Yago in in a in the figure of what the fellow almost calls him at the end of the play a devil or a demi devil but the the this phrase motiveless malignity had has has had a lot of of success uh people who also pushed against it and say no no no in fact he has motives it's he's not merely an allegorical figure of evil it's not just about the intrinsic evil that lurks in the hearts of men uh but in fact this is a highly particular figure nonetheless his I hate the mo is so to speak the top line and the bottom line here uh does he also love the more when when does he say that he says it all the time um I don't remember exactly um where um but he says it and aella says it to him that's what I was so struck by everybody saying how much they love everybody right right well that's and of course love as you suggested has a lot of different vences here too but but this is very much a play about triangles and quadrangles and so forth and of course it culminates in that that that moment in the middle of the play when a fellow thinks that he's learned the truth about desona and they kneel together on the stage uh and uh they and and at this moment uh and for me this is a crucial crucial moment in the play uh aell says to Yago because of course he says to him now art thou my lieutenant and Yago says to him in reply remember I am your own I am th own forever so so that's the moment I mean it seems to me always like the kind of marriage ceremony in which the two Rivals have been gotten rid of the two figures who a fellow chooses over yo at the beginning of the play are the lieutenant Casio and the Beloved desona and in that one moment this cleverness of Yango's strategy is that he gets the two of them to knock each other out of the game so that he is left as the one person honest honest honest yo who whom a fellow can trust and against which these former loves become become distrusted and hated yes motives I mean does it really make any difference because I mean he almost seems to enjoy just being the schemer of setting these things up beautifully so as you say people Feud I mean he's the Puppeteer that's that sort of pulls everything together and and whether he he has the motives or not really makes no difference because I mean he almost becomes a charact there's a lot of characters in the world like that who just love to play with other people and and are very good schemers so to speak well exact I think I think that that cannot be underestimated I think you're quite right that we see him at the beginning of the play end of back one I have it it is engendered hen Knight must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light so he now it's a fellow giving sorry Yago giving birth again we have the kind of cross-gender moment but he enjoys making chaos happen uh and he's very good at it remember we looked at the Duke in in measure for measure a kind of playwright figure as a figure who stood behind the sidelines in his his Friar's hood and tempted Angelo in this case to become not the angel but the devil to turn himself inside out and so forth here too you have a figure who is stands he's never there if you if you look to see all these crisis points shouting under the window uh the fight in in Cyprus he's he's never there he sometimes he will say I have to leave now I'll be back just like the frier uh he makes people attack one another and he stands aside and then you know anest Yago who looks Dead with grieving he becomes the figure to whom aella will appeal but the pleasure of creating chaos as you say creating hatred of breaking things or of making plays is very great for him um and when he is finally discomfited at the end of the play what happens to Yo at the very very end yes he goes silent yeah and that's so so this this great word Smith this great writer of scripts telling telling Rodrigo to shout under the window setting all these things up from this time forth I never will speak word he goes silent it's a kind of living death uh and it's a kind of withdrawal into uh no longer is he the the the the the play has taken over from him so to speak and when they say to him when when the Venetian Ambassador say to him at the end of the the pl look at the on the Monstrous loading of this bed it is thy Work that's the we can take that word work to mean not only what you have done but almost work in the sense of work of art that they that the this this spectacle of the Dead AEL and the dead desona is what Yago the playright has produced and uh the and and to which the resp response is the object poisons sight Let It Be hid and we turn away from this spectacle if we do but the the trajectory from all this language and writing these scripts for other people to silence here to a kind of living death uh this is the ultimate discomfort of the of the schemer I think that's right yes I was curious about something it the plays one of the big themes is sexual jealousy but nobody's having sex I mean um AOW and Desdemona don't have sex you're the analyst why are they talking about it they're not having SE no it's it's about it's about deferral it's I mean I think of the the one of the things the the the sexual consummation between aell and Desdemona is constantly being interrupted uh it's put up your bright swords for the do will Rust them is the they when they come to him at the sagittary at the beginning of the play um sagittary is is the Archer again you know and this the shot has not taken place yet sagittary is a kind of famous name for INS of this period but but everything in Shakespeare has a has a kind of signification then they go to Cyprus and he they go on separate ships and and my fair Warrior and he greets her and uh they go off to bed and again Yago creates a great outcry in the streets look let my gentle love be now wak up or uh uh says a fellow and uh when the Duke sends him off to war in the middle of the night which is his wedding night he says this the flinty and steel couch of door of of of War has for a soldier is his Thrice driven bed of down that that so he's always substituting War for love it's the opposite I mean the the great kind of mythological background here is the relationship of Mars and Venus uh the where where the great conquest of Mars by Venus is and you see this in Renaissance paintings is where the god Mars the god of war is taught to take off his armor and becomes himself defeated by the loves of Venus and he wonderful paintings in which the py the little little cherubs are playing with the armor which is now disarmed but in fact the the sexual consummation is constantly deferred here that's one of the reasons they talk about it so much and why it figures so much in the action like you know to continue with your point that men put work before love even though he can't stop thinking about love he's so obsessed with it but he never does it right well so let's talk a little bit about the courtship of aello and desd Demona in this regard uh because they remember that we get some accounts of this courtship because just to remind you of where we are in in the in the play after all this shouting under Bono's window where Bano comes Bano again is the father comes out and says why why uh why talk you me of what my house is not a grange but what's the line before that um um robbing yes thank you I talk me you you me of robbing this my house is not a GRA with this remember the gra that we had the marota and the moded gra in in U measure for measure here too we're we're City people we're civilized people with you know nothing bad can happen here but in and all this animal imagery all this farmyard imagery has invaded his dream his imagination and then these shouts in the street and then it all turns out to be true and he cannot bear it he can in fact what happens to Bano toward the end of the play he dies we're told it's a good thing your father didn't live to see this because this would have broken his heart which was already broken that the um but but Bano then wants to bring this case before the duke or or it's called the Duke of Venice here the doj the Duke of Venice uh who happens to be up sitting in the council chamber in the middle of the night because of the threat of the Turks so we have immediate and again this is very very characteristic of Shakespeare the Marshall and the nestic juxtaposed to one another that you have War outside and War inside uh and notice that not only do they never have sex they never have war that that no really the no sooner do they all sail to Cyprus than it turns out there's been a huge storm that's wiped out the the the the ships of the Turks and they all the the survivors have all gone home there's no war they all in are in Cyprus for most of the play for no reason whatever because the ostensible threat the threat from outside the threat of the Turks has been vanquished not by them but by nature or whatever by by by the Sea um leaving you know again revealing uh what what was always there the instability of of the relationships among them so here we might ask structurally speaking because we've talked about this a little bit um Why move the action to Cyprus what's the relationship of Venice to Cyprus say say again I'm sorry it's like um the opposite of Venice Venice is the city and culture and everything and Cyprus is Wilderness kind of like where anything can happen right uh is it really the opposite uh no talks St me of robbing my house is not a grange no exactly basically they've they've already got Cypress inside them they when they make this transition like any other green world or middle World in Shakespeare like the comedies that go from the city to the forest of Arden or from the city to the Athenian wood and Midsummer Night stream or whatever it is uh you you expose what's already there so they've already got Cyprus inside them I'm sure I talk in my chapter about the the the fact that that Cyprus is also the name of Venus actually the is the Greek one of the Greek names for for for Venus so they're going from Venice to Venus they're going from the city to the wild place which we've already seen to be imprinted upon them in the supposedly civilized place of Venice and they actually never get back to Venice that the whole tragedy takes place in Cyprus but the the ostensible things the Love and War things never happen happen in this play in exactly the form that you think they're going to instead they they go underground they resurface in different places and this is as true of love as it is of War so who who's at war with one another actually in this play they argue the characters are more themselves certainly aell is it's his insecurity is part of the struggle inside of him aha okay so so that a fellow who who initially presents himself uh as as a as imperturbable notice that I mean again they come to to his his in in the middle of the night put up your right swords to arrest them he he's a fighter who's not going to fight notice again the beginning of the play and the end of the play we have this business about the swords and whether you're going to use them or not that the in the in the in the death scene at the end they say don't worry we've taken his sword away from him and it turns out he's got another sword in his chamber that that uh this the the business of whether or not this hero actually is going to fight is also I mean this this is of all Shakespeare's Marshall Heroes this is the one who fights least uh the the compared to Mark Anthony compared to anybody in Julius Caesar to compared to anybody in the English History plays uh this hero doesn't fight he absolutely does not uh and you're quite right that his struggle is within himself uh what we call technically a psycho Makia a struggle of the Soul uh torn between uh and this is where we come back to all these these these diads that he him sees himself uh Through The Eyes that other people see him um I want to talk about the uh about the the courtship of of of brabantio of uh Desdemona and aello in brabantio's house Steve how much time have I got I have time okay all right good um the so so what do we know about what's the scene before I tell you but ask you what we you know what what how how is the the courtship scene described to us because this is another one of these famous Shakespearean unseen yes thank you thank you I appreciate it I'm just gonna hand it to you um it said that his that her father asks him to tell the stories of what it was like for him to grow up and she overhears it just at their table listening and so she hears what he was like in the adventures he went on and that he was a slave and all these things and she kind of becomes intrigued by all of these stories right who tells us that aell aell aell right so again we don't see it a modern film might show us this scene sort of in in black and white or something like this is a kind of past scene but we don't see it we only get it through ael's eyes so my first question to you is what is a fellow doing in Rodrigo's house sorry in ranti's house invited he was invited so so all of this horror at the idea that a fellow could be having sex with his daughter that his daughter could fall in love with with with AO Bono's own relationship to aell is a very cathected one at the beginning of the play this is the hero this is the general this is the social lion invited to the house and sitting around with the other guys to talk War Stories and AOW is invited we're told to tell his own history which as you say is a story of fantastic Adventures the the the what what kinds of Adventures does he have where does he go what kinds of places has he been he's been in courts you seen cannibals he's been cannibals exactly men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders deserts okay so this this this is the the landscape of romance and I want you to remember that word because we're going to come later in the semester to plays that are often called Shakespeare romances places that happen in exotic locations that involve shipwrecks and discoveries and so forth but this is this is a a a again not for for for Shakespeare's own time these are the kinds of stories that people would tell when they went off on Explorations and if you looked at Maps done in the period you would often find images of cannibals or Amazons or some other not us kind of strangers in the margins or in the water off there here's where civilization isn't over there are the cannibals here's where civilization is and over there are the Amazons these other types of people Mark again the us from the not us uh so that the these stories are good stories these are good like like adicus like like or shaherazad these are these are seductive stories of Adventures of which this guy sitting in your living room is the hero and uh the the uh fellow says she loved me for the dangers I had passed and I loved her that she did pity them that she was empathetic and a good listener and so forth this only is the Witchcraft I have used because of course the claim of Rano is that it's w be witchcraft nothing else could make this woman fall in love with a black man than witchcraft uh and so he this the first of many moments in which language and Witchcraft are equated here uh uh this only is the Witchcraft I have used and then it turns out in fact that uh this isn't at all why desona fell in love with him it wasn't that she pied him I saw a fellow's Visage in his mind I saw what an interesting complicated person he was it's not that I pied or was empathetic or had was like the audience of a tragedy full of pity and fear it wasn't that I was merely herois him but rather that I had a much more equal kind of relationship to him but for aell this is hero worship and for a he needs to be the hero in order to be the person she loves so his notion of why she loves him as as testified to by him is already something that ought to show us that there are some dangers involved because it it has to do with his his wholeness as a spectacle with with a kind of what what bin would call the classic body the body that of of the of the male hero that cannot be penetrated or enter that is perfect and closed and in fact he turns out to be open and attackable that he has vulnerabilities that he has has weaknesses that he has has self-doubt as you say and it's that that he can't he thinks that she can't love that he thinks that she can't love his what we call call complexity Humanity interiority that he has to be an outside in order for her to love him uh he has to be a a seamless surface without self-doubt and without interior dialogue uh he has to be a hero of a romance rather than a figure uh with any kind of of inter reality uh what is what do that little scene show you or tell us about about gender in Venice um the the scene of the courtship as it's described to us what is desdamona supposedly doing as she's listening to this account doing housew she's doing housework of some kind yes it's I mean it's I I imagine her dusting but I'm sure that this is extremely you know unhistorical but but ever the household Affairs would draw her then now for all I know she's ordering food or she's I commanding the the gondolas to go back and forth she's running the house anyway whatever she's doing it's the domestic and she's drawn away from the domestic and she is the figure of the domestic when she says to him uh supporting casos like wearing your gloves or keeping warm she is the voice of the domestic to a certain extent domestic again meaning house uh but but the the idea is that the household Affairs would draw her away and then she come back and with a greedy ear devour up our discourse that she was hungry to hear uh and this greedy ear again the ear as an open as an orifice her hunger he imagines her as a Desiring subject he imagines her as somebody who has desires uh and that her desire is for his narrative for his story for the story of a fellow as a hero uh and so so we have this picture of now where where is Mrs Rano you know Dame rabano whatever she might be do we know did you ever show up in play at all there's a very brief mention of her as you know no longer with us but you know this is this characteristic Shakespearean structure in which you have one parent and one child very often it's a father and a daughter or a mother and a son here we'll see see other examples of this as well so that again the relationship between Rano and desona is overdetermined that he is protective of her he is possessive of her uh he doesn't want her to give her away to his friend a fellow to his equal a fellow to the figure who was his house guest and who was his honored guest until um the courtship made him rethink this figure and turn inside out all of his language of heroism and this is the strange business again that you can be both the hero stranger and also the the dejected or abjected stranger uh precisely the thing that attracts brabantio to a fellow the same you know not like brabantio has been every place has you know has all these stories to tell is also what makes makes him distrust him when he comes to be The Suitor to his daughter um so so this this this is the background against which the events in Cyprus take place what about this notion of wit and Witchcraft who who mobilizes witchcraft in the play y Yago okay say say what he's the one that um has seems to have the powers to poison people that he says at one point in app play to to rodri go he says now noce we work by wit and not by Witchcraft and wit depends on dilatory time and this is this this Yago as playmaker again you know you have to wait till things happen I have it is engendered helenite must bring these mon this monstrous birth to the world's light but in fact black magic it is well no but exactly but I mean black and white are completely I mean all the all the the stereotypical cultural significations of black belong to White here and all the very typical cultural significations for white belong to Black this is a play about the the about how black and white is how you can never see the world uh but therefore it is important in fact that there are these racial markers and to just to go back to the the topic that I began with these these these Earnest attempts to make the play color blind I think were really attempts to to disempower the play uh of of exactly and you know again they were well intentioned but they they actually attempts to suggest something about the humanity of a fellow as if to associate him with with with racial identity was not to engage that same question uh we're going to stop now and come back in 10 minutes and start again thank you I was taken aback by your opening comment that that there was a critical School that said this was not about race but so I was interested in what in fact is the best argument for that uh and whether this is whether there are two plays here be two schools of thought because if it were truly about race the Doge and the leadership would not have so affirmatively adopted aell as the leader and dismissed these this upset uh contemporary important person and they just toss him away when he comes in and says I have this major problem sorry when when when is this when he he goes to the council he goes to the Doge to at the beginning when uh when banio goio goes the father goes to the Doge he's just passed off passed away well no not quite not quite the the so the the let me say two things to begin with one is that a 20th 21st century notion of race and race problems is actually pretty different from how the 16th or 17th century might have thought about race or racial difference the word race is a in this context is a I mean this is a modern word use of the word race if you find race as a word in Shakespeare's plays it's going to mean Heritage it's going to mean Family actually it's not going to mean color what the language okay well then color is it not a but but but to to to this point I was just again talking in the in the break to somebody about why it is now now again we we talked about public private the the the the U the Duke as he's called has the council chamber in session because there's a problem of State the problem of the Turks robano says to him I have a priv private matter I need to bring before you and the Duke says okay we'll talk about that first uh but the but the reason that he sets aside the Private Matter is why is it I mean who is it who convinces the Duke that um that it's not witchcraft that's being used here de Des deona says that she made the choice to be with a fellow and that she wants to go with him the Bano says this is exactly right Bono says you know uh mistress again a very strange thing to call your wife your daughter mistress uh do you see here who in this this assembly do you owe your duty and she says I do perceive here a divine Ed Duty uh I'm I'm indebted to you you're my father uh but as much uh Duty as your my mother paid to you this is where the mother comes in my mother paid in choosing you over her father so I owe to the to the uh to the Moore my Lord to the Moore my Lord so the the again she calls him by the race Nation nationality name and she calls him that in the same phrase as my Lord and uh earlier than this uh when we get this whole sorry at this moment we get the the The Narrative of the courtship that we've talked about the housewife narrative and so forth the Duke says to bravano I think this tale would win my daughter too in other words this exciting story uh that uh is is the story of the hero aell is so sedu that it seems to me perfectly reasonable not like witchcraft that she would fall in love with it so he actually takes evidence he takes evidence about the courtship and he takes evidence from Desdemona testifying herself and it's at that moment when she says I you know the Moore is my Lord I am married to him I choose him and as we were saying this is this is this is a kind of uh move about this the the the notion in the Bible that the woman is supposed to cleave the leave the father and cleave to the husband but the woman doesn't usually get to say that it's the the the two men who get to say that here's my daughter now she's going to cleave to you but the it's the outspokenness of desona which is again her heroic admirable moment here which comes back to haunt a fellow later on when she becomes outspoken on behalf of Casio when she begins to behave not like an obedient wife or an obedient daughter but like is speaking subject so I think that when the Duke but I want to come back to you and and and see what you think about this when the Duke uh decides that he can now go back to Affairs of state and to the question of the Turks and indeed to the necessity of sending this very same a fellow whom we may say he needs and therefore has to to take the side of anyway but when he decides to go back to the issue of the Turks it's because he feels that this domestic dispute in terms of its evidence has been resolved that it's not rape and it's not witchcraft it's uh marriage freely chosen by DeSoto uh I took that line by Des Demona to be it's the same line that appears in Lear at the beginning and I thought well it's I took it as not uh determinative of the not as important to the SE it's except in Lear he she says I choose you Daddy well I Choose You to the extent I owe to my fa to my father but my husband to the extent that I owe to my husband yes that's right okay but but if this were truly color based or Prejudice based whether you're using race or color yeah uh in our word world at least um a would not be of of such rank would not be accorded such respect uh it would be a very different response if it were truly a prejudiced Society in terms of uh the a reflection of the coarseness of the language the language I'm not sure I understand we've got the whole Clarence Thomas story on the pages of the paper we've got Colin Powell we have I mean we we have a hero General who is is a an African-American um and he's not treated any differently as far as I can tell he's not treated like the African-American General but rather like a a graduate of West Point but our society may not be this language is very coarse at the beginning about color the play yeah it is much coarser than discourse in our environment now public people don't it's it's language out of the 193 yes yes okay all right so I I don't think you can compare if I'm getting tangled up in this but if that language was indicative of the racial or the color attitudes or prejudicial attitudes of the society then uh Colin Powell or AOW would not be accorded such respect in other words there's an an maybe it's your difference between public and private but there is public respect and maybe it doesn't and I'm trying to deal with this question it's not about race there is public respect for aell which uh is quite different from the private discourse of what we're hearing in the in the this is this is this is complicated but but the I mean remember that that that his achievements in the public World which is the world of men you think about Joe Lewis or Jackie Robinson or or is different from the question of interracial sex and marriage here uh and different from the question of a father's property in a daughter which is another thing and that that that issue surely we can we can hope to think is an issue that that plays better in the 17th century than it does in the 20th or 21st century but it's precisely this slippage between the supposedly public and supposedly private it's precisely the the the the the inconsistency with which because this is the inconsistency that comes home to hell that he sees himself in both of these things he sees himself as the would like to see himself as the hero he has actually done all these things that he's boasting about he is the general he is the honored person he is the person he is The Peacemaker he's all these things he's also suddenly the person ACH accused of Witchcraft and he's also the person who will not give himself permission to be an erotic subject For Whom the notion of himself as an erotic subject runs against is all the fears that that the society is pushing back against him he has to be more civilized than the Civilized he has to be more a Venetian than the Venetian whether we say that he has to be more white than the white or whether just he has to be more inside than the Insiders he holds himself to a set of standards and a set set of of of abstinences uh when when he says for example I want her to go with me uh to to to Cyprus uh he says uh this isn't because of sex this isn't the the the the the these effects in me defunct uh I'm I'm I'm so old that that or I'm so mature that it's not the heat of sexual passion but rather something else something having to do with a larger view of marriage or of companionship that makes me want her to go with me we may say he protests too much that he he wants very much to present himself as as the non-an animal as precisely the opposite of all those shouted voices at the beginning as precisely the opposite of the kind of figure that he then briefly performs himself as being when he has his fit and he shouts about noses ears and lips and so forth he uh we can say he's culturally repressed whatever we want to say he does not want to give for whatever reason because he's old because he's he's he's a a Moore because he's not a Venetian because he's whatever reason they might be he does not want to give any hint of himself as a passionate private person um and so that it's quite right to say that the war comes within himself I think it's true that the that race color issues inside outside issues help to make him the way he is but he he is subject to those repressions and and the and his worst enemy is himself and we' said that too that that that he's the one who doesn't love himself in quite this way yes sir the race issue is uh somewhat subtle because he's not a member of a large class of people in uh Venice yes he is an exotic he is an exotic who has come in with a high skill level at a very very important job That's essential to the Venetian society and one of but one of the things about race is that people who are much lower say for example in class than he is such as Iago and uh uh the Rodrigo might feel that uh how you know how dare you be better than than he is than they are and uh so that therefore the race issue comes out not directly uh as when he is a guest but when he in some way threatens some econ some economic or proprial advantage that any of those uh characters have such as Pano's interest in his daughter such as Yo's interest in his uh his advancement or Rodrigo's interest in gaining the hand of Dez D yeah no I think that's right I think that that that that this is a it's the opposite of value added it's value taken away so to speak that that that when it become when he he becomes a threat of some kind or a competition or or threatens to displace something or other then suddenly they remember that he's black and that that he uh that this this be becomes a reason why uh but behind it is a whole cultural history behind it is the the history of the handkerchief around behind it is the history of this the adventures that he's had and so forth it's not as if he is a third generation black civil citizen of Venice and I I I I say this because there are black people living in in London at this time uh this is not for this play is not performed in a society that never saw black man there are free blacks living in London at this time um and it's uh there is Ben Johnson has a whole uh mask for a court mask called The Mask of Blackness which is a in which there's a an anti-mask of black que black women uh blackened women women with with with black paint on their skins uh who turn into the mask of into into queens that there's this that Blackness is very much a topic that people are engaging right now and you're quite right using it for their own purposes uh let's come back though if we can't to whatever whatever it is that seems to be producing self-doubt in a fellow uh whether it's what would be some reasons other than his race and his loc his his his country of origin yes back here right behind you M sorry his age he they don't specify I don't think it's specified but he is um it's implied that he's quite a bit older than does Mona somewhat V somewhat declined into the veil of years is what he says now now the I for me the the let me draw an analogy for for a second the uh in some of Shakespeare's comedies there's a blonde woman and a dark woman or a tall woman and a short woman and very often directors exaggerate these difference you have very blonde and very dark or you have very tall and very short as in her in hel in Midsummer Night's Dream uh in this play too it's easy to sort of take these people at their own words and say yeah he must be 60 and you know Yago is really 30 and right but but in fact my guess would be that the age differences here are exaggerated by the speakers that these are that that we're dealing with with with a culture of self-doubt and of difference making where what's more painful for the audience is not to see this old guy marri to a young girl suffering cuz he's old but in fact is he somebody who sees himself as somehow over the hill and who becomes more that way because he sees himself that way doesn't mean he isn't older than Yago certainly he's had lots of Adventures and he must have had them during some months and years but but it's it's the the everything he says about himself is is is a self-deprecation in a way it's either a self- exaggeration or self-deprecation and so rude am I in my speech uh again nobody less rude in their speech than yongo as we've said the the the dirty language at the beginning of the play is the is brabantio is Rodrigo is so forth the nobody speaks with the eloquence and and beautiful periods of a fellow which is why his breakdown is a breakdown in language when he loses the capacity to hold a whole sentence together when he has his fit his whether whatever kind of a fit it is and people have said it's an epileptic fit people have said it's a kind of that there isn't there I should say in Renaissance physiology of this time that kind of fit is sometimes compared to orgasm so that people have said that this is a kind of a sexual breakdown whatever it is but but when he has his his goes into the trance uh it the what what leads him in that direction is a kind of loss of language not the abjuration of language that we saw in in Yago not from since from this time forth I never will speak word but in fact the breakdown of Lang the capacity to make language into a kind of order and into a kind of story and and it's from that breakdown that we we we see Yago beginning to take the you know real control of the second half of the play yes sorry do the microphone please sorry is he uh like most characters in or are most characters like him in Shakespeare I mean in the sense of there's always this split that's going to come out eventually that what they look like in the surfaces um really a air and that somewhere beneath that there there's some weakness I suppose You' call it there which aago is able to exploit tremendously but I mean uh because I know some people have said Casio is sort of the perfect he wouldn't have had these self-doubts he or at least um that well what's what's casio's Achilles heel so to speak what what is casio's other side uh he can't hold his drink no we I mean cuz you see him you see this this perfect uh brilliant intellectual yeah uh first of all you see him being rather like this phrase that Yago uses and that that that thenell uses for Des no the super subtle Venetian this very very you know this notion and that's the makavelli in Venetian that's the idea of the person who you who's who who uh think you can trust but you really can't with with Casio he's a kind of super subtle Florentine he's he's too courtly with the girl at the beginning and so forth but then you see that he's got this other side which comes out when he drinks and everybody knows that he's a bad drinker but again his language breaks now for God that was an excellent song that was a better song than the other one and so forth and and you see him completely lose it he becomes quarrelsome he becomes irrational uh so that he too has this other side that that again somehow Yago knows all these things and can exploit them sometimes I mean this the when when when we are when when the idea is you know that that that Shakespeare somehow understands the human person in some complicated way uh what we actually get is the structure of an inside and an outside in precisely the way you're describing but it's not always about weakness I mean could for example Henry V Prince Hal uh looks like he's uh dissolute and then he comes to this front of the stage and explains to the audience how much that this is a kind of plot and so forth and he will turn into the Great Hero Henry V uh and and even in that play will'll have his moments of self-doubt and then his moments of leadership and so forth that a conversation with yourself or you know Richard theii another example any of these characters who are so-called makavel of which Yago is one a character who is takes pleasure out of discomforting other people of manipulating people and so forth does yongo have a a weakness yo have an interior that is available for attack or critique I'm really curious have to wait for the microphone sorry I'm really curious about iago's uh suspicion about a fellow uh having had anair with his wife yeah and he also he also at another point in the play thinks that Casio may have had an affair with his wife and there's as you say said earlier there's no evidence I didn't see any evidence for this at all and yet you know where does this come from and these are things he says in in a soliloquy when he's alone on the stage so these are things he's really thinking ah okay so that is usually and probably right however think how disturbing it is for us if the convention of the soliloquist which takes us into the confidence of the single speaker is actually also containing lies that are manipulating us uh this may be um Yago making up stories to himself you're quite right nobody's there for some of these conversations but it may I mean one one of the one of the famous things about this play is that there's that there's this one story there's not a a second you can't ever take your eyes off what's happening to aell and Desdemona and Casio and Bianca and so forth and that famously there there have been moments in the history of the production of the play in which somebody stood up in the audience and wanted to shout to a fellow don't trust him he's lying to you you know she's faithful and so forth because in most Shakespearean plays of this kind there's somebody on the stage who says that for you we'll see that in King leer we'll see it in McBeth we'll see it in lots of plays in which some deception is happening and the audience gets some kind of relief call it kind of tragic relief if you like because there's somebody in the on the stage who understands in this case uh who knows but that Yago is also practicing upon us that that the very Convention of the Soliloquy which seems to be that he tells tells us the truth might itself also here be being broken back there yes but um his wife Amelia has uh very pragmatic views on adultery and and um said that she wouldn't um be unfaithful to her husband for cloth or gifts but that if it would bring him the world she would do it and the world is a it's it's a large place for a small sin um so he has some some reason to to be suspicious of her um if those are her expressed well again it depends upon how we understand how we play that scene it's a little little scene toward the end of the play already the handwriting on the wall already we can see that the the the wedding sheets are about to be laid on the bed the wedding sheets are going to become the winding sheets and so forth and but this is girl talk these this is desona and Amelia chatting away yes do do you want to talk to this question okay please um she does say that she would she would commit adultery to um get the world for her husband wouldn't that imply that if she had uh slept with a fellow that she would try to influence him to promote Yago to his Lieutenant well does everybody believe that when Amelia says uh uh the world's a great thing it's a small price for it's a great price for a small Vice does everybody believe that we're actually getting the truth about Amelia's morals here and that she actually if the occasion presented itself where she could sleep with somebody who would be of benefit to her husband that she would do so is this is this manifest in this it's what she says but in what Spirit does she say it uh microphones please yes you see it in the Canterbury Tales where the wife says you know like I'll sleep with you if if you you know get the rocks out of the Franklin tale yes so it saves my husband but she's saying it just to make a point that you know that'll never happen but she would but she would do that for her husband that's the extent she would go to right right yeah I think it also refers to Isabella in measure for measure the same kind kind of question was asked of her and she didn't and she wouldn't do it for the world or or for her brother but in this case Amelia says well the world's a small that's a very nice analogy okay and and in both cases I mean the the the the Isabella is a figure of principle and we may say of blind principle in a way that she you know that she's extremely definitive about this and the fact that the brother is going to die is second more than our brother is our Chastity and so forth this is you're quite right this is the inverse of that but it's all in it's not as I mean the case of Isabella Angelo is actually there saying here's the key meet me at night let's do it uh in the case of Amelia it's a conversation between women um in uh in which I think it is also I mean one could perfectly well say this is her philosophy of living and and get it's the opposite of the idealizing uh Des deona the one entire perfect crystalite the the alabaster woman that this is the real ordinary woman yes please but it strikes me that Emelia is really the only one who um speaks in terms that are other than absolutes um Desdemona would never do it aella would never believe the jealousy but she's the only one who sees shadings of behavior and sees possibilities that aren't strict black or white right no I think that's right and she is also turns out to be the figure of I mean when when when the question of the handkerchief comes up at the end and when the question of the sexual jealousy and aelo says but your husband told me and and your husband she said my husband my husband my husband she picks up this word over and over again and she cannot believe it because she can suddenly see everything that has taken place so so let me just be clear about what I'm trying to say about this scene between the two women I don't think that it is I think it is perfectly possible to play the scene in which desmona is saying I'd never do it and Amelia is saying you're a fool the world is a complicated place you have to make compromises you might want to do it you should but but it's also possible to imagine it as a kind of tease between the two of them in which Amelia is poking fun at and trying to cheer up the the the the extremely Melancholy desd Demona it's possible to deliver that line it's a great price for a small Vice as a kind of joke as well as as a as a k and I'm not saying that it's the one way or the other way I'm saying that it's a line that actually can be played in a variety of different ways I would not myself take it automatically as a sign of uh Amelia's own moral values but rather as as her as a certain kind of sophisticated uh and as you say practical look at the world but it may not reflect her own sexual intentions or presented with the Isabella situation it might not be that she would function in quite that way yes you um but desimone's question to her is I think Emil's also attacking her on naive T because what she says is Are there women who would do this yes are the women who would cheat on their husbands because she can't imagine it right right right and and the the it's interesting because we we've had the the relatively pragmatic Desdemona at the beginning of the play choosing between the father and and the the husband uh we've had the the the the I saw a fellow's Visage in in his mind there doesn't seem to be a kind of narrowness or naive uh but but in this scenario this is why the continuity of Shakespearean characters is sometimes complicated because in this scenario she she needs to be the figure of Purity she has become in a way this figure of who cannot believe that there's that that he could think this of her because it's not what she believes about him please microphones microphones any you anybody I don't care you got um again um in that scene I I keep thinking about this dichotomy between love and sex and it seems that what Emilia is saying is I love my husband I love my my husband so much I would do that and there there seems to always be this you know again this um antagonism almost between the two between love and six and that um that is how I read um the scene between the two of them well let's also put into the mix here materiality because we we are we're talking about the you know the traffic in women we're talking about and this is a case in which the woman this this is the the woman becomes commercial the woman herself I mean rather than than rather than being traded between men for sex that she could become the agent of deploying her own sex for commercial gain to the husband so this is it's it's we could associate this to go back to measure for measure with mistress overdone and you know what it means to be a madam what it means to that that there's a sense in which she is here controlling the commerciality potential commerciality of her own sex uh or her own sexuality her own sexual availability uh in for the benefit of the husband here is the only person who has sex and love um yes yeah well exactly and it's it's wonderfully ironic that Bianca is certainly the most most naive woman uh and the least tdre woman in the in the play despite the fact that she is a cortisen and they treat her that way um she's in love she's in love with Casio and his beh Behavior toward her is surely one of less attractive than his drinking uh in terms of of how one might want to reevaluate Casio somebody please okay Larry then Mill Larry's person then Mill's person please well I just thought we'd moved on but back to the subject of the conversation between um iago's wife and um Emilia desona Amelia and desona Amelia in that moment I thought was more showing her loyalty to Iago and then sort of explaining why she steals the handkerchief later and that sort of thing so I didn't think of it at all as her take on having sex with other men I thought of it completely as her take on how loyal she was to her husband and that she would do anything for him good okay good well can I two comments I and just relevant to that I think I've think it's very human I've been in conversations when I have said oh I would never do that or I would do that it's only when you're faced with the decision that you know what you'll do it's easy to pass it off because you're trying to make somebody feel better or so I sort of think the girl talk thing is is important and the other thing I want to ask though is that it seems to me cashio is is intent is was it the intent to make him weak I mean I think pleading his case before this before desz Demona a man would go to the source wouldn't he if he were in fact he didn't why doesn't he he said explains why he doesn't why doesn't Casio go directly to atha oh I guess I don't know well he mean he it's in the play I mean he he he this issue is is addressed um I felt myself wondering all the way through so I missed why does desona become the agent for C y drags him into this I mean sets it up for him and he's gullible and he's not I mean he's made a big mistake by getting drunk and and misbehaving and and sort of loss of Honor so he he's susceptible to the suggestion um and he's I mean I suppose you could say he's Florentine and and mailan so you know that makes it even more um susceptible well whether he's fling maell or not is quite right that Yago is behaving in a mellian way this is another one of his little plays Within the play he sees you know he's the guy who who has set up the whole drunken Casio business he's got Rodrigo and Casio uh in this structure uh he then moves on to Casio and he says I'll tell you what you can do go to desdamona and she'll plead your case she'll help you out with this uh well I'm so mortified I you know it's I really I'm not myself I well so that the idea here is that the that that the the wife would this with it this is becomes again A Private Matter rather than a public matter that it goes through the female side here and indeed when she goes to plead with with young with a fellow when she says it's as if I would ask you to put your gloves on or stay warm or whatever it is it's conceived of in the domestic World here um the the you could say that Casio has been unmanned whatever that would mean by his drunkenness he feels that way he feels that he has lost control that he has re yeld himself to be not the person he's supposed to be uh and that from that loss onward I mean we could also see then his boasting scene with Yago uh Visa Bianca as a restoration of his you know parade of maless of his his that that that that he has control over something and the something he has control over is this woman who loves him this woman whom he has no interest in marrying and is very explicit about the way he's going to use her and he's going to use her not only sexually but to do this taking out of the work uh they what the the the the handkerchief uh with with its embroidery uh is going to be copied here by Bianca that she becomes another kind of housewife for Casio but but it's it's true that she is that that this is an unusual route but it's one that's prepared for in the play Yo does it for him yes sir Reon wait wait wait wait wait wait another reason that Dez Damon becomes an agent for Casio is that she feels a certain loyalty to him he was sort of Othello's best man in in the courting process yes right but but exactly notice how this is explained he went between them often that did did did uh Yago wants to know from aelo did Casio know about your interest in desona yes yes it went between us very very often indeed says Yago indeed says a fellow by Heaven thou echoist me and so forth and this Yago as Echo is a big figure here but the idea that uh I mean think about Dames in in in uh TR and CA again that the intermediary becomes the object of Love becomes the transferential object or becomes the the the the the the figure who who actually keeps the lovers apart rather than bringing them together that they the uh this going between them takes on a double meaning and also suggests an opportunity for Casio under the guise of courting Desdemona for aell to do some courting of his own that uh the the the idea here that Casio is the goet for AOW it's only a step to thinking that maybe he was actually courting for himself and that's a pattern that you see in several other Shakespeare plays as well um let's can we talk a little bit about the um the death scene um I don't know if we're going to have time to look at these passages or not but let's let's let's talk a little bit about the about the scene at the end because it among the things that contains some of the most magnificent poetry of the play um what somebody describe to me what happens at the end of the play what does it happen in bed he a fellow doesn't want to do anything to desona that would leave a scar or a Mark or cause her to bleed so he um oh first of all he thinks that it's Justice to um kill her in their marriage bed which is supposedly she sullied it well Yago plants the seed in his head he says it he strangle her in the bed even the bed she has contaminated he says it right out yes yes says says Yago says a fellow the justice of it pleases so the idea the scenario again is yagos uh and there's some confusion in the text as to exactly what the you know is she going to be strangled is she going to be stab what you know what what what's the method of death going to be uh so this this the that the plant should wind up up in bed again remember again what we said earlier about the deferral of consummation or about the the the omnipresence of sexual desire here among many of these figures circulating around many of these figures as something that is always in the air and never clearly settled and here finally you're going to see them in bed remember opening scene uh they're just outside the Inn maybe they've been in bed or about to go to bed but you don't see them the scene inside cus with the Bell that he comes and he says look but let my gentle love be now rised up or raised up raised up uh so you never see them in bed this is this is the this is the back scene this is this is the and this is also the scene the very scene but how different that was predicted in the opening shouting under Bono's now even now now very now an old black Ram is tupping your white you so this this animal imagery here uh is the image of people having sex in bed and you only get it in everybody else's account until the very end of the play when you suddenly get the bed yes there's also the comment about wishing their sheets happiness in the beginning happiness to their sheets happiness to their sheets and now here are the sheets exactly you who's Whose Line Is that do you remember Yago it's it's Casio actually it's C Casio Casio and Yago are talking and Casio is trying to get get sorry yo is trying to get Casio to say something salacious about a fellow in desona and Casio either because he's well-bred or because he's cautious avoids the Trap you know well you know the wine she drinks is made of grapes yeah the the the the Yago does everything he can to get Cassio to kind of talk dirty with him about these people and he keeps avoiding it and finally uh Casio says happiness to their sheets uh and this sort of closes the conversation in which yongo history yo with various people including with desmona and Amilia is capable of kind of Co language we cannot get Casio in this moment to speak about still the sheets are there absolutely and as uh many critics have recently talked about and as I'm sure I talked about in my chapter too there there's a connection between the the handkerchief also made of white linen and the sheets that you know it's white but it's got red stains on it and and the that the this this idea of of virginity of of consummation of the wedding sheets showing because again the showing of The Sheets is this idea that that the woman was a virgin that you're that why do you care about that because your children will be your own children rather than somebody else's children and again this image at the very beginning of the play uh shouted out at Bono's window about you'll have your nephew's nay to you you'll have gen genets for Germans and so forth that that your your descendants are going to be animals because your your daughter is having sex with an animal um this this is the opposite of what we see at the very end but this this this is the scene this is the scene that you have not seen and not seen and not seen and now you see it and instead of seeing sex you see death um so so and and and what what's a fellow's behavior like in this scene when he comes in with a with a with a torch put out the light and then put out the light remember this this this famous speech um what's he doing what's he doing almost like struck by the line uh uh the end of this towards the end of this longer speech and I will kill thee and love thee after yes yeah yeah yeah again it's it's it's the he can only idealize her once he gets rid of the real her which is actually not the real her but has become the real fantasmatic her he wants to get back to this idealization I will kill the and love the after um I because we have so little time left I'd like us to look not allas at any of the passages on your sheets but on your sheets there you go um uh but uh rather at A's speech to the the assembled group um in in Act 5 scene 2 about line 336 please um soft you a word or two before you go can you join me there um I have done the state some service and they know it no more of that now look at the public private here again I pray you in your letters now who's he talking to here I pray you in your letters yes but especially the Venetian ambassadors who are also desdemona's relations when when you shall these unlucky Deeds relate and what does unlucky mean well that's what they refer to but why are they called unlucky just bad luck you know I mean it's it's a deep sense of I mean this is not not yes go ahead please sort of destined uh by the Stars to be ill- faded yeah I mean it's exactly it has a has a a a a a a a resonance about it that is more than just bad bad luck speak of me as I am now here I want you to remember Yago I am not what I am uh and this whole question the question that we've been talking about about whether a theatrical character when he speaks to you directly shows you himself or something honest about himself yo I am not what I am here speak of me as I am not so easy to know what that am is nothing extenuate what does that mean extenuate what are extenuating circumstances excuses right nor set down a in Malice so don't don't make me look too good or too bad remember the the um modulous malignity of yoga then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but to well of one not easily jealous but being rocked perplexed in the extreme of one whose hand like the base Indian threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe of one whose subdued eyes albe it unused to The Melting mood drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicable gum set you down this and say besides that in a leppo once where a malignant in a turban Turk beat of an and produced the state I took him by the throat I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus now what's happening at this moment he's killing himself but why tell this story about the the the the the the malignant and turban Turk is he identifying himself with the he well he's he's he's identifying himself both with the enemy and with the hero I speak of him me as I am I your Venetian hero kill the turban Turk whom I am not and again it's the mistake to think of as a Muslim he's not um and uh but and and but but the division here is here enacted and and resolved by this self-slaughter that that the that you have the two aellos so to speak here uh present in his own mind and it's at that how does he resolve it it's by killing the the the other one um and kill the other one he also has to kill the one who speaks set you down this and say beside that in Aleppo once I took you by the throat the circumcised a dog and smote him thus Leo oh blood bloody period meaning end here all that is spoke is marred I kissed thee a I killed thee no way but this killing myself to die Upon A Kiss so here here you have finally the love match here you have finally the consummation remember the the early modern Renaissance pun on the word die which means to have a sexual climax as well as to come to a more Al end the the the much of the love poetry of the period poetry of John Dunn for example talks about wanting to die with his beloved in bed and and here what's meant is to have sex so this is that dun that we seen Romeo and Juliet too brought to a certain kind of literalization or what is sometimes called unmap foring this figure of The Little Death and the big death of the of of the sexual death as contrasted to the the the final death of mortality here becomes both of them become performed at once um and the this this this bed in which they never did find the time to make love becomes the place in which they make death together here um so that the the the end comes here with a return to the to the Deferred beginning Mel are you are you are you okay okay um the who's left who's left at the end of the play who's on stage CIO okay and who else Rano vodo Yaga Yaga look on the tragic loading of this bed this is thy Work the object poison sight Let It Be hid uh the whole whole play has been the work of Yago in this way and the tragic loading of the bed here uh is the I mean this is this is the the where we talked about Casio bringing them together going between them here is Yago as infernal Matchmaker uh bringing them together in in the other death rather than in The Little Death uh the object poison sight Let It Be hid um the and then and so the final gesture here this is again a gesture that we see very often at the ends of these Shakespearean plays is the the instruction to retell the story uh myself will straight aboard and to the state this heavy act with heavy heart relate again rhym couplet ends both the scene and in this case the play but the the invitation once again is that the state that is us I mean the survivors and the the ordinary people are going to hear this story and and and uh in in the relating of it the telling of it uh is going to be a relation of a different kind that might in fact be a a a replaying of the play uh so that the question of who uh who is the Victor here is very unclear what do you think what's what what is anything resolved there's anything redeemed here at the end of the play anything um I mean a it's a total tragedy that's S I mean um it's hard to so I mean some sometimes you kind of talk about learning from a tragedy do the people on stage learn anything at all back there yeah um I I would as to learning from it I would say no but the one person who might have might come out a little bit better is Casio because if because he um you know the string of tragic events basically uh precluded another STG of tragic events that would have led to his death well in fact C I mean in purely material terms he's he winds up as the governor of Cyprus and he he succeeds to the position of a fellow but this all looks like very very secondary to this to the domestic com into the middle of a place so one of the things that people say about this place it's a domestic tragedy it's a tragedy about about private life it's a tragedy about love it's a love tragedy here but it's a love tragedy that is enabled and disabled by Notions of oneself in various public Arenas including the Marshall world but also this world this complicated world that we were talking about about how race or color or otherness is valued and devalued and discussed and how you take people at at how you take yourself I should say at other people's valuation that's one of the things that functions very powerfully in this play that any sense of self that almost any character has here except perhaps desona am I that word am I that thing you know uh that am that word that he said uh almost everybody else gets their sense of self from another person or from another discourse out there we're going from here to King leer is that right uh many of these same themes will return in that play uh in which uh we'll see again the father and the daughter and we'll see again the public and the private and we'll see again the impossibility of full knowledge of somebody that you love so next time and I just wanted to mention quickly we tried to be really explicit in the paper topics but inevitably there will be questions please don't hesitate be in touch with your particular TF with any ideas or concerns or questions you might have about those

Literature_Lectures

9_Linguistics_and_Literature.txt

Prof: Last time I lectured under the illusion that-- I really should get in the habit of looking at the syllabus-- that all you had been assigned for Thursday's lecture was the Saussure. Lo and behold, I did take a glance at the syllabus over the weekend and realized that you'd also been assigned the Levi-Strauss, so we have a little bit of ground to cover today. I think we can do it. I think I want to reserve something like a critique of structuralism for the beginning of Thursday's lecture, because it segues very nicely into what we'll have to say about Derrida. I already promised that somehow or another the critique of structuralism just was deconstruction. I hope to be able to demonstrate that on Thursday; but I do want to get up to the point of launching a critique of structuralism on two or three grounds, and so I hope to be able to move along fairly quickly today. Now another thing that got left out, even given the proviso that it was only about Saussure on Thursday, was an adequate account of the relationship between synchrony and diachrony and the pivotal importance of this concept, not only for semiotics but for its aftermath in structuralism, and also for its relation to the Russian formalists; because you remember that in talking about function, the formalists who undertook to think about literary history and the problems of literary historiography were very much engaged in the notion that a function in a given text could be understood in two different ways. There was the syn-function, which was the relationship between that function and all of the other functions in the text-- in other words, viewed as an aspect of that text, but there was also of the same function its auto-function, which is the way in which it persists and recurs throughout the history of literature sometimes as the dominant, sometimes latent or recessive, but always in one form or another there. Now in Saussurian linguistics, the relationship between synchrony and diachrony is very much the same. To consider language in toto is to consider it at a given moment synchronically. That is to say, you don't think of language as a system if at the same time you're thinking of it unfolding historically. Jakobson, you will notice, introduces an element of time into the synchronic analysis of a semiotic system by saying that you've got to take account both of archaic and innovative features, but nevertheless they are simply flagged as archaic or innovative and not understood as changing in time as long as they are read or analyzed synchronically. But at the same token, a system does change through time. A semiotic system, language, the history of literature, the history of poetics--whatever it might be, changes through time, and to analyze that change through time you think of it diachronically. Now Saussure argues that the relationship among the parts of something viewed synchronically-- a semiotic system, let's say--are not necessary in the sense that they might be any number of other relationships, but they are nevertheless fixed. That is to say, they are what's there and they can't be other than what they are, whereas through time, if you're studying a semiotic system or studying language or whatever it might be, change takes place and it's necessary. You're looking back on it and it simply did happen, > so change is determinant in some sense. But at the same time, it's not regular. This, by the way, is a challenge to certain ideas in traditional linguistics like, for example, the one you probably all know: the great vowel shift. A structuralist's view of language has to argue that the great vowel shift, in which every vowel sound goes up a notch in some mysterious period between the medieval and the early modern, that this only has the appearance of regularity but that it is actually a diachronic phenomenon that can't be understood in terms of regularity. So the relationship between synchronic and diachronic is of that kind. Now matters are complicated a little bit on those occasions in your reading when people are talking about the way in which a mass of material-- a system of language or other semiotic system, let's say--is inferred from existing data: in other words, the way in which I infer language, langue, from a sentence, parole--I'm actually concealing from you that in fact Saussure uses a third term, langage, to talk about the sum of all sentences, but we won't get into that--the way in which language is inferred from parole. Now language, in other words, is viewed as something in space, that is to say--or as Levi-Strauss calls it, "revertible time," meaning you can go backward and forward within it, but the temporal unfolding is not the important thing about it. So in space, whereas parole, speech, unfolds in time so that parole, because it is temporal--because any speech any of us makes is in a certain sense historical, * because the beginning of the sentence is earlier in history than the end of the sentence-- for that reason, there's a relationship between diachrony and the unfolding of parole, or of a sentence or of an utterance which is parallel, though at the same time admittedly confusing. One doesn't really want to talk about a sentence as diachronic, but at the same time it does exist on that horizontal axis in which things in a combinatory way unfold in time. All right. So much then for synchrony and diachrony, something we can't get away from. It's in a way the central fact of structuralism but which I don't think I did adequate justice to at the end of the last lecture. Now structuralism. There was an incredible aura about structuralism in the 1960s. It crashed on the shores of the United States coming in from France in a way that stunned, amazed, and transformed people's lives. People like Kant reading Hume woke up from their dogmatic slumbers or, at least, that they felt that that's what they were doing when encountering structuralism. I think to me it happened when I was a graduate student at Harvard and absolutely nobody else was paying any attention to it at all. At Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell people were paying attention to it, but at Harvard I was initiated to structuralism by a bright undergraduate who seemed to be the only > person in Cambridge who knew anything about structuralism. Boy, did he know about structuralism, and he got me up to speed as quickly as he could; but it was a phenomenon that was transformative intellectually for people in the academic, and beyond the academic, world all over the country. Of course it led, in all sorts of ways, to most of what's been going on in theory ever since. The amazing thing about it is that as a flourishing and undisputed French contribution to literary theory, it lasted two years because in 1966 at a famous conference, Jacques Derrida, whom we'll be reading on Thursday, blew it out of the water. I'll come back to that. At the same time, to say that it really only lasted two years simply isn't fair. The lasting contribution of structuralism as it's indebted to semiotics, but on its own terms as well, is something one still feels and senses throughout literary theory. The concrete contributions, not all between 1964 when the first structuralist texts were translated in this country and 1966 when the conference in Baltimore took place, but the lasting concrete contributions are also terribly important. There's a wonderful book called On Racine by Roland Barthes. Those of you interested in French neoclassical theater cannot imagine, if you haven't read it already, reading a more bracing book. There is an essay on Baudelaire, "Les Chats," or "The Cats," written conjointly by Levi-Strauss and Jakobson, an extraordinary performance which was the model of a good deal else that was done in the academy during that period. The anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote a structuralist analysis of Genesis in the Bible. Indeed, it's no accident that he writes about Genesis, as I will indicate in a minute. Then subsequently, and in addition to all of that, probably the most lasting and rich contributions of the structuralists were in the field that we know as narratology. We'll be taking a look at that when we read Peter Brooks' text in conjunction with Freud a couple of weeks from now, but in the meantime the key texts in narratology are, again, by Roland Barthes in a long, long essay called "The Structural Analysis of Narrative" in which he approaches a James Bond novel as a system of binary pairs and unpacks a deep structure in the novel as a result of this binary analysis; important books by Tzvetan Todorov, crucial among them The Grammar of The Decameron; and then a good deal of work published in a series of books called Figures by Gérard Genette, whom you will find quoted repeatedly in the work of Paul de Man that you'll be reading for next Tuesday. All of this work and a great deal else in the theory of narrative, narratology, is directly indebted to, or is actually an aspect of, structuralist thought. Now I promised that I would talk a little bit about the relationship between formalism and semiotics as it clarifies itself in the work of writers like Levi-Strauss and, in particular, Jakobson. Structuralism takes from formalism, as you can see from Jakobson's analysis, the idea of function. Jakobson is originally, of course, himself a member of the school of Russian formalists. He eventually immigrates to Prague, where he is in a circle of people who are already calling themselves structuralists, and moves from there to Paris and then to the United States. So Jakobson, of course, is the one figure who definitely harkens back to both worlds, having been a formalist and having become a structuralist. One can see the amalgam of these two sets of ideas in his work. From formalism then, you get the idea of function and the relationship between syn-function and auto-function, which becomes the relationship between synchrony and diachrony. From semiotics you get the idea of negative knowledge-- that is to say, in Levi-Strauss' analysis of the Oedipus myth, for example, the notion that there is no true version, there's no originary version, and there's no sort of positive version of the myth of which everything else is a version. You simply know what you know as it is differentiated from the other things that you know-- one of the essential premises of semiotics, which is essential, at the same time, in structuralism, because here's where structuralism can be understood as an entity in itself. Unlike formalism, structuralism has an ambition with respect to the object, to the nature of the object, which is quite new. I think that the best way to epitomize that is to turn to an aphorism of Roland Barthes' in the essay "The Structuralist Activity," on page 871 toward the bottom of the right-hand column, where Barthes says, "Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it..." This is the moment in which you can see the radical difference between what structuralism is doing and what formalism is doing. Formalism takes the object and it doesn't decompose it. It sees the object as it is; it just breaks it down into its respective functions, showing them dynamically in relationship with each other and as a system of dominance and subordination, all of it understood as the way in which something is made, the way in which it is put together-- but there's no question of anything other than the object. Gogol's "Overcoat," Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristam Shandy: these are objects, and there's no question of somehow or another creating a virtual object, for example "the novel," out of one's remarks about individual texts. In a way, though, that's what, as you can see again from Levi-Strauss' analysis of the Oedipus myth, structuralism is doing. As Barthes says, "Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it…" What he means by that is that you take a bunch of variants or versions, you take a bunch of data--not necessarily all the data, but a representative amount of the data relevant to any given idea or concept-- and then you say, and this is where he gets into the idea of gross constituent units: "What are the basic constituent units of all of these items of data? Oh, yeah. I see we can put them into a pattern." We'll work on this a little bit in a minute. "Yeah, I see how this is working. As a matter of fact, there is a kind of virtual object that I can begin to observe as I organize the data that I garner from all the individual entities or versions that fall under this umbrella." That's the recomposition not of any particular object, but of a kind of virtual object which begins to emerge from one's analysis: in the case of Levi-Strauss' text, the meaning of the Oedipus myth. That's the virtual object that structuralist analysis arrives at by arranging, analyzing and classifying the data that it can get from all of the available versions of the Oedipus myth. So structuralism decomposes but not just for the sake of seeing how something works, like taking apart the parts of an engine, but rather in order to lend the parts to an analysis of a body of materials that makes it possible to recompose all of those parts in a new virtual object. That's what's going on in what Barthes calls "the structuralist activity." So quickly let's take a look at the Levi-Strauss chart, if you want to call it that, of the Oedipus myth which is on page 864 in your text and just say a word or two about it. He takes a lot of versions. Let's not trouble ourselves with how many. He doesn't have nearly as many versions by the way as he would have if he were studying a North American Indian myth or the sorts of myths that he did study in a variety of versions as an anthropologist, but he has some versions--one of them, by the way, Freud's version, one of them Sophocles' version, and a variety of versions besides those. He says, "Hmm, as you look at these various versions [gestures towards graph on chalkboard], you can see that certain things are basically happening, and they fall into certain discrete categories. We can put them in columns--that is to say, in terms of the way in which they share a common theme, but we can also put those columns in a row so that we can analyze the way in which the columns relate to each other." For example, there's a group of events, happenstances, sort of naming accidents and so on, that falls into a column called "over-determination of blood relations." That is to say, when Antigone tries to bury her brother and goes to the wall for that, in ways that you might find excessive, that's an over-determination of blood relations. Then you notice that at the same time, there's a series of actions in the myth-- going all the way back to Oedipus' family history and then down through the history of his offspring and so on-- a series of actions which have to do with the undervaluation of blood relations. People, well, they don't really seem to care as much about blood relations as they should, and as a result of that, bad things happen, too. Then there's a column of issues which have to do with the way in which recurrently, in all of the versions of the myth, there seems to be a strange preoccupation with that which is born from the earth: monsters, the teeth of monsters that are scattered and become the alphabet in the story of Cadmos, and the variety of ways in which heroes have to confront monsters as Oedipus confronts the sphinx. All of these monsters are understood as not being born from parents, or as being born from two things, but instead as emerging from the earth. They are thonic, or "autochthonous" in Levi-Strauss' word. There seems to be a strange preoccupation with autochthony in this myth, but this is offset by the way in which-- that is to say, with fending off autochthony, as if the crucial thing were to insist on the binary parental relationship that produces us, to be reassured in our humanity by the idea that one of us is born from two. But then on the other hand, there are all kinds of things in the myth which are also preoccupied with autochthony in precisely the opposite way. Lambda, the letter that begins so many of the names of the figures in Oedipus' genealogy-- Labdacus, Laius and so on--lambda looks like a limping person, right? Oedipus means "swell foot," "one who limps." What emerges in the fourth column is the idea that there are signs of autochthony in our own makeup. The reason we limp is that we have a foot of clay, that something of the earth from which we were born sticks to us, and this is a recurrent pattern, a recurrent idea, in the unfolding of the Oedipus myth. It's a peculiar thing, but notice that this is one of those occasions on which the myth explodes into other cultures. Adam means "red clay." Adam is born from the earth in the sense that red clay is taken from the earth and he is created, and there seems to be this same preoccupation with autochthony in the Oedipus myth as well, one of the interesting links of that myth with the Christian myth of the origin of man. So you've got four columns: over-evaluation of blood relations, under-evaluation of blood relations, denial of autochthony, and persistence of autochthony. I'm going to leave it at that for now because we'll come back later to see what interesting thing is going on in the way in which these four columns, all about two versus one: that is to say, whether or not we are born from two or born from one. I want to come back to that in the context of showing that in a certain way, the question of whether things--ideas, for example--come from two, two different things, or whether ideas come from one object, is after all this question is itself an allegory of the structuralist activity. That's what structuralism itself is about. That's what makes it so interesting and even perhaps peculiar that Levi-Strauss is able to find not just any thought in a myth but the very thinking that he himself is doing about the myth. That, of course, may have something to do with your sense that surely decomposing in order to recompose, creating a virtual systemic object-- notice that I have made this a dotted line [gestures towards chalkboard]-- that there is a kind of a circularity in that. I hope I have explained Levi-Strauss' four columns intelligibly, but if you look at those > four columns you say to yourself, "How on earth did he come up with that?" He himself says, "Oh, well, maybe I could have done it some other way," and you say to yourself, "How can this become decisive? How can it become authoritative?" Right? You can see what he's doing--and by the way you can confirm it by thinking of things that he leaves out. Jocasta hangs herself, but he doesn't mention that. It's not in any of the four columns, but obviously that has something to do-- you can take your choice--either between the over-determination or under-determination of blood relations. She feels guilty because she committed incest, right? Oedipus at his birth is hamstrung and exposed on Mount Cithaeron. Levi-Strauss doesn't mention that either, but obviously that's why Oedipus limps. Oedipus is a limping person like the letter lambda, right? So plainly that must have something to do with the persistence of autochthony. Finally, if you read Oedipus at Colonus, at the end of it Oedipus, when he dies, is swallowed up by the earth; "dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return." The equivalent of this in the Oedipus myth is that "where I came from [the earth] is where I will go." He becomes a kind of genius of the place at Colonus. As a result of having been swallowed up there, he becomes a kind of presiding spirit or genius of the place. So all of those things which we ourselves thought of-- he didn't think of them and he didn't put them in his diagram-- can, however, be put in his diagram. If that's the case, we have to say to ourselves, "There might be something in this. Maybe this is a plausible and interesting way of arranging these materials." So I really do think that ought to be said in defense of what may seem, however, to be a somewhat arbitrary exercise. Now turning to Jakobson, you may say with all this emphasis I've been throwing on "decomposing in order to recompose" that you don't see that going on in what Jakobson is saying. You may say to yourself, "Well, he seems to be just doing formalism. He breaks any speech act into six functions. He talks about the inter-determinacy of those six functions with a certain result. That sounds just like formalism," you say. Well, one way to show the way in which what Jakobson is doing is structuralist is to say that after all in this essay-- there's a lot more of the essay, by the way, which your editor doesn't give you. It's mostly about versification, which is the long-standing specialty of Jakobson's work: Russian versification, Czech versification and so on, a little technical, but it is all about the poetic function. After all, this essay is about the poetic function, what the formalists would call literariness. But Jakobson has a real contribution to make to this notion of the poetic function, and what it is is basically this: the poetic function-- and I'm going to quote this for the first time. It's on page 858 in the left-hand column and it's a mouthful. "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." Now you understand. "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." What is the principle of equivalence? If you've got that, you've got a good deal of it. The principle of equivalence can be understood as what Jakobson in the "aphasia" essay calls "metaphor," that is to say the way in which-- you remember last time I talked about how signs cluster in the vertical axis [gestures towards chalkboard], and if we understand language as a system, there are some signs that relate to other signs in ways that they probably don't relate to yet other signs. Then I had an incredible lapse of memory. I couldn't remember a synonym for "ship," but I hope that I got my point across to you and indicated that there are varieties of ways in which any given sign clusters with other signs. Those ways of clustering are what Jakobson calls "the principle of equivalence." What is it? Well, it's the way in which signs either are similar to each other or are dissimilar to each other. If that sounds too vague, maybe it's better not to use language of difference or similarity but actually to use language of opposition: in other words, the way in which signs are virtually synonymous, or the way in which signs are really and truly opposed to each other. Obviously, it stretches just as in versification. You don't just have full rhyme; you have slant rhyme. These relationships stretch in varieties of ways of this kind, but the principle of equivalence is the way in which signs understood as phonemes, lexemes, tagmemes--how ever you want to understand them-- the way in which signs are similar or dissimilar. The readiness with which we combine signs of that kind is what a person attending to the poetic function looks for. If the utterance seems to involve a predominance of equivalences of various kinds, then this utterance, which is unfolding on the axis of combination, right [gestures towards chalkboard], is the result of having projected that principle of equivalence-- call it metaphor, call it a principle of similarity or dissimilarity-- from the axis of selection; that is to say, that axis, perhaps a virtual one, in which language is a system to the axis of combination, that real axis--because nobody doubts the existence of speech-- that real axis in which language is not a system but has become speech unfolding in time. The principle of the poetic function, however, can be understood then as the metaphorization of what is otherwise metonymic. In other words, if I put together a sentence, what I'm doing is I'm putting words next to each other, and that's what metonymy is. Metonymy is a selection of signs, if you will, that go appropriately next to each other according to the rules of grammar and syntax and according to the rules of logic, right; but also perhaps in the ways in which the rhetorical device of metonymy can be understood. If I say "hut" instead of "house"-- I'm using an example actually taken from Jakobson's "aphasia" essay-- and if I say, "The hut is small," there is a metonymic relationship implied with houses, shacks, mansions, and other sorts of edifice, but which can only really be resolved, perhaps, by the unfolding of the logic of the sentence as in when I say, "The hut is small." So combinatory processes--borrowing the rhetorical term "metonymy" as "that which is next to each other"-- are basically metonymic. The available signs to be selected, on the other hand, on the axis of selection are selected for certain purposes if they are metaphoric. Obviously, if I'm just making a sentence, I'm not selecting signs because they're metaphoric. I select them because they go easily next to each other, either for reasons of grammar or syntax or logic. Now let's look at Jakobson's six functions [gestures towards board] taken all together. I think this is by no means difficult, and I think that Jakobson's analysis of the six functions is just absolutely, totally brilliant. In fact, I'm so profoundly convinced by what Jakobson says about these six functions that I really think there isn't much > else to say about an utterance. Obviously in different registers there's lots to say, but in the spirit of Jakobsonian analysis there's no possible complaint you can make about this except possibly one, which I probably won't get to until next time. In the meantime, it's just staggeringly effective. Let me use the example of an expression which is surely as uninteresting-- I've groped as much as I could to find the most uninteresting possible expression to show the way in which any utterance whatsoever entails these six functions: "It is raining." Oh, boy, "Excitement rains," as they say. In any case, let's say that I am an addresser--that is to say, I'm a Romantic poet. I say--probably ill advisedly if I'm a poet, but I'm a Romantic poet--I say, sort of waking everybody up when I say it, "It is raining." All right. What do I mean > if I'm a Romantic poet? What I mean to say is "I'm singing in the rain" or "It's raining in my heart." In other words, I'm expressing something emotional in saying "It is raining," so that sense of the expression "It is raining" is what Jakobson calls the emotive function. Now I'm being addressed. The thrust of the message is toward the addressee. It's being spoken by an addresser, but it's aimed at an addressee. That addressee is a small child going out the door without his coat on, and his mother or father says, "It is raining," right, which means--of course as a conative function, as a command, as something which has a design on the addressee-- what it means is "Put your coat on." But you don't necessarily say, "Put your coat on." You say, "It is raining," and that's the conative function. That's what Jakobson calls "the set to the addressee": that is to say, the basic dominant bearing that the message has, the "set," is a set to the addressee. Now there's a context for any utterance. This much I suppose none of us would think to disagree with: I'm a weatherman, I'm a meteorologist, right? I don't even have to look out the window. I look at my charts and I announce confidently through the microphone, "It is raining." Right? Everybody takes me seriously. The referential function of "It is raining" is supposed to convey information. I'm a weatherman, and I'm supposed to know what I'm talking about. So if a weatherman tells me "It is raining," I believe that it is raining. I put my hand out the door and, sure enough, it is raining, and the referential function-- the dominant in the expression "It is raining" as referential function-- has been confirmed. I don't expect the weatherman to be telling me somehow secretly that he's crying when he says "It is raining," right? > Right? I expect him to tell me the truth about the weather, right, and that's what I'm listening to him for. All right. Now "the set to the contact." Jakobson gives you those wonderful examples from Dorothy Parker's representation of a date: "Oh, boy. Well, here we are, yeah, here we are, > yeah, we sure are here," and so on, right--in other words, in a state of abject and acute nervousness filling the air with words, right, so that you're on a date, right, and you can't think of anything to say. > I really feel sorry for you. > > You're on a date and you can't think of anything to say so you say, "It is raining," and of course your interlocutor says, "Yeah, it's raining," and you say, "It's raining hard," and she says, "Well, yeah. Maybe it'll stop soon." So the conversation continues, and that's phatic function--checking to make sure the contact is working: "testing one, two, three; can you hear me?" That's what the set to the contact is: anything that confirms that you're actually sort of in communication with somebody, and anything we can say has that component. I mean, if I'm a physicist and I'm going out on a date with another physicist, I say, "E equals MC squared." Only I'm not saying "E equals MC squared"; I'm filling the air with words. So once again, it's the set to the contact, and any message in the right context has that function. The set to the code is when we're not sure that we adequately share the code with another person on a given occasion so that we back away from simply saying things to make sure that what we're saying is clear, in other words to define them. I say, "There's a mare in the field." Somebody says, "What is a mare?" "Well, it's a female horse." "Well, it's a female horse" is the metalingual function. But we're talking about "It is raining." This is where it really gets interesting. > The most interesting thing about "It is raining" in terms of these six functions is metalingual, because what on earth is "it"? Right? Somebody tells me "It is raining." I say, "What? What are you talking about? What is 'it'? I have absolutely no idea what you're saying." I've noticed that other languages have this same weird phenomenon" "Il pleut," "Es regnet." What on earth does any of that mean? What is "il"? What is "es"? What is "it"? Is it God? Is it Jupiter Pluvius? Is it the cloud canopy? Well, it sort of is the cloud canopy, but that's sort of clearly not what's meant by "it," right? "It" is a kind of grammatical and syntactical anomaly which is extremely difficult even for linguists to analyze and to explain; so that when I try to say, "It is raining," I can expect, if I am talking to a literalist, of course, the metalingual function to kick in and, in fact, bite me in the shin. It's no picnic with the metalingual function in mind saying, "It is raining." What kind of a definition of "it" is "It's raining?" > So problems arise but they're interesting problems, and they are a function, one of the six functions, of the expression "It is raining." Poetic function is unfortunately not very interesting. That's the one drawback of this example, but there's still plenty to say: "ih-ih" and the "ih" in raining, which one can hear--the double "ih" in raining, the monosyllables suggesting a kind of a quick declaration of something followed by a sense of duration that one always feels when one is aware of rain coming: that "It is rainnnnnnning," so that the duration of prolongation of the word has a kind of semantic value indicating to us that this is something ongoing-- in other words, a variety of ways in which the poetic function of "It is raining" can be considered. For the poetic function to be dominant-- as I suggested when I said a Romantic poet wouldn't be very smart if he or she said "It was raining"-- would really be taxing for anyone who wanted to make it so. But any function could be the dominant in a certain situation of any given utterance. So that then, sort of, perhaps serves to suffice as an analysis of Jakobson's understanding of the structure of an utterance. It has a structure insofar--that is to say a metaphoric as opposed to a metonymic structure insofar as we observe the presence of some kind of pressure from the axis of selection, the principle of equivalence and the axis of selection, bringing itself to bear on the way in which the combination takes place. It's just incredible that you say, "It is raining." What could be more prosaic than "It is raining?" All of a sudden you notice that string of "i's." You notice all kinds of other things about it. The way in which the most banal utterance is combined is likely in one form or another almost unavoidable. I suppose I should use the strong argument and say "unavoidably": is likely unavoidably to entail aspects of the poetic function. Where the poetic function is dominant you have literariness, and that of course, is the old object of scientific attention of the Russian formalists; but it is refined in a way that, I think, is structuralist by Jakobson because he insists on the binary nature of the process of combining elements from the axis of selection if they are equivalent-- binary being "same," "opposite," "similar," "dissimilar," and the variety of patterns in which those relations, "same," "opposite," "similar," and "dissimilar," can be launched into use. Now I've actually reached the point at which possibly I could get involved in some elements of critique, and I suppose I'll begin. I may not finish but we can always carry over into the next lecture. So since we've been talking about Jakobson, let me call your attention to one problem in what seems to me otherwise to be a truly remarkable exercise of thought. That problem arises on page 858. He himself recognizes that it's a problem. He acknowledges it's a problem, but he wants to say that he's solved it in saying what he says. It's about two thirds of the way down the page and it's about the relationship between the poetic function and the metalingual function, between the set to the message and the set to the code, as he puts it. This is what he says: It may be objected [Yes, and here we are objecting, right?] that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentence: A = A ("Mare is the female of the horse"). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametrical opposition to each other [They're not the same, right? They're in diametrical opposition to each other]: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation [in other words, to prove that one term can be understood in terms of other terms], whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. Okay. Now in one sense this is true, obviously. Yes, that is, I know when I'm speaking metalanguage and I know when I'm speaking poetry. Maybe you know it too, but what Jakobson has actually done is he's sort of exposed a structuralist nerve, because he has appealed to intention: that is to say, he's said the metalingual expression has one intention and the poetic expression has another intention. What does that mean? It has a genesis; it has an origin in an intending consciousness just as in traditions that are not structuralist, things have origins in prior causes and not in their structural relationship between two things. In other words, if structuralism is a critique of genesis, as is the case with Edmund Leach's analysis of the biblical text Genesis, as is the case certainly with Levi-Strauss' understanding of the Oedipus myth, from two and not from one--if structuralism is a critique of genesis, what happens when you have to make a distinction between two entities in your system, the poetic function and the metalingual function, in terms of their genesis: that is to say, in terms of the intention that stands behind them? As I said, the example seems trivial because we're all more than prepared to agree with Jakobson that we know the difference when we see it between the metalingual and the poetic functions, but he's not actually saying we know the difference when we see it. Maybe it would have been better if he had said, "Well, anybody can see what's metalingual and what's poetic." Maybe it would have been better if he had. What he says instead is that metalingual is intended to do one thing; poetic is intended to do another thing. That opens, actually, a can of worms about all six functions. I stand here in front of you and I say "It is raining." How do you know what I am intending, right: whether I'm nervous and sort of just being phatic; whether I am really unhappy or happy; whether I think you're crazy--it is in fact raining outside and I don't see any coats; or whether I am actually sort of just masquerading as an English professor--I am really a meteorologist? You don't know any of these things. You have to infer an intention, right? If you infer an intention in order to make these distinctions, how can the structuralist imperative of structure rather than genesis be preserved intact? How can we insist that we know things negatively and not positively if we have to infer a direct cause, a positive cause, in order to grasp distinctions even between the six functions? That's a rhetorical question with which I don't necessarily agree but it is a potential objection that you may wish to explore on your own. Now the critique of Levi-Strauss I have already hinted at, but there's another aspect of it too. That I will defer until next time because you'll find that the essay of Derrida's that you're reading is largely about Levi-Strauss, so it will make a natural segue between what we're talking about today and what we'll be talking about Thursday, to return first to certain aspects of Levi-Strauss' argument and then get going with what Derrida is saying. Thank you. See you then.

Literature_Lectures

13_Jacques_Lacan_in_Theory.txt

Prof: Well, I'd really better start. I can infer, I think, from looking around the room that there is either post-paper depression at work or that having written the paper, you scarcely had time to read a fifteen-page labyrinthine essay by Lacan. That's unfortunate, and I hope you're able to make up for it soon. Those of you who are here today can take such notes as you can figure out how to take and then go back to the text of Lacan and try to make use of them. It is a pity that not everyone's here, but we'll fare forward nevertheless. Now there is an obvious link between the work of Peter Brooks that you had last time and this particular essay of Lacan which, of course, I'd like to begin by underlining. It has to do with the part of the argument of Lacan which probably is most accessible to you after your tour through structuralism and related "-isms" and which, in a way, I think really can be used to anchor a certain understanding of Lacan. It's something I am going to want to spend a lot of time with in the long run today. In any case, Brooks understood the fictional text and the completed fictional narrative as a sustaining of desire through a series of détours, detours, inadequate and improper endpoints overcome, resulting in a continuation of desire, resulting in a proper ending--that is to say, something corresponding to what Freud understood as the desire of the organism to die in its own way and not according to the modification or pressure of something from without. This sequence of détour in the elaboration of a narrative plot Brooks called metonymy, in a way that by this time we ought to recognize as what happens in the putting together of signs along the axis of combination as it's described by Jakobson. But Brooks remarks also that at the same time, there is a binding of this sequence of signs-- of events in the case of a plot--there is an effect of unity, a feeling that the experience one has in reading a fictional plot is an experience of unity. This effect he calls "metaphor": that is to say, our sense of the unity of a fictional plot we understand as metaphoric. Some kind of identity, self-identity, or close correspondence in the meaning of the variety of events that we have encountered results in a unity that can be understood in metaphorical terms. In other words, something like what Jakobson calls the "poetic function" has been superimposed on the metonymic axis of combination in such a way that the feeling of unity, the sense of the recurrence of identity in the signs used, is something that we can come away with. This, Brooks argues, accounts for our sense of the unity of the plot even as we understand it to be a perpetual form of the delay of desire. I speak of the delay of desire: That's most obvious, of course, in a marriage plot, the marriage plot being the heart of fiction, perhaps, and most immediately intelligible-- but of course desire takes many forms. There are many sorts of plot, and they always do in one form or another have to do, in Brooks' sense, with desire. Now I pause in this way over Brooks because I think you can see-- whatever frustration you may also be feeling in encountering Lacan-- I think you can see that the same basic movement is at work in Lacan's understanding of the unconscious. The discourse of desire for Lacan, the perpetual deferral of bringing into consciousness, into being, into presence, the object of desire-- Lacan, too, harkens back to Freud as Brooks does, harkens back to the connection made in Freudian thought and picked up by Jakobson between condensation in the dream work and metaphor in the dream work, and displacement in the dream work and metonymy in the dream work-- this is central as well to Lacan's argument. The deferral of desire, and for Lacan the impossibility of ever realizing one's desire for a certain kind of "other" that I'm going to be trying to identify during the course of the lecture, is understood as metonymy, just as Brooks understands the movement of metonymy as not a perpetual but as a plot-sustaining détour or deferral of the end. So this, too, one finds in desire in Lacan. Metaphor, on the other hand, he understands to be what he calls at one interesting point "the quilting" of the metonymic chain, the point de capiton or "quilting button" that suddenly holds together a sequence of disparate signifiers in such a way that a kind of substitution of signs, as opposed to a displacement of signs, can be accomplished. We'll come back to this later on in attempting to understand what Lacan has to say about that line from Victor Hugo's poem, "Boaz Asleep," the line: "His sheaves were not miserly nor spiteful." We'll come back to that. In the meantime, the point of Lacan and what makes Lacan's reading of desire different from Brooks's, and indeed what makes his reading of desire different from that of anyone who thinks of these structuralist issues in psychoanalytic terms, is that Lacan really doesn't believe that we can ever have what we desire. He has no doubt that we can have what we need. He makes the fundamental distinction between having what we desire and having what we need. The distinction is often put--and when you read Slavoj Å―iÅūek next week-- who makes a much more central point of this, it's often put as the distinction between the "big other"-- > and later on we'll talk about why it's big-- the "big other," which one can never appropriate as an object of desire because it is perpetually and always elusive, and the "objet petit ā," the little object of desire, which is not really an object of desire at all but is available to satisfy need. Sociobiologically, you can get what you need. Psychoanalytically, you cannot get what you desire. Now the obvious gloss here, I think, is the Rolling Stones. If Lacan were the Rolling Stones, he'd have slightly rewritten the famous refrain by saying, "You can't ever 'git' what you want," right: "but sometimes if you try"-- and you got to try. Even for what you need, you got to-- > right? > You can't just sit there--"Sometimes if you try you 'git' what you need." I'm sure that Mick Jagger had many sticky fingers in the pages of Lacan in order to be able to make that important distinction, but I think it's one that perhaps you might want to salt away the next time you feel confused about the distinction between desire and need. Now obviously, it'd be great if we could just stop there, but we do have to get a little closer to the text and try to figure out why in these terms given to us by Lacan, terms both structuralist and psychoanalytic-- we have to figure out why this distinction prevails and what it amounts to, so we soldier on. First of all, let me just say a couple of things in passing. There is for humanistic studies more than one Jacques Lacan. There is the Lacan for literary studies who, I think, is very well represented by the text we have before us, even though some of his most important ideas are only hinted at in this text. For example, we hear nothing in this text about his famous triadic distinction among the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. This is something we can't really explore with only this text before us. There is only the slightest hint at the very end of the essay on the last page of the distinction I have just made between the "big other" and the "objet petit ā." We'll have lots of time to think about that because it's central to the essay of Å―iÅūek that you'll read next week, but for literary studies focusing on the structuralist legacy for Lacan, this is an exemplary selection. But there's also the Lacan, perhaps a more current Lacan-- one better known, perhaps, even to some of you in film studies: the Lacan of "the gaze," the complicated dialectic of "the gaze" which does very much involve negotiating the distinctions among the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. As I say, this Lacan we're obliged largely to leave aside if only because of the selectivity of what I've given you to read, but as I say these are Lacans with quite different emphases overlapping only to a certain degree. Now the other thing I want to say in passing explains some of the rather strange tone of this essay. You notice that Lacan is just sort of bristling with hostility > and, of course, as well, condescension. Of all the big egos in our syllabus, this is by far the biggest. It's just something we have to live with and come to terms with, but the condescension isn't just toward the natural stupidity of all the rest of us. It's toward, in particular, what he takes to be the distortion of the legacy of Freud by most of his psychoanalytic contemporaries, particularly the International Psychoanalytic Association, many members of whom were the so-called American "ego psychologists." Now what is an ego psychologist? It's somebody who begins as Lacan does-- and this is something we'll want to come back to-- somebody who begins with Freud's famous proposition, "Wo es war soll ich sein": "Where it was, there I should be." In other words, out of the raw materials of the id-- it, es--in the unconscious, the ego-- that is to say, the capacity of the human organism to develop into its maturity-- should arise. In other words, the relationship between instinctual drives and the proper inhibitions of human or adult consciousness should be a progressive one, and the purpose of psychoanalysis, the purpose of bringing people beyond their entrapment in the various infantile stages or beyond their entrapment in some form or another of neurosis, the idea of progress or development in psychoanalysis-- it has to do with the emergence and reinforcement of the ego. Lacan hates this idea, and the reason he hates it is because that idea of the emergence of a stable and mature ego is presupposed by the idea that there is such a thing as stable human subjectivity: in other words, that there is such a thing as consciousness from which our communicative and linguistic and other sorts of systems derive. Lacan takes a completely different view of consciousness. This, of course, is something to which we will turn in a moment, but the basic disagreement and the source of his most intense hostility throughout this essay concerns the question whether or not there is for each of us a stable and by implication unique subjectivity. We are not each other. We suppose ourselves--indeed, we complain when we think about ethics, about our isolation from each other-- we suppose ourselves to be altogether > individual whereas for Lacan, there is a kind of continuousness in consciousness, the reason for which I'll explain, which is not absolute. In the long run, in this essay you will find-- and I hope to be able to understand this as a kind of turn in his argument-- you will find that Lacan does actually hold out a limited sense of individual subjectivity, not really as autonomous subjectivity, not something that can authorize a sense of free will or power of agency, but a way in which, owing simply to the complexity of the unconscious, each of us, as it were, inhabits a slightly different form of that complexity. Lacan goes that far in the direction of the subject, or of subjectivity, but refuses the idea that the subject is something that can emerge from analysis or-- in the case of, I suppose, most of us-- simply through maturation as a stable, coherent, well-organized sense of self and identity. All right. Let's start, then, with the one piece of really solid clinical work that Lacan ever did. Lacan's psychoanalytic philosophy is, as he would be the first to admit and even sort of cheerfully to endorse, largely speculative. That is to say, he works in depth with philosophical and literary materials. He is not glued to the analyst's chair. He is notoriously impatient with his analysands and is very interested in matters of analysis either in, on the one hand, shortcuts or, on the other hand-- championing Freud's late essay, "Analysis Terminable or Interminable"-- taking the side that analysis is, just obviously, such is the complexity of the thing, interminable. But the one really solid piece of clinical research that Lacan did and that is accepted as part of the psychoanalytic lore is the work that he did in the 1930s on the mirror stage. That work actually does generate the system of ideas that Lacan has to offer. So what is the mirror stage? A baby in the anal phase--that is to say, no longer identifying with the breast of the mother, but aware of a sense of difference between whatever it might be and that otherness which is out there-- a baby views itself in the mirror, and maybe it views itself like this [turns towards board with hands up]. Right? It can only crawl. It can barely touch its nose. It can't feed itself, and the actual nature of its body is still fragmented and disorganized. It lacks coordination. In fact, it lacks, in any ordinary sense of the term, "uprightness." But let's say it's looking at itself in the mirror like this [turns towards board with hands up], and so what it sees is something like this [gestures towards diagram on board]. In other words, it sees something which is coherent, coordinated, and really rather handsome. "Oh," > it says, "Wow, you know, I'm > okay." > It acknowledges itself to be, it recognizes itself to be--it's the object of the mother's desire. Right? That is the moment in which it no longer identifies with the breast but thinks of itself as the object of the desire of another because it's so pleased with itself. "Somebody's got to desire me. It's probably Mom." So > there it is, and this is the moment of the mirror stage. Now what happens after that--and by the way, the rather wonderful epigraph from Leonardo da Vinci which begins your essay is all about this-- what happens after that is rather tragic. The baby falls into language, and in the moment--and I'm going to come back in a minute to the whole question of why it is language that does this-- in the moment at which it falls into language, it no longer sees itself as the ideal I-- "das Ideal-Ich" in Freud's language. It comes into the recognition that it doesn't even have its own name, let alone an identity. It has "the name of the father," but it doesn't have the phallus of the father, and it begins to recognize competition in desire. It begins to recognize that what it itself desires is not accessible in a kind of mutuality of desire and that it has no choice but to admire-- while at the same time envying and indeed forming as an object of desire because that's what it lacks-- the father. That's the sense in which--but it's the father only in a phantasmagoric sense. In Lacan the object of desire can be just absolutely anything depending on the course of the unraveling of the metonymic sequence that desire follows; but this is what Lacan associates with the Oedipal phase; that's why I say, in passing, "the father." It does have something to do with Lacan's revision of Freud in saying that the object of lack that perpetually motivates desire, the desire for what one lacks, is not at all physical. If you make that mistake, you're right back in sort of mindless Freudianism. You know, it's not the penis! It is, on the contrary, something which is by nature symbolic, something which is an ego ideal but no longer oneself-- that is to say, no longer what one has but what, through the gap opened up by language, one recognizes that one lacks. So it takes a variety of, let's just say, phallogocentric forms. In film criticism, some of you may know the essay, the Lacanian essay of Laura Mulvey in which the female object of the spectator's desire or gaze, dressed in a sheath dress, is actually just like the baby, just like anything else that's upright, it is this [points to the vertical axis on the board]. In other words, it is, despite being obviously an incredibly different kind of thing, nevertheless. in symbolic terms, the phallus. All right. Now the question then is: why is it that it's language that does this? Lacan speaks of the impossibility of realizing an object of desire, because the metonymic structure of desire follows what he calls "an asymptotic course," "asymptotic" meaning the line which curves toward the line it wants to meet but never reaches it. There's a kind of an underlying punning sense in that word of the metonymic course of desire not revealing the symptom. It's asymptotic in that sense as well. The only thing that can reveal the symptom is those moments of quilting, the moments at the point de capiton when metaphor, as Lacan says on two different occasions in the essay, reveals the symptom. So this is what happens when you can't "git" ever--when you can't ever "git" what you want. But don't worry, because you can always have what you need as long as you try. So the question is: why does language do this? What is it about language that introduces this problematic beyond repair? Lacan begins the essay with a claim about the Freudian unconscious, a claim which he takes, he says, from The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud speaks of the relationship between condensation and displacement in the dream work. Lacan says, "The unconscious is structured like a language." That's perhaps the single expression that people take away from Lacan, and rightly so, because it is, again, foundational for what we need to understand if we're to get along with him: "the unconscious is structured like a language." Now what does this mean? He doesn't say, "The unconscious is a language," by the way, and he doesn't say that he means the unconscious is structured exclusively like human language. He means that the unconscious is structured like a semiotic system. In fact, he draws from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams the idea that the way the dream work works and the way everyday life, in Freud's sense of the psychopathology of everyday life, works is like a rebus--in other words, one of those puzzles in which you can find an underlying sentence if you figure out how to put together drawings, numbers, and syllables: in other words, a sequence of signs taken from different semiotic systems that can put themselves together into a meaning. That's how Lacan understands the dream work and the movements of consciousness to unfold. The unconscious then is structured like a language, which is not the same thing as to say it is a language. Okay. Structured like a language. This means--and this is where there is this enormous gulf between Lacan and most other practitioners of psychoanalysis-- the unconscious is not, in that case, to be understood as the seat of the instincts. It's not to be understood as something prior, in other words, to those forms of derivative articulation, those forms of articulation emerging through maturity that we're accustomed to call "language." If the unconscious is structured like a language, then it--the id, es--itself is precisely the signifier, the signifier that emerges as language: not that it is foundational to language, because Lacan's point, like the point of many other people in our syllabus, is not that language expresses thought. It's not at all that language expresses thought, but that language constitutes thought, that language brings thought, consciousness, or a sense of things into being, and that this is articulated through language. Now this, of course, brings us immediately to certain issues of conflict that Lacan has not just with other forms of psychoanalysis but with a whole philosophical tradition. If you are a materialist--in other words, if you believe that things come first and consciousness comes second: that is to say, if you're a Marxist, if you believe that consciousness, ideology, or call it what you will, is determined by existing material circumstances-- as one says--you can't very well think that existing material circumstances are produced by language. Whoa. If by the same token you're a positivist, if you believe that the meaning of things is something that is expressed by language, something that language is brought into being to express: then also you are giving priority to things, to that which is behind language, to that which gives rise to language-- rather than, as Lacan does, giving priority to language. He actually attacks both the Marxist tradition and the positivist tradition at various points in your text. The sideways blow at Marxism is on page 1130, the right-hand column. The sideways blow at positivism is on page 1132, the right-hand column. I don't want to pause to quote them but you can go to them in your text. So what is it, id, or es? What is that which is normally called "the instinctual drives," the id, the unmediated wish for something? Well, Lacan says it is nothing other than the signifier. He says, "What do I mean by literalism? How else can I mean it except literally? It is the letter." That is to say, consciousness begins with the letter. Remember Levi-Strauss saying in the text quoted by Derrida that language doesn't come into being just a little bit at a time. One day there is no language, and the next day there is language: which is to say, suddenly there is a way of conferring meaning on things, and that way of conferring meaning on things is differential. That is to say, it introduces the arbitrary nature of the sign and the differential relations among signs which are featured in the work of Saussure. So it is for Lacan. The letter is not that which is brought into being to express things, not that which is brought into being in the service of the ego to discipline and civilize the id, but rather is "it" itself. That is to say, it is the beginning. "In the beginning was the word." In the beginning was the letter, which disseminates consciousness through the signifying system that it makes available. Now actually I'm hoping that in saying these things you find me merely and rather dully repeating myself, saying things that I've said before, because it seems to me that this is the part of Lacan which is accessible and which is central to the sorts of things that we've been talking about, which I rather imagine you must be getting used to by this time. Lacan shares a structuralist understanding of how the unconscious discourses. He accepts Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy and he sees the cooperative building-up relationship of metaphor and metonymy in the discourse of the unconscious and of the psychopathology of everyday life in much the same way that Jakobson does. Remember Jakobson associates metaphor and metonymy not just with poetry and prose, not just with certain kinds of style, but actually with pathologies. In its extreme forms, metaphor and metonymy as manifest in linguistic practice take the form of aphasias, as Lacan points out; and so Jakobson, too, is concerned with something sort of built-in, hard-wired in the way in which language works in and as the unconscious that, in its extreme forms, is aphasic and always expresses itself in tendencies either metonymic or metaphoric. Now, of course, he also draws on Saussure but-- as your editor rightly points out in a footnote-- the way in which he reads Saussure [draws on chalkboard], the signifier, the big signifier over the little, rather insignificant signified--because after all, what does the signified matter? You can never cross the bar--right?--to get to it. You are barred from it. The signified is that from which you are forever excluded, and we'll go into Lacan's examples of this in a minute. This is actually quite different from Saussure's [draws on chalkboard] "signified over the signifier," anchored by a kind of mutuality whereby it's never a question what generates what, but rather a question which has in common, I think, with Lacan's so-called algorithm only in fact the bar itself; the fact that the relationship between signifier and signified, or signified and signifier, is an arbitrary one that can't be crossed by evoking anything natural in the nature of the signified that calls forth the signifier. There they agree, but as to what produces what: Saussure is agnostic about it and Lacan insists that the big S is that which generates the signified-- that from which any possibility of grasping a signified arises and derives. So Lacan's algorithm is, in fact, rather different from Saussure's diagram. Okay. Let's exemplify this by going back to what I said about the red light [gestures to the board repeatedly throughout this paragraph]-- right?--because here, too, I think we'll have continuity. The red light over a door is a signifier which has a great deal to do with desire, right? This we take for granted. The red light in other contexts has nothing to do with desire, but the signifier, "red light over a door," suggests desire-- but desire for what? Well, we think we know "desire for what," but look at the signifier. "Desire for the door," right? What is the relationship between the signifier and what would seem to be the signified? That's not what you desire. You don't desire the door, and it's the same with hommes et femmes, right? What is this hommes et femmes? Well, okay. The little girl says, "We've arrived at Gentlemen," and the little boy says, "We've arrived at Ladies." Well, that seems to be quite healthy, right? We're on our way to something like hetero-normative desire--great, terrific. But wait a minute. This hommes here: what is hommes? What does that have to do with the price of--the only thing you can do even behind this door is restore your personal comfort. It has nothing to do with hommes, right, or anything else for that matter. If the visible signified is in question, well, in what sense can we call this door hommes? Right? It's the same with femmes. There is, in any case, in Lacan's anecdote the wonderful existence of the railroad tracks, which for him constitutes the bar: that is to say, that owing to the nature of language, owing to the arbitrary relation of the signifier to the signified, the little boy and little girl--who are wonderful characters right out of Nabokov's Ada-- I don't know if any of you know that novel, but the little boy is sort of a little genius, obviously Lacan, but his sister is even smarter than he is. "Idiot," she says, just like a character in Nabokov, but both this little boy and little girl are barred from desire-- from their desire--because they are already putting up with a substitute precisely insofar as they seem to be on track toward something like the hetero-normative expression of desire. It's not an expression of desire at all. It's an expression of need because they are not able to bring into being, consciousness, or before themselves the object of desire indicated by the signifier. The signifier is always displaced from the object of desire in precisely the ways that are borne out diagrammatically in these formulas. All right. So what then is desire? Well, perhaps we've covered it: it is the endless deferral of that which cannot be signified in the metonymic movement of discourse, of dreaming, or of the way in which the unconscious functions. Lacan is very ingenious in, I think, convincingly showing us how it is that we get from one signifier to another: in other words, how what he calls the chain of the signifier works. You have a series of concentric rings [gestures to the board], but each concentric ring is made up of a lot of little concentric rings which hook on to associated surrounding signifiers in ways that could be variable. This, I think, very nicely re-diagrams Saussure's sense of the associative structure of the vertical axis: that is to say, of the synchronic moment of language, the way in which some signifiers naturally cluster with other signifiers, and not just with one group of signifiers but a variety of groups of signifiers. But they don't at all naturally cluster with just any or all signifiers, so that you get associative clusters in the axis of selection, and they are indicated by this [gestures to board]. As the chain of signifiers unfolds, the one or another of these possible associations links on-- and remember all of these signifiers are made up, in turn, of a chain of concentric circles. So I think this is a rather good way of understanding the unfolding of metonymy. Now every once in a while you get metaphor-- whoa!--and it's a moment to be celebrated in Lacan because it's, as he says, "poetic" and it is also, as he says, in a number of places the manifestation, the only possible manifestation, of the symptom. What is the symptom? It is the awareness of the lack of an object of desire expressed in a displaced manner-- that is to say, expressed in a manner which is not, however, completely obfuscatory of the lack of the object of desire, just sort of caught up in my endless babbling; but rather is that moment of pause in which there is a gathering together of signifiers and, ultimately, a substitution of one signifier for another in such a way that one says, "Aha. I see it. I can't grasp it, I can't have it, but I see it. I see the object of desire. I see what has been displaced by the very act of signification." That's what he calls "metaphor," and he sees metaphor as appearing at these points de capiton. Think of this as a quilt. You know what I'm talking about: quilting knots, pins--no, not needles. That's what you make a quilt with. * Those little buttons, quilting buttons, right? That's what a quilt is like. It's filled with something and then the stuffing is held in place by buttons. Right? So the stuffing of metonymic signification is held in place usefully for the analyst, for the reader, and for the interpreter by these quilting buttons or points de capiton. So the example that Lacan gives is--as I say, he gives several examples. There are wonderful, dazzling readings, both with four lines from Valéry and of the one line from Victor Hugo. I focus on the Hugo because it's a little easier, just the one line. He says, "There is something that happens in this line which is metaphoric," and I'm delighted that he uses the word "sparks." In other words, the metaphoric, the presence of the metaphor, is a spark. Remember I was talking about, in Wolfgang Iser, the need to gap a sparkplug: in other words, the need to have a certain distance between two points in order for the spark to happen. If it's too close, it doesn't happen; you just short out. If it's too distant, it doesn't happen because the distance is too great. So the spark that Lacan is talking about is the relationship-- "his sheaves were neither miserly nor spiteful"-- between Boaz and his sheaves; because the sheaves themselves which give of themselves-- just as certain other things we could mention give of themselves-- the sheaves themselves which give of themselves, and certainly are not miserly or spiteful for that reason-- they're generous, they're open, they give, they feed us, etc., etc., etc.--are supposed, in metonymy, to indicate that Boaz is like that. Look at the munificence of Boaz's crop. It's neither miserly nor spiteful, but as Lacan points out, the miserliness and spitefulness comes back in an unfortunate way precisely in that word "his": > because if he is a possessor of the sheaf, he is--this involves the whole, as it were, structure of capitalist or Darwinian competition and involves, at least in an underlying way, all the elements of thrift, if you will, and competitive envy or spite, if you will, that seem to have been banished from the sentence. In other words, metaphorically speaking, Boaz returns in his absence. He substitutes. He is substituted for by the expression "his sheaves." The possessive means that he is not the things that he's said to be, metonymically speaking, and the sheaves themselves are precisely what he is in the Oedipal phase: that is to say, precisely what he is if he is objectified by a baby looking at him; but at the same time, not at all what or where we expected him to be. In other words, the point de capiton of the sentence, of the line, is the substitution of Boaz for his sheaves and his sheaves for Boaz. So the line has both a metonymic reading and a metaphoric reading. Here I think you can see Lacan's sense of the relation between metaphor or metonymy hovering between that of Jakobson or Brooks and that of de Man, because there seems to be an underlying irreducible tension between reading the line as though it says that Boaz was generous and free of spite, and reading the line as though it said that Boaz just necessarily-- because he's one who possesses something-- is a person who has the characteristics of miserliness and spitefulness. The tension, in other words, seems to me to be in Lacan an irreducible one so that, at least in that regard, we can place him closer to de Man than we have to, say, Brooks or Jakobson; which isn't to say that Jakobson is not the primary and central influence on Lacan's way of thinking about the axis of combination. The appearance of metaphor on the axis of combination, the way in which we can identify these quilting buttons on the axis of combination, is nothing other than what Jakobson said and meant when he said that the poetic function is the transference of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination, right? I'm not saying--in speaking in passing of the sort of irreducible conflict one senses between metonymy and metaphor here-- I'm not saying that Jakobson is not the primary influence behind Lacan's thinking in this regard. All right. Now Lacan says language is a rebus, as I've said, and he says the movement of the signifier, which is the movement of desire, is the articulation of a lack. That is to say, it is in the impossibility, as certain kinds of language philosophers would say, of making the signifier hook on to the signified or, as we might say, hook up with the signified-- in the impossibility of doing that is precisely the impossibility of realizing an object of desire. So all of this should I hope now be clear. So some of the consequences are that language-- the most obvious consequence is, and this isn't the first time or last time that we will have encountered this in various vocabularies and contexts-- that "language thinks me." On page 1142, the right-hand column, for example: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." That is to say, that which brings my thinking into being is not present to me. It is it. It is the letter. It is the signified which perpetually evades us and which cannot possibly be present to us. I am not present to myself. I cannot be present to myself because what is present is the way in which my self comes into being in discourse which cannot identify me. It cannot identify me either as subject, or, in a phase of narcissism, supposing I can somehow or another re-imagine myself in the mirror phase, as an object of desire. All right. So I actually think that without quite having meant to, I have pretty much exhausted what I have to say in outline about Lacan. I haven't said nearly enough about the relationship between desire and need as it plots itself in our actual lives and in fiction, because the extraordinary thing about it is it's not just a slogan from the Rolling Stones or from Lacan. As we think about it, it's not that we're not happy with our relationship with the things that we need: obviously we are, but the extraordinary thing about it is that we recognize in our lives, in the magical world of film--that is to say, the world of illusion deliberately promoted by film and in fiction-- we recognize the absolutely central significance of this distinction. That's what's so wonderful and amazing about the essay by Å―iÅūek you'll be reading for next week called "Courtly Love," which I love and which headlines, which features readings of a series of films in which the Lacanian distinction between the impossibility ever of achieving the Big Other-- by the way, there are times in various kinds of fictional plots in which you can actually have the object of desire, but what always happens in plots like that is that the unconscious, the psyche, finds ways of rejecting it. I can't have that--it's my brother; or I can't have that--it is in one form or another forbidden. In other words, in actuality, in the way in which the psyche works according to the structure of the films Å―iÅūek undertakes to analyze-- and he's so profuse in examples that he really does leave us feeling that there's a kind of universality in what he's saying-- yeah, there are all kinds of object choices that can happen and do happen and may even seem satisfactory, but those are all objects, objets petit ā; whereas the Big Other, that which is the true object of desire, is something that will perpetually evade possession. Okay. So next time we're actually talking about the anxiety of influence in Harold Bloom, and then in the ensuing lecture we'll return in a way to Lacan when we take up Deleuze, Guattari and Slavoj Å―iÅūek. Thank you.

Literature_Lectures

Harvard_ENGL_E129_Lecture_2_Troilus_and_Cressida.txt

uh welcome back I'm glad to see you I'm glad to have people in The Ether out there joining us as well uh we're never going to know from day to day who was here and who's there but we're one large community uh we'll get started in a minute or two talking about TR and cresa but before we do I just want to make sure that whether there are any questions about the mechanics of the course the syllabus is downloadable from the website if you haven't brought one with you if you don't have one in hand it's very straightforward it's a play a week uh the you'll remember that we ask you to email in questions to come prepared with questions I will normally and be and because I've asked you hello uh because I've asked asked you to read my chapter in Shakespeare after all has anybody had any difficulty finding a copy of Shakespeare after all it's uh I've asked you to read my chapter on that topic on the play as well as the play itself I don't want to recapitulate that material straightforwardly so I will often ask uh to begin with a couple of questions that we can put on the board as an as a kind of starting point where you want us to start rather than where I might decide that we want to start and that will not keep you from asking questions I hope throughout the entire two hours traffic of our time together uh but in particular I'm hoping that you will play the the Lion's part in the second half of this discussion uh Mel and Larry have are armed now with their their trusty portable microphones uh remember that if you ask questions or make comments which you're also absolutely free to do uh that wait if you will for the microphone to come to you so that the people who are taking the course distance can also hear what you're asking or what you're you're intervening with this is not a lecture this is a conversation and you should feel absolutely free at any moment to interrupt to take the stage to ask a question to say that I'm not being clear to say that you disagree with me uh or to say that you find the play difficult or unwelcoming uh for how many of you you was this hi uh your first encounter with reading trus and cresa um and for those of you did you find it uh a a comfortable wonderful rewarding experience a difficult experience a mix can I have some reading responses yes just wait wait wait for the right sorry I I thought it was a mix and I guess reading it uh reading about uh my question really was that the heroes really don't seem like Heroes yep that's quite right yeah I think that that will be often the case in Shakespeare I'm going to talk a little bit about why that seems most particularly true in this case but I think even a more straightforwardly idealized figure like H who who would be a Shakespearean hero that we would expect to be heroic Henry Henry V Henry V indeed but we you know it takes him three plays to get to the point where he looks heroic and he only looks heroic against the background of everybody saying he was a wasal he was a Playboy he hung out with the wrong people and so forth so that this question of full heroism but nonetheless heroism is in a way the topic of the play the possibility of heroism is in a way the topic of the play and so it is not surprising to find that in some ways no one lives up to that ideal or that if people do live up to that ideal it is at Great risk to themselves as in the case of Hector who plays by all the rules who offers single fight who is willing to be a champion who fights on behalf of a principal rather than according to his own beliefs who does thinks that Helen should be given back but unless will fight for her who will not fight Ajax straightforwardly because Ajax is his cousin and who because he plays by every single one of the roles is in fact ganged up on the result of a dies as a result of an ignal ignal non non straightforward fight and is then dragged around uh on Achilles Chariot throughout the city that's what happens to heroism in this play but we'll we'll I I hope that we'll talk a good deal about why that might be so and what that tells us if it tells us anything both in our own time and in other times other comments about the experience of encountering the play um I found the the language especially especially the long speeches uh really dense with poetic imagery right almost like that was the point of the speech more than moving the action oh that's a very very helpful thing to say I think both halves of what you say are true the language is extremely dense metaphorical stuffed language the language of Shakespeare entering you know a major phase of his writing though in fact the ends of the when we get to the end of the semester we'll find that these very great place at the end are emptied out of this kind of metaphor that the metaphor comes to life on the stage rather than being in the lines but it's very true that there are a lot of moments and I want to talk about those too in which everybody kind of stands up and makes speeches and they make speeches against one another and they make speeches on behalf of themselves and things do come to a not exactly a halt but rhetoric takes over and it's not necessarily the rhetoric of persuasion it's the rhetoric of iteration it's the rhetoric of staking staking a claim or taking a position that in fact you already are expected to be taking nobody is surprised when Nestor says what he says when Agamemnon says what he says when ulsi nobody says oh my you really believe I mean trus of course says you know we must defend Helen and they they they they uh they act out their own rhetorical positions at very great length uh the passages are gorgeous and well worth analyzing and we will analyze some of them but it's true that there would be a sense that this very Marshal play which ends with a lot of fights and a lot of deaths and so forth is it at some points very static indeed and that it takes that form of kind of Talking Heads of you know here are the Greek generals and here's what they have to say here are the Greek generals and here's how they're going to kiss cresa here are the potential uh Trojan Heroes for cresa to choose her favorite one while talking to panderas a lot of lines of people perform performing or not performing so that the the the language does have have a very full-bodied quality and I choose this phrase from the language of line wine advisedly because in fact you will all have noticed and all the criticism about this place says it's full of language of food and drink of digestion of scraps of food of leftovers of waste and so forth It's about consumption it's about consuming yourself it's about uh being overstuffed in some way and there is a sense in which uh the characters in the lines are over stuffed uh it's a it's a it's a wonderful play it's a very highly admired play it is not a play that everybody reads in high school or in college and so and because of this quality that you're describing also because of the quality that you mentioned about this the the the rather anti-heroic elements of the play which are indeed a lot of what it's about about or a lot of what it's worrying about uh it's often a play that people encounter with some uh nervousness or some some some discomfort some uncertainty as to where they should Place themselves with regard to this play so I want to begin by placing it in a couple of ongoing cultural and and and historical and performative conversations uh and suggesting some analogies for the play both within the Shakespearean Corpus and outside so that you will feel that you own this play more than you may feel right now because this play should be part of your personal Pantheon in just the same way that Hamlet is or aello is or King leer is and part of our purpose in beginning with tros and cresa and then with measure for measure before we get to the place that you will expect team Shakespeare's High period like aello and McBeth is to show you why these are all part of the same set of rhetorical and and characterological and and ideological concerns the first thing I want to say is that even though I spent a lot of time last time talking about King James I want to make sure that you understand that this is an Elizabethan play it's a play was probably written in 16001 uh and that it uh it is written that is to say around the same time as Hamlet which is 16161 uh if you know Hamlet you'll know that there's a famous moment in that play in which the the traveling players come to Elenor and Hamlet welcomes them gladly and he says to the first player the major actor he says please recite me a speech from anas tale to Dao please recite me a speech from that wonderful old play that I admire so much that I've seen you perform elsewhere and in fact the first player does by memory and Hamlet clearly has remembered this speech as well recite at Great length from this very moving speech uh moving play in in couplets and in in in blank verse uh about uh the anas the Trojan having escaped the ruins of Troy meeting with Dao in Carthage and telling her about the fall of Troy and telling her the story of the death of Old King Priam and how it is that people in Troy respond to that death now obviously from the point of view of Hamlet's own play the death of a king and the suitable mourning of his loving wife is very much thematic to the play of Hamlet but the what what's also crucial here is that this so that the the play in a way suggests that the ancient world had it right that men were Men Kings were Kings old men were mourned and their wives really mourned for them and tore their hair out and so forth as as opposed to this modern world the world of Hamlet in which the wife not only doesn't seem to mourn she remarries very quickly and Remar somebody who turns out perhaps to be the murderer of her first husband uh So within Hamlet that's one of the functions of that that play but it also suggests to us something about the preoccupation of this period with this model with the with the the fall of Troy with the notion of heroic greatness with again people behaving as they ought to have behaved because here's here would be a case in which heroism presumably is truly functioning in which the the the uh they die as Heroes the wife Mourns the old man is is is not a laughable figure like the way ulyses Marx and Nestor but is in fact a grand figure and so forth here is how the ancient world ought to be and how the fall of Troy ought to be understood so this is this is in the language of Elizabeth culture this is in the mind of the playright Shakespeare at the time when he's also then setting out to write his own play about the fall of Troy which doesn't look anything like that heroic moment uh in the stuck in the middle of Hamlet now again stuck in the middle of Hamlet it it it contrasts those of you who will remember Hamlet will remember with the modern play the murder of gonzago the mouse trap about the perfidious wife who or the weak wife who says she's never going to marry again if her if she loses her first husband but who immediately and so forth where the modern world looks much more like the world of Hamlet's own time and it's contrasted with the ancient world uh in in tro and cresa we whoever we are are in the middle of this ancient world and lo and behold it doesn't look very very classic it looks in fact deeply deeply modern in its uh conflicts about Fidelity about the the the honor due to the old about about heroic codes about uh what's worth fighting for that that all of these things that are hypothetically presumed in some notion of classical literature as the model of heroism are here up for grabs so here is Shakespeare our playwright working with this material and working with it in the same time period in very interesting ways sometimes as the back Shadow as it is in Hamlet and sometimes as the foreground as it is in trus and cresa uh now the Queen Elizabeth herself is within a couple of years of her death she is an old woman she is a very powerful Monarch uh she has been receiving uh love embassies for decades from people who would like to marry her long Beyond her childbearing years because marriage to the Queen of England is a way to become the king of England and to take over power and so forth so she for a long time has has has been this beloved love object uh regardless of what her actual age is or her actual eligibility is for love marriage sexuality romance whatever it is uh it is not a huge huge stretch to think that some of the ambivalences about what it's worth fighting for when it comes to Helen might be in your mind as you're thinking about Queen Elizabeth that that that the uh the the issue of a world which is config Ed around a woman and her behavior is now somewhere in the air uh in the politics of the time one thing that has happened to Elizabeth is that people who adored her have begun now to think of themselves as her successors rather than her suitors or her Rivals and this was particularly the case with her her former favorite the ear of Essex uh who in 16001 uh fostered a uh or attempted to foster a rebellion on the part of the populace to make him the king uh to to depose her to suggest that he might might in fact replace her this is quelled he is is disposed of uh but the the the notion of essic here as a kind of Achilles is one thing that people have observed about this play that there's a kind of reflection here uh in the the the politics Within the play of the politics that are surrounding the play um in any case what is clearly true uh whatever we think about these historical Echoes uh is that the English Associated themselves very much with the land of Troy that one of the old names for London is Troy nuvant Troy Novant new Troy that the idea this is this is what's what's called In classical learning trans Lao stud and translatio empir that is to say the the travels of learning and the travels of Empire from their supposed Source in ancient Greece and then ancient Rome across Europe to England and then ultimately to the American Century the past Century the idea that these things travel Westward that Empire travels Westward that learning travels Westward uh and that the literary Cannon as we understand it for example might begin with the ancient Greek Classics and might end with with what with American literature or with in fact uh literature written to the west of America but the the the idea was that learning traveled and that that it was you know trans translatio means to to to travel and also to translate uh and here we have uh the story of uh the new Troy being located not as it was then in the ancient world but now in the modern world of Shakespeare in London uh there there uh so there's a certain identification and affection with things Trojan uh and particularly with the codes of chivalry of romantic love of petan love as embodied in a figure like trus uh there is at the same time in academic life in uh England at this time a quarrel uh kind of political intellectual quarrel within the University of Oxford between people who called themselves Greeks and people who called themselves Trojans where the Greeks were the classicists the humanists the people who were were recovering classical literature the Trojans were the supporters of medieval scholasticism of again the language of shivalry of the sort of indigenous language of Europe as opposed to the recovered language and literature of the ancient world uh so that this Greeks and Greeks and Trojans would have been thought of as a a a a multiple set of dialogues here there lots of ways of being a Greek or a Trojan of embodying the Greek or the Trojan side here um this play today and by today I mean over the last know 50 years even has been performed formed precisely where we began as a play that embodies and anticipates and and uh instantiates modern ambivalence modern disillusionment with war with ideals with the power of myth with the idea of belief with the idea of the possibility of fidelity and love that this is a very modern play in lots of quotation marks in its interest in and attention to the impossibility of living up to these ideals and one of the most uh one of one of the most fascinating things to me about this play is the kind of parlor trick by which cresa and trus and Pander too all know their own stories even though they are you know they're depicted as living in the time of the Trojan War they somehow have inted the fact that troilus is going to be the icon of of faithfulness Against All Odds as true as trus that cres is going to be the icon of infidelity as false as cesd and that Pander panderas is going to become the archetype of all bods of all pimps of all all that that the word Pander itself is going to lose its capital P and become the the personification of this kind of of cynical bringing together of people for sexuality rather than for love that that these characters all carry around with them and give voice to their own myths even though they are somehow on aware of it so that some of the again the most poignant moments in this play is where she is saying oh please I'm always going to be true to you if not just always say as false as Chris and you think oh no there it goes because you know more because you know the myth you know more than they know about themselves and that you know because Shakespeare is so famous and we're familiar with his plays we often have that experience with lots of his plays we know more about King Le and what's going to happen to him but there isn't that sense that he's become a myth in quite this way these characters walk around talking about their own myths and they were powerless to escape the myths that have created them uh and and by the time of Shakespeare these myths have come down through medieval literature if you read Cher's trollis and Crusade you'll find that Crusade is a a much more I going to say a a a she she's in some way more attractive a more flirtatious and also slightly more owered figure than this CA who seems to be trapped by a series of circumstances that she cannot really escape and I'm going to talk in a few minutes about about about the various women in the play and how this functions for them but this reputation of CR and therefore of trolis as being the icons of doomed love the icons of of U petrarchan Love Gone Wrong here and uh cresa as as as ultimately embodying falsehood rather than truth this by the time of Shakespeare had reached a point where these characters uh are are are describing their own situations as if they've read all these poems as if they know their own as if they known their own history and that ironic situation really increases together with what we know about the Trojan War I mean if if somebody were to rush into the middle of this this play and say oh a big horse is coming in you know mean it's you you know the story already and they knew this story better than we do and so it's all about for boing and doom so here I want to put the play in a different set of I put put it a little bit in its historical context and a little bit in its literary historical context now I want to put it for you in at least two kinds of Shakespearean context one is the plays that surround it not only how but also measure for measure 12th night uh as you like it these romantic plays those of you who know these the the the the plays of of Shakespeare's High Comic period are again a little bit about disillusionment about the impossibility of love as well as its its its uh unbearable attractions uh about the way in which lovers are trapped in their own situations and all of these uh play is really end with something going wrong with with in the case of 12th night malvolio stalking out and saying I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you uh but the the the so that that in the plays that Shakespeare is writing around this time many of these same concerns are being voiced there are certainly moments in this play in which I hear the voice of rosaland in which I hear the voice of feste in 12th night and I can cite some of those for you but but I particularly want to to put the play in a different kind of shape shakespare in context and that is and I do talk about this in my chapter the context of Shakespeare's three great plays about pairs of lovers Romeo and Juliet trus and cresa Anthony and Cleopatra that these plays are in many ways rewrites of one another that they engage some of the same issues about how it is that love can make its own little world while around it circumstances are making that love Impossible about what it means to to have a private moment together about how a woman can risk by showing her own love many passages in this play wonderful passages in which trus sorry cresus says why have I we blab why have I blabbed why have I said what I feel now I've given the power over to you or he says why were you so hard to win hard to seem one because my power is in withholding my love just as with Queen Elizabeth her power was in withholding whatever she might have felt uh that over and over again she talks about her uh incapacity to to take control of the situation uh and this is very much Juliet situation in in Romeo and Juliet where she comes out on the balcony doesn't know that he's out there and says you know uh Romeo wherefor th Romeo I I you know expresses her love and then he actually pops up and speaks and she is disconcerted for a moment and says feain what I dwell on form feain Fain uh we repent what I have spoke but farewell compliment Dost thou love me do you love me and cresa also finds it even more difficult to ask him whether he loves her because her circumstances are not only the circumstances of the family but also the circumstances of the whole culture and the whole myth not only I mean in both cases you have feuding sides Mones and capulets or here Greeks and Romans but here we have the whole weight of myth of a 10 Years War uh of uh where cresa is merely a pawn here she too has a father uh but the father is in fact the agent of her downfall here uh that the world has become much bigger and as a result the lovers have even less in the way of agency by the time we come as we will to Anthony and Cleopatra you'll see that these lovers are bigger still that it's not only ancient Troy and ancient Greece but it's really the whole world world and we looked at a passage last time of how the dead anony seemed to Cleopatra to be a kind of constellation uh that but but where paradoxically uh by by ruling the whole world by being a an Egyptian queen and the great hero of the Roman army and so forth they have a way of conquering these myths of changing the myths and it's still a tragic story but they're more in control they're not necessarily inol control of what happens to to them but of how it happens to them uh so that these three plays uh spaced in time all of which are love tragedies all of which are tragic all of which end in death are are plays that that that very much about this diad about the notion of the word and tying these lovers together um and and there would be a way of looking at trus and cresa as a very very tiny footnote to the story of the tro War the fact that the that we see the war as the background to this story of the love of this couple is part of what makes this play so powerful um so so so modern Productions of this play uh very often mobilize the stories of other Wars and other times has anybody seen a production that's in more modern dress than Greek or Trojan dress yes um I saw National Theater 1999 um which blew my mind I saw it before I read it so I at some point i' I'd love to talk a lot about this performance versus reading thing because it's so interesting to me the experience you have seeing the play right versus or in addition to reading it um but they had all the Trojans were played by black actors and all the Greeks were white actors and it was very um minimal uh scenery um and I think all the my recollection the Trojans all had kind of white robes it was it was very kind of intense very very intense and it wasn't making a reference to a particular other war going on at the time but the Bosnia everything was going on so it was definitely charged with the war and since I had never read it before and I had I had you know the usual background in The Iliad you know some of reading The Iliad and this kind of thing I was so amazed by especially Achilles the the unsportsman like to be to be mild about it um way he killed Hector which I was incredibly shook the Achilles was the actor was phenomenal and that was an incredible incredible thing about War I mean it was it was almost like watching the war on the PBS thing now it had that same impact to me about the horrors of what people do to each other in war there's there is no relief in this play there is no safe space there is even those Chara the characters whom who whom you admire are either powerless or doomed or both uh and the play is often it's been done uh in American Civil War address for example it's been done as north south gray blue it's certainly been done with reference to Bosnia or to Vietnam it's been done and I think I mentioned this last time with costumes from a whole variety of different Wars all on the stage so that it seems to be the quintessence of War all times kind of zeroing in onto this somebody as a doughboy and somebody in a with a Bayonet and somebody with a cocked hat and and many different Wars all at once uh and the the the the play very often is seen as Shakespeare's uh pushing back against the senseless of War even at a time when precisely as Henry V has been mentioned when the glories of war and its capacity to en Noble literally to a noble people uh is also being performed when there is not this automatic notion oh no no war war is not a good thing war is a way to make a reputation for yourself but the the the play has has frequently been performed uh as as a kind of titration of of the the is issues having to do with war and so the the CNN or PBS is very appropriate now we have a lot of widescreen movies being produced this very year that are about the same set set of issues but the question of sort of what is this really are these the hero is it really Achilles is this you know when you get up close and personal with Achilles is this what you encounter that uh use of the play uh as as as something that seems extremely preent to a shifting modern perception about the nowin aspects of War uh has made this a a production favorite I'm particularly interested that you mention Productions since if you read any of the prefatory material to this play you'll see that the question of whether it was performed and for whom and by whom is very much contested that there seem to be two title pages of the quto versions one of which says as it was acted by the kings men and the other one who says never acted never staled with the Applause of the of the common people and so forth and there there Scholars have reasons why they think one or another of these things might be claimed but the issue of whether performance in this case came prior to production or or publication or publication before performance is actually very very Germaine uh this is a also a play that is quite full of wonderful set pieces pieces that you will recognize as you know great poetry or as famous Shakespearean passages and again to see them in the midst of all this action is also rather startling and we're going to look at some of those in just just a second um in my newspaper this morning I I I would do this week I looked at the book review the fir first uh page of the book review uh of the New York Times which is about the Supreme Court and uh about this is about Jeffrey tuan's book about the Supreme Court and the the reviewer says uh that it it it takes the same same perspective as a tracking shot in film it shows you this one and that then that one and then that one and it struck me that that's very much certainly how a lot of the staging in this play works that you in order to introduce this unusually large cast of characters we have scenes like the scene in which panderas and cresa are on some kind of of of Overlook and parading beneath them are these uh Trojan soldiers and a little game is being played between panderas and cresa in which panderas of course wants her to uh to be interested in troilus she's actually deeply interested in troilus but she doesn't want to say so and so she says that you know who's that handsome guy who's that handsome guy what sneaking fellow is this anris the sneaking fellow is oh that's trous uh again this is this is the same move that Juliet makes the beginning of Romeo Juliet when she is at the capula ball trying to figure out who that handsome guy is but she doesn't want her nurse to know she wants to know who Romeo is and so she says who's that who's that who's that oh and who's that and here we have the opposite the pandus wants her to look at this one person and uh she's in fact she's very interested in him but she wants to pretend that she is not what sneaking fellows this uh so that was one thing that struck me the other thing was just in yesterday's paper where there was an article about the uh new MacArthur fellows uh the so-called genius grants that the Jonathan and John and Katherine MacArthur Foundation give uh and as a literary scholar I'm always interested to see who are the literary Scholars who are so honored well in this list there are many songs scientists and there's a museum director and there's a vocalist and there's a painter and there's a creative writer uh there are no literary critics or theorists as once there were uh and the one person who engages you probably saw this with literature is in fact a psychiatrist who wrote two books one about the Iliad and one about the Odyssey in terms of combat fatigue combat trauma and one of them is called U Achilles and the um KES and Vietnam kiles and Vietnam and the other one is called uh adicus and America and they're they're both about returning soldiers and the trauma of war and it's quite an interesting story actually about this guy that he himself he had a stroke at age 40 and he uh had to to step aside from his active Life as a biochemist and decided to catch up on his reading and so he read the classics and then he started using them in his his practice and writing these books about them I I I'm actually going to get hold of the books and see whether he's read any criticism about these the the uh or or whether he's entirely selftaught but in any case what he's doing is using these these classical plays as a way of contextualizing and understanding in his I can't say his assumption the Assumption of the Boston Globe as regards this man's scholarship is that uh he is uh that as he says and he here he's quoted I saw Achilles everywhere in what these men were telling me that that that nothing had changed in 2500 years that it was still the same business of battle fatigue and combat fatigue and stress yes he is vitim postraumatic stress who is Achilles Achilles well that's that's that's the claim of this man uh Andor the claim is that modern soldiers have a nobility and a tradition behind them and again I will read these books so I'm not just making this up um but but uh but indeed post-traumatic stress syndrome is a modern name for what in Virginia Wolf's time was called shell shock and before that had a whole series of other names this a very modern coinage uh and if it is in fact describing the kind of burnt outness that we find in these Trojans and Greeks who have been in their tents in this battle for all this time as the play begins uh it's there's nothing wrong with reading backwards there's nothing wrong with reading anachronistically uh but it's interesting to me that again it's it's it's his reading of language translations of Homer not indeed his reading of trus and cresa which is a far more um uh unhappy version of the same less heroic version of the same uh that brought him to look at how these these soldiers were talking to him so this is all a kind of preamble to say that the play uh however however difficult its language is early on and partly the language is difficult at the beginning because it's it's uh it's it's uh non Noble language it's it's it's panderas uh bickering with troilus about sort of how to get cresc to bed and you you have to stand the bolting and the sifting and as if they're making a cake here there's lot of language that seems very local and referring to uh uh to ordinary life rather than to something heroic or or something very beautiful uh so it takes a while to kind of get into the language of the play but the play actually is is deeply resonant I think and is resonant on questions like um the structure of authority the nature of love the possibility of fidelity the value of ideals and whether those ideals in fact should refer to something or exist merely as ideas uh separate from anything which which what might embody them uh so play is quite full of these convers ations I was going to call them dialogues but in most cases it's more than two people speaking uh it's very full of conversations that seem to try to take sides on these great questions and where you have the heroic figures speaking out their on on on these questions the most famous of all of these speeches probably in some ways is Ulisses speech on degree in act 1 scene 3 uh that many of you had have encountered if you've encountered the notion of the Elizabethan World Picture I wonder if we can look at this speech together it's in act 1 scene 3 just so that you we I can talk about it a little bit this is the scene in which the uh Greeks are all array um talking about uh what they should plan now they've been here for such a long time what should they do should they give up should they stay the course again these are very familiar Concepts to us mired as we are in a war that doesn't seem winnable and doesn't seem as if it could possibly come to an honorable close is it more honorable to quote stay the course or to withdraw what about the human cost these issues which we deal with on the front page of the newspaper are are all over this play uh but we have a group of Greek uh Chieftain Greek Greek Lords uh discussing the and each one has a different point of view we hear from Agamemnon we hear from Nestor the old NE Nestor and then we hear from ulyses what is Ulisses uh uh reputation in this period what is he what kind of a character is he supposedly right exactly he is Crafty he is so he's he's not only Noble he's also a good now again this is ulyses is o ious it's the same guy uh it's he's he's a he's he's clever he's manipulative he's eloquent very eloquent uh but he's also a good politician and so after two men stand up and say well you know uh this is very difficult we don't quite know what to do Nestor says in the reproof of chance lies the true proof of men um then you get Ulisses talking about um what they should do uh and uh [Music] I bear with me I'm going to read quite a bit of I'm going to start with act one line Scene Three around line 56 just for a second then skip around a little bit um okay so so first he Praises them for their rank uh hear what yous speaks beside the Applause and approbation that which most Mighty for thy place in sway Agamemnon is the boss and thou most Reverend for thy stretched out life Nestor is aged I give to both your speeches I respect everything you say which is a tick tip off to you that he's not going to agree with them uh which were such as Agamemnon every hand of Greece should hold up high in brass and such again as venerable Nester hatched in silver should with a bond of air strong as the Axel tree knit all Greeks ears to his experienced tongue yet let it please both thou great and wise to hear Ulisses speak well Chris now they all want to hear him speak and they contrast him to thyes the satirist the scarus the the the the the figure on stage who is going to speak the unvarnished truth the the the negative truth all the argument is a is a and a cuckold thides will'll say the whole story of the Trojan War is just about a and a cuckold about a woman who sleeps around in her husband who can't keep her home that's it uh and at the end of the play he'll say the same leery Le leery nothing but leery all is Wars and leery that's the whole story that is the running title against that you get the whole whole all of Homer you get and all of Shakespeare you get all of the rhetoric uh that wants that not to be the case uh so speak Prince of Ithaca and be of less expect that matters needless of import bur look at the negatives here uh the point of what he's saying is I do not expect you to say something of no value so look at all the negatives be of less expect that matter needless of import burden divide thy lips than we are confident when rank thides opes his mastic gummy Jaws we shall hear music wit and oracles instead of saying we expect you to say wise things he says we don't expect you to say unwise things so it's all in this deliberately in the negative everything is they're stuck they're absolutely stuck here uh ulses now begins to speak um and he his his his speech uh is has been taken to be a speech about hierarchy and degree and Authority here and has at various times been unpro plugged into a notion of how modern people think or used to think that Elizabethan people thought about power so uh listen to this with with with some grains of of of salt here uh look how many Grecian tents do stand Hollow Upon This Plane so many Hollow factions when that the general is not like the hive to whom the foragers shall all repair what honey is expected degree being visited masked the unworthiest shows us fairly in The Mask the heavens themselves the planets and this center that is the earth observe degree priority and place insist your course proportions season form office and custom in all line of order and therefore is the glor planet Soul our son in Noble Eminence and thred and and spared amidst the other so sun is the best of the of the of the heavenly bodies but when the planets now I'm at line 94 when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander what plagues and what portents what Mutiny what raging of the sea shaking of Earth commotion in the winds frights changes Horrors divert and crack Rend and deracinate the unity and married calm of States quite from their fixture so look at how this line falls apart divert and crack Rend and deracinate to tear up from the roots the unity and married Cal of States this is all about a marriage gone wrong also quite from their fixture oh when degree is shaked which is the latter to all high designs the inter rise is sick so when when when order and sequence isn't in place the Enterprise that which we're involved in is sick and now he's going to give some examples of this how could communities degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities peaceful Commerce from dividable Shores so all those things that bring people together the Primal geny and doe of birth the fact that the eldest inherits prerogative of age crowns scepter Laurels so old people Kings Nobles poets but by degree stand in authentic Place take but degree away untune that string and hark what Discord follows each thing meets in more mere ugcy there's nothing but but but fighting the bounded Waters should lift their bosoms higher than the shores and make a sop of all this solid globe and a sop here is not only something that's wet but it's also a piece of of bread dipped in wine so it becomes trivialized here strength should be Lord of imbecility and the rude son should strike his father dead force should be right or rather right and wrong between whose endless jar Justice resides the jar is the fighting back and forth here should lose their names and so should Justice too then everything includes itself in power power into will will into appe it an appetite and Universal wolf so doubly seconded with Will and power must make perforce and Universal prey and last eat up himself so here's all that language of eating and food here in the service of kind of a cannibalistic gesture on the part of a society turned upside down because there is no order no degree no law uh and then he'll go on and give some examples the general is disdained by him once step below he by the next and so forth so when when EMW till came in the 1940s to write his book called the Elizabethan World Picture he quoted this passage as an example of what the elizabethans thought about degree that God his angels the Queen the the the Nobles that there was a social hierarchy that one one in fact went up against it at One's cost and that in fact it was impossible to imagine a world in which the center didn't hold in which there wasn't this sense of hierarchy of which the notion that somehow the the sun rotated around the earth rather the Earth rotating around the Sun was a kind of an emblem here um uh this this uh tillard however ends his book uh by a very little by glancing at what's going on outside his Scholar's window that is at England during World War II and says you know against this we see the whole world seems to be arrayed and in fact this setpiece which was a setpiece in Shakespeare's own time uh exists here uh as a as an antitype because not even Ulisses believes in it what is Ulisses political advice to the Greeks when Hector comes with his challenge what should what should they do exactly there that that that that instead of having Achilles who is the highest ranking the the the figure of degree and power and so forth uh on the Greek side fight Hector as would be right uh in single fight this Noble uh Shaler fight uh instead they should whoops I'm losing myself here instead they should uh send Ajax who is is is much mocked in this text uh who is a secondary fighter who is described as an elephant as ill-shaped as not very smart uh we should show our foul Wares and think perhaps they they'll sell before we show our Fair Wares now again those of you who know as you like it will remember this phrase from from rosin's account of uh why Phoebe the shepherdess shouldn't set her her cap so high that everybody will love her uh sell when you can you are not for all markets here too the idea this commercial language about selling Ajax think perhaps the the the foul wearers will sell yes just wonder if this doesn't say more about ulyses as a character than it says about Shakespeare's view of the great chain of being says nothing about Shakespeare's view about anything okay um no precisely but but the the this is against any notion that Shakespeare has a view of the great chain of being ulyses has a viewer that he believes or doesn't believe about a great chain of being but there's no reason to think that Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare is not a character in the play uh there's no reason to think that uh I mean why should we believe that Ulisses means this despite the fact that he goes against it what what in the play would make us think that this notion of a chain of being so to speak would be something that that the play endorses or believes in Ulisses U just to push the point seems as cynic to me and and that he would use something which is an ideal and generally accepted to gain his ends uh that's why I said it seems to say more about him as a character well I think that's right I think that that that that he is utilizing a familiar argument eloquently and vividly and and imbuing it with this language of appetite and this language of power and this language of animals and a whole set of kinds of language that we're going to see throughout the play but that that doesn't mean that the idea subtract ulyses is what everybody believes uh they they can have heard it a lot I mean what would be a modern bromide somebody give me an example of a of a of a modern cliche about life that that we think we all subscribe to we have any goes around comes around all right that's good that's good fine um so so supposing somebody stands up and says well you know but uh you've heard what goes around comes around but actually I think you know it stops here um that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody believes the cliche against which he is speak I mean it's the play is neutral with with regard to this uh we can say he behaves against what it is that he preaches he preaches something and he practices something else but we and we can say they're all incredibly impressed by what he has to say but was there anything in in uh I mean does does the does the play does does do the events of the play endorse some notion of hierarchy and Order yeah I I don't mean to monopolize what I'm thinking though is the plays that are coming like leer and MC Beth are all about order being turned upside down and and how when that happens there's a force almost in nature that that changes things back to the right order at a cost I would say that in all of all the place before and all the place after uh order is destabilized and people suffer as a result what I wouldn't agree with is that we ever get back to that notion of an order I don't think so King Lear does not get restored to his throne uh the who follows after depending on what text you follow he clearly not going to have that kind of unitary power um Julius Caesar is destroyed and what follows him is chaos of various kinds first the the conspirators and then true chaos but we don't really have a sense at the end of the play that the world of Octavius is going to restore us to that idealized if it is idealized figure of Julius Caesar yes so Professor Garber would you also say the same is true for comedies as well that despite the fact that it is a comedy that at the end of it we still are a great deal away from where we started that there's never a restoration of the status quo oh absolutely absolutely and just as there's never actually really a marriage we'll see this next week with with with with u measure for measure but you remind me to mention that this play sits very uneasily among the genres that it's been called and that that one printed text calls it a comedy that it's placed in the folio between the tragedies and and the histories that that people have not known how to classify it's a love story so should it be a comedy is people die so should it be a tragedy it certainly is about a historical event so should it be a history but the the the this is this is already a long lost ideal and what what what but what I would say in terms of the evidence that I'm trying to bring forward here and then I'm going to call on you so Mel you can Scamper back there um uh is that the the way Ulisses describes the notion of degree here is so negative the negatives outweigh the positive so what you see is the loss of degree you only see the existence of that ladder when it's sick you only see the existence of the Sun in the middle supposedly when the planets are about to be wandering in disorder and so forth what is if we were to go through and sort of count the number of phrases that describe the negative as opposed to describing the positive uh you only get this notion of wholeness through this image of Brokenness and disorder and and that may be how ideals produce themselves in any case I the idea that the the elizabethans as if this were one common group Americans all believe whatever it is but as if the elizabethans had a belief in this certainly there were hierarchies there were ranks there were uh there was the queen there were the Nobles there were various kinds of nobles uh there were commoners who were in different but but but they're not comfortably in these they're already all for one thing they're all in the theater every single one of them is in the theater the the commons the Nobles the Royals they're all in the theater uh they're all impersonated on the stage the uh we're already looking at a world in which this ideal if it ever existed is almost unimaginable and in fact if that's what really what Till's book talks about it's the phrase the Elizabethan World Picture and love joy phrase the great chain of being that suggests some more narrow and and and idealized view than these scholars in fact saw but but certainly certainly I I I completely agree with you that this is ulyses manipulation uh do we have time for a question Steve yes please um this is just the first half of the tape we're not near done yet um I was what you were saying about um whether or not the order ever actually existed yes seems it seems to me that although there's a lot of talk about the order and it's a very you know it's a very Marshal atmosphere where it seems like order would be Paramount it seems like the illusion of order is based on the illusion of a meritocracy um for example Achilles is the proud warrior and Ajax is not as good as what at what he does but it really is an illusion because uh even Ulisses who who praises this order uh doesn't he doesn't necessarily uh he doesn't he doesn't follow through on that idea of the best at the the best at the top right well what when we see the best when we we're we're going to look at Achilles and his life and the complications of his life we're going to look at some of these figures um we see that the this notion of hierarchy is these characters seem quite different from their archetype so to speak they all of them seem intention with their archetypes I want you to think of these characters in terms of sports Heroes for I mean this would be the the clearest way of because we don't have political Heroes like this anymore what we do have is David Ortiz or Manny Ramirez or and and what happens when when the guy who wins the tour to France is then now proved to be or exposed to be perhaps somebody who who has used blood doping what happens when the heroism that we want to believe in and believe me it's only in in entertainment and in sports that we now maintain these discourses of heroism and with with people in the entertainment World we're willing to it doesn't matter how many drunk and driving convictions they have it's a different world uh the sports world seems to be closer to us in terms of did Barry Bonds really or did he really hit that home run without the the aid of of of anything else we'll come back to this question and in in about five minutes okay let's see if we can come back to where we were I want to go right back to this scene that we were looking at uh the scene of Ulisses talking about degree and look at what happens in the rest of the scene and then I want to contrast it come in please uh I want to contrast it with another version of the same scene later on so uh because this will give you some sense of how the play is built I think so if we can return am I am I not Amplified okay like [Music] that want to bring you back to act 1 scene 3 uh to also show you something about how it is that Shakespeare is working as a playwright because having had this grandiose picture from ulyses they say yes yes it's right so he his conclusion is to end a tale of length Troy in our weakness lives not in her strength the problem is that we ourselves have have have fallen apart uh and now he'll come to some examples and his chief example is what's happened to Achilles and we now get from him a description of Achilles and Petrus and the relationship between Achilles and Petrus in which he imagines what is taking place in the tent of Achilles and Petras uh he uh so stick with me here now at still in act one scene three around line 142 uh the great ailles who opinion crowns the senu in the farhead of our hosts so the best guy grows dainty of his worth and in his tent lies mocking our designs with him patrus upon a lazy bed the live long day breaks scarl Gest so they're lying around in the tent according to elses joking uh and what is uh what is Petrus like well he's like an actor and actually he's like a bad actor um he with ridiculous and awkward action and your footnote will tell you that awkward means backward and there's a glance here at at sexual backwardness as well which slanderer he imitation calls imitation that great classic virtue of drama of course to imitate an action he pageant us he performs us sometimes great amnon thy topless deputation he puts on now remember we're watching a play in which actors have been performing Agamemnon and Nestor and ulyses now Ulisses imagines a scene that we're not at in which Petrus is acting the parts of Agamemnon and Nestor and ulses what is the difference between these two kinds of acting sometime greater Agamemnon thy topless deputation he puts on now topless here doesn't mean without a shirt it means as as in the topless towers of iliam uh the the matchless without without a without a anything above it uh and like a strucking player whose conceit lies in his hamstring who whose you know intelligence is in his legs or in his rear end and do think it rich to hear the wooden dialogue and sound with his his stretched footing and the scaffolded the scaffolded again is the theater that he's clomping around on he acts th greatness in so uh we'll we'll hear the same phrase later on with Cleopatra fearing that she that her boy her greatness will be boyed by a boy actor on the English stage or on the Roman stage uh here we have Ulisses fears in fact before our very eyes the fear that they are being acted by people who show them to be foolish or caricatures uh when he speaks just like a chime amending with terms unsquared uh at this fusty stuff the large Achilles on his pressed bed bling from his deep chest laughs out a loud Applause cries excellent te Agamemnon just now play me Nestor H and stroke thy beard as being dressed to some ration and so now we have this imagination of what it's like to play the part of Nestor and he goes on and on this sport Sur Valor dies cries oh enough patol or give me ribs of Steel I shall split all to pleasure of my spleen and so he imagines what it's like for Petrus to be performing the parts of the Greek heroes or the Greek Kings uh in front of Achilles again remember that we've just seen this scene played by actors and now if you will go forward with me to act two scene 3 where uh killes invites thees into the company of Petrus and himself and goes through the same scene again act 2 scene 3 around Line 39 or 40 uh Achilles who there Petrus thides my Lord remember thides is the the scoris Greek as the the table as the the list of characters tells you he's the the the cynic uh why my cheese my digestion the thing that I like for dessert why hast thou not served thyself into my table so many meals and again all this food here again serve thyself they're going to eat him up come what's Agamemnon and here you're going to get in very short order ulyses speech on degree as delivered by thides uh then tell me Petrus come what's Agamemnon thy Commander Achilles then tell me Petrus what's Achilles thy Lord thides then tell me I pray thee what thyself thy knower Petrus I know all about you you then tell me petus what art thou thou must tell that knowest oh tell tell says Achilles the audience I'll decline seides the whole question this is a declension like a Latin declension it's the various forms of the verb Agamemnon commands Achilles Achilles is my Lord I am Petrus as noer and Petrus is a fool why am I a fool says Petrus make that demand to my Creator it suffices me thou art and again we get from from thides Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon thides is a fool to serve such a fool and petus is a fool positive so this is the latter this is the same sequence this is the speech on degree from the underside this is what happens when you use the same rhetoric but in fact you're not using ideals but you're using either satire or cultural iism or some kind of critique if you're not if if if not imbued with the ideology that war is a good thing and that fighting for principle counts and thides and everything he says does not believe this then this is what that speech on degree that took 100 lines winds up being this one's a fool and this one's a fool to serve this one this one is a fool and this one is just a plain old fool the bottom is just you're a fool um so the play functions by doing this kind of thing by showing you a scene and then turning it inside out in exactly this kind of way and it does the same thing with the relationship between cresa and Helen as romantic objects and then with the relationship between trus and cresa and diamides and cresa that the the the the sets of scenes play themselves out and you see their Underside you see how the ideal fails to hold so uh here I want to talk just for a second about about women and value in the play I'm going to leave some time for questions from you I promise but I want to say something about women and value that in a way the in the great great speech uh in act 2 scene two in which trus trus and Hector debate the question of whether they should uh keep Helen or let her go uh this is incidentally your footnotes will tell you a classic debating Topic in the schools this is not Shakespeare didn't invent the idea that that two Trojan Heroes would would think about this just as to be or not to be that is the question was a famous debating topic would is it better to be and to suffer or to not have suffering by not having Consciousness uh that Debaters would and rhetoricians and and and budding lawyers would practice so they would also practice this great topos from the classics uh should the Greeks keep Helen or they should they let her go the Trojans keep Helen uh or let her go uh this this this debate is a very classic debate it's here being given persons who who perform it and in act two scene two you get what's ought but as is valued on the part of um whom whose view is that what's ought what but what what is anything but yes you know what's ought but as just valued but value lies not in particular will who Who's Who view is is is Hector and which whose view is trus is by what you know of them which one which one one of these is one of them and one of them is the other one what's ought but what is something but but but how it's valued and the other one says but value lies not but in particular will can't just say it's can only be valued by the marketplace it can only can only you it can only be valued by something intrinsic this is a question of extrinsic versus intrinsic value is it eBay is it you know Helen on eBay uh that she gets a lot of of bids whereas cresa gets no bids and so Helen is valuable and cres is not valuable or is it in fact that there is some valuer some some insurance underwriter some somebody who's going to come in and say uh this is intrinsically valuable and and of course what would make it intrinsically valuable would not be something material but something ideal something from the world of of of ideas whose view is whose yes anybody well trus is the one who believes that she's intrinsically valuable because they made her valuable when they took her from the Greeks I think aha so it's a theme of honor and Renown it's it it's it's been moved to this level of of the non-material of the ideal because in fact it doesn't matter so much about her and she you know Helen appears a lot as a kind of clinging attractive woman but you don't get that sense that she is anything other but a pra in a way she's she this is the quintessential Trophy Wife there is no more trophy wife than Helen she's exactly that she's a trophy and she's a wife um and uh that's the the she is a sign of achievement uh but having been taken she has then become the objective for a set of ideals that transcend her person her materiality herself she's become a theme a theme of honor and Rena out um so this is this is a basic debate about not only about economics and value but about whether in fact ideas have values or whether values have values when we talk about values in American culture when when when somebody like like Bennett writes a book about values he's assuming that they that that that these are not merely marketable things but these are things that function in the realm of ideals or morals and this is a little dialogue that deals with the question of how you get to be in that place of how something gets to be believed that way yes can we just clarify what the situation with Helen was like how she came to be where she is in the play like if she W she willingly left or she was imprisoned or how she came into this relationship with Paris how much play tell us that's why that's what I'm getting confused about I don't really remember I don't think the play does tell us very much about this we we know that he calls her minel that that there's that she's become very anglicized here uh that there but but there's there's not does anybody have any sense that she is unwilling that she I mean does she speak about this all we have is the play and the play suggests that Paris and Helen are all over each other uh a good deal of the the time and that the the the the many of the other characters have very little respect for they think of this as a kind of Adventure that he went on or a kind of whim or a kind of appetite something that got them into this long long War but having having taken this trifle he has made it into a theme of honor and they are all dying for this thing and yes he's not F no exactly EXA well nobody's fighting nobody's fighting this is so so interesting the word that jumps out at me in speech after speech after speech is the word unarm everybody unarm the prologue comes out at the beginning and I should redo the prologue because it's in very fancy language and then he said hither I I come a prolog armed and this is in part a citation from a play of Ben Johnson's that does the same thing but and in like conditions to our argument so I'm dressed like a soldier because this is a play about War uh and the very first thing that we hear tro look at this at the very beginning of the play uh so we have the prologue uh in Troy there lies the scene and so forth um hither am I come a prologue armed but not in confidence of author's paner actor's voice but suited in like conditions as our argument so here I am I don't have a pen I I'm I'm not armed as an actor I'm armed as a soldier to tell you fair beholders that our play leaps over the V and first Lings that it will start in media race just the way mil Milton The Way Way Homer's poem starts in medos race uh beginning in the middle starting then way to what may be digested that is shortened but also digested in a play uh like or find fault do as your pleasures are there's a rhyming couplet that ends this thing now good or bad his but the chance of War Ender panderas enter paneris and trollis trus call here my varlet I'll unarm again and so we have prologue is armed hero is unarmed and every single person Paris and trist talk about that Helen having the right to unarm Great Hector to unbuckle his buckles after the war that Helen is going to do that thing that none of the soldiers can do she can unarm great Hector and they've all been unarmed in the way that you know those those Renaissance paintings that show Venus and Mars where Mars is has been making love to Venus and so what his his his armor all lies kind of scattered around because he is naked having been making making love with her and the the various py little little Cupids are playing with the armor or whatever so the the the god of war is not dressed for war he has been seduced into love away from his own job and in fact his armor has become a play thing for for uh little figures of love little Cupids little invisible perhaps figures that that that animate people's minds so here too all of these figures are are unarming rather than arming over and over again uh when when Achilles comes comes upon Hector toward the end of the play Hector is exhausted and he says uh I am unarmed forgo thy Vantage Greek and what does Achilles do he doesn't say yes you're quite right I'll see you tomorrow on the battlefield he says meridon let's go this is our chance uh so they they're all taking off their Armor All the Time nobody's armed they're all uh unarmed the only one that's armed is the prologue and he's armed nominally in costume but also with this story that he has to tell so so this is this is the heroic story of taking off your armor by and large and somewhere in the background is this story about how taking off your armor uh in order to go toward love I mean Our Love and War because this is this is the war based upon love and is that really possible but if what is Helen valued at what's Helen's value in this play if Helen is a stock are you buying or selling um well isn't isn't that kind first of all isn't that kind of the debate and second of all um if as to whether you're buying or selling um I would say at this point you're probably selling because um she's she's losing value by virtue of having been the cause of this war but but when what does Hector decide if Hector's view is um as you suggest that she doesn't have intrinsic value that she that that value lies not in particular will something's really that what's ought but as is valued um if if Hector's view is that that she is not worth what what she do cost the keeping and yet he decides and he he's instigated this whole conversation and then he comes to the end and he does exactly what ulyses did Y is one side and he acts on the other side he says nonetheless I think we have to keep her because we're in this thing so far we have to keep our troops there we have to keep fighting on her behalf uh so that Helen's value is is a given here whatever we actually think her value might be her value is a given because it is the fulcrum that creates the war so all these figures are dying on behalf of the rape of Helen and I mean yes doesn't he spec Hector specifically say that her value is not as great as the value of the Lives who are lost or the people who are dear who are dying in the war he makes it very solid he but then he takes it all back then then he he's let's let's just look at this it's 2 two um it's I I'm not going to read you the whole speech though the whole passage though it's beautiful about line 52 Hector brother she is not worth what she' have C cost the holding tus what's ought but as is valued Hector but value dwells not in particular will it holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein his precious of itself as in the prizer his mad idolatry to make the service greater than the God and the will dots that is inclinable to what infectiously itself affects without some image of the affected Merit now dots is always in Shakespeare a sign of of passion outrunning reason of a Kind of Love That is not really love here it his mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god to pay more attention to your ritual than to what it is that the ritual is in service of uh it so that that that that here contrary to the argument that we've been making it's Hector it's Hector who has the idea that there's got to be some kind of intrinsic value um and uh trus argues against this they argue back and forth and back and forth um and uh the here he says you know uh if you vouch was wisdom Paris went as you must needs for you all cried go go if you'll confess he brought home Nobel prizes you must need for clapped your hands and cried inestimable why do you now the issue of your proper wisdom's rate and do a deed that never Fortune did beggar the estimation which you prized richer than sea or land or theft Mo base that we have stolen what we do fear to keep um several Pages later we get Hector saying yet know but line 190 yet nevertheless my brightly spreadin I prend to you in resolution to keep Helen still for it is a cause that hath no mean dependence upon upon our joint and several dignities that our honor is now based upon this trus why there you touch the life of our design she is the theme of honor and Renown uh it's about Glory again so this this troy list is very much like Hotspur say in Henry IV part part one uh he is a figure who believes more in honor than in life itself uh and and and Hector despite the fact that he has all these great reasons for saying that we should let her go nonetheless feels that they have now got to the point where her her her value whatever it was is now uh the cause that that upon their their their dignities uh depends upon keeping her here upon upon the the because if they give up the pretext of the war then indeed they have nothing left um the this and and and there's this a whole lot of conversation about how the future is is going to imagine them uh which again you know looked at from the point of view of what looks like a kind of Time Tunnel back to ancient Greece when in fact it's the future that is now looking at them is particularly ironic because the question of how these things are valued it looks quite different and and Helen is never an idealized figure here they can't even remember a time when she was accepting this Narrative of on the part of of of Hector sorry of trus where he says you all said she was inestimable she so so is but this is this is way way in the past but cresa in contrast to Helen what is cresa worth one man who aner yes exactly that that that cresa is exchanged in the ordinary way unstifled trus is more honorable or more romantic or more like love than what we see of of paris's relationship to Helen nonetheless uh she has no power and she is simply traded away she's worth nothing virtually nothing who wants her back her father her father Talus and why is he over there anyway yes he's a traitor but what why why why is he a traitor just just out of a whim or he says I can't remember what he says but uh he explains reason why he's on the other side do anybody remember Prophet who predicted that the Greeks were going to Prevail well and and he has also the word of Cassandra this this notion that that and I should have put her on the board too in my list of of Greek women or of women in this play uh that that the he he he knows about the fall and so he's over on the other side uh but he's she's and the play begins with this ironic marking in which panderas says you know I don't know why she didn't go with her father and in fact that the fact that she didn't go becomes the tragedy that the play looks at here that the the the uh now uh those of you who know Shakespeare's plays will have observed many relationships between fathers and daughters uh name me some of them that will come either before or after this one Lear and and Cordelia his you know the the faithful daughter and the and goroll and Regan who else sorry well yes G rean and Lear so give me another example of fathers and daughters Juliet Juliet and her father uh and her father wants her to marry Paris and she wants to marry Romeo somebody else Pericles Pericles and his and his daughter Marina uh where again if when we get to that play we'll see that Marina also uh not only does he have a daughter uh there's the this little tension narrative is played out also with Pericles own marriage where Pericles father-in-law pretends that he doesn't want her uh him to marry taiza uh so the the father's willingness or unwillingness to give the daughter to give the daughter in marriage to keep her with him uh ponus and ailia we have examples of of successful and nonsuccessful sings yes pora and her dead father and the dead father wonderful where she feels like the Dead Hand of the father is keeping her from going forward into love and marriage and and an independent life and in fact it maybe turns out that the casket choice is is enabling that but here's a case in which the father reaches out across the plague across the Trojan War across from one Camp to another and brings the woman who has been struggling toward a kind of erotic Independence and the capacity to choose and to give herself and to be sexual the father reaches back across and brings her back into his control uh and this is fatal for everybody faithful at least for everybody that she because she is is is cresa there a very basic question is cresa uh despite the fact that the Greeks talk about her as a daughter of the game when they she actually returns to them what is a daughter of the game a prostitute is she a prostitute is no how many lovers has she had one who tet so so when we meet her this is a whole new adventure for her this is really and and pandas is rubbing his hands and talking about this you know the the the maiden heads and about about virginity and about you know uh lovers with their first love and so forth she so quickly gets turned into this figure of of apparent uh multiple partners when she when she comes back to the Greeks and they all kiss her this is another one of these lineups I've been trying to show you all these various lineups she kind of goes through down the line one of them kisses her and then the next one kisses her and ulyses will not kiss her and so forth and they they use her in this way uh and then then she's given over to diamides who is supposed to take her to her father's tent and then she becomes the lover of diedes or he becomes her lover um and the the the Descent of cresa from this her her unwillingness her shyness her her her her fear perfectly Justified as the plag demonstrates that once she gives herself uh both in spoken words why have I blabbed and also sexually uh hard to seem one my Lord once she gives herself once she removes herself from that platonic that that peten position of resistance she will have given over whatever power she has uh that that's exactly what happens to her and so the irony here is in part in the contrast between uh Helen and hear your question about sort of did Helen go willingly or is she a prisoner is quite relevant I think because if if if Helen were in the similar position if we saw Helen also saying I don't want to be with Paris I really want to be with menus uh then then you'd have a very different picture of this but but both Paris and hel as you say he's not fighting she's not fighting they're uh you know in Camp over here and everybody else is dying around them so uh can can we look at the passage that you provided for us here um because this this this passage I think is I've asked Mel and Larry to produce a couple of passages for us as we we did last week I think so so nicely with the uh the bit of an and Cleopatra it be useful for us to look collectively at a passage every every time if we can and I'd like at least to look at the first one of these um okay so trus why was my cresit then so hard to win cres hard to seem one but I was one my Lord with the first glance that ever pardon me if I confess much you will play the Tyrant I love you now but till now not so much but I might Master it in faith I lie my thoughts were like unbridled children grown too headstrong for their mother see we fools why have I blabbed who shall be true to us when we are so unsecret to ourselves but though I loved you well I would you not in yet good faith I wished myself a man or that we women had men's privilege of speaking first sweet bid me hold my tongue for in this Rapture I shall surely speak the thing I shall repent see see your silence cunning in dumbness in my weakness draws my soul of counsel from me stop my mouth trus and shall albe it sweet music issues V what do you notice in this passage in terms of its language language yeah or imagery or what what other than the sense itself but what makes the sense or the senses it seems like it's uh like you can almost see it being performed like he has to be there responding as she's speaking there seem to be points where he makes a certain movement and she reacts to that throughout the passage that that's that's when she when she interrupts herself um when she uh uh points at him this this dxis is pointing at C see your silence and so forth there's a sense in which but could you imagine that in fact she's the motivator of these gestures on his part rather than his actually intervening is she when when she when she pauses when she interrupts herself is it because he's respon he's smiling he's putting his arms around he's doing whatever he's doing or is it is it something internal to her that is creating this this this check upon her it's something internal to her she it's something internal to her she's feeling insecure of his of uh his love and that's why she's reacting like that it's I think we we we it could be either of these things it could be internal to her I mean let us say one could perform it in either way but certainly what she's giving voice to here is is the the question of whether she's lost as well as won something the question of whether in giving herself she now has lost control of the situation I think it's about inequality that um she's she's powerless against his great power why does he have great power because he's the man because he's a man anyway whether he's the man that's another he turns out not to be unfortunately he turns out not to be the man um he uh he but but this this question when she says yet good faith I wished myself a man or that we women had men's privilege of speaking first now again can you think of anywhere in the plays of Shakespeare that either of both of these things come true exactly she does she does in in in much do about nothing beatric says you know oh that I were a man I would eat his heart in the marketplace uh but because she can't she needs Benedict to go be her hero and and her instruction to Benedict is very clear kill claudo go be the her be the man I can't be who else uh that we women had men's privilege of speaking first I gave you the example of Juliet a few minutes ago on the balcony uh speaking her love before she knows that Romeo loves her who else oh yeah yes lady MC Beth exactly you know bring forth men children only he says to her and so she's clearly the the the you know performing those stereotypically male things that the two of them both think are male to a certain extent uh sorry volumnia volumnia ah volumnia is a very volumnia and Cory lanus will encounter her is a very powerful but but it's hard to imagine volumnia speaking her romantic love to the father of cor the mind boggles at the idea of volumnia wooing but may I mean maybe so maybe so um but but think about Rosland for example uh who has to dress in men's clothes in order to get Orlando to speak his love to her in as you like it this this scenario in other words works out pretty well in Shakespearean comedy when I mean whether it's beatric cuz beatric you know she doesn't kill claudo and Benedict doesn't kill claudo but but her her voicing this desire to be a man even though she's dressed in women's clothes has a certain effect upon Benedict both Rosland and Viola in as you like it in 12th night respectively D or Porsche in Merchant of Venice do dress as women in order to play the men's part here but cresa this is not a capacity for cresa she cannot do this because of the drama that she's in and because of the way gender is in a way constructed in this progen world uh then but on the other hand we have Petrus so what do you have to say about Petrus in this regard yeah well Petrus isn't exactly seamlessly sort of smoothly Crossing gender boundaries he's um he's ridiculed and he's seen as being less than a man but obviously he's not a woman and so he's kind of almost the the tone that I think is there is he's almost kind of good for nothing well but he also turns out to be a great hero doesn't he I mean there's there's also some discourse about I mean it doesn't the fact that he is or is not depend depending upon whether you believe thides or not uliss Achilles male Harlot doesn't affect his Marshall prowess uh and in fact what is it that finally makes Achilles go Bonkers and go out to hunt down Hector the death of petroplus um it's this is what I mean Achilles will not leave his tent now what is his Claim about why he won't leave his tent he made a promise didn't he to whom and about what his girlfriend he's girl he's got a fiance he's got a got a fiance who is she yes she's poxa one of the daughter one of the infinite numbers of daughters he's got 50 children so so so yes he I mean at least this is this is the story is that in various other versions I think it's Bria that he's engaged to but but here her name is pox uh and we can think about the Winter's Tale and polixin when we get there but uh the turns out there's it takes a while to learn this that it's not or not only because he's a lazy loud who doesn't want to fight for the Greek ideals but because he's taken a vow about he's another vow having to do with love this is a vow that keeps you from fighting rather than a vow that makes you fight uh but what ultimately brings him out of that is the death of Petrus and uh his the his immediate desire to Revenge Petrus uh now what what would you say is the value of Petrus in terms of what we've been saying about cresa and Helen and value here yes well when that whole discussion about what makes something worth something right this is what he's worth to Achilles yeah he's not worth this to anybody else I mean in the same way but to Achilles he's he's the pearl of great price I mean he's the most he's Helen I mean he's the most important thing to Achilles he he he's that the value the the the the motive force and yet uh but is it is there a difference be between between his being a man and some of these women being valued yes yes there is certain difference because he's a man he's a friend right that's what differs him from from anybody from any of these women they're not friends they're Maybe objects of sexual desire or some other values for man but he's also a friend um maybe I don't know maybe achillus looks at him also as a he has a different um different different own maybe than than any woman in that world has again let's remember I agree with you but but uh remember that all these parts are played by men so that again femininity here and the difference between a woman and a man is a performed thing that crescit is played by a man Petrus is played by man thides is played by man yes it seems for me that being a man it's a Valu Abino uh right from the start while being a woman is not necessarily a value or might be even something wrong like in the case of C or later in the case of Helen the yeah the question of whether women's I mean this that's why the value debate is so interesting to me other than that it's very magnificent is that that value all seems constructed here just as character and gender are constructed so value is constructed and imbued whereas I mean I think you're quite right to to assume that there is some initial value in whatever you see of Petrus indeed whatever you see of thides or panderas uh these are characters who have a different kind of agency and a different I mean and literally an agency in that they can travel back and forth cresa is escorted what then I mean what what do you make of this exchange of tokens the sleeve and the glove because in a way crescit is already a token I mean the token gives a token the token takes a token there's a sense in which this this this um chivalric Exchange in which trus is infuriated because diamides is wearing his heart on his sleeve we still have this phrase uh wearing the sleeve that trois gave to cresa as as an assurance here uh that this this is already a theatricalization of something that has been performed for us in terms of character and the the the person thing exchange here this question of value of whether you're a pearl or a person or whether you're a sleeve or a person or something is very much this how value is constructed is is performed for us in part by this business of of the of the sleeve yes isec in a way making her peace with her lot in other words she's really doesn't have any control now so now she's uh she's uh this other guy is going to be her agent uh for S success whatever level she can have where whereas trollis trolas is gone this is the trolia substitute yes yep um the the I to keep I don't hate I want to come back to Romeo Juliet again into the moment in Romeo and Juliet when the nurse says to Juliet uh Romeo is banished so forget about him uh your second husband will be much better take the one that's here not the one that's gone so and and the audience does not value this advice even though we see that it's offered by an an a character we used to like so here there's a sense in which as as you suggest her her her Horizon of expectation is narrowed she needs a protector think about about the lady an at the beginning of Richard III uh and why she might accept the offer of marriage from this guy who has killed her father-in-law and her husband and uh there's there's a sense of protection here and there is a sense of of giving up what is diam's attitude toward toward cresa he seems to want what he wants willing to play the game in fact that I think he uses that phrase uh whereas trus is very willing to play the game Dames is uh I think uh much more uh practical about about what he wants in the situation which seems to me to be pretty much of you know the physical mistress relationship as opposed to anything idealized yeah yes I think he canot it may be that he also kind of uh does what um troilus doesn't want him to do there's he may be provoked even by by troilus telling him oh don't don't touch her just guard her blah blah blah and um that's what he may be CH kind of challenged with in his um in his pride how does trus find out about the relationship between diamides and cresa he watches it he sees it yes yes is he alone when he sees it no so so I want you to to bear in mind that this play is constructed on a certain set of kinds of scenes some of which are these plays Within the play of which this is one there's an onstage audience trus and Ulisses watching this relationship we'll see the same scene happen in aell a couple weeks from now watching this relationship troilus very much wanting to intervene ulses keeping him from intervening we have have this kind of scene we have the kind of scene which is what I call in my book an unseen that is a scene which is imagine so vividly and described to us that we think we are seeing it the scene that I described to you in which ulses imagines what's going on in the tent of Achilles and Petrus and Petrus mocking U Agamemnon and Nestor and so forth and we have the acting out scenes in which we actually see thides uh teing uh Petras and Performing for him in that way and we also have these uh the the these sort of U the scene that I described at the beginning this tracking shot scene that's what I wanted to to say this this scene in which panderas and cresa are watching the Greek her the Trojan Heroes go by or the series of the Greek Heroes speak or something in which they're all lined up and they're all speaking very pieces uh and we also have and this is equally useful I think uh parallelisms on the Greek side and on the Trojan side who is the equivalent of thides on the side of the uh of the Trojans yes pandas pandas why do you say that um oh sorry um I don't know Ahad um why is panderas structurally equivalent to I guess because they're both offering insight about what's going on and they're kind of the characters who aren't directly involved in everything but are still somewhat on the edges of things they're observers absolutely rather than I mean panderas doesn't have a romantic relationship himself he's a voer or a Pander or something like that uh cites 2 is not fighting uh they are they are facilit ators they are manipulators they are critics they are cynics they are bystanders uh they are demystified the modern looking at this structure uh from different points of view how are they different how is pandus different from thetes pandas a cynics have some investment in this I mean he uh where Society seems to be totally um um outside of it and critical of what's going on uh I think pandas is a little upset when uh this relationship is between trolas and cresus is is broken up yeah I mean to say that pandas is a romantic as may be to overstate the case a little bit uh but but there is an in I mean what kind of an investment it is it's hard to know but there is an investment in in in bringing the two of them together uh where thides as you say is is uh really draws a line between himself and these figures he he is he is the radical of what they're talking about he's the unvarnished thing the what when we come to King leer and we see that that poor Tom on the heath the vanished Edgar is the thing itself Thou Art the thing itself the bare forked animal thides is in a way the thing itself we'll see a figure like this in in measure for measure as well a kind of uh demystified truth teller not highly regarded who speaks to the audience from the point of view of of a really deep cynicism about about human character or human personality what happens to panders at the end of the play yeah he's gonna he's gonna you know make a career out of being a pimp that's what he's going to turn into himself yes exactly exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy that you remember the bargain in the middle in which they all say he says here's a bargain made you know if you're false we're all going to say as false as Cresent if you're true we we're all going to say is true is Trist and let if that happens let everybody call the the the Bringers together the Brokers between panders and it comes not only has come true already in Shakespeare's time this is these words are all in the dictionary uh but it comes true even by the end of the play there's some dispute about where the play ends there sort of the there there's some suggestion I mean there in some versions of the play panderas does not come out and say I'm panderas I'm I'm now uh let me just show you where the where the the the split sometimes is in act 5 scene 11 um when uh again those of you who are familiar with Shakespeare's tragedies will know whether it's the early tragedies like Romeo or or or Julius Caesar the later tragedies like King L MC Beth you you'll know that very often the tragedies end with uh a Survivor coming forward and saying let's go talk about this let's see if we can make sense of the history we've experienced the implication is that somehow revisiting the events of the play will disclose some things but it it's it's a gesture toward leaving the stage and trying to remember and it's a gesture often spoken by a character lesser than the greatest figures of the play but someone who's who also uh brings an obligation into the audience to continue that conversation and if you look at trus uh around line 20 uh uh a little bit before uh about line 12 maybe uh in act 5 scene 11 uh where troilus is talking about the death of Hector and what the death of Hector means and for him it means the end of belief the end of of of the possibility of idealism he's dead and at the murderer horse's tail and beastly sort dragged through the shameful field um Hector is gone that line 14 who shall tell pram so or hecubah let him that will a screech out I who will a screech out I be called go into Troy and say their Hector's dead there is a word will Prime Turn to Stone make Welles and noobies of the maids and wise cold statues of the youth everybody's going to freeze and in a word scare Troy out of itself but March away Hector is dead there is no more to say and some versions of the play end there with this rhyme couplet with this gesture of leaving the stage and with this idea that you have to tell it but nobody is going to believe it and that in fact the statement Hector is is dead is uh like hamlets I am dead Horatio one of those impossible things to say it's the end of a whole structure of belief uh the play however in the version that we have or the most of us have goes on um and troilus speaks some lines here that he also speaks slightly earlier in the play hence broker lacky ignominy and shame pursue thy life and live I with thy name so he names panderas as a as a figure he makes him into an allegorical figure poof you're an allegory you're I I am going to control this story and take of my love story that you have turned inside out so much into a caricature uh live I with thy name and everybody leaves and then you have an epilogue from panderas and half of it is in Pros a great Shakespearean medium and the medium often of a kind of low voice why should our Endeavor be so desired and the performance so loathed people who know earlier plays of Shakespeare who's the kind of character who would speak in a language like that it's very like fall staff it's this line is actually very much like mistress quick light at the beginning of H the 5th about fall staff uh what verse for it for instance for it let me see and then he reads a little bit of verse in here and then then he calls us all panders good traitors in the flesh set this in your painted claws this is not them this is us as many as be here of panders Hall your eyes half out weep out at Pander fall or if you cannot weep yet give some groans though not for me yet for your aching bones and here this is the idea here is a veneral disease Brethren and sister of the whole door trade all of us panders some two months hence my will shall here be made and so forth till then I'll sweat and Seek about for eases and at that time bequ you my diseases so why why might the play end with this figure of Pander this invocation of of of sexual disease this idea of of going forward into a world made of people like this what's happened in this play or how would you compare the two endings supposing I were to set you as a as a as a problem so of choose one ending and say why okay good so one one seems I'm sorry we were not being magnified one seems TR and one seems satiric with Hector it's the death of an ideal say again Hector is the death of the ideal and and pandra seems to be the Triumph of of Decay and and cynicism and survival of Decay cynicism and survival that that that world that diseases continue that this long disease my life says Pope the the the that that there there is here this balance between that's why I love when there's a double ending like this because you see how it works in one way and how it works in the other way that we have trus himself having lost all fa feeling now that he must speak the the the radical Hector is dead for him that's the most basic possible thing to say for panderas that itself is a story that's yesterday and it's as if he's come out onto the stage away from this battle of 20 2500 years ago and into the modern world and we'll see that these plays the same thing happens in Hamlet the same thing happens in many many of these play that even the loss of an ideal is an ideal because it instantiates something just as this question about whether Helen is worth something instantiates Helen's worth even as we debate about it so also for trist to feel disillusioned is to uh instantiate his illusion or to canonize his illusion uh for a panderas a thides to say all the argument is a and a cuckold that's all you need to know about the War uh is a very different kind of narrative and these plays are poised in that dialectic and we will see certainly next week where we're going to wind up in that world of brothel uh and of ideals uh and as we go on and we look at the highs and the lows we're going to see this balance always or I should say imbalance always at war with itself here uh we've got to stop unfortunately there's lots more we could do with this play on to measure for measure as you can see we're going to try to speak cumulatively about the plays uh don't forget this one as we come to talk about the next one

Literature_Lectures

24_The_Institutional_Construction_of_Literary_Study.txt

Prof: We've been passing through a variety of discourses concerning the nature of identity, the way in which identity is constructed-- incidentally with varying degrees of emphasis, the way in which identity is constructed in literature. I'm going to come back to this perhaps missing link, literature, in a minute. In the meantime, I just wanted to point out something that I'm sure you've inferred for yourselves: namely that each one of these approaches to identity has a history, and that the history results in a recent chapter which is something like what you might call a deconstructive moment, signifying on theory itself such that the claim of theory as a mainstream discourse to hold certain views is something that in and of itself, from a subversive perspective, needs to be deconstructed and undermined. There is the idea in postcolonial studies of hybridity as the undermining of cultural binaries-- that is, the double consciousness in which one experiences simultaneously a kind of identification with a state apparatus and a will to subvert it. By the way, I thought I'd give you another example of how that works because it applies to me. I don't actually watch talk shows very often, but should I be watching a talk show, they often invite people on to these shows whom they call professors. I just wanted to point out to you the degree to which the sly civility, the hybrid sly civility with which people are called "professors," is for a professor one of the most discouraging sounds in the language, because they know very well when someone is addressed by a talk show host as "professor" what they mean is you are a pedant. You don't know how to park a bicycle straight. You have no understanding of the real world. I don't know why I've invited you on this show in the first place, > except somebody told me you were an expert. That's what it means in the public sphere to be a professor. Bhabha perhaps exaggerates a little bit when he says the discourse of hybridity has an element of terrorism about it. Bhabha is writing long ago before 9/11 and so on and perhaps uses the term a little loosely, but I have to say when I hear somebody addressing me, someone not in the academy--because of course, people have contempt for me in the academy, too, but it's a more complicated thing. They may not have contempt for other professors, if you see what I mean, so that's more complicated. But when someone not in the academy addresses me as "professor," I suppose I can't say that I feel terrorized exactly, but I do feel depressed. > That's an important part of the double consciousness of the subaltern, as Bhabha expatiates on it. Then in any case, finally there is the deconstructive moment of gender theory in which gender is understood not as something essential but as something performed-- something brought into existence not just by verbal discourse but by all the semiotic systems, including gesture, dress, and all the rest of it that constitutes the way in which gender comes into being. Now in each case you have instances of knowledge as negation. I'm just trying to pull this back into the perspective of what we recognize perhaps more readily as literary theory. By "knowledge as negation" I mean semiotic knowledge, something that I've been trying to stress really as a central theme throughout this course. "I am--well, I don't know what I am, but I'll tell you this: I'm not that." In other words, the way in which I come to understand myself as not that-- and I, of course, am the person who possesses hegemonic discourse, so I see myself, I come to understand myself for the first time in the argument of a Toni Morrison or an Edward Said or, in a certain sense, of a Judith Butler. I come to understand, in a way, for the first time when I reflect on what I'm not-- that is to say, when I try to objectify or to pigeonhole that which I'm not, which is of course not what I'm really not but what I suppose myself not to be. In all of these ways then, you can see that the way in which, according to the sorts of thinking we have been reviewing in recent weeks, one comes to understand oneself is precisely negative in the tradition of semiotic and formalist understandings of language. I am not at all necessarily what I am. I am precisely as I understand it not that, not the other; and I grasp myself perhaps in ways that deepen my alleged understanding of myself as a result of this negative process. All right. So I say all these things again to reassure you that we still are talking about literary theory, that the ways of thinking about things that we've encountered recently really do arise out of issues given to us by deconstruction and by negation in the semiotic and formalist tradition. We can understand what has happened basically-- this in terms of the overall structure of the course-- not as a change in the structure of thought we examined when we took up language as the primary determinant of understanding, but as a transformation of language-- the determinant of social understanding-- into what we call "a social text"; so that our head now is not the repository of Saussure's langue, that is something that just sits there in and of itself as a system, but rather it's full of other people's language. It is a space in which society itself understood as discourse jostles for attention and struggles somehow or another to shape itself into intelligibility. That's the fundamental change. Language is still preeminent in the kinds of thinking that we've been doing. We haven't really gotten away from language, but we have altered our understanding of language. Language is now a social text. It is now, in Bakhtin's words, other people's language, and we understand it therefore not-- and of course, semiotics and deconstruction don't understand it as our own either, because language always precedes us; but we understand it more clearly as something that is given to us as a social formation that in turn forms us. In a way that does bring us to our topic today because this topic, almost the last topic of the course, has to do with the preconditions of interpretation. What makes it possible for us to think something? How is it that we come to think one thing as opposed to another thing? How is it that there are areas of agreement among us? How is it, for that matter, that there are areas of disagreement among us and indeed that these areas characteristically seem to be so nonnegotiable? > The point arises at which we just can't find ourselves in agreement on things just as the point arises when we realize that we are in some profound way in agreement about other things. How is it that all of this comes to be? In order to do that, let's first go back to Tony the Tow Truck. Because we've said all along that it's about whatever it is that we happen to be talking about, let's think about Tony once again as being about the things we've been discussing recently. We can say, for example, that Tony is a Marxist contestation of the social determinacy of identity in other forms. It's a realist text because, as we've said before, nothing happens. There is no change in the social formations that are the givens of the story, but it nevertheless does lay out the relationship among social norms in ways that show that life goes on despite social inequality, despite--of course here I'm going to throw something at you that you perhaps hadn't thought of so much in terms of Tony before-- despite ethnic and gender difference. Now what happens then in Tony, to move to a slightly different way of thinking about it, is we can see that it's a global story masked as a story of hybridity in the American melting pot. It should have been perfectly plain to you all along that Tony is an Italian American with the complex personality of the subaltern. On the one hand, he believes in the American dream. He likes his job. He buys into the system, in other words, but on the other hand he recognizes that he has his own place in the world, the little yellow garage. It's his niche in the world and it's something that is partly what affords him his identity. Neato, of course, on the other hand is the neurotic WASP in the manor house, sort of representing that sort of class, and Speedy very interestingly is a member of what John Guillory calls "the professional/managerial class." What's interesting about Speedy is that suddenly we realize that his ethnic origins, his class origins, and even his gender-- because he may be a woman--are not perhaps as relevant as one might have imagined them to be because the professional/managerial class is interesting-- as Guillory's source, Alvin Gouldner, points out at length--precisely as the emergence of a body of people with common interests who really can't be said, at least, to derive from, or perhaps in a way even to belong to, a common class. Speedy is certainly in Tony the Tow Truck a representative of this new emerging class. Perhaps it's no accident that Neato comes first. I think memory serves me in saying that Neato comes first in the sort of folkloric triad because Neato represents an older class, a class which in a certain sense is giving way to the professional/managerial class. It makes sense that first you get Neato and then you would get Speedy. So then we can also think of Tony the Tow Truck, of course, in terms of gender. We've said there are no women in it, and yet at the same time you do have those frowning and smiling houses sort of embodying the angel in the house, but it's not just that. Obviously, Neato--I've never drawn a picture of Neato but with his little bow tie and his prissy "Oh, I don't want to get dirty" he's just a bundle of gay stereotypes. > Then obviously with Bumpy, he pushes and pushes--you don't even want to go there. > In any case, this is plainly a story about gender, and so you can see that it's about all these things. So then here is the question, and it really does provide us with our transition to today's materials: what have I been doing all this time with Tony the Tow Truck? I've been doing exactly, as you can see now, what Fish does with Jacobs, Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and Ohmann. I've been showing that if you bring a certain supposition to what you're reading, you're going to perform a certain kind of hermeneutic act, not with any particular strain but more or less spontaneously because that's what you are conditioned to do. Now Fish's class had no trouble construing the assignment for his previous class as a poem, and you can see, of course, that it was sort of ready to hand to be construed that way. Fish admits that, but he's lecturing some people in Kenyon College and he just sort of runs his finger down the list of faculty names and says, "Look what I could do with these names." I think he does make his point because you can do it with absolutely anything. We can see, of course, that his class actually missed a few points. It forgot to mention that an ancient and important meaning of the word "Levin" is lightning, so that a flash of revelation is entailed in any religious understanding of the poem. It's almost impossible to understand why his class was stumped by the word "Hayes" because "Hayes"-- well, we see things through a glass darkly. We see them in a haze, and that's exactly the way in which we're likely to respond to instances of religious revelation as they are given in the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century. In any case, what we've been doing with Tony the Tow Truck is of this kind. We've taken a text with a--by the way, you may want to know whether I think Tony is really about something as opposed to about all those things. Well, I actually do, and I mentioned it in passing, but it's only an intuition and it really doesn't arise out of any particular predilections I have for psychoanalysis. It does seem to me, however, that a story written to that age group in which the climactic line is "He pushed and he pushed and I'm on my way" is pretty obviously about one thing as opposed to a lot of other things. If you really pushed me about what Tony the Tow Truck is about, I would say, "Well, I think it's an anal phase parable and that Robert Kraus very possibly wrote it for that purpose. In other words, this would engage the attention of the toddler who is having the story read to him or her, and its meaningfulness probably is going to come across to the toddler in that way perhaps in more pronounced fashion than in any other-- certainly and obviously in a more pronounced fashion than most of the ways in which we've been talking about the text. So that's what I think. Of course, I've disclaimed any connection with psychoanalysis but nevertheless I know something about it, and so that's part of my interpretive community. We'll get back to that. In any case, we've been treating Tony the Tow Truck in this way and we have been, well, nodding our heads and saying, "Yeah, yeah, it's about that, too," and "Guess so, yeah. Interesting, isn't it? Wonder what it's going to be about on Thursday." We've been doing this because we belong to an interpretive community. Now I want immediately to add here two caveats. I would say that within the interpretive community that makes up this room, a community of people who are interested in interpretation, you probably have suspected all along that interpretation was a mug's game and therefore wanted to take a course of this kind to find out just how bad it was. All of us at least have in common a concern with the potential complexity of those circumstances that surround interpretation. We are an interpretive community that's interested in interpretation, so we play the game. However, I would hazard that within this interpretive community there are two sub-communities which probably, in a certain sense, while they see the significance of the exercise, nevertheless want to hold out against it. One of them is the community which either always has or has now come to have a very, very strong commitment to one or another point of view that's been passed in review in this course and who therefore finds it demeaning of the important point of view that it would be treated simply in a survey in a serial way with all sorts of other points of view that may or may not supplant or jostle with it. Now this takes us back to the remarks I was making at the beginning about the way in which one can perhaps acknowledge the usefulness of a survey course but nevertheless bridle at the very idea of a survey course when, after all, the only thing that matters is Marx's thought. Why do we spend any time with all of these other approaches to things and so on-- just sort of whichever form of thought is the only thing that matters to you. This would probably lead you to say not so much that Tony is only about this one thing but "Oh, this is a really facile and irrelevant exercise because the important thing is to take this one thing seriously." The implication is that if you take a lot of other things in review, you're not taking this one thing seriously. So that might be one sub-community within our interpretive community. Another one might be a sub-community that is still committed, as one's tempted to say, to high culture and says, "I think we should have used 'Lycidas' or 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.' It was demeaning to high culture to use Tony the Tow Truck and furthermore," this sub-community might very well say, "if we had used 'Lycidas' or 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,' a certain approach, a certain way of reading either of those poems, would have made sense self-evidently-- meaning that all of the other approaches are trivial." If your commitment is not so much to one point of view as to some idea of high culture, you're not going to say in advance which approach it is, but you're going to suppose that somehow or another such is the value and nature of high culture that it will be possible to arrive at a sort of consensus view of what's going on in one of its products. This is what Guillory is talking about at least in part in his review of defenses of Western civilization, Western culture and so on. They have a meaning. They have a continuity. They have a stability which is worth preserving and which ought to be the central business of the schools to promulgate. So those are possible sub-communities within our interpretative community, but we all do have in common the recognition that it's possible to riff on a text in this way. If somebody does it, we recognize that whether we like it or not, we ourselves could probably do it ,too-- which is proof, from Stanley Fish's point of view and also from John Guillory's point of view, because we're in a school that we have a great deal in common. It's what we have in common that brings the text into visibility in the variety of ways that we've performed on it. Now with all of this said, let's talk a little bit more about what an interpretive community is first, according to Stanley Fish, and then move to the point where we may wish to suggest one form or another of criticism of this idea. Let's begin with Fish's first sentence, which is on page 1023, the upper left-hand column. This is a series of lectures, and so he begins by saying: Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretative communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those activities produce. I don't know that he really carries his argument all that much farther forward in this lecture, which is why I think it's worthwhile to begin with this sentence because in some ways it does anticipate what he then lays out once more in this lecture. Now an interesting thing about the career of Stanley Fish is that he actually, in the course of that quite high-visibility career, changed his mind twice. His changes of mind are actually recorded residually in this essay that you read, "How Do We Recognize a Poem when We See One?" which, by the way, is a completely disingenuous title because we don't see poems. > That's the whole point. There is no poem there. If it's there, it's because you put it there. In any case, these changes of mind are residually present in this text. They are actually manifest in the peculiar vagary of the argument of an earlier essay he wrote called "Interpreting the Variorum," which is what was in the second edition of > the Richter anthology and the one that I used to teach, but I think it's still worth harkening back to those changes of mind. When I was his student at the University of California, he held his first opinion. This was just before he published Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, a book for which a seminar that I was in was a kind of guinea pig. To give you an example of what he meant by saying that a stable text produces a reader, which was his first belief, I give you an example that he uses from Milton about Satan's spirit. This is Satan standing by the fiery lake. He's just pulled himself up to his full height, he has a spear, and Milton writes about it [points to board]: His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine [okay: spear, pine about the same size] Hewn… to be the Mast of some great Ammiral [well, let's see, mast-pine-spear] were but a wand… Then you realize that the sequence of sizes is completely reversed and what you thought, what you'd already filled your consciousness with-- the tallest pine--is just a wand compared with the size of Satan's spear. So what's he saying? He's saying you think that your mind can grasp the magnitude of Satan, you think you know how big Satan is, but the language of Paradise Lost is going to teach you, is going to educate you into realizing that you shouldn't mess with Satan because Satan is much bigger than you think he is. What I didn't write here, and what continues the passage, shows that even here Satan is absolutely at his weakest. The passage continues [points to board]: "He walkt with to support uneasy steps…" In other words, he's just risen from the fiery lake. He's as weak as he's ever going to be right now > and yet he's already a lot more than you can handle. That is the way the syntax of Paradise Lost educates us into realizing that every time we think we grasp the point of a text, we prove that we are fallen readers, that we have prematurely understood what's there, and that only understanding it in the long run can prevail upon us to realize the fallen condition, which the text is obviously after all about. That was Fish's first opinion. Not too long after that, in the course of writing a book called Self-Consuming Artifacts, he began to have a different opinion which more or less reversed the first one. He decided it isn't the text that brings the reader into being-- that is to say, brings about the self-realization on my part that I'm a fallen being in the case of Paradise Lost. It isn't the text that brings the reader into existence. It's the reader that brings the text into existence. It's the reader, after all, who performed this act of reading, and it's the reader who made visible in the text the possibility that this is what Milton is doing. So he reverses his field while retaining the same structure of argument and the same range of insight about what one can think about a text. Well, that was fine until he realized that a reader has to come from someplace. A reader isn't just an autonomous being. This is where he realized that the third step in his development, his second change of mind, means this: it's not the text that produces the reader, it's not the reader that produces the text, but it's the community that produces the reader who in turn produces the text. Those three points in other words map the progress of his thinking on these issues. Take a quick look at page 1025, the right-hand column. He says, bottom of the paragraph: "Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them." When he says that, he's only at phase two of his thinking, because there is still the possibility open to the reader of thinking that the interpreter is an autonomous being whose thoughts, whose interpretive powers, and whose strategies of reading emanate from something from within. Then on page 1027 he clarifies, toward the bottom of the right-hand column: "This does not, however, commit me to subjectivity..." In other words, it's not just a question of whatever I think is in a text is in a text. I'm the one who makes the text, and you make the text, and the other person makes the text. We all make different texts because we all have different subjectivities--that's not what he's saying. This does not, however, commit me to subjectivity because the means by which they are made are social and conventional. In other words, I can't have an off-the-wall interpretation of anything if anyone else ever hears it. Yeah, if I'm > just in my room, surrounded by yellow wallpaper or something like that, I suppose I can have an off-the-wall interpretation of something, but if I try to publish it, forget it. When I try to publish, when I try to express myself, when I expose myself to any aspect of the public sphere, my interpretation--if it's to be judged as an interpretation at all, if it's to count as an interpretation, and if it's to count as an opinion-- must already be enmeshed in the interpretative community to which it's addressed. It must have some sort of link with that community. It must involve some sort of membership or relationship with that community, so that what Fish concludes is that there are neither subjects nor objects. In other words, this is Fish's way, following Derrida and deconstruction, of attacking the Western metaphysical tradition. As long as we suppose that understanding is a matter of parsing or coming to terms with subject-object relations, we're on the wrong track to understanding. We have to understand the way in which neither the subject nor the object can be said to have a stable existence, to have integrity of any kind, before we can come closer to grasping how it is that interpretation is made and achieved. We've seen this before all the way back at the beginning of the semester when we talked about fore-having in Heidegger and Gadamer, about the way in which we always see something as something: we never see it as an object, we never see it in and of itself. We've seen this before, but there is a slight difference because Heidegger and Gadamer hold out the object as a standard against which one's opinions about it can be tested. In other words, the hermeneutic circle is a movement back and forth between interpretation and what's being interpreted, so that what's being interpreted is a constant check on the process of interpretation just as interpretation, as it deepens, is a finer and finer outlining of the nature of the object. So the hermeneutic circle which resembles, which anticipates the thinking of Fish in that it insists on the way in which all interpretation begins as preconception, nevertheless does also entail that subtle difference in that the object is there. It's not that Fish denies the existence of objects--although sometimes his rhetoric makes it seem that way. He simply denies that we can know them as objects at any point. We bring them into being, and in bringing them into being we construct them in whatever way it is that we construct them. Okay. Interpretive community. What do we make of this idea of interpretive community? I have just said we all belong to an interpretive community. We sitting here all belong to an interpretive community. There may be a couple of sub-communities here, but basically we're an interpretive community. We understand each other, and yet at the same time it's equally the case, as I'm sure all of you are thinking to yourselves, that no one of us has exactly the same set of opinions as anyone else. We say we belong to an interpretive community. We can in fact, according to a certain weak form of the argument, understand the way in which yes, we do bring things into being according to certain habits that have evolved through our membership in such a community; but at the same time we say, "Guess what? I don't quite interpret > Jacobs, Rosenbaum and the rest of them in the way Fish's class did. I still don't interpret it in the way that Professor Fry supplemented their interpretation. I interpret it a little differently, and furthermore I knew all along it wasn't a poem. You can't fool me," and so on. Each of us says to ourselves, "Okay. Yeah, we have certain things in common, but there are also ways in which we differ." What would Fish say to that? I think what he would say is this, and I do think this needs to be acknowledged: it weakens his position. He would say, "All right, granted: in a rough sense, we belong here-- just as John Guillory says in a rough sense we're all in a school-- we belong to an interpretive community; but there's another sense in which we are each of us the sum total, the composite, of all the interpretive communities to which we now in some way or another have an affinity and from which, in all the variety of ways one can mention, we have emerged. Yes, we're each different because the sum of the interpretive communities to which we belong, constituting the ultimate interpretive community that indeed we are, is always going to be a little different from the sum of the communities to which other people belong. This reduces the idea of interpretive community to a kind of atomism whereby we all concede and all say, "Yes, it's true. I am in a certain sense a community." That's all Bakhtin said: "I am a community. I am a community and, of course, what communities do when they think is interpret." Thinking is interpretation. But at the same time "What's the point," we then say, "of saying I'm a community if, in fact I'm a little different from everybody else?" Why not retain a certain sense of subjectivity, or why not at least retain that sense of individuality which results from the fact that none of us ultimately or completely on every particular agree with anybody else-- the reason being that the sum of our interpretative communities that makes up that fundamental community to which we say we belong is always a little bit different?" Now there is another argument against this position which might be called radical constructivism. We hear very frequently from sociobiological thinkers like Edward O. Wilson, for example, who point out that consciousness is hard wired to do and to recognize all sorts of things. It has been shown in the lab that aesthetic preference, which of course was always held up to derision as anything like an objective standard-- "There is no disputing tastes," we always say-- but even aesthetic preference, it's been shown in the lab, involves certain predilections we all do have in common. We all prefer the so-called golden section, we love arches, and this can explained in all sorts of ways. The most common explanation has to do with what's called shelter theory. We like shapes that somehow or another offer shelter or protection. In any case, the fairly conclusive evidence is that in a variety of ways, we are hard wired to recognize things. Darwin's last book is all about how we recognize each other's expressions, we recognize the expressions of animals with which we have a great deal in common, and that we do this from infancy--in other words, all sorts of evidence to this effect. I'm not sure Fish's argument is vulnerable to that position because, after all, hard wiring is communitarian. > The point is precisely that we all have it and that it's not something that we can call individual, not something that we can call autonomous to any one of us as individuals. So it seems to me that although the argument against so-called radical constructivism usually does take this form, it actually is not a very good argument, and that the argument objecting to the mere weakness of the way in which interpretive community as a concept ultimately becomes atomistic is a stronger argument; because what does it matter if I'm an interpretive community if I'm still a community of one? In some measure, it's something that seems less worth talking about once one's put it in those terms. Very quickly then on Guillory whose argument actually ended the very debate that he thinks is going to intensify and get worse. In other words, he thought that the big, hot-button topic in the academic world for the next twenty-five years or more would be the canon wars: canonical, non-canonical, cultural, and multicultural-- he thought this would be the fundamental point of contention in the academic world. Well, it wasn't, and the reason it wasn't is that his argument was so brilliant everybody came to their senses and realized > that they were barking up the wrong tree, literally. His book, Cultural Capital, simply silenced not the public, because nothing ever silences the public, > but simply silenced the debate about the culture wars in the academy. In some ways Guillory amusingly undermines his own prophecy, which by the way is on page 1477 in the upper right-hand column if you care to read it. Now Guillory's main preoccupation-- which he takes largely from Pierre Bourdieu but also, as he argues in a long constructive digression, from Antonio Gramsci--his main preoccupation is with the school as a means of establishing and proliferating what Gramsci called "hegemony." The school, in other words, on this argument doesn't typically-- and we'll come back to the exception that Guillory himself does make-- doesn't typically send out into the world minds armed with specific bodies of knowledge or understanding. It sends out into the world, especially when it's a question of the humanities-- which Guillory thinks are painting themselves into the corner in their obtuseness-- the school sends out into the world people endowed with a certain quantum of cultural capital. It repeats, in other words--in Bourdieu's term it "reproduces"-- a structure of class, but really class in the sort of super-structural sense: class superiority that regardless of the specific content that a person supposes himself to have been mastering, simply replicates an orientation to the ruling class that the school in Western culture, according to Guillory, has always had. What the school reproduces is not knowledge so much as itself, the attitude that it embodies, its reason for being, its reason for continuation, and its relation to power and state apparatus. That's Guillory's basic position and it's why he says that the culture wars simply play into the hands of the monolithic ideology of the school. What happens when you embrace multiculturalism as the only means of inculcating what Guillory calls "progressive pedagogy"-- what happens when you embrace multiculturalism, according to Guillory, is that you deracinate the objects of your intention from the culture to which they belong in precisely the way that the great monuments of Western civilization have long since been deracinated from their historical and cultural circumstances. You reduce both Western Civ and alternative canons to the same deracinated, rootless sort of nature as cultural capital. "I have read this. I have a certain status and negotiability in the world as having read this." In the case of Western Civ, it's quotations from the poets and after-dinner speeches. In the case of multicultural curricula, it's the opportunity to allude in precisely the same way on largely the same occasions, and in either case it has nothing to do with learning anything, according to Guillory, about the historical and social circumstances in which any kind of cultural production are grounded. Now the argument depends, of course, on supposing that the way in which the great works are taught is as though they embody certain ideas of principles. That is to say, they're taught as messages, in Guillory's view, whatever form of message it might be. The Western canon has a message about the importance of being an American. The multicultural canon has a contestatory message about the importance of being whoever happens to be speaking, but in each case they're merely messages. They're not cultural artifacts. They don't emerge from the real sort of historical and living circumstances in which they are written, which of course is, most broadly speaking, simply an appeal to method, a new way of teaching. Guillory's own deepest commitment is, in fact, to the great works. Guillory began as an early modern scholar. He wrote a very, very fine first book on Spenser and Milton. His later work in literary sociology in no ways discredits or undermines the fact that earlier in his career he was interested in a cultural canon. In fact, probably the most interesting chapter in Cultural Capital is maybe not this introductory theoretical one but an amazing chapter in which he shows how Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" came to predominate in English curricula even though it was written in the vernacular, in English. He shows in other words how "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," in the way in which it situated itself in culture at that time, actually undermined the premium place on the classics, on Latinity, and helped the emergence of a vernacular national curriculum. It's an absolutely brilliant argument in which "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" is itself constantly and steadily and fascinatingly invoked. In other words, Guillory himself likes the classics. Perhaps the most interesting part of this argument is the way in which the Western Civ mavens are simply fooled about their own understanding of what a canon is because perpetually, history changes canons. The more books you get, the fewer you can read, and the more gets dropped out of any curriculum, including the Western Civ curriculum. Today we're proud if we're proponents of great books. We're proud of reading Plato and Aristotle. In the old days, people didn't stop with Plato and Aristotle. They read everything there was to read in Greek and Latin culture and then they read such few books as may have been published in English. Well, a great deal has happened since then, and perforce modern languages and literatures have altered the canon always to the end of thinning it out. More and more gets left out. This is an inevitability even in the so-called "canonical" and therefore itself needs to acknowledge the centrality of historical change. Guillory's argument obviously hinges on the failure of anybody involved in these debates to distinguish between the two forms of culture. > There is culture, the kind of culture on which a person without any education at all and the new professional/managerial class can meet, the kind of culture in which precisely literature doesn't matter. Who needs literature? "I'm running Hewlett-Packard. Do I need literature?" At the same time, there is the kind of culture with a capital K, as we say, which is all about the great books, high culture, the monuments of civilization, and so on. Guillory says the total disconnect in the way in which we understand the relations between these two forms of culture is what leads to the kinds of deracination in teaching that he complains about. He himself finally thinks that anything is fair game to be taught, and it can be taught progressively as long as it is taught in terms of its social and historical circumstances. He points out that a great book--I will quote this and then I'll leave you-- is great in part because it can't possibly be reduced to the silliness that the advocates of Western Civ attach to it. He says, page 1482, right-hand column: No cultural work of any interest at all is simple enough to be credibly allegorized in this way, because any cultural work will objectify in its very form and content the same social conflicts that the canon debate allegorizes by means of a divided curriculum. The Odyssey is full of lying, trickery, class betrayal. In The Iliad, perhaps the most interesting character, as I'm sure you'll all agree, is Thersites who is scarcely an advocate of the values that we associate with Western culture. In any case, this is what Guillory means by saying that you cannot monumentalize anything in this way if you read it carefully and attentively enough. So ultimately it's simply a program for reading. Okay. Next time we'll talk about the idea that we shouldn't have theory at all.

Literature_Lectures

16_Marilynne_Robinson_Housekeeping_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Today is Novel Pitch Day. Does everyone have a ballot? If you don't have a ballot, there are some down here. We have a wonderful list of six novels, all brought to you by students from this class. I'll tell you, my dream is that one day someone will pitch their own novel. That's my dream, and yeah, this could happen. Yes. Okay. Are you ready? Ballot? Here you go. So, without further ado, is everybody ready? Now, each of these students has been given five minutes only to make their presentation, and at the end of it you will rank your top three choices, 1 for your first choice, 2 for your second choice, 3. The TFs will take your ballots. They will leave the room. I will begin to lecture on Housekeeping, and when they've added it all up, which should go pretty fast because there are nine of them and they're very good at adding. You have to know that to get in to the Ph.D. programs here. There is a little arithmetic test. They will add it all up, and then I will announce at the end of the class which book it will be. So, without further ado, Emma Barash will come and talk to us. Emma: Well, thank you, Professor Hungerford. I'm Emma Barash, and I am pitching Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. So, what is Baldwin like? Well, Baldwin is one of the great twentieth-century American authors, and he has some really unique insights into human interaction and a shrewd sensitivity into the internal lives of his characters. His background kind of shines through his prose. He is the son of a preacher, so his words have this really strong, sort of, grandness to them, and there's a really, really unique resonance to everything he writes. Anyway, so Baldwin, in my opinion, isn't read as often as he should in academic settings, so I chose this book because I wanted to use this opportunity to read Baldwin at Yale. And a nifty little fact about Giovanni's Room: It's about 150 pages. Yeah. And, it's eminently readable, so that's a big plus at the end of the semester. But also, I didn't just choose Giovanni's Room because it's short. I chose it because it fits seamlessly with our syllabus. So, what's Giovanni's Room about? Well, Giovanni's Room is the story of David, a twenty-something man who flees America to Paris in hopes of finding himself. While in Paris David finds a fiancé, Hella, and, in her absence, another lover, Giovanni, a man. So, the novel spirals around David's reverie on one particular evening, the evening of Giovanni's execution. I don't want to ruin any more of the book, so I'll let you wonder what offense Giovanni has committed. Now, Giovanni's Room fits with the notion of the Identity Plot which Professor Hungerford was discussing a lot last week, but here the identity problem is founded in sexuality, a fascinating issue which the literature we've studied so far has yet to explore. So, Giovanni's Room complicates the Identity Plot further, but Giovanni's Room also explores national identity. It is an American novel of expatriotism, an American in Paris. So without further ado I want to read a passage in which David realizes his alienation from America and from American-ness. So, here he is walking into the American post office in Paris to pick up his mail: Yet walking into the American Express office one harshly gray midsummer afternoon, I was forced to admit that this active, so disquietingly cheerful horde struck the eye at once as a unit. At home I could have distinguished patterns, habits, accents of speech with no effort whatever. Now, everybody sounded, unless I listened hard, as though they had just arrived from Nebraska. At home I could have seen the clothes they were wearing, but here I only saw bags, cameras, belts and hats--all clearly from the same department store. At home I would have had some sense of the individual womanhood of the women I faced. Here, the most ferociously accomplished seemed to be involved in some ice-cold or sun-dried travesty of sex, and even grandmothers seemed to have had no traffic with the flesh. And what distinguished the men was that they seemed incapable of age. They smelled of soap, which seemed, indeed, to be their preservative against the dangers and exigencies of any more intimate odor. The boy he had been shone somehow unsoiled, untouched, unchanged through the eyes of the man of sixty, booking passage with his smiling wife to Rome. His wife might have been his mother forcing more oatmeal down his throat, and Rome might have been the movie she had promised to allow him to see. Yet, I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth, and perhaps not even the most important part. Beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected. Okay. All right. Here you see that miserable sense of separation, that confusion, that hopelessness that Baldwin crafts, that loss of identity, and perhaps you can begin to see the beauty and the might of his language which molds such a powerful story of love, of loss, and--most importantly--of self. Okay. Thank you. Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. Kelsey, where are you? There you are. Kelsey: Hello. I'm Kelsey, and the book that I'm pitching is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. It is about a certain insane asylum, and the narrator is a six-foot-seven schizophrenic deaf mute Indian chief named Chief Bromden, whose life is turned upside down by a brutal and hedonistic man named Randall McMurphy. And Ken Kesey, who I need to talk about a little bit, was sort of a rock star. He was to the hippie generation what Jack Kerouac was to the Beat generation. He was an era's most outspoken proponent of LSD. He and his Merry Pranksters went on the road in their Magic Bus touting it across the nation. One road trip that he took in 1964 with Neal Cassady, the same Neal Cassady who Dean Moriarty was crafted after, was written down in a book by Tom Wolfe called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip so he has that, sort of, in common with Jack Kerouac. And I'd like to play a little clip that I have from a BBC interview with Kesey about LSD's effects on his writing. Oh, just some background information: While he was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he was working in a mental institution. [Announcer:] Kesey's experiences at the hospital inspire him to write a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He claims the drugs enhanced his creativity. [Kesey:] I would have not been able to write that well without LSD. I could see a reality with a new light shining on it, and it goes right through your eyes to your fingertips. Taking acid was a shortcut to enlightenment that we were given in this century, for those of us who would like to go on to better realities and understand and respect and say, "Okay. The door has been opened. This is the key that opened it." Kelsey: Okay. So, the door that Kesey opens in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reveals the inner workings of an insane asylum. This, of course, draws attention to the one most obvious, and also most complicating theme of the book, that of madness. We've touched on the theme of madness before with Lolita and with Franny and Zooey, but I don't think we have addressed it as explicitly as we would with this book. The book is set in an insane asylum. There is no way to avoid insanity. At first glance that might seem like a very straightforward assertion. However, the very sense of omnipresent madness in the book is one that, I think, ropes this book very neatly into the argument of Professor Hungerford's syllabus. I think it's an intensification of most of the themes we've studied so far, for example the Identity Plot. I think it's a very unique manifestation of the Identity Plot, because the people in the insane asylum are perhaps one of the most isolated groups that you could possibly be a part of. They're isolated by their own neuroses, the tyranny of the nurses and a barricade of concrete, plexiglass and barbed wire. I think if you imagine any attempt to find yourself within the confines of a sanitorium, you can sort of see how interesting a story would be crafted on that. Another theme that we have talked about is the relationship between language and experience. We talked about that with John Barth, and I think that's a really important question to focus on, when you're reading a book like this, because you have to think to yourself as you're reading: how does an author accurately capture the experience of insanity, and, more importantly, how can we as readers trust a narrator that's self-diagnosed as insane? And, in that same vein: what is truth, and how does one portray truth? I'd like to read a passage from the book. This is at the very beginning, when we're first introduced to the Chief, and he decides that he is going to begin telling about all this: …about the hospital, and her, and the guys, and about McMurphy. I've been silent so long, now it's going to roar out of me like flood waters, and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving. My God, you think this is too horrible to have really happened. This is too awful to be the truth, but, please, it's so hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it, but it's the truth even if it didn't happen. So, I think you can see the confusion that can arise from having an insane narrator. One of the most enticing aspects of this book is that it is funny. There are extremely hilarious aspects of this book. I don't know if any of you have seen the movie, or at least that famous clip of Jack Nicholson laughing like a maniac. The movie, in general, doesn't do the book justice at all, whatsoever, of course. But I think that one moment is quintessentially Ken Kesey, and he uses humor as his most powerful tool in conveying his deep and serious messages in this book. One thing that I want to point out is, there is this really fascinating thing that happens over the course of this book, and it's this. There is an X that frames the plot. And that X: one arm is the Chief's ascension from insanity, and the other arm is McMurphy's descension into insanity. And I think, if we choose this book, one of the most challenging aspects of our analysis of it will be to find where the two slopes of those intersect. Just to wrap up, I think that this book is absolutely phenomenal, and it's completely engrossing. My own introduction to it was completely random. It was one of the books that my roommate happened to throw into her suitcase before she came to Yale, and I read it at the beginning of the year. I took it with me to my grandparents' over a weekend, and I didn't sleep the entire weekend 'cause I was reading it. And I think, if you choose this book, each and every one of you will be equally as enthralled. So, I hope you pick it. Professor Amy Hungerford: Miranda.Miranda: Hi. I'm pitching Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Joan Didion is, in my mind, one of the greatest intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. She is perhaps best known for her journalism, particularly her collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I believe came out in 1968, in which she coolly confronts and sensibly analyzes the confusing cultural climate of the late 1960s. What I think is most remarkable about her reporting is the lack of naiveté with which this literally tiny woman-- I don't know if you any of you seen a picture of her. She's just remarkably small. So, she is clear-eyed, but not unsympathetic, innocent but detached, and above all candid in her assessment of her country and her time. The voice that she develops in Slouching Towards Bethlehem serves her very well in Play It As It Lays. She's able here, too, to draw the same sort of precise portraits that she relied upon in her nonfiction, that results in a novel that is positively, undeniably seductive. The plot revolves around a sort of marginal actress, Maria Wyeth, who is divorced from her director husband and who drifts aimlessly through the Hollywood party scene of the late 1960s waiting for something to touch her, impact her emotionally and morally. She's both damaged and, as a result, utterly unreachable. Tragedies--and there are many, major and minor, that sort of blithely by--slip off her or appear to. It is a novel very much about a woman who accepts everything, feels nothing, and finally resigns herself to the inevitable. The inevitable is, in many cases, trivial fates dealt out at cocktail parties. It is told in several voices, Maria's and three of her closest friends, and each character is haunted by an ineffable loss of meaning and consequences that they either ignore or are ignorant of, willfully or otherwise. In many ways these characters' lives are coming or drifting apart, and their lack of awareness of this fact becomes, through Didion's prose, our own, so that the shock of the final scenes is both powerful and hopelessly hollow. And I don't mean that in the negative sense. I mean that we feel that consequences perhaps are unimportant, that there is something larger at work. So, Play It As It Lays, I think, fits very nicely into the syllabus because it provides a beautiful contrast to The Crying of Lot 49 in that it depicts the disintegration of southern California, and specifically L.A., in a much less manic, but no less troubling way. Didion's language, in its flat, plain tone, mimics the flat, plain Los Angeles of her narrative, as Pynchon's convoluted, elusive language does his perplexing and intricate portrait of the city. Also, as with Housekeeping, the loss of self is imagined as a dispersal, though Didion's dispersal is a cold, defensive and ultimately empty one. Slouching Towards Bethlehem begins with a quote from Yeats that includes the phrase "The center will not hold." This has become very emblematic of that era. Maria, who in the first few pages declares that nothing applies to her, is perhaps one of the most poignant examples of the personal consequences of the loosening, the loss of cultural restrictions in the 1960s, a time when, in fact, none of the old rules applied to her or anyone else. Didion proposes that the consequences of this freedom might be more than any single individual can cope with, that in fact if nothing applies, the individual center, no lesson societies cannot hold. It is an account of the '60s that appears perhaps elsewhere, but was, I think, defined by Didion in this novel, and I want to read a very brief passage from the beginning. Here we go. I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point. But because the pursuit of reasons is their business here--[she is, I believe, at this point institutionalized] they ask me questions: "Maria, yes or no: I see a clock in this inkblot. Maria, yes or no?" A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct. I believe my sins are unpardonable. I have been disappointed in love. How could I answer? How could it apply? "Nothing applies," I print with a magnetized IBM pencil. "What does apply?" they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune. "There are only certain facts," I say, trying again to be an agreeable player of the game, "certain facts, certain things that happened." They will misread the facts, invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none exist, but, I told you, that is their business here. And I think it would be wonderful to end the semester with a strong female voice that is darkly amusing, courageous and, especially, cold. And I don't mean cold in the negative sense; just that she approaches things in a sort of detached way that allows you to observe these characters, but not attach yourselves to them in a way that promotes a sort of self-identification that makes it difficult for you to judge their actions. It's also fairly short, just over 200 pages: a fast, captivating read. This is a sort of stupid analogy, but I imagine it's sort of like getting on a highway in L.A. (not during rush hour) but heading to where you're going, maybe east towards the hills, and you get to your exit, sort of, before you realize it. So that's my pitch. Thank you.Will: Hi. My name is Will. I'm pitching Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. I'm actually going to start without introducing it at all. I'm just going to play a clip from the movie that was made of the book. I'm not even going to talk about it. Will: That was a clip from the movie version of Jesus' Son, and this is the book. It's by Denis Johnson, who has been in the news a lot lately because he wrote Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award in 2007. And this book is, kind of, the book that established him as a serious, great author, and I think it's wonderful. It's a collection of stories, and they're all kind of about the same character, one of the characters you saw in there, and kind of the same group of characters runs through all the different stories. And so, it's kind of novelistic in that way, kind of like Lost in the Funhouse, the book we read. I guess, as you might or might not have been able to tell from the clip, the book kind of deals with drug addiction, and the main character is addicted to heroin. But I really think the book kind of transcends the drug genre. I'm not a huge fan of drug books, myself, but I think this book is really beautiful and powerful and devastating and really hilarious, really funny at times. What else? It's short (like everyone else has been saying), but this book really is short. It's only 160 pages, and there really aren't very many words on each page, 'cause it's quite small, as you can see. And really, I find this book-- I don't know how much I want to describe it, but it takes place mostly in Iowa and kind of just travels around, kind of daily things. In one of the stories the main character and his friend decide to rip scrap metal from a house and sell it to make a little money so they can get drunk that night, and just different kind of adventures that they go on. And then the book kind of ends as he makes this kind of pilgrimage to Arizona. It's really beautiful. I guess I'll just read you a quick passage, if that's all right. We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard filled with rows and rows of austere identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there had been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man, the drive-in!" I wasn't sure what these words meant. "They're showing movies in a fucking blizzard," Georgie screamed. "I see. I thought it was something else," I said. We walked carefully down there and climbed through the busted fence and stood in the very back. The speakers which I had mistaken for grave markers muttered in unison. Then there was tinkly music of which I could very nearly make out the tune. Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out of their gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had ever come to see the show, they'd have left when the weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down one from last week, or one left here because it was out of gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath. So, I guess that gives you enough of an idea of it. I think it's great and I think you should vote for it. It's a quick read. It's really riveting and enthralling and I find it really an incredible book. So, Jesus' Son. Eli: Hi. I'm Eli. The book I wanted to pitch was Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. And the main reason I wanted to pitch it, of course, was: Professor Hungerford said that she's waiting for one of us to pitch their own book, and--contrary to conventional wisdom--this is actually my own book, just so you know. But, setting aside authorship issues--the thing is, you just had to introduce the seed of doubt, and then the rumors percolate, so this is good--I love books that have outrageous characters. Actually, hearing some of these pitches, I was like, "oh, maybe I should vote for some of the other books." But I won't tell you that. But, this book does have outrageous characters, which is really cool. And also, I just thought, the pitch, I would just kind of describe some of the characters, and you'd be like, "those characters are indeed outrageous," or go, "I will vote for this book." So, the book kind of takes place in two different worlds. One is the world of Trachimbrod, which is a small shtetl in the eighteenth century, and also Jonathan Safran Foer's ancestral home. And the other world is kind of modern day Ukraine and it features Jonathan Safran Foer on a quest. As, I don't know if you Jews out there, I'm sure, at some point, have done this, as I have, been drawn to Slovakia or Ukraine to find the ancestral home, and that's what Jonathan Safran Foer is doing in this book. So, in the, kind of, modern-day world, there are a number of really cool characters. The main one is the hero, Jonathan Safran Foer, who is also referred to as the "spoiled Jew" and the "ingenious Jew." The other character is his humble translator, Alexander Perchov, who learned English exclusively through the use of a thesaurus (which produces some outrageous results) and who works for the family business, Heritage Touring. His description of it is: It's for Jewish people like the hero who have cravings to leave the ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine. I will be truthful again and mention that before this voyage I had the opinion that Jewish people were having shit between their brains. That is because all I knew of Jewish people was that they paid father very much currency in order to make vacations from America to Ukraine. Food for thought. And then there's also Alex's dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Jr., which is Heritage Touring's "officious seeing-eye bitch." So, that's one world. And in the other world, the world of the shtetl, we have a Well-Regarded Rabbi who speaks exclusively in capitals. We have Brod, a brilliant girl who emerges magically from a river and is adopted by the disgraced usurer, Yankel D. We have two synagogues, the Congregation of the Slouchers and the Congregation of the Upright. We have villagers, including the deceased philosopher, Pinchas T, who in his only notable paper, "To the Dust: From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return," argues that it would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. We have the good gefilte-fish monger, Bitzl Bitzl R. We have the mad squire and village rapist, Sofiowka N. We have Harry V, the shtetl's master logician and resident pervert, who had been working for many years on his magnum opus, "The Host of Hoists," which, he promised, contained the tightest of tight logical proofs that God indiscriminately loves the indiscriminate lover. So, I don't know how many of us that will pardon, in here… So, besides these outrageous characters, I do think this book fits well with the themes of the course. It deals with identity, language and experience, and problems of narration and remembrance. As the New York Times Book Review (I guess you could say) lauded the book, "Not since A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio." So, going with that, I thought I'd read, as people have been inclined to do, a passage from the book. I'm going to take a little risk here. I've been reading the book with a Russian accent in my head, so I figured I would just go with that here. I figured that would have the added benefit of: If you don't vote for this book, then I'll just be the kid who made a fool of himself and read with a Russian accent in front of everybody. So, I know you don't want to do that to me. Yeah. Okay, I think. All right. So here we go. This is Alex kind of introducing himself at the beginning of the book: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa. Lamborghini Countaches are excellent so are cappuccinos. Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle and the Unyielding Zookeeper. If you want to know why so many girls want to be with me, it is because I am very premium person to be with. I am homely and also severely funny and these are winning things. But nonetheless I know many people who dig rapid cars and famous discotheques. There are so many here who perform the Sputnik Bosom Dalliance--which is always terminated with a slimy underface--that I cannot tally them on all of my hands. There are even many people named Alex. (Three in my house alone!) That is why I was so effervescent to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. It would be unordinary. So that's said, and a fool proudly made. That's it. Thank you. Roger: Well, it's really unfortunate to have to go after that, but hi. My name's Roger. I'm presenting for Amina's section, and we're doing Dave Eggers' What is the What (and you can't see the "What" because it's 20% off; plug, plug). And, I guess, rather than try to sum up the book myself, I'll use not the author's but the person about whom the book is written's own words: "What is the What is the soulful account of my life, from the time I was separated from my family in Marial Bai ---- to the thirteen years I spent in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, to my encounter with vibrant Western cultures beginning in Atlanta, to the generosity and challenges that I encountered elsewhere. So, just to add a little bit to that, What is the What is a story of a Sudanese refugee in the United States. And in the course of telling it, he reads an account from his life back in Africa, to stories here in the United States, and everything in between. As for reasons why you should want to vote for it or read it, I think the first thing which many of us in the section realize about the book is just that it's really engaging. It's written in a way that's, I would say, kind of refreshing compared to some of the other more--how to put it?--complex authors that we've read, in that it's just really accessible and really just an easy read that's deeply human. You feel like you're having a conversation with the guy, and (even though the guy is actually having a conversation with Dave Eggers, so maybe that's why you get that impression, but at any rate) it's also a book which manages to address really, really serious current issues such as civil war, genocide, alienation in American society, but do so in a way that's simultaneously really poignant and inspiring, but also, actually, funny. It's not a book that you're going to read and be depressed by, even though you will come from it having really felt that you're dealing with really significant material, which I thought is really cool, and we thought was really cool. It's also--just going on to the whole contemporary thing-- it's written by one of the best contemporary authors out there. He was nominated for a Pulitzer; he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, I think, last year, 2007. (I'm not sure, and if I got that wrong and someone here is a big Eggers fan, I'm terribly sorry.) But yeah; he's great. And, in a course where we're doing from 1945 to the present, I think it's good to have a really strong, really contemporary author represented. So, that's another cool thing. Another thing which I think would be really cool about reading this book is that - it's not your standard academic book at all. You're not going to find this book on any syllabus, but it still really merits being read in that sort of a context because of the depth of the material that's being covered, because of the way it's written. Really, there are some beautiful descriptions with beautiful language. And, well, for any other reason that you'd want to read a book in a class, it can serve that function, and yet you'd probably more like to hear about it in a coffee shop or in a restaurant. So, I think that's a pretty cool opportunity which this would give us. As far as tying in to the course matters, this book is a great, great study, and, I would think, an unprecedented study, as far as the Identity Plot goes, for our class, because as a black African the protagonist is identified not by his ethnicity in the United States, but by his race. And, as is shown in a really very interesting, I guess, scene, at the very beginning of the book, where he's being robbed by a black man who says to him, "Oh, well, we're brothers because you're African" and at the same time derides, only refers to him as African and actually mislabels him as Nigerian when he's Sudanese. So, it really offers some really interesting perspective into issues of race, issues of ethnicity, and just a totally new look at American society from, yeah, a perspective that we're not really used to. I guess, yeah, that basically covers that. As far as some other, maybe a little bit sillier things, this is a great date book for those of you who either are dating or are looking to be dating. It's a book that people are reading all of the time, and, even if they aren't reading, then you can really wow them with just your knowledge of contemporary literature, and to say nothing of your concern for the people who are struggling in America and abroad. So, really, that's a big plug. And it's also won a bunch of awards. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, which I think is good, and the guy from Barnes & Noble would not let me leave the counter because he liked it so much, and he is a good judge. So, those are some really good plugs but as far as a weakness, you might notice it's a little bit bigger than some of the other books that we've read, but I promise you that that's okay. You fly through the pages, and just to give you a sense of why you do that, I'll read to you a section from the book. It's actually the last paragraph of the book, but it's not like one of those spoilers, like "And then your mother died." No. It actually, really, I think, is very fitting to read, now, because it's kind of his plug for why you should read his book, or at least it's a description of why he tells this story. So here we go. Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person I have encountered these last difficult days, and every person who has entered this club during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you, because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other. I am alive, and you are alive, so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell these stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. Thanks. Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Vote. If this were really a high-tech classroom, we'd have a little console for you, and you'd be voting online, but we don't. Okay. Okay. Anyone need a ballot? Okay. Rank them 1,2, 3. TAs get to vote, too. Yes, you do. And when you're finished, pass them to the aisles. Can I borrow your pencil? I am voting too. Okay. Everybody voted? Okay, TFs. Everybody done? Pass them over. Okay. We will see them in a moment. Well, let me say it's a tough act to follow you guys so congratulations to all the people who pitched books, although I have to say I am a little hurt at the implied criticism. Long? Long? Hard? Boring? I don't recognize my own syllabus. Maybe the long, but not the hard and the boring. So, we will see what that next book will be. Now, I have exactly five minutes, so what I think I want to do is just say something very quick about loss in this book. I put this quote up on the board: "Need can blossom into all the compensation it requires." That little blurb, I think, encapsulates this novel's meditation on loss. I asked you last time to think about where Ruth's voice comes from, what situation we can imagine, and there are a bunch of different theories that critics have put forward about where Ruth is and from where we hear her voice coming. One is that she's dead and she's speaking to us from the afterlife, that she really, somehow, did die in the lake that day, that she fell off the bridge, or somehow the bridge is a metaphor for her passage into death. Or that this is an adult Ruth, living who knows where, or just as a transient, who has written this account, or who speaks to us, somehow. I think that quotation from Marilynne Robinson that I gave you at the end of last lecture, about how she aims to speak in the voice of the consciousness of the person--not necessarily the words that they would use if they were to write their own account--suggests that what she is getting at doesn't require that kind of historical explanation to account for it, that she doesn't want us to have to think of Ruth speaking from a particular place, which is also a way to say that Ruth is gone; somehow Ruth is absent from us. And this relates to my point last time about how identity is imagined as voice. Ruth, the historical Ruth, the character Ruth, a Ruth that we could situate in any concrete position in the world, has vanished from the frame of this novel. What we're left with is her voice. The logic here is that vanishing makes the voice totally present; that full human presence is in the voice, somehow inherent. That's why there are all of these meditations on what would happen if various people either did disappear or didn't disappear. So, when Ruth meditates on what it would be like for her to leave Sylvie, she says, "I did not want to grow gigantic and multiple to Sylvie." Her sense is that, by leaving Sylvie, her absence would become enormous, and she herself, in a kind of negative presence, would become larger than she is, and this is how Ruth feels about her own mother's disappearance, that when her mother disappeared, what she got in return was the compensation of memory: sharp, specific, evocative, mysterious, ever-present memory. And the visual metaphor for this kind of memory is, of course, the lake. The lake is imagined to contain whole and undecayed all the objects of the past that have been lost in it. So memory is imagined in the same terms, so that you could always bring them up to the surface and there they would be, whole. So, the resurrection imagined, if you run the film backward of the train slipping in to the lake--I read that passage last time--the kind of resurrection imagined, is the way memory works. But more specifically it's the way the language of memory works. And I want to read my own favorite passage. This is at the very end of the novel, and I want you to think, as I read it, about the difference between this passage and the one I read from Bluest Eye about Pecola, that passage of negativity about her being a kind of blank or a negative, against which all other virtues could be present in the world. So, think about that as I read this, the bottom of 217: Since we are dead, the house would be hers now [hers, Lucille]. Perhaps she is in the kitchen snuggling pretty daughters in her lap. And perhaps now and then they look at the black window to find out what their mother seems to see there, and they see their own faces and a face so like their mother's, so rapt and full of tender watching, that only Lucille could think the face was mine. If Lucille is there, Sylvie and I have stood outside her window a thousand times and we have thrown the side door open when she was upstairs changing beds and we have brought in leaves and flung the curtains and tipped the bud vase and somehow left the house again before she could run downstairs, leaving behind us a strong smell of lake water. She would sigh and think, "they never change." Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed, wearing, say, a tweed suit with an amber scarf at the throat, to draw attention to the red in her darkening hair. Her water glass has left two thirds of a ring on the table and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door, smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats and combing our hair back with our fingers. We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small, damp heap in the middle of the table and sort out the gum wrappers and ticket stubs and add up the coins and dollar bills and laugh and add them again. My mother, likewise, is not there, and my grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail wagging, and my grandfather with his hair combed flat against his brow does not examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the seagulls could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie. So, you see in that incredibly lyrical evocation of absence how the very absence calls forth this lyric voice. The structure is exactly the same as the one that Morrison uses to describe what Pecola is to Claudia and Frieda and the rest of their community. It's a way in which absence calls forth the living essence of other people, but here what's called forth is a sort of living essence of imagination, a living essence of voice, so that Sylvie and Ruth's absence for Lucille becomes the very presence that they have to her. There is a passage earlier in the novel where she describes the condition of the body that matches up with this understanding of absence. She's outside in the orchard--this is on 203--imagining the story of a young girl in a lighted house that she sees. Let's see. It would be that kind of story, a very melancholy story. Her hair, which was as black as the sky, and so long that it swept after her, a wind in the grass, her fingers, which were sky black and so fine and slender that they were only cold touch like drops of rain, her step, which was so silent that people were surprised when they even thought they heard it, she would be transformed by the growth of light into a mortal child. And, when she stood at the bright window, she would find that the world was gone, the orchard was gone, her mother and grandmother and aunts were gone. Like Noah's wife on the tenth or fifteenth night of rain, she would stand in the window and realize that the world was really lost. And those outside would scarcely know her, so sadly was she changed. Before she had been fleshed in air, and clothed in nakedness, and mantled in cold, and her very bones were only slender things like shards of ice. She had haunted the orchard out of preference, but she could walk into the lake without ripple or displacement, and sail up the air invisibly as heat. And now, lost to her kind, she would almost forget them, and she would feed coarse food to her coarse flesh and be almost satisfied. And then Ruth meditates on her transformation in that time in the orchard. If I had stayed there, I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark. And, in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. I would call this an anorexic aesthetic. It's an aesthetic of starving the self into invisibility so that the voice can become present. So in this scene, when she imagines the girl inside the house eating, all that's outside the house is lost. All she can see when she looks out her window is her own reflection. But outside the house, she is starved in to a kind of ethereal, full presence. So the logic of absence--to bring it back around to this question of identity and the identity of the voice--the logic of absence starves away the person so that this fullness can appear. And I think this is the dark side of a novel that so many people initially read as a feminist novel, a novel celebrating the strength and the independence of women. It turns to an aesthetic that has a kind of purchase in our culture; that sense of anorexia blends into the spiritual fullness of imagining memory as this beautiful, lyrical presence. I think this is the complexity of this novel; this is the tension. It's also, in many ways, its beauty. So, now I believe we have an answer. Jonathan Safran Foer. That will be our novel. Eli, congratulations. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful break.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_1_The_Parts_of_the_Whole.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: You don't need me to tell you that human civilization is very, very old. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the earliest stages of human civilization was quite limited for many centuries. That is, until the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which unearthed for us the great civilizations of the Ancient Near East, of which I have drawn a remarkably life-like map here on the board: [laughter] Mediterranean, I always start with the Mediterranean Ocean, the Nile River, the Tigris and the Euphrates. So: the great civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the area we refer to as the Fertile Crescent, of which a little part here about the size of Rhode Island is Canaan. And archaeologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were stunned to find the ruins and the records of remarkable peoples and cultures--massive, complex empires in some cases but some of which had completely disappeared from human memory. Their newly uncovered languages had been long forgotten; their rich literary and legal texts were now indecipherable. That soon changed. But because of those discoveries, we are now in a position to appreciate the monumental achievements of these early civilizations, these earliest civilizations. And so many scholars, and many people, have remarked that it's not a small irony that the Ancient Near Eastern people with one of the, or perhaps the most lasting legacy, was not a people that built and inhabited one of the great centers of Ancient Near Eastern civilization. It can be argued that the Ancient Near Eastern people with the most lasting legacy is a people that had an idea. It was a new idea that broke with the ideas of its neighbors, and those people were the Israelites. And scholars have come to the realization that despite the Bible's pretensions to the contrary, the Israelites were a small, and I've actually overrepresented it here, I'm sure it should be much smaller, a small and relatively insignificant group for much of their history. They did manage to establish a kingdom in the land that was known in antiquity as Canaan around the year 1000. They probably succeeded in subduing some of their neighbors, collecting tribute--there's some controversy about that--but in about 922 this kingdom divided into two smaller and lesser kingdoms that fell in importance. The northern kingdom, which consisted of ten of the twelve Israelite tribes, and known confusingly as Israel, was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians. The southern kingdom, which consisted of two of the twelve tribes and known as Judah, managed to survive until the year 586 when the Babylonians came in and conquered and sent the people into exile. The capital, Jerusalem, fell. Conquest and exile were events that normally would spell the end of a particular ethnic national group, particularly in antiquity. Conquered peoples would trade their defeated god for the victorious god of their conquerors and eventually there would be a cultural and religious assimilation, intermarriage. That people would disappear as a distinctive entity, and in effect, that is what happened to the ten tribes of the northern kingdom to a large degree. They were lost to history. This did not happen to those members of the nation of Israel who lived in the southern kingdom, Judah. Despite the demise of their national political base in 586, the Israelites alone, really, among the many peoples who have figured in Ancient Near Eastern history--the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the Hurrians, the Canaanites--they emerged after the death of their state, producing a community and a culture that can be traced through various twists and turns and vicissitudes of history right down into the modern period. That's a pretty unique claim. And they carried with them the idea and the traditions that laid the foundation for the major religions of the western world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So what is this radical new idea that shaped a culture and enabled its survival into later antiquity and really right into the present day in some form? Well, the conception of the universe that was widespread among ancient peoples is one that you're probably familiar with. People regarded the various natural forces as imbued with divine power, as in some sense divinities themselves. The earth was a divinity, the sky was a divinity, the water was a divinity, had divine power. In other words, the gods were identical with or imminent in the forces of nature. There were many gods. No one single god was therefore all powerful. There is very, very good evidence to suggest that ancient Israelites by and large shared this world view. They participated at the very earliest stages in the wider religious and cultic culture of the Ancient Near East. However, over the course of time, some ancient Israelites, not all at once and not unanimously, broke with this view and articulated a different view, that there was one divine power, one god. But much more important than number was the fact that this god was outside of and above nature. This god was not identified with nature. He transcended nature, and he wasn't known through nature or natural phenomena. He was known through history, events and a particular relationship with humankind. And that idea, which seems simple at first and not so very revolutionary--we will see, that's an idea that affected every aspect of Israelite culture and in ways that will become clear as we move through the course and learn more about biblical religion and biblical views of history, it was an idea that ensured the survival of the ancient Israelites as an entity, as an ethnic religious entity. In various complicated ways, the view of an utterly transcendent god with absolute control over history made it possible for some Israelites to interpret even the most tragic and catastrophic events, such as the destruction of their capital and the exile of their remaining peoples, not as a defeat of Israel's god or even God's rejection of them, but as necessary, a necessary part of God's larger purpose or plan for Israel. These Israelites left for us the record of their religious and cultural revolution in the writings that are known as the Hebrew Bible collectively, and this course is an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as an expression of the religious life and thought of ancient Israel and as a foundational document of western civilization. The course has several goals. First and foremost, we want to familiarize you with the contents of the Hebrew Bible. We're not going to read every bit of it word for word. We will read certain chunks of it quite carefully and from others we will choose selections, but you will get a very good sense and a good sampling of the contents of the Bible. A second goal is to introduce you to a number of approaches to the study of the Bible, different methodological approaches that have been advanced by modern scholars but some of which are in fact quite old. At times, we will play the historian, at times we will be literary critics. "How does this work as literature?" At times we will be religious and cultural critics. "What is it the Israelites were saying in their day and in their time and against whom and for what?" A third goal of the course is to provide some insight into the history of interpretation. This is a really fun part of the course. The Bible's radically new conception of the divine, its revolutionary depiction of the human being as a moral agent, its riveting saga of the nation of Israel, their story, has drawn generations of readers to ponder its meaning and message. And as a result, the Bible has become the base of an enormous edifice of interpretation and commentary and debate, both in traditional settings but also in academic, university, secular settings. And from time to time, particularly in section discussion, you will have occasion to consider the ways in which certain biblical passages have been interpreted--sometimes in very contradictory ways--over the centuries. That can be a really fun and exciting part of the course. A fourth goal of the course is to familiarize you with the culture of ancient Israel as represented in the Bible against the backdrop of its Ancient Near Eastern setting, its historical and cultural setting, because the archaeological discoveries that were referred to in the Ancient Near East, reveal to us the spiritual and cultural heritage of all of the inhabitants of the region, including the Israelites. And one of the major consequences of these finds is the light that they have shed on the background and the origin of the materials in the Bible. So we now see that the traditions in the Bible did not come out of a vacuum. The early chapters of Genesis, Genesis 1 through 11--they're known as the "Primeval History," which is a very unfortunate name, because these chapters really are not best read or understood as history in the conventional sense--but these 11 chapters owe a great deal to Ancient Near Eastern mythology. The creation story in Genesis 1 draws upon the Babylonian epic known as Enuma Elish. We'll be talking about that text in some depth. The story of the first human pair in the Garden of Eden, which is in Genesis 2 and 3 has clear affinities with the Epic of Gilgamesh, that's a Babylonian and Assyrian epic in which a hero embarks on this exhausting search for immortality. The story of Noah and the flood, which occurs in Genesis 6 through 9 is simply an Israelite version of an older flood story that we have found copies of: a Mesopotamian story called the Epic of Atrahasis a flood story that we also have incorporated in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Biblical traditions have roots that stretch deep into earlier times and out into surrounding lands and traditions, and the parallels between the biblical stories and Ancient Near Eastern stories that they parallel has been the subject of intense study. However, it isn't just the similarity between the biblical materials and the Ancient Near Eastern sources that is important to us. In fact, in some ways it's the dissimilarity that is remarkably important to us, the biblical transformation of a common Near Eastern heritage in light of its radically new conceptions of God and the world and humankind. We'll be dealing with this in some depth, but I'll give you one quick example. We have a Sumerian story about the third millennium BCE, going back 3000--third millennium, 3000 BCE. It's the story of Ziusudra, and it's very similar to the Genesis flood story of Noah. In both of these stories, the Sumerian and the Israelite story, you have a flood that is the result of a deliberate divine decision; one individual is chosen to be rescued; that individual is given very specific instructions on building a boat; he is given instructions about who to bring on board; the flood comes and exterminates all living things; the boat comes to rest on a mountaintop; the hero sends out birds to reconnoiter the land; when he comes out of the ark he offers a sacrifice to the god--the same narrative elements are in these two stories. It's just wonderful when you read them side by side. So what is of great significance though is not simply that the biblical writer is retelling a story that clearly went around everywhere in ancient Mesopotamia; they were transforming the story so that it became a vehicle for the expression of their own values and their own views. In the Mesopotamian stories, for example, the gods act capriciously, the gods act on a whim. In fact, in one of the stories, the gods say, "Oh, people, they're so noisy, I can't sleep, let's wipe them all out." That's the rationale. There's no moral scruple. They destroy these helpless but stoic humans who are chafing under their tyrannical and unjust and uncaring rule. In the biblical story, when the Israelites told the story, they modified it. It's God's uncompromising ethical standards that lead him to bring the flood in an act of divine justice. He's punishing the evil corruption of human beings that he has so lovingly created and whose degradation he can't bear to witness. So it's saying something different. It's providing a very different message. So when we compare the Bible with the literature of the Ancient Near East, we'll see not only the incredible cultural and literary heritage that was obviously common to them, but we'll see the ideological gulf that separated them and we'll see how biblical writers so beautifully and cleverly manipulated and used these stories, as I said, as a vehicle for the expression of a radically new idea. They drew upon these sources but they blended and shaped them in a particular way. And that brings us to a critical problem facing anyone who seeks to reconstruct ancient Israelite religion or culture on the basis of the biblical materials. That problem is the conflicting perspective between the final editors of the text and some of the older sources that are incorporated into the Bible, some of the older sources that they were obviously drawing on. Those who were responsible for the final editing, the final forms of the texts, had a decidedly monotheistic perspective, ethical monotheistic perspective, and they attempted to impose that perspective on their older source materials; and for the most part they were successful. But at times the result of their effort is a deeply conflicted, deeply ambiguous text. And again, that's going to be one of the most fun things for you as readers of this text, if you're alert to it, if you're ready to listen to the cacophony of voices that are within the text. In many respects, the Bible represents or expresses a basic discontent with the larger cultural milieu in which it was produced, and that's interesting for us, because a lot of modern people have a tendency to think of the Bible as an emblem of conservatism. Right? We tend to think of this as an old fuddy-duddy document, it's outdated, has outdated ideas, and I think the challenge of this course is that you read the Bible with fresh eyes so that you can appreciate it for what it was, in many ways what it continues to be: a revolutionary, cultural critique. We can read the Bible with fresh and appreciative eyes only if we first acknowledge and set aside some of our presuppositions about the Bible. It's really impossible, in fact, that you not have some opinions about this work, because it's an intimate part of our culture. So even if you've never opened it or read it yourself, I bet you can cite me a line or two--"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and I bet you don't really know what it means. "The poor will always be with you": I'm sure you don't really know what that means. These are things and phrases that we hear and they create within us a certain impression of the biblical text and how it functions. Verses are quoted, they're alluded to, whether to be championed and valorized or whether to be lampooned and pilloried. But we can feel that we have a rough idea of the Bible and a rough idea of its outlook when in fact what we really have are popular misconceptions that come from the way in which the Bible has been used or misused. Most of our cherished presuppositions about the Bible are based on astonishing claims that others have made on behalf of the Bible, claims that the Bible has not made on behalf of itself. So before we proceed, I need to ask you to set aside for the purposes of this course, some of the more common myths about the Bible. I have a little list here for you. The first is the idea that the Bible's a book. It's not a book. We'll get rid of that one. The Bible is not a book with all that that implies, that it has a uniform style and a message and a single author, the sorts of things we think of when we think in a conventional sense of the word "book." It's a library. It's an anthology of writings or books written and edited over an extensive period of time by people in very different situations responding to very different issues and stimuli, some political, some historical, some philosophical, some religious, some moral. There are many types or genres of material in the Bible. There's narrative, wonderful narrative stories. There's all kinds of law. There are cultic and ritual texts that prescribe how some ceremony is supposed to be performed. There are records of the messages of prophets. There's lyric poetry, there's love poetry, there are proverbs, there are psalms of thanksgiving and lament. So, there's a tremendous variety of material in this library, and it follows from the fact that it's not a book but an anthology of diverse works, that it's not an ideological monolith. And this is something a lot of students struggle with. Each book, or strand of tradition within a book, within the biblical collection sounds its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that is the Bible. Genesis is concerned to account for the origin of things and wrestles with the existence of evil, the existence of idolatry and suffering in a world that's created by a good god. The priestly texts in Leviticus and Numbers emphasize the sanctity of all life and the ideal of holiness and ethical and ritual purity. There are odes to human reason and learning and endeavor in the wisdom book of Proverbs. Ecclesiastes reads like an existentialist writing from the twentieth century. It scoffs at the vanity of all things, including wisdom, and espouses a kind of positive existentialism. The Psalms are very individual writings that focus on individual piety and love and worship of God. Job, possibly the greatest book of the Bible, I won't give away my preferences there, challenges conventional religious piety and arrives at the bittersweet conclusion that there is no justice in this world or any other, but that nonetheless we're not excused from the thankless and perhaps ultimately meaningless task of righteous living. One of the most wonderful and fortuitous facts of history is that later Jewish communities chose to put all this stuff in this collection we call the Bible. They chose to include all of these dissonant voices together. They didn't strive to reconcile the conflicts, nor should we. They didn't, we shouldn't. Each book, each writer, each voice reflects another thread in the rich tapestry of human experience, human response to life and its puzzles, human reflection on the sublime and the depraved. And that leads me to my second point, which is that biblical narratives are not pious parables about saints. Okay? Not pious tales. They're psychologically real literature about very real or realistic people and life situations. They're not stories about pious people whose actions are always exemplary and whose lives should be models for our own, despite what Sunday School curricula will often turn them into. And despite what they would have us believe. There is a genre of literature that details the lives of saints, Hagiography, but that came later and is largely something we find in the Christian era. It's not found in the Bible. The Bible abounds with human not superhuman beings, and their behavior can be scandalous. It can be violent, it can be rebellious, outrageous, lewd, vicious. But at the same time like real people, they can turn around and act in a way that is loyal and true above and beyond the call of duty. They can change, they can grow. But it's interesting to me that there are many people who, when they open the Bible for the first time, they close it in shock and disgust. Jacob is a deceiver; Joseph is an arrogant, spoiled brat; Judah reneges on his obligations to his daughter-in-law and goes off and sleeps with a prostitute. Who are these people? Why are they in the Bible? And the shock comes from the expectation that the heroes of the Bible are somehow being held up as perfect people. That's just not a claim that's made by the Bible itself. So biblical characters are real people with real, compelling moral conflicts and ambitions and desires, and they can act shortsightedly and selfishly. But they can also, like real people, learn and grow and change; and if we work too hard and too quickly to vindicate biblical characters just because they're in the Bible, then we miss all the good stuff. We miss all of the moral sophistication, the deep psychological insights that have made these stories of such timeless interest. So read it like you would read any good book with a really good author who knows how to make some really interesting characters. Thirdly, the Bible's not for children. I have a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old. I won't let them read it. I won't let them read it. Those "Bible Stories for Children" books, they scare me. They really scare me. It's not suitable for children. The subject matter in the Bible is very adult, particularly in the narrative texts. There are episodes of treachery and incest and murder and rape. And the Bible is not for naive optimists. It's hard-hitting stuff. And it speaks to those who are courageous enough to acknowledge that life is rife with pain and conflict, just as it's filled with compassion and joy. It's not for children in another sense. Like any literary masterpiece, the Bible is characterized by a sophistication of structure and style and an artistry of theme and metaphor, and believe me, that's lost on adult readers quite often. It makes its readers work. The Bible doesn't moralize, or rarely, rarely moralizes. It explores moral issues and situations, puts people in moral issues and situations. The conclusions have to be drawn by the reader. There are also all kinds of paradoxes and subtle puns and ironies, and in section where you'll be doing a lot of your close reading work, those are some of the things that will be drawn to your attention. You'll really begin to appreciate them in time. The fourth myth we want to get rid of: the Bible is not a book of theology, it's not a catechism or a book of systematic theology. It's not a manual of religion, despite the fact that at a much later time, very complex systems of theology are going to be spun from particular interpretations of biblical passages. You know, there's nothing in the Bible that really corresponds to prevailing modern western notions of religion, what we call religion, and indeed there's no word for religion in the language of biblical Hebrew. There just isn't a word "religion." With the rise of Christianity, western religion came to be defined to a large degree by the confession of, or the intellectual assent to, certain doctrinal points of belief. Religion became defined primarily as a set of beliefs, a catechism of beliefs or truths that required your assent, what I think of as the catechism kind of notion of religion. That's entirely alien to the world of the Bible. It's clear that in biblical times and in the Ancient Near East generally, religion wasn't a set of doctrines that you ascribed to. To become an Israelite, later on a Jew--the word "Jew" isn't something we can really historically use until about this time, so most of our period we're going to be talking about the ancient Israelites--to become an Israelite, you simply joined the Israelite community, you lived an Israelite life, you died an Israelite death. You obeyed Israelite law and custom, you revered Israelite lore, you entered into the historical community of Israel by accepting that their fate and yours should be the same. It was sort of a process of naturalization, what we think of today as naturalization. So the Hebrew Bible just isn't a theological textbook. It contains a lot of narratives and its narrative materials are an account of the odyssey of a people, the nation of Israel. They're not an account of the divine, which is what theology means, an account of the divine. However, having said this, I should add that although the Bible doesn't contain formal statements of religious belief or systematic theology, it treats issues, many moral issues and some existential issues that are central to the later discipline of theology, but it treats them very differently. Its treatment of these issues is indirect, it's implicit. It uses the language of story and song and poetry and paradox and metaphor. It uses a language and a style that's very far from the language and style of later philosophy and abstract theology. Finally, on our myth count, I would point out--well I don't really need to cross this out, this is something to discuss--I would point out that the Bible was formulated and assembled and edited and modified and censored and transmitted first orally and then in writing by human beings. The Bible itself doesn't claim to have been written by God. That belief is a religious doctrine of a much later age. And even then one wonders how literally it was meant--it's interesting to go back and look at some of the earliest claims about the origin of the biblical text. Similarly, the so-called five books of Moses--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the first five books we call the Pentateuch of Moses--nowhere claim to have been written in their entirety by Moses. That's not something they say themselves. Some laws in Exodus, you know, the Book of the Covenant, a few things--yes, it says Moses wrote those down, but not the whole five books that tradition later will ascribe to him. The Bible clearly had many contributors over many centuries, and the individual styles and concerns of those writers, their political and religious motivations, betray themselves frequently. I leave aside here the question of divine inspiration, which is an article of faith in many biblical religions. It's no doubt an article of faith for people in this very room. But there is no basic incompatibility between believing on faith in the divine inspiration of the Bible and acknowledging the role that human beings have played in the actual formulation and editing and transmission and preservation of that same Bible. And since this is a university course and not perhaps a theological course or within a theological setting, it's really only the latter, the demonstrably human component, that will concern us. It's very easy for me to assert that our interest in the Hebrew Bible will be centered on the culture and the history and the literature and the religious thought of ancient Israel in all of its diversity rather than questions of faith and theology. But the fact remains that the document is the basis for the religious faith of many millions of people, and some of them are here now. It is inevitable that you will bring what you learn in this course into dialogue with your own personal religious beliefs, and for some of you, I hope all of you, that will be enriching and exciting. For some of you it may be difficult. I know that, and I want you to rest assured that no one in this course wishes to undermine or malign religious faith any more than they wish to promote or proselytize for religious faith. Religious faith simply isn't the topic of this course. The rich history and literature and religious thought of ancient Israel as preserved for us over millennia in the pages of this remarkable volume, that is our topic, and so our approach is going to be necessarily academic; and especially given the diversity of people in this room, that's really all that it can be, so that we have a common ground and common goals for our discussions. But it has been my experience that from time to time students will raise a question or ask a question that is prompted by a commitment, a prior commitment to an article of faith. Sometimes they're not even aware that that's what they're doing, and I want you to understand that on those occasions I'll most likely respond by inviting you to consider the article of faith that lies behind that question and is creating that particular problem for you. I'm not going to be drawn into a philosophical or theological debate over the merits of that belief, but I'll simply point out how or why that belief might be making it difficult for you to read or accept what the text is actually and not ideally saying, and leave you to think about that. And I see those as wonderful learning opportunities for the class. Those are in no way a problem for me. All right, so let's give a few sort of necessary facts and figures now about the Bible and then I need to talk a little bit about the organization of the course. So those are the last two things we really need to do. An overview of the structure of the Bible. So you have a couple of handouts that should help you here. So, the Bible is this assemblage of books and writings dating from approximately 1000 BCE--we're going to hear very diverse opinions about how far back this stuff dates--down to the second century: the last book within the Hebrew Bible was written in the 160s BCE. Some of these books which we think are roughly from a certain date, they will contain narrative snippets or legal materials or oral traditions that may even date back or stretch back further in time, and they were perhaps transmitted orally and then ended up in these written forms. The Bible is written largely in Hebrew, hence the name Hebrew Bible. There are a few passages in Aramaic. So you have a handout that breaks down the three major components. It's the one that's written two columns per page. Okay? We're going to talk in a minute about those three sections, so you want to have that handy. These writings have had a profound and lasting impact on three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For the Jewish communities who first compiled these writings in the pre-Christian era, the Bible was perhaps first and foremost a record of God's eternal covenant with the Jewish people. So Jews refer to the Bible as the Tanakh. It's the term you see up here. It should be also on that sheet, Tanakh, which is really the letter "t", "n" and "kh", and they've put little "a's" in there to make it easy to pronounce, because kh is hard to pronounce, so Tanach. Okay? And this is an acronym. The T stands for Torah, which is a word that means instruction or teaching. It's often translated "law"; I think that's a very poor translation. It means instruction, way, teaching, and that refers to the first five books that you see listed here, Genesis through Deuteronomy. The second division of the Bible is referred to as Nevi'im, which is the Hebrew word for "prophets." The section of the Prophets is divided really into two parts, because there are two types of writing in the prophetic section of the Bible. The first or former Prophets continues the kind of narrative prose account of the history of Israel, focusing on the activities of Israel's prophets. All right? So, the Former Prophets are narrative texts. The Latter Prophets are poetic and oracular writings that bear the name of the prophet to whom the writings are ascribed. You have the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and then the twelve minor prophets, which in the Hebrew Bible get counted together as one book, because those twelve are very small. The final section of the Bible is referred to as Ketuvim in Hebrew, which simply means "Writings," and that's probably about 50% of the Hebrew you're going to get in the whole course, so please don't be scared. You know, I've got two or three other terms that'll be useful along the way, but there's really no need to know Hebrew. I just want you to understand why Tanakh is the word that's used to refer to the Bible. So the Ketuvim, or the Writings, are really a miscellany. They contain works of various types, and the three parts correspond very roughly to the process of canonization or authoritativeness for the community. The Torah probably reached a fixed and authoritative status first, then the books of the Prophets and finally the Writings. And probably by the end of the first century, all of this was organized in some way. If you look at the other handout, you'll see, however, that any course on the Bible is going to run immediately into the problem of defining the object of study, because different Bibles served different communities over the centuries. One of the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible was a translation into Greek known as the Septuagint. It was written for the benefit--it was translated for the benefit of Jews who lived in Alexandria--Greek-speaking Jews who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the Hellenistic period somewhere around the third or second century BCE. The translation has some divergences with the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible as we now have it, including the order of the books, and some of these things are charted for you on the chart that I've handed out. The Septuagint's rationale for ordering the books is temporal. They've clustered books Genesis through Esther, which tell of things past; the books of Job through the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon contain wisdom that applies to the present; and then the prophetic books, Isaiah to Malachi, contain or tell of things future. Some copies of the Septuagint contain some books not included in the Hebrew canon but accepted in the early Christian canon. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, became by and large the Bible of Christianity, or more precisely it became the "Old Testament" of the Hebrew Bible. The church adopted the Hebrew Bible as a precursor to its largely Hellenistic gospels. It was an important association for it, with an old and respected tradition. Our primary concern is the Bible of the ancient Israelite and Jewish community--the 24 books grouped in the Torah, Prophets and Writings on that other sheet--which is common to all Bibles. Whether Jewish or Christian, those 24 are the baseline common books. So those are the 24 that we're going to focus on. Because the term "Old Testament" is a theologically loaded term, it sort of suggests the doctrine that the New Testament has somehow fulfilled or surpassed or antiquated the Bible of ancient Israel, you're going to hear me refer to the object of our study as the Hebrew Bible. You may certainly use any other term, and you may certainly use the term Old Testament, as long as it's clear we're talking about this set of 24 books and not some of the other things that are in the Old Testament that aren't in the traditional Hebrew Bible. It means you're studying less, so that might be a good thing. So, it's fine with me if you want to use that but I will prefer the more accurate term "Hebrew Bible." Also while we're on terminology, you'll notice that I use BCE to refer to the period before 0 and CE to refer to the period after 0; the Common Era and Before the Common Era, and in a lot of your secondary readings and writings they'll be using the same thing. It corresponds to what you know as BC, Before Christ, and Anno Domini, AD, the year of our Lord. It's just a non-Christian-centric way of dating and in a lot of your secondary readings you'll see it, so you should get used to it: BCE and CE, Before the Common Era and the Common Era. From earliest times, Christians made use of the Bible but almost always in its Greek translation, and the Christian Old Testament contains some material not in the Hebrew Bible, as I've mentioned. And some of these works are referred to as the Apocrypha--so you will have heard that term. These are writings that were composed somewhere around here, sort of 200 BCE to 100 CE. They were widely used by Jews of the period. They simply weren't considered to be of the same status as the 24 books. I'm glad they pick up the garbage at 11:10 [laughs] on Wednesday mornings. But they did become part of the canon of Catholic Christianity and in the sixteenth century, their canonical status was confirmed for the Catholic Church. With the Renaissance and the Reformation, some Christians became interested in Hebrew versions of the Bible. They wanted to look at the Hebrew and not the Greek translation from the Hebrew. Protestants, the Protestant church, denied canonical status to the books of the Apocrypha. They said they were important for pious instruction but excluded them from their canon. There are also some works you may know of, referred to as the Pseudepigrapha--we'll talk about some of these things in a little more detail later--from roughly the same period; tend to be a little more apocalyptic in nature, and they were never part of the Jewish or the Catholic canon, but there are some eastern Christian groups that have accepted them in their canon. The point I'm trying to make is that there are very many sacred canons out there that are cherished by very many religious communities, and they're all designated "Bibles." So again, we're focusing on that core set of 24 books that are common to all Bibles everywhere, the 24 books of what would in fact be the Jewish Tanakh. Not only has there been variety regarding the scope of the biblical canon in different communities, but there's been some fluidity in the actual text itself. We don't, of course, have any original copies of these materials as they came off the pen of whoever it was who was writing them, and in fact before the middle of the twentieth century, our oldest manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts of the Bible dated to the year 900. That's an awful long distance from the events they're talking about. And we've got to think about that, right? You've got to think about that and what it means and how were they transmitted and preserved without the means of technology, obviously, that we have today; and what was so exciting in the middle of the twentieth century was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm sure that you've heard of them. They brought about a dramatic change in the state of our knowledge of our Hebrew manuscript evidence. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves in the Judean desert. We used to think they were a library of a sectarian community; now I think they think it was a pottery factory or something. So maybe they were just shoved there by people fleeing the Roman conquest in 70. So that's up for grabs. But we have this really great collection of scrolls, and among them we have found an almost complete copy of every book of the Bible. Sorry--almost complete copy of the Book of Isaiah and then partial copies or fragments of all of the biblical books, except maybe Esther. Am I wrong about that? I don't think there's an Esther from Qumran, I think that's the only one. And some of them date back to the fourth and third century. So do you understand now why everybody was so excited? Suddenly, we have evidence, thirteen or fourteen hundred years earlier, that people were reading this stuff and, by and large, it's a pretty constant textual tradition. Sure there are differences, sure there are differences. We see that our manuscripts are not exactly like those fragments, but there is a remarkable degree, a high degree of correspondence so that we really can speak of a relatively stable textual tradition but still some fluidity. And that's going to be interesting for us to think about. There are many translations of the Bible, but I would like you to purchase for this course the Jewish Study Bible . So let me turn now to just some of the administrative, organizational details of the course, the secondary readings that we'll be using. I'm asking you to pick up the Jewish Study Bible not only for the translation of the Tanakh, which is a very good translation, but because it contains wonderful scholarly articles in the back. It used to be we had a course packet for this course that was two volumes, and now with the purchase of this, I've been able to really consolidate the readings. They're really wonderful; great introductions to the individual books of the Bible and so I think you will find that this will become like a Bible to you [laughs]. So you need to pick that up. It's at the Yale bookstore. I also would like you to pick up this paperback, it's not terribly expensive. We're going to be using it in the first few weeks especially: The Ancient Near East. Other readings, the secondary readings for the course, are all already online. I will be also making them available at Allegra for people who would like to just purchase them already printed out so you don't do it yourself, but I know some people really prefer to work online--and certainly for the first week of reading, you can get started because it is online. I don't think things will be available at Allegra's until probably tomorrow afternoon. The syllabus. As you can see, it's a pretty thick syllabus, but it's divided into a schedule of lectures and then a schedule of readings. All right? So, understand that there are two distinct things there. It's not just all the scheduled lectures. The last few pages are a schedule of the actual readings, and the assignment that you'll have for the weekend and for next week's lectures are the readings by Kaufman. I really, really need you to read that before the next class, and I want you to read it critically. Kaufman's ideas are important, but they are also overstated, and so they're going to be interesting for us. We're going to wrestle with his claims quite a bit during the course of the semester. The secondary readings are heavier at the beginning of the course when we are reading very small segments of biblical text. That will shift. Right? Towards the end of the course you're going to be reading, you know, a couple of books in the Bible and maybe a ten-page article of secondary reading; so, you know, it's front loaded with secondary readings. So you'll want to get started on the Kaufman, because for the first few weeks it's quite a bit of secondary reading but we're covering just a few chapters of Bible each time in the first few weeks. Sections: We're going to be doing this online registration thing that I've never done before, so I hope it works. We do have three teaching fellows for this course. I hope that will be sufficient. Actually, if the teaching fellows could stand up so people could at least recognize you, that would be wonderful. Anyone wants to volunteer, we could have a fourth. Okay, so we have two in the back there, we have Tudor Sala raising his hand and Tzvi Novick here. They will be running regular discussion sections and then Kristine Garroway will be running a writing requirement section. I don't think that was listed in the Blue Book, but it should've been listed online that it is possible to fulfill your writing skills requirement through this course. So Kristine will be running that. We will bring on Monday--so please have your schedules as well-formed as they are, on Monday--we will put up times and we will take a straw poll to figure out if we can accommodate everybody within the times. One more extremely important announcement, it's on your syllabus, but I want to underline it even more than it is already underlined and boldfaced. I want to underline the importance of the section discussions in this course. In fact, it's really wrong to call them section discussions. It sounds like you're discussing the lectures and the readings and you're really not. The section discussions are a complement to the lectures. What I mean is: this is an awfully big thing to spend just one semester studying, and I can't do it all, and in my lectures I'll be trying to set broad themes and patterns and describe what's going on, but I want you to have the experience of actually sitting and reading chunks of text and struggling with that and understanding the history of interpretation of passages and how so many important things have happened historically because of people's efforts to understand this text. So in sections, a large part of the focus in section will be on specific passages, reading and struggling with the text, the kind of thing I can't do in lecture. This is important because your final paper assignment will be an exercise in exegesis, an interpretation. The skills that you will need for that paper I am fairly certain are not things that you would've acquired in high school and, if we have some upperclassmen--I don't know, but maybe not even some upperclassmen will have acquired here yet. Exegesis is a very particular kind of skill and the teaching fellows will be introducing you to methods of exegesis. So it's really a training ground for the final paper, and we have found that people don't succeed in the course in the final paper without the training they get in section discussion, which is why section participation is worth ten percent of your grade. However, if there are repeated, unexcused absences, there will be an adjustment in the grade calculation, and it will be worth twenty to twenty-five percent of your grade, and it will be a negative grade also. And believe me, this is a favor to you. It is definitely a favor to you. These sections are critically important in this course. Okay? So, if you have any questions, I can hang around for a few minutes, but thank you for coming. We'll see you Monday.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_18_Literary_Prophecy_Micah_Zephaniah_Nahum_and_Habbakuk.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: We were talking last time about prophets of the Assyrian crisis. We've talked about two of the northern prophets, Amos and Hosea, and we started talking about Isaiah who was a southern prophet, a prophet in Judah; and we'll be talking now about the second southern prophet of the Assyrian crisis. That is Micah, or Micah. And he is said to come from the town of Moreshet, which is about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem. So he's in Judah, and he's the last of the eighth-century prophets. He's quite different from the city-bred Isaiah. He seems to have been a rural prophet who spoke for the poor farmers. Now, he's prophesying in the second part of the eighth century, so 740 to about 700. He's attacking the northern kingdom, although he's a southern prophet. He attacks Israel for idolatries and says that the kingdom will surely fall because of these. So he also follows the other prophets, as we've seen, in condemning the people for their moral failings. The greedy landowners, the dishonest merchants, the aristocracy, they're all targets of his denunciations as are other leaders: the priests, the judges, royalty, the royal house as well as other false prophets. But the greatest contrast between Isaiah and Micah--if you want to differentiate these two southern prophets of the Assyrian crisis in your mind--the greatest contrast lies in his view of the city as inherently corrupt. It's inherently sinful; it's inherently doomed to destruction. Isaiah had preached the inviolability of Zion and Micah is sharply critical of the Davidic dynasty. He ridicules the idea of the inviolability of Zion. He ridicules the belief that the presence of the sanctuary in Jerusalem somehow protects the city from harm. He says, on the contrary, that God will destroy his city and his house if need be. Micah 3:9-12: Hear this, you rulers of the House of Jacob, You chiefs of the House of Israel, Who detest justice And make crooked all that is straight, Who build Zion with crime, Jerusalem with iniquity! Her rulers judge for gifts, Her priests give rulings for a fee, And her prophets divine for pay; Yet they rely upon the Lord, saying, "The Lord is in our midst; No calamity shall overtake us." Assuredly, because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field, And Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins, And the Temple Mount A shrine in the woods. A stark contrast then between Isaiah who trusts and has confidence that God will never allow His holy city to be destroyed, his sanctuary to be destroyed. His presence in the midst of the city is a guarantee that it will survive. And Micah says: it's no guarantee of anything. One of the most famous passages in the Book of Micah is in chapter 6--eight verses in chapter 6--and this is a passage that takes the form of a covenant lawsuit, which we've talked about before, and the structure is as follows (I've put it up on the white board there): The first two verses are the issuing of the summons, the summons to the case. So the prophet here is acting as God's attorney and he summons the accused and he summons the witnesses--those would be the mountains, who are to hear the case against Israel, God's case against Israel: Hear what the Lord is saying: Come, present [My] case before the mountains, And let the hills hear you pleading. Hear, you mountains, the case of the Lord-- You firm foundations of the earth! For the Lord has a case [=a lawsuit] against His people, He has a suit against Israel. So those are the opening verses and in verses 3 to 5 we then move on to the plaintiff's charge, God's charge or accusation. And this is given, again, through the attorney. He appeals to Israel's memory of all of the events that have manifested his great love for her. That begins with the exodus of course and continues with the entry into the Promised Land and he says Israel seems to have forgotten all of these deeds that God has performed on her behalf, and the obligations that those deeds obviously entail. Israel's conduct in response to this continuous benevolence on God's part is appalling. In verses 6 to 7 you have the defendant's plea. This is Israel speaking, but Israel really, of course, has no case to plead. And Israel knows that her only choice is to try to effect reconciliation but she doesn't know where to begin. Verses 6-7: With what shall I approach the Lord, Do homage to God on high? Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings, With calves a year old? Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, With myriads of streams of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, The fruit of my body for my sins? And the prophetic attorney--because the prophet is here acting as the attorney--in verse 8, responds to this. "He has told you, O man, what is good, And what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice And to love goodness, And to walk humbly with your God." [See note 1] And the word that has been translated here as goodness, is this word hesed. This is a word that we discussed last week in relation to Hosea, and it's a word that seems to refer to that covenantal loyalty, the loyal love of covenantal partners. This is a classic passage that really typifies the prophetic emphasis on morality or the primacy of morality in prophetic thought. The book of Micah itself structurally alternates three prophecies of doom with three prophecies of restoration or hope. So it's doom, restoration, doom, restoration, doom, restoration. These last prophecies tell of the glory of Zion to come in the future. These restoration passages may seem a little out of keeping or out of step with the scathing denunciations or condemnations of Judah in the other parts of Micah's prophecy, and so some scholars have suggested that those restoration passages and those references to God's unconditional promise to preserve the Davidic kingdom, and the optimistic predictions of universal peace--these must be interpolations by a later editor. And it's true that certain parts we see again in Isaiah. But this is always a very difficult case or issue, because we know that the prophetic writings do fluctuate wildly between denunciation and consolation. So I think that a shift in theme alone is not ever a certain basis for assuming interpolation--outright contradiction perhaps--but a shift in theme or tone is never a solid basis for assuming interpolation. Anachronism is a very good guide to interpolation. So Micah explicitly refers to the Babylonian exile, of course, and that's going to be in 586 and he's in the eighth century. He's also going to refer to the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. The walls of Jerusalem aren't even destroyed until 586 for anyone to even speak about rebuilding them, so those little units or passages may of course represent late editorial interpolations. But in its present form--in that nice structure of alternation of denunciation, restoration, denunciation, restoration, a pattern that happens three times--that structure, is I think typical of the common paradox that we find in the prophetic writings where they try to balance God's stern judgment on the one hand, his punishment, with his merciful love and salvation of his people. A further paradox lies in the very preservation of prophecies like Micah's prophecy. These prophecies were probably preserved by priests in the temple, even though priests were very often among the targets of the prophets in their denunciations, particularly Micah. Alright, so we've talked about the prophets who responded to the Assyrian crisis towards the end of the eighth century, two in the north, two in the south. Jerusalem survived the siege of 701 when the Assyrians laid siege in 701. And that gave credence to the royal ideology, the idea that God was with Zion, was with Jerusalem, and was with the House of David and would preserve them, but even so Judah moves into the next century, into the 600s in a considerably weakened state after the siege. And it's during that century--the first half of the next century--that Assyria reached the zenith of its power. In Judah, you have King Manasseh reigning. Now, King Manasseh reigned for nearly 50 years. We're not sure of exact dates, but somewhere around the 690s to the 640s, about 640: 50 years. Now remarkably, the Deuteronomistic historian devotes only 18 verses to this king who reigned for 50 years and all of those verses are entirely negative. And that's in great contrast to their treatment of his father, Hezekiah, and his grandson who follows him, Josiah. Manasseh was apparently a loyal vassal of Assyria, and according to the biblical writer he reversed the reforms of his father Hezekiah who is said by the writer to have destroyed idolatry and so on. But he is said to have reversed that and to have adopted Assyrian norms. As we move through this century and move towards the latter half of this century, Assyria, which has overextended itself is beginning to decline and some of the other states in the Ancient Near East are able to break away. First Egypt breaks away; Babylon breaks away. Josiah comes to the throne in Judah in 740. He sees Assyria's weakness. He decides to take advantage of that and asserts Judean independence, carries out a series of reforms--we've talked about several times--in 622, which include purging the cult perhaps of Assyrian religious influences, centralizing worship of Yahweh only and in Jerusalem, and so on. So this centralization of the cult served probably a political agenda as well, of asserting independence from Assyria. Assyria is continuing to decline towards the end of this century and in 612 the capital Nineveh will fall. The Babylonians manage to conquer the Assyrians by destroying Nineveh; it's actually an alliance of Medes and Babylonians. So things are going quite well. Josiah is king; he's a favored king, but just a few years later he will die in a battle against the Egyptians at Megiddo. So a little bit of historical background for you as we talk about the next prophets. Alright, so Josiah, the king who's highly favored will die in 609. Now, Zephaniah was a Judean prophet who prophesied during the reign of King Josiah. So we're going to be moving on now to Zephaniah and Jeremiah, as the prophets of the Babylonian crisis--and we're going to throw in a couple of prophetic characters along the way, but they will be the two main prophets of the Babylonian crisis, obviously in the south--all we have now is a southern kingdom, Judah--but I'll be picking up on two other prophets in a moment as well. So he prophesied during the time of King Josiah. Some of his prophecies seem to date to the time, we think, before Josiah's reforms in 622. And those prophecies tend to be very pessimistic and very grim. Judah is condemned. It's condemned for apostasy; it's condemned for decadence, all of the things that flourished under King Manasseh. God is wrathful and his wrath is imminent. There will be a universal destruction according to Zephaniah. All life, animal and human, will be exterminated. So, as we saw in the book of Amos this Day of Yahweh, this Day of the Lord, which has been so eagerly awaited, will not in fact be a day of triumph, but a day of dark destruction and despair. Zephaniah 1:15-18, That day shall be a day of wrath, A day of trouble and distress, A day of calamity and desolation, A day of darkness and deep gloom, A day of densest clouds, A day of horn blasts and alarms-- Against the fortified towns And the lofty corner towers. I will bring distress on the people And they shall walk like blind men, Because they sinned against the Lord; Their blood shall be spilled like dust, And their fat like dung. Moreover, their silver and gold Shall not avail to save them. On the day of the Lord's wrath, In the fire of his passion, The whole land shall be consumed; For He will make a terrible end Of all who dwell in the land. You can see why people didn't enjoy listening to these prophets, but at the same time, like the other prophets, Zephaniah also offered hope. There will be a humble remnant which will seek refuge in God. These Jewish exiles, he says, will be delivered from their oppressors and even Gentiles will join in the worship of God. Zephaniah 3:11-13: "In that day, You will no longer be shamed for all the deeds By which you have defied me. For then I will remove The proud and exultant within you, And you will be haughty no more On my sacred mount. But I will leave within you A poor, humble folk, "--this idea of purging the dross and leaving the pure remnant--"And they shall find refuge In the name of the Lord. The remnant of Israel Shall do no wrong And speak no falsehood; A deceitful tongue Shall not be in their mouths. Only such as these shall graze and lie down, With none to trouble them." There will also be an ingathering of any exiled. Verse 20: "At that time I will gather you, And at [that] time I will bring you [home]; For I will make you renowned and famous Among all the peoples on earth, When I restore your fortunes Before their very eyes." There's one passage in particular that seems extraordinarily joyous. It seems to announce the salvation as happening now, as present and so a lot of scholars think that this was Zephaniah's reaction to Josiah and Josiah's reform which seemed to him to perhaps be the very salvation for which the nation was longing. Chapter 3:14 and 15: Shout for joy, Fair Zion, Cry aloud, O Israel! Rejoice and be glad with all your heart, Fair Jerusalem! The Lord has annulled the judgment against you, He has swept away your foes. Israel's Sovereign the Lord is within you; You need fear misfortune no more. So, this sounds very much like a reaction to these reforms initiated by Josiah. This is hailed as the very restoration of God's presence in the community of Judah that was desired. The judgment has been annulled, these terrible things I've been prophesying will not happen. Another short prophetic book we should mention now is the Book of Nahum. It's very different from the other prophetic books. It doesn't really contain prophecies and it doesn't really upbraid the people for their failings, which are two things that most of the other prophets do. The Book of Nahum is a short little book and it's really a series of three poems and the first one is an acrostic poem, an alphabetical poem--each line beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet--and these poems rejoice over the fall of Nineveh in 612, the capital of the cruel Assyrian empire. The Assyrians were actually quite widely hated in the Ancient Near East. They were noted for their exceptional brutality, their inhumanity, particularly in their conquests and empire building. They deported populations wholesale; they were guilty of all sorts of atrocities like mutilating their captives; they would butcher women and children--all sorts of horrendous deeds. We have lots of testimony about this, both in Assyrian sources but other Ancient Near Eastern sources, texts as well as artwork. So Nahum, in this poem, is celebrating the avenging and wrathful God who has finally turned around to destroy this terrible enemy of Israel and indeed the world. According to Nahum, it's quite true that God had used Assyria as his tool. He had used Assyria to discipline the kingdom of Israel--they did destroy Israel--and to discipline Judah for Judah's sins. But God is ultimately the universal sovereign and so Assyria's savagery--even if it was part of God's disciplining of his children is--Assyria's savagery is itself something that must be punished. So for Nahum, the fall of Nineveh is God's vengeance upon Assyria for her barbaric inhumanity. The Book of Nahum has often been praised for its very vivid poetic style. It describes these armed legions that march against Nineveh and plunder its treasure, and some of the most exciting archaeology that's been going on has been the digging up of Nineveh. I think the dig has obviously stopped for reasons having to do with the climate in that part of the world, but the findings of Nineveh and the sacking of Nineveh--how shallow pits were dug and treasures thrown into them and covered over by the gates of the city as people were fleeing, and many of these things-- when you read the description of Nineveh and look at some of the archaeological data, it's quite fascinating. But Nahum looks forward to a happy era of freedom for Judah and he says in 2:15: "For never again shall the wicked come against you." Well, this isn't true, and in fact, in a few years Josiah's going to be killed. Judah's going to be made subject to Egypt and in fact Babylon. By 605 Babylon manages to extract tribute from Judah as a vassal. So in a way, we have here really a glaring error and it's important to note that this error in Nahum--it wasn't updated, it wasn't repaired in order to protect his prophetic reputation. So we see this interesting tension. We sometimes see prophetic books being edited, revised, having interpolations put into them, partly out of this conviction that their words must be relevant and continue to have some relevance; and other times, there seems to be good evidence that prophetic oracles were preserved rather faithfully. But with the fall of Nineveh, national confidence was probably boosted and then things quickly turned sour with the death of Josiah in 609, which was a terrible shock. You have Judah lying trapped, as it were, between two great powers: Egypt in the southwest, Babylon in the northeast. And in 605, as I said, Babylon managed to defeat Egypt and reduce Judah to the status of a tributary vassal under the King Jehoiakim. King Jehoiakim rebels and in response, the Babylonians lay siege to Jerusalem. There will be two sieges of Jerusalem by the Babylonians just as we've had two sieges earlier--two sieges: one in 597, one in 587, both under Nebuchadnezzar. He lays siege to Jerusalem in 597, and doesn't destroy Jerusalem. He kills the king, takes the king's son into captivity in Babylon and installs a puppet king, still under the assumption that things could be kept under control. So the puppet King Zedekiah is on the throne but he also decides to rebel and assert Judah's independence against the Babylonians. So Nebuchadnezzar returns, and this is in 587. And now the city is in fact captured, the sanctuary is completely destroyed, and the bulk of the population is exiled and this is what brings to end nearly 400years of an independent Hebrew nation. The Book of Habakkuk was written during this period, so 600 to the destruction--somewhere in those years. That's the period in which the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem twice. Habakkuk is another unusual prophetic book. It doesn't contain prophecies, so much as it contains philosophical musings on God's behavior. And we're going to see this increasing now as we move into the next section of the Bible when we complete the prophetic section. We'll be encountering writings of very different genres and some of them do contain these philosophical musings on God's conduct. Habakkuk 1 and 2 are a kind of poetic dialogue between the prophet and Yahweh, and the prophet complains bitterly about God's inaction. Verses 2 and 3 of the first chapter: How long, O Lord, shall I cry out And You not listen, Shall I shout to you "Violence!" And you not save? Why do You make me see iniquity [Why] do You look upon wrong?-- Raiding and violence are before me, Strife continues and contention goes on. And skipping down to verses 13 and 14, You whose eyes are too pure to look upon evil, Who cannot countenance wrongdoing, Why do you countenance treachery. And stand by idle While the one in the wrong devours The one in the right? You have made mankind like the fish of the sea, Like creeping things that have no ruler. Well, God responds to these charges by saying that the Babylonians are the instruments of his justice even though they ascribe their might and their success to their gods, rather than to Yahweh. Now, we've already seen in other books the idea that a conquering nation is serving as the instrument of God's punishment. But Habakkuk is a little bit unusual because he doesn't couch this idea in the larger argument that Judah deserves this catastrophic punishment. There's a great difference between Habakkuk and the Deuteronimistic historian, for example, because Habakkuk doesn't assert that the people are suffering for their sins. Habakkuk is struggling with what appears to him to be a basic lack of justice. The Deuteuronomistic historian wants to assert God's justice, and whatever suffering happens is justifiable. Habakkuk is resisting that idea and we're going to see that resistance really come to a climax next week when we talk about the Book of Job. Habakkuk in 1:4 struggles with this, "…decision fails / And justice never emerges. / For the villain hedges in the just man-- / Therefore judgment emerges deformed." It's not merely that the wicked and the righteous suffer the same fate, it's that the wicked really seem to fare better than the just and that reduces humankind to the level of fish and creeping things for whom sheer power and not morality is the principal consideration. Now, having made this charge, Habakkuk awaits God's answer. In chapter 2:1-5 he says, I will stand on my watch, Take up my station at the post, And wait to see what He will say to me, What He will reply to my complaint. The Lord answered me and said: "Write the prophecy down, Inscribe it clearly on tablets, So that it can be read easily. …the righteous man is rewarded with life For his fidelity. How much less then shall the defiant go unpunished,… Not a terribly deep answer. The righteous simply have to have faith that justice will prevail and this faith has to sustain them through the trials that challenge that very idea. We'll see a deeper answer to this same problem in the Book of Job. The third chapter then shifts gears. So much so that once again scholars say it must be an interpolation. But again, I would warn that dramatic shifts in tone and theme are not that uncommon in the prophetic books and we have to be careful. But in this third chapter, God is described as a warrior god. He thunders from the east, he hurls his spear, he seeks vengeance on Israel's oppressors. It may be that this is some editor's attempt to respond to Habakkuk's skepticism that Yahweh will bring justice--and bring it soon-- that he's waiting: how long? why is this taking you so long? Why are you not acting? And this image of an avenging warrior God answers Habakkuk's opening question: How long will God stand by and watch while the Babylonians rape and pillage? But on the other hand, it's possible that it's Habakkuk himself and again the book exhibits that same paradoxical tension we've seen through so many of the prophetic books. Specifically, he holds out the paradoxical view that God's justice is slow in coming but the righteous must have complete faith in its ultimate execution. But he's raised the issue of theodicy, the problem of evil, the problem of suffering. Ultimately, he sees the problem's resolution only in some vision of the future--an avenging God, when justice will be done. That is typical of some texts that we will see later, particularly apocalyptic literature, which is going to emphasize patient waiting for an end time when there will be a cataclysmic final act that will bring justice and judgment. Now the prophet, who lived at the time of the final destruction of Judah, saw the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 was the prophet Jeremiah, another long prophetic book. So we have our three long prophetic books, Isaiah of the Assyrian crisis, Jeremiah of the Babylonian crisis, and Ezekiel writing from exile in Babylon. Jeremiah was born of a priestly family in a village near Jerusalem, Anathoth, and he began prophesying while he was still a boy. Now, he was a contemporary of King Josiah and so he saw the renaissance that briefly occurred under his guidance: the sweeping reform, the eradication of Assyrian influences that had been welcomed by King Manasseh, the renewal of the covenant, all of these activities that are so highly favored by the biblical writer. And when Josiah died, Jeremiah also lamented his passing, along with the rest of the nation. Jeremiah witnessed the final destruction and the exile. The Book of Jeremiah is a collection of very different types of material. There's really no clear organization, there's no clear chronological order, not the kind of thing you can just sort of sit down and read from beginning to end and hope it'll make sense. There are prophecies, there are oracles and diatribes against foreign nations, there are stories, biographical narratives, there's some poetry, and at the very end a little brief historical appendix which really resembles 2 Kings: 24 and 25. So the literary history of the book itself is also quite complex because there's great variation in our ancient witnesses. The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Bible--third century BCE Greek translation of the Bible--its Jeremiah is much shorter than the Hebrew version of Jeremiah and it's arranged differently; internally, the arrangement is different. There are also significant differences between the Hebrew text that we have now and some fragments of Jeremiah that have been found among the Dead Sea scrolls. So this attests to the very open-ended nature of written compositions in antiquity. We find three main types of material, however, in Jeremiah. (1) The poetic oracles that generally are attributed to Jeremiah; Then (2) biographical anecdotes and narratives about him, which are attributed to his amanuensis and assistant whose name I don't think I put up here. Baruch ben Neriah, ben simply meaning son of, so Baruch, the son of Neriah, whose name comes up quite a bit in the Book of Jeremiah. And he is a scribe who assists Jeremiah, and it's thought that perhaps the biographical narrative sections were composed by Baruch ben Neriah. Then we also have (3) certain editorial notes about Jeremiah that are in the style of the Deuteronomistic historian, Deuteronomistic editor. Jeremiah, in general, seems to have very close connections with the language and the ideology of Deuteronomy. So if we look quickly at the structure of the book, for the most part, the first 25 chapters, Jeremiah 1 through 25 contain an introduction and an account of Jeremiah's call, but then also poetic oracles with some biographical snippets thrown in there as well. Not snippets narratives--biographical narratives as well as poetic oracles. In 26to 29 we have stories of his encounters--I should say run-ins--with other prophets and with authority figures of various types. Chapters 30 to 33 are oracles of hope and consolation; 34 to 45 are more prose stories, and these stories center around and after the time of the final destruction. Then we have several chapters, 46 to 51 that contain oracles against nations. Some of these, scholars think, might be from other writers and then again, as I say, it concludes with this historical appendix about the fall of Jerusalem that's extracted from 2 Kings. Now, Jeremiah preached the inevitable doom and destruction of the nation because of its violation of the covenant, which was the very charter for her existence, and his descriptions were quite vivid and quite terrifying. He denounced Israel's leaders, the professional prophets in particular with whom he has many encounters. The professional prophets are liars, he says, because they prophesy peace. He has some negative references to priests as well, but he's especially critical of King Jehoiakim who's the son of Josiah. He can be compared to Micah because he also attacked this idea, this popular ideology of the inviolability of Zion. As long as injustice and oppression are practiced in Judah, the presence of the temple is no guarantee of anything. Judah will suffer the fate that she deserves for failure to fulfill her covenantal obligations. So God tells Jeremiah to go stand at the gate of the temple and speak these words, and this is a passage that's often referred to as the "Temple Sermon." It's from chapter 7: Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don't put your trust in illusions and say, "The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these buildings." No, if you really mend your ways and your actions; if you execute justice between one man and another; if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow… You hear the language of Deuteronomy right? Those three are always together in Deuteronomy, drawing very heavily on the same language. If you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place; if you do not follow other gods, to your own hurt --then only will I let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers for all time. See, you are relying on illusions that are to no avail. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely,… Again, allusion to the Decalogue, right? Those four terms in the Decalogue. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely, and sacrifice to Baal, and follow other gods whom you have not experienced, and then come and stand before Me in this house, which bears My name and say, "We are safe"? [Safe] to do all these abhorrent things! Do you consider this House, which bears My name, to be a den of thieves? As for Me, I have been watching--declares the Lord. So he attacked this doctrine of the inviolability of Zion and that would have been iconoclastic to say the least. But he pointed to history as proof for his assertion. He cites the example of Shiloh as an example. You remember during the period of the Judges when the Ark of the Covenant was peripatetic and would stay at different places, but for some time it came to rest at Shiloh with the priest Eli and his sons. And in that time, the Philistines managed to destroy the sanctuary and capture the Ark and carry it off into Philistine territory. So the presence of the Ark of the Covenant is no guarantee of anything, and the belief that God would not allow his temple, his city, his anointed ruler to be destroyed, Jeremiah says, is a deception. It's an illusion. His political message resembles very much the message of his predecessors. He says that the nation's pathetic attempts to resist the great powers and to enter into alliances with the one against the other--these were all completely futile. And to dramatically illustrate the destruction and the slavery that were inevitable, he paraded around Jerusalem, first in a wooden yoke and then in an iron yoke. He does this in chapters 27 and 28. This is a symbol of the slavery, the yoke of the master that is to come. In chapter 27:6 he claims that God has power over all the Earth and has given the Earth to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, God's servant. As you can imagine, referring to the destroyer of the nation as God's servant would have been shocking, not to say dangerous. You can imagine parallels in our own time, where people would see the God most commonly understood to be the God of most Americans being the one who orchestrated attacks against us. It would have that same kind of feel and power to people, and in several passages Jeremiah exhorts the king to submit to the Babylonian forces. This is acceptance of God's will, the forces that are surrounding Jerusalem. To ensure the preservation of his words, which were not popular, Jeremiah had his amanuensis Baruch write down everything that God spoke to him. Chapter 36 gives us an insight into this process. It's kind of interesting because Jeremiah's words are transcribed. God specifically tells Jeremiah how to do this. "Get a scroll," he says, "and write upon it all the words that I have spoken to you--concerning Israel and Judah and all the nations--from the time I first spoke to you in the days of Josiah to this time" (36:2). Now it's the time of KingJehoiakim and then in verse 4 we read, "So Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote down in the scroll, at Jeremiah's dictation, all the words which the Lord had spoken to him." Now, Jeremiah is in hiding at this time because he's politically very unpopular, so he instructs Baruch to take the scroll to the temple and to stand there and to read it to the people. The king's officials are there. They report to the king about the subversive message which has been delivered by Baruch. So Baruch goes into hiding; the scroll is torn into strips and burned. God orders Jeremiah to get another scroll and repeat the process, and he does. Verse 32 of chapter 36, "So Jeremiah got another scroll and gave it to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah. And at Jeremiah's dictation, he wrote in it the whole text of the scroll that King Jehoiakim of Judah had burned; and more of the like was added," – so, and then some. They came back with even more. So it's possible--some scholars suggest--that what was written, would have been the contents of chapters 1 to 25 which really contains the oracular material, the oracles. But in any event, this story gives us some insight into the process of prophecy. It doesn't appear to have been really off the cuff. The compositions of the prophets were literary compositions that were committed to memory; they could then be dictated again. And on an archaeological note, I should point out that one of the most exciting finds, I think, is a clay--in 1975 they found a clay bulla which is like a clay imprint of Baruch son of Neriah, the scribe – that's what it says on the clay imprint. Another one was found in 1996. It was said to be found in a burnt house in Jerusalem, which would have been around the time of the destruction. And it just showed up on the antiquities market, so some question whether it's genuine or not. The second one that was found has a fingerprint on it and people say, well, that could be the fingerprint of Baruch son of Neriah. Anyway, this is the fun stuff you get to do if you do archaeology, but there are plenty of people who think that these probably are the seals of the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, that he would have used to stamp anything that he would have transcribed or written. So Jeremiah was rejected; he was despised; he was persecuted by fellow Judeans. Naturally, they would have seen him as a traitor. He was flogged, he was imprisoned. Often in his life he was in hiding, he was a very troubled person and he lived in very difficult times. But we also get an insight into his emotional state which we don't from any of the other prophets. He suffered immensely; he weeps over Jerusalem in chapter 8 and 9. We get a sense of the turmoil that he suffers, particularly because of a group of passages that are referred to as the Confessions of Jeremiah and these are sort of scattered throughout--some in chapters 11 and 12, 15,17, 18,20, but these are passages that reveal his inner state. Some people question their authenticity, but in any event they paint a very fascinating portrait of the prophet. He curses the day that he was born; he accuses God of deceiving him, of enticing him to act as God's messenger only to be met with humiliation and shame, but he can't hold it in. God's words rage inside him and he must prophesy. It would be better had he not been born at all than to suffer this ceaseless pain. Chapter 20:7-18, just selections from there: You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed; You overpowered me and You prevailed. I have become a constant laughingstock, Everyone jeers at me. For every time I speak I must cry out, Must shout, "Lawlessness and rapine!" For the word of the Lord causes me Constant disgrace and contempt. I thought, "I will not mention Him, No more will I speak in His name"-- But [His Word] was like a raging fire in my heart, Shut up in my bones; I could not hold it in, I was helpless. I heard the whispers of the crowd-- Terror all around: "Inform! Let us inform against him!" …Accursed be the day That I was born! …Accursed be the man Who brought my father the news And said, "A boy / Is born to you," And gave him such joy! Let that man become like the cities Which the Lord overthrew without relenting! …Because he did not kill me before birth So that my mother might be my grave, And her womb big [with me] for all time. Why did I ever issue from the womb, To see misery and woe, To spend all my days in shame! Nevertheless, despite all of his very harsh criticisms of the establishment authorities, the royal house and even scribes, other prophets who are labeled as liars by Jeremiah, his words were preserved by scribes, by the Deuteronomistic editors. Shortly after the fall of Judah, Jeremiah was taken forcibly to Egypt. And he lived his final years out in Egypt. He didn't give up his job though. He kept denouncing people. We have records of his denouncing his fellow Judean exiles down in Egypt for worshipping the Queen of Heaven and as before, it seems very few heeded him there. But like the earlier prophets, Jeremiah also balanced his message with a message of consolation, and there are some very interesting and unique features of Jeremiah's message of consolation. These passages are found particularly in chapters 30 to 33 where we have more hopeful prophesies. He envisages a restoration; the exile will come to an end, and in fact Jeremiah is the first to actually set a time limit to what we might refer to as the dominion of the idolaters; the idolaters holding sway over God's people, and that time limit he says is 70 years. Jeremiah writes a letter to the first group of deportees, so remember the first siege in 597? You have the king killed, his son and many people taken into exile in Babylon. Jeremiah, from Jerusalem, writes a letter to that first group of exiles and it's quite remarkable, it's found in chapter 29, and it's quite remarkable for its counsel, its advice to the exiles to settle down in their adopted home and just wait out the time. There is an appointed end. He warns the people not to listen to prophets who say you will return shortly, it's just a lie. The Israelites have to serve the king of Babylon and by doing so they will live. So in Jeremiah 29:4-7, "Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, to the whole community which I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon," --he's writing to the exiles: Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you..." Instead of seek the welfare of Jerusalem, seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you "and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper. In other words, you're in for the long haul. And you shouldn't be deceived by the idle dreams or the false prophets who tell you that return is imminent. God has other plans. They are plans for welfare, not for evil, and they will give you a future and a hope. At the end of 70 years, Jeremiah said, there will be a great war of all the nations and Judah and Israel will be returned to their land. Zion, he declared, would be acknowledged as the Holy City and a new Davidic king would reign. A new covenant would be made with Israel as well. And this time, Jeremiah says, it's a covenant that will be etched on the heart, encoded as it were into human nature. Jeremiah 31:31-34: See, a time is coming--declares the Lord--when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers, when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, a covenant which they broke, so that I rejected them--declares the Lord. But such is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel after these days--declares the Lord: I will put My Teaching into their inmost being and inscribe it upon their hearts. Then I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No longer will they need to teach one another and say to one another, "Heed the Lord"; for all of them, from the least of them to the greatest, shall heed Me--declares the Lord. So this is a remarkable idea. It seems to express some dissatisfaction with the element of free will, which is otherwise so crucial to the biblical notion of covenant and morality: the idea that humans freely choose their actions. After all, when you think about some of the major themes set out in the Hebrew Bible at the very beginning in the opening chapters, this would seem to be a cardinal principle: choice. But free choice does mean of course that there will be bad choices and there will be disobedience and evil, and people can get tired of that and Jeremiah was. So his utopian ideal is inspiring, but it does eliminate the element of free will. It seems to describe a situation in which humans are almost hardwired to obey God's covenant. That's a tension that will also be developed in some later texts. I just note it here. In a very beautiful passage, Jeremiah describes a future restoration of the temple, the bringing of offerings again, the singing of psalms and praise, and this is in contrast to chapter 25. There, in chapter 25, he warned that God will banish "the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of bridegroom and bride," leaving the land a desolate ruin. Now in his oracle of consolation Jeremiah says, Again there shall be heard in this place… in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without man, without inhabitants, without beast--the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of bridegroom and bride, the voice of those who cry, "Give thanks to the Lord of Hosts, for the Lord is good, for His kindness is everlasting!" as they bring thanksgiving offerings to the House of the Lord. For I will restore the fortunes of the land as of old--said the Lord [Jer 33:10-11]. So just to kind of summarize these prophets leading up to the time of the destruction (because next time we'll be talking about the exile and later the return): The fall of Jerusalem shattered the national and territorial basis of Israel's culture and religion. The Babylonians had burned the temple to the ground, they carried away most of the people to exile, to live in exile in Babylon, leaving behind mostly members of the lower classes to eke out a living as best they could. And it was the completion of a tragedy that had begun centuries earlier and it was interpreted as a fulfillment of the covenant curses. It was the end of the Davidic monarchy, although the Deuteronomistic historian does close with this note, that the son of Jehoiakim was alive and living in Babylon, kind of holding out hope that the line hadn't actually been killed out, hadn't been completely wiped out. But the institution seemed to have come to an end for now. It was the end of the temple, the end of the priesthood, the end of Israel as a nation, as an autonomous nation, and so the Israelites were confronted with a great test. As I've stressed before, one option would be to see in these events a signal that Yahweh had abandoned them to, or had been defeated by, the god of the Babylonians, and Marduk would replace Yahweh as the Israelites assimilated themselves into their new home. And certainly there were Israelites who went this route, but others who were firmly rooted in exclusive Yahwism did not, and they're the ones who left us their literature. How could this faith survive outside the framework of Israelite national culture, away from the temple and the land, uprooted and scattered? Could Israelite religion survive without these national foundations and institutions and on foreign soil, or would it go the way of other national religions? You hear the pain and the despair that would have been experienced at this time in the words of the Psalmist, Psalm 137 which is written at this time: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion. There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs our tormentors, for amusement, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour. It was the message of the prophets that helped some Israelites make sense of their situation in a manner that kept them distinct and invulnerable to assimilation. And this was probably the reason for the preservation of the prophetic writings, even though they had often been despised or unheeded in their own lifetimes. Yahweh hadn't been defeated, they claimed. The nation's calamities were not disproof of His power and covenant, they were proof of it. The prophets had spoken truly when they had said that destruction would follow if the people didn't turn from their moral and religious violations of God's law. So that rather than undermining faith in God, the defeat and the exile when interpreted in the prophetic manner, had the potential to convince Jews of the need to show absolute and undivided devotion to God and His commandments, so that paradoxically the moment of greatest national despair could be transformed by the prophets into an occasion for the renewal of religious faith. The great contribution of the prophets was their emphasis on God's desire for morality as expressed in the ancient covenant. The great contribution of Jeremiah was his insistence on God's everlasting covenant with his people, even outside the land of Israel and despite the loss of national religious symbols--the temple, the Holy City, the Davidic king. And this insistence that the faithful person's relationship with God wasn't broken, even in an idolatrous land, when added to Jeremiah's notion of a new covenant, provided the exiles with the ideas that would transform the nation of Israel into the religion of Judaism. Next time we're going to turn to two post-destruction prophets who also helped the nation formulate a viable response to the tragedy that had befallen them. This is a point at which we can begin to use words like "Judaism."

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_7B.txt

okay so here we are we're still in in memoriam we are now moving towards the conclusion of the work and we had been looking at uh at the christmas time which begins in 104 this is the the lyric number 104 uh we looked at 104 and 105. 106. let's let's just go back to 106 just for a moment because i've been saying before we took our break that we are beginning to see a shift in the tone of the work and so look at this and compare this with what we saw earlier wring out wild bells to the wild sky the flying cloud the frosty light the year is dying in the night ring out wild bells and let him die let the year die let the let the old go let the old go ring out the old ring in the new ring happy bells across the snow across the snow the year is going let him go wring out the false ring in the true wring out the grief that saps the mind wring out the grief that saps the mind for those that hear we see no more wring out the feud of rich and poor ring in redress to all mankind wring out a slowly dying cause and ancient forms of petty strife ring in the nobler forms of life with sweeter manners purer laws ring out the want the care the sin the faithless coldness of the times ring out wring out my mournful rhymes but ring the fuller minstrel in wring out false pride in place and blood the civic slander and the spite ring in the hu the love of truth and right bring in the common love of good wring out old shapes of foul disease ring out the narrowing lust of gold wring out the thousand wars of old ring in the thousand years of peace the millennium ring in the valiant man and free the larger heart the kindlier hand wring out the darkness of the land ring in the christ that is to be okay so clearly we're dealing with something very different than we were earlier all right now if we can go to the screen please thank you and we have lyrics 1 23 through the epilogue which give us this affirmation of faith of faith overcoming doubt the argument that if love is immortal love with a capital l is immortal and this is an idea that goes back at least to plato among the ancient greeks then the object of the poet's love must likewise be immortal and from that he is going to derive finally his consolation let's look at a little bit of this lyric 1 23 there rolls the deep where grew the tree o earth what changes thou hast seen there where the long street roars hath been the stillness of the central sea the hills are shadows and they flow from form to form and nothing stands they melt like mist the solid lands like clouds they shape themselves and go but in my spirit will i dwell and dream my dream and hold it true for though my lips may breathe ado i cannot think the thing farewell that which we dare invoke to bless our dearest faith our gastliest doubt he they won all within without the power in darkness and we guess i found him him with a capital h now i found him not in world or sun or eagle's wing or insects i in other words not in scientific investigations nor through the questions men may try the petty cobwebs we have spun with our systems of philosophy and so forth if error when faith had fallen asleep i heard a voice believe no more and heard an ever breaking shore that tumbled in the godless deep a warmth within the breast would melt the freezing reasons colder part and like a man in wrath the heart stood up and answered i have felt okay notice that when he has doubted and the colder reason has chilled the warmth of of his desire for consolation and his desire for his friend something warmer has melted his breast and he has felt he has felt in the heart and this is confirmation for him that it's not a question of what is objectively true it is a question of what is subjectively true remember this is a question that we have looked at all along when we've been studying the romantics that the romantics unlike some of their more rationalist and empiricist fellows in the period were not interested simply in the objective truth of certain kinds of claims about nature but they were also interested in what was subjectively true and therefore constituted another kind of knowledge no like a child in doubt and fear but that blind clamor made me wise then was i is a child that cries but crying knows his father near and what i am beheld again what is and no man understands and out of darkness came the hands that reach through nature that reach through nature molding men again that metaphor of the molding the molding love is and was this is 126. love is and was my lord and king love is and was my lord and king and in his presence i attend to hear the tidings of my friend okay to hear the tidings of my friend which every hour his that is to say loves couriers bring love is and was my king and lord and will be though as yet i keep within the court on earth and sleep encompassed by his faithful guard and here at times a sentinel who moves about from place to place and whispers to the worlds of space in the deep night that all is well that all is well this is the deeper the deeper sense in the deeper truth and the deeper knowledge that he is experiencing so that in 129 notice dear friend he's addressing now his departed friend dear friend far off my lost desire so far so near and well and wheel oh loved the most when most i feel there is a lower and a higher and so forth in 1 30 thy voice is on the rolling air thy voice is on the rolling air i hear thee where the waters run thou standest in the rising sun and in the setting thou art fair what art thou did i cannot guess but though i seem in star and flower to feel the some diffusive power i do not therefore love thee lives my love involves the love before my love is vaster passion now though mixed with god and nature thou i seem to love thee more and more far off thou art but never nigh i have these still and i rejoice i prosper circled with thy voice i shall not lose thee though i die and notice what he says in 131 a living will that shall endure when all that seems shall suffer shock rise in the spiritual rock flow through our deeds and make them pure that we may lift from out of dust once again out of dust in the varying senses in which he's been using dust metaphorically in these lyrics a voice is unto him that hear a cry above the conquered years to that us works and trust with faith with faith that comes of self-control notice faith comes of self-control one has to exercise a certain kind of discipline over one's feelings too the truths that never can be proved until we close with all we loved and all we flow from soul and soul and then in the epilogue he concludes and rise o moon from yonder down till over down and over dale all night the shining vapor sail and pass the silent lighted down the white-faced halls the glancing rills and catching every mountain head and or the friths that branch and spread their sleeping silver through the hills and touch was shade the bridal doors with tender gloom the roof the wall and breaking let the splendor fall to spangle all the happy shores by which they rest and ocean sounds and star and system rolling past a soul shall draw from out the vast and strike his being into bounds and moved through life of lower phase result in man be born and think and act and love a closer link betwixt us and the crowning race of those that eye to eye shall look on knowledge under whose command is earth and earth and in their hand is nature like an open book no longer half akin to brute for all we thought and loved and did and hoped and suffered is but a seed of what in them is flower and fruit whereof the man that with me trod this planet was a noble type appearing air the times were ripe that friend of mine who lives in god that god whichever lives and loves one god one law one element and one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves so he is finally at peace and finally he has achieved the consolation that he has so devoutly wished so uh this is tennyson's attempt to resolve the kind of crisis of faith that many were undergoing in the 19th century and we're going to be talking more about that as we encounter more of our writers dealing with this whole question not always because of the death of a loved one but in one way or another coming to question some of the traditional beliefs of traditional religion some of them work through these as tennyson does and come to a new kind of affirmation of faith some abandon religious faith and become either atheists or as thomas henry huxley was to coin the term agnostics that is to say those who say well there's not enough reason on one side of the question or the other really to convince one whether or not god truly exists that's the agnostic position so we're also going to be seeing how within the christian religion or religions themselves they're going to be all kinds of different responses there are going to be fundamentalist christians who simply do a kind of end run around the whole problem and say well we know by faith and by our study of the bible what is true and so what difference does it make what some of these philosophers and scientists and even theologians are saying we simply know what is true and that's all there is to it there are roman catholics who will sidestep the whole issue in yet another way i don't mean sidestep in the bad sense but we'll attempt to outflank some of these problems in yet another way particularly the challenges to the bible and we'll talk more about this later on uh or the literal truth of the bible in certain respects by saying well the uh the catholic church's position has always been not that the church depends upon the bible but the bible depends upon the church and upon the authority of the church and therefore convenes councils establishing and re-establishing and affirming and reaffirming the authority of the church and in particular of the papacy and we will see within various protestant denominations those who wrestle with this kind of issue in other ways particularly those who are followers of what in the 19th century was called liberal protestantism with a capital l and a capital p but these are some of the movements that we're going to be looking at in weeks to come right now what i'd like to do is to turn to robert browning and in order to do so let's see if i can bring this up i did it okay so robert browning who lived a a good long life as did many of these guys by the way and he is best known for not inventing so much as the sophistication with which he develops the potential of the dramatic monologue the dramatic monologue now the best way i know of to explain what a dramatic monologue is whoa whoop wait wait wait wait anybody here know i mean why should i be doing all the talking here anybody know what a dramatic monologue is you heard the term before just not quite sure what it might mean well dramatic monologue is first of all a monologue in the sense that we're just listening to one person but it's dramatic in the sense that we have more than one person involved in the action more than one person involved in the action as in a drama or as in a play in which typically we don't just have one actor coming out onto the stage i mean you can have something like that but uh that's not typically what we think of as a play what we are usually talking about is the enactment of some kind of episode or series of episodes comprising a plot in which we have various characters interacting with one another now let's go back to our concept of dramatic monologue what if you have a poem in which you have only one person's voice but everywhere implied is another person and that other person's response to the first person it's like listening in on one half of a telephone conversation i mean everybody here has done that right you know you're at somebody's house maybe your own house phone rings somebody picks up the phone and they're talking and that's what you hear but to some extent at any rate you're going to be able to infer what the other person is saying or how the other person is responding to the voice that you are listening to that's very much what we have in the dramatic monologue or at least many of browning's very greatest dramatic monologues in this we will also have the creation of a persona a persona what's a persona anybody know it's more than just a personality the ancient meaning of the word persona was the role that an actor plays the role that an actor plays so that among the greeks and romans the actors would come out on the stage wearing masks at least originally they were masks and you were not supposed to confuse the person playing the role with the mask signifying the role that the actor was playing if for no other reason than that you could have one actor playing more than one role in the same play and each time the actor came out the actor might be wearing a different mask the ancient rhetoricians picked that concept up and applied it to what we do when we seek to communicate with others and in particular to persuade others we may adopt a certain persona which we believe will be persuasive with a person or a group of persons on a particular subject in a particular context for example if you are going on a job interview you're going to try to figure out what does the employer or prospective employer want not just in terms of qualifications but what kind of a person does the employer want and you're going to try to perce project those qualities in the interview in order to be successful in other words you are going to try at least for the moment to develop a persona which may not be identical with who you are in all other circumstances now i'm not talking about being cynical i'm just talking about trying to be effective you probably talk to children differently than you talk to other adults you probably talk to me differently than you talk to your close friends okay that's simply the way in which we adapt in different circumstances okay so let's take the idea of the persona as itself being something which is created but which is not necessarily identical with the person who has created it the classic example in our literature is swift's modest proposal remember a modest proposal where you've got this uh this social scientist this this political economist in england who is saying the way to deal with the question of poverty in ireland and crime among the lower classes who can't find any kind of gainful employment the starvation of people who can't feed themselves the way to deal with this is for us to invest money into fattening up the irish children and then marketing them as food well of course the person who is the modest proposer is not jonathan swift what jonathan swift is doing is creating a bitter satire of people with that kind of mentality i mean not that anybody was literally proposing that but people of that kind of cold mentality towards the suffering of other people especially poor people so it's the creation of a persona for a particular purpose but the persona need not be identical with the person who creates it so also here with browning browning is going to be imagining a particular person who then becomes the speaker in one of the poems and so there is a distance often between that voice that we are listening to in the poem and browning as the implied author of the poem okay clearly there's a tremendous potential here for the ironic treatment of the persona as in swift but also obviously as we shall see in browning and there's going to be a question of the reliability or the unreliability of the speaker does browning identify or not identify with the speaker in swift's case we just talked about how swift clearly clearly is sending us all kinds of implicit messages that he does not identify with the author of or the putative author of a modest proposal what about browning well let's see let's first of all take the poem my last duchess and we're going to see ferrara who's an italian who will be the voice or the persona in the poem okay and he's addressing another person we don't hear what the other person says but we can imply what the other person's responses are from what ferrara says remember this is how the dramatic monologue is working and of course we're going to be asking the question how do we know what browning thinks of ferrara well let's look at the at the poem it's not very long ferrara is speaking that's my last duchess painted on the wall looking as if she were alive ferrara is a widower we're going to figure this out as we go along but i'm just going to tell you in advance so that it will help to make things a little easier to follow ferrara is a widower he's a duke and his last duchess his his now dead wife sat for a portrait which is now hanging on the wall so as he's talking to this other person he draws the other person's attention to the portrait of his last duchess that's my last touches painted on the wall looking as if she were alive i called that piece of wonder now fra pandolf's hands worked busily a day and there she stands frop handoff well there were italian painters uh at the very dawn of the italian renaissance who were often called fraudus and fraud that and so forth because they were in religious orders often and did religious paintings so not only religious paintings fraud pandoff's hands worked busily a day and there she stands would please you sit and look at her i said pr frog handoff by design for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance the depth and passion of its earnest glance but to myself they turned since none puts by the curtain i have drawn for you but i and seemed as they would ask me if they durst how such a glance came there okay he's showing off isn't he this is this is name dropping you know well you're not the first one to notice that painting you see why frog handoff did this for me a famous painter did this for me this is not just any portrait this is one done by a master this is very valuable and he's puffing himself up with his own self-importance okay but now i've drawn the curtains so that you can see it you see i'm giving you a very special privilege and they seemed people who have looked at it it seems they would ask me if they durst how such a glance came there so not the first are you to turn and asked us see we assume thou that that's what the other person has done is to ask him not simply about the painting but about the expression of the woman in the painting sir he responds now to the question that has been asked of him it was not her husband's presence only that called that spot of joy into the duchess's cheek so we're getting into jealousy here it was not her husband he's her husband or was her husband when she was alive it was not her husband's presence only called that spot of joy into the duchess's cheek perhaps for a pandolf chance to say her mantle laps over my lady's wrist too much or paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half flesh that dies along her throat okay and of course she would be flattered by his attentions after all he's an artist who deals in beauty such stuff was courtesy she thought and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy it was courtesy not courtesy in our sense of courtesy being polite let's say but courtesy in the older sense as in amur courtois that is to say if one goes back all the way into the middle ages there was something which was considered to be courtliness on the part of a man towards a lady and there were rules for courtliness and that's where we get our terms courting or paying court to the woman okay so such stuff was courtesy she thought and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy she had a heart how shall i say too soon made glad what on earth does that mean to sin made glad too easily impressed notice his condescension towards his wife she liked whatever she looked on and her looks went everywhere indiscriminately you see she should have been focused on me i mean look at me i'm such a great wonderful person she would have been she should have been focused on me and me alone but her looks went everywhere sir twas all one my favor at her breast the dropping of the daylight in the west the bow of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her the white mule she rode with round the terrace all in each would draw from her alike the approving speech or blush at least see my favorite or breast or all of these other trivial things were all elected to her she thanked men good but thanked somehow i know not how as if she ranked my gift of a 900 years old name with anybody's gift i have bestowed on her the honor of my ancient family's name and she treats that in the same way she treats anybody's gift and notice his his term gift okay this is not sharing i have given her this gift of my family name it's just condescension everywhere here who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling even had you skill in speech which i have not to make your will quite clear to such a one and say just this or that in you disgusts me he's going to talk that way to his wife just this or just that disgusts me here you miss or there exceed the mark okay this is him instructing his wife and if she let herself be lessened so nor plainly sent her wits to yours forsooth and made excuse ian then would be some stooping and i'd choose never to stoop you see i would be stooping even to correct her and obviously i am much too elegant and refined and elevated to stoop oh sir she smiled no doubt whenever i passed her but who passed without much the same smile this grew i gave commands stop that stop smiling at other men the way you smile at me then all smiles stopped together then all smiles stop together he starts not just leaning on her he starts squashing her right and what happens he squashes the life out of her then all smiles stop together there she stands as if alive will please you to rise we'll meet the company below then i repeat the count your master's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretense of mine for dowry will be disallowed this apparently is somebody in the service of a count and of course here he is politely saying that you know your account is is so not only so wealthy but so generous that i'm sure that any request for dowry i make will be acceptable to the count though his fair daughter's self as i avowed as starting is my object they will go down together sir notice neptune though taming a seahorse thought a rarity which klaus of innsbruck cast in bronze for me for me as they're passing down the staircase well okay so notice what browning has been able to pull off in this poem and we go back to if we can go back to the screen just for a second okay uh we've got ferrara the persona ferrara clearly is not browning is he he's he's a character created by browning and notice he's speaking to somebody else and we can infer the responses of that other person to him from what he says in response to those responses okay now how do we know what browning thinks of ferrara well notice the things that he puts in ferrari's mouth he's he's proud to the point of being egotistical i mean this is not just a healthy pride in oneself and one's own abilities this is this is a kind of egotism kind of runaway egotism he doesn't care about his wife and when he thinks that she is smiling at others or on others what does he want to do he wants to accuse her first of all of ingratitude because she has not sufficiently honored his gift to her of his ancient family name but he also wants to quash her and apparently does quash her we don't know how she died but somehow or another she died and no doubt quite unhappily and notice now how he gets to the point of being interested in the dowry at the same time that he's suggesting he's not interested in the dowry but only in the beauty of the countesses or the excuse me the count's daughter okay why should we assume that if he marries the count's daughter that he's going to behave any differently than he did to his last duchess he hasn't changed he hasn't learned a thing has he and even in his last gesture as they're going down the steps he points to a piece of sculpture which apparently is probably you know perched on a landing there on the staircase in this most pretentious of ways so we have all kinds of evidence here don't we of what browning thinks of ferrara okay now let's look at a very different kind of poem taliban upon setabose caliban upon cerebos who is caliban who in our literature is named caliban before browning's pop anybody know hint hint shakespeare and him shakespearean play intent the tempest okay half man half monster thou earth and so on and so on yeah okay okay so um and and set off against ariel right who is a character in the tempest who is spirit or spirit-like okay so caliban is really sort of half brute half human the way browning is treating him is as if caliban were the so-called missing link in our evolutionary history one of the things that people very quickly seized on in darwin's origin of the species but particularly his descent of man was well where's the link where's the link if we are indeed evolved out of some other species with whom we can still be compared in certain respects physiologically at least such as apes then where's the missing link should we not be able to find some remains even if there are fossil remains of creatures who were in between who are in the middle of that evolutionary shift and if we can't find that what does that do to the theory of evolution and of course evolutionary biology has been dealing with that kind of research ever since and well that's not the only thing dealt with obviously but that's one of the things dealt with and so you know we have uh archaeologists and geologists and anthropologists and biologists and uh paleontologists uh mainly in africa more recently to some extent in asia but mainly in africa because all of the evidence points to what appears to be the fact that the human family all comes from africa originally mean we're all africans i'm african you're african we're all africans um and we go back to some kind of common pre-human and then in various stages of development into human beings as we are now okay and it's been the business of many of these sciences that i was mentioning a moment ago to try to discover the fossil remains of the different stages evolutionary stages in between okay so uh what browning is doing with this is very playful in a way i mean the poem is a serious poem but it's also a very playfully handled poem in certain respects he's imagining what if we had that person who is halfway between animal and human a caliban okay on an island what would he think about what kinds of questions would he pose for himself how would he seek to answer those questions okay so we have caliban is the only one speaking in the poem by the way so it begins we'll sprawl now that the heat of day is best flat on his belly in the pits much mire with elbows wide fists clench to prop his chin and while he kicks both feet in the cool slush and feels about his spine small f things course run in and out each arm and make him laugh and while above his head a pompous plant coating the cave top as a brow if i as well its eye creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard and now a flower drops with a bee inside and now a fruit to snap out catch and crunch he looks out or yon sea which sun beams cross and across and re-cross till they weave a spider web meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times and talks to his own self this is a kind of prologue setting the scene for us okay this is not caliban speaking yet but he's going to be speaking in a moment and talks to his own self however he please touching that other whom is damn called god because to talk about him vex says ha how could he but no in time to vex is now when talk is safer than in wintertime moreover prosper and miranda's sleep in confidence he drudges at their task and it is good to cheat the pair and jibe letting the rank tongue blossom into speech okay uh prospero and miranda are two principal figures in shakespeare's play okay so he's going to speak sarabo setabo setobos thinketh he dwelleth in the cold of the moon thinketh he made it with the sun to match but not the stars the stars came otherwise only made clouds winds meteors such as that in this aisle what lives and grows thereon the snaky sea which rounds and ends the same so he's thinking he's thinking what who made the moon who made the sun who made the sky so in line 55 and following he made all these and more senebose by the way is his name for god he made all these and more made all we see and us in spite in spite okay not in love but in spite how else he could not himself make a second self to be his mate as well as mate himself he would not make what he mislikes or cites and eyesore to him were not worth his pains but did in envy listlessness or sport make what himself would feign in a manner be weaker in most points stronger and a few worthy and yet mere play things all the while things he admires and mocks too that is it because so brave so better though they be it nothing skills if he begin to plague look now he's talking about god and god creating the world as caliban understands that world look now i melt a gourd fruit into mash and honeycomb and pods i have perceived which bite like finches when they bill and kiss then forth and then when froth rises blattery drank up all quick quick to the maggot scamper through my brain last throw me on my back in the seated time and wanted wishing i were born a bird put case unable to be what i wish i yet could make a live bird out of clay okay i yet could make a live bird out of clay remember creation book of genesis making out of clay would not i take clay pinch my caliban able to fly for there see he hath wings okay so we're to imagine that caliban now has got some clay and he is fashioning something so he's going to make a bird now and see here he's got wings as he's you know pulling out the wings from the clay or shaping them in great comb like the hoopos to admire and there a sting is in stinger to do his foes offense there and i will that he begin to live this is as if he were said about i will that he begin to live flighty and rock top nip me off the horns of griggs high up that make the merry din saucy through their veined wings and mind me not in which feet if his legs snapped brittle clay and he lays stupid like why i should laugh i created this this being and if his leg breaks so what i'll laugh and if he's spying me should fall to weep beseech me to be good pray to me as god repair is wrong bid his poor leg smart less or grow again well is the chance word this might take in other words i might do it what he he prays for or else not take my fancy i might hear his cry and give the mankind three sound legs for one but pluck the other off and leave him like an egg and lessened he was mine in merely clay this is caliban's view of god that god is just totally arbitrary totally arbitrary and you know god may do something good for people god may do something bad for people but god is god god can do anything he wants to this is the way caliban is thinking okay so then look over in line 98 and following thinketh such shows no right no wrong in him nor kind nor cruel he's strong and lord i i'm strong myself compared to yonder krabs you see you know the analogical reasoning here you see i am to god okay as the crabs are to me okay that march now from the mountain to the sea let 20 pass and stone the 21st i just totally arbitrarily i can let this string of crabs go down i'll let 20 of them pass and then just because i decide to i take a stone and crushed the 21st loving not hating not just choosing so say the first dragler that boasts purple spots shall join the file one pincer twisted off say this bruised fellow shall receive a worm and two worms he whose nippers end in red as it likes me each time i do so he so also god okay it's totally arbitrary it's simply power for the sake of power okay go over to 225 what does god do spirit the squirrel that it nothing fears but steals the nut from underneath my thumb and when i threat bite stoutly in defense spareth and urchin that contrary wise curls up into a ball pretending death for frighted my approach the two ways please but what would move my collar my anger more than this that either creature counted on its life tomorrow and next day and all days to come saying forsooth in the inmost of its heart because he did so yesterday with me and otherwise with such another brute so must he do henceforth and always i would teach the reasoning couple what must means doth as he likes or wherefore lord so he so also he okay see the point here is that he might spare some of these and he might not but he might spare them so long as they didn't presume that he had to be consistent and follow some kind of rule because i can do if i were god i can do anything i like okay and then down in 263 and following he and so would have him misconceived supposed his caliben drives hard and ails no less and always above all else envies him and wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights moans in the sun gets under holes to laugh and never speaks his mind save housed is now outside groans curses if he caught me here or heard this speech and he asked what checklist at would to appease him cut a finger of or of my three kid yearlings burn the best or let the twosome apples rot on tree or push my tame beast for the orc to taste while myself lit a fire and made a song and sung it i mean this is what we read in say the religion of the greeks that this is what the greeks would do right sacrifices burning animals and so forth would i hate be consecrate to celebrate the united state no mate for thee what see for envy in poor me will okay so that's a very interesting kind of poem and let's go back to the screen for a moment please so we've got a different kind of dramatic monologue here we've got the figure of taliban we've talked about him we've now seen him in action we have the whole question of natural theology of natural theology does anybody know or remember what natural theology is it goes back to very ancient times but it was very big in the 18th and 19th centuries and of course in many quarters continues to be so natural theology begins with the premise that we can investigate what god has done in creating his creation and from that we can infer things about god as the creator of what he has created it's natural theology in the sense that it's not a theology based on say the bible or some other source it's a theology which is based on philosophizing about the nature of nature itself and as we come to an understanding of the nature of nature we come to an understanding at least to some extent not only of the necessity for god's existence but we can begin to infer certain things about god now what browning is doing is he's taking that whole argument and turning it upside down he's saying what if we see the actions of god as completely arbitrary completely capricious and is simple acts of power on the part of a willful being who exercises power for no other reason than that he can often governed simply by whims that these also are inferences that one could draw based on a study of the nature of nature including human nature well well okay where does browning stand in all this it's hard to tell it's hard to tell he doesn't really tell us does he but it is significant that he puts all of this into the mind of taliban okay rather than say inventing some philosopher let's say and as i put up here on the screen as my last point this raises the whole problem of anthropomorphizing in religion what does the word anthropomorphize mean anybody know what does anthropomorphic mean anybody know i'm not having much luck tonight well it's a long evening i know um so uh the greek word anthropos that we use in things like anthropology and so forth uh means man man in the sense of man and woman means human okay and uh morphe means form means form okay so something which is anthropomorphic is in the form of a human or is in human form or human-like form what happens in the arena of religion when we anthropomorphize when we create images of god as say the uh the white-haired man with the long beard up on the clouds right you know then he is surrounded by you know various other figures who at least in some respects look like human beings i mean the angels may have wings but they otherwise may look very much like human beings and then when god is described god is described very much in terms that are like the behavior of human beings except blown up to the scale of god okay now that creates all kinds of very interesting problems because on the one hand we have a kind of negative theology in which we say what god is not god is not mortal god is not limited in power god is not limited in knowledge right and so we say god is immortal god is omnipotent god is omniscient which is just the flip side of what i just said in negative terms what we do is we conceive of god as not what we are okay and that's one way of doing it but notice another way of doing it is to look for some kinds of similarities that will in effect make god recognizable now that's very very very very common in religions and i'm talking about religions around the world i'm not now talking simply about one religion the most obvious example of course would be what westerners know very well the uh the myths of the greeks and the romans where obviously the gods and goddesses not only look like human beings but except for the fact that they are immortal and have certain powers that we don't have they seem to be very much like us and they behave very much like us and their motives are very much like our motives and sometimes they can be very petty and very cruel and sometimes they can be very generous and very loving but what happens when that gets applied to other conceptions of god well it it's a real problem and of course i'm not saying that i've got an answer to this but this is a classic problem in the history of religions and in the philosophy of religion and in the history of theologies okay so notice here of course that's exactly what caliber does he simply assumes that god is somebody like himself that's how he would behave if he were god that's how he does behave towards these creatures over whom he can exercise power like the crabs and others so therefore god okay well uh partly browning doesn't mean to be taken seriously here but in part he's simply having fun with stirring up trouble stirring up trouble i mean there are a lot of people who would who would read this poem who would get real angry and real upset and want to quarrel with browning well then he's accomplished what he wanted to accomplish because browning would probably sit back and say that's what i was trying to do trying to get you to think most people don't think and they certainly don't think about questions like this at the very least i've got you thinking okay so what is browning's view of caliban it's it's hard to tell and that what kind of evidence would we decide that's a very interesting question i think well okay um caliban upon said about a very interesting poem and one that gives us a very different view of these matters than tennyson's in memoriam did and what i'm trying to do here and i'm going to be doing this in the next class or two as well is to start complicating things that you can't simply go back and say the victorians thought such and such the victorians believed such and such which victorians i mean you wouldn't stand still for that would you if somebody were talking about people in our time well you know what americans think right which americans where on what subjects under what conditions right i mean a lot of us think a lot of different things and sometimes we agree with one another and sometimes we disagree with one another okay well the same thing was true with the victorians and the same thing is true throughout cultural history it's always always a danger to create these glib generalizations about a whole people or about a whole culture and if you hear somebody doing that just turn a switch in your head you know uh tune into them in a different way okay because it's always going to be more complex than that you can't talk about how people thought in the middle ages which people there are lots of i'm talking about a thousand years of human history just in the west alone in which there are all kinds of people who thought all kinds of different things and they got into all kinds of arguments with one another constantly so okay let us look at one more browning poem in the time that remains to us fraulipi lippy prolipo-lippi this is another dramatic monologue in which we have the figure of an early renaissance artist who is in between two different cultural moments he's a monk but he's also an artist he has loyalty to the institution that represents the past his church his monastic order their beliefs their rules but he also has loyalty to his art and from the long view of history browning is suggesting it is that art that represents the future it is that art that represents the future looking forward into the renaissance said glorious glorious flowering of the arts and of a whole cultural movement that we term humanism which is not an easy or unproblematic term or concept itself but nevertheless from browning's point of view is an opening into the future and here is fraulipo lippy right in the middle of things we're going to talk about people who felt that way as well and in this poem we have a representation of the spirit abstracted from the body how would you do that in art over against the representation of beauty in the body as an expression of the spirit see there's one kind of view of life which would want to cultivate the spirit at the expense of the body and what kind of art would that lead to there's another kind of view which sees in the beauty of the body an expression of spirit and what kind of art would that lead to and so finally of course we can ask once again to what extent do fraulipo lippies or any of these personae of brownings represent browning's own views in this case is his aesthetics and so i'm just going to begin looking at a very little bit of this and we can continue this next time how he begins i am poor brother lippo by your leave you need not clap your torches to my face he's been stopped apparently by guards or police officers or something like that so what's to blame you think you see a monk what just past midnight and you go the rounds and here you catch me at an alley's end where sportive ladies leave their doors in jar oh oh uh oh certainly not where a monk is supposed to be uh and so he identifies himself in line 39. yes i'm the painter since you style me so and then he's going to go on to talk about his escape to follow the call of the world and we're running out of time for this particular class so we're not going to have time to pursue this in the kind of detail that i would like to and we'll come back to this poem uh at the beginning of our next class but what i want you to be considering is my question that i posed a few moments ago what kind of art does it lead to if you prize the world of the spirit above and beyond the world of the body over against what kind of art is produced when you see the beauty of the body itself as an expression of spirit okay

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_24_Alternative_Visions_Esther_Ruth_and_Jonah.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: An interesting counterpoint to the apocalyptic literature and the apocalyptic reliance on God's cataclysmic consummation of history in order to dole out justice to the righteous and the wicked, is found in the Book of Esther. And this is a short novella. It's set in fifth-century Persia, it was probably written in the fourth century, we think, but it's set during the reign of Xerxes (and there's no x in the Hebrew alphabet--this is Ahasuerus, which is Xerxes), and he was a fifth-century Persian emperor from about 486 to 465. It's another heroic fiction that features a Jew in the court of a gentile king, so it's like Daniel. The Jews of Persia are threatened with genocide, and they are saved not by divine intervention but entirely through their own efforts. Indeed, the Book of Esther does not mention God once. The story revolves around Mordechai. Now, Mordechai is a pious Jew. He sits at the gate of the Persian king, Ahasuerus or Xerxes, and his beautiful niece is also central to the story of course--that's Esther--and he has adopted her as his own. There's a lot of comic irony in this story. It really is a fun read. Time is not going to permit me to go into the various subplots and the dramatic reversals, the ironies and twists, but I will just highlight a few of the most salient points that are relevant to the conversation we've been having. When the Persian king divorces his wife, Vashti, because she refuses to appear in the royal diadem before his male courtiers--presumably in nothing but the royal diadem--Esther's great beauty commends her to the king and she becomes queen. Now, her uncle Mordechai advises her to be discreet about her Jewish identity for safety's sake. In 2:10 and 11 it says, Esther did not reveal her people or her kindred, for Mordechai had told her not to reveal it. Every single day Mordechai would walk about in front of the court of the harem, to learn how Esther was faring and what was happening to her. So, a little while later the king promotes a certain Haman, Haman the Agagite, to the post of chief administrator. And everyone in the palace gate kneels down to Haman as the king has ordered, everyone that is except for Mordechai. Day after day he refuses, and finally the matter is told to Haman. This is chapter 3:4-6, and "When they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them," speaking to Mordechai and he won't listen to them, …they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordechai's resolve would prevail; for he had explained to them that he was a Jew. When Haman saw that Mordechai would not kneel or bow low to him, Haman was filled with rage. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordechai alone; having been told who Mordechai's people were, Haman plotted to do away with all the Jews, Mordechai's people, throughout the kingdom of Ahasuerus. So Haman casts lots. The word for lots is purim; so he casts lots in order to determine the date of the massacre and then he offers the king a handsome bribe in return for permission to kill the Jews of the kingdom. This is chapter 3:8-11--and listen to the rationale that's proposed. He says to the king: …"There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king's laws; and it is not in Your majesty's interest to tolerate them. If it please Your Majesty, let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury." Thereupon the king removed his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the foe of the Jews. And the king said, "The money and the people are yours to do with as you see fit." So he provides a rationale. He also provides a good bribe along with it to get this edict. So this edict goes out to every province to destroy, massacre, and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day. This is to be the thirteenth of the month of Adar. Jews everywhere begin to fast and weep and wail. They mourn, they wear sackcloth and ashes. And Esther sends to Mordechai for an explanation of the commotion. She's somewhat sealed off here in the harem and doesn't quite know what's going on. So he sends a message informing her of the decree. And he urges her to appeal to the king and to plead for her people. And Esther hesitates, partly because to appear unbidden before the king carries a penalty of death. And Mordechai responds with this message. This is Esther 4:13b to 16: "Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king's palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another quarter, while you and your father's house will perish. And who knows, perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis." Then Esther sent back this answer to Mordechai: "Go, assemble all the Jews who live in Shushan," [in Susa, in Persia] "and fast in my behalf; do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my maidens will observe the same fast. Then I shall go to the king, though it is contrary to the law, and if I am to perish, I shall perish!" So Mordechai went about the city and did just as Esther had commanded him. It's a very tense scene, Esther approaches the king and he--you get a signal: he raises his scepter or not, to accept you or not--and in this tense moment he permits her entry and he offers to grant her every request. And so she asks that the king and Haman attend a banquet that she's preparing. And at Esther's banquet, the king offers to grant Esther any request that she might wish to make. And so her request is stated in the following terms, terms that show her loyalty to her people. Esther 7:3b-6: …"If Your Majesty will do me the favor, and if it pleases Your Majesty, let my life be granted me as my wish and my people as my request. For we have been sold, my people and I, to be destroyed, massacred, and exterminated. Had we only been sold as bondmen and bondwomen," [as slaves] "I would have kept silent; for the adversary is not worth the king's trouble." Thereupon King Ahasuerus demanded of Queen Esther, "Who is he and where is he who dared to do this?" "The adversary and enemy," replied Esther, "is this evil Haman!" And Haman cringed in terror before the king and the queen. So Esther boldly reveals her Jewish identity before the king. She expresses her solidarity in her speech with phrases like "we" and "my people and I." There's a real comedy of errors that follows. The king leaves the room in a rage and Haman falls prostrate on Esther's couch to beg for his life. So when the king reenters the room, he sees Haman in this compromising position and he declares, "Does he mean to ravish the queen in my own palace?" So he orders Haman to be impaled on the very stake that Haman had set up for Mordechai, and Mordechai in fact is then elevated in Haman's stead within the court. But the Jews are still in danger because an edict of the king's cannot be revoked. Once a word has gone forth from the king, it is law. So the solution is a second edict in which Ahasuerus charges the Jews to arm and defend themselves. And so then we have another of many reversals in this story. What was to be a day of defeat and massacre of the Jews becomes a day of triumph as the Jews who now have permission to arm themselves and fight, slay those who were bent on murdering them. The victory celebration which is the festival of Purim is commemorated by Jews to this day. The very melodramatic story of this luxurious Persian court life and all of the attendant political intrigue that goes on in this story, it's recreated in annual Purim celebrations, very raucous, carnival-like dramatizations. According to the Talmud on Purim, it's a mitzvah, which can mean a commandment or a good deed, to get so drunk that you can't distinguish between Mordechai and Haman. But for all of that there are some very important and striking themes in the story. First, there's the ethnic element of Jewish identity, rather than religious, that comes to the fore in the book of Esther. The presentation is secular, the Jews are described as a people, an ethnos. Esther is fully assimilated to her gentile environment. Unlike Daniel, who prays towards Jerusalem daily in the court of the king and observes the dietary laws in the court of the king, we hear nothing like this about Esther at all. There's also a very human and very anti-apocalyptic message in this story. It gives expression to the conviction that solidarity and heroic resistance are necessary in the face of overwhelming anti-Jewish aggression to ensure Jewish survival. This, according to the book of Esther, so different from the book of Daniel, is the lesson to be learned from Israel's history. If the book of Esther presents one alternative to the post-exilic eschatologies in which Yahweh's enemies are afflicted and consumed for their wickedness, then the book of Jonah offers another perspective. The book of Jonah is actually found among the section of the Bible called the Prophets--the second section, the prophetic books of the Bible--and that's because in the book of Kings, 2 Kings 14:25, we have someone identified as Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet. This is considered the same Jonah, and so the book is considered to be among the books of the Prophets. But it differs in significant ways from the other prophetic books. It is not, in fact, a collection of oracles. It's actually a story, a somewhat comic story, a comic tale about a reluctant prophet named Jonah. The second interesting or unusual thing about this book, is that Jonah is commissioned by Yahweh to carry a message to the people of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, not to the people of Israel. The Israelite concept of divine mercy receives its full expression in the book of Jonah. In the first chapter, Jonah receives a call from Yahweh who instructs him to go to Nineveh, whose wickedness is great, and to proclaim God's judgment. Chapter 1, the first three verses: "The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come before Me. Jonah, however, started out to flee to Tarshish from the Lord's service." "…He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went aboard to sail with the others to Tarshish, away from the service of the Lord." So he does this immediate about-face in a very comic touch and sets sail for Spain, the other end of the Mediterranean. But of course, Jonah cannot escape from God, and God sends a storm which threatens to destroy the ship. The non-Israelite sailors on board pray to their gods and then finally they cast lots in order to discover who it is who's brought this danger to the ship. And the lot falls to Jonah. So Jonah confesses that he's a Hebrew who worships the Lord who, as he now realizes, made both land and sea. And that is a fact that strikes great terror in the heart of the sailors when they hear this, that his God is Yahweh. Jonah further adds that he's trying to flee from God's service and the clear implication is that he is the cause of this terrible storm. So Jonah proposes that he be thrown overboard to save the ship. The sailors strive mightily to battle the storm but finally in despair they pray to God, Yahweh, to forgive them for killing an innocent man. And they heave Jonah overboard and save the ship. Now, the sailors are said by the narrator to revere God. They offer a sacrifice to him. They make vows. In the meantime, God has appointed a huge fish to swallow Jonah and so preserve his life. And from the belly of this fish, Jonah prays to God. The prayer or the psalm is not entirely appropriate to the narrative context. It's probably an insertion in the story by a later writer. It's an insertion that was probably suggested by references within the prayer to drowning in the deep, to crying out to God from the "belly" of Sheol--and Jonah is in the "belly" of the fish, so that linguistic resonance may very well have been what prompted someone to insert this prayer here. In any event, in response to Jonah's prayer, God orders the fish to spew Jonah out onto dry land. In chapter 3, Jonah gets his second chance. God calls him again and in contrast to his first response, this time Jonah sets out for Nineveh at once. And he proclaims God's message: "In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown." And then comes the shocking element in the story. Chapter 3:5-10: The people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast, and great and small alike put on sackcloth. And when the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his robe, put on sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he had the word cried through Nineveh: "By decree of the king and his nobles: No man or beast--of flock or herd--shall taste anything! They shall not graze, and they shall not drink water! They shall be covered with sackcloth--man and beast--and shall cry mightily to God. Let everyone turn back from his evil ways and from the injustice of which he is guilty. Who knows but that God may turn and relent? He may turn back from his wrath, so that we do not perish." God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out. So idolatrous Nineveh believes God and humbles itself before God hoping to arouse his mercy. And in another humorous touch, we read that even the animals are wearing sackcloth--they're fasting and crying out to God. So from the greatest to the very least, the inhabitants of Nineveh turn back from their evil ways and God's mercy is in fact aroused. The Assyrians are spared, and Jonah is furious. Chapter 4:1-4: This displeased Jonah greatly, and he was grieved. He prayed to the Lord, saying, "O Lord! Isn't this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment. Please, Lord, take my life, for I would rather die than live." The Lord replied, "Are you that deeply grieved?" Jonah doesn't respond; he just leaves the city to sulk. And his complaint seems to be twofold. If you're going to punish the wicked then just punish them. They deserve it. And if you're planning to spare them, then just spare them and don't waste my time with messages and oracles. But the stronger problem for Jonah seems to be the lack of punishment for the wicked. Jonah is indignant that the Assyrians didn't get what they so richly deserved: didn't I say this would happen? You always forgive, you're this slow-to-anger, compassionate guy! You always repent, the wicked are never punished! I'm fed up with the way you do things, God. Your mercy perverts your justice. And some things ought not to be forgiven. People must be held to account for their evil actions. How can God not do justice? Jonah sits in a little booth that he has constructed and God causes a leafy plant to grow over him, providing shade and saving him from a good deal of discomfort. And the plant is to be the source of a final lesson for Jonah. Jonah 4:6-11: …Jonah was very happy about the plant. But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; and the sun beat down on Jonah's head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, "I would rather die than live." Then God said to Jonah, "Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?" "Yes," he replied, "so deeply that I want to die." Then the Lord said, "You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!" How could Yahweh not be compassionate? For even the most evil of peoples are no less his creation that he has cared for, than precious Israel. And if they will only turn to Him in humility, he'll wipe the slate clean, he'll show compassion and forgive. It is only human to long for the punishment of the wicked. But God longs for their re-formation, their turning. The date of the book of Jonah really can't be ascertained and you will hear arguments in both directions. Many scholars date it late; others suppose that the story is at least at base an old, old story. Nineveh appears as another Sodom, basically. It's a story that is in keeping with that older Torah tradition in which it's assumed that God punishes non-Israelites or other nations for immorality, but not necessarily for idolatry. The gentile sailors even, who worship others, are not necessarily punished and in fact, it's said that they revere God and they're reluctant to throw this man overboard. Other nations are not obligated, in the view of this book as in the early traditions of Genesis, to accept monotheism. But they're bound by a certain basic moral law, maybe the moral law of the Noahide covenant, and it's for this that God has decreed punishment. So the theme or the basic problem in this short book is the problem of God's justice verses his mercy. And Jonah is a champion of divine justice. He believes that sin should be punished, he's outraged at God's forgiveness. But Jonah learns that a change of heart is enough to obtain mercy, and that the true role of the prophet is perhaps to move people to reformation and turning. What must have been the reception of this book in the post-exilic period? Again, not knowing exactly when it was written--We can imagine, however, in the manner of a canonical critic, how it might have been perceived by people in the post-exilic period for whom it would have become canonical. The very idea of a prophet being sent to Nineveh--Nineveh the capital of the hated Assyrian empire, the home of the people who had destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the ten tribes of Israel in 722, dispersing those ten tribes forever, the nation that had then laid siege to Jerusalem and exacted tribute from Judah for many years--this must have been startling. Ultimately then, this book would represent a strand of thought in post-exilic Judah that differed very much from the eschatological fervor that delighted in fantasies of the destruction of Israel's enemies, such as we found in Joel and as would be featured later in Daniel, and in post-biblical apocalyptic literature most notably the Christian book of Revelation. The book of Jonah reminded Israel that the universal God is desirous of the reformation and the turning of all his creation, human and animal. And proposes that the Israelite prophet is called upon to carry a message of divine forgiveness to other nations, not just judgment. Even those that have humiliated and despised God's chosen. So wittingly or unwittingly, we may never know, the author of this little satire fostered the post-exilic sense of Israel as a light unto the nations. This is an idea that we've already seen in some of the late prophetic writings. Just a few words of conclusion. The literature of the Hebrew Bible relates the odyssey of Israel from its earliest beginnings in the stories of individual Patriarchs worshiping a Canaanite deity to its maturity as a nation forced by history to look beyond its own horizons and concerns. The Israelites were lifted up to become something greater than they could ever have planned. They came to see themselves as God's servants to the world, at the same time that they struggled and argued with their God and criticized themselves for their very human weaknesses and failings. From another vantage point, the Bible can be seen also as an anthology that struggles against great odds to sustain a peoples' covenantal relationship with God. The contrast between reality and the religious-moral ideal that good prospers and evil is defeated was a distressing and perplexing problem that occupied the biblical writers. The existence of evil, the suffering of the righteous, the defeat of God's chosen, all this seemed basically incompatible with certain fundamental monotheistic intuitions; that God holds supreme power in the universe, that God is essentially good and just, and his providential care extends throughout creation. How can faith in such a God be upheld in the face of evil and suffering? Although, all ancient cultures--and modern cultures--struggle with the problem of evil, it had particular poignancy for ancient Israel. In other Ancient Near Eastern literatures, we find doubt about the existence of a moral order, certainly. But only in Israel does the question of evil touch on the very essence of God and the very foundation of religious faith. Paganism posits the existence of primordial evil demons or gods, and thus the existence of evil and suffering does not impugn the good gods themselves. Later religious systems that grow out of the Bible will in fact increasingly posit demons or a devil. Second Temple Judaism, later-rabbinic Judaism, and most especially Christianity, will posit some devil to account for evil in the world. Undeserved suffering, outrageous and frustrating as it might be, can then be explained at least by the jealousy or the caprice of the evil angels or gods or the demons or devil, who are indifferent to man's fate. But in biblical religion there is no independent evil principal. And so, undeserved suffering and rampant evil impugn the goodness and justice of God himself. Biblical persons have no refuge from evil and suffering other than faith in God's justice. And if that justice is slow in coming, then despair and doubt threaten. For this reason, Israelite theodicy, I think, is charged with great pathos because the stakes are so high. If one loses faith in an essentially moral universe, one loses God. Or at least as we saw in the Book of Job, one loses a God who governs the world according to a clear moral standard. But the biblical writers don't approach the problem as philosophers or theologians might. For the philosopher, theodicy, the problem of evil is primarily a logical problem, it's a contradiction. How can a just and good God allow evil and suffering to exist in the world? And like any other logical problem, it's best solved--according to the philosophers and theologians--through the careful construction of a systematic argument. This is not the method or the approach of the biblical writers. For them, the problem is not philosophical; it is personal, it is psychological, it is spiritual. The burning question is really this, how can one sustain a commitment to Israel's God in the face of national catastrophe and personal suffering? How can one have the strength to embrace, to trust, to love this God knowing that unpredictable suffering and chaos have struck and may again strike at any moment? And various writers from various periods add their voices to Israel's struggle to come to terms with the problem of sustaining faith in the midst of evil and suffering. The Bible's aim is not to solve the philosophical problem of theodicy, so much as it is to enable the relationship with God to survive all shocks, to make life in covenant with God a viable option, despite the evil and the suffering that are experienced by the faithful. The Bible doesn't offer one single model of how to cope with this problem. A dynamic relationship with what is perceived to be a living personal God rather than the static God of the philosophers, is too complex to be captured in a single dimensional theology. Systematic theology could not do justice to the variegated experiences of the nation and of an individual life, and that's not the mode or genre chosen by the biblical writers. And so various models are presented, not all consistent with one another, but each serving a particular segment of the community coping with a particular challenge at a particular time. Each is an attempt to sustain Israel's relationship with God in the face of challenges to that continued relationship. Biblical writers tell stories and they interpret history in order to illustrate the many ways in which various individuals and the nation as a whole, have managed to make sense of the covenantal relationship with God. There's room for multiple models, multiple images of God and his relationship to Israel. And as modern readers of the Bible, we can only marvel at this unresolved polyphony in this ancient anthology. It's as if the rabbis who were later to canonize this collection saw the truth in the words of Qohelet, that to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. And so they included books with very different approaches to the fundamental problems that face the ancient Israelites as Israelites and as human beings. So after 586 BCE, the Deuteronomist salvaged Yahwism from going the way of other defeated national religions by arguing that Israel had suffered not because God's promises weren't true but because they weren't believed. And this enabled the Israelites to continue faithful to their God, despite the destruction of his sanctuary, his chosen city and his ruler. The prophets emphasized the moral and communal aspects of the covenant without which all sacrificial worship was anathema. And so they unwittingly prepared the way for a worship without sacrifice in the Diaspora, and in later Judaism. The Psalms give expression to the deepest emotions of the worshiper struggling with personal despair and anger or brimming over with joy and faith. Job gives vent to the outrage we feel over unjust suffering, while Ecclesiastes preaches existential pleasures as a solace for the vanity of all human endeavor. Ezra and Nehemiah confront the very real problem of assimilation and identity with a call to Israel to close ranks, while Jonah and Ruth remind Jews of the universal providence of their God and the power of repentance. Esther and Daniel provide encouragement of radically different types for Jews under threat of persecution and massacre – one a plea for self-reliance and solidarity, and the other, a promise of divine intervention in an apocalypse. Do all these books contradict each other? No more than I contradict myself when I say that today I feel happy, but yesterday I felt anxious. Israel's relationship with God has always been a dynamic and a complex one. To each of these books there was a time and a purpose in the past, and as countless readers of the Bible have discovered over the centuries these books offer continued teaching and inspiration in the shifting moments of every age. Thank you very much for your attention this semester. Don't forget the review session that will be held here with me next week from 10:30-12:30. And you're early; you get to go home ten minutes early. Thank you.

Literature_Lectures

16_The_Social_Permeability_of_Reader_and_Text.txt

Prof: So we arrive at our turn to sociogenesis. Genesis is, of course, here obviously--even as we read both Jauss and Bakhtin for today--a misleading term in a certain sense; because obviously, the most egregious difference between Jauss and Bakhtin-- and once again you're probably saying to yourself, "Well, my goodness. Why have these two texts been put together?"-- the most egregious difference is that Bakhtin's primary concern is with the "life world" that produces a text and Jauss' primary concern is with the "life world," or perhaps better "succession of life worlds," in which a text is received. I think you can tell, however, from reading both texts, and will be conscious as you go through the materials that remain on the syllabus, that the relationship between the production and reception of literature, or of discourse of any kind, once you factor in the social setting of such a text, becomes much more permeable, much more fluid. There's a certain sense in which the producer is the receiver; in which the author is the reader and stands in relation to a tradition, to a past, as a reader; and the reader in turn, in continuing to circulate texts through history-- that is to say, in playing a role as someone who keeps texts current-- is perhaps even in concrete terms a writer. That is to say, he or she is someone who expresses opinions, circulates values, and keeps texts, as I say, in circulation. I've always felt this about Jauss's sense of what a reader is. What kind of reader would it be who was responsible for the continued presence, or influence, of a text through literary history who wasn't in some sense communicating an opinion? This is obviously truer today than ever before when we have blogs and discussion groups and when everybody is circulating opinions on the internet. Plainly the reader, plainly the taste-maker, the reader as taste-maker, is at the same time a writer. Just in passing--this has become a digression but I hope a useful one-- in this context, one can think about a really strange pairing, Jauss in relation to Bloom. If Bloom's theory of strong misreading as a principle of literary historiography can be understood as a relationship between writers as readers and readers as writers, so by the same token if we see Jauss's analysis of reception in these terms, and if we think of reception as a necessary circulation of opinion, there is, after all, a sense in which for Jauss, too, the reader is a writer and the writer is a reader. That is undoubtedly a remote connection, but it is a way of seeing how both Bloom and Jauss are figures who have strong and interesting and plausible theories about literary history. All right. To go, however, back to the beginning-- back to the sense in which we're at a watershed, or a moment of transition in this course, leaving for the moment out of the picture the intermediate step of psychogenesis-- to go back to this sense of our being in a moment of transition-- as always, such is the calendar, just at the wrong time: we finally accomplish our transition, then we go off to spring break, forget everything we ever knew and come back and start off once again as a tabula rasa. We'll do our best to bridge that gap. In any case, if we now find ourselves understanding in reading these two texts for the first time, really--although it's not that we haven't been talking about "life" before. Obviously, we have been, as it's not as though the Russian formalists culminating in the structuralism of Jakobson don't talk about a referential function. It's unfair even to the New Critics to say that somehow the world is excluded from the interpretative or reading process-- even though all along we've been saying things like this, we still sense a difference. The difference is in the perceived relationship between the text, the object of study, and the life world-- the sense, in fact, in which a text is a life world. This has, after all, something to do with our understanding of what language is. So far we have been thinking of language as a semiotic code and also with the strong suspicion that this semiotic code is a virtual one. We have been emphasizing the degree to which we are passive in relation to, or even, as it were, "spoken by" this language. In other words, it's been a constant in our thinking about these matters that language speaks through us, but we have exercised so far a curious reticence about the sense in which this language is not just a code, not just something that exists virtually at a given historical moment, but is in fact a code made up of other people's language: in other words, that it is language in circulation, not just language as somehow abstractly outside of networks of circulation available for use. So we begin now to think of language still, and the relationship between language and speech, but now it's not a language abstracted from reality; it's a language which, precisely, circulates within reality and as a matter of social exchange and social interaction. Language is now and henceforth on our syllabus a social institution. In literary theory it has the same determinative relationship with my individual speech, but we now begin to understand the claim that I don't speak my own language in a different register. Hitherto it's been, well, "Language is there before me, what I speak is just sort of that which I borrow from it," but now this takes on a new valency altogether. What I don't speak is my language; it's other people's language. My voice--and the word "voice" is obviously under heavy pressure here, even though nobody says it goes away-- my voice is a voice permeated by all the sedimentations, registers, levels, and orientations of language in the world that surrounds me. I take my language, in other words, from other people. I stand here--for my sins--lecturing in kind of an ad-lib way, and that makes it even more pronounced in what I say. You're hearing the internet. You're hearing newspaper headlines. You're hearing slang. You're hearing all sorts of locutions and rhetorical devices that I'd be ashamed to call mine, > at least in many cases, because they are in the world; they are out there, as we say. What's out there gets to the point where it's in here, and the next thing you know, it becomes part of the ongoing patter or blather of an individual. It is, in other words, the speech of others that you're hearing when you hear an individual. The extent or the degree to which this might be the case is, I suppose, always subject to debate. We're going to take up a couple of examples, but in any case, you can see that without the structure of the relationship between language and speech having really changed-- and in fact it won't really change as we continue along-- without the structure of the relationship between language and speech having changed, the nature of this relationship and the way in which we think of it in social terms is changed, and the social aspect of it now comes into prominence and will remain there. Now in order to see how this works in the case of today's two authors a little more concretely, I wanted to turn to a couple of passages on your sheet. You got my grim warning last night that if you didn't bring it, I wouldn't have any to circulate. We'll see how well that worked, and if it didn't work, well, perhaps it'll work better in the future. In any case, first of all turning to the first passage on the sheet by Bakhtin-- by the way, if you don't have the sheet, maybe somebody near you does, or maybe somebody near you has a computer which is being used for the correct purposes that can be > held somehow between the two of you. These are all possibilities. The first passage on the sheet by Bakhtin is about the relationship between what he takes to be a formalist understanding of double-voicedness-- for example, the new critical understanding which he's not directly talking about but which we could use as an example of irony-- the ways of talking about not meaning what you say. He's talking about those sorts of double-voicedness in relationship to, in contradistinction to, what he means by "genuine heteroglossia," and he says, first passage on the sheet: Rhetoric is often limited to purely verbal victories over the word, over ideological authority. [In other words, I am sort of getting under your ribs if you're somehow or another voicing an authoritative, widespread, or tyrannical opinion by some form or another of subverting it-- in other words, a kind of a binary relationship between what I'm saying and what's commonly being said out there.] When this happens [says Bakhtin] rhetoric degenerates into formalistic verbal play but, we repeat, when discourse is torn from reality it is fatal for the word itself as well. Words grow sickly, lose semantic depth and flexibility, the capacity to expand and renew their meanings in new living contexts. They essentially die as discourse, for the signifying word lives beyond itself; that is, it lives by directing its purposiveness outward. Double-voicedness, which is merely verbal, is not structured on authentic heteroglossia but on a mere diversity of voices. In other words, it doesn't take into account the way in which there are seepages or permeabilities among the possibilities and registers of meaning, depending on extraordinarily complex speaking communities coming together in any aspect of discourse, ways in which we have to think about the life world of a discourse in order to understand the play of voice. Heteroglossia is the language of others. That's what it means if we are to to understand the way in which the language of others is playing through and permeating the text. A comparable response to formalism on the part of Hans Robert Jauss-- I should say in passing that both Bakhtin and Jauss have authentic and close relations with the Russian formalists. Bakhtin begins, in a way, at the very end of the formalist tradition, as a kind of second generation formalist, but quickly moves away--it is breaking up in the late 1920s-- from that and begins to rewrite formalism in a certain sense as a sociogenesis of discourse in language; and by the same token, Jauss in his theory of literary history-- which is not enunciated in these terms in the text that you have, but rather in the long text from which I wish your editor had taken an excerpt, called "Literary History as a Provocation to Literary Theory." You have excerpts from that on your sheet. In any case, in Jauss' understanding of the relationship between the text and the life world, Jauss cobbles together, as it were, aspects of Russian formalist historiography, particularly that of Jakobson and Tynjanov, and a Marxist understanding of, as it were, the marketing, reception, and consumption of literary production. These pairs of ideas go together in his developing of his thesis about literary reception, to which we'll return at the end of the lecture. The second passage on the sheet, which distances him, in which he wants to distance himself somewhat from both of these influences, goes as follows: Early Marxist and formalist methods in common conceive the literary fact within the closed circle of an aesthetics of production and representation. In doing so, they deprive literature of a dimension that inalienably belongs to its aesthetic character as well as to its social function, the dimension of its reception and influence. In other words, the way in which a text, once it exists, moves in the world, the way in which it persists, changes as we understand it and grows or diminishes as time passes in the world: this is the medium, the social medium, in which Jauss wants to understand literary-- precisely literary--interpretation, as we'll see. Coming a little closer to this issue of the relationship between thinking of this kind and the formalist tradition, Bakhtin on page 592, the left-hand column toward the bottom-- I'm not going to quote this, I'm just going to say that it's there-- Bakhtin begins a sentence about, as he puts it, literary "parody" understood in the narrow sense. Now what he's implying here is that the theory of parody belongs primarily to Russian formalist literary historiography. In other words, the relationship between a new text and an old text is one of, broadly conceived within this discourse, parody. Bakhtin picks up the word "parody" in order to say also on page 592, the left-hand column about halfway down: … [A] mere concern for language is [and it's an odd thing to say, "a mere concern for language" > ] but the abstract side of the concrete and active [i.e., dialogically engaged] understanding of the living heteroglossia that has been introduced into the novel and artistically organized within it. To pause over this, "parody": if we linger merely on the literariness of parody, we simply don't have any grasp of the complexity of the ways in which the dialogic or the heteroglossal modulates, ripples, and makes complicated the surface of literary discourse. Parody once again leaves us with a sense of the binary: the previous text was this, the secondary text or the next text riffs off that previous text in a way that we can call parodic-- but that's binary. It's one text against another and leaves out the whole question of that flood or multiplicity of voices which pervades the text. Okay. So then Jauss has an interesting moment again, in the fourth passage on your sheet, in which he is obviously directly responding to that passage at the end of Tynjanov's essay on literary evolution which we've had on the board and which we've discussed before. You remember Tynjanov makes the distinction between evolution-- the way in which a sequence of texts mutates, as one might say, and the way in which, in other words, successive texts (again) parody or alter what was in the previous text-- and modification, which is the influence on texts from the outside by other sorts of historical factors which may lead to textual change. Tynjanov says that it's important, actually for both studies--for the study of history and also for the study of literary history-- that the two be always kept clearly distinct in the mind of the person looking at them. Well, Jauss's response to that is perhaps chiefly rhetorical, but it nevertheless once again does mark this shift in the direction of the understanding of language as social that I've been wanting to begin by emphasizing. Jauss says: The connection between literary evolution and social change [that is to say, those features in society that would and do modify texts] does not vanish from the face of the earth through its mere negation. What is he saying? He's saying "does not vanish from the face of the earth" because Tynjanov said it did. > There is no doubt that that's the passage Jauss is talking about.] The new literary work [he goes on] is received and judged against the background of the everyday experience of life. In other words, the work exists in a life world. There is no easy or even possible way of distinguishing between its formal innovations and those sorts of innovations which are produced by continuous and ongoing factors of social change. They interact. They seep into one another in exactly the same way that all the registers and sedimentations of human voices interact and seep into one another in Bakhtin's heteroglossia. All right. So these then are the emphases of both of these writers with respect to formalist ideas which have played a prominent part in most, if not all, of the literary theory that we have studied up until now. I'd like to linger a little while with Bakhtin before turning back to Jauss. Now heteroglossia or diversity of speech, as he calls it sometimes--he says at one point again on page 592 toward the top of the left-hand column-- heteroglossia is what he calls "the ground of style." I want to pause to ask a little bit what he might mean by this expression, "the ground of style," the italicized passage. It is precisely the diversity of speech and not the unity of a normative shared language that is the ground of style. In other words, I've already said, of course, when I speak I'm not speaking to you in an official voice. I am not speaking the King's English. In fact, on this view there's really no such thing as the King's English. Nobody speaks the King's English because there is no such isolated distilled entity that one can point to. Language, at least the language of most of us-- that is to say, of everyone except people in hermetically sealed environments like, for example, a peculiarly privileged, inward-looking aristocracy--the language of virtually all of us is the language of the people, the language of others. It is that which we have to continue to think about as we consider how a style is generated. We speak of a style as though it were purely a question of an authorial signature. Sometimes we think of style and signature as synonymous. "Oh, I would recognize that style anywhere." Coleridge said of a few lines of Wordsworth, "If I had come across these lines in the desert, I'd have said 'Wordsworth.'" Well, obviously there is a certain sense in which we do recognize a style: for example, the style of Jane Austen. [Points to quotation on board.] I suppose arguably you could think that this is the style of Dr. Johnson, but most people would recognize it as the style of Jane Austen; and yet at the same time, as we'll see in a minute, it is a style made up, in ways that are very difficult finally to factor out and analyze, of many voices. Okay. So this would suggest, I think--this idea of a style as a composite of speech sedimentations-- this idea would suggest that possibly there isn't a voice, that to speak of an authorial voice would be a very difficult matter and might lead us to ask, "Does this move the idea that the sociolect speaks through the idiolect, the idea that the language of everyone is, in fact, the language that speaks my speech, my peculiar individual speech--does this once again bring us face to face with that dreary topic, the death of the author?" I don't think so, not quite, and certainly not in Bakhtin, who gives us a rather bracing sense of the importance of the author in a passage on page 593, the right-hand column. He says: It is as if the author [this is, of course, sort of coming face-to-face with the problem of whether there still is an author] has no language of his own, but does possess his own style, his own organic and unitary law governing the way he plays with languages [so style is perhaps one's particular way of mediating and allocating the diversity of voice that impinges on what one's saying] and the way his own real semantic and expressive intentions are refracted within them. [And here Bakhtin saves or preserves the author by invoking the principle of unifying intention and the way in which we can recognize it in the discourse of any given novel.] Of course this play with languages (and frequently the complete absence of a direct discourse of his own) in no sense degrades the general, deep-seated intentionality, the overarching ideological conceptualization of the work as a whole. So this is not, though it may seem to be in certain respects, a question of the death of the author as provoked by, let's say, Foucault or Roland Barthes at the beginning of the semester. It's not that exactly. Everything that we've been saying so far can be seen to work in a variety of novels. The novel is the privileged genre for Bakhtin. He, I think perhaps somewhat oversimplifying in this, reads the novel, the emergence of the novel, and the flowering and richness of the novel against the backdrop of genres he considers to be monoglossal: the epic, which simply speaks the unitary voice of an aristocratic tradition; the lyric, which simply speaks the unitary voice of the isolated romantic solipsist. Over against that, you get the polyglossal, the rich multiplicity of voice in the novel. As I say, I think that the generic contrast is somewhat oversimplified because nothing is easier and more profitable than to read both epic and lyric as manifestations of heteroglossia. Just think of The Iliad. What are you going to do, if you really believe that it's monoglossal, with the speeches of Thersites? Okay. In any case, the basic idea, however, is I think extraordinarily rich and important, and I thought we could try it out by taking a look for a moment at the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which I'm sure most of you know [gestures to board, It is plainly an example of the relationship between what Bakhtin calls "common language"-- "It is a truth universally acknowledged," or in other > words, it's in everybody's mouth--and something like authorial reflection, or what he elsewhere calls "internally persuasive discourse." Now in traditional parlance, this would be a speech which manifests irony, the rhetoric of irony against which Bakhtin sets himself in the first passage on your sheet. "How ridiculous!" we say. Jane Austen doesn't believe this. This is drawing-room wisdom, and everything in her sentence points to the ways in which it's obviously wrong, even while it's being called a truth: "universally" meaning the thousand people or so who matter; in other words, > there are a great many people who neither acknowledge nor care about any such thing. Then, of course, the idea that "a single man in possession of a good fortune," or indeed otherwise, has nothing to do but be "in want of a wife." Obviously, this is what is being said not by the man in the street but by drawing-room culture. Now even before we turn to the complication of the ways in which the sentence is being undermined, bear in mind that the plot of the novel confirms the "truth." In other words, Darcy and Bingley, both of them "in possession of a good fortune," do turn out very plainly to have been in want of a wife and, in fact, procure one by the end of the novel. That is precisely what the plot is about, so that the conventions governing the plot of Pride and Prejudice altogether confirm the truth that is announced in this sentence, even though it is a truth that is plainly to be viewed ironically. That in itself is quite extraordinary and, I think, reinforces our sense that this is one of the great first sentences in the history of fiction. Let's turn now to the way in which we can think of it as something other than a simple irony. Of course, there is this word "want." We've been thinking a lot about want lately because we have just gone through our psychoanalytic phase. What exactly does this > single man really want? In a way, the subtle pun in the word "want," which means both "to desire" and "to lack"-- well, if I lack something, I don't necessarily desire it. I just don't happen to have it, right? On the other hand, if I want something, I can also be said to desire it. Well, which is it? Is it a kind of lack that social pressure of some sort is calculated to fill, or is it desire? If it's desire, what on earth does it have to do with a good fortune? There are elements of the romance plot which raise precisely that question. Desire has nothing to do with fortune. Convenience, social acceptability, comfort: all of those things have to do with fortune, but desire, we suppose--having passed through our psychoanalytic phase-- to be of a somewhat different nature. The complication of the sentence has to do actually with the question of the way in which the meanings of these words can be thought to be circulating and to create ripples of irony of their own far more complicated than "Oh, the author's much smarter than that, she doesn't mean that," which is already a complication introduced by the fact that her plot bears it out. How can her plot bear it out if she's being so ironic? Of course, there is obviously a good deal more to say. A single man in possession of a good fortune obviously may not at all want a wife, for a variety of reasons that one could mention, and that can't be possibly completely absent from Jane Austen's mind. So that has to be taken into account in itself and certainly does [lights go off in lecture hall]-- I think you see it's the sort of sentence that bears reflection beyond a kind of simple binary of the sentence as spoken by the man in the drawing room, or the woman in the drawing room. "It's idiotic, it's obviously wrong-- we simply can't say that": the style of the author is a style that is sedimented by and through complexities of circulated meaning that really can't be limited by any sense of one-to-one relation of that kind. > All right. What else about Bakhtin? One more thing: His idea of common language. This is not a concept that is supposed to have any one particular value attached to it. It's a little bit like the rhizome. It could be good; it could be bad. Common language could be a kind of Rabelaisan, carnivalesque, subversive, energetic body of voices from below overturning the apple carts of authority and the fixed ways of a moribund social order. It could be that, but at the same time it could itself be the authoritative, the reactionary, the mindless. Common language could be that universality of acknowledgement which seems to go along with unreflected, knee-jerk responses to what one observes and thinks about. Common language has that whole range. The important thing about it is that it's out there and that it circulates and it exists in relationship with what Bakhtin calls "internally persuasive discourse"-- in other words, the way in which the filtering together of these various sorts of language result in something like what we feel to be authentic: a power of reflection, a posing of relations among the various strata of language, such that they can speak authentically, not necessarily in a way that we agree with but in a way that we recognize to constitute that distilled consciousness that we still do call "the author," and to which we ascribe, in some sense, authority. Precisely in the peculiar self-mocking relationship between this sentence of Pride and Prejudice and the plot of Pride and Prejudice as a whole, we feel something like the internal persuasiveness, the coherence of the discourse. I think, maybe just to sum up Bakhtin, I want to quote you from the other long excerpt that you have in your anthology, which I would encourage you to read. Sometimes I have asked people to read it but I decided to drop it this year--but it's still a very strong and interesting argument. It's called "Discourse in the Novel," and I just want to read in the left-hand column, near the bottom of the column: "The ideological becoming of a human being in this view is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others." In other words, the coherence of my mind, of what I say insofar as coherence exists, is the result of selecting out, of selecting among, in my assimilation of the words of others, such that there is a pattern of, again, coherence. All right. So finally, the novel is the social text par excellence for Bakhtin for these reasons, and it confirms again what we have been saying about a new way of thinking of language. Language, as that which speaks through us, is not just language; it's other people's language, and we need to understand the experience of the process of reading and of texts as they exist and the nature of authorial composition as an assimilative, selective way of putting together other people's language. All right. Now quickly Jauss. He takes us back, obviously by way of Iser-- I think you can see that Jauss's talk about horizons of expectation and the disruption of expectation has a great deal to do with Iser's understanding of the role of the reader in filling imaginative gaps that are left in the text, which are based on a complex relationship with a set of conventional expectations-- by way of Iser to Gadamer; because after all, what Jauss has to say is a way of talking about Gadamer's "merger of horizons." But for Jauss it's not just my horizon and the horizon of the text. It's not just those two horizons that need to meet halfway on common ground as mutually illuminative. It is, in fact, a succession of horizons changing as modes of aesthetic and interpretive response to texts are mediated historically-- as I say--in a sequence. It's not just that the text was once a certain thing and now we feel it to be somehow different, hence in order to understand it we need to meet it halfway. It's rather a matter of self-consciously studying what has happened in between that other time and this, here and now. The text has had a life. It has passed through life changes, and these life changes have to be understood at each successive stage in terms of the three moments of hermeneutic grasp, as described by Gadamer in the historical section of Truth and Method. The distinction between intelligere, explicare, and applicare-- understanding, interpretation, and application-- that Jauss talks about at the beginning of his essay actually goes back to the eighteenth century. What Jauss has to say about it is, yes: these three moments of hermeneutic understanding exist for any reader or reading public at any moment in the history of the reception of a text. He makes a considerable to-do about distinguishing between the aesthetic response to the text and a subsequent or leisured, reflectively interpretive response to the text. This may seem a little confusing because he admits with Heidegger and others, as we've indicated ourselves in the past, that you can't just have a spontaneous response to anything without reflection. There's always a sense in which you already know what it is, which is to say a sense in which you've already interpreted it; but at the same time, Jauss makes a considerable point of distinguishing between these two moments-- the aesthetic, which he associates with understanding, and the interpretive, which he associates with what is in the hermeneutic tradition called interpretation. Now why does he do this? It's a question of what he means by "the aesthetic." A text enters historical circulation and remains before the gaze of successive audiences in history because it has been received aesthetically. Aesthetics is the glue that keeps the text alive through history. In other words, people continue to say, to one degree or another, "I like it." If they don't say, "I like it," there will never be a question of interpreting it > or transmitting it historically, because it's going to disappear. As Dr. Johnson said, "That book is good in vain which the reader throws away." In other words, from the standpoint of interpretation or from the standpoint of philosophical reflection or whatever you might wish to call it, a book may be good, just incontestably good-- but if it didn't please, if it didn't give pleasure, if it didn't attach itself to a reading public aesthetically by means of pleasing, none of what would follow in the hermeneutic process could ever take place. So that's why Jauss makes such a point of distinguishing between the aesthetic and the interpretive. Then of course the historical study of reception is what shows us the degree to which any set of moments of aesthetic and interpretive reception is mediated by what has gone before it. In other words, a text gradually changes as a result of its reception, and if we don't study reception, we are left naively supposing that time has passed and that the past has become sort of remote from us so we have certain problems interpreting; but these problems as far as we know haven't arisen from anything that could properly be called change. There has been an unfolding process of successive interpretations whereby a text has gone through sea changes: it's become less popular, more popular, more richly interpreted and less richly interpreted, but tends to keep eddying out from what it was sensed to be originally, to the point where all sorts of accretive implications and sources of pleasure may arrive as we understand it. In a certain sense, once again it's like "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," but now it's not just Pierre Menard and Miguel de Cervantes. It's as though a succession of people, perhaps whose native language was not French necessarily but who knows-- German, Russian, whatever--continued to write in Spanish a text which turns out to be word-for-word Don Quixote as the centuries pass, each one acquiring a whole new world of associations and implications and giving pleasure in successively new ways. When we finally get to the point in the late nineteenth century, when we encounter this Frenchman, Pierre Menard, writing Don Quixote, the important thing would be to understand that lots of people have done it between him and Cervantes. This is a kind of skeletal model of how a reception history according to Jauss might work. Now the history of reception studies two things. It studies changing horizons of expectation, and that's something you're familiar with from Iser-- that is to say, the way in which a reader has to come to terms with conventions surrounding expectation in any given text, in order to be able to negotiate what's new and what's nearly merely culinary in the text-- it involves changing horizons of expectations which don't just change once in the here and now, but have changed successively through time. It also involves changing semantic possibilities or, if you will, changing possibilities for and of significance-- what does the text mean for me now?-- but understood again not just as something that matters for me, but has successively mattered for successive generations of readers in between. Just to take examples of how this might work in the here and now, there is just now on Broadway a revival of Damn Yankees, which is about a baseball player who sells his soul in order to beat the Yankees. One can't help but think that the revival of interest in Damn Yankees has something to do with the steroid scandals and the way in which so many baseball players do sell their souls in order to win and in order to have good careers. It occurs to one that it is in this sort of atmosphere of social and cultural censure that we're suddenly interested in Damn Yankees again. Perhaps there will be a revival of Tony the Tow Truck because in the economic downturn, obviously to be rich or to be glamorous like Neato or to be busy like Speedy-- all of this becomes obsolete, more or less irrelevant and beside the point, and what really matters is little guys helping each other. So Tony the Tow Truck could be revived today as a parable of the good life in the downturn, and so it will probably be read by everyone, it will give pleasure, it will therefore be interpreted, and it will survive to live another day historically, fulfilling the three moments of the study of the history of reception required by Jauss. All right. So with that said, it's been a very interesting fifty minutes I think. > With that said, I hope you all have a good break and we'll see you when you get back.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_3B.txt

oh alright thank you for telling me yeah we are back good and so we were talking right before the break about the kind of conflict that that Wordsworth was going through and for him this was a real real real crisis because it not only was a division of loyalties between France in England but also remember that at this point his ladylove was over there on the other side of the channel he obviously would not have had communication with her or with their child and at this time that also would have been a terrible source of anxiety for him and he no doubt still would have believed that they were going to get married once they could get together so he then realizes this is still in the tenth book that he has somehow or another been wrong or perhaps that he has been betrayed by what happened to the French Revolution and we have that section dealing with the reign of terror in France and the terrible atrocities which were carried out against political opponents of Robespierre and his crowd in the committee for Public Security and the kinds of nightmares that this led to in Wordsworth and others who were just trying to deal with that and because they believed in the French Revolution to see what happened in the aftermath of the Revolution and how the revolution was betrayed by criminals like Rob's beer was was just a a crushing experience for the young man now you have to realize that one thing is that he's still very young and another is that he has put a lot of his idealism into the revolution okay and so by the revolution betraying his ideals he feels somehow or another betrayed as well and that he has somehow another undergone some kind of betrayal of his own royalties and failure in any event he undergoes a very serious crisis and even a collapse so that in the eleventh book in lines 279 and following we have a section in which he is talking about the kind of crisis and breakdown he went through so that for example in 293 and following so I fear dragging all precepts judgments Maxim's Creed's like culprits to the bar he's trying to hold on to anything he can conventional wisdom passed down truths calling the mind suspiciously to establish in plane day her titles and her honors now believing now disbelieving endlessly perplexed with impulse motive right and wrong the ground of obligation what the rule and whence the sanction till demanding formal proof and seeking it and everything I lost all feeling of conviction and in fine sick wearied out with contrary teas yielded up moral questions in despair this was the crisis of that strong disease that strong disease this the soul's last and lowest ebb I drooped deeming our blessed reason of least use were wanted most okay he's a child of the Enlightenment which in England was typically called the age of reason and he's tried to use every rational means to explain his feelings to himself and to get himself out of this crisis and they failed in other words deeming our blessed reason of least use we're wanted most so what is going to work for him then it was thanks to the bounteous giver of all good that the beloved woman in whose sight those days were passed now speaking in a voice of sudden admonition like a brook that does but cross a lonely road and now seen heard and felt and caught at every turn companion never lost through many a league maintained for me a saving intercourse with my true self for though be dimmed and changed both as a clouded and awaiting moon she whispered still that brightness would return she in the midst of all preserved me still a poet made me seek beneath that name and then alone my office upon earth this is Dorothy of course his sister Dorothy and she's the one who comes along when he needs it most and she is a kind of steadying influence on him and she's the one who keeps telling him you have to stick to who you are and what you are and so he follows her advice and eventually he experiences the great epiphany that comes in the 14th book in the conclusion and let's look at that by way of concluding our discussion of Wordsworth poetry till we get to critical ridges discussion of Wordsworth's poetry okay so the 14th book right there in the beginning he's on another one of his excursions and people used to do this they would climb Mount Snowdon which is a mountain in North Wales and it's a fairly high mountain and he's also a very imposing and it's a very beautiful mountain and he's going to climb up the mountain with his friend starting in the night so that would be a pretty you know difficult climb I mean climbing at night is not the safest way to mountain climb and they go through what seems to be fog but actually it's through the cloud and they get to the top of the mountain and they're looking now down on the clouds illuminated by the moon and a starry sky and looking out over the sea and he has a kind of Epiphany a kind of Epiphany let me put that word on our drawing board over here what does the word Epiphany mean anybody who have an idea yes having a revelation yeah yeah I'm sorry yeah good a revelation yeah and it's also another one of those words that we take over from religious discourse and use here more or less metaphorically it's a kind of breaking through from another reality and to another reality okay in one of those excursions I'm going back to the poem now in none of those excursions may they never fade from remembrance through the northern tracts of Cambria this is Wales ranging with the youthful friend I left Beth Gillard's Hut's at couching time capturing time being the time when most people would go to bed and west we took my way to see the sunrise from the top of Snowden to the door of a rude cottage at the mountains base we came and roused the Shepherd who attends the adventures stranger steps a trusty guide then cheered by short refreshment sallied forth it was a close warm business summer night wond dull and glaring with a dripping fog low hung and thick that covered all the sky that underaged we began to climb the mountain side the mist soon virtus round and after ordinary travelers talk with our conductor pensively we sank each into commerce with his private thoughts thus did we breast the ascent and by myself was nothing either seen or heard that checked those musings or diverted saved at once the Shepherd's Letcher who from among the crying's head to his joy on earth to hedgehog this is the Shepherd's dog teased his clarinet play with barkings turbulent this small adventure for even it seemed in that wild place and at the dead of night being over and forgotten on we wound in silence as before with forehead bent earthward as if an opposition set against an enemy i panted up with eager pace and no less eager thoughts thus might be where a midnight our way ascending a truce distance each from each and i has chanced the foremost of the band when at my feet the ground appeared to baton and with a step or two seemed better still nor was time given to ask a learned the cause for instantly a light upon the turf fell like a flash and low as I looked up the moon hung naked in a firmament of asier without cloud and at my feet rested a silent sea of holy mist a hundred hills their dusky backs up heaved all over this still ocean a hundred hills their dusky backs up heaved all over the still ocean ok what are those okay could be mountains clouds cards of look like mountains right yeah the types of the clouds the will crack mountains and of course it's you know they're dark it's nighttime and beyond far far beyond this solid vapors stretched in headlands tongues and promontory shapes into the main Atlantic that appeared to dwindle and give up his majesty usurped upon far as the sight could reach not so the theory of vault encroachment none was there no loss only the inferior stars had disappeared or should a fainter light in the clear presence of the full orbed moon who from her sovereign elevation gazed upon the billowy ocean as it lay all Meakin silent save the third rift not distant from the shore where on we stood a fixed abysmal gloomy breathing place mounted the roar of waters torrents streams innumerable roaring with one voice heard over earth and sea and in that hour for so it seemed felt by the starry heavens felt by the starry heavens you see the starry heavens are alive when into error had partially dissolved that vision given to spirits of the night in three chance him and Wanderers in calm thought we affected it appeared to be the type the very type of a majestic intellect its acts in its possessions that it hasn't craves when himself it is and would become they all beheld the emblem of a mind with a capital M this is a mind you know the Great Spirit that rolls through all things that feeds upon infinity that boobs over the dark abyss in temp to hear its voices issuing forth to silent in one continuous stream a mind sustained by recognitions of transcendent power incense conducting to ideal form in soul of more than mortal privilege and so he speaks now that now Nature had shadowed thereby putting forth in circumstances awful and sublime to words that the Romantics loved awful in the sense of capable of experiment inspiring awe and sublime something which is so wondrous that it's really ultimately beyond human expression and so on and so notice what he talks about then is he talks about how nature enters into him and he enters into nature and it's really that kind of commingling that makes him into what he is and when he experiences this he is experiencing something like what College is going to call the primary imagination and only afterwards when he recollects this experience in tranquility can he write poetry about it using what coverage is going to call the secondary imagination so having said to all of the above let's turn to our good friend Coleridge so if we can go to the screen please okay so we've got Coleridge who wrote a book called biography a little area biography a little area which was published in 1817 1817 and what we're going to be looking at here first is chapter 13 in which he talks about imagination both primary and secondary imagination and then fancy this is what we call faculty psychology faculty psychology a study of human psychology based on the premise that the different activities of our psyches imply different psychological faculties memory being one faculty well-being another faculty the imagination being another faculty rational intellect being another faculty and so on and so on and so on that's what is usually called faculty psychology okay we'll come back to chapter 14 in a moment okay let's look at chapter 13 in the Biograph theater area this is a very very famous passage if you're having trouble finding it in the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology which is what I'm following here it's on page four 77 and 78 the imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary the primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am now the infinite I am that's an echo of River heard language like that sorry the Old Testament yes it's right out of the Bible and what is he saying here okay there can be an activity in the infinite I am viewed as mind with a capital M divinity the Great Spirit that rolls through all things and the primary imagination is a reenactment in the finite mind the mind of me or you in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am in other words there is something of the Divine in me because there is something about me at least at the level of primary imagination which is like the infinite I am okay the secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the farmer now before we get into his description of it let me just make one thing clear what he's saying with primary imagination is something like what Wordsworth was talking about when he was having one of those epifanov moments okay one of those epiphanies when he's caught up in that experience the first time round in Tintern Abbey well later on Mount Snowdon and it's as if he is caught up in something transcendent something beyond himself that is the experience that one has in what Coleridge calls the primary imagination but when you're caught up in the experience you can't really write about it it's going to be the secondary imagination Courage's term which writes poetry which creates poetry the secondary I consider is an echo of the former but it's not the same thing just as an echo is not the same thing as the original sound coexisting with the conscious will I mean it's to some extent at any rate under the control of the will you can will yourself to write a poem or something like a poem or a reflection on your experience yet still is identical with the primary in the kind of its agency in differing only in degree or intensity and in the mode of its operation it dissolves diffuses dissipates in order to recreate in order to recreate it dissolves things diffuses them dissipates in order to recreate or where this process is rendered impossible yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify to you to to experience and Express the unity in things that otherwise would seem to be disparate it is essentially vital even as all objects treated as objects are essentially fixed and dead okay and essentially what he's doing is he's saying that in primary imagination we experience unity unity with nature with other human beings with the heavens with the earth with the Great Spirit that rolls through all things and that is ultimate unity the secondary imagination as a poetic creative faculty breaks down our normal perceptions in order to reveal to us the inner unity of all things but notice what we're talking about as we're talking about the subjective experience of the creative artist here aren't we we're not talking about objective knowledge as the scientist might understand it fancy on the contrary has no other counters to play with but flick cities and definites the fancy is indeed no more than a motive memory emancipated from the ordinary of time and space and blended with and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice but equally with ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready-made from the law of Association now all he means by that well I shouldn't say that because there's a lot packed in here but but what I want to draw out of this is the notion that fancy as a creative activity is something like playing with words playing with the formal rules of poetry playing with certain kinds of images okay but not with any particular purpose ultimately to lead us to the experience of the unity of all things okay it's much more the concept of poetry as play of poetry is play ok nothing wrong with that by the way it's just that from Coleridge's point of view that is poetry of a lower order than the poetry produced by imagination ok and then he goes on in Chapter 14 to make some interesting comments about the collaboration between himself and Wordsworth during the first year that mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the practicability of combining both these are the poetry of nature we just saw something like that in the description of the experience on Mount Snowdon the thought suggested itself to which of us I do not recollect that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts in the one the incidents of agents were to be in part at least supernatural supernatural and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions and would naturally accompany such situations supposing them to be real supposing them to be real in other words there's one kind of poetry in which at least some of the things presented are supernatural but they would be presented in such a way as to give them a sense of reality and we're in this sense they have been to every human being who from whatever source of delusion is at any time believed himself under supernatural agency such as the boy Wordsworth out there on the lake for the second class this is a different category of poetry subjects will be - were to be chosen from ordinary life the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them or to notice them when they present themselves in other words these are going to be the things of just ordinary everyday life especially here rural life but as perceived by somebody who is thoughtful in somebody who meditates on the wonder of these seemingly ordinary things in this idea originated the plan of the lyrical ballads the book on which they collaborated in which was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic something beyond the usual the everyday what is usually taken as the real yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest in a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination and this is very very very very important what just follows now very famous statement that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith that's quoted over and over and over and over again by people talking about movies by people talking about poetry by people talking about painting by people talking about you know opera by people talking about any of the Arts what does poetic faith consist of a willing suspension of disbelief is a condition seen a quinone for poetic faith a necessary condition in other words okay to be able to suspend our natural common-sense tendency to disbelieve in what is taking place in the movie is necessary for us to make the act of political even that such and such a person or event could be real okay mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the minds attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us tintern abbey and inexhaustible treasure but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity custom familiarity we see the same things all the time and therefore we no longer appreciate them and selfish solicitude we have eyes yet see not ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand once again biblical language right with this in Hue I wrote the Ancient Mariner that's what he's doing in the Ancient Mariner in part it is a poetic experiment in writing a certain kind of poem the kind of poem in which things happen which are supernatural events which seemingly could not happen in our quote real world at least the real world defined by common sense and yet in order to appreciate a poem like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner we must make a willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith in the work in order to enter into it appreciatively Wordsworth on the other hand is going to take the kind of thing that could happen to anybody at any time you know you've got in the country where you go out in your back yard and you look around and you really see possibly for the first time you really see how wondrous it all is okay there's a an American poet William Carlos Williams who is also a an MD a medical doctor who very famous poet of the early 20th century who followed along with this in the sense that he talked about how he would get up before anybody else in the house would get up in the you know his family and he'd go out into the kitchen and he would be making coffee at the sink and over the sink was a window and he'd look out into the into the backyard and there was a an apple tree I think was an apple tree out there and so at one point it struck him that he had been doing the same thing for something like 15 years and he'd never really seen that tree not ever really seen that tree and how absolutely wondrous that tree really was that's the kind of thing that Coleridge is talking about here Wordsworth doing I mean anybody here I don't maybe some of you have to tintern abbey anybody here could go to tintern abbey you know and you'd walk around and it's you know it's beautiful setting and so forth but there are lots of places that are beautiful settings you know but but really to see the wonder in it and to express that in a way that can draw us into the wonder in it that is the poet or at least it's one kind of poet according to Coleridge okay so having said that about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner let's take a look at the Rhine of the Ancient Mariner notice how the Rime of the Ancient Mariner begins there are really two there are two different speakers here but let me let me go through the list up here that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner calls upon poetic faith in the supernatural powers in nature if you're not willing to grant Coleridge that then you might as well not read the poem the form is suggestive of a traditional ballad remember I said something last time about how the romantics were fascinated by M tick WA T by the Middle Ages by things that were old by things that had come down in folk tradition the ballad certainly fits the bill in all of those respects and the form is suggestive here of a ballad we have two narrators or two speakers there's the wedding guests who's the primary speaker in the poem who encounters the Ancient Mariner while on his way to a wedding and the Ancient Mariner stops him because the Ancient Mariner is under a compulsion to tell his story that's a common narrative by the way in European story storytelling popular storytelling so storytelling okay and we're going to note especially the responses of the wedding guests to what the Ancient Mariner relates because this is a tale not simply about some event though it may very well have been based on courage having wins certain accounts of ships be calmed in the Pacific and their scholars have believed that he did read such accounts and of course that's what happens here but beyond that this is a tale of sin conversion confession penance and ultimately of redemption it's ultimately a poem about sin as a kind of fall but then the path to redemption what is the path to redemption well we have to read the poem college wondered whether the poem was too heavy-handed particularly at the end in moralizing and moralizing but then again is something that we'll have to think about when we get to the end of the poem well let's look at this poem together and again what we're going to do is we're going to focus on certain passages obviously we don't have time to do all of these poems in toto except for the shortest ones so we pick out certain passages to focus on okay but let's look at the very beginning first of all it is an Ancient Mariner and he's stuck with one of three by thy long gray beard and glittering I now will force Tepes talmy the bride men's doors are opened wide and I am next of kin the guests are met the feast is set may hear the married in he holds him with his skinny hand there was a ship quoth he hold off unhand me graybeard loon F Tunes his hand dropped he he holds him with his glittering eye the wedding guests stood still and listens like a three years child the Mariner half his will the wedding guests set on us down he cannot choose but here and thus speak on that ancient man the bright eyed Mariner the ship was cheered the Harbor cleared merrily did we drop below the Kirk below the hill below the lighthouse top and so on so he's a seaman or has been a seaman this Ancient Mariner and he is telling a tale of how he boarded a ship and he went off on this ship and then notice they have ice storms for example 55 and well even 51 and following and now there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold and ice masked high came floating by what would that be icebergs yeah exactly exactly as green as emerald and through the drifts the snowy Clift's did send a dismal Sheen those shapes of men or beasts weaken the ice was all between the ice was here the ice was there the ice was all around it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swooned a at length did cross an albatross through the fog it came as if it had been a Christian soul we hailed in in God's name it ate the food in their head eat and round and round it through the I stood split with a thunder foot and helmsman steered us through and a good south men stuck up behind the albatross did follow and every day for food our play came to the Mariners hollo in mr. card on master found it perched for Vespers nine Vespers are what evening prayers yeah evening prayers right well as all the night through fog smoke white-livered the while the white moonshine God saved the Ancient Mariner from the fiends that plague thee thus why were cursed thou so and the Mariner replies with my crossbow I shot the albatross and then skipped down to 91 and I had done a hellish thing and it would work and woe for Oliver died code the bird that made the breeze to blow all wretch said day the bird to say that made the breeze to blow and of course they're going southward and they're going to end up in the in the South Pacific under a hot and copper sky the Sun is beating down on them everything is drying out they running out of water they have become be calmed and this actually used to happen to ships and the ships would be sighted from time to time by other ships whose sailors would go aboard these ships that they found and they called them ghost ships because there would be nobody alive on the ship and nobody would know what happened to them that nobody would be alive and here would simply be a ship drifting around because what would you do I mean if you couldn't catch any winds you know there you would be be calmed in the sea and eventually you'd run out of food and water all in a hot and copper sky this is in 111 and following the bloody Sun at noon right up above the mastered stand there bigger the moon day after day day after day we stuck no breath no motion as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean it's a wonderful image water water everywhere and all the birds to drink water water everywhere nor any drop to drink everybody's heard that at some time or another right the very deep did rot oh Christ that ever this should be ye slimy things to crawl with legs upon the slimy sea well okay look at the last stanza there were the last two stanzas and every tongue through utter drought was withered at the root we could not speak no more than if we had been choked this suit our role today what evil lips had our from old and young his fellow sailors instead of the cross the albatross about my neck was hung as the sign of his guilt well okay so look apart for now 1 to 24 and following the wedding guests I through the Ancient Mariner I fear that skinny hemmed and thou art Wong and lank and brown as is the would cease and I fear the end by glittering I and thy skinny hem so Brown fear not fear not thou wedding-guest this body drop not down alone alone all all alone on a wide darhk's on a wide wide sea and never a saint took pity on my soul in agony the many men so beautiful and they all dead did lie and a thousand thousand slimy things lived on and so did I I looked upon the rotting sea and drew my eyes away I looked upon the rotting deck and there the dead men lay I walked to heaven and tried to pray but however a prayer had dashed a wicked whisper came and made my heart is dry as dust he's incapable of praying even for some kind of forgiveness we're gonna find out the reason in just a moment the moving men went up the sky and into 63 and now and no where did abide softly she was going up in the star or two beside her beams be mocked assult remain like april her frost spread but where the ship's huge Saturday the charmed water burned alway a still and often read beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water snakes they moved in tracks of shining light and when they reared the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes water snakes there are parts of the South Pacific in which there are water snakes by the way and see first he's disgusted by them but then he changes within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire blue glossy green and velvet black they called and swam and every track was a flash of gold and fire oh happy living things note under Beauty might declare a spring of love gushed from my heart and I breast them unaware sure my kind saint took pity on me and I breast them unaware the self same moment I could pray and from my neck so free the albatross fell off and sank like led into the sea see when he recognizes the beauty even if these lowliest of creatures and he recognizes some kinship with them in an act of love because after all that's what love is in one sense right what happens somehow or another he is blessed and he can now pray and the symbol of his guilt falls off his neck into the sea well so he eventually gets home again mysteriously miraculously and so we get to the end and this is at the very conclusion of the work say 597 and following a wedding guests the soul hath been alone on a wide wide sea so lonely twas what God himself scarce seemed there to be no sweeter than the marriage feast to sweeter far to me to walk together to the carrick with a goodly company the clerk by the way is a Scots word for church to walk together to the Kuykendall together pray while each to his great father bends old men and babes and loving friends and youths and maidens gay farewell farewell but this I tell to thee thou wedding-guest he pray as well whoever well both men in bird and beast this is the part that Coleridge thought maybe became a little bit too heavy-handed with its moralizing he praiseth well whoever thought both men and bird and beast he prayeth best who ever the best all things both great and small for the dear God who loveth us he made and loveth Paul the Mariner whose eye is bright whose beard with age is horror is gone and now the wedding guests turned from the bridegroom's door he went like one that hath been stunned and is of sense for Lorne a setter and a wiser man he rose tomorrow morn well ok interesting we go back to the screen just for a moment please see we go back to the screen for a second great so note the responses of the wedding guests right that's what is most important from college point of view it's not simply the tale that the Ancient Mariner tells it's what effect this has on the wedding guests because the wedding guests in sympathy response in the true sense of sympathy fellow-feeling he responds to the experience of the wedding excuse me of the Ancient Mariner and in doing so he himself grows to be a sadder and a wiser man when he rises the following morte so we have a tale in a sense of sin of conversion of confession of that sin of penance for having committed to sin in the first place and ultimately of redemption now as one of our footnotes in the textbook points out in front of colleges asked him I think it was at a dinner party asked him if he should have written a poem with more of a moral to it than he said in reply but my good madam the problem was my poem is that it has too much of a moral well again I leave that to you to decide that colleges point really is not that a poem should not have some kind of moral or other teaching perhaps but that that should be implicit rather than explicit it shouldn't be something that we get beaten over the head with it should be something that is more suggested more implied so ok um let us now make a jump may seem like a slightly odd jump at first but I think you'll see my point in just a moment to Mary Robinson and I know you've got this in your textbook but I better her dates up here on the screen just so we could be reminded of when it was that she lived and when she was writing she was a little bit older than Wordsworth and Coleridge and she died young unfortunately of a mysterious disease about which people are still arguing she is a newly resurrected woman poet novelist and dramatist and I say resurrected and I put quotes around the word resurrected because it's not that she hasn't always been there but she hasn't always been recognized for the very fine poet that she really was and some of you who took with me the first half of this course will know that a assignment that I commonly give in British literature one British literature from the earliest times down to the end of the 18th century is to do an analysis of a woman writer of a woman writer and to ask the question about what place she has or ought to have in the so called Canon of major English literature now let's go to the to the chart here just for a moment the notepad okay nowadays we spend a lot of time in literature courses talking about the Canon what does that word mean anybody here no have you heard that your other classes yeah degenerate you don't have a microphone well I'll just try to repeat what you say okay Oh what she's saying is that the canon consists of a group of works in this case literary works which are considered to be great and essential to to the culture considered by whom by the way who does who makes that judgment yeah yeah she's saying academics or leading scholars and and that's true that's true who who's the the authority to decide let's let's go back the word Canon is taken over from discussions of the Bible scholarly discussions of the Bible I mean who established and by what means and with men Authority what the books of the Bible are you know in the case of the Hebrew Bible it took centuries for the rabbis you know to argue it all through and decide what the books of the Hebrew Bible were going to be in other words the Canon of the Hebrew Bible or what Christians call the Old Testament and that wasn't just self-evident and it had to be decided by people who had the authority to make the decision which means really the power to make the decision and of course that power that authority belonged to the rabbi's now in the case of the Christian or New Testament there were other Gospels around at the time of the Gospels that came to be considered the Canon and there are lots of other epistles and so forth that were around in the early Christian church why didn't those things get in who established the Canon under what conditions and with what authority well in the early church those who had the authority and the power made decisions about what went in and what did not go in as authentic works of the Bible and therefore part of the Canon or what we call canonical texts we are to this day still some disputes about whether or not certain books of the Bible or canonical for example if you pick up a standard Protestant edition of the Bible you may find at the end of the Old Testament a certain number of books which are called Apocrypha Apocrypha or non canonical books whereas in a Catholic edition of the Bible those will be included as canonical books okay now you know that distinction is being burned to some extent as there are now texts of the Bible that are being produced for Protestants and Catholics alike in which some of the the old disputes become muted at least to a certain extent but you can see the sort of thing that I'm getting at so the concept of a Canon as our friend over here pointed out is that you can have in whatever realm it is the religious realm the cultural realm the political realm whatever it is you can have a kind of Kanon of the works that are accepted to be authoritative to be authoritative and to be monuments to the culture okay well we're going to book like this there's nothing more economical than the Norton Anthology of English literature there are comparable anthologies of American literature and of French literature and of African literature and of Asian literature and so on and so on and so on who establishes you know the list of the people who go in or who don't go in well that's very interesting and with met Authority and of course it's going to be scholars in this case right scholars are going to decide these things Wordsworth is so important but notice how much space he's given in a space is at a great premium in these anthologies look how much space he's given that's a sign of how important he is regarded by the people who not only establish that uphold the so-called canon of great writers of English literature so going back to the assignment that I give in the first half of this course which some of you may have taken actually I know that some of you have taken because I look around and see some of you have taken this I commonly give an assignment to go and find a woman writer because women young writers usually were either unrepresented or under represented in these anthologies you go back a few editions and you're not going to find very many women finding one here or there but not very much and it's not really so much that people were trying to keep women out it's just that they weren't seriously looking for the the really good women writers who were there all along and that was a kind of unconscious cultural bias on the part of scholars and we're primarily male scholars of course okay but then or not not that all men were you know suffering from sexist bias by any means but many were and it took in many cases our women colleagues to draw our attention not only to the fact that there are some wonderful women writers in our tradition that who they are and what these qualities really are and so increasingly you will notice more and more attention being devoted to women writers in these canonical anthologies of English and American literature and literature's of other people's as well the same thing by the way has also been true of ethnic minorities you know it used to be in anthologies of of American literature that you just wouldn't find people of color well you might find a token one here there but now you pick up the average anthology of of American literature and you may have as much as a third of the space devoted to to two writers and other artists and intellectuals of color very interesting very important and even after we begin to recognize the importance of the contributions of African Americans people began to point out the wait a minute you know we weren't putting any Hispanics in these you know and yet there's this extremely rich and creative tradition there as well in America and so on and so on and so on and so on okay so there has been a kind of turning around now here's Mary Robinson go back to my original claim she is a newly resurrected woman poet novelist and dramatist she's been there all along right she wasn't born yesterday it's just that she hasn't been recognized she wasn't in earlier editions of these anthologies however in a long time she was much admired by some of her principled contemporaries including her principal male contemporaries such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and she was extremely popular in her own day much more popular than wins with her Coleridge one of her novels when it appeared sold out an entire edition in one day I mean she was a very very popular writer and then sank into relative obscurity until she has been resurrected let's look at the haunted beach this once again is like colleges project described in the biography a little area chapter 14 and carried out in the wine of the Ancient Mariner this is romantic poetry treating the mysterious and the supernatural and in this respect it is comparable to Koller inches Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and it's also incomparable in the sense that it's a very fine poem in its own right okay upon a lonely desert beach where the white film was scattered a little shed up reared its head though lofty barks were shattered the seaweeds gathering near the door of sambar path displayed and all around the deafening roar we echoed on the chalky shore by the green billows made a bevel jetting cliff was seen where sea birds hovered craving and all around the Quags were bound with weeds forever waving and here and there a calf and wide in chadwin joy jaws displayed and near the sands at MF tied a shivered mast was seen to ride where the green billows strained and oft while the moaning windstorm stole or the summer ocean the moonlight scene was all serene the waters scarce in motion then while the smoothly slanting sand the tall cliff wrapped in shade the fisherman beheld a band of specters gliding hand and hand where the green billows played specters ghosts otherworldly supernatural figures well at least super normal figures reminds you doesn't it of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a sense ok until their faces were snow and suddenly they wandered into the skies with hollow eyes they looked as though they pondered and sometimes from their hammock shroud there are dismal howlings made and while the blast was strong and loud the clear name marked the ghastly crowd where the green billows played and then above the Haunted hunt the curlews screaming uttered crows or seabirds then the road or with furious roar the frothy breakers covered and for in the fisherman's lung shed a murdered man was laid with ten wide gashes in his head and deep was made his sandy bed with the green billows played see there's some mystery involved here a shipwrecked Mariner was he doomed from his home to sever who swore to be through wind and sea Foreman undaunted ever and when the wave restless rolled about his arm he made a packet rich of Spanish gold and like a British sailor bold plunged where the billows paid the spectre banned his messmates brave sunk in the yawning ocean while to the mast he lashed him fast and braved the storms commotion the winter moon upon the sand a silvery carpet made and marked the Sailor reach the land and marked his murderer wash his hand where the green billows played and since an hour the fisherman has toiled and toiled in vain for all the night the Moony light gleams on the spectre drain and when the skies are veiled in gloom the murderers liquid weigh pounds or the deeply yawning tomb and flashing fires the sands Illume where the green bellows play full thirty years his task has been day after day more weary for heaven designed his guilty mind should dwell on prospects dreary bound by a strong and mystic chain he has not power to stray but destined misery to sustain he wastes in solitude and pain arose some life away so there's some compulsion here too which binds him to this place this place seemingly out of time and that's very interesting isn't it it's very interesting indeed it's and there's a mystery here and you can't completely put your finger on exactly what has happened I mean we could we could try to figure out the the mystery and come up with our own solutions to the mystery and perhaps you can have fun doing that you know in in your journals if you want to do that it's it's really left for us in a very mysterious way and so in some respects this is reminiscent of the one of the Ancient Mariner notice even the rhymes and the rhythms are similar to those of Coleridge's poem later on the American and Galen Poe is going to be writing poems very much like this right plays with sound plays with the supernatural plays with the mysterious and while Poe has sometimes been looking down on by critics of American literature in France at least he's regarded as one of our greatest poets and he's had a great influence on modern French poetry well let's just briefly mention also that in college we also have Kublai Khan and let me just let me just draw your attention to one thing very quickly in the time left to us I'm just going to read the opening stanza of Kublai Khan in Xanadu did Kubla Khan this is the exotic the faraway the eastern China in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree where alph the sacred River ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea so twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills world blossomed many an incense bearing tree and there were forests ancient is the hills in folding sunny spots of greenery and notice the deep romantic chasm and so on and so on and so on this is usually taken as a kind of poem about the artistic imagination with its subterranean roots and then it's bursting forth suddenly and it's love of beauty as signified perhaps by the Pleasure Dome fashioned by the great artists either Cleveland himself or those whom he had employed for creating this pace and then looked back to the last poem of Mary Robinson's in our anthology to the poet color age and what we have here is a poem which is her response to reading Kublai Khan and manuscript some sixteen years before it was printed and courage had earlier praised her undoubted genius as a poet so she wrote in response to this compliment from Coleridge this poem to the poet Coleridge which is really a kind of poetic commentary on his poem Kubla Khan more about this next time

Literature_Lectures

Rickert_Manly_How_two_WWI_code_breakers_produced_the_preeminent_edition_of_The_Canterbury_Tales.txt

well thank you very much um I'm extremely honored to be here and I have thanks to a lot of people I must especially thank Alice shrier the director of the special collections Research Center in Regenstein library and her staff because they among other things brought over the display and it was no small job they had to pack it up and bring it over in what Alice described as a car and I also thank David pavich very much he's regularly helped me present this material in Greater detail than I will tonight um in my chosa classes um and I also would like to thank Barbara Bostic who organized the photographs I've got of our University of Chicago cha manuscript and who arranged the very nice invitation the photographs on the invitation well the University of Chicago humanists of my title he was an expert in electronics and new new things he was out there on The Cutting Edge of new technology his name was his name was John Manley his dates were 1865 to 1940 and the other one is Edith Rickett and her dates were 1871 to 1938 and I'm very happy to be talking about them now because 2010 is the 70th anniversary year of the publication of their final and greatest scholarly project this eight volume Landmark edition of Chula Canterbury Tales and I've put only four volumes of the eight on display here I felt sorry for the Caravan well John Manley was brought to the University of Chicago by its first president William Rainey Harper he was brought here in 1898 that is 6 years after the university had been established as a PhD granting institution and it was when it was very much out to prove itself as every bit as good or better than all those places out east um Manley had started his career as a mathematician he'd done a master's degree in mathematics at Ferman College University in Greenville South Carolina and then he taught mathematics for a while in college and high school but in 1888 he went to Harvard to study philology and he received his PhD in 1890 and apparently instead of questioning him one of the examiners simply handed him a cigar a year later he was appointed as associate professor at Brown University and he was promoted to full Professor one year after that whereupon president Harper invited him to come to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor Manley was unenthusiastic until Harper invited him to come as full professor and as the first head of our English Department he remained head of the department until he retired in 1933 but there was a gap during World War I this was when the cryptologist Herbert Yardley brought him into the cryptographic Bureau of the war department in Washington and according to Yardley Manley had Cipher brains and he also says that Manley developed into the most skillful and Brilliant of their cryptographers um Manley was qualified for this job partly because in 1913 George Fabian who was an eccentric millionaire living in the Chicago area Fabian had invited him him to work on what were taken to be codes in Shakespeare's plays that proved that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon and this I discovered you'll be amazed I was amazed maybe you know this but in 1916 judge Richard Stanley Tut Hill ruled in the Circuit Court of Cook County that Shakespeare was indeed bacon manly was not to blame for that one well and the University of Chicago really dis approved okay now much later I'm just jumping ahead for a moment on the cryptography thing in 1931 Manley was working on the 15th or early 16th century voyich manuscript um it's in Yale now it's written in a in a still unbroken code and thanks to this Association Manley got a place in Max McCoy's 1995 Indiana Jones and the Philosophers Stone in which he helps the FBI investigate the manuscript's theft he goes to Princeton to enlist the services of Indiana Jones well he arrived in the department of English just in time to be present at the defense of the brilliant and beautiful Edith Ricket they photos of her to prove her beauty she had grown up in lrange Illinois she'd been educated in the Chicago Public School System she graduated ated with an AB from Vera and then she returned to teach in L Lion's Township High School in lrange which I gather still exists okay but while doing that she also worked towards a PhD in English literature and philology at the new University of Chicago and she received the degree with Magna kumla in 1899 she was the first woman to have such an honor and only the second individual in the university to have it she went back and taught for a while in Vasa but then she burned her academic Bridges and set up as a freelance writer and researcher in London there she published five novels and more than 50 short stories translations of medieval Works um and she did work in archives she did commissioned work in the London archives but in 199 she came back because of a financial downturn and she worked um as an editor and and trying to write till 1918 when guess what Manley recruited her to assist in his code breaking activities and the two of them were working together and were key in unscrambling the waberski cipher waberski was the German spy lotha vitsky in 1916 it seems he was responsible for detonating over 2 million tons of us ammunition that had been stored on black Tom Island in New York Harbor anyway he was picked up coming in from Mexico into the United States with a little bit of Cipher sewn into a sleeve and it took three days um Manley and Ricket decoded this and it was basically trying to get the Mexicans in against the United States I'm going to quote a recent person on this cryp crypto analysis he's saying he put it this way in a 3 marathon of cryptoanalysis manly aided by Miss Ricket perceived the pattern of this 12-step official Cipher with its multiple horizontal shiftings of three and four-letter plain text groups ripped apart by a final vertical transcription so it was a difficult one it was a tough one and in her Diaries um Edith Rickard mentions the moment when it all sort of went click and how glad they felt well after all this wartime excitement Rickett came back here and worked as a part-time instructor at the University of Chicago until she was officially hired into the English Department as associate professor um in 1924 so this would have been just after she and Manley had got together their idea about this great editorial project that they were going to do it was one in which they were setting out to break barriers in the field of textual editing and they were working at a time when editing was a high Prestige scholarly occupation um since then because of easy copying techniques and changes of the way in which we think of knowledge it's become a low Prestige activity but then it was at the top um there and they had a prestigious text to work on they had can Cha's Canary Tales it reaches us not in any text left by chosa the Hib self but only in scribal copies there's some 83 of these plus a couple of c and prints which have have equal Authority with um manuscripts they're like independent Witnesses and all of these extent Witnesses contain obvious copying errors and that sort of thing and many differ from each other in complex ways in what they include so um Manny and Ricket eventually are going to establish that our earliest and most most reliable witness which is the hener manuscript um named after place that it has um that it doesn't have some of the material in the manuscript that was had hither to been thought as the best manuscript the elmere manuscript like the whole Canon Yan's prologue and tales so there's a question what do you do when you've got such a lot of missing material or or was it added that sort of thing or another example would be that hener has a rather respectable wife of bath whereas the elmir manuscript has some lines that turn her into a more lascivious lady um and so there are masses of problems of this kind and I put some photos reproductions of manuscripts on the display for the sake of time I'm going to skip over what was involved in this enormous editorial project when I devised the handout I was going to spend more time on this so forgive me for that what I want to emphasize is that it required enormous labor they were using a technique an editorial technique called recension and this involves examining every word in every witness of the text because after all even a late scribe um might have been working with an early fragment closer to Cha so it required looking at every every word in all of these um in fact that that that what I just said about the late scribe it worked for the H for the manuscript we've got here in the University of Chicago which is a late manuscript which which has a couple of lines in Cha's tale of melaby um which are obviously missing everywhere else except one manuscript was was probably copied from our Chicago one so it show I mean they had to look at everything um and then after examining every word and recording all the variant imagine doing that um they would take the errors they'd work out a kind of family tree or stemmer of how the manuscripts related with each other and then they'd used this stemmer to try to move back to construct a text that was purged of all the errors that they'd seen along the way and with the amount of evidence that they had the idea was that this could be done very objectively um well the result of all this enormous labor would be a scholarly construct that in theory at least corresponded more closely than anything we actually have to the first scribal copy of the text um the one from which all the other copies came ultimately and the idea is they they were working on the model of printing where you would have um a copy text so they're thinking in those terms so they're pushing towards that now some editors might think they'd got to that first scribal copy and then they'd start putting things right that they thought that scribe had made okay or then they might get think they've got to the author and they might even correct a few errors the author they thought the author had made so it was very he times in which to be doing um editing but Manley and Ricket were respectively restrained they sought only to retrieve the text that came as close as humanly possible to the first scribal copy of the whole Cy Tales now they did also plan to prepare eventually a library Edition with a text that would press back to Cha's own text a handy Edition and had they lived to do that the history of CHA teaching would probably have been rather different from what it has been um anyway huge job immense challenges not only because there were a lot of witnesses but they became increasingly aware that there was very real uncertainty over whether there had ever been an original scribal copy of the canterbary tales so they were uncertain about the thing they were aiming to rec construct had ever existed um we partly know this thanks to them but what we what Chula schols assume is that when cha died he left a number of fragments and these fragments ascribe or a number of scribes perhaps working independently tried to make a whole Canary Tales um out of them as best they could um and those the scribes cobbling together well they might have drawn on CH on material that cha had intended to cancel say or um material that wasn't by him or material that had belonged to earlier versions than the one he left at his death um or the scribes could have made up material so there were all these problems they were facing and they weren't really clear before Manley and Ricket started their work well their first task was to track down all the witnesses so Ricket went went to London and she appealed for information about manuscripts that had been recorded in medieval wills and Here There and Everywhere but which people had lost track of so she put ads into the times literary supplement and into country life and you see who has these manuscripts in those days in England well as a result of this she eventually increased the number of known Witnesses by about 10 and she established the whereabouts of quite a lot of others and things weren't always easy and here's a little story okay during World War I a fragment of chorer had been offered to Sir John Ballinger for per to purchase for the National Library of Wales but I'm quoting in the general confusion it got away and was never heard of again so man and Ricket again I quote could only grieve I'm getting this from a letter she wrote to her students back here in Chicago Chico um but then then Balinger had a stroke and the opposite thing happened that you you then you expect with a stroke because the next time they went to see him he came running towards them with outstretched hands and he said you know that fragment of the nuns priest's tale that the curate named Jones of meria brought to the National Library during the war they were Bound in the Latin Welsh dictionary of 16 1932 so they were able to track these fragments I've got pictures of some of them there they in fact belong to a manuscript that was that was looks as if it would have been an exceedingly good one very close to Cha but it's just fragments in that so that's how they got that well eventually I should say in all of this they were helped by William McCormick he was a Scottish literary scholar he headed the university grants Commission in England he he was a Cherian um he got really involved in the project which is finally dedicated to him and he's the one who bought our chorer manuscript he bought it so that they would have it for use um in this project um so with his help they were finally able to get photo stats of every single witness to Cha's Works um and they knew about this technology of the photostat thanks to their codebreaking activities so as a result we have in Regenstein photostats of every manuscript and important printed text of the canary Tales um only one manuscript of fragments has been found since they worked um but we have a lot of other stuff in Regenstein too now you'd think that m and Ricket already had plenty to get on with but they also thought they should collect every single referen chorer that occurs in the medieval records so they and a lot do because it was Customs official okay so they employed professional archists in England to help them collect these references and they persuaded the university to buy up a huge collection of cheap manuscript material that had just come on the market and with this they plan to teach their graduate students how to read medieval scripts and also the languages they need to know to work in the archives in England they need to know Latin French various dialects of Middle English um and this is in Regenstein now it's the bacon collection of English court and manner documents and so special collections has this huge collection of Manor Court roles those are the that is the records of the courts that do local Justice and we've got one example looking at you there a court role I thought there are lots and lots of these things so there's one there that's that that's the most valuable thing that's actually got over here and it wasn't valuable when they bought it they got the whole collection I think for $500 okay that was great in those days even though $500 was worth something okay so um the special collections has all of that and it has files and files bearing on the life records some of them done by the professional archists in London and I've put some of that there and some by students and people who went over and all this stuff was put into wee bolt 410 it's Philip des's office now it should be with the English Department but it isn't um and it's that was known as the chorer laboratory and this is where Manley and Ricket trained their graduate students assistants and this is where the gra these assistants they work through all the manuscripts work word by word recording the variants and there's a very complex system that they worked out for how to record so many variants um for so many lines for so many manuscripts and so on the result they also worked out a complex system for checking but the result was astonishingly accurate but things could be Lively along the way and this is why I've abandoned editing tonight to talk you about Lively things to you about Lively things along the way okay okay in 1931 mamy and Ricket were busy working in England and a Mr hris a student and five of six women some of whom were going to become major ch syrians um they were holding the fort back at home and the women had it in for hris and they wrote a letter to the acting head of the department Jr Hulbert saying that Hendrick wasn't putting his hours in horber urged hris to write to Manley and Ricket with his side of the story and I'm going to quote from his letter okay it's a mad letter it's four pages you know single space he's absolutely out of his mind I I'm not giving you much of this but okay um he starts off by saying that it was really rather nice in the cha laboratory you know until this trouble started you know um it the laboratory had been a very gay place to be in a kind of Ville house really a bque show bque show um and then he goes on I've referred to the laboratory as a bque show it is also a chatter box at times I've not been able to work because of the annoyance of Senseless conversation I could not sit and listen to their lavious stories these are typical miss m enters and in a loud voice says I wonder what Lucy will say when she wakes up and finds that I wasn't at home last night and it develops that she got home at 3:00 and left before Lucy Had awakened that morning another morning miss m enters and calls out think of it Mr teal asked me to sit at his desk for five minutes I asked him who he thought I was then follows a conversation in which all join each one expressing an opinion of Mr T another evening Miss D announces that she's going to have dinner with a bachelor in his apartment miss m raises her loud voice louder and says now look out Mabel you can't tell what will happen in a bachelor's apartment oh that's nothing Miss D replies I lived with a married man for four months and all his wife worried about was that he wouldn't have enough to eat another morning just one more okay another morning Miss D has read from an old book of etiquette or manners they all call to mind something that has been read each one contributing to the clamor a young lady should wash her stockings so many times times per week and her feet and anything else when a young lady goes out with a gentleman and they are to sit on the grass under a tree he's supposed to do certain things and they add something about other matters all adding to a general confusion is it any wonder that I pick up and leave with all this going on well he um originally planned to send it to miss Ricket um and she said that she could tell Mr Manley whatever she chose that he would do other work or whatever they wanted but then he decides to send it to Mr Manley Dear Mr Manley this is handwritten on second thought I've decided to send the letter to you instead of to miss Rickard who may become too excited about it and have her health affected I'm sorry of course to have to trouble you with it okay her health was not good at the time so there may have been a real worry but somehow at the end of that letter that's really something okay well Halbert his conclusion about all this was that continuous work of the minute character that the students were doing gets on people's nerves and makes them abnormal and that men should not be employed on the chorer staff Manley simply wrote back to the whole staff saying you've behaved as naughty children when the nurse is away and everything seems to have calmed down well there was of course a program that required fun things originally promised well the Rockefeller Foundation talked of giving them an annual budget of $50,000 um for five years and five years complete leave for the two of them um so that was the initial promise um but it finally came through when the money came through the annual budget was $23,000 with no Assurance of continuity and manle and Ricket had to teach for half the year that's for two quarters that's our full-time load um and also from 1929 the University Administration which was now headed by the fifth President of the University Robert Hutchins it began pressuring them to finish within the originally estimated 5 years despite all the teaching now from the first Manley had worried about Hutchins and I'm going to quote a letter he wrote to David Stevens who was assistant to the previous president Max Mason I'm somewhat troubled about what you say of Hutchins I saw too little of him in the Autumn to be able to guess his plans or his policy the most disturbing incident to me personally was his query whether we couldn't make the Chex without taking up all the subsidiary investigations that is the life records on which we are spending time and money of course I told him we could but that in the first place if we did neglect them someone else would would come along and do them better and make a better text than ours well Manley's logic may not be great in that final sentence but in wanting to ditch the life records Hutchins was being very shortsighted as in the long run the life records which were finally published I have them over there they were published in 1966 by two of Manley and Ricket students and they've proved a really major contribution to scholarship um well the addition came out in 1940 I'm not going to describe it now that's another thing I've just abandoned for the sake of time but I will what I want to say is that it stunned Scholars when it came out I'm quoting Kent Malone of Johns Hopkins history will know it as a landmark of American literary scholarship and there was a review in the times literary supplement in 1940 June Under The Heading heroism in scholarship it's concurring prodigious the great Merit of this vast accomplishment does not consist merely in the fact that it makes possible a better text of the canabury tales than any which has hitherto been published it marks an Epoch in the development of the art of editing a classical text from a large number of manuscripts but it literally killed its editors this at least is the heog graphy Ricket had worked absolutely nonstop on it for years and in 1931 she had a break down um she was then off and on unwell she kept working of course but she had a heart attack in 1936 that led her left her bedridden even so she worked as much as she could two days before her death of a stroke in 1938 she handed Manley a paper on which she'd written her thought thoughts about what she thought were some important early chorer trays things that have come through from early cha drafts in a manuscript in Cambridge and Manley didn't buy what she said and he clear about that but he did publish this material in the end of the volume two of the Edition um and she died the two days after handing the is over and then Less Than 3 months after the publication of the Edition and before the appearance of most of its reviews including the timeses literary supplement one that I just read Manley died of a heart attack he had had bad health for some years and his Portrait by William Orin um it's looks at us as we walk into the English Department Orin was the most important Portrait Painter of the day a very very expensive he charged $155,000 to make a portrait but Ricket had managed to make friends with him and so the university gave it in got it in return for a little gift and now orin's paintings are exceedingly valuable an unsigned one that um is was established to be his was estimated at £250,000 on a recent um what is it Antiques Road Show in England um at AR's sign okay well the addition despite all the Lively goings on in the cha laboratory was incredibly accurate it didn't have the impact it deserved for one thing World War II intervened and for another man and Rickett's results are disconcertingly complicated it's partly because they were doing a kind of project where you have to get to the end almost before you can begin it before you can lay it out and they're being pushed for time all the time they had to publish their text before they'd got all the variants in order it it was very it was a very hard job for them um they were able to use Photo offset though which meant that the addition was less expensive than it might otherwise have been um they didn't of course lived to produce the projected Library Edition that would have concisely borne witness to their work um so Scholars have never picked up on their text for everyday teaching um instead a one volume edition of Cha's works that came out in 1933 for Yale by FN Robinson has dominated the market okay he's a real slacker as an editor okay okay not nearly such a good tech oh okay well Manley and Ricket have also come in for longer term criticism and some of this is valid um this decision that they had to make Midway that they couldn't get a single scribal architect type the copy text um they realized this sort of Midway they were extremely honest about it and they said well under the circumstances they had to proceed as if there were such an archetype um but this let a methodological inconsistency into the addition which they never had time to revise out and this opened them to severe criticism and in particular George Cain of London University later University of North Carolina in 1984 he produced an astonishingly ungenerous account of their work it's it's it's amazing it's one of the most nasty things that I've read he was an editor using a different method so may have been other things in it for them for him um it has been quite influential but it inspired Roy Vance Ramsey um who in his um obituary was termed defender of the Underdog to spend 16 years and 713 Pages it's over there defending manle and Rickett's Edition and I'm not the only one to think that he did this satisfactorily um there's been meetings of the medieval Academy and that sort of thing on this well criticism or no criticism all Scholars have acknowledged the validity of many of manle and Rickett's findings many um but one important one was that they recognized that the hener manuscript is normally textually Superior to anything else we have and as a result Robinson's Edition that Yale thing has increasingly been corrected in the direction of hener and hener has also been used by the editors of the very Orum chorer this aims to record the scholarly history of the Canter Tales they're using a version of hanger they also took all Manny and Rickett's um col cards for this and now we have one more project the canary Tales project it's to be executed its officers hope in close collaboration with Regenstein library and it aims to make available all manuscripts and various later editions of the cany tales in electronic form and it's going to do this in part by reconstructing the witnesses texts out of manle and rickets lists of variant readings so they're going to be putting electronic all that raw data that Manny and Ricket had analyzed through their heads so they're undoing all that so we can reanalyze it oh well okay anyway it's a great project and it really looks beautiful the bits they've done on um the when you go into them on the Internet well my last words are going to come from people who wrote to Manley about the addition just before he died I quote First Martin Rood ruu D um he had been student here and he was a scandinavi naist I think he was teaching at Madison he writes it has made me feel very humble and very proud humble in the realization of what great scholarship is and proud to have known you it makes me proud too of the University of Chicago and of my country for work like this gives us the right to hold up our heads and here's um RS crane writing from within the English Department Department the book as I think of it is a symbol of the kind of scholarship at once rich in detail and closely reasoned which you have made the tradition of this department and which in however diverse or new forms is and I hope will continue to be the ideal of us all only by daring to do new things and trying always to do them in the most workmanlike way can we expect to justify our presence at the University of Chicago which for me at least will always be the University of Manley I I've been asked if I'll answer questions and if I can maneuver all this electronic stuff I'll give it yes could you explain for us in a large sense what the notion of a witness is oh what what does witness mean oh um it's an extent examp example of the text so a manuscript um a manuscript containing chores Canter Tales is a witness to the Canter Tales it's a simple as that um I use the term witness rather than manuscripts Med or medieval manuscripts because I have to include some printed texts for this but it's a general term for a work that you're going to look at when trying to reach a text that approximates as closely as possible to ch's own so is the magic number 83 the magic number of manuscripts is is that yes some of them are about 56 or something are of what we assume were complete Cur tales and others are of bits of the Cy tales and then we've got um a couple these kton prints his kon's first printing we know was from a manuscript we no longer have and his second printing which he took off that he corrected from yet another manuscript that we no longer have but it seems to be in a very good manuscript so you have to unravel all of that so you have to take his printed texts also into account when trying to get back to choro at a certain point you could stop worrying because the printed texts are going to be working from Material you already have so the cut off is about 1,500 when thinking about how to get back to ch's text does that answer it I'm sorry I didn't mean I don't mean to be using jargon um yeah yes yeah of course biologists have been doing this sort of genealogical analysis long before there were any biological geneticist but there now are biological geneticist who have very powerful computer tools that have been developed for DNA mutation anal so will this digital form of all of the records that that came up with are there plans to apply this yes this is why I would be quite unable to work on this Cat Tales project that they've got going but they have already published in places like nature diagrams of um where the manuscripts Fall using these techniques however I was very upset us looking at this and they left out Elsmere and I wanted to see where they would put it but they forgot it in nature so it but um I've got actually I no I may have left it in my office but there are these diagrams you could I mean if you Google kind of retails comma nature you probably going to come up with the picture yeah but they they are doing that so it's all this is left left any realm that I can deal with Mandy and Ricket would have been able to deal with it they had the minds that could deal with any new breakthrough thing like that yeah yes yes just couple of quick questions one have you examined the I think the JG Library the CT TR TS thinkg has in that Library I've never looked at the one in the Morgan Library no the second one is how would handled that letter that that that you're quoting from how would cha have handled these young people he would have turned it into a fablo it would have been oh it would have been a Miller's tale he would have loved it this did great yeah he would I mean this it would it should have been among his papers we would have known that he was planning a fablo around it at the back yes yeah um so what did about was she the Las woman I read about they oh that's a good question and because I went so fast they worked on the assumption that say in the elmir manuscript where these additions are that these had come through um from either earlier drafts or from more complete material that had get been brought together after the hener Scribe worked so they treated much of these this additional material as cheran now editors recently who've been absolute hard hanger nuts um have done additions that have none of it and it makes rather different looking text but Manny and Ricket they wanted they these look I I keep thinking if I'm describing this to my students I say these guys were really cool and they would have wanted I think a slightly lascivious wife of B yes next amre Rel there there was a rumor the rumor among medievalists was um that they were romantically involved um it they were certain was certainly an extremely close intellectual friendship lasting from that World War I time till their deaths um his tribute to her sub in the Edition and in his papers she was this something and sweet as she was strong I mean this is a person who really L they loved each other there's no doubt if they if they had a clo if they had a romantic relationship they were very circums there's not anything in the archives that would uncover much of that um they had to be for her career they would have had to be but her the novel I've put there which she published it was the year she became full Professor it's about a young girl who's really weighing the pros and cons of marriage and who's against marriage who comes out against um I would say in that book also I found in the archives that during that World War I period She published a poem and it was Manley who sent it out anonymously for her about a young man who had died in the war and he his name was Ned and there is a Ned who turns up in the in her Diaries as someone she knew so maybe there was someone who'd been killed in the war she and man certainly had a had a very sustaining relationship um I they were quite old I I don't I don't want to push this too hard um I I if they took stuff out of the archive it's none of my business you know these were exceedingly nice people I'm so fond of them after reading their stuff I'm sorry yes an eight volume book must have been expensive did it sell well who bought it okay well as I said it was photo offset so the University of Chicago press was able to bring it out more cheaply than otherwise in fact Manley hoped that it would be inexpensive enough that even students could own it um I don't know how well it's soell but of course all libraries would have had to get it I mean it's an absolute essential thing and it was much less expensive than it might have been with different technology so all so the reviewers of people all sort of say hooray hooray it looks odd to start with but it's great but I can't tell you what the sales were at that point there was all the business of the war and everything else to complicate things oh cha would like the oh there's another question because I think people want to go and drink I was going to say cha would like this but okay yeah at the University archives here in record house at Woodward CL which is tor down there was a house I think name for record house yes yes and now of course that's secur it's so sad she was so beautiful I've got a nice digital picture of her now which I'm thinking of getting framed and putting up in the department she she's really something thank you so [Applause] much thank you very much for uh it is the tradition of the library Society to present to the collections of volumes uh to honor our speaker and an appreciation and we have have selected choser contemporary approaches edited by Susanna fine David Raven Pennsylvania State University press 2010 it has been added for the collection in honor of Christina vanol on the occasion of her talk to the University of Chicago Library Society two University of Chicago humanists and a landmark mission of J's Camp can I just say thank you Susanna fine was a student here she did her ma here and she's a friend of mine that's so good thank you that's [Applause] great

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_4_Doublets_and_Contradictions_Seams_and_Sources.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: So, last time I gave a reading of the creation accounts that are in Genesis 1 to 3. These are two very different stories but their placement side by side suggests the possibility of a joint reading. Nevertheless they are very different in character, and today I want to focus in on the second creation story. This is a story that is predominantly in Genesis 2 and trickles into Genesis 3, and I'm going to look at it mostly in isolation from the first account. I'm going to be looking at it in light of an important parallel. This parallel is The Epic of Gilgamesh--I get to point this way now, to the boards, okay? The Epic of Gilgamesh, and I'll be drawing on the work of many scholars, Nahum Sarna probably most prominently among them, but others also who have devoted themselves to the study of these textual parallels, and developing an interpretation of these stories. I'd like you to carry that with you into your discussion sections as you look at some of the other interpretations from antiquity and on into the modern period. Now The Epic of Gilgamesh is a magnificent Mesopotamian epic that relates the exploits of a Sumerian king, King Gilgamesh of Uruk. That's the name of the city-state over which he is king. And the epic as we now have it was probably composed between 2000 and 1800 BCE. Gilgamesh was apparently a historical character, an actual king of Uruk, but the story of course has fantastic and legendary qualities to it. We have a full text of the epic that was located in the library of Assurbanipal, an Assyrian king. It's a seventh century copy of the story. But we have fragments that are much, much older (that date back to the eighteenth century) that were found in Iraq. So clearly it's an old story and we have even older prototypes for elements of the story as well. The story opens with a description of Gilgamesh. He's an extremely unpopular king. He's tyrannical, he's rapacious, he's undisciplined, he's over-sexed. The people in the city cry out to the gods. They want relief from him. They particularly cite his abuses towards the young women of the city. And the god Aruru is told that she must deal with Gilgamesh. Aruru is on the board. So Aruru fashions this noble savage named Enkidu. Enkidu is designed to be a match for Gilgamesh, and he's very much like the biblical human in Genesis 2. He's sort of an innocent primitive, he appears unclothed, he lives a free, peaceful life in harmony with the animals, with nature and the beasts, he races across the steppes with the gazelles. But before he can enter the city and meet Gilgamesh he has to be tamed. So a woman is sent to Enkidu and her job is to provide the sexual initiation that will tame and civilize Enkidu. I'm reading now from The Epic of Gilgamesh (Pritchard 1958,40-75): For six days and seven nights Enkidu comes forth, mating with the lass. After he had had (his) fill of her charms, He set his face toward his wild beasts. On seeing him, Enkidu, the gazelles ran off, The wild beasts of the steppe drew away from his body. Startled was Enkidu, as his body became taut. His knees were motionless--for his wild beasts had gone. Enkidu had to slacken his pace--it was not as before; But he now had [wi]sdom, [br]oader understanding. Returning, he sits at the feet of the harlot. I'm not sure why that translation. I've been told by those who know Akkadian that the word could mean "harlot/prostitute," it could mean some sacred prostitute… I'm not an expert in Akkadian. But: He looks up at the face of the harlot, His ears attentive, as the harlot speaks; [The harlot] says to him, to Enkidu: "Thou art [wi]se, Enkidu, art become like a god! Why with the wild creatures dost though roam over the steppe? Come, let me lead thee [to] ramparted Uruk, To the holy Temple, abode of Anu and Ishtar, Where lives Gilgamesh, accomplished in strength And like a wild ox lords it over the folk." As she speaks to him, her words find favor, His heart enlightened, he yearns for a friend. Enkidu says to her, to the harlot: "Up lass, escort thou me (to Gilgamesh)… I will challenge him [and will bo]ldly address him." So that's tablet I from The Epic of Gilgamesh. So through this sexual experience Enkidu has become wise, growing in mental and spiritual stature, and he is said to have become like a god. At the same time there's been a concomitant loss of innocence. His harmonious unity with nature is broken, he clothes himself, and his old friends the gazelles run from him now. He will never again roam free with the animals. He cannot run as quickly. His pace slackens, he can't even keep up with them. So as one reads the epic one senses this very deep ambivalence regarding the relative virtues and evils of civilized life, and many of the features that make us human. On the one hand it's clearly good that humans rise above the animals and build cities and wear clothes and pursue the arts of civilization and develop bonds of love and duty and friendship the way that animals do not; these are the things that make humans like the gods in The Epic of Gilgamesh. But on the other hand these advances have also come at a cost. And in this story there's also a sense of longing for the freedom of life in the wild--the innocent, simple, uncomplicated life lived day to day without plans, without toil, in harmony with nature, a somewhat Edenic existence. So there are very obvious parallels between this part of the epic that I've just read to you and our second creation story. Enkidu like Adam is fashioned from clay. He's a noble savage, he's a kind of innocent primitive, and he lives in a peaceful co-existence with animals. Nature yields its fruits to him without hard labor. He's unaware of--he's unattracted by--the benefits of civilization: clothing, cities and all their labor. Just as Enkidu gains wisdom and becomes like a god, and loses his oneness with nature, so Adam and Eve after eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil are said to have become like gods, and they also lose their harmonious relationship with nature. In Genesis 3:15, God says to the snake: "I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your offspring and hers; They shall strike at your head, And you shall strike at their heel." Presumably there had been a peaceful relationship between creatures like snakes and humans to that point. They are banished now from the Garden. It used to yield its fruits to them without any labor, but now humans have to toil for food and the earth yields its fruits only stintingly. So in Genesis 3:18, God says to Adam: "Cursed be the ground because of you; By toil shall you eat of it All the days of your life: Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; By the sweat of your brow Shall you get bread to eat" So knowledge or wisdom or perhaps moral freedom, seem to come at a very high price. But there are important differences between these stories too. And the most important has to do with the nature of the act that leads to the transformation of the human characters. It's Enkidu's sexual experience, his seven-day encounter with the woman that makes him wise and godlike at the cost of his life with the beasts. There has been a long tradition of interpreting the deed or the sin of Adam and Eve as sexual, and there are some hints in the story that would support such an interpretation. I was just reading recently a scholarly introduction to Genesis that very much argues and develops this interpretation. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in violation of God's command. Now eating can perhaps be a metaphor for sex, some have argued. Knowledge of good and evil--perhaps that could be understood in sexual terms. In biblical Hebrew the word "to know" can mean "to know" in the biblical sense. It can mean sexual intercourse. Snakes are symbols of renewed life and fertility in the East because they shed their skins so they seem to be eternally young; and they're also phallic symbols. Eve says that the snake seduced her. uses a term that has some sexual overtones. So do all of these hints suggest that, in the biblical view, the change in Adam and Eve came about through sex? If so, is sex a negative thing forbidden by God? It would depend if you view the change as a negative thing. That seems unlikely in my view. You will certainly hear it argued, but it seems unlikely in my view. God's first command to the first couple was to be fruitful and multiply. Now admittedly that comes from the first creation story in Genesis 1; nevertheless in the second creation story when the writer is recounting the creation of woman, the writer refers to the fact that man and woman will become one flesh. So it seems that sex was part of the plan for humans even at creation. Also, it's only after their defiance of God's command that Adam and Eve first become aware of, and ashamed by, their nakedness, putting the sort of sexual awakening after the act of disobedience rather then at the same time or prior to. So maybe what we have here is another polemic, another adaptation of familiar stories and motifs to express something new. Perhaps for the biblical writer, Adam and Eve's transformation occurs after an act of disobedience, not after a seven-day sexual encounter. The disobedience happens in a rather backhanded way. It's kind of interesting. God tells Adam before the creation of Eve that he's not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that's in Genesis 2:16, on pain of death. Eve doesn't hear this command directly. She has not yet been created. In Genesis 3 we meet the cunning serpent, and although many later Hellenistic Jewish texts and the New Testament will identify the snake as a Satan, an enticer, a tempter, some sort of evil creature, he doesn't seem to be so in this fable. There's no real devil or Satan character--we'll talk about Job later--in the Hebrew Bible, the snake in Eden is simply a talking animal. He's a standard literary device that you see in fables of this period, and later--the kind that you find for example in the fables of Aesop. And the woman responds to the serpent's queries by saying that eating and even touching the tree is forbidden on pain of death. One wonders whence the addition of touching. Did Adam convey God's command to Eve with an emphasis all his own? "Don't even touch that tree, Eve. It's curtains for us if you do." She didn't hear the original command. Or did she just mishear in some very tragic version of the telephone game. And the serpent tells her, No, "you are not going to die" if you touch or eat the fruit. In fact, he adds, the fruit will bring you wisdom making humans like gods who know good and bad. And in fact that's certainly true. He tells her the truth. Genesis 3:7 is a very critical verse and it's rarely properly translated. Most translations read like this: "She took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate." The implication is that Eve acts alone and then she goes and finds Adam and gives him some of the apple and convinces him to eat it. But in fact the Hebrew literally reads, "She took of its fruit and ate and gave also to her husband with her, and he ate." "With her" is a very teeny-tiny little word in Hebrew, so I guess a lot of translations figure they can leave it out. But the "with her" is there in the Hebrew. At that fateful moment, Adam and Eve are standing together at the tree, and although only the woman and the serpent speak, Adam was present, and it seems he accepted the fruit that his wife handed him. He was fully complicitous, and indeed God holds him responsible. He reproaches Adam. Adam says: Well, Eve handed it to me. She gave it to me. Eve explains, the serpent tricked me. God vents his fury on all three, and he does so in ascending order: first the snake for his trickery and then the woman, and finally the man. So just as the harlot tells Enkidu after his sexual awakening that he has become like a god, so Adam and Eve after eating the forbidden fruit are said to be like divine beings. Why? Perhaps because they have become wise in that they have learned they have moral choice. They have free will, they can defy God and God's plans for them in a way that animals and natural phenomena cannot. But now that means there is a serious danger here, and in Genesis 3:22, God says, "Now that man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever?" So it's the threat of an immortal antagonist that is so disturbing and must be avoided. And so God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden and he stations these kerubim, these cherubim--not puffy cute little babies like Raphael painted, but these fierce monstrous creatures--and a fiery, ever-turning sword to guard the way back to the tree of life. It is now inaccessible. So the acceptance of mortality as an inescapable part of the human condition: it's a part of this story. It's also one of the themes of The Epic of Gilgamesh. As the story continues Enkidu enters the city and Enkidu earns Gilgamesh's respect and deep love. This is the first time that this rapacious tyrant has ever actually loved anyone and his character is reformed as a result. And then the rest of the epic contains the adventures of these two close friends, all of the things that they do together. And when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is absolutely devastated. He's for the first time confronted with his own mortality. He's obsessed with grief over Enkidu, and he's obsessed with the whole issue of mortality. He begins a quest for immortality, and that takes up most of the rest of the epic. He leaves the city, he travels far and wide, he crosses these primeval seas and endures all sorts of hardships. And finally exhausted and battered he reaches Utnapishtim, also there on the board, Utnapishtim, who is the only mortal ever to have been granted immortality by the gods, and he comes to him and asks for his secret. It turns out that Utnapishtim can't help him, and we'll come back to Utnapishtim later in the flood story, and Gilgamesh is devastated. He then learns the whereabouts of a plant of eternal youth. And he says: Well that's better than nothing. That at least will keep him young. And so he goes after the plant of eternal youth, but he's negligent for a moment and a thieving snake or serpent manages to steal it and that explains why snakes are always shedding their skins and are forever young. Gilgamesh is exhausted, he feels defeated, he returns to Uruk, and as he stands looking at the city from a distance, gazing at it, he takes comfort in the thought that although humans are finite and frail and doomed to die, their accomplishments and their great works give them some foothold in human memory. Now Nahum Sarna is one of the people who has pointed out that the quest for immortality, which is so central in The Epic of Gilgamesh, is really deflected in the biblical story. The tree of life is mentioned, and it's mentioned with a definite article. Genesis 2:9 says, "with the tree of life in the middle of the garden," as if this is a motif we're familiar with, as if this is something we all know about. But then it's really not mentioned again as the story proceeds. The snake, which in The Epic of Gilgamesh is associated with the plant of eternal youth, in Genesis is associated instead with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That's the focus of our attention in Genesis, and it's only at the end of the story that the tree of life appears again in the passage that is emphasizing its permanent inaccessibility. And we could perhaps draw two conclusions from this. First it may be that Adam and Eve had access to this tree up to that point. As long as their will conformed to the will of God, there was no danger to their going on eternally, being immortal. Once they discovered their moral freedom, once they discovered that they could thwart God and work evil in the world, and abuse and corrupt all that God had created, then God could not afford to allow them access to the tree of life. That would be tantamount to creating divine enemies, immortal enemies. So God must maintain the upper hand in his struggle with these humans who have learned to defy him. And he maintains the upper hand in this, the fact that they eventually must die. Second of all the motif of guards who block access to the tree of life suggests that no humans have access to immortality and the pursuit of immortality is futile. So it might be then that God really spoke the truth after all. The fruit did bring death to humankind. Before we leave this story and move onto Cain and Abel, I just want to make a couple of quick observations. First of all the opening chapters of Genesis, Genesis 1 through 3, have been subjected to centuries of theological interpretation, and I hope that you're in the midst of reading some of them now. They have generated for example the doctrine of original sin, which is the idea that humans after Adam are born into a state of sin, by definition. As many ancient interpreters already have observed, the actions of Adam and Eve bring death to the human race. They don't bring a state of utter and unredeemed sinfulness. In fact what they tell us is that humans have moral choice in each and every age. The story is primarily etiological rather then prescriptive or normative. We've talked about this: these etiological tales are tales that are trying to explain how or why something is the way it is. This is why serpents shed their skin, for example. In The Epic of Gilgamesh they were the ones who got the plant of eternal youth. It's etiological. The writer observes that humans emerge from innocent childhood to self-conscious adulthood. The writer observes that survival is a difficult endeavor and that the world can sometimes seem harshly hostile. The writer observes that women are desirous of and emotionally bonded to the very persons who establish the conditions of their subordination. The story is explaining how these odd conditions of life came to be as they are, which is not to say that it's the ideal situation, or even that it's God's will for humankind; these are etiological fables, and they're best read as such. Second of all in this story we see something that we'll see repeatedly in the Pentateuch, and that is that God has to punt a bit. He has to modify his plans for the first couple, by barring access to the tree of life. That was not something presumably he planned to do. This is in response to, perhaps, their unforeseen disobedience: certainly the way the story unfolds that's how it seems to us. So despite their newfound mortality, humans are going to be a force to be reckoned with. They're unpredictable to the very god who created them. Finally I'll just draw your attention to some interesting details that you can think about and maybe talk about in section. God ruminates that the humans have become like "one of us" in the plural. That echoes his words in Genesis 1 where he proposes, "Let us make humans," or humankind, "in our image." Again in the plural. Who is he talking to? And what precisely are these cherubim that are stationed in front of the tree of life barring access? What do we make of these allusions to divine colleagues or subordinates in light of Kaufman's claims regarding biblical monotheism? You should be bringing some of the things we talked about when discussing his work, into dialogue with and in conflict with some of the evidence you'll be finding in the text itself. So think about these things, don't pass over these details lightly, and don't take them for granted. The Cain and Abel story which is in Genesis 4:1 through 16: this is the story of the first murder, and it's a murder that happens despite God's warning to Cain that it's possible to master the urge to violence by an act of will. He says, "Sin couches at the door;/Its urge is toward you/Yet you can be its master," Genesis 4:7. Nahum Sarna and others have noted that the word "brother" occurs throughout this story repeatedly, and it climaxes in God's question, "Where is your brother, Abel?" And Cain responds, "I don't know; am I my brother's keeper?" And ironically you sense, when you read this that, even though Cain intends this as a rhetorical question--"Am I my brother's keeper?"--in fact, he's right on the money. Yes. We are all of us our brothers' keepers, and the strong implication of the story is as Sarna puts it, that all homicide is in fact fratricide. That seems to be the message of this story. Note also that Cain is culpable, and for someone to be culpable of something we have to assume some principle that they have violated. And therefore this story assumes the existence of what some writers, Sarna among them, have called "the universal moral law." There seems to be in existence from the beginning of creation this universal moral law, and that is: the God-endowed sanctity of human life. We can connect it with the fact that God has created humans in his own image, but the God-endowed sanctity of human life is an assumption, and it's the violation of that assumption which makes Cain culpable. The story of Cain and Abel is notable for another theme, and this is a theme that's going to recur in the Bible, and that is the tension between settled areas and the unsettled desert areas and desert life of the nomads. Abel is a keeper of sheep. He represents the nomadic pastoralist, unlike Cain who is the tiller of soil, so he represents more settled urban life. God prefers the offering of Abel, and as a result Cain is distressed and jealous to the point of murder. God's preference for the offering of Abel valorizes the free life of the nomadic pastoralist over urban existence. Even after the Israelites will settle in their own land, the life of the desert pastoralist remained a sort of romantic ideal for them. It's a theme that we'll see coming up in many of the stories. It's a romantic ideal for this writer too. Now the murder of Abel by Cain is followed by some genealogical lists. They provide some continuity between the tales. They tell us folkloric traditions about the origins of various arts, the origins of building, of metalwork and music, but finally in Genesis 6:5 we read that, "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart," the human heart, "was evil continuously". And this sets the stage then for the story of a worldwide flood. Now here again the Bible is making use of older traditions and motifs and adapting them to their own purposes. I've hinted at this already and we'll look at it in a bit more detail now. We know of a very ancient Sumerian flood story. The hero is Ziusudra, also on the board. We also know of a very early Semitic work, the Epic of Atrahasis, in which there's a flood. But the most detailed flood story we have actually comes from The Epic of Gilgamesh, on the eleventh tablet of The Epic of Gilgamesh. You'll remember that in his search for immortality Gilgamesh sought out Utnapishtim, the one human who had been granted immortality. He wants to learn his secret. And when he begs for the secret of eternal life he gets Utnapishtim's story, and it's the flood story. He learns that Utnapishtim and his wife gained their immortality by a twist of circumstances: they were the sole survivors of this great flood, and as a kind of reward they were given immortality. The Sumerian story of Ziusudra is very similar to the Genesis account. In both you have the flood coming about as the deliberate result of a divine decision; you have one individual who's chosen to be saved from the flood; that individual is given specific instructions on building an ark, and is given specific instructions on who to bring on-board the ark. The ark also comes to rest on a mountaintop, the hero sends out a bird to reconnoiter the land, to find out if it's dry yet. When the hero emerges he builds an altar. He offers sacrifice to the deity and receives a blessing. Very similar, parallel stories, and yet there are significant contrasts between the Mesopotamian story and its Israelite adaptation. Let's compare some of the elements from all three of the stories with the biblical story. In The Epic of Gilgamesh we have no motive given for the divine destruction whatsoever. It just seems to be pure capriciousness. In the Epic of Atrahasis we do in fact read of a reason, and the text there states, "The land became wide and the people became numerous. The land bellowed like wild oxen. The god was disturbed by their uproar. Enlil heard the clamor and said to the gods, "Oppressive has become the clamor ofmankind. By their uproar they prevent sleep". So it seems that humankind is to be destroyed because they irritate the gods with their tumult and noise. In the Gilgamesh epic, Ea, an earth-water god, does ask another god, Enlil, how he could have brought the flood on so senselessly. He says, "Lay upon the sinner the sin; Lay upon the transgressor his transgression", which would indicate that in The Epic of Gilgamesh there is this element of capriciousness. The biblical writer in retelling the story seems to want to reject this idea by providing a moral rationale for God's actions. The earth, the text says, is destroyed because of hamas. Hamas is a word that literally means violence, bloodshed, but also all kinds of injustice and oppression. Noah is saved specifically for his righteousness, he was righteous in his generation. He was chosen therefore for moral reasons. So the writer seems very determined to tell the story in a way that depicts God as acting not capriciously but according to certain clear standards of justice. This was deserved punishment and the person who was saved was righteous. Furthermore in the Mesopotamian accounts the gods do not appear to be in control. This is something that's been pointed out by many writers. Enlil wants to destroy humankind completely. He's thwarted by Ea who drops hints of the disaster to Utnapishtim so Utnapishtim knows what to do and therefore manages to escape the flood. But that's thwarting the design of the god who brought the flood. He wanted everything destroyed. When the flood comes the gods themselves seem to have lost control. They're terrified, they cower. The text says they "cowered like dogs crouched against the outer wall. Ishtar," the goddess Ishtar, "cried out like a woman in labor . And moreover during the period of the flood they don't have food, they don't have sustenance. At the end when Utnapishtim offers the sacrifice, the gods are famished and they crowd around the sacrifice like flies, the text says. The biblical writer wants to tell a different story. In the biblical flood story, God is represented as being unthreatened by the forces of nature that he unleashes, and being completely in control. He makes the decision to punish humans because the world has corrupted itself through hamas, through bloodshed and violence. He selects Noah due to his righteousness and he issues a direct command to build an ark. He has a clear purpose and he retains control throughout the story. At the end, the writer doesn't depict him as needing the sacrifice for food or sustenance. We might say that this story, like the story of Cain and Abel before it, and like the story we will read later of Sodom and Gomorrah, this story presupposes this universal moral law that Sarna and Kaufman and others have talked about, this universal moral law that seems to govern the world, and if God sees infractions of it, then as supreme judge he brings humans to account. If morality is the will of God, morality then becomes an absolute value, and these infractions will be punished, in the biblical writer's view. The message of the flood story also seems to be that when humans destroy the moral basis of society, when they are violent or cruel or unkind, they endanger the very existence of that society. The world dissolves. So corruption and injustice and lawlessness and violence inevitably bring about destruction. Some writers have pointed out that it's interesting that these humans are not being punished for religious sins, for idolatry, for worshipping the wrong god or anything of that nature, and this is important. The view of the first books of the Bible is that each nation worships its own gods, its own way, perhaps. At this point in the story, perhaps the view is that all know of God even if they ignore him. But the view eventually will be that only Israel is obligated to the God of Israel, other nations aren't held accountable for their idolatry in the books of the Torah. We'll see this is we continue along. And yet everyone, all humans, Israelites or non-Israelites alike, by virtue of having been created by God in the image of God--even though they may not know that God, or may ignore that God--they are bound to a basic moral law that precludes murder and, perhaps from this story, we could argue other forms of oppression and violence. What better way to drive home the point that inhumanity and violence undermine the very foundations of society than to describe a situation in which a cosmic catastrophe results from human corruption and violence. It's an idea that runs throughout the Bible, it also appears in later Jewish thought and some Christian thought, some Islamic thought. The Psalmist is going to use this motif when he denounces social injustice, exploitation of the poor and so on. He says through wicked deeds like this "all the foundations of the earth," are moved, "are shaken". The Noah story, the flood story, ends with the ushering in of a new era, and it is in many ways a second creation that mirrors the first creation in some important ways. But this time God realizes--and again this is where God's got to punt all the time. This is what I love about the first part of Genesis--God is trying to figure out what he has made and what he has done, and he's got to shift modes all the time--and God realizes that he's going to have to make a concession. He's going to have to make a concession to human weakness and the human desire to kill. And he's going to have to rectify the circumstances that made his destruction of the earth necessary in the first place. So he establishes a covenant with Noah: covenant. And humankind receives its first set of explicit laws, no more implicit, "Murder is bad." "Oh I wish I had known!" Now we're getting our first explicit set of laws and they're universal in scope on the biblical writer's view. They apply to all humanity not just Israel. So these are often referred to as the terms of the Noahide covenant. They apply to all humanity. This covenant explicitly prohibits murder in Genesis 9, that is, the spilling of human blood. Blood is the symbol of life: that's a connection that's made elsewhere in the Bible. Leviticus 17, "The life… is in the blood." So blood is the biblical symbol for life, but God is going to make a concession to the human appetite for power and violence. Previously humans were to be vegetarian: Genesis 1, the portrait was one in which humans and animals did not compete for food, or consume one another. Humans were vegetarian. Now God is saying humans may kill animals to eat them. But even so, he says, the animal's life is to be treated with reverence, and the blood which is the life essence must be poured out on the ground, returned to God, not consumed. So the animal may be eaten to satisfy the human hunger for flesh, but the life essence itself belongs to God. It must not be taken even if it's for the purposes of nourishment. Genesis 9:4-6, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of humans… So if you are killed by a beast or a human, there will have to be a reckoning, an accounting. "…of every person's brother I will require the life of the person. Whoever sheds the blood of a person, in exchange for that person shall his blood be shed, for God made humans in his image. All life, human and animal, is sacred to God. The covenant also entails God's promise to restore the rhythm of life and nature and never again to destroy the earth. The rainbow is set up as a symbol of the eternal covenant, a token of the eternal reconciliation between the divine and human realms. We should note that this notion, or this idea of a god who can even make and keep an eternal covenant is only possible on the view that God's word and will are absolute, insusceptible to nullification by some superior power or some divine antagonist. Now, I handed out, or there was handed out to you a sheet of paper. You might want to get that out in front of you because we're going to talk a little bit about the flood story in Genesis 6 through 9. When we read the flood story in Genesis 6 through 9, we're often struck by the very odd literary style. I hope you were struck by the odd literary style, and the repetitiveness and the contradictions. So I want to ask you now, and be brave and speak out, in your reading of the story did anything of that nature strike you? Was the story hard to follow? Was it self-contradictory, and in what ways? Anything? Just don't even be polite, just throw it right out there. Yes? Student: [inaudible] Professor Christine Hayes: Okay, we seem to have two sets of instructions. Someone's pointing out here, we seem to have two sets of instructions about what to bring on-board: either to bring two of each sort of living thing, animals and birds and creeping things, or in another passage God tells Moses to bring on seven pairs of pure animals and one pair of impure animals and seven pairs of birds. Right? Different sets of instructions. Anything else strike you as odd when you were reading this story? Student: [inaudible] Professor Christine Hayes: Okay, rain seems to be there for different amounts of time, doesn't it? There are some passages in which the flood is said to have lasted for 40 days, or be on the earth for 40 days. We find that in Genesis 7:17, but in Genesis 7:24,150 days is given as the time of the flood. Anything else? Any other sorts of doublets or contradictions, because there are a few more? Who's giving the instructions? That's not hard; you have it right in front of you. Who's giving the instructions? Student: [inaudible] Professor Christine Hayes: Okay, God. We have the word "God" being used I guess in that translation, right, with a capital G. What else is used? Student: [inaudible] Professor Christine Hayes: Lord. Those are actually different Hebrew words underneath there, okay? Those two terms are different names of the deity that's giving the instruction. Okay, so there are two designations used for God. Yahweh, which is the sacred Tetragrammaton, it's written with four letters in Hebrew, they don't include vowels. We don't really know how it's pronounced; I'm guessing at Yahweh, and that is a proper name for God, and in your translation that would be translated as "LORD" in small caps. So wherever you see '"LORD" in small caps, that's actually the English translation for Yahweh, the proper name, like almost a personal name for God. And then in other places we have this word Elohim, which actually is the word for "gods," a sort of generic term for deities in the plural. However, when it's used to refer to the God of Israel it's clearly singular, it always has a singular verb. So that will be appearing in your text as "God" with a capital G. So whenever you see "Lord" or "God" those are actually pointing to different words that are being used in the underlying Hebrew text. Twice God is said to look down on creation. Twice it is said that he is displeased. Twice he decides to destroy all living things. Twice he issues instructions and as we've seen they're contradictory. We seem to also have a different account of how long the flood lasted; there are more subtle contradictions throughout as well. Sometimes the flood seems to be the result of very heavy rain, but in other descriptions it seems to be a real cosmic upheaval. You'll remember the description of the world from Genesis 1 as an air bubble essentially that's formed by separating waters above and waters below. They're held back or pressed back by the firmament above. And it's the windows in the firmament that are opened--those waters are allowed to rush in and dissolve that air bubble. It's as if we're back to square one with the deep, right? Just this watery mass again. So it's creation undoing itself in some of the descriptions, as opposed to just heavy rain. And in keeping with that idea of a kind of a return to chaos, Noah is represented in a way as the beginning of a new creation. Because like Adam and Eve in the first creation story, Noah is told to be fruitful and multiply. He's also given rule over everything, and that's now extended to the taking of human life . The Bible contains a lot of repetition and contradiction. And sometimes it occurs in one passage, as in the flood story here, and sometimes it occurs in stories or passages that are separate from one another, for example, the two creation stories. There are many significant differences between the two creation stories. They different greatly in style. Genesis 1 is formalized, it's highly structured, it has the seven days and everything's paired up. It's beautifully structured, it's very abstract. Genesis 2 is much more dramatic, much more earthy. The first creation story doesn't really contain puns and wordplays, it's a little bit serious. The second creation story is full of them: there are all sorts of little ironies and puns in the Hebrew. Adam, the earthling made from the earth. Adam is made from adamah. Adam and Eve are naked, arum, which is the same word for clever or shrewd, and the snake is arum, he's clever and shrewd: there are lots of little puns of this kind. There are also differences in terminology between the two stories. Genesis 1 speaks of male and female, one set of Hebrew terms, but Genesis 2 uses man and woman, a different set of Hebrew terms to describe the genders. So the terms for gender are different in the two stories. Genesis 1 refers to God, as in your translation "God," Elohim, the word that's translated as "God." He's remote, he's transcendent. He creates effortlessly through his word and through his will. But Genesis 2 refers to the deity as a name that's really a combination, it's Yahweh Elohim, so you'll see '"Lord God" right? You see that a lot in the Bible as well, Lord God. That tells you both of those words were side by side in the original Hebrew. So in Genesis 2 the deity is Yahweh Elohim. He's much more down to earth. He forms the human like a potter working with clay. He talks to himself, he plants a garden, he takes a stroll in the garden in the cool of the evening. He makes clothes for Adam and Eve. He's spoken of in much more anthropomorphic terms then the God that we encounter in Genesis 1. So what we have in the first few chapters of Genesis are two creation stories that have distinctive styles, distinctive themes, distinctive vocabularies and they're placed side by side. In Genesis 6 through 9 we seem to have two flood stories with distinctive styles, and themes, and vocabularies, and substantive details, but they're interwoven instead of being placed side by side. And there are many such doublets in the Bible. At times we have whole books that repeat or go over the same material. In fact the whole historical saga that's recorded from Genesis through the end of 2 Kings is rehearsed again in the books of First and Second Chronicles. What are we to make of the repetitions and the contradictions here and throughout the Bible? What are the implications? Suppose you came across a piece of writing that you knew nothing about just lying there on the table. You didn't know who wrote it, where, when, how, why, and someone says to you, "I want you to draw some conclusions about that piece of writing. I want you to draw some conclusions about its authorship and the way it was compiled or composed." And so you pick it up and you start reading and you notice features like this. What might you conclude? Throw it out, what might you conclude? No presuppositions. You pick up the work and you find these features. What might you conclude about its authorship or manner of composition? Student: There are multiple authors. Professor Christine Hayes: You might conclude that there are multiple authors. Right? Multiple authorship. Yeah? Student: There are revisions. Professor Christine Hayes: That revisions may have been made, so that you might have different sources that have been revised or put together in different ways. Right? Revisions implying that you've got something and then it's worked over again, additions might be made so now that's a new source. You might conclude that these features are evidence of multiple authorship; a good deal of revision which points itself to a kind of composite structure, different layers maybe, different sources. Well as early as the Middle Ages there were some scholars who noticed these things in the biblical texts. They noticed that there are contradictions and repetitions and there are anachronisms too, other features that were evidence of multiple authorship, revisions and composite structure. So what? Why would that be a big deal? Student: [inaudible] Professor Christine Hayes: Okay, it could be a bit of a problem if this text has become the basis for a system of religious faith or belief, and your assumptions about it are that its telling a truth that is singular in nature. And also what about the traditional beliefs on the origin of this text? Right, who wrote this text according to traditional beliefs? I'm hearing Moses, I'm hearing God, I'm hearing a bunch of different things, but there are traditional ideas about generally the Mosaic authorship of the Bible, certainly the first five books of the Bible. And so these features of the text which were noticed were a challenge to traditional religious convictions regarding the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible, and in many ways the perfection of the Bible, as speaking with a unified voice on matters of doctrine or religious theology. So medieval commentators for example began to speak a little bit more openly about some of these features. One of the first things they noticed is that Deuteronomy 34 describes the death and burial of Moses. So they decided it was possible that Moses didn't write at least that chapter. Similarly there are some anachronisms that they had to explain. One of the most famous is in Genesis 13:7. It's in the midst of a story about dividing the land between Lot and--at that time his name was Abram, it later becomes Abraham--but between Lot and Abram. And the narrator in telling this story sort of interjects and turns to us, the readers, and says, "The Canaanites and Perrizites were then dwelling in the land." Now what's weird about that sentence? The narrator is speaking to us from a time in which the Canaanites and Perrizites don't live in the land, right? "That's back when the Native Americans lived in Connecticut." Is that writer living at a time when Native Americans are still living in Connecticut or owning Connecticut? No. They're writing from a later point of view. So the narrator breaks and talks to the audience in Genesis 13:7 and says, "That was back in the time when the Canaanites were in the land." When did Moses live? Who lived in the land in the time of Moses? The Canaanites. I know you haven't gotten there yet, but when you get to Deuteronomy you're going to find out he doesn't make it into the land. So he never makes it in there, he never gets in before the Israelites conquer. He dies--the Canaanites are still in possession. So that line was certainly written not by Moses; it was written by someone at a much later time who's looking back and referring to the time when the Canaanites were in the land. So these are the kinds of things that people began to notice. And with the rise of rationalism in the modern period, traditional notions of the divine and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books of Moses, were called into question. The modern critical study of the Bible begins really with Spinoza who in the early seventeenth century suggested that the Bible should be studied and examined like any book: without presuppositions about its divine origin or any other dogmatic claims about its composition or authorship. But it was a Catholic priest, Richard Simon, who first argued that Moses didn't write the Torah, and that it contained many anachronisms and errors. Well we've run out of time, but I'll pick up this fascinating story on Wednesday and we'll learn a little bit more about critical ideas about the composition of the Bible. Please be on the look out for emails from section leaders with study guides for sections which will be meeting this week; you'll have a lot of fun with the creation stories.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_11_On_the_Steps_of_Moab_Deuteronomy.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: You may have heard that post-biblical tradition hails Moses as ancient Israel's first and greatest law giver; and certainly the Bible depicts Moses as receiving law from God and conveying it to the Israelites. But clearly Moses isn't the author or compiler of the legal traditions contained in the Bible. Some of the individual laws we know are found in very, very, very Ancient Near Eastern laws: they're part of an Ancient Near Eastern legal tradition. The collections as a whole clearly date to a much later period of time--and we're going to see that clearly when we talk about Deuteronomy today--and they have been retrojected back to the time of Moses. But nevertheless, Moses is the central figure in the biblical narrative, from Exodus all the way through Numbers and into Deuteronomy. And he's going to serve as a paradigm for Israel's leaders to follow. In the biblical view no one can look upon the face of God and live, and yet Moses, who spoke with God "mouth to mouth," the text says, was an exception to this rule. So why wasn't he permitted to see the fulfillment of his labors? Why was he not permitted to enter the Promised Land? This is a question that plagued ancient Israel, and the Bible contains the effort of tradition to explain this great mystery, or tragedy. When Moses asks God if he can enter the land--that's in Deuteronomy 3:25--God refuses, and he gives his reason in Deuteronomy 32:49-52: You shall die on the mountain that you are about to ascend, and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin; for you both broke faith with Me among the Israelite people, at the waters of Meribath-kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, by failing to uphold My sanctity among the Israelite people. You may view the land from a distance, but you shall not enter it--the land that I am giving to the Israelite people. So what happened at Meribath-kadesh that made God so angry? Well you can read the story, it's in Numbers 20, the incident is described there. But the answer is still not entirely clear, it's not clear what Moses did that was so bad as to deserve this punishment. Perhaps it's Moses' failure to follow God's instructions to the letter when he is producing water for the Israelites or demanding water: perhaps that's what angers God. But one gets the impression that the story in Numbers 20 and Deuteronomy's subsequent claim that it was something about that story that earned Moses God's disapproval... you get the impression that these are an attempt to explain what was probably a longstanding tradition about a great leader who died on the east side of the river. For that to have happened, for that death to have happened the writers seem to surmise, he must have sinned; there must have been some punishment for some sin. After a very poignant scene in which God shows Moses the Promised Land, from a lookout point on the east side of the Jordan River, we then read about the death of Moses in Deuteronomy 34: God spoke to Moses on that same day. "Ascend this Mount Abarim, the peak Nebo, in the land of Moab opposite Jericho, and look at the Land of Canaan which I am giving Israel for a holding." .. So Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, opposite Jericho. And God showed him all the land, from Gilead to Dan [which is in the north], and all of Naphtali and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all of Judah [in the south] to the outer Mediterranean Sea; and the Negev [the southern wilderness]; and the Plain of the Valley of Jericho, the Palm City, as far as Zoar [the end of the Dead Sea]. ... Then Moses the servant of God died there, in the land of Moab, as God had said, and he buried him in the valley, in the land of Moab...but no man knows the place of his burial, to this day. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the Plains of Moab for thirty days...and there never again arose in Israel such a prophet as Moses, whom God knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and wonders which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to his household and to all his land; none like him in respect of all the mighty power and all the great and terrible deeds which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel. [Hayes translation] There's no other human being in the Bible who earns such a tribute. This is unusual for the biblical writer to speak in such glowing terms of a human character. I said that Moses becomes a paradigmatic leader in the biblical tradition. And the force of Moses as paradigmatic leader of Israel is apparent in the very first leader to succeed him, and that is Joshua. Deuteronomy closes with a transfer of authority from Moses to Joshua. So in Deuteronomy 34:9 we read, "Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands upon him; and the Israelites heeded him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses." And in several ways Joshua's going to turn out to be a kind of carbon copy of Moses. Moses crosses the Reed Sea, the waters stand in a heap, and the children of Israel cross over on dry land. We'll see in connection with Joshua that he crosses the Jordan River into the Promised Land, the waters stand in a heap, the children of Israel cross on dry land--that's in Joshua 3:13. After crossing, the Israelites then celebrate the Passover, and that makes a strong link then to the Exodus led by Moses, also at the time of the first Passover. Moses had a vision of God at the burning bush. He was told to remove his shoes, his sandals, because he was on holy ground. Joshua is also going to have a theophany--that's a vision--after he crosses the Jordan. He'll see a man with a drawn sword who's the captain of the Lord's host and he tells him to remove his shoes, he is on holy ground. Moses is the one to mediate a covenant between God and Israel at Sinai. Joshua will mediate a renewal of the covenant at a place called Shechem. Moses sent out spies to scout out the land; Joshua also sent out spies to scout out the land. Moses holds out a rod during battle in order that Israel prevail over her enemies, and Joshua will do the same with a javelin. So these are all important literary parallels and they signal the importance of Moses in Israelite tradition, as the paradigmatic leader; so other leaders who are praised will be modeled on Moses. It's said of Joshua after the Israelites enter the Promised Land, it's said, "On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel so that they revered him all his days as they had revered Moses." So no greater praise can be given to an Israelite leader than to be compared to Moses. But now we're going to take a close look at Deuteronomy and we'll pick up with Joshua on Wednesday. So Israel's wanderings in the wilderness end on the Plains of Moab, which is on the east bank of the Jordan River, and it's there that the book of Deuteronomy opens. There Moses is going to deliver three long speeches prior to the Israelites' entry into the Promised Land, and these three speeches constitute the bulk of the book of Deuteronomy. So Deuteronomy differs very much from the other four books of the Pentateuch because in those books you have an anonymous narrator who describes Yahweh as directing his words to Moses to then be conveyed to Israel. Moses will speak to Israel on God's behalf. But in Deuteronomy Moses is going to be speaking directly to the Israelites so that the book is written almost entirely in the first person, whereas the first four books of the Pentateuch are not; they are third person anonymous narrative, narration. Here we have the bulk of the book in the first person: direct speech. Now Moshe Weinfeld--I've put his name on the board as someone who you should associate always with the book of Deuteronomy--Moshe Weinfeld is one of the leading scholars of Deuteronomy and he describes the book as expressing ideology by means of a programmatic speech put into the mouth of a great leader. That's a very common practice in later Israelite historiography, and he says it's happening here already. And I'll be referring quite a bit to Weinfeld's work as we talk about Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy differs from the other books of the Pentateuch in other significant ways. So for example, according to the Priestly writer, Israel received its laws, its Torah, from God at Mount Sinai. But in Deuteronomy the laws were given here on the Plains of Moab, 40 years after Sinai, before the Israelites crossed the Jordan. At Sinai the Israelites heard the Decalogue but the remainder of the laws, it would seem, are delivered on the Plains of Moab. We can look at the basic structure of Deuteronomy in a couple of ways. We can do a kind of literary division, which I have on this side of the board, according to the speeches. So to begin we have the first speech which is a sort of introductory speech in the first four chapters, going through 4:43. There's an introduction that gives us the location, where the Israelites are, and also then Moses' first sermon. Moses in this sermon is giving a historical review, and the purpose of this historical review is didactic; he wants the Israelites to learn something, to infer something from this review of their history from Sinai to the present day. And in that review, as he retells the story, which we've just been reading about in the previous books, we see his selective choice of events, we see how he's describing things in a way that underscores God's faithful, loyal, fulfillment of the covenantal promise, and he's using this to urge the Israelites to do their part by obeying God's laws. The second speech extends from 4:44 through 28:6. And this also contains a bit of a historical review, again retelling some of the narrative of the earlier books of the Torah and again giving us an insight into this phenomenon of inner biblical interpretation, or parts of the Bible that review parts elsewhere are already beginning to interpret and present that material in a particular light. But then we have a central section of laws being presented, beginning at about 12; so this is still part of Moses' second speech, but stretching from Deuteronomy 12 through 26 we have laws, and this is in many ways a repetition of much of the revealed legislation we've already encountered. That central portion of laws, 12 through 26, is thought to be the earliest core of the book. We're going to come back and talk about that in a moment. Now the Greek title for this book, which is Deuteronomy, deutero nomos, a second law, a repetition of the law, and that name derives from the fact that the bulk of the book contains this legal core of material which reviews the law. In Chapter 27 we have a covenant renewal ceremony. It takes place on a mountain near Shechem after the Israelites have crossed the Jordan. It describes the ceremony that will take place, excuse me, after they have crossed the Jordan. And from ancient Greece we know that in the ancient world settlers who would colonize a place, particularly if they colonized a place at divine instigation, they would perform certain ceremonies that would be accompanied by blessings and accompanied by curses. They would write the laws on stone pillars, they would erect an altar for sacrifices, they would proclaim blessings and curses for those who obey and disobey--very similar to what happens in chapter 27; all of these elements appear in chapter 27. Chapter 28 lists the material rewards that will accrue to Israel if she is faithful to God's law, and the punishments if she should disobey--and some of these are very creative. But the importance of the Deuteronomist's view of history in which Israel's fate is totally conditioned on her obedience to the covenant--this is something that will occupy us repeatedly at a future date. I mention it here but it's something we will need to come back to. The third speech of Moses is in Chapters 29 and 30. This speech emphasizes the degree to which evil fortune is the responsibility of the community. Moses enumerates additional misfortunes and sufferings that will befall Israel if she sins. But he emphasizes the choice is Israel's: God has been clear regarding what's required, and it's not beyond Israel's reach to attain life and prosperity. She needs to only choose. And this is all set out in a speech in Chapter 30. I'll read from verses 11 to 20: Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, "Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it. See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity. For I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His laws, and His rules, that you may thrive and increase, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land that you are about to enter and possess. Listen to the cadences of this kind of language in Deuteronomy. We haven't heard language like this before but it's what people often think of when they think of biblical language. It starts here in Deuteronomy. But if your heart turns away and you give no heed, and are lured into the worship and service of other gods, I declare to you this day that you shall certainly perish; you shall not long endure on the soil that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life--if you and your offspring would live--by loving the Lord your God, heeding His commands, and holding fast to Him. For thereby you shall have life and shall long endure upon the soil that the Lord your God swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them. So all has been given. It's simply Israel's choice to take it or not. The last section of the book, chapters 31 to 34, is a sort of miscellany of appendices. There's some ancient poetry that's found in chapter 32, which is referred to as The Song of Moses; scholars refer to it as The Song of Moses. We have the blessings of Moses recorded in chapter 33, and then chapter 34 is the story of Moses' death: I read part of that to you. Now centuries ago already scholars of the Bible noted that Deuteronomy opens with the verse, "These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan," that is to say the trans-Jordan, on the other side of the Jordan. So that line is obviously written from the prospective of someone who is inside the land, saying Moses said that when he was over there, outside the land, on the other side of the Jordan--so he's looking eastward. And so that's a line that one would think could not be written by Moses because Moses did not ever enter the land and would not be in a position to talk about something being on the other side of the Jordan. Likewise the last chapter which describes Moses' death and burial probably was not written by him. So as we shall see, these and many other textual features point to the period of composition for Deuteronomy, which was many centuries after the time that Moses would have been supposed to have lived, if we are to assume he was a historical character. And so through careful analysis you have scholars like Moshe Weinfeld and many others--I think Bernard Levinson is the one has written about Deuteronomy in your Jewish Study Bible, and that's a wonderful introduction to read there, so I encourage you to please make sure you look at that--but analyses of scholars like these have led them to draw the conclusion that the original core of Deuteronomy emerged in the eighth century, and this is now where my interesting little mountain-shaped diagram is going to come into play. It was probably a scroll of laws known as the Book or the Scroll of the Torah. Deuteronomy refers to itself that way in Deuteronomy 17:19-20. And so we think it was probably something roughly equivalent to chapters 12 to 26; maybe there was a little introduction, a little conclusion. And eventually these laws were put into the framework of a speech by Moses: maybe chapters 5 through 11 and maybe 28; maybe that would've been in the eighth, seventh century. And then at some later point several things happened, and I will say them in the following order, but that doesn't mean they happened in this order, we really aren't sure. At some point several things happened. You have framing chapters, Deuteronomy 1 through 4, the sort of introductory frame and historical review, as well as the appendices at the end, chapters 31 and 34--those get added. You also have laws being updated, passages being expanded, to reflect the experience of exile. You'll remember that as of 586, Jerusalem is destroyed and the Israelites are in exile in Babylonia. Additionally at some point Deuteronomy is appended to the other four books of the Pentateuch. Genesis through Numbers is made to precede this. It's serving therefore as their conclusion, and by being joined to them it confers its title as a book of Torah, as a scroll of Torah, to that material as well. They don't use the word "Torah" in that way, in those books; only Deuteronomy uses the word Torah to speak of God's instruction or revelation overall. So by being appended now to Genesis through Numbers, all of this perhaps comes to be known as Torah, as well. And then finally during the exile or sorry, probably during the period after the exile--no, during the exile, down to the end of the sixth century, Deuteronomy was incorporated into a larger narrative history that runs from Joshua through Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings: that's all a unit, as we'll come to see in the next lecture. And so Deuteronomy in a way served as an introduction to that material looking forward; so a conclusion to the previous four books but also an introduction to a long narrative history that's going to run through to the end of 2 Kings. Now there's a lot of debate over the precise timing of these events and this process by which this material grew and was expanded, but in the post-exilic period, at some point, the entire unit, the Genesis through Numbers material, Deuteronomy, and then the lengthy historical narrative, all the way through 2 Kings, was solidified. The Deuteronomistic history is sort of an odd conclusion to the Genesis through Numbers material because it doesn't really have the expected narrative climax. You sort of expect the story to end with the entry of the Israelites into the land, and hopefully under Moses, and that doesn't occur. Some scholars have suggested that deferring Israel's possession of the land to the future may have reflected the historical experience of exile, an experience which challenged the very idea of the possession of the land as central to the maintenance of the covenant. So if you are in exile, then perhaps a more satisfying ending is to have Israel not in fact entering the land. The complex process by which Deuteronomy was formed underscores the fact that modern notions of authorship cannot be applied to biblical texts. We think of an author, we tend to think of an author, as a discrete individual who composes a text at a specific time, but this isn't the way that texts came into being in the ancient world, particularly important communal texts. As Weinfeld points out, the biblical authors were what we would call collectors, compilers, revisers, editors, and interpreters of ancient tradition. Ancient texts were generally the product of many hands over the stretch of many long centuries, and during that time modifications and recontextualizations occurred. And so we refer to those who transmit and develop a text in this way as a school; but you need to understand that we are using that in a relatively informal way. So when we talk about the Deuteronomic School or the Deuteronomistic School, we're really talking about the fact that we have a set of texts that all seem to share a certain sort of ideology or orientation; and yet we know that parts of them seem to date from very, very different times. And so we think of that text as being preserved, transmitted and developed by many hands who share certain commonalities, common ideologies, we call it a school. It's not that we know of the existence of a Deuteronomistic school, and we say, oh, well then they must have produced this text. It's the other way around. We have a text, and its features suggest to us a longstanding tradition of scholarship, that preserved and transmitted the text in that way. Same with the Priestly school: we're speaking about the Priestly materials which clearly have evidence of originating from the eighth, seventh, sixth and fifth centuries, and so there must have been a common stretch of scholarship that would have preserved and transmitted and developed those traditions, and we call that the Priestly school. The legal core of Deuteronomy--so really from 5 to 26, because 5 is where some of the legal material begins--contains first of all a somewhat expanded version of the Ten Commandments, you have that in Deuteronomy 5, and then other laws, really from 12 to 26, that resemble the legal material that's found in Exodus--the collection of material we've called the Covenant Code. And they also seem to bear some relationship to the laws in Leviticus and Numbers. But the question is, what is the relationship between the different versions of the legal material? Some of these laws will parallel each other quite closely and others do not. So are Deuteronomy's legal traditions a direct response to or modification of the laws in Exodus and Numbers, or are they best understood as just different, independent formulations of a common legal tradition? Weinfeld has argued that Deuteronomy is dependent on the previous traditions of the Pentateuch, that Deuteronomy revises and reforms them according to new ideas: its new notion of a centralized cultic worship, and secondly its humanitarian spirit. Those are two controlling ideologies he says that shape its revision of pre-existing material. He specifically argues that Deuteronomy is dependent on the E source, the source that some scholars think is pretty hard to isolate or find in the biblical text. But in E, Sinai is referred to as Horeb, and in Deuteronomy Sinai is also Horeb. The author of Deuteronomy limits the revelation at Sinai to the Decalogue and seems to assert that the full law was given to Moses for the Israelites on the plains of Moab. In Weinfeld's view this means that Deuteronomy, with its revisions, would have been seen, would have been presented as and would have been seen as an updated replacement of the old Book of the Covenant, rather than its complement. It exists side by side in our text now, but I think in his view those who promulgated it were understanding it as the updated replacement of the laws of the Book of the Covenant. For the most part Deuteronomy doesn't really contain much in the way of civil law. It tends to focus on the moral-religious prescriptions--kind of the apodictic law in Israel--and the few civil laws that are there tend to be reworked in line with Deuteronomy's humanity. So, for example, the laws of the tithe, the laws of the seventh year release of debts, the rules for the release of slaves, the rules for the three festivals--these are all ancient laws; they occur in Exodus but they appear in Deuteronomy with modifications, modifications about things that concern the Deuteronomists, and some of you have discussed some of these in section. So in Deuteronomy the Israelite debt slave comes out of his or her servitude, with generous gifts from the owners. This is not something that appears in Exodus. Or as another example, Deuteronomy extends the Covenant Code's prohibition against afflicting a resident alien. In Deuteronomy there's the insistence that the Israelites must not just refrain from afflicting them, but must love the resident alien. It goes so far as to provide concrete legal benefits, food and so on, for the resident alien. So while the relationship of D to some of the laws in the Covenant Code is often--not always but often--one of revision, the relationship between D and the laws in the Priestly source is more difficult to characterize. The Priestly source seems to represent an equally early set of laws, legal traditions, that just emanated from a very different circle and had different concerns. It tends to deal with sacral topics, or if it's dealing with other topics it will deal with the sacral implications of those topics. Like D, P often updates and revises laws of the Covenant Code. We can see that in the fact that the Priestly source abolishes Israelite debt slavery altogether and insists that slaves must be acquired only from the nations around Israel: no Israelite can enslave another Israelite. Nevertheless Weinfeld argues that on occasion Deuteronomy contains laws that are also found in P, but presents them in a more rational manner, is the word he uses, or desacralized manner. So D's treatment, Deuteronomy's treatment of sacrifice, we'll see in a moment, is going to be different, for example, from P's. They have different concerns and different foci in their presentation of that material. In any event, many scholars through their analysis of these texts have been led to conclude that the Deuteronomistic School updated and revised earlier laws, particularly laws in the Covenant Code, but sometimes also in the older legal stratum of P; and they did so in keeping with the circumstances of the eighth to sixth century. So Deuteronomy exemplifies a phenomenon that occurs at several critical junctures in Israel's history--and we're going to see this as we move forward through the biblical text--and that is the modification and re-writing of earlier laws and traditions in the light of new circumstances and ideas. So Deuteronomy is itself an implicit authorization of the process of interpretation. And the notion of canon, or sacred canon, that's exemplified then by biblical texts is one that allows for continued unfolding and development of the sacred tradition. And that's an idea that I think differs very much from modern intuitions about the nature of sacred canons. I think a lot of people have the intuition that a sacred canon means that the text is fixed, static and authoritative because it is fixed and static, or unchanging. That's not the biblical view or ancient view of sacred canon. Texts representing sacred revelation were modified, they were revised, they were rephrased, they were updated and they were interpreted in the process of transmission and preservation. It was precisely because a text or a tradition was sacred and authoritative that it was important that it adapt and speak to new circumstances; otherwise it would appear to be irrelevant. So it's a very different notion of what it means for something to be canonical and sacred, from what I think some moderns have come to understand those terms to mean. So what are the special circumstances and concerns that guide Deuteronomy's revisions of tradition? One of the primary changes--you probably heard in section as well by now--is the emphasis on worship at a single, central shrine. That's going to represent a great change in Israel's religious practice. According to Deuteronomy the central sanctuary will be located in a place that God himself will choose--it's not named in Deuteronomy--or in a place where he will cause his name to dwell; that's the other phrase that's used. Jerusalem is never explicitly mentioned as the site in question but Jerusalem will later, in fact, fulfill this function, according to other biblical texts. Now there are striking similarities between Deuteronomy's religious program and the major religious reforms that were carried out in the eighth century by King Hezekiah, but even more so in the seventh century by King Josiah, around 622: King Josiah. This is a reform that's reported in the book of 2 Kings, in 2 Kings 22. This reform has long been noticed and provides scholars with a basis for dating the core materials of Deuteronomy, dating them to the late seventh century. According to the story in 2 Kings, during temple repairs that were being done in the time of King Josiah, the scroll of the Torah--that's how it's phrased--the scroll of the Torah was found and when it was read the king was distressed because its requirements were not being upheld. Now this term, the scroll of the Torah, as I said, does not occur in Genesis through Numbers; it is a phrase that occurs in Deuteronomy, in Deuteronomy 17. Then continuing the account in 2 Kings, Josiah is said to take action. He assembles the people, he publicly reads the scroll, the people agree to its terms and then Josiah's reforms begin. We hear that he purges the temple of vessels that had been made for Baal and Asherah, that were in the Temple of Yahweh. He removes all foreign elements from the cult, he prohibits sacrifice to Yahweh anywhere but in the central sanctuary. He destroys all of the high places--this refers to sort of rural shrines that were scattered throughout the countryside where local priests and Levites might offer sacrifices for people--ritual shrines and pillars being used in the worship of Yahweh: these are deemed to be quite legitimate in the J and E sources. The patriarchs are doing this sort of thing all the time, building altars all around the country, but it's Deuteronomy that contains commandments to destroy the worship, first of all the worship of other gods but also the worship of Yahweh in high places or in rural shrines. So this is evidence again that what Josiah found to base his reforms on was something like the Book of Deuteronomy: it's Deuteronomy that contains the prohibitions of high places and so on. After these reforms it's reported that the Passover was celebrated. It was celebrated not as a family observance in individual homes; it was celebrated as a national pilgrimage festival, celebrated by everyone in Jerusalem. That's how its celebration is described in the Book of Deuteronomy. It's described as a family celebration in individual homes in the other books of the Bible. So again this is another basis for the conclusion that the scroll of the law, found by Josiah and guiding his reforms, was something like the legal core of Deuteronomy. Scholars now think that that legal core of Deuteronomy was produced in the Northern Kingdom, the Northern Kingdom of Israel which fell in 722, you'll recall. It was probably produced there in the eighth century, and that is supported by the fact that Deuteronomy has affinities with the writings of some prophets we'll be looking at later from the Northern Kingdom of the eighth century, such as the prophet Hosea, and we'll see this when we look at Hosea's writings. It also has affinities with the E source, which is also connected with the Northern Kingdom. In the ninth and eighth century, the Northern Kingdom was the site of a struggle, a struggle against Baal worship. It was also home to certain prophets such as Elijah and Elisha, who are known for their zealotry and their exclusive Yahwism. So some scholars think that was going on in the ninth/eighth century in the north, the sort of Yahweh-only party that was working hard and struggling against Baal worship. And they think that those Yahweh-only traditions were brought south; after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722, you have refugees coming south, they brought these traditions with them. Some of these written materials were put into the Temple and then about a century later, during Josiah's time, when the Temple was being refurbished, they were found. Possibly this material was then worked into a larger scroll, given its Mosaic introductions and so on, and that all contributed to Josiah's reform. So the centralization of the cult also needs to be understood against the larger political backdrop of the late seventh century. The Assyrian threat loomed large. You have to remember that the Northern Kingdom has already been completely destroyed: ten tribes exiled, deported, and essentially lost. The Southern Kingdom managed to escape destruction but only by paying tribute as a vassal to Assyria. So Judah, the Southern Kingdom, is a tribute-paying vassal state to the Assyrian overlord. And of course there's a great deal of Assyrian cultural influence and religious influence in Judah as a result. So 2 Kings tells us that there were foreign forms of worship being introduced right into the Temple. Josiah's reforms have been interpreted by some as an attempt to assert the political and the cultural and religious autonomy of Judah. Unregulated worship throughout the land was no longer going to be acceptable; the people were going to be united around a central, standardized Yahweh cult, which would be purged of any Assyrian influence or foreign influence. And this was deemed as necessary to stand up against or to survive the Assyrian threat. So it's in that context that we can look at the very strong parallels that exist between the Book of Deuteronomy and certain Assyrian treaties, from the seventh century. We already talked about the Hittite vassal treaties as a model for the Israelite covenant, when we were talking about Exodus. But Deuteronomy is clearly dependent on another model and that is the Assyrian vassal treaty. The best exemplars of these treaties are the treaties of the Assyrian emperor Esarhaddon. He was a seventh century ruler of Assyria, down to about 669. These treaties were discovered about 50 years ago, and Moshe Weinfeld is one of the people who's done a tremendous amount of work with these treaties. He's argued at great length that Deuteronomy reworks the second-millennium Hittite model in accordance with the covenantal patterns that are evident in the first-millennium vassal treaties of Esarhaddon. We see history being used as a motivational tool and we see laws being reinforced by curses; and it's fascinating, if you line up some of the curses in Esarhaddon's treaties with the curses in Deuteronomy, there's an amazing correspondence. Deuteronomy also includes blessings; the Assyrians didn't do that. Weinfeld notes that the Assyrian treaties are really loyalty oaths that are imposed upon vassals, rather than true covenants. And Deuteronomy is also something of a loyalty oath, except that the people are pledging their loyalty to a god rather than to a human king. So you have the exhortation to love the Lord your God--and think back to some of that language that we heard as I read Deuteronomy 30 -- he exhortation to love the Lord your God, to go after God, to fear God, to listen to the voice of God: these are all typical of pledges of loyalty, and they are paralleled in the Assyrian treaties where the vassal has to love the crown prince, he has to listen to the voice of the crown prince. The same phraseologies are used. So it is a political literary form, but it's borrowed and it's referred to God. The Assyrian treaties also will warn against prophets or ecstatics or dream interpreters who will try to foment sedition. If you'll notice in Deuteronomy 13 we have something quite similar: a warning against false prophets who will try to foment sedition, and lead the people to the worship of other gods. Some scholars refer to Deuteronomy as a kind of counter treaty, if you will, right? A subversive document that's trying to shift the people's loyalty from the Assyrian overlord to God, the true sovereign, and it's part of a national movement. Deuteronomy differs in style, in terminology, in outlook and in theological assumptions from the other books of the Torah. As a series of public speeches it adopts a highly rhetorical tone, a very... sometimes an almost artificial style. It's a style of a very skilled preacher almost. It employs direct address: you, you; sometimes in the singular, sometimes in the plural, but Moses is constantly speaking in a very personal tone, direct address. And there are all sorts of hortatory phrases, phrases that exhort you: to do this with all your heart and soul, do this in order that it may go well with you. The land is described as a land where milk and honey flow, and if only you will obey the voice of Yahweh your God. This is the kind of language that's used here, and not so much in the other books. So let's isolate now some of the major themes of Deuteronomy, before we close our study of the Pentateuch. First of all as I've mentioned, the centralization of the cult: that's a key theme in the book of Deuteronomy and it had very important effects. It brought Judean religion closer to monotheism because you have the insistence of worshiping one god in his one central sanctuary. Sacrifice was offered only on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which meant that slaughter of animals for meat in the countryside no longer has a sacral component to it. It's just ordinary, common, profane slaughter. There's evidence that that wasn't true before this reform, that if you wanted to kill an animal for meat you had a kind of a makeshift altar out there in the field, and you would pour out the blood and give it back to God and so on. You might still pour out the blood, obviously, but there was previously a more sacral element to it. Now slaughter in the countryside was simply common, profane slaughter. As a result you have a lot of rural Levites who are out of business now, a lot of people who would have officiated at local shrines, and they're out of business: that probably explains the fact that Deuteronomy makes special provision for the Levites and includes them in its... in legislation, sort of social welfare legislation. There are provisions that are made for the Levites, who are not going to be able to earn their income anymore at these local shrines. So many of them would have gone up to Jerusalem and a real tension is going to develop between the Jerusalem priests and this class of Levites who are newcomers; and we'll see some of that tension played out in some other texts. So centralization of the cult and that has some social ramifications. We also have a greater abstraction of the deity; this is something many people point to in the Book of Deuteronomy because Deuteronomy and books that are related to it--those that are going to follow--consistently refer to the sanctuary as the place where Yahweh chose to cause his name to dwell. God himself isn't said to dwell in the temple, nor is the temple described as a house of God. The temple is always the dwelling of his name. The house is built for his name. Weinfeld asserts that this is in order to combat the ancient popular belief that God actually dwells in the sanctuary. Likewise to eradicate or guard against the idea, which is implicit in earlier sources, that God sits enthroned on the cherubim, on the cherubim, who guard his ark, Deuteronomy emphasizes that the function of the ark is exclusively to house the tablets, the tablets of the covenant; that's its purpose. The ark cover isn't mentioned, the cherubim aren't mentioned. We don't have the image of this as a throne with the ark as God's footstool. So it seems to be a greater abstraction of the deity. Some abstraction is also apparent in the shift from visual to aural imagery in describing God's self-manifestations or theophanies. One hears God but one doesn't see God, in Deuteronomy. And that's very different from earlier texts where we're seeing a sort of a cloud encased fire and so on. So the sanctuary is understood to be a house of worship, as much as it is a cultic center, in which Israelites and foreigners alike may deliver prayers to God who dwells in heaven. So he is in heaven; this is a place of worship. That's not to say that sacrifice is abolished, it's not to say that sacrifice isn't important to Deuteronomy--very far from it, it's an essential part of God's service for Deuteronomy. But Deuteronomy is less interested in cultic matters and in any event when it focuses on sacrifices it focuses on a different aspect of those sacrifices. The sacrifices it talks about consist primarily of offerings that are consumed by the offerer in the sanctuary, or are shared with the disenfranchised in some way: the Levite, the resident alien, the orphan, the widow--portions are given to them. So by emphasizing the obligation to share the sacrificial meal with disadvantaged members of society, Deuteronomy almost gives the impression that the primary purpose of the sacrifice is humanitarian, or at least personal--the fulfillment of a religious obligation or the expression of gratitude to God and so on. These are aspects of the sacrifices that are emphasized in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy also emphasizes social justice and personal ethics and neighborly responsibility. God's own righteous behavior on behalf of the weak and the oppressed is a model for Israel's righteous behavior. God assists the orphan, the widow and the stranger, and that's the basis of Israel's injunction to assist them also. It's the basis for the humanitarianism that I mentioned earlier that seems to run through the laws of Deuteronomy 12 through 26. A further theme in Deuteronomy is the fact that the covenant concept entails the idea that each generation of Israelites understand itself as having been bound with God in the original covenant. So in Deuteronomy 5:2-3: "The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb . It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today." Now this is interesting because remember the generation has died off, that saw the Exodus and Sinai, right? So these are the children now and they're saying, it was us, every one of us who is here today. So every generation of Israel is to view itself as standing at the sacred mountain to conclude a covenant with God, and that decisive moment has to be made ever-present. That's a process that's facilitated by the obligation to study, to study the laws, to recite them daily, to teach them to your children: these are instructions that are contained in Deuteronomy. Moreover Deuteronomy 31 proclaims that every seventh year the Torah is to be read publicly, the entire thing. And Weinfeld argues that where many Ancient Near Eastern cultures direct the king to write the laws for himself, to read them, it's only in Israel--he's yet to find a parallel--it's only in Israel that the law is a manual for both the king and the people. It's to be proclaimed and read aloud to the people, on a regular basis, every seven years. A further theme of Deuteronomy is the emphasis on love. Weinfeld points out that the Assyrian treaties stress the vassal's love for the crown prince, but there's never a reciprocal love by the crown prince for the vassal. And Deuteronomy differs in this respect. Deuteronomy emphasizes God's gracious and undeserved love of Israel, and that's expressed in his mighty acts on Israel's behalf. The Deuteronomist makes it clear that God's great love should awaken a reciprocal love on Israel's part, love of God. Love of God here really means loyalty. The word that is used is a word that stresses loyalty. Love and loyalty are mere abstractions, however, without some sort of vehicle for their expression; and the vehicle for their expression then is God's Torah, the sum total of God's teachings and instructions and laws and guidelines, which are supposed to ensure long life and prosperity in the land. That idea is found in a very important passage known as the Shema. This is a passage that's really a central expression of the love of God in Israel, and it's been singled out as an essential part of the Jewish liturgy, at a very early, early stage, and continues to this day. It's so called because of the first word of the passage. It's in Deuteronomy 6, it begins in verse 4, and the first word is "hear," Shema. Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. So love and loyalty to God is the foundation of the Torah but Torah is the fulfillment of this love and loyalty: studying it and observing it and teaching it and transmitting it. Another key idea that occurs in Deuteronomy is the idea of Israel as the chosen people. We find it here for the first time. It's an expression of the particularity of Israel and its unique relationship with God, and that uniqueness is expressed by this term, bachar, which means "to elect" or "to choose." This is the first time we encounter this. Yahweh has chosen Israel in an act of freely bestowed grace and love to be his special property. Deuteronomy 10:14: Mark, the heavens to their uttermost reaches belong to the Lord your God, the earth and all that is on it! Yet it was to your fathers that the Lord was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose you, their lineal descendents, from among all peoples--as is now the case. This idea may be rooted in the Ancient Near Eastern political sphere in which sovereigns would single out vassals for the status of special property; and in fact the word used is a word we do find in Exodus. But Deuteronomy contains statements of national pride, national exaltation, and unlike the Priestly materials which portray holiness as a future goal to be attained through the observance of God's Torah--you shall be holy to me by doing the following things--Deuteronomy speaks of Israel as holy now, and thus bound to the observance of God's Torah because of their holiness: you are a holy people to me, therefore you should do... So to put it--and this is perhaps to put it too crudely--for P, for the Priestly source, holiness is a goal to be attained through obedience to God's Torah. For Deuteronomy, holiness is a status to be lost through disobedience to God's Torah. When we come back I just want to finish up with one or two last comments about a couple of key ideas or themes in Deuteronomy before we move on to the beginning of the Deuteronomistic history that starts in Joshua. This coming week you'll be having midterms as part of your section meeting and in addition at 6 p.m. tonight I'll be making the essay question available online and if it gets to 6:01 and there's nothing online, somebody call me real fast, okay? All right, good, thanks, and good luck with the exam.

Literature_Lectures

3_Ways_In_and_Out_of_the_Hermeneutic_Circle.txt

Prof: All right. Let's hope we can free our minds of these matters now and turn to something a little more substantive, which is the question--before we plunge in to Gadamer really: what is hermeneutics? Well, what it is is easily enough explained despite the sort of difficulty and thorniness of the word. It is the art or principles of interpretation. But hermeneutics has a history; that is to say, it's not something which has always just been there. It's not something that people have always thought about in a systematic way. Strictly speaking, what I have just said isn't true. Many of you probably know that Aristotle has a treatise called De Interpretatione. The Middle Ages are rife with treatises on interpretation. I suppose what I'm really saying is that the word "hermeneutics" wasn't available, and the idea that there ought to be a sort of a systematic study of how we interpret things wasn't really current. Of course, by the same token the notion of hermeneutics arises primarily in religion first, specifically in the Christian tradition, but that isn't to say that there hasn't been, that there wasn't long before the moment at which hermeneutics became important in Christianity, that there wasn't centuries' worth of Talmudic scholarship which is essentially also hermeneutic in nature-- that is, to say concerned with the art and basis of interpretation. What gave rise in the Western world to what is called "hermeneutics" was in fact the Protestant Reformation. And there's a lot of significance in that, I think, and I'll try to explain why. You don't really puzzle your head about questions of interpretation, how we determine the validity of interpretation and so on, until A) meaning becomes terribly important to you, and B) the ascertainment of meaning becomes difficult. You may say to yourself, "Well, isn't it always the case that meaning is important and that meaning is hard to construe?" Well, not necessarily. If you are a person whose sacred scripture is adjudicated by the Pope and the occasional tribunal of church elders, you yourself don't really need to worry very much about what scripture means. You are told what it means. It goes without saying therefore what it means. But in the wake of the Protestant Reformation when the question of one's relationship with the Bible became personal and everyone was understood, if only through the local minister, to be engaged with coming to an understanding of what is after all pretty difficult-- who on earth knows what the Parables mean and so on, and the whole of the Bible poses interpretative difficulties-- then of course you are going to have to start worrying about how to interpret it. Needless to say, since it's a sacred scripture, the meaning of it is important to you. You do want to know what it means. It can't mean just anything. It's crucial to you to know exactly what it means and why what it means is important. So as Protestantism took hold, by the same token the arts and sciences of hermeneutics took hold, and people began to write treatises about interpretation-- but it was always interpretation of the Bible. In other words, in this tradition religion came first. After that, the next thing that happens is you begin to get the rise of constitutional democracies, and as you get that, you begin to become much more interested, as a citizen or as a person who has suffrage or as a person who in one way or another has the rights of the state or nation-- you begin to become concerned about the nature of the laws you live under. That's why hermeneutics gradually moved--I should say, it didn't desert religion, but it expanded--to the study of the law. The arts and sciences that had been developed in thinking about interpreting scripture were then applied to the interpretation of something the meaning of which had become almost as important; that is to say, it mattered what the law was and how it was to be interpreted. You know of course that this is absolutely crucial to the study of the law to this day: what are the grounds for understanding the meaning of the Constitution, for example? There are widespread controversies about it, and many of the courses you would take in law school are meant to try to get to the bottom of these thorny questions. Well and good. Once again you see that hermeneutics enters a field when the meaning of something becomes more important and when that meaning is recognized to be difficult to grasp. Now as yet we haven't said anything about literature, and the fact is there is no hermeneutic art devoted to literature during the early modern period and for most of the eighteenth century. Think about the writers you've studied from the eighteenth century. It's very interesting that they all just sort of take meaning for granted. If you think about Alexander Pope, for example, or even Samuel Johnson, as they reflect on literature and why it's important and what the nature of literature is, they aren't concerned about interpretation. They're concerned about evaluation, establishing the principles of what's at stake in writing a poem or in writing literature in some other form and raise questions that are largely moral and esthetic. They are not concerned about interpretation because to them, good writing is precisely writing that's clear, writing that doesn't need to be interpreted but has precisely as its virtue its transparency of meaning. In fact, during this whole period playwrights were writing prologues to their plays abusing each other for being obscure-- that is to say, abusing each other for requiring interpretation. "I don't understand what your metaphors are all about. You don't know what a metaphor is. All you do is make one verbal mistake after another. Nobody can understand you." This is the nature of the prose and verse prefaces to theatrical pieces in the eighteenth century, and from that you can see that interpretation is not only not studied but is considered to be completely extraneous to what's valuable about literature. If you have to interpret it, it isn't any good. Then as the eighteenth century wears on, you begin to get the sense-- with the emergence of Romanticism, as is well known and I think often overstated-- you begin to get a cult of genius. You get the idea that everything arises from the extraordinary mental acuity or spiritual insight of an author and that what needs to be understood about literature is the genius of its production. Well, well and good, but at the same time, if that's the case, and if there is this extraordinary emphasis on the importance of the expression of genius, you can see what's beginning to happen. The literary creator starts to seem a lot more like the divine creator, that is to say, and in a certain sense could be understood as a placeholder for the divine creator. Remember that secularization in Western culture is increasing during the course of the Enlightenment-- that is to say, during the course of the eighteenth century, and there's a certain way in which Romanticism and what's important about Romanticism can be understood as what Northrop Frye has called a "secular scripture." In other words, the meaning of literature becomes more difficult because it's profoundly subjective and no longer engaged with the shared values that had made for the importance of literature; that is to say, our sense of why it's so important to understand it has also grown because for many people, it begins to take over partly at least the role of religion. So with the rise of secular scripture-- that is to say, literature imagined as something both terribly important and also difficult to understand-- naturally the arts and sciences of hermeneutics begin to enter that field. In particular, the great theologian of the Romantic period, Friedrich Schleiermacher, devoted his career to principles of hermeneutics that were meant to be applied as much to literature as to the study of scripture, and established a tradition in which it was understood that literature was a central focus of hermeneutics. So much then for the history of hermeneutics. What followed was the work of Wilhelm Dilthey around the turn of the century, of Heidegger in his Being and Time of 1927, of Gadamer who in many ways can be understood as a disciple and student of Heidegger; and a tradition which persists today follows from the initial engagements of Schleiermacher during the Romantic period with literature. All right. So what is the basic problematic for hermeneutics in this tradition? It's what we probably all have heard about and something that I will briefly try to describe, what's called the hermeneutic circle. So what is the hermeneutic circle? It's a relationship between a reader and a text or-- as is the case for certain kinds of students of hermeneutics but not Gadamer, I think--of a relationship between a reader and an author: in other words a relationship which is understood to aim at understanding the intention of an author. The author of the fourth quotation on your sheet for today, E.D. Hirsch, belongs in that tradition and understands the hermeneutic circle as a relationship between a reader and an author where the text is a kind of a mediatory document containing the meaning of the author. But for Gadamer and his tradition, it's a little different. It can be understood as the relationship between a reader and a text, and this can be put in a variety of ways. It's often put in terms of the relationship between the part and the whole. I approach a text and of course the first thing I read is a phrase or a sentence. There's still a lot more of the text and so that first fragment a part, but I immediately begin to form an opinion about this part with respect to an imagined or supposed whole. Then, I use this sense I have of what the whole must be like to continue to read successive parts--lines, sentences, whatever they may be. I keep referring those successive parts back to a sense of the whole which changes as a result of knowing more and more and more parts. The circularity of this interpretative engagement has to do with moving back and forth between a certain preconception about the whole that I form from studying a part, moving then to the part, back to the whole, back to the part, back to the whole and so on in a circular pattern. This can also be understood as a relationship between the present and the past-- that is to say, my particular historical horizon and some other historical horizon that I'm trying to come to terms with, so that I refer back and forth to what I know about the world before I engage the text; what the text seems to be saying in relation to that which I know, how it might change my sense of what I know by referring back from what I know continuously to an understanding of the way in which the past text speaks. Finally of course, because hermeneutics isn't just something that takes place across an historical gulf-- because it also can take place across a social or cultural gulf, or maybe not even very much of a gulf-- when we engage each other in conversation, we are still performing a hermeneutic act. I have to try to understand what you're saying and I have to refer it to what I want to say, and the circuit of communication between us has to stay open as a result of this mutual and developing understanding of what we're talking about. It's the same thing, of course, with conversations across cultures. So understand that hermeneutics isn't necessarily about, as Gadamer would put it, merging historical horizons. It's also about merging social and cultural and interpersonal horizons and it applies to all of those spheres. All right. Now the hermeneutic circle, then, involves this reference back and forth between the entities that I've been trying to describe. Let's just quickly--and here we begin to move in to the text--listen to Gadamer's version of how the circularity of this thinking works. This is on page 722 toward the bottom of the left-hand column. The reader [Gadamer's word is 'he'] projects before himself a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. [In other words, as soon as he sees what the part is like, he projects or imagines what the whole must be that contains this part.] Again the latter [that is to say, the sense of the initial meaning] emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. The working out of this fore-project [that is to say, the sense we have in advance of the meaning of what we are going to read] which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there. In other words, what is there--which is a kind of way of talking that Gadamer inherits from Heidegger-- really has to do with what Gadamer means when he talks also about die Sache, the subject matter. In other words, the effort of a reader in coming to terms with the meaning of a text is an effort to master the subject matter, what is there, and--I suppose it's fair enough to say as a kind of paraphrase-- what the text is really about. That's what Gadamer means when he says "what is there." Anyway, you can see that in this passage on page 722, Gadamer is describing the circularity of our reading, and he's describing it in a way that may raise certain concerns for us. "What do you mean, a fore-structure or a fore-project or a fore-having? Can't I view this thing, as we might say, objectively?" In other words, aren't I going to be hopelessly prejudiced about what I read if I've got some sort of preliminary conception of what it's all about? Why don't I just set aside my preliminary conceptions so that I can understand precisely what is there? How am I ever going to understand what is there if I approach it with some sort of preliminary idea which I never really get rid of because each revision of what I think is there as a result of further reading nevertheless becomes in itself yet another fore-project or preliminary conception?" In other words, this way of thinking seems to suggest-- to tell you the truth it does suggest-- that you can't get away from preliminary conceptions about things. This, of course, is disturbing and it's especially disturbing when you then get Heidegger and Gadamer insisting that even though there are always these preliminary conceptions-- which Gadamer sort of boldly calls "prejudices," and we'll come back to that-- even though there are always these preliminary conceptions, there nevertheless are, as Heidegger puts it, two ways into the circle. All right? A circle, in other words, is not necessarily a vicious circle. See, that's what you are tempted to conclude if you say, "I can never get away from preconceptions." All right? "I'm just going back and forth meaninglessly because I'm never going to get anyplace." Right? But Gadamer and Heidegger say, "No, that's not true. That's not true. A circle isn't at all necessarily vicious. The way into the circle can also be constructive." That is to say, you really can get someplace, and so you're entitled to say, "Well, okay. It can be constructive, but how can that be?" Take a look at the second passage on your sheet from Heidegger, not the whole passage but just the first sentence of it where Heidegger says, "In an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being." "Now wait a minute," you say. "If I'm just dealing in preconceptions here, how can I take anything from the entity itself?" Right? That's just what seems to be at risk if I can never get beyond my preconceptions. Well, let me give you an example. I was going to do this later in the lecture but I feel like doing it now. In the eighteenth century, a poet named Mark Akenside wrote a long poem called The Pleasures of the Imagination, and in this poem there is the line "The great creator raised his plastic arm." Now let's say that we're into polymers. We know what plastic is. We have no concern or hesitation in saying what plastic is, and so we say, "Oh, gee. Well, I guess the great creator has a sort of a prosthetic limb and he raised it. All right. So that's what the sentence must mean." But then of course, if we know something about the horizon within which Akenside was writing his poem, we are aware that in the eighteenth century the word "plastic" meant "sinuous," "powerful," "flexible," and in that case of course, we immediately are able to recognize what Akenside meant, why it makes perfect sense. The great creator raised his sinuous, powerful, flexible arm, and we know where we stand. Now notice this. In other words, this is an example of good and bad prejudice, right? The good prejudice is our prior awareness that plastic meant something different in the eighteenth century than it means now. And we bring that prejudice to bear on our interpretation of the line, then that is a constructive way into the circle according to Heidegger and Gadamer. The bad prejudice is when we leap to the conclusion, without thinking for a moment that there might be some other historical horizon, that we know what plastic means. The reason we can tell the difference, by the way, is that if we invoke the eighteenth-century meaning of plastic, we immediately see that the line makes perfect sense, that it's perfectly reasonable and not even particularly notable; but if we bring our own meaning to bear-- that is to say our own sense of what the word "plastic" means-- then of course the meaning of the line must be crazy. I mean, what on earth? Why would he be saying this about the great creator? Now I think I'll come back to this example next week when we're talking about an essay called "The Intentional Fallacy by W.K. Wimsatt," and I will revisit the possibility that there might be some value in supposing that Akenside meant the great creator raised his prosthetic limb, but I'll leave that until next week. I think for the moment it should be plain to you that this is a good way of understanding what the difference between a useful preconception and a useless preconception brought to bear on an interpretative act might consist in. All right. Now in giving the example, I've gotten a little bit ahead of myself, so let me reprise a bit. As you can tell from your reading of Gadamer-- and of course, the title of the great book from which this excerpt is taken is Truth and Method or Wahrheit und Methode, with its implicit suggestion that there is a difference between truth and method-- the great objection of Gadamer to other people's way of doing hermeneutics is that they believe that there is a methodology of interpretation. The basic methodology Gadamer is attacking in the excerpt you've read is what he calls historicism. Now that's a tricky word for us because later in the semester we're going to be reading about something called the New Historicism, and the New Historicism actually has nothing to do with what Gadamer is objecting to in this form of historicism; so we will return to the New Historicism in that context. For the moment, what Gadamer means by "historicism" is this: the belief that you can set aside preconception, in other words that you can completely factor out your own subjectivity, your own view of things, your own historically conditioned point of view-- I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said "historically conditioned," I mean your own point of view-- that you can completely factor that out in order to enter into the mindset of some other time or place: that you can completely enter into the mind of another. This then is the object of historicizing and, as we'll see at the end of the lecture, there's a certain nobility about it to be juxtaposed with the nobility of Gadamerian hermeneutics. In the meantime, Gadamer is objecting to this because he says, you simply can't do this. You cannot factor out these preconceptions. All you can do, he says, is recognize that you do exist in, you do live in, you do think consciously within a certain horizon, recognize that you are coming face-to-face with another horizon, and try to bridge your horizon and the other horizon-- in other words, to put it simply, to find common ground, to find some way of merging a present with a past: a here with a there, in such a way that results in what Gadamer calls Horizontverschmelzung, "horizon merger." This act of horizon merger has as its result what Gadamer calls "effective history," and by "effective history" he means history which is useful-- that is to say, history which really can go to work for us and is not just a matter of accumulating an archive or distancing ourselves from the past. I'll say again, somewhat in advance perhaps of the time I should say it, that Gadamer thinks that there's something immoral about historicism. Why? Because it condescends toward the past. It supposes that the past is simply a repository of information, and it never supposes for a minute that if we actually merge ourselves with the moment of the past, the past may be able to tell us something we ought to know-- that is to say, it may be able actually to teach us something. Gadamer believes that historicism forgets the possibility of being taught something by past-ness or otherness. Now I think in order to make this viewpoint seem plausible, we probably should study it for a moment a little bit more philosophically. That is to say, you're asking yourself, "Well, sure. You know what? I pride myself on this: I can factor out all forms of subjectivity. I really can be objective. I'm perfectly capable of understanding the past in and for itself without any contribution of my own, without, in short, any preconceptions." So let's look at a couple of passages from your sheet, from Heidegger's Being and Time, from his analytic of the hermeneutic circle, and see what Heidegger has to say about this claim. This is the first passage on your sheet. Heidegger says: When we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the things which are closest to us bears in itself the structure of interpretation and in so primordial a manner that just to grasp something free, as it were, of the "as" requires a certain adjustment... What is Heidegger saying? He is saying, I stand here and I am just looking. I look back there and I'm just seeing that sign that says 'exit'. I'm not interpreting it. I don't have any preconception about it. I'm just looking. Right? No, Heidegger says, this is a total illusion. How do I know it's a sign? How do I know it says 'exit'? I bring a million preconceptions to bear on what I take to be a simple act of looking. And then Heidegger says, you know what? It's not at all uninteresting to imagine the possibility of just seeing something without seeing it as something. It would be kind of exhilarating, wouldn't it, to be able just to have something before us. Right? But he says, "You know what? That is well nigh impossible. It is in fact a very, very difficult and derivative act of the mind to try to forget that I am looking at a sign that says 'exit' and, in fact, just looking at what is there without knowing what it is. In other words, I don't not know first that that's a sign that says "exit." The very first thing I know is that it's a sign that says "exit." There's no prior act of consciousness. It's the very first thing that I know. It's an interesting thought experiment to try not to know that that's a sign that says "exit." As Heidegger points out in this passage, that's a thought experiment which, if it can be done at all, derives from that prior knowledge. I always know something first as something. If I can just have it there before me, that is a very difficult and derivative intellectual act, and it cannot be understood as primordial or primitive. I am always already in possession of an interpretation of whatever object I look at, which isn't at all to say that my interpretation is correct. It's only to say that I can't escape the fact that the very first movement of mind, not the last movement but the first movement of mind, is interpretative. Right? We always see something as something, and that is precisely the act of interpretation. We can never just have it there before us or, as I say, if we can--if we can--it's a very, very difficult act of concentration. Continue the passage: "This grasping which is free of the 'as' is a privation of the kind of seeing [and you see how attracted Heidegger is to it because he shifts his rhetoric] in which one merely understands." In other words, It would be an extraordinary thing not to understand, Heiddeger is saying. We can't help understanding. We always already understand, which has nothing to do again with whether or not we're right or wrong. We always already just necessarily do understand. It's a kind of imprisonment, understanding, and when Heidegger says, wouldn't it be great not to have to merely understand? right, he's saying, wouldn't it be great just to have it there before us? but he's also insisting that this is an incredibly difficult, if not impossible, moment of thought. All right. So that's why--and this is perhaps the essential, the central passage, and I don't want to pause over it-- but you can look at passage number three on your sheet, which says roughly again what Heidegger is saying in the first passage-- that's why we must work always as interpreters with preconceptions, with fore-understandings. Now what about this word "prejudice"? It is a sort of a problematic word. Gadamer is a bit apologetic about it, and he goes into the appropriate etymologies. The French préjugé and the German Voruteil all mean "prejudgment" or "prior judgment." They actually can be used in a court of law as a stage toward arriving at a verdict. They needn't be thought of as vulgar prejudices, one of which is in fact the "prejudice against prejudice." As Gadamer says, this is the characteristic idea of the Enlightenment: its prejudice against prejudice, that we can be objective, that we can free ourselves of-- Okay, fine. But prejudice is bad, we know prejudice is bad. We know what prejudice has wrought historically and socially, so how can we try to vindicate it in this way? It's extremely problematic. What Gadamer does in his essay is actually an act of intellectual conservatism, it has to be admitted. That whole section of the essay in which he talks about classicism-- and you may have said to yourself as you were reading it, "Well, gee, isn't this sort of digressive? What's he so interested in classicism for?"-- the whole section of the essay in which he's talking about classicism and which he later calls "tradition" is meant to suggest that we really can't merge horizons effectively unless we have a very broad and extensive common ground with what we're reading. The great thing about classicism for Gadamer, or what he calls "tradition," is that it's something we can share. The classical, Gadamer argues, is that which doesn't just speak to its own historical moment but speaks for all time, speaks to all of us in different ways but does speak to us-- that is to say, does proffer its claim to speak true. The classical can do that. "Okay, great," we say to Gadamer. "Certainly you're entitled to an intellectually conservative canon. Maybe other principles of hermeneutics will place much more stress on innovation or novelty or difference, but you're not sure people can understand unless they share a great deal of common ground." All well and good, but you know what? That's where the bad side of prejudice sneaks in. Slavery was considered perfectly appropriate and natural to a great many of the most exalted figures working within the tradition that Gadamer rightly calls classical-- classical antiquity. A great many modern figures never stopped to question slavery. Slavery was an aspect of classical culture which had its defenses. Well, Gadamer doesn't talk about this obviously, but it is an aspect of that prejudice that one might share with tradition if one weren't somewhat more critical than this gesture of sharing might indicate. I just say that in passing to call your attention to it as a risk that's involved in our engagement with a hermeneutic project of the nature of Gadamer's. It's not to say that Gadamer favored slavery or anything of the sort. It is, however, to say that prejudice-- while plainly we can understand it simply to mean preconception which is inescapable and can understand that philosophically-- nevertheless can still be bad. We have to understand the way in which it's something that, if we're going to accept this point of view, we need to live with. All right. So it is troublesome, and it's troublesome also, perhaps, in a variety of other ways that I won't go into. I think that what I'd like to do in the time remaining is to call your attention to two passages, one in Gadamer's text which I'm about to read and the other the fourth passage on your sheet by someone called E.D. Hirsch, whom you may actually know as the author of a dictionary of what every school child should know and as a sort of a champion of the intellectual right during the whole period when literary theory flourished, but a person who also is seriously invested in hermeneutics and conducted a lifelong feud with Gadamer about the principles of hermeneutics. The two passages that I'm about to read juxtapose the viewpoints that I've been trying to evoke in describing Gadamer's position. The dignity and nobility of Gadamer is that it involves being interested in something true-- that is to say, in hoping that there is an intimate relationship between meaning, arriving at meaning, and arriving at something that speaks to us as true. Hirsch, on the other hand, is evoking a completely different kind of dignity. What I want you to realize as we juxtapose these two passages is that it is impossible to reconcile them, and it poses for us a choice which, as people interested in interpretation, needs ultimately to be made and suggests perhaps differing forms of commitment. Now the first passage is in Gadamer's text on page 735, the very bottom of the page, and then I'll be going over to page 736. Gadamer says, and here again he's attacking historicism: The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint, i.e., place ourselves in the historical situation and seek to reconstruct the historical horizon. [I've been attempting to summarize this position and so I trust that it's easily intelligible as I read it to you now.] In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find, in the past, any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves. And, by the way, this would also apply to cultural conversation. If I'm proud of knowing that in another culture if I belch after dinner it's a compliment to the cook, right, and if I'm proud of knowing that without drawing any conclusions from it, that's sort of the equivalent of historicism. It's just a factoid for me. In other words, it's not an effort to come to terms with anything. It's not an effort to engage in dialogue. It's just historicizing otherness in a way that somehow or another satisfies my quest for information. So it's not just a question of the past, as I say and as I've said before. It's a question of cultural conversation as well. Thus, this acknowledgment of the otherness of the other, which makes him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth. This is a devastating and, I think, brilliant argument. I think it ought to remind us of what's at stake when we invoke the notion of objectivity. Implicit, according to Gadamer, in the notion of objectivity is an abandonment of the possibility of learning from the object, of learning from otherness. It only becomes a question of knowing the object, of knowing it in and for itself, in its own terms, and not at all necessarily of learning from it, of being spoken to by it. All right, but now listen to Hirsch. All right? This is really a hard choice to make. > What Hirsch says, invoking Kant--rightly invoking Kant-- is: "Kant held it to be a foundation of moral action that men should be conceived as ends in themselves, not as instruments of other men." In other words, you are an end and not a means to me unless in fact I'm exploiting you and instrumentalizing you. Right? That's Kant's position and that's what Hirsch is leaping to defend. This idea that I don't really care, or that I don't really think I can come to terms with the actual meaning of an entity as that entity, is instrumentalizing the entity. In other words, it's approaching it for me. This turns the whole idea of being open to the possibility that the other is speaking true--it turns it on its ear and says, Oh, no, no. You're just appropriating the other for yourself. Right? You're instrumentalizing the other. You're not taking it seriously as itself. That's Hirsch's response. He continues: This imperative is transferable to the words of men because speech is an extension and expression of men in the social domain and also because when we fail to conjoin a man's intention to his words, we lose the soul of speech, which is to convey meaning and to understand what is intended to be conveyed. Notice that although the nobility of this alongside the nobility of Gadamer is obvious and painful > and really does seem to bring us to a crossroads where we really want to be Yogi Berra, right, and go in both directions--even though this is the case, notice one thing. Hirsch is not saying anything about truth. Right? He's talking about meaning--that's good-- and he's making the notion of arriving at a correct meaning as honorific as he possibly can, but it is significant that he's not talking about truth. It's Gadamer who is talking about truth. For Hirsch the important thing is the meaning. For Gadamer the important thing is that the meaning be true, right, and that's where the distinction essentially lies. Gadamer is willing to sacrifice because of his belief in the inescapability of preconception. He's willing to sacrifice historical or cultural exactitude of meaning. He's willing to acknowledge that there's always something of me in my interpretation, but it's a good something because after all I am mindful of the horizon of otherness. I am not just saying "plastic" means "polymer," right, but nevertheless there's something of me in the interpretation. Hirsch is saying, "There's nothing of me in the interpretation. Therefore, I am able to arrive accurately and objectively at the meaning of the other, and I honor the other by arriving with such accuracy at the meaning," but notice that truth isn't backing it up. It doesn't seem to be a question for Hirsch of whether the other speaks true. This is unfair to Hirsch, by the way, because truth actually is backing it up. All you need to do is read him and you will recognize that it does matter to Hirsch whether the other speaks true, but it's not implicit in the philosophical position he's taking up here. It's something that the philosophical position sacrifices. Okay. So that's the basic distinction and, as I say, as far as I can see it's irreconcilable so it leaves us with a choice that really does have to be made, and it's a choice which looms over a course in literary theory and coming to understand the tradition of literary theory. Some will take one side, others will take another, and we'll find ourselves siding or not siding with them, at least in part for reasons that arise out of the distinction between these two positions that I've been making today. We may or may not have the lecture on Iser, but on Tuesday we'll be getting into the varieties of formalism and first we'll take up the American New Criticism. All right. Thanks.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_14_The_Deuteronomistic_History_Response_to_Catastrophe_1_and_2_Kings.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: We were talking last time about the establishment of the monarchy or kingship in Israel and I want to say a little bit about some of the features of Israelite kingship, and today I'll be coming back frequently to the Israelite notions of kingship and royal ideology. But to start off: one of the most important things to realize is that the king in Israel was not divine, as he was in Egypt, or even semi-divine. Occasionally, he offered sacrifice but he didn't play a regular role in the cult. Israelite royal ideology was heavily indebted to Canaanite royal ideology. You have similar language that's applied to the kings of Israel. The king is said to be appointed by the deity or deities to end wickedness, to enlighten the land, he is the channel of prosperity and divine blessing for the nation. All of this is true of Canaanite kings as well, and the king, as we've seen, is spoken of as God's son. That doesn't imply divinity. It's a metaphor, the metaphor of sonship. It was used for the Canaanite gods as well, and it expressed the special relationship between the king and the deity. It was the same relationship as was found between that of a suzerain and a vassal, and in our suzerainty treaties, also, the vassal is the son of the suzerain. It's a kind of adoption, and what it means is that the one who is metaphorically the son is to serve the father loyally, faithfully, but is also susceptible to chastisement from him. And that's what we saw in Nathan's statement or pronouncement or prophecy to David last time. Michael Coogan points out that the notion of the sonship of the king was revolutionary. It was a deliberate effort to replace an earlier understanding according to which the entire nation of Israel was God's son. You remember during the plagues in Egypt when God refers to Pharaoh as having oppressed His son, Israel, His firstborn. As Yahweh's son, the king now is standing between God and the people as a whole. And we're going to return in a moment to this new royal ideology and what's really going to be a very tense juxtaposition with the covenant theology. But first I want to say a little bit more about the characters of David and Solomon before going into the way royal ideology was later developed. In the Bible, David is second only in importance and in textual space to Moses; the amount of space that's devoted to him, is second only to Moses. There are three characteristics of David which stand out, and the first is that he's described as being quite proficient in music and poetry and so we'll see that later tradition is going to attribute to him not only the invention of various instruments but also the composition of the Book of Psalms. It seems to make sense that he would be the composer of the Book of Psalms in that he has a reputation for poetry and music. He is also credited with great military and tactical skill and confidence. He deploys his army on behalf of Israel but he also, once he is king, deploys his army within Israel against his rivals. Third, he is depicted as a very shrewd politician. And it was David who created permanent symbols of God's election of Israel, God's election of David himself, God's election of David's house or line or dynasty to rule over Israel in perpetuity. It is said that he conceived the idea of a royal capital. He captured the city of Jebus, Yebus--it was a border town so it was free of any tribal association. I guess it's sort of like Washington, D.C.; it's not located really within any one tribe; and he captured this and built it up as the city of David. The city was going to be renamed Jerusalem and it would become understood as the chosen city, the place where God caused His name to dwell: as Deuteronomy said, there would be a place where God would choose to cause His name to dwell. And so Jerusalem becomes a symbol of God's presence, it becomes a symbol of Israel's kingdom, the monarchy; it becomes a symbol of the dynasty of David. It is referred to as the City of David. David transfers the Ark to this city and so he makes it the home to the ancient witness of the covenant, the Sinaitic Covenant. The added implication is that the Davidic dynasty has inherited the blessings of the covenant. It is somehow fulfilling the promise to the patriarchs, which is also associated with the nation of Israel at Sinai. He planned a temple that would become the permanent resting place for the ark and a cultic center for all Israel but the building of this temple was left to Solomon so we'll discuss it and its symbolism when we get to Solomon. But according to the biblical record it was still David who made the chosen dynasty, the chosen city, what would eventually be the temple, into permanent and deeply interconnected symbols of the religion of Israel. And it's really with David that the history of Jerusalem as the Holy City begins. Now the biblical assessment of David is initially relatively positive, and this changes shortly after his ascension to the throne. Beginning in 2 Samuel from about chapter 9 to 20 and then on into the first couple of chapters of Kings, you have a stretch of text which is often referred to as the Court History or the succession narrative of David. The critical question that drives this particular historical fiction is the question of succession: who will succeed David? He has many children but one by one his sons are killed, or they're displaced or disqualified in one way or another, until finally there is Solomon. There are lots of wonderful major and minor characters in this drama. It's a very complex drama, lots of intrigue and passion, but the material in this section also presents a rather unusual portrait of David. He's weak, he's indecisive, he's something of an anti-hero. He stays home in the palace while other people are off leading battles and fighting the wars. He enters into an illicit relationship with a married woman, Bathsheva (or Bathsheba). He sees to it that her husband is killed in battle to cover up his affair. It's this combined act of adultery and murder that earns him a sound scolding from Nathan, the prophet Nathan--we'll come to that when we talk about prophets next week. But God punishes him with the death of his son. And it's really from this point on in the story that we see David losing control over events around him; his control declines. He is indecisive on the whole question of succession and that leads to all kinds of resentment and conflict as well as revolts. There's one revolt, which is a revolt in support of his son, Absalom. That's a revolt that the Deuteronomistic historian also indicates was a punishment for his affair with--for David's affair with Bathsheba. But during this revolt David flees from his enemies, he's stripped of his crown, he's degraded. When Absalom is killed David weeps for his son uncontrollably and this only angers his own supporters who fought so earnestly against Absalom in his defense; it's a very poignant moment. But by the end of the story, David is almost completely impotent, and senile even. The prophet Nathan and Bathsheba plot to have Bathsheba's son, Solomon, named the successor of David and there really is no point at which there's any divine indication that Solomon has won divine approval, no divine indication that he is the one. It happens through palace intrigue, particularly with Bathsheba and Nathan. But the northern tribes--there are signs throughout the story of the hostility of the northern tribes and that's a warning sign, that's a warning sign of future disunity. This whole court history is just a wonderful, masterful work of prose. You're going to be reading something from a book by a fellow named Meir Sternberg, which is I think just a wonderful study of the Bathsheba story. Some speak about all of this unit as being authored by the J source. You need to know that source theory has undergone so many permutations. There really isn't any standard view but I think the idea that the sources J, E, P and D extend beyond the Pentateuch is now generally no longer accepted so you will sometimes see people talking about the J source as going all the way through the end of Second Kings and being in fact--J is the author of the court history. But for the most part I think most people think of the source theory as applying to the Pentateuch, and beyond that we talk about the Deuteronomistic historian redacting older earlier sources. I'll talk a little bit more about some of those sources as we move through the later books, the books of the former prophets. The court history has an array of very richly drawn characters. They act out all sorts of scenes of power and lust and courage and struggle. There's crime, there's tender love. It's a very realistic sort of psychological drama. It's also striking for its uncompromising honesty. We don't see anything like that really in the work of any contemporary historian. David is depicted in very, very human terms. The flattery and the whitewashing that you find in other ancient Near Eastern dynastic histories is lacking here. The flattery and whitewashing that we get for example in Chronicles, the books of Chronicles, are really just a retelling of the material here in the former prophets and they clean up the picture of David. There's no mention of Bathsheba in there. So you do have that kind of whitewashing as part of the historiography of the Book of Chronicles, but it's lacking here. All of the flaws, all of the weaknesses of David, a national hero--they're all laid bare. Implicitly perhaps, that is a critique of kinship. It is perhaps a critique of the claim of kings to rule by divine right. The author here seems to be stressing that David and, as we shall see, Solomon (he's quite human, Solomon's quite human)--they are not at all divine. They're subject to the errors and flaws that characterize all humans. As we move out of Samuel now and into 1 and 2 Kings, we see that these books, Kings, contain the history of Israel from the death of King David until the fall of Judah in 587, 586, and the exile to Babylonia. These books also appear to be based on older sources. Some of them are explicitly identified. They will refer sometimes to these works, which evidently were subsequently lost but they'll refer to the Book of the Acts of Solomon or the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel, or the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah. Annals and chronicles were regularly maintained in royal courts throughout the Ancient Near East. There's no reason to think that this wasn't also done in a royal setting in Israel. These annals generally listed events, important events in the reign of a given king. They tended not to have much narrative to them and the beginning of the first 16 chapters of 1 Kings has that kind of feel, not a lot of narrative, and really reportage of events. Beginning in 1 Kings 17:17-22, and the first nine chapters of 2 Kings, there's a departure from that annal style, annal genre the reporting of events in the reign of a king. You have more developed narratives in those sources and these narratives generally feature prophets. So it's going to lead very nicely into our study of Prophets beginning on Monday. Some of the narratives evidently would have circulated independently, particularly the stories, probably, about Elijah and Elisha, these zealous Yahweh-only prophets. They were probably local heroes and these stories circulated independently, but they've come to be embedded in a framework that conforms those sources to the ideology and religious perspective of the Deuteronomistic historian. 1 Kings 2 is the death scene. It has David's deathbed instructions to his son, Solomon. He tells Solomon to kill all of his rivals and opponents and in verse 12 we read, "And Solomon sat upon the throne of his father, David, and his rule was firmly established." And it seems that at this point the three crises that we noted in the Book of Samuel, at the opening at 1 Samuel, the three crises we noted are resolved. The crisis in succession is resolved. David is succeeded by his son, Solomon, and all of the kings of Judah for the next 400 years in fact, until the destruction in 586, all of these kings will be of the line of David. The military crises seem for now to have been resolved. We've had lots of military and diplomatic successes and Israel seems to be secure. And also the religious crisis that we mentioned is resolved. The Ark was retaken from the Philistines, it's been brought to Jerusalem, it's been installed in Jerusalem, and now a magnificent temple is planned that will house the Ark and be a site for the central worship of all Israel. But the resolution of these crises came at a cost. They produced fundamental changes in Israelite society. From a loose confederation of tribes--however idealistic that picture was--but from a loose confederation of tribes united by a covenant, we've now got a nation with a strong central administration, it's headed by a king. And that king seems to enjoy a special covenant with God. Rather than charismatic leaders who rise as the need itself arises and then fade away, we now have permanent kings from a single family. And preserved in the biblical sources is a tension, a tension between the old ideas of the covenant confederation, what we might call covenant theology, and the new ideology of the monarchy. This new royal ideology combines loyalty to God and loyalty to the throne, so that treason or rebellion against God's anointed is also apostasy, it's also rebellion against God Himself. The two become conflated. There's a scholar named Jon Levenson, I've talked about him before in connection with the covenant at Sinai, but in this wonderful book called Sinai and Zion he really juxtaposes these two ideologies. He points to this deep tension between the covenant theology and the royal ideology. In covenant theology, Yahweh alone is the king. He's got a direct suzerain-vassal relationship with the people. So Israel is the subject of covenant theology. The covenant theology therefore implies almost automatically a somewhat negative view of the monarchy and that's what we've seen here and there, in the Book of Judges and in Samuel. Monarchy is at best unnecessary and at worst it's a rejection of God. Nevertheless, despite that resistance or that critique, monarchy, kingship, is established in Israel, and Levenson sees the royal ideology that developed to support this institution as a major revolution in the structure of the religion of Israel. Where the Sinaitic Covenant was contracted between God and the nation, the Davidic covenant is contracted between God and a single individual, the king. The covenant with David--another scholar, Moshe Weinfeld, whom I've mentioned before as well, he describes the covenant with David as a covenant of grant. This is a form that we find in the ancient Near East also. It's a grant of a reward for loyal service and deeds. And so God rewards David with the gift of an unending dynasty. It's a covenant of grant. He grants him this unending dynasty in exchange for his loyalty. And the contrast with the covenant at Sinai is very clear. Where Israel's covenant with God at Sinai had been conditional--it's premised on the observance of God's Torah if there's violation, then God will uproot the Israelites and throw them out of the land --the covenant with David, by contrast, with his dynastic house (and by implication with David's city and the temple atop Mount Zion), that covenant will be maintained under all conditions. Remember the passage that we read of Nathan's prophecy last time. So the royal ideology fostered a belief in some quarters, and we'll see this in the next few weeks, a belief in the inviolability, the impregnable nature of, David's house, dynasty, the city itself, the chosen city, the sacred mountain, the temple. We'll return to this idea in later lectures. So you have this deep tension lining up Israel's covenant at Mount Sinai, which is conditional, on the one hand, with God's covenant with David, which is centered on the temple and palace complex at Mount Zion, and which is unconditional and permanent. Scholars have tried to account for these two strands of tradition in Biblical literature in different ways; the covenant theology with its emphasis on the conditional covenant with Moses contracted at Sinai; the royal ideology and its emphasis on the unconditional covenant with David focused on Mount Zion. One explanation is chronological--that early traditions were centered around the Sinai event and the covenant theology. They emphasize that aspect of the relationship with God, and later traditions under the monarchy emphasize royal ideology. Another explanation is geographical. The northern kingdom, which if you'll recall and we'll talk about in a moment, the northern kingdom is going to break away from the southern kingdom (Davidides will not rule in the northern kingdom) so the assumption is that the northern kingdom, which rejected the house of David--they de-emphasize a royal ideology and its focus on Zion and the house of David, and they emphasize the old covenant theology and the Sinai theology. And by contrast the southern kingdom, in which a member of the house of David reigned right until the destruction, the southern kingdom emphasized Zion and its attendant royal ideology. Well, Levenson rejects both of these explanations. He says it isn't that one is early and one is late, it isn't that one is northern and one is southern. We find the Sinai and the Zion traditions in early texts and late texts. We find them in northern texts and in southern texts. In the south, David's house was criticized just as roundly as it was criticized in the north, and emphasis was placed on the Sinai covenant over against the royal ideology in the south as well as in the north. So the two traditions he said coexisted side by side, they stood in a dialectic tension with one another in Israel. And eventually they would come to be coordinated and work together, we'll see that more towards the end of the lecture. But he says that the Zion ideology will take on some of the aspects of the legacy of Sinai. Mount Zion will soon be associated with the site of God's theophony or self-revelation; it will become a kind of Sinai now permanently in Jerusalem. It would become the site of covenant renewal. It will be seen as the place where Torah goes forth, and that's an idea of course originally associated with Sinai--that's where God's instruction or Torah went first. But all of these features will be collapsed or telescoped or brought into Mount Zion and the temple complex. But eventually, he says, it's not simply that the Sinai covenant theology was absorbed into the royal ideology and Mount Zion, because the entitlement of the house of David will eventually be made contingent on the observance of God's Torah. The king himself, we will see, is not exempt from the covenant conditions set at Sinai. And even though he would never be completely deposed for violating the Sinaitic Covenant he will be punished for his violations. The two will work in tandem. It's an idea that we'll return to. We'll see it more clearly as we get towards the end of this lecture. But for now keep in mind that the two are going to be held in tension and work together to check one another. Now David's son, Solomon, is given mixed reviews by the Deuteronomistic historian. He ascends to the throne through intrigue, as I said, there's really no indication of a divine choice or approval, but he's said to reign over a golden age. His kingdom is said to stretch from Egypt to the Euphrates. He made political alliances and economic alliances throughout the region. He would seal these alliances with marriages. He married a daughter of Pharaoh. He married the daughter of the king of Tyre in Phoenicia and so on. The text claims that he built a daunting military establishment: he put a wall around Jerusalem, there were fortified cities--Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer--these were bases for his professional army. It's said that the army featured a very expensive chariot force. He also had accomplishments in the realms of industry and trade. He exploited Israel's natural position straddling the north-south trade routes and was able to bring great wealth to the state in that way. The daily supplies that were needed to maintain Solomon's very lavish court are detailed in 1 Kings, so it seems to have been an extraordinarily elaborate court. He developed a merchant fleet. He seemed to work closely with the Phoenicians and the Phoenician King Hiram in developing a merchant fleet and exploited trade routes through the Red Sea. All sorts of exotic products are listed as coming in to Jerusalem from Arabia and the African coast. We have the famous story of the visit of the queen of Sheba. This could possibly be the Sabean territory in South Arabia and there may be some basis in fact given these trade routes and how well traveled they were at this time. And of course he is known for his magnificent building operations. Many scholars assume that given this tremendous wealth this would have been a time for a flowering of the arts, and so it's often been maintained that this would have been the time for the early traditions, biblical traditions, early traditions of the nation to be recorded, perhaps the J source. People date it to the tenth century, the time of Solomon. But we should be a little skeptical of this grand picture because archaeologists have found that Jerusalem was a small town; it was a very small town really until the end of the eighth century suddenly it absorbed many refugees from the fall of the northern kingdom. Remember Israel is going to be destroyed in 722, so refugees fleeing southward will greatly expand Jerusalem; we have archaeological evidence of that. But there are very few material remains that attest to a fabulous empire on a scale that's suggested by the biblical text. Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer, the three places that are mentioned as fortified military bases, these have been excavated. They do show some great gateways and some large chambers, even some stables, but archaeologists differ radically over the dating of these lairs. Some date them to the time of Solomon, some see it as later. Most concur that Israel was probably at this time the most important power in its region, but still it would have been small and relatively insignificant compared to, say, Egypt or Mesopotamia, some of the great civilizations at either end of the Fertile Crescent. But it would have been the most important state in that area and probably was able to have some dominance over some neighboring areas as well. I just want to mention three things about Solomon, things that he's noted for. One is that he's praised for his wisdom and because, again, the biblical text praises him for his wisdom later tradition will find it convenient to attribute the Book of Proverbs to him as well as the Book of Ecclesiastes. These are two works that belong to the genre of wisdom literature we'll be talking about later in the semester. Second, in addition to being praised for his wisdom, he's praised for constructing the temple and in fact the primary focus of all of the biblical material, or the biblical story of Solomon, is the building of the temple, the dedication of this temple for the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem. He continued the close association of the cult and the monarchy, the religious and political leadership, by constructing this magnificent new temple within the palace complex and he himself appointed a high priest. So the juxtaposition of the house of the king and the house of the deity on Mount Zion was quite deliberate. And this hill, even though geographically it's very small, becomes in the mythic imagination of Israel, this towering and impregnable mountain. Levenson again argues that Zion came eventually to take on the features of the cosmic mountain. The cosmic mountain is a mythic symbol that we find in the ancient Near East. The cosmic mountain has these powers or potencies that are universal and infinite and we find it in the religion of Israel as well, specifically in connection with Mount Zion. The cosmic mountain in ancient tradition was understood to be the meeting place of the gods like a Mount Olympus, for example–it's a cosmic mountain. But it was also understood to be the axis mundi, that is to say the juncture or the point of junction between heaven and earth, the meeting place of heaven and earth, the axis around which these worlds met or were conjoined. In Canaan--in Canaanite religion the Mountain of Baal, which is known as Mount Zaphon, was conceived precisely in this manner. And Levenson points out tremendous commonalities of language and concept in connection with the Mountain of Baal, the Mountain of El, and the Mountain of Yahweh. In fact, the word "Zaphon," Mount Zaphon is used to describe God's mountain in the Bible in one particular passage. So the temple on Mount Zion came to be understood as sacred space much like the cosmic mountains of other traditions. It's described as a kind of paradise sometimes, almost a Garden of Eden. It's described as the place from which the entire world was created. It's also viewed as a kind of epitome of the world, a kind of microcosm, an entire microcosm of the world. It's also seen as the earthly manifestation of a heavenly temple. The temple came to represent an ideal and sacred realm. And we also see it as the object of intense longing. Many of the Psalms will express intense longing: if I could just sit in the temple, if I could just be in that space, that sacred space--we see it in the Psalms. In a passage describing the dedication of the temple–it's in 1 Kings 8--Solomon explains that the temple is a place where people have access to God. They can petition to Him and they can atone for their sins. It is a house of prayer, he says, and it remained the central focal point of Israelite worship for centuries. So his great wisdom, his great virtue in constructing the temple notwithstanding, Solomon is very sharply criticized for, among other things, his foreign worship. His new palace complex had a tremendous amount of room for his harem, which is said to have included 700 wives. Many of them were foreign princesses, many of them would have been acquired to seal political alliances or business alliances, noblewomen. 700 wives and 300 concubines, as well as various officials and servants. Now of course these numbers are likely exaggerated, but Solomon's diplomatic alliances likely necessitated unions that would of course have been condemned by the Deuteronomistic historian. He is said to have loved foreign women, from the nations that God had forbidden and he succumbed to the worship of their gods and goddesses, which is really the key point. The whole fear of a foreign spouse is that one will be led to or will support the worship of foreign deities, and so Solomon is said to have built temples for Moabite gods and Ammonite gods. This all may point to a general tolerance for different cults in Jerusalem in the tenth century and in the ninth century. This may not have been an issue in Jerusalem in the tenth and ninth century, but it's an issue for the later Deuteronomistic editor. They have no tolerance this. So Solomon's primary flaw in the Deuteronomistic historians' view is his syncretism, which is prompted by his marriages to these foreign women who brought their native cults to Jerusalem. His religious infidelity is said to be the cause of the severe problems and ultimately the division of the kingdom that will follow upon his death. In order to support this tremendous court and harem, as well as the army and the bureaucracy, Solomon did introduce heavy taxation as well as the corvée, which is forced labor or required labor on state projects. So you have this developing urban structure, complex developing, bureaucratic urban structure that's now being superimposed on the agricultural life, and that leads to all sorts of class distinctions and class divisions between officials, bureaucrats, merchants, large-scale landowners who are prospering perhaps, smaller farmers and shepherds who are living at more of a subsistence level. So you have divisions between town and country, between rich and poor. And this is a great change from the ideals of the tribal democracy, some of the ideals that some of you looked at when we were talking about legal texts, where there seemed to be these economic blueprints for bringing about economic equivalence through sabbatical years and jubilee years and so on. In short, the list of social and economic ills that were enumerated by Samuel (in 1 Samuel 8, when he was trying to persuade the people from establishing a monarchy), that list of ills--you'll have a standing military, a standing army you'll have to support, you'll have to do labor for the state, you're going to have all kinds of taxes and special levies, you're going to be virtually enslaved--many of these things seem to have been realized, the Deuteronomistic historian would like us to believe, in the reign of Solomon. Moreover, as we've already seen, the very institution of monarchy itself didn't sit well in some quarters because centralized leadership under a human king seemed to go against the older traditions of Hebrew tribal society, united by covenant with God, guided by priests, prophets, occasional judges inspired charismatically. So already before Solomon's death, the northern tribes were feeling some alienation from the house of David. They're resenting what they perceive to be Solomon's tyranny. So let me give you a brief timeline of what happens from the death of Solomon down to the destruction. And on one of the earlier handouts I gave you, there is a list of the kings north and south. This is not something you need to memorize and I'm certainly not going to stress it, but if you want to keep score, that's a list that you can refer to. So, when Solomon died in 922 the structure that had been erected by David and Solomon fell into these two rival states and neither of them of course is going to be very strong. You have the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom referred to as Judah, each with its own king: Jeroboam in the north, Rehoboam in the south. Sometimes they're going to be at war with one another, sometimes they're going to work in alliance with one another, but 200 years later, from 922 down to 722,200 years later the northern kingdom of Israel will fall to the Assyrian empire. The Assyrians come down to the border of the southern kingdom, to Judah, and Judah remains viable but it is reduced to vassal status. It is tributary to this new world power. Finally, Judah will be destroyed about 150 years later --about 587,586. The Babylonians, the neo-Babylonian empire, they have conquered the Assyrians and they assume control over the ancient Near East and take the southern kingdom. Now the story of the northern kingdom, Israel, that is presented in Kings, is colored by a Judean perspective, and it is highly negative and highly polemical. So Solomon was succeeded by his son, Rehoboam, but the ten tribes of the north revolted when he refused to relieve their tax burden. They came to him and asked if they could have some relief and he answered them very harshly, so they revolted and a separate kingdom was set up under the rule of the Israelite Jeroboam, just at the end of the tenth century. So divided now into these two kingdoms, they begin to lose power, probably losing any control they may have had over outlying territories. So let's focus first on the northern kingdom of Israel. The area was more divided by tribal rivalries and religious traditions than Judah. You have ten tribes in that region. Jeroboam didn't seem to be able to establish a very stable rule. 1 Kings 12 tells us of Jeroboam's effort to break the connection with the traditional religious center of Jerusalem in the south. He establishes his own government at Shechem--that was a place that was already revered in Hebrew tradition. This is where we have the covenant renewal ceremony by Joshua, so it's already a somewhat sacred site. So he establishes his capital in Shechem, and then he establishes royal shrines, one in the southern part of Israel and one in the northern part of Israel; on each of the borders, north and south of the kingdom, in Dan and Bethel (Bethel in the south and Dan in the north). A golden calf is placed in each shrine according to the text, and this is viewed by the Deuteronomistic historian as a terrible sin. Indeed the story is written in a manner that deliberately echoes the story of the golden calf that was made by Aaron in Exodus 32. There are linguistic echoes that make it very clear that we are supposed to view this as a sin as great as the sin of Aaron. It may well be that if Jeroboam did in fact do this that he was a good Yahwist and was just trying to establish alternate sanctuaries for Yahweh that would rival Jerusalem's. But the Deuteronomistic historian wants to see this as another instance of idolatry, and therefore, deliberately echoes the primordial cultic sin of the golden calves when talking about Jeroboam's activity. It brands his cultic center as illegitimate idolatry. Jeroboam is represented by the biblical writer as having made unacceptable concessions to Canaanite practices of worship, and so he is criticized for this. Despite his best efforts, his kingship is fairly unstable, and in fact in the 200-year history of the kingdom, the northern kingdom of Israel, we will have seven different dynasties occupying the throne. There was great material prosperity in the northern kingdom. I've just picked out a few kings to highlight so these are not to be understood to be necessarily in order, I've just picked out a few highlights, but the rule of Omri was a time of some material prosperity and his son, Ahab. Ahab was the first part of the ninth century. Omri is an interesting person because he's the first king from either kingdom to be mentioned in sources outside the Bible. We have a large stone referred to as the Moabite Stone and in this stone, which boasts of a military defeat, there's the boast that Omri of Israel was defeated. Omri bought and fortified Samaria as the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, and archaeology does reveal that this was in fact quite a magnificent city at this time. But again the Deuteronomistic editors are going to judge him as evil. He's disobeyed God. His son, Ahab, also comes in for bad press. Ahab is also mentioned outside the Bible. We have an inscription of an Assyrian king who describes a coalition of Israelites and Aramaeans who fought against the Assyrians, and Ahab is mentioned in that inscription. Omri and Ahab were clearly very powerful and influential in the region. They are even mentioned outside the Bible. Ahab and his Phoenician wife, Jezebel, seem to have established a very extravagant court life in the capital of Samaria, and for this they are also going to be condemned by the Deuteronomistic editors. Jezebel was Phoenician and when Jezebel tried to establish the worship of her Phoenician Baal as the official cult of Israel (she built a temple to Baal in Samaria) the prophets Elijah and Elisha preach a kind of holy war against the monarchy. Now we're going to come back to these very zealous Yahweh-only prophets of the north when we talk about prophecy next time. Ahab and Jezebel meet a very tragic end and there will be a military coup. A military coup led by an army general, Jehu, in about 842. These are all kind of approximate years, you know--different books will give the--they'll differ by five years one way or the other but it's our best effort at reconstructing things based on some of these outside extra-biblical references that give us a firm date and then we can kind of work around those. So the army general Jehu in about 842 led a military coup. He was anointed king by the prophet Elisha and he had a very bloody revenge on Jezebel. Jezebel and the priests of Baal were all slaughtered, the text says, as well as every worshipper of Baal in Samaria; they were all slaughtered. By the eighth century you have the new Assyrian empire on the rise, and in 722 the Assyrian king Sargon reduced Israel to the status of a province. And we have an inscription by Sargon that confirms the biblical report of this defeat. And in this inscription Sargon says, "" Samaria "…led away as prisoners [27,290 inhabitants of it…. [The town I] re better than (it was) before and therein people from countries which myself quered." So: population transplanting. "I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as (is customary) for Assyrian citizens". So there's a basic agreement between this and the biblical account. Many of the governing class, the wealthy merchants, many tens of thousands in all, were carried off to northern Mesopotamia and they were lost to history. These are the ten lost tribes of Israel. There would have remained behind some Hebrew farmers and shepherds, they would have continued their old ways, but as was consistent with their policy, the Assyrians imported new peoples to repopulate this area and to break up any local resistance to their rule and this would then become the province of Samaria. And this ethnically mixed group would practice a form of Israelite religion, but the Deuteronomistic editor does not view it as legitimate and ultimately these Samaritans were going to be despised by the Jews of the southern kingdom, the Jews of Judah. They were seen as foreign corruptors of the faith. They were always ready to assist Judah's enemies against Judah, so they felt very little kinship and very often the Samaritans would join against, those attacking Judah. So there was tremendous rivalry between the Jews of Judah and the Samaritans. Hence, the New Testament story makes sense--this was a hated person, this good Samaritan. So if we turn our attention now to the southern kingdom of Judah: Judah was comprised of the two remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and it enjoyed internal stability for the most part. It remained loyal to the house of David ruling in Jerusalem. Shortly after Israel fell in 722 to the Assyrians, the Judahites--whose king at that time was King Hezekiah, so the king Hezekiah had to agree to terms with Assyria. They became subject allies or vassals of Assyria. But Hezekiah began to prepare for rebellion, began to make alliances with neighbors and this prompted the Assyrians to march in and lay siege to Jerusalem. This would have happened about 701, and this siege is described in Assyrian sources, so we have independent records of this from Assyrian sources. We read there: "As to Hezekiah, the Jew,"--of Yehud, right? the Jew--"he did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts," etc. "I drove out…200,150 people…. Himself I made prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage" . But eventually the Assyrians actually withdrew the siege, Judah was able to withstand the siege, preserve their own kingship. The Assyrian empire is going to fall in 612--this is the fall of Nineveh you may have heard of at some point--and they will fall to the rising Babylonians, the neo-Babylonian empire. It's the neo-Babylonian empire that will succeed in felling Judah under Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon in 587 or 586. The walls of Jerusalem are dismantled, many members of the governing classes, wealthier classes, are going to be carried off into exile in Babylonia. And that the Hebrews didn't fade into oblivion after the loss of political independence and their geographical base, is due in large part to the interpretation of events provided by the Deuteronomistic school. So we need to talk a little bit about that ideology and why it had the historical effect that it had. As I mentioned before, Deuteronomy isn't just the capstone of the Pentateuch's narrative, it's also the first part of a longer literary history. Martin Noth was the German scholar who first argued for this, argued that the composition and authorship of Deuteronomy has more in common with what follows in some sense than what precedes it. And he argued that we should understand this to be a unit, the product of a particular School. Since this Deuteronomistic School is looking back at the history of Israel up to and including the defeat and exile of the Israelites in 587 or 586, the final form of the work of the Deuteronomistic School--the final form must be post exilic. It's post-586, but there are of course various layers within that larger work that we can't really date with precision. I just want to say something about the scholarly methodology that led to the conclusion that there is such a thing as a Deuteronomistic School. That method is redaction criticism. And we've already discussed the goals and the methods of other types of criticism: source criticism or historical criticism. We've talked a little bit about form criticism and tradition criticism. But redaction criticism grew out of a kind of weariness with some of these other forms of biblical criticism and their constant fragmentation of the biblical text into older sources or into older genres or into older units of tradition in order to map out a history of Israelite religion. These other methods seem to pay very little attention to the text in its final form and the process by which the text reached its final form. So redaction criticism rejects the idea that the person or the persons who compiled the text from earlier sources did a somewhat mechanical scissors and paste job, didn't really think too much about the effect they were creating by putting things together. Redaction criticism assumes and focuses on identifying the purpose and the plan behind the final form of the assembled sources. It's a method that wants to uncover the intention of the person or the persons who produced the biblical text in roughly the shape that we have it, and what was intended by their producing it in the shape that we have. So redaction criticism proceeds along these lines and this is how it first developed. First you can usually identify linking passages, that is to say passages that kind of join narrative to narrative or unit to unit, in an attempt to make the text read more smoothly or just to ease the transition from one source to another. And these linking passages are assigned to R for redactor. Also assigned to R are any interpretative passages. That means passages that stand back to comment on the text or interpret the text in some way. Any place where the narrator turns to directly address the audience. So for example, when you have a verse in which the narrator turns and says, "That was when the Canaanites were still in the land," that would seem to be from the hand of a redactor putting the sources together. When you have an etiological comment, that is to say a comment of the type, "And that is why the Israelites do such and such ritual observance to this day," that also seems to be written from the perspective of a compiler of sources, someone who's putting the text together. There are also some passages that vindicate or justify or otherwise comment on what's about to occur, or passages that summarize and offer an interpretation or justification of what has just happened. We'll see that in 2 Kings 17; we also saw that in the Book of Judges. We had this prospective summary saying: this is what's going to happen--there's going to be sin, they're going to cry out, there'll be, you know, God will raise up someone, they'll deliver them and then they're going to fall back into sin again. So these are comments that are looking forward to tell us what it is we're about to read and if you join all such passages together and assign them to R you very often find that there are tremendous stylistic similarities in these passages. They use the same rhetoric over and over again or you'll see the same point of view and it's very often a point of view that isn't in the source materials that they're linking together. And this is how one arrives at some understanding of the role of the redactor in the final production of the text, how the redactor has framed our understanding of the source materials that he has gathered. And the Deuteronomistic historian who is responsible for the redaction of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges and so, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, provides not just a history in the sense of documenting events as they occur (as if there's ever documentation without interpretation) but provides a strong interpretation of history, a philosophy of history. He's trying to ascertain the meaning of events, the larger purpose and design, something we've called a historiosophy. And we find the Deuteronomists' interpretation of Israel's history in the preface to the Book of Deuteronomy, we find it in editorial comments that are sort of peppered throughout Joshua through Kings, and we especially find it in the summary of the entire unit that is contained in 2 Kings 17. Before we read that passage we need to think about what it was that prompted the Deuteronomist to adopt a particular interpretation of Israel's historical record. The Deuteronomistic historian was attempting to respond to the first major historical challenge to confront the Israelite people and the Hebrew religion. And that was the complete collapse of the Israelite nation, the destruction of God's sanctuary, and the defeat and exile of the people of the Lord and God of history. The calamitous events of 722, but especially 587, raised a critical theological dilemma. God had promised the patriarchs and their descendants that they would live in His land. He had promised that the house of David would stand forever but here the monarchy had collapsed, the people were defeated and they were in exile. So the challenge presented by this twist of history was really twofold: Is God the god of history, is he omnipotent, is he capable of all, can he in fact impose and effect His will, and if so then what about his covenant with the patriarchs and his covenant with David? Had he faithlessly abandoned it? Well, that was unthinkable. Then if he hadn't faithlessly abandoned his covenant with his people and with David, he must not be the god of history, the universal lord of all. He wasn't able to save his people. Neither of these ideas was acceptable to the Deuteronomistic school. It was a fundamental tenet of Israelite monotheism that God is at once the god of history, capable of all, whose will is absolute, whose promises are true and at the same time a god of faithfulness who does not abandon his people, he is both good and powerful. So how could the disasters of 722 and 586 be reconciled with the conviction that God controlled history and that He had an eternal covenant with the patriarchs and with David? The historiosophy of the Deuteronomistic school is the response of one segment of the Israelite community, we'll see another response when we turn to the Prophets, but the basic idea of the Deuteronomistic School is that God's unconditional and eternal covenants with the patriarchs and with David do not preclude the possibility of punishment or chastisement for sin as specified in the conditional Mosaic covenant. So you see how both ideas are going to be important to hold in dialectic tension: both theologies, the covenant theology as well as the patriarchal and royal theology. So this is because although God is omnipotent, humans do have free will, they can corrupt the divine plan. So in the Deuteronomistic history the leaders of Israel are depicted as having the choice of accepting God's way or rejecting it. God tries to help them. He's constantly sending them prophets who yell at the kings and tell them what it is God wants of them, but they continue to make the wrong choice. They sin and ultimately that brings about the fall, first of Israel and then of Judah and it's the idolatrous sins of the kings that does it. With the deposition and the execution of the last Davidic king, Zedekiah, the Deuteronomistic school reinterpreted the Davidic Covenant in conditional terms on the model of the Sinaitic Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, according to which God's favor toward the king depends on the king's loyalty to God, and in this way the fall of the house of David could be seen as justifiable punishment for disobedient kings or rulers like Manasseh. (We'll come back to him.) Remember the Davidic Covenant that Nathan proclaimed in 2 Samuel 7 explicitly said that God would punish and chastise his anointed. That's what it means to be a son, to receive correction, discipline and punishment. I'll have to finish this these thoughts on Monday and see specifically how they interpret and understand the history of what happened in a way that enabled certain segments of the population to see this as in fact proof of God's strength and faithfulness. And then we'll turn to prophecy on Monday.

Literature_Lectures

17_Cormac_McCarthy_Blood_Meridian.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. I'd like to begin. Welcome back. It is good to see you all. It's a bit startling. I don't know where those two weeks went. So, tell me: I asked you to read Blood Meridian over break; was this a happy Spring Break task for you? Was it good "beach reading," as I promised? No? No. I'd like, before I begin my lecture today, just to hear a little bit from you, just so that I know what you're thinking about as I talk to you about this book. Who liked this novel? Okay, a good, maybe, half of you. Someone tell me why they liked it; someone, someone, someone tell me why they liked it. Okay. Now you're getting all quiet. Someone can tell me one sentence why you liked this novel. Yes. Thank you.Student: I like how creepy the judge is.Professor Amy Hungerford: You like how creepy the judge is. It is impressive how creepy he is, yes. Okay. Why else? Yes.Student: I actually like how kind of quickly and bluntly some of the atrocities happen in it. So, you'll be reading a passage where there are pretty mundane things, and then all of a sudden, slaughter. Professor Amy Hungerford: And you liked that? That was good. Yeah. It certainly is a kind of virtuosic representation of violence, yes, absolutely. What did it remind you of? Well, yes, yes.Student: I liked how ambiguous the ending was.Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. The ending is very strange, and we'll talk about that. What else? Yes.Student: I liked that it read like a nightmare.Professor Amy Hungerford: It read like a nightmare. What does that mean?Student: I just remember, reading it, it felt like a nightmare. It was very, sort of, jumbled, and just very sensory, and it felt like a nightmare.Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. It is very sensory. This prose concentrates so much on the material of the world, absolutely, and it does have that feeling of drawing you into its world very completely. I think, also, that sense of nightmarishness is heightened by the fact that the plot is not very strong in this novel. That's not what's driving this novel. You're laughing. Why do you laugh? Why do you laugh about that, about the plot? Yes. You're still smiling from the laughter, so I'm going to ask you. Student: Just because yes, that is true. That's part of the reason that I found it difficult to continue reading, just maybe be interested by the- I guess the dry, sort of emotionless way of presenting violence. It was sort of interesting, but the fact that there didn't seem to be a point, or a place that they're going, it made it really hard to not just be, like. "oh, this is going to be disgusting."Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. It can produce this aversion in readers. How many were averse to this novel? Okay, a few of you, at least. Yeah. I think, - when I first tried to read this novel, I failed twice. I'm a sensitive soul. So, I failed twice to read this novel because of its violence, and then I persevered. But it can get, actually kind of boring, sometimes, I think, because of the plotlessness. So, unless you're really interested in how the story is being told in that language, it can be repetitive and can numb you as a reader, I think. These are all aspects of the novel that I will try to account for over the course of my two lectures today and on Wednesday. There are two other things I'm going to do in these two lectures. One is, today, to think hard about what it means to track allusions in a novel. So, that's going to be one thing that I do today. Allusions appear in most of the things that we read, dare I say all of them, but one never quite knows what to do with them, once you have identified them. Now, the sense of literature as an art with a history depends on our being able to do something with allusions or to have something to say about them. What does it mean that one novel speaks to a novel or a poem or another kind of writing from the past? How are we to make sense of that in the evolution of the art form? This is a foundation of what English literary study looks like pretty much at any university. At any university, if you're an English major, you're asked to study a historical range of texts. You're asked to master, in some portion, or to some extent, the literary tradition in English. What does it mean that we're asked to do that? Cormac McCarthy's novel gives us the opportunity to take a case study. What does it mean, in this day, in this time, for this writer to be writing in a tradition? So, allusion is one thing I'll focus on that's of general interest in literary studies. The second thing, in the second lecture, that I will focus on is what to do with detail, what to do with that odd detail that you notice in the novel. It could be anything. Is there a way of making an argument that will radiate out from that detail into some more holistic understanding of a novel? My second lecture will be a demonstration of that and an argument for that as a literary technique, and I hope that this will be useful to you in writing the next paper, which will be coming up fairly shortly. So, I want to begin, then, with this quotation from Cormac McCarthy. This was his first interview, 1992. Many of you probably know he's gotten a lot more press since Oprah's Book Club chose his latest novel, The Road. He's sort of been out and about. He gave her an interview. He's given an interview since then for a magazine. Before that he was a very reclusive writer, and he had been writing since the late '60s and by 1992--up until that point--he had refused all interviews. He usually refused readings, even when he had zero money. He lived out of hotel rooms, even when he was married and had a son, when he was a young man. He's on his third marriage now. He would turn down invitations to read even when they were down to their last dollar. His ex-wife tells some amusing stories about this. He'd get an invitation to read, he'd turn it down, and they'd eat beans for another night. So, that's her take on what that life was like. He says in this interview: "The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." So, this is my invitation to take seriously allusion in Blood Meridian. Did anybody on their own recognize some of the sources of Blood Meridian? Did you notice any allusions? Yes. Student: Oral history, storytelling. Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. The oral tradition is very powerful in McCarthy's writing. The sound of the prose is very important to him. Yeah. What else? Yes.Student: Along those same lines, when he frequently talks about the sun coming up or going down, there is a lot of that in The Odyssey, when the sun's fingers are coming out…Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. A lot of that cosmic imagery, I think he does take from the great epics of our language. Yes. What else? What else did you notice? Yes.Student: I noticed a lot of references to the Bible: the burning bush and other things.Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely. The Bible is peppered throughout this, and I'm going to have a lot to say about that--some to say about it, today, but I have a whole argument about that that I'll get to on Wednesday. Yeah, absolutely. What else? Anything else you noticed? Well, I'm going to start, actually, a little bit closer to home, in the American tradition. I'm going to start with Moby-Dick. This is my lineup of texts that I am going to use today to talk about Blood Meridian. So, I want to start with Moby Dick. This is probably the single most important book for McCarthy, beside the Bible, as a source for both language, character, ideas, moral questions. All kinds of things come from Moby-Dick. And, if you want to begin in the easiest way, the first thing is to think about Ahab. Ahab is known for his monomaniacal evil, his evil quest to take on the white whale. As a character who is loquacious, charismatic, threatening, violent, he is very much a model for Judge Holden. So, in that simple, general way McCarthy owes a debt to Moby-Dick. There are many specific ways that this novel owes a debt to Moby-Dick. One, that I'll joint point out, is from the prophet chapter in Moby-Dick. That's chapter 19. If you've read the novel, you can recall that before Ishmael and Queequeg get on the Pequod they are accosted by a beggar in the street. And his name is Elijah, and he warns them in very cryptic language about what they've actually signed away, when they signed the papers to board the Pequod. And he suggests that what they've signed away is their souls, not just the couple of years of their life. The version that we get in Blood Meridian can be found on page 40 and 41. It actually starts on 39. The kid has joined up with Captain White's gang of filibusters, and they are in a bar and there they find--this is on 39--an old, disordered Mennonite in this place. And he turns to study them, "a thin man in a leather waistcoat, a black and straight-brimmed hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers." And, if you look at the Moby-Dick version, I just want to point out how closely he's following the cues here. "Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words [shipmates have ye shipped in that ship] were put to us by a stranger who, pausing before us, leveled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily appareled in faded jacket and patched trousers, a rag of black handkerchief investing his neck. Just the way that description, the very brief description of his outfit, what he's wearing around his neck, his hat: they match up, in these two little paragraphs. The Mennonite, however, is much more dire, much less playful than Melville's Elijah. He says to the assembled men: "They'll jail you to a man" This is on 40: "Who will?" "The United States Army, General Worth." "The hell they will." "Pray that they will." He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. "What does that mean, old man?" "Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed you'll not cross it back." "Don't aim to cross it back. We goin' to Sonora. What's it to you, old man?" The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet. He speaks slowly. "The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land, ye'll wake more than the dogs." But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering. And how else could it be? How these things end, in confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again, and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone. The whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting along the grapevines had begun to stir and call. "There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto," said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate. He offers them these portentous sayings, like this last little epigram about the tavern and the road thereto, and he uses this archaic language. Moby-Dick's prophet, who occupies the same structural spot, accosting the main characters as they go out on their journey, is much more playful. He is berated by Ishmael for pretending to have a big secret, for speaking as if he had a secret to tell, but not telling it. So, McCarthy takes the model and transforms it slightly, brings it into a realm where sincerity and depth and fear replace the inklings of fear around a core of good will, irony, playfulness. The reason there is that difference, I think, is that McCarthy has decided not to give us an Ishmael. Ishmael is an incredibly charming narrator. He is thoughtful; he's funny; he is a little self-mocking; he can wax both grand and silly; he can recognize his own silliness. There's a vast interior of Ishmael's mind that we see in this narrative. We never see the like of this from the kid, never. This is one way in which McCarthy has revised Melville, so this is one of those observations I'm going to, sort of, put up on the shelf. What does it mean that this is the way he has revised Melville? This is one of the questions that my two lectures, together, will answer. What does that revision mean? Another specific scene in which McCarthy is revising Melville comes when Toadvine almost kills the judge. Do you remember the scene? The judge has been dandling the little Indian boy on his knee. The men around the campfire are delighted. They laugh. In the morning the judge has killed the boy, and scalped it, and is wiping his hands on his pants. And Toadvine puts his revolver to the judge's head, and the judge says, "Shoot that thing or put it away." And Toadvine puts it away. This is the direct echo of a moment when Starbuck stands outside Ahab's cabin. Ahab's maniacal quest for the whale has been made apparent to the whole ship. Starbuck, that wise and deliberative man, understands that the fate of the whole ship has now been recruited to Ahab's maniacal cause. He knows that if he takes the musket and shoots Ahab in his bed he will save the whole ship of men. He does not do it. So, both Toadvine and Starbuck are presented with a moral problem: Do you murder the leader of an immoral, ill-fated, violent quest? Both men decide not to. This is a scene I'll come back to next time, on Wednesday, and I'll have more to say about it. But, for now, one thing that we can say about it is, once again, the lack of interiority for these characters makes a crucial difference. It's a crucial point of revision. Starbuck, we know, is deliberative. We know he is a wise man. He gives counsel to Ahab over the whole course of the novel: to abandon his quest, to go home to his wife, at the very end of the novel. In a crucial moment, Starbuck gives an impassioned plea to Ahab, reminds him of his wife and child and says, "Leave off chasing that whale. Let us live and go home." We have no such history for Toadvine. What do we know about Toadvine? Well, he wears a scapular of ears that he's cut off. He has tattoos from his criminal past on his face. He wears the evidence of a criminal life, not the furrowed brow of Starbuck's thought. He is a very different kind of character, and that leads us to wonder how we need to understand his failure to shoot the judge. Is it that moral complexity yields lack of decisiveness, as we might say for Starbuck, that moral complexity is presented as a kind of weakness? Or, is that far too much to say about Toadvine? Is Toadvine a morally complex character? Do we have any basis upon which to say such a thing? So, this is another kind of question we want to ask. Now I'm going to move to my second in line, here, and that's Paradise Lost. McCarthy rings the changes on the great voices of American literature, but also of world literature in English. You were talking about The Iliad and the epic tradition. In this case, he is entering the great realm of poetry. Now he gives a specific revision of Paradise Lost in Blood Meridian, if you recall. How many of you have taken a Milton class, or have read Milton in class? Okay. Okay, a good number of you, so probably a bunch of you realize this. When the judge makes gunpowder, do you remember this scene? The men are out of gunpowder. They find the judge in the desert. They're being hounded by the Indians they've been chasing all this time. They're at their mercy. They know they're going to be massacred. They find the judge sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert. Who knows how he got there? Glanton takes him up. He rides with them, and he takes them to a volcanic cone, a dead cone, and there he instructs them how to make gunpowder. He takes brimstone from the rim of the cone, he mixes it with charcoal and other things, and then he has them piss on it. And from this he makes gunpowder, and they use that gunpowder to defeat the Indians who come after them. Well, this is taken directly from Paradise Lost. Satan instructs his fiends in how to make gunpowder, and I'm going to read you a little bit from Book 6 of Paradise Lost. So, the fiends are down in Hell strategizing, somewhat in despair over their chances against God's angels. The fallen angels are standing around Satan, and they're taking turns making speeches, and they've just heard a speech from a fallen angel who says, "We really need a better weapon. Otherwise we're never going to win this war." And here is what Satan has to say. Whereto with look composed Satan replied. Not uninvented that, which thou arightBelievest so main to our success, I bring. Which of us who beholds the bright surfaceOf this ethereous mould whereon we stand, This continent of spacious Heaven, adornedWith plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems, and gold; Whose eye so superficially surveysThese things, as not to mind from whence they growDeep under ground, materials dark and crude,Of spiritous and fiery spume, till touchedWith Heaven's ray, and tempered, they shoot forthSo beauteous, opening to the ambient light? These in their dark nativity the deepShall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame; Which, into hollow engines, long and round,Thick rammed, at the other bore with touch of fireDilated and infuriate, [that's very much a McCarthy word, infuriate] shall send forthFrom far, with thundering noise, among our foesSuch implements of mischief, as shall dashTo pieces, and o'erwhelm whatever standsAdverse, that they shall fear we have disarmedThe Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt. So, there Satan's saying, "Look at the world. You look at all these plants. The chemicals we need are in this earth." So, this is what the judge says, for his part, in like circumstance. This is on 129,130, and this, remember, is told by Tobin, the ex-priest: In all this time,--[as they were riding across the plain without gunpowder] In all this time the judge had spoke hardly a word. So at dawn we were on the edge of a vast malpais and his honor takes up a position on some lava rocks there and he commences to give us an address. See, there is that same structural position. The judge occupies the place that Satan does in Paradise Lost and gives a speech: It was like a sermon but it was no such sermon as any man of us had ever heard before. Beyond the malpais was a volcanic peak and in the sunrise it was many colors and there was dark, little birds crossin down the wind and the wind was flappin the judge's old benjamin about him and he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to men and beast alike, and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith. So, the oration urging them to see in the earth all the things they need: exactly out of Paradise Lost. And then, a little further down the page, you see that Tobin speculates about the volcanic terrain they're crossing - "where for aught any man knows lies the locality of Hell." He even speculates that this is where Hell's entrance might be. So, what does McCarthy do when he invites us to see the judge as the parallel of Satan? I think this is one of the most powerful allusions driving readings of this novel. Lots of readers have taken Judge Holden as heroic evil, on the model of Milton's Satan.Remember, the famous problem about Paradise Lost is that, here was Milton writing it to justify the ways of God to men, justifying how good God was, and yet Satan is this incredibly compelling character. Milton writes Satan to be irresistible, and in particular he is, rhetorically, incredibly gifted, and so he makes all of these wonderful speeches that Milton writes for him that we get to listen to. So, McCarthy sets up a similar problem in Blood Meridian. Here is the judge. He has this compelling language that we want to listen to. It's very sonorous. There is that debt to the oral tradition, and yet he is this incredibly evil man. So, there is a problem, here, of moral valence. Can we condemn, or does the book condemn, this figure? It's the problem in Paradise Lost. It's the problem, also, in Blood Meridian. If you find the violence in Blood Meridian simply gratuitous, then you've answered that, in a certain way, by saying, "No. The character is not so compelling that I can put up with the graphic representation of violence. It doesn't make it worth it." But there is another school of thought that says the aesthetics of the violence, the aesthetics of the judge, do make it worth it. So, that is a kind of debt. The other way this sheds light on the novel is to say that the novel is concerned, like Paradise Lost, with the great cosmic structures of the world. Now, this is another element, too, of its use of the Bible, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But it gives, for the novel, a certain kind of weight. It makes us read it looking for those big, cosmic structures and statements about those big, cosmic structures. It lends it weight unleavened by the kinds of delightful playfulness that we see from Ishmael. Melville is full of the Bible, and full of portentousness, too, but always Ishmael's voice is there charming us. What we have here, instead, is sheer portentousness--some say pretentiousness--weighing on every sentence. The allusions to Paradise Lost are part of that portentousness. Now, let me move to something smaller, moving a little later in the poetic tradition: Wordsworth. In the opening lines of this novel, we see the line on page 3, "All history present in that visage," the face of the kid, "the child, the father of the man." That phrase, "The child, the father of the man," comes from a short, little poem by William Wordsworth. It's called "My Heart Leaps up when I Behold." My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky: / So was it when my life began, / So is it now I am a man, / So be it when I shall grow old / Or let me die! / The child is father of the man: / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety. This is a lovely little snippet of a poem. The point of it is to say that the child, delighted by the rainbow, gives you the man, delighted by the rainbow, and he says, "Let me die if I'm no longer delighted, if I get to be so old that that childlike delight in the rainbow is gone." The rainbow comes freighted with its own biblical literary history: that is, it's the sign of God's promise to the world, to humankind, that God will no longer send a flood to wipe out the human race as He did in the days of Noah. So, it is a hopeful sign for the fate of humankind, and it reflects well on God's intentions towards us. McCarthy's child, father of the man, is a very different sort. Just read that sentence right prior to the allusion: "He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence." What McCarthy announces here, in his revision of Wordsworth, is that, although to invoke Milton's Satan is already to project us into the realm of Romantic figures, he is rejecting the later Romanticism of the early nineteenth century which found in humankind, especially in the child as the epitome of pure humankind, a kind of great hopefulness. This is not what McCarthy sees in humankind. This is not what the kid gives to us, even though we are told, a little later on, on page 4, the child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. What does that innocence mean? Is it, here, an innocence like Wordsworth's child, who can behold the rainbow with joy and a pure relation to the world and to a caring god? Is it that kind of innocence? Is it the innocence simply of not knowing something? Is it that kind of innocence? Is it an absence of guilt? Is that what the innocence is? These are questions, again, I'm going to put up on the side. What is the quality of the kid's innocence? This is something I'm going to answer on Wednesday, but I want you to think about it. The allusion to Wordsworth causes us to ask that kind of question. The revision tells us we are in a much darker world. Now, I'm actually going to skip over some of the biblical allusion and trust you to read, in the first couple of pages, just in that first section. I'd like you reread it and think about how the Bible is woven in there. You see lots of Garden of Eden imagery there. You see a parricide, the image of the murdered father. There is an echo there of Cain and Abel, even though they are brothers. There is a sense that this is a world in which violence and murder has already entered. So, you can think about that. I want to go, now, to my last in the pile of books. This is an historical source called My Confession, and it is by a man named Samuel Chamberlain. Chamberlain fought for the U.S. in the Mexican War, and after the war was over he joined up with the Glanton Gang. The Glanton Gang is a historical fact, as far as we know. It was a gang of scalp hunters that operated around the border right after the Mexican War in the 1840s and '50s. Sam Chamberlain--I want to show you--he was quite a remarkable guy. He was from Boston, born in New Hampshire, grew up in Boston. At sixteen he left Boston and went out West, taking a sort of circuitous route. He went to find his fortune and to find adventure, but he also went with a box of paints. And he produced these amazing watercolors everywhere he went, and he wrote this testimony of his adventures called My Confession. It reads like a picaresque. It's full of his own heroism, all the senoritas that he romances, all the great battles he fights in, but he really gives us an amazing set of paintings. You can just see these. I'm going to show you a couple. While I'm waiting for this to come up, I'm going to show you something you can't see on this web site. This is the Texas State Historical Society where these documents are kept. The pages are written-- I don't know if you can see this. This is a reproduction. See, he writes in this gorgeous hand, and he embellishes all the pages with little drawings. And this is hundreds of pages long, with hundreds of watercolors in it. My bet is that McCarthy actually saw this manuscript in the Texas State Historical Society. That's where he lived. That's where he was living when he wrote this book. And it just is amazingly visual and gorgeous. He ended up making three copies of this with all its paintings. When he got back to New England he married and he had three daughters (which he named after various senoritas that he had romanced) and he made a copy of My Confession for each, so there are three of them. One is at Annapolis; one is at the Texas State Historical Society, and I think one is with the family. All right. So, this isn't giving you the paintings that I want, and I'm going to--These are two that I took up. This one on the right-- Well, we'll do the little one on the left. The one on the left is his drawing of the Grand Canyon, and he claims that it was the first ever painting of the Grand Canyon (and I think this is probably false). That's them crossing through, the gang. This is Judge Holden, here, discoursing on evolution in a very Judge Holden-ly way. So, we actually hear about this sermon on evolution in the novel. Well, here it is in Chamberlain's Confession. Now, I want to read to you a little bit from the Confession. The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size who rejoiced in the name of Holden, called Judge Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew, but a more cool-blooded villain never went unhung. He stood six foot six in his moccasins, had a large, fleshy frame, a dull, tallow-colored face destitute of hair and all expression, always cool and collected. But when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hog-like eyes would gleam with a sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of a fiend. [I'm going to skip a little bit.] Terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name in the Cherokee nation in Texas. And before we left Fronteras, a little girl of ten years was found in the chaparral foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed out him as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand. But though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime. He was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico. He conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the harp or guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, out-waltz any poblano of the ball, plum centre with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in geology and mineralogy, with all an errant coward, but not that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage and strength stealing weapons, but where the combat would be equal he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight and he knew it. The intellectual beast saw fit to patronize me in the most insulting manner, lecturing me on the immorality of my conduct in drinking and gambling. This was shortly after the murder of the muchacha, and when I made an angry reply he said, "Come, Jack. Don't bear ill will. Shake hands and make up." I replied, "No. I thank you. Your hand is too large and powerful. It leaves its mark." Holden gave me a look out from his cold, cruel eyes and quietly said, "You are there, are you? Well, look out where my hand may squeeze the life out of you yet, my young bantam." I felt like trying my revolver on his huge carcass, but prudence forbid bringing matters to a deadly issue at present. There is that same Toadvine-Starbuck moment. It's right in My Confession, as is that particular strange description of Judge Holden as huge and hairless. Now, in the nineteenth century hairless just meant that he didn't have a beard, but McCarthy takes that and makes it into this really freakish character. It's almost like he's a giant infant. What does it mean that McCarthy gets the most powerful character in the novel so directly from this source? That's one question. Second question is: what does it mean that he's actually taking an historical fact, the Glanton Gang and their adventures, and using these as the kernel of his novel, when--as my little pile of books here has demonstrated--he's totally absorbed in the novel's relationship to literary history? So, what's he doing by doubling the literary history with an American history? He's pursuing two sets of links back through time: one in the realm of art, one in the realm of history. What's the relationship between the two? When I first read this, I will say, I was extremely surprised. Are you surprised, too, to see that it takes so directly from Chamberlain's manuscript? The problem is the problem of originality. This is a problem that, I think, McCarthy's quotation, that I wrote up on the board, points towards: "The ugly fact is that books are made out of books." Why is that an ugly fact? What's ugly about that? "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." Is it ugly because it calls into question the very principle of originality? This is what someone, a reader like Harold Bloom, might say. Harold Bloom argues that it is the "anxiety of influence" that shapes many writers in the tradition. As they take on the great writers of the past, they feel that they are ever belated, that there is no room yet in the world to push the art form further. Is that why it's an ugly fact? Is its ugliness, or the way that word is used in this quotation, is it registering McCarthy's anxiety about his own belatedness? Can he really be original? Can he really answer the portentous, cosmic aura that he invokes over and over again in the very style of this novel? The style keeps telling you, "Come and look for a deeper meaning." Now, I want to point out one last thing for you, since I do have just the couple minutes that I will need. This is on 4 and 5. At the top of 4, as the kid moves from Tennessee down to New Orleans, and then out to the West, he moves through the South: He sees blacks in the fields lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton, a shadowed agony in the garden. [There is some of that Eden imagery I was going to point out to you at more length.] Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. The landscape itself is already an artifact; it's paper. It's as if it's of McCarthy's own construction. But if you look just across the page, on 5, this is a tiny thing, and probably it didn't register to you at all. A week on he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat. Do you notice the way the words are repeating there? "Spiderlike among the bolls of cotton," "his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his coat." It's a tiny, little thing. I would argue, however, that what we're seeing here is the way the very style and tone perpetuates itself, out of itself. So, I want to add a final layer in my excavation of allusion, and here say that he's alluding to himself, that there is a constant re-layering that takes the language and the repetitiousness of that language builds within the text. There is a lot of anxiety about origin, right here in these couple pages. We're told, "Only now is it"--as he goes to Texas--"only now is the child finally divested of all he has been." And you note, at the beginning, that he is, and his folk are known for, "hewers of wood and drawers of water." These are the traditional adjectives given to the sons of Ham, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. Ham's crime against his father, Noah, was that he saw his father, Noah, naked in his tent. Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and I guess he was naked in his tent while he was passed out. Ham happened to peep in and saw his father naked. His two brothers covered the father. The two brothers are therefore blessed; Ham is cursed. Why is this a curse-worthy action? Why is this a curse-worthy mistake? I think it's because, in seeing the father naked, you see the mystery of your origin. And so, the kid is likened to someone cursed for looking upon their origin. There is a sense in which he can almost understand it. This is meant to be mystery, and yet by looking, somehow, he is closer to it than he should be. The problem for the kid is to divest himself of origin, to forget it, so if Ham is cursed because he saw his origin, the kid's curse lies, in part, in the divestiture of all origin. He forgets it. It's not that he sees it; he forgets it. And then you can get a sentence like this: "His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrain so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay." I want you to read the sentence several times before Wednesday, and ask yourself if you can figure out what it means fully, all of it. Parts of it are more clear than others. Think about the balance between the rhythm of that sentence and its content, the tone, what its tone says to you, what its diction says to you, and what the sentence itself actually says to you. So, that's what I'd like you to think about. And on Wednesday I'm going to take this discussion of allusion, and I'm going to sort of ball it up and it'll become part of another argument, and that'll stem from one tiny detail I'm going to take out of the novel. So that's where I'm going.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_12_The_Deuteronomistic_History_Life_in_the_Land_Joshua_and_Judges.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: I was talking last time about the concept of election or choice, God's choice of Israel, Israel as the chosen one, which occurs for the first time in the Book of Deuteronomy. And I was talking about the fact that for Deuteronomy the election of Israel, God's election of Israel means or entails the idea that Israel is a holy people, holy in the sense of separated to God--that root meaning of holiness which means to be separated from the common or the ordinary. So that separation entails separation from alien peoples and practices that are inconsistent with the worship of God. So for this reason, intermarriage with the Canaanites is prohibited in Deuteronomy. And, in fact, they are to be utterly destroyed. All alien practices are to be removed from the covenant community. Now, given that there were probably no Canaanites at the time of Deuteronomy's composition, according to some scholars, these texts may be understood as a kind of internal polemic against those elements of Israelite society whose practices didn't conform to Deuteronomy's Yahweh-only policy, or Yahweh-only ideals. This is an idea we will come back to in a minute. I just want to throw it out here. Separation entails also separation to God's service. That means, of course, the observance of his laws, especially the laws of purity, the rejection of pagan practices, and so on. So the privilege of having been chosen or singled out, of being a holy people to God entails obligations and responsibility. At the same time, it's interesting that Deuteronomy seems to be aware of some of the dangers in this idea, the danger of a superiority complex, a moral danger involved in the notion of election. So Deuteronomy warns repeatedly: it is by no special virtue or merit that Israel was the one chosen. And Moses admonishes the Israelites not to suppose that their inheritance of the land of Canaan is due to their own powers, or on account of any righteousness or virtue that they possess. In fact, he says, far from it. Israel was chosen by Yahweh in an act of spontaneous love--;it does not imply her perfection--an act of spontaneous love for the patriarchs. And the election was entirely God's initiative and is no cause for Israel to boast. So Deuteronomy 7, verses 6-8 read: For you are a people consecrated [made holy] to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people. It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that the Lord set His heart on you and chose you --; indeed, you are the smallest of peoples; but it was because the Lord favored you and kept the oath He made to your fathers that the Lord freed you with a mighty hand and rescued you from the house of bondage, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. So don't be tempted--Moses later warns the Israelites--don't be tempted to say to yourselves (this is in Deuteronomy 8:17), "My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me," or again, to say in Deuteronomy 9:4, "The Lord has enabled us to possess this land because of our virtues." On the contrary, he emphasizes, it is only because the wickedness of the Canaanites is so great that the Lord has to drive them from his land, and now he is giving you a chance. But it is conditional for you, just as it was for them. Don't fail him or he will drive you out just as he drove out the Canaanites. That's a theme in Deuteronomy. We are going to see in a moment how important that is, or in a few lectures, how important that idea is for the Deuteronomistic historian in general. But we will get there. Another theme in the Book of Deuteronomy is the theme of providential concern, and that appears in Deuteronomy 8. God's providential love and care for Israel is expressed through various metaphors in the Bible. And the prophet Hosea, who seems to have very strong connections with the Book of Deuteronomy, the prophet Hosea will develop further this image of parent and child that occurs in Deuteronomy 8. So in a way, the language we were just referring to was really the language of husband and wife, you know, someone who simply loves someone, not because they are perfect, but that is their choice. They favor them. They love the person, and they make a bond with them. It does not imply anything about other people. It is simply that is the person who has been the focus. So we have a lot of sort of love and marriage imagery, husband and wife imagery, used for God and Israel, but we also have this parent and child imagery that appears. In Deuteronomy 32:10, the image is that of an eagle that bears its young on its wings: He found him in a desert region, In an empty howling waste. He engirded him, watched over him, Guarded him as the pupil of his eye. Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings, Gliding down to his young, So did he spread his wings and take him, Bear him along on his pinions; The Lord alone did guide him.… It almost seems to play on the idea that when teaching its young to fly, the eagle will push them out of the nest, swoop under them, bear them up for awhile over and over until they get the idea. So God is repeatedly testing and correcting the Israelites until they are ready for the Promised Land. So Deuteronomy's content, which are these farewell speeches and the death and the burial of Moses, are a fitting capstone to the Pentateuchal narrative. But at the same time, Deuteronomy really does not bring closure to this narrative, because at the end of Deuteronomy, the promises still are not fulfilled. The people are still outside the land. Some have suggested that this is quite purposeful. It points to an exilic date for the work's final composition: that is to say when it was finally redacted, the redactors were in exile, writing for a people living in exile. And the Deuteronomist wants to make it clear that it is fidelity to the Torah, rather than residence in the land that is critically important. But in any event, Deuteronomy is not simply the concluding book of the Pentateuch, or the story that began in Genesis; it's also the first part of a much larger, longer literary work, as I mentioned last time, a work that runs from Deuteronomy through to the end of 2 Kings. And we are going to consider today the program and the work of this so-called Deuteronomistic school. But before we do that, I wanted to just make a few concluding remarks about source theory and the Pentateuch. We have talked about the Documentary Hypothesis. We have talked about the different sources that scholars believe they have been able to identify as comprising the five books of the Pentateuch. And one of the things I mentioned a couple of times are some of the debates that occur on the question of dating. There is a great deal of ideological baggage that is involved in the dating of the sources. One of the issues that I think is a real problem is the fact that the Priestly source, P, is so often misjudged and maligned. I hope that the little bit of time that we have spent on the Priestly materials gave you some appreciation of its transformation of older Israelite rituals and traditions into symbolic practices that would communicate basic convictions about morality, convictions about holiness. I hope it gave you a sense of its communal ethic as opposed to an individual morality, the idea that the actions of every individual have an impact on society as a whole. But the anti-priest, anti-cult sentiment, of European Protestantism, is apparent in the history of biblical scholarship in the last few centuries. And it is apparent in that scholarship's negative assessment of the Priestly source of the Bible. So for Wellhausen, the Priestly source, which emphasizes cult and ritual--logically it had to represent a late degenerate stage in the evolution of Israelite religion, because priestly ritualistic cultic practices, these are degenerations. These are movements away from true spirit-filled religion in his view. So according to Wellhausen, the early period of ancient Israel must have been characterized by a free, more natural form of religion, an intimate relationship with God, unencumbered or unsullied by the legalistic cultic obsessions of priests and cult. He argued that in 586, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the people were taken into exile in Babylon, that was when, in Babylon, the priests were able to assume control, and they were able to play on the exiles' overwhelming feelings of guilt and failure. The priests were able to construct a new identity and religion that stressed the sinfulness of the people, and the need for ritual purity and ritual observance and legalism as the road back to God. And they were able to write themselves back into the narratives and stories of Israel's past. And this, according to Wellhausen, was a degeneration. Well, this reconstruction of the evolution of Israelite history, Israelite religion, excuse me, is really driven more by theological prejudice than it is by historical evidence. And it stems from an obvious projection of the Protestant-Catholic tension onto Israelite history. It also is driven very much by a secessionist account of Judaism as being something that was moribund at the time of Jesus. Jesus came and revived this as a spirit-filled religion again, when it had decayed and withered and degenerated like a dead tree, as Wellhausen refers to it. This isn't to say that all scholars who date P to the post-exilic period are motivated by the same problematic assumptions. That is certainly not the case. There are scholars of all stripes and allegiances who view P as late; and there is some very good objective evidence for dating parts of P to the post-exilic period, just as there is good objective evidence for dating parts of D and the other sources to the post-exilic period. So when it comes to dating the sources, certainly I would say all scholars agree that the Priestly materials reach their final form in the exile or post-exilic period. So that is the sixth century, right? (You are going to find out, we are going to return from exile in the 530s, o.k.?) So when we talk about the post-exilic period, we are talking about the period after the return. So the period of the exile is the sixth century, the bulk of the middle of the sixth century. So it certainly reached its final form in that period , as did Deuteronomy, and the Pentateuch probably generally. Nevertheless, there are many data that suggest that the Priestly sources retain very early strata, just as D contains pre-exilic or early material. P espouses a communal ethic, and post-exilic priests are going to turn increasingly to an individual ethic. Many sections of P do not seem to assume a central sanctuary. Remember that the idea of the central sanctuary really took hold in 622, with Josiah and Josiah's reform. So it becomes a real watershed for us in dating texts: texts that are happy with the existence of shrines throughout the land of Israel are probably pre-Josiah, pre-622, pre-exilic. Texts that insist on a central sanctuary are probably Josiah's time or later. And there are many sections of P that don't seem to assume a central sanctuary. There are sections of P that do seem to assume a central sanctuary. More significantly, I think, P contains no universal ban on intermarriage. It does not employ its purity laws or language to mark an inseparable boundary between classes within Israel or between Israelites and gentile others. The use of purity and purity language to inscribe boundaries between Israel and other nations is very characteristic of the post-exilic period. We are going to see that when we get there. So it is very hard to understand P's silence in this regard, if it stems entirely from the post-exilic, priestly circles. So I think that instead of charting an evolution or a degeneration--as I have over on the side of the board- -an evolution or a degeneration from JE, the pure spirit-filled religion, to D, the humanitarian, ethical religion, to P, cultic obsessiveness and guilt-ridden legalism, as is done or implied in some classical source theory (some, not all), it may be better to see these three as really representing three distinct and roughly contemporaneous strands of ancient Israelite tradition and experience told from their own perspectives. These materials were transmitted and developed by different circles within Israelite society over centuries, and they crystallized at different times. JE has fragments that are quite old, but it probably reached its final form before the centralization of the sanctuary. It is still comfortable with the existence of many sacred places throughout the land, so probably before 622. Deuteronomy contains northern traditions from before the fall of Israel, which was in 722, but it was clearly finalized in the exile. There are many passages that make it clear that it's written from an exilic perspective. And the Priestly source, likewise, contains many, many older traditions, but reached its full and final form in the exilic or post-exilic period. So each of these complex, multi-layered sources--in each one of them you can find different layers--each one possesses its own emphases, its own agenda, its own perspectives. Sometimes they complement one another. Sometimes they challenge and contradict one another, but they are not best seen as linear, as telling a neat, linear story about Israelite religion flowering and fading. Their diversity has not been flattened or homogenized by the final editor of the text. It has been preserved in a manner that stimulates reflection and debate. So with those concluding remarks, we are going to move on now to the second major section of the Bible. We have been discussing the Torah, or Pentateuch, and now we are moving on to the section of the Bible that is referred to as the Prophets. This section of the Bible is divided into two parts we refer to as the "Former Prophets" and then the "Latter Prophets." The Former Prophets will concern us for the next few lectures. And the Former Prophets include the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. They read as a historical narrative. This material is a theologically oriented account of Israel's history from the conquest of Canaan, or what is represented as the conquest of Canaan, to the destruction of the state by the Babylonians in 587-586 BCE. This material is therefore crucial background to reading the Latter Prophets. Now the Latter Prophets is a collection of books, each of which bears the name of the individual whose prophecies it purports to contain. These prophets delivered their oracles at critical junctures in Israel's history, in the nation's history, so their words are only going to make sense to us if we first understand the particular historical crises that they are addressing. And that historical narrative that runs from Joshua through 2 Kings provides that information. It tells us of the critical junctures in the nation's history, and that will help us then slot the different prophets in. So the Former Prophets, or the historical books, like the books of the Bible that we have already studied, contain various older sources that have been put together by a later hand. We have an editor or a group of editors who reworked these older sources. They were oral traditions. Some of them were probably from royal archives and so on. And they wove them together into the form that we have now, and that is a process that is referred to as redaction or editing. The anonymous person or group or school that's responsible for the final composition, the final redaction of these books, would put the materials together by inserting verses and speeches that would frame the older sources and link them together, give them some sort of common uniting thread. The redactors' linking and framing passages and their revisions of the older sources exhibit certain common features. They harp on the same themes over and over again; they use some of the same language over and over again; they share certain assumptions. And those features and assumptions have a lot in common with the book of Deuteronomy, a lot in common with the book of Deuteronomy; and that is what led the German scholar, Martin Noth, to surmise that Deuteronomy and these historical books really form a unit, so that Deuteronomy not only looks back and finishes off the Pentateuchal narrative, it looks forward as the beginning of really the historical account that is to follow. J, E and P really seem to come to an end here; there is some debate about this, but because the interpretive history that runs from Joshua to 2 Kings is based on ideals that are set out in the book of Deuteronomy, we refer to the person or the persons who redacted this whole unit as the Deuteronomistic historian, or the Deuteronomistic School. The whole unit, as a whole, was redacted after 622: that's clear. It assumes and insists upon the centralization of the cult. The last dated event that is mentioned in 2 Kings is something that occurred in 562. That was when King Jehoiachin was released from prison in Babylon, in 562. So the work was probably concluded shortly after that date: so in exile or towards the end of the exilic period. Martin Noth assumed that there was one editor. Other scholars have assumed that there were two, or even more, successive editions of this history because there are multiple perspectives that seem to be represented. But the last seems to be an exilic perspective, the perspective of someone sitting in exile and we will be returning to that in a future lecture. Some of the books within this very large unit, or at least the traditions within this very large unit, are less influenced by Deuteronomy and its themes and its concerns. Some contain clearly pre-Deuteronomistic elements and materials, if you will. But I encourage you to read the excellent introduction to the Prophets, the section of the Bible "The Prophets" which was written by Marc Brettler in your Jewish Study Bible. I think it is an excellent introduction to the complexity of this material. The most salient feature of the Deuteronomistic School is the conviction that Israel's residence in the land is a function of its obedience or disobedience to the covenant with Yahweh. And that conviction is going to color its presentation, its evaluation and its interpretation of Israel's history and her kings from Joshua right through to 2 Kings. Yehezkel Kaufmann uses the term "historiosophy" which I have written up here, historiosophy, to describe this material. Where a historian might simply record events (as if that is such a simple thing to do, but let's go with that for a moment)--a historian might simply record events, however selectively or partially, might try to indicate cause and effect where possible; but a historiosophy is a more conscious philosophy of history. It's seeking to ascertain the meaning of events to draw larger philosophical, ideological conclusions from the events of history, and to point to the larger purpose or design of history, not to say just what happened, but to say why it happened and what it means for us today that it did happen. So the Deuteronomistic history is not simply a history of Israel until the destruction of Jerusalem, it is a historiosophy. It is making an argument and it's attempting to communicate the meaning and the significance of the events of that time, and it does so through a pattern, a literary pattern we will see, of reward and punishment. This is an important point, and as we begin to go through the material, we will be coming back to this. We will return to this idea. There are certain key features of Deuteronomistic thought that are evident from Joshua through 2 Kings. One is the belief in the divine election of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the city that is referred to in Deuteronomy when it says God will choose a place to cause his name to dwell. In the Deuteronomistic books, that place is going to be Jerusalem. There is also a belief in the divine election of David as the king of Israel and his dynasty. Now, it's interesting because the other four books of the Pentateuch never mention a king. In Genesis through Numbers none of the legal materials say: when you have a king this is what he shall do. It is only the book of Deuteronomy that assumes or prepares for a monarchy and contains legislation for a king, and the things that he should do. So this, again, underscores the connection between Deuteronomy and the following books. Deuteronomy assumes a king. It is being written and redacted at a time when there is a king in Israel, there have been kings in Israel, and it is providing laws for the construction of an ideal monarchy. So David, the theme of David as the elected king of God, David also as the ideal king, is something else that is a theme of these books. Another theme that we see in these books or feature of the Deuteronomistic School is the emphasis on what we call the Yahwist prophets -- prophets like Elijah and Elisha. These prophets are held up as heroes and champions of religious purity. They are completely against any kind of mixture of Yahweh worship with other elements, any kind of syncretism. The other thing we see in the Deuteronomistic material is a preference for Judah, the Southern Kingdom, as compared with a very negative presentation of the Northern Kingdom, Israel. The Northern Kingdom Israel is going to come in for very, very bad press at the hands of the Deuteronomistic writers, which shows that they probably favor or come from Judah. So the northern kings are going to be uniformly denigrated. They are going to be denigrated because they maintain cults that rival the central sanctuary of Jerusalem. And this is going to be what does them in. The other theme that we see throughout the Deuteronomistic material is the negative presentation of the Canaanites. But we will talk more about who these Canaanites were and how complicated, in fact, that presentation is. Now, the books of Joshua and Judges that open the Deuteronomistic history, these books recount or relate the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelite tribes, and the early years of the settlement: that's in Judges. To gain an understanding of some of the issues involved, and the emergence of a tribal structure in the land, it's helpful to know something about the geography of Israel, which is why I have handed out for you a couple of different maps, but one that gives you physical features (and that is on the top). It has often been pointed out that in the past 4000 years more wars have been fought for the possession of the tiny strip of land known as Canaan, or the land of Israel, or Palestine, than have been fought for almost any other area in the world. And in the ancient world, the reason for this was that this very small rectangle--;it's about 150 miles long and 70 miles wide, about the size of Rhode Island--this very small rectangle lies on the way to anywhere worth going in the Ancient Near East. You've got Egypt over here. You've got Asia Minor up here, and you've got Mesopotamia over here. Not a tremendous amount of inherent value in this strip of land, but it is important for where you could go by traveling through it. So you have three main trade routes that cross the country, and they were used by trading caravans that would carry gold and grain and spices and textiles and other goods between Egypt and the rest of the Fertile Crescent and up into Asia Minor. So control of these international highways brought a great deal of wealth to the area, but the central location was a double-edged sword, because in times of peace it would bring prosperity, but, of course, in times of war the land was perpetually invaded as armies would crisscross the land going off to do battle with the great powers. So on their way to conquests in Egypt, or Asia Minor or Mesopotamia, armies would tramp through the land. And that explains the succession of rulers that have held the region: the Egyptians, the Amorites, the Israelites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Greek Ptolemies, the Seleucids, the Romans, and the list continues as we go on into the medieval and the modern periods. Now, despite the fact that this is a very small piece of land, it boasts great geographical diversity. So there are three main geographical subdivisions. You can see them on your map, and they really run in strips from north to south. If you look at your map you will see first on the west side, you've got a low coastal plain. It is about 20 or 30 miles wide. It is the coastal plain, and that provides, or that is the main highway out of Egypt or down to Egypt. That area was controlled by Egypt at the purported time of the Exodus. Running north to south, next to that coastal plain, is a region of low mountains. These low mountains are cut by some valleys that sort of run east-west: you will see one there, the Valley of Jezreel, in particular; that was a particularly fertile valley. So the valleys that cut through the mountains are extremely fertile. The Plain of Megiddo also joins with the Valley of Jezreel. That is the most fertile part of the country, but it was also the site of many of the most bloody battles in Israel's history. Then next to that north-south central hill country, you've got also running north to south, what we call the Great Jordan Rift Valley. It goes the entire length of the country. And the Jordan River runs through this valley. It rises in the Sea of Galilee or the Kinneret in the north, and then it flows about 65 miles, I believe, down to the Dead Sea. At the northern extreme of the Rift Valley, is Mount Hermon, which is the highest point. It is snow covered, Mount Hermon. And that is the highest point in Israel, it rises about 10,000 feet above sea level. The central mountain area, those are between 4000 and 10,000 feet above sea level. As you move from the central area over to Jerusalem--Jerusalem is about 2,500 feet above sea level--but then as you continue moving east towards the Rift Valley, that area is dramatically lower -- and you feel it as you travel the road there, just how quickly it drops, so that by the time you get to the Sea of Galilee you are 700 feet below sea level, and the Dead Sea is nearly 1300 feet below sea level. That is the lowest point on the earth's land surface--so this dramatic drop in just a very short geographical area. Up in the north, the river is surrounded by very lush vegetation on both sides, but there is no life 65 miles south down by the Dead Sea. This is because the water is 25% salts and minerals--although I hear they found some sort of bacteria or something there, so I guess I should not say anymore that there is no life--but essentially there is no life we would care about in the Dead Sea area. So it is a very desolate area. And tradition identifies this as the site of Sodom and Gomorrah. The area around the Sea is basically semi-desert. We call this the wilderness, the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, the wilderness of Judah or Judea. So within this relatively tiny area there are radically diverse regions, and this fact held important implications for Israel's history. Unity was difficult. Being somewhat isolated, the inhabitants of each region developed a distinctive economic and cultural character. You have the small settled farmer in the more fertile areas. You have semi-nomadic shepherds. You have city dwellers. You have merchants and traders who are handling the commerce on the trade routes and enjoying broader cultural contacts. So that's the geographical setting for what we are about to read in the Book of Joshua. The structure of Joshua is really somewhat simple. We can really divide it into two major parts. The first 12 chapters form a unit that conveys the invasion and conquest. There are certain important elements. In chapter 2 we have Joshua sending out spies to scout out the land. In chapter 3 we have the account of crossing the Jordan River. In chapter 6 we have the Battle of Jericho. The story of the Battle of Jericho is really a composite of two accounts that have been woven together into a single narrative. So in one of them Joshua's warriors seem to march silently around the city seven times. In another, the priests carry the Ark around the city 13 times, so scholars think there are two different accounts here woven together. Chapter 8 describes the victory at a place called Ai, which is near Jericho. Chapter 9 tells the story of the Gibeonites who join the Israelites; they are a local group that seems to join them. And then 10 and 11 give us two further military campaigns. Towards the end of 11, we have summary statements. In Joshua 10:40, we read: "So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb"--;that's the desert here to the south--;"and the lowland"--so you have the hill country, the low land--;"and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed". Chapter 11 goes on to stress that Joshua completed the task that had been begun by Moses. In verse 15: "Just as the Lord had commanded His servant Moses, so Moses had charged Joshua, and so Joshua did; he left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses." And again, in verse 23, the insistence: "Thus Joshua conquered the whole country, just as the Lord had promised Moses; and Joshua assigned it to Israel to share according to their tribal divisions, and the land had rest from war." So Chapters 13 and 21 go on to describe the division of the land among the tribes and then we have some sort of tidying up at the end. The remaining chapters are appendices: 23 is a farewell address, and 24 is a renewal of the covenant at Shechem, which brings everything to a nice conclusion. So the narrative in the first part of Joshua, Joshua 2 to 12, describes the invading Israelites as an organized confederation of 12 tribes whose conquest is accomplished in a few decisive battles under the military leadership of Joshua. And the disunited Canaanites put up little or no resistance: they're paralyzed by a fear that is sent by God. All of those who were conquered are put to the ban or the herem--that's the sacred devotion of objects and persons to God, which entailed killing them, so they were utterly destroyed. So the first half of the book of Joshua contains a streamlined, idealized account according to which the Israelites managed in a relatively short period to take the central hill country, confining the Philistines to a little strip here on the coastal plain. We will come to the Philistines in a minute. The account of the conquest in Joshua 2 through 12, is concerned to express the basic idea that Israel's victories would not have been possible without Yahweh, without his wondrous help. It was Yahweh who divided the Jordan before them. It was Yahweh who broke down the walls of Jericho. It was Yahweh who put fear in the hearts of the Canaanites. Yahweh was present at every battle. The Ark was a visible sign of his presence and it marched before them. And soon after the conquest representatives of all of the tribes of Israel are going to meet and make a solemn covenant at Shechem to be the people of Yahweh, to worship him alone. And according to the Book of Joshua, Israel's tribal structure assumed its classical form at this time. This is a very neat picture of the rapid conquest of Canaan, but it's at odds with statements elsewhere in Joshua and in the book of Judges. For example, the victories in Chapters 2 through 10 are confined to a very small area, what would actually be the tribe of Benjamin basically, so just one small area. In Joshua 13:1: Joshua 13 opens with the statement that Joshua was old, advanced in years, and there was much of the land remaining to be possessed. In Joshua 10 (which is in the first part of Joshua--Joshua 10) verses 36-39 report the conquest of several cities in the south, including Hebron and Debir. But in Judges, we read that they had not been captured: they were captured later, after Joshua's death. Joshua 12:10 reports the defeat of the king of Jerusalem. In Judges 1:8 and 21, we read that the people of Judah did this (conquered the king of Jerusalem) and that despite that victory they failed to actually drive out the inhabitants, the Jebusites, who lived there. And it is not until King David, 200 years later that, in fact, we will read about the capture of Jerusalem. Judges 1 gives a long list of the places from which the Canaanites were not expelled. Also archaeological evidence contradicts the picture in Joshua. In the Ancient Near East, destroyed cities tended to be leveled, and then a new city would just be built on top of the ruins, and you would have these slowly rising mounds--each one of those is called a tell (so you may have heard of Tell Dor?). These are mounds which represent the successive layers of destroyed and rebuilt cities. And excavations will reveal the destruction layers under the floor of new cities. So following the biblical account, we would expect evidence of a thirteenth century destruction of Canaanite cities. And archaeologists for a long time were convinced that they would find these destruction layers. But they were disappointed. They have found really no evidence of extensive conquest and destruction in thirteenth and twelfth century archaeological layers. Some of the sites that are said to be destroyed by Joshua and the Israelites weren't even occupied in this period, the late Bronze Age, beginning of the Iron Age; the Iron Age begins around 1200. Excavations at Jericho and Ai indicate that both of these towns were laid waste at least 200 years before the probable time of Joshua; so there weren't even any walls in Jericho at the time of Joshua. Of 20 identifiable sites that were said to be conquered or captured by Joshua and the next generations, only two show destruction layers for this time, Hazor and Beth-el. And yet interestingly enough, Hazor's capture described in Joshua is contradicted elsewhere in the Bible, because in Judges 4 and 5, it is still a Canaanite city. It is said there that it is still a Canaanite city and Joshua failed to take it. So the conclusion one can draw from all of this is that Joshua 2 through 12 is a kind of ideological construction, the significance and the purpose of which we will come back to in a moment. But clearly the formation of the nation state, Israel, was much more complicated than the picture that's presented in Joshua 2 through 12. Scholars have proposed three possible models to explain the formation of Israel. The first is an immigration model. This was first posed by German scholars. Since the main Canaanite cities that existed in the land at that time were fortified or walled cities down on the plains, the Israelites, it's thought according to this model, would have entered and they would have occupied the very sparsely populated central highlands. They would slowly have begun to take control of the plains coming down from the highlands. Well, we do know that at the end of the late Bronze Age, beginning of the Iron Age, around 1200, this was a time of great upheaval throughout the Mediterranean world. We have the collapse of Mycenaean civilization. We have the Trojan Wars. The Hittites are invading Asia Minor, modern day Turkey to the north. And these upheavals are leading to mass migrations, migrations of people. Many are sailing from mainland Greece and from the Greek Islands, and they are flooding this area, the coasts of Phoenicia, the coasts of Canaan and Egypt. And these people are spoken about in a lot of our ancient sources. They are referred to as "peoples of the sea," coming in from the sea, from islands and coastal areas of the northeastern Mediterranean. One of these peoples of the sea, one of these groups, inhabited an area here: Perasta or Pelasta. The word "Palestine" comes from this, Peresta, Palesta or Philistines. It is all the same root. And so a group if these sea peoples comes in and occupies this area. They will be the Philistines, the area that is now the Gaza Strip. And they found the five Philistine cities that you will hear about increasingly in the book of Judges: Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath, Ashdod and Ekron. The idea of the immigration model is that Hebrew settlement would have probably occurred at about the same time in the latter part of the thirteenth century. The Hebrews could take advantage of all of these upheavals and the weakened hold of Egypt. Remember Egypt had control of this area but their grasp was weakening with the flood of people coming in from the sea and other migrations. Their hold was weakening and the Hebrews would have been able to take advantage of that and enter in and occupy areas in the central highlands. The problem with the immigration model, again, is the archaeological record. Archaeologists have, indeed, found several sites in the central hill country -- which is pretty exciting--and they were clearly newly established in the thirteenth, twelfth, eleventh centuries. So clearly something new was happening in the central highlands at this time. They extend throughout the land, but mostly the central highlands. And these are thought to be Israelite, especially because they appear in places that the Bible identifies as strongholds of Israel. Remember also, you have the Merneptah stele of 1204, in which the Egyptian pharaoh boasts that he managed to wipe out Israel. It is obviously a hyperbolic boast, but the point is it shows that there was an identifiable entity, Israel in Canaan, by 1204. These new thirteenth century settlements, however, are in their material culture, that is to say their pots and their jars and their houses, entirely Canaanite. The inhabitants seem to have been peasant farmers, like other Canaanites. One interesting difference is the absence of any pig bones, which is kind of interesting. But in any event, this suggests that these settlements were established peacefully, not by a group coming in and conquering. Maybe they emerged from within, rather than being established by peoples immigrating from without. So there are two other models, then, models different from the immigration model, two other models for understanding the formation of Israel, that build on this archaeological evidence. The second model is what we call the revolt model. The revolt model proposes that Israel began really as a social revolution within Canaan. We do have a set of letters. These are letters that date from the fourteenth century BCE. They were written by people in Canaan to the Pharaoh in Egypt--remember the Pharaoh still has control over Canaan at this time. And in these letters there are lots of complaints about groups that are causing turmoil and upset in Canaan. They are challenging Egypt's rule. And these people are called Habiru, or Abiru. They were not an ethnic group so much as a marginal social group of people in revolt, if you will. Some have suggested that Israelites escaping from Egypt may have joined with these disaffected Canaanites in revolt, known as Habiru, these trouble makers, to establish their own settlements and to worship a liberator god, Yahweh, rather than follow the rule of Pharaoh. A final model, then, is a model of gradual emergence, which simply holds that Israelites were basically Canaanites who had developed a separate identity and settled increasingly in the central highlands. They withdrew and settled in this area. The theory doesn't try to explain why they separated. We don't know. Perhaps it was disaffection. Perhaps they were pushed out by the invading sea peoples. And maybe it was something else. But they withdrew for some reason. And how and why they took up the worship of Yahweh or the cult of Yahweh isn't really clear; but it seems to have been what marked them as distinct from other Canaanites. The Yahweh cult may have been introduced by people escaping slavery from Egypt. Most scholars see the Exodus story as evidence for the presence of some escaped slaves among this community. So the important thing is that the Hebrews at this stage were probably not a united people. Various elements went into the final mix that would emerge as the nation Israel: local Canaanites who, for some reason, withdrew and established their own settlements, with a continuous material culture, and established agricultural lifestyle--you have them. You have escaping slaves from Egypt. And remember, we do have some evidence of destruction from outside, so there could also have been some foreigners coming in and destroying and settling. It even seems that some local foreigners were admitted to the community. We read of Midianites who covenant into the community . We read of Kenites who covenant into the community. And archaeology supports this picture of merging of peoples, a picture of the merging of peoples, rather than conquest or even large-scale immigration, because the new settlements in this period show such continuity with the past, not a complete break, not the initiation of something radically new. And, again, some of the elements within this group may have brought with them the story of a miraculous escape from Egypt. They may have understood this to be the work of Yahweh, a god known probably from southern regions. And so the mixed group that would join together to become Israel accepted Yahweh, though perhaps not exclusively, and adopted the national story of the Exodus as its own at some point. The Hebrew tribes, themselves, were likely still in the process of formation. But the tribal structure of Israelite society that would develop would be strengthened by the natural division of the land into these separate geographical areas: that only reinforced the tribalization of society. And these local tribes probably did assimilate elements of the local population. We've really seen already the ethnic mix of various elements reflected in religious imagery and institutions. We've seen that Yahweh is represented in terms reminiscent of the tent dweller, El, the god of the semi-nomadic tent-dwelling Hebrews and their patriarchs, and certainly a god of the Canaanite pantheon. We have seen that Yahweh is also represented in terms reminiscent of Baal of the Canaanite pantheon, the God of the settled Canaanite population. In fact, in the book of Judges, you will read of a temple to Israel's God, the God of the Covenant, and that temple is called the Temple to the God of the Covenant or Baal Berit. The word "berit" means covenant. It is referred to as Baal Berit; it's referred to as El Berit or Baal El Berit; and this is in reference to Yahweh. These terms are all used to describe the God of the Covenant. So in short, we really may hypothesize a union of cultural, religious and ethnic elements: local Canaanite agriculturists, semi-nomadic Hebrews perhaps, of the Exodus, escaped slaves, perhaps Habiru/Abiru, a disaffected group that is in revolt. All of these would come together to produce what would be a new political and religious reality called Israel. If so, why does the book of Joshua provide such a different account, one of outside conquest by means of a war led by the hosts of the Lord? Because in this account military skill is much less important than ritual preparation and purity. The Israelites march around Jericho for six days with seven priests carrying seven horns and the Ark of the Covenant, and then with a blast and a shout the walls tumble. The conquest is represented as a miraculous victory by God. That's emphasized in Joshua 24:12. It was God, not the sword or the bow, that drove out the enemy. And why the claim of the utter destruction of the Canaanites when evidence points to close Canaanite origins? This practice, which I mentioned before and is known as herem or the ban, is not unique to Israel. I know some of you have studied it in sections: you looked at the inscription of King Mesha, King Mesha of Moab. There is a very important, famous inscription from the ninth century BCE, written by King Mesha of Moab Moab is to the southeast of the Dead Sea, so King Mesha of Moab. And in the inscription he writes, he boasts: "And the god Chemosh said to me, go, take Nebo from Israel. So I went by night and fought against it from the break of dawn until noon, taking it and slaying all 7000 men, boys, women and girls and maid servants, for I had devoted them to destruction for the god Ashtar Chemosh", referring to herem. It is likely that such claims are hyperbolic in Moab, and it is likely they were hyperbolic in Israel. But that does not lessen the shock value for a modern reader, even though war in our time is no less savage and no less brutal. But the important question here is why a biblical writer or editor would want to insist that the Canaanites were to be completely destroyed. I think assertions of national identity and independence are often predicated on differentiation from others. If the Israelites were, in fact, basically Canaanites, who had withdrawn from the larger collective, who insisted on the overlordship of Yahweh, then Canaanites who did not join them in this were a special threat to the new Yahwism. This same dynamic of intense sibling rivalry appears again in the first few centuries of the Common Era, when some Jews separated from others and in differentiating themselves and creating their own identity as Christians, felt it necessary to engage in devastatingly vituperative and violent rhetoric against their fellow Jews. The interesting thing, however, is that we must not ignore another voice that's in the biblical text, and it is a voice that adds a level of complexity to this picture. Because alongside the idealized portrayal of the Israelite conquest in the first half of the book of Joshua, alongside the call for the destruction of all Canaanites, we find interesting tales of alliances and incorporation of various Canaanite groups. Indeed, who was one the heroines of the Battle of Jericho, if not a Canaanite woman, a prostitute no less, named Rahab. She declares her faith in Yahweh and she delivers the city into Joshua's hands. The biblical writer saw fit to preserve and include this account of a heroic Canaanite prostitute. Another Canaanite group, the Gibeonites, trick the Israelites into making a covenant with them, and it is a covenant the Israelites then feel bound to observe. Michael Coogan has described such stories as etiological tales. They are attempts to explain the fact that there are lots of Canaanite groups included in Israel; and we need to understand and explain that reality as much as we are conveying an ideological account in which all Canaanites are obliterated or destroyed. At the very least, these stories raise questions about the biblical portrait or portrayal of invasion and conquest. And at most, they illustrate the biblical writers' taste for literary subversion yet again, something we will see over and over. The imperative of preserving a distinct identity--based on giving up the worship of other gods or older gods and observing all that is written in the law of Moses--is reiterated in Joshua's farewell address in Joshua 23, and in the covenant renewal ceremony in 24. And the central idea is that there is one proper response to God's mighty acts on behalf of Israel, and that is resolute observance of the book of the Torah of Moses, without intermingling with the peoples that remain. So in Joshua 23:7-8: "Do not utter the names of their gods or swear by them; do not serve them or bow down to them, but hold fast to the Lord your God as you have done this day." And verses 11 to 13: For you own sakes, therefore, be most mindful to love the Lord your God. For should you turn away and attach yourselves to the remnant of these nations--to those that are left among you--and intermarry with them, you joining them and they joining you, know for certain that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations out before you; they shall become a snare and a trap for you, a scourge to your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the Lord your God has given you. In 24, the Israelites are assembled at Shechem to renew the covenant, and Joshua recounts God's mighty deeds on behalf of Israel and exhorts them to choose whom they will serve: Yahweh, who has done all of this for them so undeservedly, or the gods of those whose lands they are settling in. And the people are warned of God's jealousy. He demands exclusive loyalty. He will not tolerate any deviation in the service of alien gods. The ban on intermarriage here is quite specific. It is directed against Canaanites only, not all non-Israelites, for a very specific reason: religious purity. Marriage with Canaanites, the people closest to you, specifically, will lead to the worship of that spouse's god, and Israel is to show undivided loyalty to God, or God will take the gift of the land from her as he did the Canaanites. One last remark for you to think about. Consider the position of the Israelites in the sixth century, the time of the final editing of the Deuteronomistic history. The Israelites are sitting in exile in Babylon. They are trying to make sense of the tragedy that has befallen them, the loss of their land. Consider how a text like Joshua 23 and Joshua 24 would go a long way towards explaining their fate while retaining faith in Yahweh. We're going to return to this when we reach the conclusion of the Deuteronomistic history in 2 Kings.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_13_The_Deuteronomistic_History_Prophets_and_Kings_1_and_2_Samuel.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: One thing that kept cropping up , and it is something that crops up every time I teach this course, and I should always say something about it preemptively, is just a terminological issue. Israelites are not Israelis. The word "Israeli," term "Israeli," refers to a citizen of the modern state of Israel. So there are no Israelis before the year 1948. Okay. And we use Israelite to refer to the ancient inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Israel. So that is an important distinction. I know you hear "Israelis" and so that is just a term that people thought would apply to anyone who inhabited a place called Israel. But Israeli and Israelite are used precisely in order to make that distinction between the ancient and the modern period. Okay. So we are talking about Israelites. And while we are on the subject, we are not talking about Jews yet, either. We cannot really use the term "Jew." It is not historically accurate for the period that we have been dealing with in the Bible. When we get towards the very end of the biblical period, we'll see that when Persia conquers and reconstitutes this area, or designates as a province, this area as Yehud (so the Persians are going to be the ones to create a province called Yehud in this area, including Jerusalem) they will allow the Israelites who are in exile to go back and live there, and they will become Yehudites. And this is going to be where the word Jew comes from. But that is not going to be historically accurate before the end of the sixth century. And even then it is still a technical term having to do with living in the Province of Yehud. It is not an ethnic term. The word "Yehud" or "Jew" does not become an ethnic term for quite some time. So "Israelites" is the correct term for the group that we are dealing with here. Hebrew is not bad, either, it basically is a linguistic term that refers to people who speak Hebrew. And so the Hebrews--it is something of a social-ethnic term, but based mainly on the linguistic feature of speaking Hebrew. Okay. So no Israelis, only Israelites. All right. We were reaching the end of Joshua, and we are going to be moving on to Judges today. And the Bible describes the early Israelite socio-political unit as the tribe. And this is what is going to be featured in the last part of the Book of Joshua. We are going to see that tribes are territorial units. A tribe is attached to a territory. Within the tribe you have clan elders, and the clan elders are the ones who dispense justice. They make decisions regarding the general welfare of the tribe. So the second half of the Book of Joshua--so the first half recounts the conquest, and then the second half recounts the division of the land among the 12 tribes, who, it is claimed, were descended from the 12 sons of Jacob. We have a couple of different lists of the tribes in the Bible, so if you take a look some time, you might want to compare the list that is in Genesis 29 or 30. It is pretty much the same list that is in Genesis 49. These are in blessings. Patriarchs will very often give blessings of all their children, so you look at the names of the children and you will see the list of twelve. You have the six sons of Leah. You have the four sons of the two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, and the two sons of Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin. And that is probably the oldest list that we have. But if you compare it to Numbers 26 and the list that is in Joshua with the distribution of the land, you will see that Levi or Levi is not included, presumably because the Levites, who were to function as a priestly class in Israel, they have no land allotment. They are supported through the cultic practices and the perquisites that come from the sacrifices. And so instead of the Levites, we find that there are tribes named for the two sons of Joseph. So there is no Joseph tribe per se. Joseph's two sons are Ephraim and Manasseh, and this is how we then reach the Number 12. So there is no Levi in the later lists, but the Joseph tribes have been split into Ephraim and Manasseh, if you will, who are said to be the two sons of Joseph. So the consensus is, the scholarly consensus is, that what you have in Canaan is an alliance of tribes, perhaps not precisely twelve, you know. At different times there might have been a different number and different groups that came together at different times. But you have these tribes who are worshiping Yahweh, perhaps not exclusively as we have seen. And they have some loose obligations of mutual defense in these different alliances. The Book of Joshua presents this very idealized portrait of these twelve tribes who are preexistent. They come into the Land of Canaan already formed basically as twelve tribes. They are united with one another by their covenant with Yahweh, and they conquer the land in concert. But there are other elements of the biblical narrative, as we have already begun to talk about, and will continue to talk about today as we move into Judges, which really suggest there was much more sporadic cooperation among the tribes. You never have more than one or two really acting in concert until the very end of the Book of Judges. And so this suggests that there really was no super-tribal government or coordination at this early stage. The Ark is said to have circulated among the different tribal territories, it did not rest permanently in the territory of one tribe until somewhat late in the period--it comes to rest at a place called Shiloh. Shiloh. And it seems that only in extraordinary cases would you have the tribes acting together, perhaps by decision of the tribal elders. But superimposed upon the authority of the elders is the authority of certain inspired individuals. And these are known as judges, and it is the exploits of these individuals that are recorded in the Book of Judges. And we will turn to the Book of Judges now. The Book of Judges is set in that transitional period between the death of Joshua and the establishment of a monarchic system. It is about a 200-year period, from about 1200 to 1000 or so. It is an imaginative and embellished reconstruction of that period of transition. We'll also see it is a very ideologically laden reconstruction. So the stories depict local tribal skirmishes, rather than confrontations between nations. You have pretty much skirmishes with groups around the country. And that makes a lot of sense for this 200-year period, when Canaan is making a transition. A transition from city-states in the Bronze Age to the emerging nation of what will be Israel, next to it Philistia, on the east side, Aram. So we have--nations are going to be coming into being by the end of this period, but there is this 200-year transitional period before you get the formation of these independent states. Like Joshua, the Book of Judges consists of various sources that were fused together in a Deuteronomistic framework. I will come back to that. In fact, it is really a collection of individual stories that center on local heroes, several of whom are, interestingly enough, socially marginal. These are pretty scrappy characters. You've got the illegitimate son of a prostitute. You've got a bandit. You've got very interesting, colorful, and as I say, socially marginal people. And these stories have a real folkloristic flavor to them. They're full of drama and a lot of local color, local references to places and customs and so on. So if you were to list the stories of the various judges, the major judges--we have six major and six minor judges; the minor judge is just simply a reference to the fact that they judged for a certain period of time. So there are 12 listed in all, I believe) and there are six major judges for whom there is a lengthy story, beginning with Ehud in chapter 3. It is a very funny story. Ehud leads the Israelites against the Moabites; a lot of sort of bathroom humor in that one. In chapters 4 and 5, you have Deborah, who helps the Israelites in battle against certain Canaanite groups. You have three chapters, four chapters, chapters 6-9, recording the adventures of Gideon. Gideon fights against the Midianites. Gideon is interesting. There are signs in his story that he is divinely chosen. There is some evidence of the annunciation of his birth, and some signal that he is divinely chosen. Then in 11 and into a little bit of chapter 12, you have the story of Yiftah or Jephthah, who fights against the Ammonites--very interesting and tragic story of his daughter, which echoes similar sorts of stories in Greek legend. You also have in chapters 13-16, Samson who, of course, fights against the Philistines. Samson is somewhat atypical. He also has a tremendous and fatal weakness for foreign women, and that is a strong theme throughout the Samson stories. We will come back to some of that. Then towards the end: you have some interesting chapters at the end. 17 and 18 tell the story of Micah or Micah, and his idolatrous shrine. And then finally, the quite horrifying and gruesome tale, beginning in chapter 19, going on through 20 and 21-- the story of the Levite's concubine and the civil war. We will come back and talk about some of these in a little more detail. But that is just to give you a sense of the different units that are in the story, that are in the book. And these stories have then been embedded in a Deuteronomistic framework. This framework provides the editor's view and pronouncement on and judgment of the period. Some of the stories seem to have been left pretty much intact themselves. There isn't in many cases, a lot of interference inside the story, only a few interpolations that express the editor's theology of history. But the editor's theology of history is best seen in the preface to the book, which is why I sort of stuck these over to the side, this preface that frames the book. And chapter 1 gives a detailed summary of the situation at the end of Joshua's conquest--taking stock, listing the extensive areas that Joshua had failed to take from the Canaanites, despite the impression that is given by the Book of Joshua (certainly the first part of it) that they did everything they were supposed to have done and fulfilled the commandments to Moses and so on. But here, we get a list of all the places they failed to take from the Canaanites, starting in Judah and moving northward. They tend to always start in the southern area, in Judah, and then list things in a northward direction. Then in Judges 2:1-5, an angel appears before Joshua's death, and the angel recounts God's redemption of the Israelites from Egypt and then quotes God as follows: "I will never break my covenant with you. And you, for your part, must make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you must tear down their altars." That is a phrase that is found in Deuteronomy 12: again, one of those phrases that makes us link Deuteronomy with all of these subsequent books, and we refer to it all as a school, the Deuteronomistic School, because we have these phrases from Deuteronomy that will be peppered throughout the rest of these books. God will be faithful to his covenant, in other words. But it is a two-way street. And if Israel does not do her part, she will be punished. The editor is setting us up with that expectation before we even begin to read an account of what happens. The angel then relates that Israel has already not been obedient, so God has resolved--this is a fait accompli at this point--God has resolved that He will no longer drive the Canaanites out before the Israelites. He will leave them as a snare and a trap to test their resolve and their loyalty. So it is a very far cry from the idealized portrait that we had in the first half of the Book of Joshua. So that opening announcement listing all of the ways in which they had failed to take the land, and the visit by the angel who tells them: you have already failed in so many ways, and so God is not even going to help you to rout the Canaanites any longer--that is followed then in a section from chapter 2:11 through chapter 3:6. And this is a kind of prospective summary, a summary before the fact of the nation's troubles. And this is a passage that expresses the editor's judgment on the nation of this period. "Another generation arose after them, which had not experienced the Lord, or the deeds that He had wrought for Israel. And the Israelites did what was offensive to the Lord," literally what was evil in the eyes of the lord. An important phrase: what was evil in the eyes of the Lord. …They followed other gods, from among the gods of the peoples around them, and bowed down to them; they provoked the Lord….Then the Lord was incensed at Israel, and He handed them over to foes who plundered them…as the Lord had declared and as the Lord had sworn to them; and they were in great distress. Then the Lord raised up leaders [see note 1] who delivered them from those who plundered them. But they did not heed their leaders either; they went astray after other gods and bowed down to them… I am sort of skipping, right? I am condensing all of this. …When the Lord raised up leaders for them, the Lord would be with the leader and would save them from their enemies during the leader's lifetime; for the Lord would be moved to pity by their moanings because of those who oppressed and crushed them. But when the leader died, they would again act basely, even more than the preceding generation--following other gods, worshiping them, and bowing down to them; they omitted none of their practices and stubborn ways. So in short, it is the view of the Deuteronomistic historian expressed here in Judges, that Israel's crises are caused by her infidelity to Yahweh, through the worship of Canaanite gods, and for this sin, God sells the Israelites to their enemies and then, moved to pity when they cry out under the oppression, He raises leaders to deliver Israel. This pattern of sin, punishment, repentance and deliverance through leaders is the recurring pattern throughout the book. It punctuates the transition from each of these leaders that God will raise up. So it is this recurring pattern. This Deuteronomistic perspective, as well as Deuteronomistic ideology, generally, isn't always apparent within the individual stories themselves, as I stressed. Some of them seem to be pre-Deuteronomistic folktales about the exploits of these local heroes. They were popular stories. So Gideon, we'll see, builds an altar despite the fact that we know Deuteronomy insisted on centralized worship and prohibited outlying altars or multiple altars. He is also known, his other name, if you will, is Jerubbaal. It is a name that is made with Baal, meaning Baal will strive, or Baal will contend. So this is an alternate name for Gideon. He erects an idol. The people of Shechem, where he is--after his death they continue to worship Baal Berit, the Baal of the covenant, which is an interesting sort of merger of Baalism and covenantal religion. So you have a lot of these elements that presumably the Deuteronomist would disapprove. The story of Samson also appears to be largely pre-Deuteronomistic. It was again probably a very popular, entertaining folktale about a legendary strong man. You know, he can lift up the gates of the city. He can tie the tails of 300 foxes with torches and so on. But this great strong man is undone by his one weakness, which is a weakness for foreign women, particularly Philistine women (at least we think Delilah was Philistine). And that proves to be his downfall. So you can see in a way how these stories were fodder for the Deuteronomistic editor. The Deuteronomistic editor insists that foreign gods often accessed through marriage to foreign women, exercised a fatal attraction for Israel. And it was the inability to resist the snare of idolatry that would ultimately lead to ruin. You have to remember that the final editing of this narrative history is happening in exile. Right? It is happening for people for whom all of this is ultimately leading towards a tragedy. All right. So the leaders who are raised by God are called judges. That is the term that is used in other Semitic texts to refer to leaders in the second millennium, sometimes human and sometimes divine. So the term is used here in the biblical text. It refers always to a human leader, and one who exercises many different powers or functions, not merely judicial. We think of the word "judge" really in a judicial context, but that was not the extent of the function of the judge. The Israelite judge was actually primarily a military leader, commissioned with a specific task, and only in times of national crisis. The judge had a charismatic quality, which in several cases is expressed by the phrase, "the spirit of the Lord came upon him." God would raise up the judge to deliver the people from a specific crisis. The judge might muster troops from two tribes, or three tribes, sometimes only a clan or two, which suggests that there was no real national entity at this particular time. We never see more than one or two tribes acting together or some clans of a tribe. But the institution of judges never created fixed political forms. And each judge differed from the last in background, in class, and even gender. We do have one female judge, Deborah, who did exercise judicial functions evidently, according to the text. The judges are not chosen necessarily for their virtue. Many of them seem to fall into the literary type of the trickster, a bit like Jacob. Some of them. They are crafty, tricky types. Gideon is explicitly chosen for his weakness, and not because of his strength. It turns out that he is quite a ruthless fighter, and he is clearly not a devout Yahwist. Jepthah is an outlaw. Samson is hardly a moral exemplar. So these are not meant to be idealized heroes, but popular heroes. There is a very interesting tension in the Book of Judges that will continue beyond into the Book of Samuel, as well, but a tension regarding kingship. The individual stories seem to suggest a very deep-seated distrust of kingship. So in Judges 8, the people ask one of the judges, Gideon at that time, to become king. And he responds this way: "I shall not rule over you, nor shall my sons rule over you. Yahweh shall rule over you". That is 8:23. And indeed, the short reign of Gideon's ruthless son Abimelekh, which means "my father is king" ironically, is a complete disaster. The position of judge is temporary. God was viewed as the permanent king in Israel. The temporary authority of the judge derived from the kingship of God. So the judge's position could not become absolute or permanent. That would be a rejection of God's leadership. The Book of Judges seems to be squarely against the notion of kingship in Israel. But the book as a whole seems to suggest a certain progression towards kingship, and this emerges from some of the editorial elements and interpolations. The final chapters of Judges document Israel's slow slide into disorder and ultimately into civil war. Chapter 18 opens with an ominous statement or phrase that recurs throughout the final chapters. "In those days, there was no king in Israel." That happens again in chapter 19:1, chapter 21:25. "And in addition it is said that everyone did as he pleased, or everyone did what was right in his own eyes." It is in chapter 21:25. By the end of the book, the Israelites find themselves spiraling out of control in an orgy of violence and rape, and in the final chapter, all out civil war. A Levite's concubine is raped by a gang, murdered by the tribe of Benjamin. And this is an atrocity that is to be avenged by all the other tribes. The Levite takes her body, cuts it into 12 parts, sends a part to each of the tribes as a call to war, to join together in a war of extermination against Benjamin. And many scholars have observed that it is ironic and tragic that the one time the tribes do all act in concert is against one of their own. This is the only time all 12 tribes, or the other 11 tribes, come out against a common enemy and it is the tribe of Benjamin. At a certain point, however, they realize with some regret that the tribe of Benjamin is near extinction. This is not a good thing, so the other tribes then arrange to kidnap women from Shiloh as mates for the remaining Benjaminites. So as a final comment on this horrible symphony of barbarity, of rape, murder, civil war, kidnapping, forced marriage, the Deuteronomistic historian concludes the Book of Judges with this refrain: "In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased." It is a wonderfully polysemic phrase, no king in Israel, no human king, perhaps also given their behavior no divine king. So again I see that as sort of an ominous refrain throughout. There was no king in Israel. Every man is doing as he pleases, and look at the situation we have reached by the end of the Book of Judges. The Deuteronomist's explanation for the moral and social bankruptcy of Israel at the end of the period of the judges at the dawn, or on the eve, of the monarchy, is Israel's continued infidelity. And the prescription for this situation at some level in the text is a king. This sits uneasily with an anti-monarchic trend in some of these stories. But according to the Deuteronomistic historian, the institutional structure of a kingdom of God--right, a sort of "theocracy" is how a later Jewish historian would describe this period--a kingdom in which God is the king and the community is led by inspired judges in times of crisis--that structure, that institutional structure failed to establish stability, a stable continuous government. It failed to provide leadership against Israel's enemies within and without. You have Ammon and Moab to the east. You have the Philistines to the west, and they soon manage to subjugate the entire land. So the tribes seem to be conscious of the need for a centralized authority, a strong central authority; and the demand for a king arises. In their search for a new political order, the people turn to the prophet Samuel. Samuel is the last in a line of prophet judges, and they ask him to anoint a king for them. So we are moving now into the Book of Samuel. And the Book of Samuel deals with the transition from the period of the judges to the period of the monarchy. In the first Book of Samuel, you have the opening chapters that record the birth and career of Israel's last judge, Samuel. So that is chapters 1-4. The next few chapters through chapter 7 deal with the Philistine crisis, and at this time the Ark of the Covenant itself is captured and taken into Philistine territory. Chapters 8-15 give us a story of Samuel and Saul, who will be Israel's first king. And then the last half of the book, 16 on to 31, are going to give us the story of Saul and David. So 1 Samuel opens with the story of Samuel's birth to Hannah, and her dedication of her son to the service of God at Shiloh, at the sanctuary at Shiloh. So Shiloh appears to have been the most important shrine in the period before the monarchy. The prophet, Jeremiah, is going to refer to Shiloh as the place where God first made his name to dwell. You remember the Deuteronomist is always speaking about centralization around a place where God will cause his name to dwell. At first that was Shiloh. It has been noted that after the birth of Samuel, the text conveys a sense of three crises, and I have listed them on the far side of the board over there. The first crisis is a religious crisis. The priest of the time, Eli--he is also described as a judge, but perhaps that is just to fit him literarily into the pattern of leadership that predominates in this section of the Bible--he is said to be aging, and his sons are quite corrupt. As a result, the text says, "The word of Yahweh is rare in those days." So there is a crisis in religious leadership. There is also a crisis in political leadership, or political succession to some degree. Judges 2 tells us that Eli's two sons are clearly not worthy. They dishonor the sacrifices, and according to one reading they lie with the women at the door of the shrine. God says he will cut off the power of Eli's house. His two sons will die in one day. And God will find and raise up a faithful priest. But in the meantime, no leader is apparent. So we have a crisis in succession, if you will. The third crisis is a military crisis. In Judges 4-7, the Israelites suffer a defeat at the hands of the Philistines. I'm sorry, in 1 Samuel! They suffer defeat at the hands of the Philistines. The Ark is captured. Eli's two sons are killed and the news of all of this kills Eli, as well. So when we first meet Samuel we wonder: is he going to be the answer to all of these crises, these problems? Chapter 3 says that the word of God comes to Israel through Samuel. In contrast to the statement that the word of God was rare in those days, we hear that the word of God is now coming to Israel through Samuel. It raises some hope. In chapter 7, Samuel exhorts the people to stop serving alien gods and Ashteroth and to serve God, and only then will God deliver them. So the people do this, and Samuel leads them. He employs--his military tactics mostly include prayer and confession and sacrifice, but he manages to lead them to victory over the Philistines. God thunders and the Philistines flee in fear. So Samuel seems to be combining in one person several functions. He is a priest. He is in the shrine. He offers sacrifices. He builds altars. He is also a seer and a prophet. He receives the word of the Lord and, like a prophet, he will be anointing kings. And he is also a judge in the sense that he leads Israel to military victory. But he also travels a circuit acting as a judge in a judicial sense--it says throughout Israel, but really most of the places we hear about are within the confines of Benjamin. So this story seems to mostly be focused in the southern region in the tribe of Benjamin. But even he is unable to provide Israel with the kind of leadership that the text suggests is required. The Philistine threat is going to reemerge, and the crisis of succession will remain, obviously. And so the representatives of the twelve tribes come together to Samuel to ask for a king. Samuel is therefore a kind of a transition figure between Israel, the semi-democratic confederation, and Israel, the nation and monarchy. It is going to be a huge transformation, as we will see. But he is going to be the one to bridge the gap to this new kind of leadership. Now as in Judges, the historical account that we have in 1 Samuel contains many contradictions, many duplicates, so scholars take these as evidence of the existence of various conflicting sources and traditions that have been put together in a larger framework. So for example, we have three different accounts of the choice of Saul as king. We have two accounts of his being rejected ultimately by God. We have different accounts of how David came to know Saul and how David entered Saul's service. We have more than one account of David's escape into Philistine territory, of his sparing Saul's life. That happens twice. Twice he has the opportunity to kill him. Twice he spares his life, and so on. Goliath is killed twice. Only one of those occasions is by David. On the other occasion he is killed by some other hero. So most important for us, however, is the existence of sources that hold opposing views of the institution of kingship. This makes for an interesting and complicated structure in the book. Some of the passages are clearly anti-monarchic and some are clearly pro-monarchic. And I have put them up here, the anti-monarchic passages: 1 Samuel 8. There is a passage in 10. There is a passage in 12. The pro-monarchic passages are sandwiched in between these, right, in 9 and 11. So you have this alternating sequence of anti, pro, anti, pro, anti. 1 Samuel 8 is a classic example of the anti-monarchic perspective. Samuel is initially opposed to the whole idea. He apparently resents the usurpation of his own power. Until God says, Heed the demand of the people in everything they say to you. For it is not you they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected as their king… .Heed their demand; but warn them solemnly, and tell them about the practices of any king who will rule over them. [1 Sam 8:7-9] And so Samuel does that. He does that in verses 11-18. He warns of the tyranny of kings, the rapaciousness of kings, the service and the sacrifice they will require of the people in order to support their luxurious court life and their large harem, their bureaucracy and their army. "The day will come", Samuel warns, "when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and the Lord will not answer you on that day"--a very anti-monarchic passage. The people won't listen to him, and they say quite significantly, "No… We must have a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations: Let our king rule over us and go out at our head and fight our battles" . So this is an explicit and ominous rejection, not only of Yahweh, but of Israel's distinctiveness from other nations. And what, after all, does it mean to be a holy nation, but to be a nation separated out from, observing different rules from, other nations. In Samuel 12, Samuel retires, and he says as he does so, "See, it is the king who leads you now. I am old and gray" . And he, again, outlines what is required of a good king, and then again chastises the people for even having asked for a king, warning that really God must be served wholeheartedly. A king should not interpose himself. Some have argued that the editors who compiled the text preserved the pro-monarchic perspective of their sources, but they chose to frame the pro-monarchic passages with their own anti-monarchic passages, with the result that the anti-monarchic passages really provide a stronger interpretative framework and are dominant. The implication is that despite positive contemporary evaluations of Israel's kings, from the perspective of the later period, from the perspective of the editors and perhaps those sitting in exile, the institution of kingship was a disaster for Israel. And that negative assessment is introduced by the Deuteronomistic redactor into his account of the origin of the institution: that God, himself, warned at the time that this transition was being made and this request was being made--God himself, warned that this had the potential to be quite disastrous. Others feel that the pro-monarchic and anti-monarchic views were contemporaneous and both ancient, and we see that simply reflected in these dueling sources. So whether one view is older and one more recent, whether both are ancient views or both are recent or later views, the end result is a very complex narrative. As you read it you feel thrown back and forth between these positive and negative assessments of kingship. And we feel these, and see these very different views of monarchy in ancient Israel. So these views really defy categorization in the end. They are one of the things that give the book such complexity and sophistication. Not only is there ambivalence, however, about the institution of kingship or monarchy, there is also a great deal of ambivalence about the first inhabitant of the office, the first king, King Saul, himself. Judges has three different accounts of Saul's appointment as king. In chapter 9,1 Samuel 9, it is a private affair. It is just between Saul and the prophet Samuel. Samuel anoints Saul as king with oil in a kind of a private encounter. The anointing of kings is also found among other ancient Near Eastern groups, the Hittites, for example. In Israel, it seems to be a rite of dedication or consecration, making sacred to God, ("con-secration," making sacred). And it is done not just for kings. It is also done for high priests. They are also anointed with sacred oil. Then in 1 Samuel 10, you have Saul's appointment represented as being effected by a lottery. It is a lottery that is presided over by Samuel, but there is a lottery system and the lot falls to Samuel to be appointed king. In the next chapter, in 1 Samuel 11, we have Saul victorious in a battle over the Ammonites and so he is elected by popular acclaim, if you will. These could all be complementary ways of his slowly securing the position. They could be seen as competing accounts. But he is an important and a striking figure. Nevertheless there seems to have been some controversy about Saul and it is preserved within our sources. On the one hand, he is described in very positive terms. He is tall. He is handsome. He is winning. He is charismatic. In fact, he is associated with ecstatic prophecy: the spirit of the Lord comes upon him and he prophesies in a sort of raving and dancing and ecstatic mode. He defends his own tribe. He is from the tribe of Benjamin, and he defends them from Ammonite raids. And he is hailed by the tribes as a leader in time of war. As king he did enjoy some initial military victories. He drove the Philistines from their garrisons, and he was such a popular and natural leader that even Samuel, who at first resented Saul and resented the idea of a king, came to appreciate him and was said to really grieve for him upon his death. But once David enters the story, which is about halfway through the Book of 1 Samuel (it's 1 Samuel 16), then we begin to see clearly negative assessments of Saul, perhaps because the sources about David stem from circles that were loyal to the House of David, and David is going to succeed Saul, obviously, as the second king of Israel. Perhaps the negative assessment is because of Saul's ultimate failure and suicide. That had to be accounted for by identifying some fatal flaw in him. So now his ecstatic prophecies are presented as irrational fits of mad behavior. So where once the spirit of the Lord was said to come upon him, now he is said to be seized by an evil spirit from the Lord that rushes upon him suddenly causing him to rave in his house. Elsewhere he commits errors. He doesn't obey Samuel's instructions to the letter, and that is going to cost him the support of Samuel and ultimately God. We have two stories of disobedience related in 1 Samuel. One is in chapter 13. He sees that the morale of his men is sagging and so to rally them together he officiates at a sacrifice. He was supposed to wait for Samuel to arrive and do it, but he sees that it needs to happen now, and so he officiates at the sacrifice himself. And this appropriation of a priestly function enrages Samuel, and this is Samuel's first pronouncement or prediction that God will not establish Saul's dynasty over Israel, despite the fact, by the way, that other kings at other times will sacrifice with impunity. So it is interesting because David and others will sacrifice and it doesn't seem to be a problem. But here it is given as the occasion for Samuel's fury and his first pronouncement that the dynasty of Saul will not be established. In chapter 15, we have a second instance of disobedience that earns Samuel's disapproval. Again, against Samuel's order, he spares the life of an enemy king. This is King Agag. He spares his life and otherwise violates the terms of herem: this notion of total destruction or devotion of booty and enemies to God through total destruction. And, again, when he violates the order of herem, Samuel again announces that God regrets having made Saul king. "The Lord has this day torn the kingship over Israel away from you and has given it to another who is worthier than you." That is chapter 15:28. In any event, with his support eroding, Saul seems to sink into a deep depression and paranoia. And toward the end of his life, he is depicted as being completely obsessed with David and the threat that David poses to Saul himself, but also his dynasty. Saul is angry that his own son, Jonathan, who presumably should succeed him to the throne, has a deep friendship with David and, in fact, throws his support over to David instead of himself. In several jealous rages Saul attempts to kill David or to have him and his supporters killed. In one particularly violent incident he kills 85 priests whom he believes have given shelter to David and his supporters. So in these encounters between Saul and David, the sources portray Saul as this raving, obsessed paranoid person, and David is seen as a sort of innocent victim, and he protests his loyalty and his support for Saul. He does not seem to understand why Saul should view him as a threat. And twice he passes up the opportunity to do away with Saul himself. He says, I will not raise my hand against the Lord's anointed. So the portrayal of Saul as a raving and paranoid man who is obsessed with David probably reflects the views of later writers who were apologists for the House of David. Positive views of Saul's character weren't entirely extinguished by the biblical writer. David's own lament, when he hears of Saul's death by suicide, and Jonathan's death, also, may reflect Saul's tremendous popularity. David orders the Judahites to sing what is called the Song of the Bow in praise of Saul. Your glory, O Israel, Lies slain on your heights; How have the mighty fallen! ... Saul and Jonathan, Beloved and cherished, Never parted In life or in death! They were swifter than eagles, They were stronger than lions! Daughters of Israel, Weep over Saul, Who clothed you in crimson and finery, Who decked your robes with jewels of gold. How have the mighty fallen In the thick of battle-- Jonathan, slain on your heights! I grieve for you, My brother Jonathan, You were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me More than the love of women. How have the mighty fallen, The weapons of war perished! [2 Sam 1:19,23-27] Of course, representing David as bewailing Saul and Jonathan in these terms, would have served an apologetic function, as well. And David is cleared of any part in or even desire for the death of Saul. So half way through the Book of Samuel then, is the first part of the story of David and his encounters with Saul, running through to the end of 1 Samuel and the first few chapters of 2 Samuel--about Second Samuel 5. And this whole section, this first part of the story of David, has the feel of a historical novel, or narrative. There is a lot of direct speech and lots of dialogue. So it has the feel of fiction, of a novel. Given that the ruling family in Judah was referred to as the House of David for several centuries, and given a wonderful archaeological find dating from the ninth century--it's a Syrian inscription that refers to the House of David dating to the ninth century--so given those two pieces of evidence, I think most scholars would see David as a real person. None of the details of the biblical account can really be confirmed, of course, but I think the consensus is that David was a real person. There are obviously some who do not hold that and believe this is a much later retrojection. But David is, surprisingly enough, presented as very human. He is not a divine character, and he is certainly not even a highly virtuous character. The first installment of his story through about 2 Samuel 5, is clearly sympathetic to David and favorable to David. But it is not entirely obsequious or flattering, which is the sort of genre that we very often have coming out of ancient Near Eastern texts dealing with royalty. This part of the story may be an apology for David, but it is also subtly critical of him. Certainly David is a hero, but if you read between the lines, he is also an opportunist. He is an outlaw. He serves as a mercenary for the Philistines for some of the time, and he can act pretty unscrupulously. So this isn't royal propaganda in the simple sense, even though to some degree it may be an apology for David. As we are going to see in a minute, David will fare much, much worse in the second installment of his story, and this is the story that takes up the bulk of 2 Samuel. So moving now into the Book of 2 Samuel and the latter part of David's story. Actually, no, I lied! We are going to back up for one minute just to talk about the different accounts of David's emergence--the three different stories, if you will, of David's discovery, because in the first, Samuel, again, secretly anoints him king of Judah. So it is a private affair. He anoints him as the king of Judah, which is just the southern region. He does this in Saul's lifetime. David is the youngest of his father's sons, so this anointment is another reversal of primogeniture, the exaltation of the lowly that we see so often in the Bible. In the second account we first meet David when he is summoned to play music for a disturbed Saul who, of course, is suffering from these irrational fits. And then in the third account, David is introduced as the 98-pound weakling who takes on the legendary Goliath. Later, after the death of Saul, David will be anointed king in Hebron over his own tribe, Judah. He then manages to either win over or kill off the rest of Saul's household, anyone else who could make a dynastic claim to the throne based on descent from Saul, anyone who might be a threat to his claim to kingship in the more northern region. And eventually the northern tribes will also elect him king. And so the united kingship of the northern parts of Israel and the Tribe of Judah is finally formed. Once his reign seems secure, and the nation is consolidated behind him, David then captures Jerusalem and launches attacks against Israel's neighbors. And the text says that the Lord gives him victory. This is in 2 Samuel 8 now, verses 6 and 14. God gives him victory. The biblical narrative depicts him as the master of a huge empire that stretches from the desert to the sea. There is very little evidence that Israel actually established lasting control over all of the states in this region. It's likely that David was able to take advantage of a power vacuum. Egypt's hold on Canaan was crumbling. Again, the migration of these "peoples of the seas" throughout this region and other peoples pressing in from the desert had really upset the two major powers in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, and they really had lost control of the central region. And so David was--and the Israelites were able to take advantage of this and establish an independent state. And David's independent state was probably able to dominate the area for a little while, ending the Philistine threat, for example, and possibly even collecting tribute from some of the surrounding or neighboring states, Ammon and Moab and Edom. But it is the prophet Nathan, who transmits God's promise to David, a promise that will become the basis for the faith in the eternity of the Davidic kingdom. And that happens in 2 Samuel, chapter 7:8-17, a very important passage and very important in the construction of what we will see is a royal ideology; a royal ideology that comes to contest some of the basic ideology of the nation. "Thus says the Lord of hosts." This is Nathan speaking now, quoting God: "Thus says the Lord of hosts, I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people Israel, and I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you, and I will make for you a great name like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and violent men shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house." [meaning here dynasty] "When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house [meaning now a temple] for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son. When he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men; but I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. In accordance with all these words, and in accordance with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David." [RSV; see note 3] It's a very important passage, and it's with this passage that you have the idea of an eternal and unconditional covenant between God and the House of David, or the dynasty of David. And this is now the fourth covenant that we have met: the Noahide covenant, the patriarchical Covenant, the Sinaitic Covenant, and now the Davidic covenant. Note that God says that David and his descendants may be punished for sin. They certainly will be punished for sin, but he will not take the kingdom away from them as he did from Saul. So God's oath to preserve the Davidic dynasty and, by implication we will see later, next time, Jerusalem as well, would lead eventually to a popular belief in the invincibility of the Holy City. In addition, the belief in Israel's ultimate deliverance from enemies became bound up with David and his dynasty. David was idealized by later biblical and post-biblical tradition, and became the paradigmatic king. So even when the kingdom fell finally to the Babylonians in 586, the promise to David's House was believed to be eternal. The community looked to the future for a restoration of the Davidic line or Davidic king, or a messiah. Now the Hebrew word messiah simply means anointed, one who is "meshiach" is anointed with the holy oil. That is a reference to the fact that the king was initiated into office by means of holy oil being poured on his head. So King David was the messiah of God, the king anointed by or to God. And in the exile, Israelites would pray for another messiah, meaning another king from the House of David appointed and anointed by God to rescue them from enemies and reestablish them as a nation at peace in their land as David had done. So the Jewish hope for a messiah, speaking now in the post-biblical where it is correct to say Jewish, the Jewish hope for a messiah was thus always political and national. It involved the restoration of the nation in its land under a Davidic king. We are going to talk next time about the royal ideology that begins to emerge and challenge the older Sinaitic and covenantal ideology. But that is too much to get into now. So we will deal with that on Wednesday and then move on through the rest of the Deuteronomistic history.

Literature_Lectures

7_Vladimir_Nabokov_Lolita_cont.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: I want to start my lecture today looking back to that handout I gave you--but didn't give you a discussion of--a couple of days ago, from that essay Good Readers and Good Writers that I quoted at the very beginning of class this term. If you took the time to read that, what you saw is Nabokov meditating on how reader and writers meet, and so I just want to read to you a little bit from that. If you still have it, you can get it out: The real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but it does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain--and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever. So, this is Nabokov's beautiful evocation of how writer and reader meet at the summit of this misty mountain of the imagination. But, I've been suggesting to you over the course of the lectures so far this term that this is, for many books, a totally idealized sense of how a reader encounters it. And no book demonstrates that in quite the same way on our syllabus as Lolita itself. It's true that Black Boy was censored, even after it was published in its abbreviated form. In the '80s it was censored from high school libraries, but Lolita was censored at the very start in a different way, and completely. If you read, as I asked you to do, the essay at the back, On a Book Entitled Lolita, you'll see, as Nabokov describes, he circulated it to American publishers, four of them, and it was turned down by everybody, finally published in France by the Olympia Press which had also published other controversial books like Naked Lunch and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Nabokov cannot meet his reader on the misty mountain because somebody has to agree to publish this book first; it has to exist in the world before that reader can meet it. And the very fact of censorship--So, the book was published by the Olympia Press, and then it was banned in France and in Britain; it was imported into the United States, and several years later an American publication was made. And it rocketed to the bestseller list. So, it was a very popular book in the U.S., but it did have this history of being banned in Europe, and it was certainly controversial here. Therefore, the mark of censorship is actually still on this book. The essay that you read was produced at the behest of his French publisher. They wanted him to write something that would make people feel better about the book, that would give some account of its origin and give some defense for its publication and its content. And so, we have it bound with the book, always, now. And so, in a way, you can say that, although it's Nabokov's voice, and it's adding to the novel (nothing was taken away from the novel in the way that half of Black Boy was removed before it was published), it's still deformed in a certain way, or influenced by the history of that censorship. Now, I think it's worth thinking about what he says in that essay. And I'm especially interested in this passage on 313 about the genre fiction of pornography, so this is 313, if you'll turn to it: In modern times the term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient. Old, rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel, stories where if you do not watch out the real murderer may turn out to be, to the fans' disgust, artistic originality. Who, for instance, would want a detective story without a single dialogue in it? Thus, in pornographic novels action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Artistic originality turns out to be the murderer, to the fans' disgust. Artistic originality here is likened to the murderer of convention. It's originality that destroys convention, and here it's given that frisson of being a criminal too. He's suggesting the criminality of real artistic innovation, and by doing that, by using that language to describe artistic originality, he allies artistic originality with the figure of Humbert. So, there are multiple ways, at multiple levels, that Nabokov is defending his work in this afterword. For one thing, he insults the publishers. He suggests that they didn't finish the manuscript because, when his manuscript turned out not to be pornographic genre fiction, they stopped reading, 'cause that's what they wanted, and they said, "This is terrible," put it down. So, he insults the people who turned down the book in the United States; he allies originality with criminality, and he suggests that it is the banal attention to convention that is, in fact, what needs to be censored, what needs to be done away with. He also gives us, if you notice, his little secret map of Lolita, or so it seems as it's presented to us, his secret map of the scenes that delight him in his own novel, and this is on 316: I find it [Lolita] to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. [There he's playing with the name Haze.] And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying "waterproof," or Lolita in slow motion advancing towards Humbert's gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber who cost me a month of work, or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star, the capital town of the book, or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens--[my Latin is bad] Nabokov These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted--although I realize very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over and not noticed, or never even reached, by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something along the lines of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. He says these are the scenes, and I want you to keep those scenes in mind. Some of them we've already talked about. Andrew talked about the class list and gave you some ways of understanding those pictures in Gaston Godin's apartment. So, we've talked about those. Today, I'm going to pick up on some of those other scenes that he mentions as his secret points of delight in the novel. What kind of novel do we see if we attend to those scenes? So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take that essay--the product of censorship, the response to censorship--and I'm going to use it to read back into the novel. And I want to work with you to see what we can see, if we use those scenes as our points of reference. And so, our task today will be to think about that second road trip in the novel--so, this was your reading for today--to begin at that second road trip that Lolita initiates and think about what happens to the novel from there to the end. Now, the most conspicuous things that happen are an increase in the violence of the novel. He hits her; he pushes her; he rapes her repeatedly. We see more of those scenes in the second half of the novel. His style becomes more manic. It gets even funnier. There are many passages of outright comedy in this second half, especially the shooting of Quilty, which is a sort of parody of the climax of a crime movie. So there are all kinds of flourishes in the style, and Humbert presents himself as more and more of a hapless madman. You can see it in his perceptions. You can see it in his language. You can see it in the behavior he reports, as when he vomits at the resort in Colorado when he thinks that Lolita has gone away, and then he sees her playing with a dog, and he thinks, "Oh, if only she would play with me; she's playing with a damn dog," and then he's sickened by this idea. You see more of that kind of physical deterioration. He drinks more. So, he's getting very desperate. Lolita, on the other hand, becomes more calculating, and it's this that I want to focus in on today: what becomes of Lolita in this second part? And I want to suggest, if we turn to page 207 and the beginning of that trip, I want to suggest that in the second half Lolita takes on the role of the artist. If you'll recall, the two of them have a fight over her participation in the play because he suspects her of deceiving him somehow: either with boys, or, somehow, with someone associated with the play. He doesn't quite suspect the truth yet, that she has met Quilty through that play. So, they have this big fight. It's raining. She rides her bicycle away into the rain when the neighbor calls to complain about their yelling at each other. So this is on 206,207: "In front of the first drugstore I saw with what melody of relief Lolita's fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled and entered." Okay. There he is struggling with the door. There is that physical comedy, and I'll suggest to you that in that sentence, the pushing and pulling, you're seeing part of Nabokov's verbal play. It's not just, sort of, physical comedy translated into prose, but there are a host of other moments in the novel where pushing and pulling figure: darkly in one of the rape scenes (he pushes her in to a room); less darkly at the drugstore (the soda jerk pulling on the levers of the dispenser). "Look out!" Some ten paces away Lolita through a glass at a telephone booth, membranous god still with us, cupping the tube confidentially, hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hang up and walked out with a flourish. So, here now, we move from Humbert's verbal flourish, to Lolita's physical one: "Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly. "A great decision has been made. But first, buy me a drink, Dad." She watched the listless, pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the Coke, add the cherry syrup, and my heart was bursting with love-ache: that childish wrist! My lovely child! "You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by." Mr. Pim watches Pippa suck the concoction. J'ai toujours admire la supreme l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. So, here is his verbal ecstasy as he watches her: "Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk. "Look. I've decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play. I really do. Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again, but this time we'll go wherever I want, won't we?" I nodded. My Lolita. 'I choose; c'est entendu?" she said, wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl. "Okay, Entendu. Now hop, hop, hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked." A storm of sobs was filling my chest. She bared her teeth and after her adorable schoolgirl fashion leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird. Miss Lester's finely groomed hand held the porch door open for a wobbling old dog qui prenait son temps. Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree. "I'm drenched," she declared at the top of her voice. "Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?" An invisible hag's claw slammed down an upper floor window. In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee. "Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight." She's seducing him in this scene, so the flourish passes from his prose. It's not gone from his prose, but in this scene, very clearly, it passes from his prose into her acting. And Humbert reflects that her work in the play has trained her into certain affectations. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't exactly spot this one. She, now, is using the clichés of romance to seduce him into following her map for their second journey, starting out on the second journey by calling forth all his mad love for her, so that he will be, in a sense, blinded by that and not see her machinations. You see it again on 209, a little later in this scene. His suspicion is aroused when a car pulls up next to them as they're heading out of town. It's Edusa Gold driving up next to them, and he's asking who was it exactly that had been impressed by Lolita's acting. And Lolita takes him to mean, who was the person in the car next to them, not who was the person that the person in the car was referring to. "I was not referring to her." "Who, exactly, concocted that play?" "Oh, yes, of course. Some old woman, Claire something I guess. There was quite a crowd of them there." "So she complimented you." "Complimented, my eye. She kissed me on my pure brow," and my darling emitted that new yelp of merriment which, perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms, she had lately begun to affect." And I just want to skip down to the bottom of that paragraph. He gives her a kind of warning--which I'm going to talk about in a little while--but at the very end he says, "The tour of your thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen-and-a-half inches." He's warning her not to grow up, essentially: "'More might be fatal.' I was kidding of course. We are now setting out on a long, happy journey. I remember…." And then, look at the paragraph break there. "I remember as a child…" Now, this is not in quotes: I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had Appalachian mountains boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned, Tennessee to Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet: all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak. This is the realm of that mountain of imagination that I was showing you in the passage from Good Readers and Good Writers. This is Humbert's meditation on looking at a map and seeing a range in which imagination can have pure play. Now, as it turns out, if you keep reading there, he's disappointed to find what the Appalachian mountains actually look like in the United States. He finds them much less romantic, a kind of garbage dump, a very seedy stretch of the world. But what I want you to note is how that chapter break brings us from Lolita's first efforts at motivating the romantic clichés; her first efforts immediately pay off in transporting him into that mountainous imagination. This is how we know that she's got him; she's got him in the imagination. She's not just seduced his lustful body. She has him fully under her power at this point, and it's that chapter break that you can see demonstrating the fact. Now, I want to look at page 231,232. This is one of those passages that Nabokov points out as being special to him. This is Lolita playing tennis. So, 231. "My Lolita"--this is near the bottom of the page: …had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle, when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm, and far back-flung racket as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean, resounding crack of her golden whip. It had that serve of hers beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long, elegant hop." And then a little further down the page: "She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life revealed an innocence of frankness, a kindness of ball playing that permitted a second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory." That pose--the pose of tennis service, the raised foot--it's the same pose she uses to seduce him in that scene I just read after their fight: "I feel sort of romantic tonight." She is acting out a form: in the first case the form of romantic fiction, the heroine who swoons back; in this scene the form of the game, the perfect form of tennis. And he says she did a perfect imitation of top-notch tennis. This is on 231: "Her form was indeed an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis, without any utilitarian results." It's perfect tennis, but she never wins. And he reflects on 232: "Had not something within her been broken by me, not that I realized it then, she would have had on top of her perfect form the will to win and would have become a real girl champion." He reads the non-utilitarian quality of her form as the evidence of her broken nature. But I would like to suggest that it's precisely that non-utilitarian quality that is the mark of her wholeness in a certain way. If aesthetic bliss is what Nabokov confesses is his ultimate aim for art in the essay On a Book Entitled Lolita, something like that is what Lolita gives us in her perfect tennis form without the will to win: the frankness, beauty, kindness, lack of deception. And, in that sense, it is also a version of play, of children's play--not competitive play, which is a different kind of thing--but pure play. And this gets us back again to that image of the chess problem that I was talking about in my first lecture. The chess problem is not in the middle of a game. It's a puzzle, but it has for its delight a kind of solitary quality, both of the composer and of the solver of the chess problem. So, it's not in the course of competitive play, and--although he uses the language of competition to describe the relationship between the composer and the solver--it's not in that sense a competitive game, as chess would be: white against black. This kind of self-absorbed, autonomous play of Lolita's tennis form is the kind of play that children have. It doesn't have a point. It's all process and form. If the threat to the work of art, to the novel, is something like convention, I want to think hard about what the threat to this kind of play is in the novel. And I want to suggest that the threat to this kind of play is parallel to the threat to children. The threat to children in the novel multiplies. It is not just Lolita who is threatened, but all sorts of children. So, let's begin with another of those scenes on 213 that Nabokov points out to us, the Kasbeam barber. Why did it take him a month to come up with the Kasbeam barber? What's going on in this tiny snippet that's so important? So here it is. In Kasbeam, a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut. He babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and at every explodent spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings. And so inattentive was I, that it came as a shock to realize, as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ballplayer had been dead for the last thirty years. So, the barber is speaking about his son in such a way that he seems alive, but, in fact, he's dead. So here is one dead child playing baseball, or the memory of him playing baseball is alive with his father. If you look down at the very bottom of that page, you see "a young woman far gone in the family way had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently, while a jealous boy of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by trying to push or pull"--there is that word play again coming back to us--"the swing board. He finally succeeded in getting himself knocked down by it and bawled loudly as he lay supine on the grass while his mother continued to smile gently at neither of her present children." And, if you skip over to 215, this image comes back of this mother: "All cars had disappeared except his station wagon. His pregnant young wife was now getting into it with her baby and the other more or less canceled child." So, here are at least three examples of canceled children, and you can use that phrase, I think, to characterize Lolita. She is a canceled child. Her childhood is stolen from her by Humbert. In this scene, it is the mother's imaginative preoccupation, in a sense, that cancels her children, and you can ask whether she is preoccupied with the idea of the new child within her. You get that sense of pregnancy being an inner meaning or an inner significance, and perhaps it's a figure for what preoccupies her, for the world of imagination and possibility. But she has that kind of distant internal smile. This is the same kind of smile that Lolita is said to have--the beautiful passage where Humbert remembers Lolita's famous smile that ranges around the room but doesn't seem to engage anyone. It's as if her smile is the response to an internal imagined life, one that's inaccessible to Humbert. He says of her he does not know what regions there were in her mind, what "dim, adorable regions" there were in her mind, that he would never know, that he was denied access to, as he raped her. And so, children--which have this potential to play--are consistently canceled, over and over again. There are other examples. On 223 we find out that Mona, Lolita's friend from the play, her baby sibling--we're not told whether it's a boy or girl--dies, and we see it in one of those parentheticals, 223. This is Mona's letter. "Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother's confinement (our baby, alas, did not live), it all seems a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint." Again, that parenthetical elides the death of the child. We're reminded in this scene of the death of Lolita's little brother. Remember, Charlotte Haze speaks in her letter of a lost son who died at the age of two. The bodies of children pile up, but other things happen to children too. Remember when Lolita and Humbert are partially discovered having sex in a field by a mother and her children gathering flowers. They're described as carved, bluestone children. And think about the name of that town, Elphinstone, of which Nabokov again is proud: Elphinstone, a little child of stone, a small figure of stone. And the elf-like image is something that he applies to Lolita over and over. So, what you see is children dead, children turned to stone, and this is the dark side of that fairy tale quality that we see in other parts of the novel that's been coming back in our lectures. These are children turned to stone. And it suggests, if you go back now to that scene on 207-208, as they set out for the second trip in the middle of the page (actually a little above): " I was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border. I was braver now than last year, and there deciding what to do with my little concubine who was now 60 inches tall and weighed 90 pounds." The threat against Lolita is growing with her body; as she gets bigger, so he becomes murderous towards her. And this is allied with his desire, in a sense, to crystalize what he has taken from her. And here in the middle of the page a little ways down: My love's striped black-and-white cotton frock, jaunty blue cap, white socks and brown moccasins were not quite in keeping with the large, beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet which gemmed her throat, a spring rain gift from me. He has taken summer rain that the page before, we are told, gemmed her hair ("shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee")--"her gemmed hair"--takes that rain, and ossifies it, makes it lapidary, turns it to stone in the aquamarine, and puts it on a chainlet. And the diminutive "let" at the end of the chain doesn't really cover up the chain itself. It doesn't really mitigate against the confinement he has perpetrated on Lolita. She is in chains, and just because it's ornamented, just because it has the diminutive, doesn't mean that it's not a chain. It's around her throat, that vulnerable place. So, if art as play is something like performance, something like an embodied art, the art of the tennis service, or even the art of theater or film, there is another kind of art that is gemlike, hard, cold, equally formal but dead: "bluestone children." So, this is the other form that the aesthetic can take. And I think that Nabokov is consistently concerned about these two valences of what the aesthetic can look like. So, if it can look like the gem, it can last forever. As Humbert dreams at the very end of the novel, he says, "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, as this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." He thinks of his account as that kind of enduring stone-like object, and it may give immortality, but it traps her there in immortality with him. He is then as immortal as she is in the pages of this screed. And so--like the chainlet--it takes that stone-like distillation of life, turning rain to stone, turning life to the representation by your tormentor. It turns into something durable that will outlast them. So, the problem with art is in a sense that it is immortal. That's the problem. If life is threatened over and over again in this novel by mortality--dead children, Lolita growing up inevitably, painfully, putting her at risk. Her body grows; she can't do anything about it--that's mortality, the passage of time. This difference--between the art that's lapidary and the art that's living--is that the art that's living, by very virtue of being alive, can also die. So, this is the problem with the autonomous work of art. If your dream as a writer is to make an autonomous work of art that has, as we say in a very colloquial way, a life of its own, but the problem is that there is something about life that's dependent on the possibility of its negation. That's why on Valentine's Day you might give your lover real flowers rather than plastic ones. It's the very potential to decay that makes them beautiful. And so, the problem here is that Nabokov dreams of an art that's living, something like the butterflies that he was so enchanted with in his life and work outside of fiction. And the butterfly does appear in just one moment, and it's during the tennis scene. As Humbert and Lolita play, there is one butterfly that flits between them. It's a mark of their equality as artists in that moment. The butterfly is the perfect work of art because it is both a representation and alive. It has eyes on its wings. It looks like a leaf. It is nature in its aesthetic form as imitation of itself, life as an imitation of life. Can you make a novel, as he says in the essay, that will "sprout wings and grow claws" in secret in his mind? That's an image taken from the metamorphosis of the butterfly within the chrysalis. He wants his novel to be like that living butterfly, but the threat is always that it will be more like the aquamarine. And I want to suggest to you that the aquamarine has an even darker personal significance to him. When his family fled Russia, the only things of value that they brought with them were some of his mother's jewels. These jewels were hidden in a canister of talcum powder, later buried in the yard under a tree in Europe as they moved from place to place in their exile, and they were gradually sold off one by one to fund their life. Those jewels, I would suggest to you, carried with them the sense that they were the ossified remains of a radiant Russian life, and so the image of the jewel is a kind of dead childhood, even for him as a writer. So, where is Nabokov in here? I think that's one of the places where Nabokov is. It's Nabokov meditating on this problem. I want to read that last passage on 308 that he mentions in the essay. Actually, it starts on 307. This is Humbert standing on the lip of a ravine by the side of the road, listening to the sounds of a small town rising up to him: And soon I realized that all of these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader, what I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic, one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost inarticulate spurt of vivid laughter or the crack of a bat or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it. And blood. And beautiful, bright-green flies. The living voice is missing. What you get instead is the corpse of the novel, with marrow, and blood, and flies. Dolly Schiller--aptly named of course for the German Romantic philosopher who advocated play as a mode of the aesthetic, German Romanticist of the nineteenth century--Dolly takes on that identity as the Romantic figure, and she dies giving birth to a girl, to a baby girl; she dies in childbed. Remember I asked you from the preface, John Ray's preface, to figure out who Dolly Schiller is, who dies in childbed. Well, by now you should know that's Lolita. So she dies giving birth to a child. She has taken on the mantle of Romantic artist, but she dies giving birth to a live person: two modes of creativity embodied in Lolita, in that one act, and in that name. She is giving birth to a real, live thing--not a creation that is more like stone, but an actual person. And so, what you see is not just the paradox of wanting your work of art to be a living work of art, to be personified in that way or made animate that then exposes it to mortality--the Woolworth's workers who don't read it and who think no one in the world ever reads it, that kind of risk. Your book cannot live if it has no reader to meet it at the top of that mountain. But Dolly embodies that other kind of creativeness: human creativity of the literal kind, giving birth to a child. I think it's telling that this kind of creation is a failure; it cannot succeed in the confines of this novel. Nabokov had a way of making an absence at a point of his utmost investment. For instance, in his autobiography he notes the date of and the phone call that tells his mother that his father has been assassinated. But he doesn't tell you until many pages later what it was that happened on that date. He says, "On" whatever the date was; I think it was March 22^(nd) "when my mother received a phone call…." And then, it just goes on about something else, doesn't tell you what that phone call was. It was his father's assassination. Like those absences in other parts of his writing, I think this absence, this failure of any birth, it marks a sort of vanishing point of art, that art somehow can't quite compete with the real inventiveness of nature and of human persons. He's going to try. He's going to try to give us a living prose, but this is the end against which it finds itself pressed. Next time, we're turning to a very different kind of writing, a writing equally preoccupied with its relationship to the world, to life, but very differently approaching that problem. So, try to think about that as you turn to On the Road.

Literature_Lectures

20_The_Classical_Feminist_Tradition.txt

Prof: This lecture, I think, starts with a series of preliminaries. The technical term for preliminaries of this kind in literary study is "prolepsis"-- that is to say, the form of anticipation which, in a certain sense, covers what will be talked about later. They are prolepses of this kind. First, I wanted to say that in entering upon the phase of this course which concerns a series of particular identities as perspectives, as points of departure, we're still thinking about the literary text; and, of course, in thinking about identity itself, we come upon a form of critical endeavor which is, in practical terms, incredibly rich and productive. It is simply amazing how, as Jonathan Culler once put it, "reading as a woman," or reading as an African-American, or reading as any of the other sort of identity that we're going to be talking about-- it's simply amazing how this kind of reading, if it's done alertly, transforms everything. That is to say, it has an incredible practical payoff. Last time in the context of the New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant anecdote begins with Queen Elizabeth saying, "I am Richard II, know you not that?" Well, Stephen Greenblatt isn't concerned with investigating a pronouncement of that sort from the standpoint of feminist criticism, or indeed from the standpoint of something we'll be taking up later on-- gender theory; but still, it's rather an amazing thing for Queen Elizabeth to say, isn't it? It suggests really that it's, after all, remarkable that she, a woman, would find herself in a position not so much needing to endure the kind of suffering and peril that her own sex has traditionally endured but rather potentially enduring the suffering and peril that one would experience in the masculine gender position, made perhaps even more interesting and complicated by the fact that Elizabeth knows perfectly well that despite the rarity of her being Richard II, it's nevertheless not a unique position. She has subjected > Mary Queen of Scots to precisely that position. She has deposed and beheaded her, ultimately, in just the way that she fears the Earl of Essex will depose and behead her. So the way in which this remark, "I am Richard II, know you not that?"--so easily commandeered and made use of from the standpoint of the New Historicism-- can come to life in a completely different way when we think about it as a question of a gendered experience is, I think, in itself a fascinating one. Now at the end of the last lecture, by way of further preliminary, I told a little fib. I said that there were no women in Tony the Tow Truck, and of course in your prose text of it-- the one that you've been clutching to your bosom feverishly for the entire semester-- there are no women. There are just guys talking. However, if to the prose text, and I've told you about these, you add the illustrations--this [gestures to board] is one of them, roughly speaking, and I did it from memory-- if you add the illustrations, you'll have to realize that it's not just the cars. You see the little smiles on the faces of the houses there: it's not just the cars that are happy about what's going on when Bumpy finally comes along and pushes Tony, but it's the houses in the background which have been expressing disapproval at the reactions of Neato and Speedy to the predicament. There are big frowns on the faces of those houses in those illustrations, houses that now express beaming approval when the morally correct thing is done. Now in the Victorian period--and in a certain sense I think Tony the Tow Truck in this regard harkens back to the Victorian period-- there was a poet named Coventry Patmore who, actually a rather good poet, became notorious, however, in the feminist tradition for having written a long poem in which he describes woman as "the angel in the house." You're probably familiar with that expression, and it's an idea which is also, I think, embodied in a monumental book of some twenty-five years ago by Ann Douglas called The Feminization of American Culture. The idea is that moral and aesthetic and cultural values are somehow or another in the hands of women in the drawing room, at the tea table, dictating to the agencies of society-- all of which are strictly male prerogatives-- what a proper ethical sense of things ought to be. In other words, the role of the angel in the house is not just to wash the dishes and take care of the kids, although that's a big part of it. The role of the angel in the house is also to adjudicate the moral aspect of life at the domestic level, and that's exactly what these houses, obviously inhabited by angels--how else could they be smiling and frowning?-- that's what these houses are doing. So it is the case after all that there are women in Tony the Tow Truck. All right. Now, as I say, this moment is not exactly a crossroads in our syllabus. It's not like moving from language to the psyche to the social, because obviously we're still very much in the social. In fact, it's not even as though we haven't hitherto encountered the notion of perspective. Obviously, we have in all sorts of ways, but particularly in the work of Bakhtin or Jameson, we're introduced to the way in which class conflict-- that is to say, being of a certain class, therefore having an identity--gets itself expressed in literary form dialogically and gets itself expressed either as the expression of conflict between or among classes or as a more cacophonous and yet, at the same time, very frequently harmonious chorus of voices of the sort that-- in notions of "carnivalization" and other such notions-- one finds in Bakhtin. In other words, the way in which the language of a text, the language of a narrative or of a poem or of a play gets itself expressed, is already, as we have encountered it, a question of perspective. That is to say, it needs to be read with notions of identity, in this case notions of class identity, in mind if it's to be understood. Well, what's also interesting, though, about turning to questions of identity is that perhaps more sharply now than hitherto-- although I have been at pains to point out certain moments in the syllabus in which one really does arrive at a crossroads, and you simply can't take both paths-- nevertheless, within the context of thinking about identity in these ways as literary theory, we begin to feel an increased competitiveness among perspectives. I'm going to be pointing this out from time to time in the sequence of lectures that we now undertake, but from the very beginning there is a sense of actually a competition which is in some ways unresolved to this day-- for example, between the feminist and the Marxist perspective. That is to say: what is the underlying determination of identity and consciousness? Is it class or gender, just for example? This is not a new topic. This isn't a topic that we stumble on today as a result of some belated sophistication we have achieved. Listen to Virginia Woolf on page 600 of A Room of One's Own where she says, top of the left-hand column: For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now in a way, Woolf is pulling her punches here. She is not saying class has priority over gender, nor is she saying gender has priority over class, if we're to understand the history of the oppression of women or the history of the limits on the forms of women's expression. She's pulling her punches, and yet at the same time I think we can see a point of view in Woolf's Room of One's Own which is, after all, rather surprising. Think of the title. Think of the later title of a tract in some ways similar about the possible scope for contemporary activity for women, Three Guineas. These titles are grounded in material circumstances. Woolf stands before her audience, her Oxbridge audience of women, and says all she really has to say is just this one thing: if you're going to expect to get anything done in the way of writing or in the way of any other activity that's genuinely independent of patriarchal limitation, you've really got to have 500 pounds a year and a room of your own. That's all she really says she has to say. In fact, as you read through the six chapters of A Room of One's Own, you find that, as if on an elastic band after the extraordinary range of impressionist thinking that each chapter manifests, she is pulled back to this one particular-- as she sees it--necessary practical precondition, a material precondition. If you want to get anything done--you're not Jane Austen, you're not a genius sitting in your parlor whisking your novel-in-progress under a piece of blotting paper every time a servant comes in to the room, you're not like that--you really do need today the independence of having 500 pounds and a room of your own. In other words, I think one could show that even in A Room of One's Own-- which is, if not the greatest, certainly the most eloquent feminist treatise on the conditions of women's writing ever written-- one could show that even in that, there is a certain priority given to the perspective of class, as opposed to the perspective of gender. Gender will continue to be conditioned by the effects of money and power if in fact something isn't done-- let's face it--to redistribute money and power. This is a perspective which, by the way, is even clearer in Three Guineas and suggests that despite its main agenda, which is a feminist one--that underlying that there is a sense of the priority of class. These sorts of tensions continue to haunt not just feminist criticism, but other forms of criticism having to do with other forms of identity really to this day. Conferences featuring a variety of identity perspectives very typically develop into debates on precisely this issue, and the one-ups-persons of conferences of this kind are always the ones who somehow get in the last word and say, "You're all naļve. You suppose that this is the basic issue, but there's an underlying issue which is the basic issue, and that's the one that, I'm going to demonstrate, must absolutely prevail." It's not necessarily always the Marxist card which is played in this context, although it frequently is. It could be some other card, but it's always a card played. It's always the last word at the conference which makes everybody go away and say, "Oh. I thought this was about women. Oh, dear. It must be about something else." We will have to come back to that because in a way, the material we cover today and the way that we're enabled to discuss it by its own nature is something that calls for another lecture and a lecture that we will actually provide. There's a very real sense, as I hope to show by the end of the lecture, in which traditional--I call this "classical feminist criticism"-- in which traditional or classical feminist criticism needs to be supplemented, perhaps in the Derridean sense, by something more, which is gender theory. As I say, at the end of the lecture I'll try to explain what that might entail, and then come back to it when we discuss Judith Butler and Michel Foucault a few lectures from now. All right. So A Room of One's Own is an absolutely amazing tour de force. It's actually one of my favorite books. I read it like a novel, and in many ways it is a novel. I think immediately that that might give us pause because if Charlotte Brontė is to be called to task for tendentiousness-- that is to say, for writing from the standpoint of complaint, of perceived oppression; and if Charlotte Brontė's tendentiousness gets in the way of the full expression of what she has to say-- which is to say, the unfolding of a novel; and if as Virginia Woolf, I think, actually rightly remarks, at least from an aesthetic point of view, we wonder why on earth Grace Pool suddenly appears after Jane's diatribe about wishing that she could travel and wishing that her horizons had been broadened, that somehow, Virginia Woolf says, Grace Pool is out of place and there's been a rift in the narrative fabric: if this criticism of Charlotte Brontė is fair, and we'll be coming back to it in other contexts, then of course it could be turned against the choice of narrative style, of narrative approach, in A Room of One's Own itself. This, I suppose, could only strike you forcefully if you read the whole of A Room of One's Own, all six chapters, which I urge you to do because it's so much fun. If you read the whole of A Room of One's Own, you'd say, "Well, gee. This is sort of a novel, too." The speaker says, "Oh, call me anybody you like," not unlike Melville's speaker saying, "Call me Ishmael." You can call me Mary Beton. You can call me Mary Seton, call me Mary Carmichael. It doesn't really matter, but I've had certain adventures. At least that person speaking has had certain adventures which are fictitious, or at least I reserve the right to have you suppose that they are fictitious. In other words, this is a narrative that moves quite by design in the world of fiction. In other words, Virginia Woolf is saying it really isn't true, as she tells us in the first chapter, that she, Mary Beton, after sitting at the river thinking, wondering what on earth she's going to tell these young ladies about women and fiction-- as she's been thinking about that, finally she gets a little idea. It's like pulling a bit of a fish out of the river, and the fish starts swimming around in her head. She becomes quite excited and she walks away across the grass. At that point up arises a beadle, a formidable person wearing Oxonian gowns and pointing at the gravel path where she, as an unauthorized woman, should be walking, as the grass is the province only for the men enrolled in the university; and then she has repeated encounters of that kind. She goes to the library unthinkingly, only to be told by an elderly wraithlike gentleman that since she's a woman she needs a letter of introduction to get in. And so her day, her fictitious day of thinking about what on earth she should say to these young women about women and fiction, begins, somewhat unpleasantly for her character, as a presented fiction. In other words, A Room of One's Own is, in a sense, a novel. It continues with a very pleasant lunch that she has. She's been invited to the campus as a distinguished writer. It's okay to be a woman who is a novelist as long as you don't rock the boat too much. In that regard, she can have been invited to such a lunch and has a very pleasant lunch because it's provided by men in an atmosphere which is designed for men. Then she goes to visit a friend who is teaching at this fictitious college. She has dinner with the friend in that college's dining hall, and the dinner is extremely inferior and plain, and then they go to her rooms and they start talking about the conditions in which this college was built. A bunch of women in the nineteenth century did all they could do to raise 30,000 pounds, no frills, thank you very much. None of them had any money. There were no major donations and so the grass never gets cut, the brick is plain and unadorned, and that's the way life is in this particular women's college. The next day she goes to the library because she decides she's really got to find out something about what people think of women; and so, what is a woman? I don't know so I'd better look it up in the library, she thinks. She finds out that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men have written books about women: on the inferiority of women, the moral sensitivity of women, the lack of physical strength of women, on and on and on. She lists them as items in the library catalog which actually are there > in the library catalog--all of them, of course, getting themselves expressed in these hundreds and hundreds of books about women by men. Well, this is very frustrating but, as you can imagine, it's an occasion for wonderful satire-- one has to say tendentious satire, because obviously it's male-bashing. My point is that she wouldn't let Charlotte Brontė get away with that. Charlotte Brontė has to suspend her anger, Virginia Woolf wants to say, if she's going to get the whole of what's on her mind expressed. Well, Virginia Woolf, who sort of doesn't sound very angry, but you could well be mistaken about that-- she's venting her anger in comic effects-- Virginia Woolf allows herself, because that really is the case, a measure of anger. So it is in that chapter. Then she goes home and the rest of A Room of One's Own takes place in her home. She's in her study pulling books off the shelf of her library, and this is more or less chronological. It starts with a time when she looks on the shelf where the women writers ought to be and there aren't any women writers, and then later, yes, there are women writers, there are quite a few novelists. Then later in the twentieth century, women writers get a little bit more scope for their activity, and as she passes all of this in review, we continue to get her reflections on the state of literary possibility for women in literary history. That's the structure of A Room of One's Own overall and it is within this structure, which is an impressionistic and narrative, undoubtedly novelistic structure--there are precedents for it. Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H. is one in particular--and which is, in a way, itself what it's talking about: It is a novella, and in the context of the novella, as I say, there's a certain tension or contradiction in an author who is allowing herself tendentious opinions while denying the right to have such opinions on the part of one of her predecessors. As you can imagine, what she says about Charlotte Brontė has been controversial in subsequent feminist criticism. There are a number of ways in which feminist critics feel that Virginia Woolf is misguided or needs to be supplemented, and this is one of them. By and large, feminist critics feel that Charlotte Brontė, or any other writer, has the right to be tendentious. We'll have more to say about Virginia Woolf's criterion of androgyny, which is not thinking like either sex, in part. We'll come back to that, but most feminist criticism has felt for a variety of reasons that androgyny isn't necessarily the ideal toward which women's prose ought to be aspiring and takes Virginia Woolf to task therefore for having taken this view of Charlotte Brontė. Now yes, feminist criticism has taken A Room of One's Own to task in a variety of ways, but at the same time--and I think this is freely and handsomely acknowledged by feminist criticism-- it is amazing--when you read the whole text, and even when you read the excerpts that you have in your anthology-- it is amazing how completely Virginia Woolf's arguments anticipate the subsequent course of the history of feminist criticism. I just want to point out a few of the ways in which it does. As Showalter points out, the first phase of modern feminist criticism was the kind of work that primarily paid attention to men's treatment of women in fiction. Mary Ellmann's book of 1968 called Thinking about Women, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics in 1970 are both books which focus primarily on sexist male novelists whose demeaning treatment of women is something that the feminist perspective needed to bring out. This criticism is superseded in Elaine Showalter's account by what she calls, and prefers, "gynocriticism" or "the gynocritics." Gynocriticism is not so much concerned with men's treatment of women in fiction as with the place of women as writers in literary history and as characters-- regardless of whether they are characters in men's or women's books in their own right-- in the history of fiction. In other words, gynocriticism turns the topic of feminist criticism in the late sixties and early seventies from the history of oppression by men to the history of a women's tradition. Now this sense of the unfolding of things, it seems to me, is already fully present in Woolf. She, too, wants to talk about the possibilities for women writers, about the need for women writers to feel that they're not alone. Above all at the same time, however, she frames this emphasis on the woman's perspective with the sort of trenchant, frequently satirical observations about men's treatment of women and men's way of demeaning women and keeping them in their place-- as, for example, all the men, most of them professors, who wrote books about women, as she discovered in the British library, do. All of this is very much in the tradition of that first phase of feminist criticism that Showalter identifies with Ellmann and Millett and others of that generation. So the capaciousness of Woolf's approach in one sense can be understood as precisely her ability to bridge both sorts of modern tradition-- no longer chronological as Showalter presents them as being, correctly--but rather as a kind of simultaneity in which the emphasis on men's marginalization of women and the emphasis on women's consciousness and traditions can be set forth at the same time. Now also in Virginia Woolf there is what-- Since the publication of the fascinating book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar called The Madwoman in the Attic-- this is also an allusion to Jane Eyre, you remember Bertha, the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre-- since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, feminist criticism has talked about the madwoman thesis: the idea, in other words, that because they could not openly express themselves creatively as writers or as artists of other kinds, women were forced to channel their creativity into subversive, devious and perhaps psychologically self-destructive forms, as in, for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. You find Woolf already on page 600-- just actually below the passage about class and gender that I read before-- you find her touching on this madwoman theme long before Gilbert and Gubar. She says: When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, [and then of course she adds] and even of a very remarkable man who had a motherā€¦ There, in other words, one strongly suspects that there is a person whose creativity has been oppressed and unfortunately channeled in unsocial or antisocial directions. This, as I say, is a tradition that's sustained. It still exists in Showalter. In her gynocritical perspective--that is to say, her insistence on our registering, chronicling, and becoming familiar as scholars with the history of women as well as the history of women's writing-- the recognition of such forms of repression as witchcraft, as madness, as herbalism, as whatever it might be, need to be taken into account. Also very much on the mind of Woolf already, as it still is particularly for Showalter because this is Showalter's understanding of the task of gynocriticism, is the notion that one needs a tradition, that one of the great difficulties and shortcomings facing the woman's writer is that, yes, there are a few greats--the same ones always named, Austen, the Brontės, George Eliot-- but there is not a sense of an ongoing tradition, of a developing tradition within which one could write; so that Woolf on page 606, the right-hand column, talks about "the man's sentence," the difficulty of coming to terms with not having, not just a room of one's own, but a language of one's own. This is toward the top of the right-hand column: "Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use." All the literary models, all the models of novelistic prose--most of them, in any case, are engendered male; because the atmosphere of writing--and this is a point that we'll be getting to soon-- the very fact of writing is something that we have to understand as having a male stamp on it. Further down in the right-hand column: That is a man's sentence [she's just quoted a long sentence]; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest." It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontė, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontė, she got infinitely more said. By the way, this is disputable because certainly it's possible to understand Jane Austen's prose style as emerging from the work of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, in particular, so it is disputable. At the same time, Woolf's point is that Austen was able to shake herself free from this terrible problem of wanting to say something but finding that one doesn't have one's own language, a language suitable to-- appropriated by and for and as one's identity-- for saying it. "So I want to write as a woman, I want to say the things that a woman wants to say, but all I've got to say it with is a man's sentence." That's Woolf's point, and of course it has many and long ramifications. I'm holding at bay the criticism of a great deal of this that has to be leveled at it by feminist criticism and gender theory roughly since 1980, but in the meantime the ramifications are interesting and they are reinforced by the theoretically very sophisticated wing of feminist criticism that we call French feminism. Some of you may know the work of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Writers of this kind insist that there is such a thing as women's language. Women write not just with their heads and their phalluses but with their whole bodies. Women don't write carefully constructed periodic sentences. Women write ongoing paratactic, impressionist, digressive, ad hoc sentences: sentences without ego-- being without structure more or less corresponding to being without ego. We'll come back to this in a minute in Showalter, but in the meantime French feminism was willing to settle on and for an idea of women's writing and, implicitly behind this idea, an idea of what a woman is that is very easy to identify as somehow or another essentializing. Why can't a woman write a rigorous periodic sentence? After all, that's the kind of sentence that Jane Austen did, in fact, write. In a whole variety of ways that one might think of, why can't a woman, if she is to be free to be whatever she wants to be, write a sentence which isn't necessarily of this gendered feminine sort? Why does women's writing, in other words, have to be women's writing? It seems to me that it is French feminism and the possible critique of French feminism that Virginia Woolf is anticipating when she embarks on this perilous idea of androgyny, of the kind of mind that needs to be both male and female and that needs to write in a way that Virginia Woolf says is actually very sexy, precisely in the moment when one is not thinking about one's sex-- the moment, in other words, when there is no longer a question of the man's sentence and the woman's sentence. I think it has to be said that although one could emphasize in A Room of One's Own this sort of advanced criticism of French feminism, and also of the idea that there is essentially something that we call woman-- and I'm not through with that topic-- I think it has to be said that although we could read A Room of One's Own in this way, at the same time we have to recognize an ambivalence on Virginia Woolf's part on this subject. There is a difference between her insistence that Jane Austen wrote like a woman, that she shrugged off the tyranny of the man's sentence and wrote her own kind of sentence, a woman's sentence--regardless of whether or not that is actually in literary historical terms true-- between the idea, on the one hand, that it's important to write like a woman and the idea, on the other hand, that it's important to write androgynously. We have to concede, I think, the impressionistic form of these lectures that she's giving. We have to concede that she wavers on this point; that somehow or another it's very difficult to pin down in Woolf the question of whether there is essentially something to be called "women's writing"; just as the question behind that, whether there is essentially something to be called "woman," or the question on the contrary-- whether the ideal of all writing is to shed as fully as it can precisely its gendered aspects. There is perhaps a kind of creative or rich inconsistency on this point that, it should be said, one also finds and needs to take into account in reading A Room of One's Own. All right. Now getting a little closer to this whole question of beyond the gynocritical-- because Showalter, for example, in talking about the history of the novel talks about those three phases: first the "feminine," the phase in which women try very much to write as though they were men by deferring completely to male values in all the ways that they can; perhaps introducing a kind of, again, "angel in the house" cultural benevolence and benignity into perspectives of men that can be sometimes rather militaristic and harsh. but nevertheless hiding behind frequently male names like Currer Bell, Acton Bell, George Eliot, and so on, and not really entering into questions of the place of women in society. Showalter then says this is a phase supplanted by a feminist moment in the history of the novel in which novels like the late work of Mrs. Gaskell, for example, and other such novels become tendentious, and the place and role of women becomes the dominant theme of novels of this kind. By the way, this takes Woolf's critique of Charlotte Brontė a little bit out of chronology, because presumably Charlotte Brontė belongs to what Showalter is calling "the feminine phase" in the history of the novel, and so it's interesting that Woolf finds a kind of proto-feminism, damaging to the texture of Jane Eyre, already in Charlotte Brontė's novel. Then finally what Elaine Showalter likes best: the supplanting of the feminist novel-- because Elaine Showalter, too, is nervous about the tendentiousness of fiction-- the supplanting of that by what she calls "the female novel," which is the novel that simply takes for granted the authenticity and legitimacy of the woman's point of view, writes from that point of view but, as in Virginia Woolf, having shed or shaken off the elements of anger or adversary consciousness that earlier novels had typically manifested. This history of the novel is very similar to what Showalter is doing with her sense of the history of recent feminist criticism. That's in two phases: first the feminist, as she calls it, when the treatment of women by men in fiction is the main focus; and then the gynocritical, which is the appropriation for women of a literary tradition. Showalter is at pains to point out that much of the most important work of recent feminist scholarship, the feminist scholarship of the 1970s, is in simply the unearthing of and expanding of a canon of women's writing not exclusively novelistic, because there had been a time when the novel was sort of half conceded to women as a possible outlet for their writing. But this concession was accompanied by the sovereign assertion that they couldn't write poetry and plays, and so an expansion of the canon such that all forms of writing are available and made visible and recognized as actually existing in a tradition-- so that we can trace women's writing, as Showalter puts it, from decade to decade and not from great book to great book, so that there really is a tradition comparable to the male tradition that one can think about, think within, and draw on as a creative writer oneself, So both Showalter's history of the novel and her history of modern feminist criticism-- or modern women's criticism, one had better say-- end at the point when it is still a question of the woman's perspective. But this raises a question--and I've been touching on it in a variety of ways-- but it really raises the question that has to haunt thinking of this kind. We're going to be encountering it again and again and again as we move through other forms of identity perspective in criticism and theory. It raises the question whether if I say that a woman's or women's writing is of a certain sort, if I identify a woman in a way that I take somehow to be recognizable-- let's say I identify a woman as intuitive, imaginative, impressionistic, sensitive, illogical, opposed to reason, a refuser of that periodic sort of subject-predicate sentence that we associate with men's writing-- I can appropriate that for women like the French feminists and I can identify women in so doing as such people-- but isn't that simply inverting what men say in Virginia Woolf's discoveries in the British museum in the second chapter of A Room of One's Own-- isn't that just inverting all the negative values that men have attached to women all along? Isn't it ultimately to accept men's opinions of women, men's ways of saying that because they are avatars of reason, science, logic and all the rest of it-- isn't a way of saying that the head is higher than the heart and accepting, in other words, the lower or inferior status of this organ to this organ even though one supposes oneself to have transvalued them and insisted, in promoting women's consciousness, that the heart is higher than the head? One hasn't done anything, in other words, to the essential identities that have governed patriarchal thought from the beginning. It is precisely this characterization of women that has enabled and engendered patriarchy. This is where the theoretical problem arises. It calls for, it seems to me, a sense that somehow or another one has to put the possibility-- and there's really no other way to say it, and this is something that Judith Butler frequently says and people who work in the mode of Judith Butler say-- one has to put the suggestion that perhaps the best thing one can say as a feminist is there is no such thing as a woman; there is no woman. Now of course this is perilous, and this is what drives such an unfortunate wedge in the midst of feminist thought. In real life, in real material existence, there certainly are women. They are oppressed by laws, they are oppressed by men, and their rights and their very lives need to be protected with perpetual vigilance. The theoretical idea, in other words, that there's no such thing as a woman is not an idea that can be sustained in life. Yet at the same time, the implications of what the language of identity politics is always calling "essentialism," the implications of saying "woman" is one particular thing-- and it might be better if we said "woman" was one particular thing, but something other than what men have been saying she was all along-- but making the problem worse, saying that "woman" is one particular thing, which is just what men have always said she was-- only it's a good thing, right, that positions of this kind are taken up in this way, despite the fact that they're absolutely necessary for practical feminism and for real-world feminism-- is nevertheless detrimental to a more sensitive theoretical understanding of gender and of the possibilities of gender. It's all very well to be intuitive and emotional and impressionistic, but one wants to say two things about that. In the first place, a guy gets to be that if he wants to, right? > In the second place, why does a woman have to be that, right? It's perfectly clear in both cases that there are exceptions which go vastly beyond the exception that proves the rule. It's perfectly clear that in both cases there are sensibilities across gender that completely mix up and discredit these categories, and so for all of those reasons there is a problem. Just very quickly I want to point out, looking at Showalter's essay, that this is a bind that criticism around 1980 really hasn't gotten past. Time's up. I'm not going to take the time to quote passages, but notice her animus--and here, in a way, we go back to the beginning--her animus against Marxism and structuralism on the grounds-- and of course we've said this ourselves-- on the grounds that both of them present themselves as "sciences." Aha! They're gendered male! Marxism and structuralism aren't anything we want to have to do with because this is just Virginia Woolf's beadle raising its ugly head again and imposing its will-- through its superior rationality--on women. So we don't want any of that. What we want instead is a form of criticism, and this is what she says in effect at the end of the essay on pages 1385 and 1386, that evades scientificity; a form of criticism that engages with the reality of texts and of the textual tradition but doesn't trouble its head with theoretical matters. In other words, a form that dissociates itself from the logical, from overarching structure, from scientificity. Showalter leaves herself in this position, and she leaves feminist criticism in this position as-- how might one put it?--a colonized enterprise that can do anything it likes as long as it's not reasonable. If that's the case, then of course it imposes an essentializing limit on the possibilities of feminist criticism, just as of course the characterization of men's criticism in the way that it's characterized, needless to say, also imposes limits on that. Whether fair and legitimate limits, or perhaps exaggerated limits, is open to question. That's not nearly as important a point as the reminder that there is a kind of marginalization of the possibilities for feminist criticism involved in saying that it has to be something other than the sort of thing that Marxist and structuralist paradigms make available. Okay. Now I think that Henry Louis Gates, influenced by Bakhtin, will have a very interesting way of coming to terms with this question of what's available for a marginalized minority criticism once it avoids or has succeeded in avoiding the terms of the mainstream criticism. I want you to read Gates' essay with that particularly in mind. Then we'll come back with the question of, as it were, the future of feminist criticism, in a way since 1980, when we turn to the work of the gender theorists, in particular Judith Butler.

Literature_Lectures

ENGL_3328_LECTURE_1B.txt

okay and here we are back again from our intermission and uh we're going to begin to talk about the actual material of the course now having spent the first part of our uh discussion this evening talking about the format of the course and the assignments and so on uh one other thing however before we go on that did occur to me in discussions with a couple of the students about assignments uh in the intermission internet sources nowadays you know it's real easy isn't it you know you use Google or whatever uh search engine you want to use and you start looking up information on God knows pretty much everything right uh well there are internet sources and internet sources be very very very careful about what kinds of inter materials you are using handle them with care and handle them very critically I love to tell this story I was teaching The Graduate seminar in Beowolf uh oh a couple of years ago this is one in which graduate students were actually reading Beowolf in the original and uh so at one point we got talking about internet sources and one of the graduate students informed me that he had run into a whole site on B Wolf come to find out it is hosted by a 9-year-old boy who has this site for posting his ideas about bolf and materials that he has collected about bolf and let's give him all the credit in the world for his initiative I mean how many 9-year-old boys are going to do something like that on the other hand you know is that a credible source for somebody to use in an academic paper uh surely not so one has to be very very careful about the kinds of materials that one is using that one finds on the internet um usually the most reliable materials are in scholarly books and encyclopedias and uh artic and journals and so forth that is not to say that there aren't wonderful wonderful materials on the internet just be careful and also be careful of the tendency that some people have just to want to copy and paste I mean my God you know it's just the easiest thing in the world download something copy paste and so forth uh uh uh uh no no no no no no no no uh that's plagiarism so be very very very careful about that sort of thing too so uh having said all of that I know that individuals may have individual questions for me either among the group that's here with me uh or those of you who are taking the course at a distance so if you do have specific individual questions please bring them up with me or with the assistant instructor okay so let's go on and begin to talk about the actual material of the course and if we can go to the PowerPoint slides please let's talk about uh whoa I have to go to another step here okay there we are [Music] um Romanticism when we're talking about romantic writers and different romanticisms how do you go about defining something like that as complex and v as varied as it is well here I am following the 20th century famous 20th century philosopher ludvig wienstein who said that you can often Define things not by saying exactly what it is but by talking about the featur that it shares in common with other members of the same family of the same family so you can't talk about what is the essence of Romanticism and is Byron more romantic than Wordsworth or is Wordsworth less romantic than Keats you see that sort of thing doesn't make any sense well we can talk about is a family of writers speaking metaphorically of course because these people were not literally related to one another a family of writers who could be recognized as a family of writers by sharing in a pool of common features sharing in a pool of common features so that all members have some of these features and no member has all of the features let me give you an example a very commonplace example actually I should have a photograph to show you um I have seven Brothers No Sisters sadly enough but I have seven brothers very unusual to have eight Boys in in a family with no girls uh and if you were to look at a picture of us what you would know notice is that we all look different in the sense that we're all individuals but you can sort of tell that we're all members of the same family now two of my brothers are really quite dark and obviously as you can see with me I'm I'm very fair and uh five of my brothers like me are also very fair two of my brothers have uh brown eyes the others of us have blue eyes uh there are some brothers who are tall some are shorter you know and so forth and yet even despite these differences you can see that there is a common pool of similarities such that that you can recognize that we are a family of Brothers okay that's the kind of thing that viken Stein was talking about that if you try to define something by discovering what its Essence is is and then saying well this is a true romantic and that person's not really a true sort of romantic but not really a true romantic or more romantic and less romantic or pure romantic or this one's purer than that one uh that doesn't make any sense at all and you don't get anywhere with that sort of thing it's like trying to define the novel nobody has ever been able to Define find what a novel is in and of itself but what we can say is there is in effect a family of literary narratives such that they share in a common pool as it were of features so that every one of the members of that family will have at least some of the features of that pool but no member of the family of novels will have all of the features that make sense so that's the sense in which I'm going to be talking about Romanticism and the various romantic writers so what are some of the features of Romanticism there is at least an implied and sometimes quite explicit critique of industrialization and of urbanization of human life and experience we'll talk more about this in a moment I want to give you some interesting historical facts in just a moment about how there was a vast shift population shift in England this ultimately was going to happen over here and it happened in all of the Western countries and now increasingly it's happening all over the world of people away from the countryside away from rural life and increasingly into towns and cities and there were massive dislocations as a result because all of a sudden you have people who are displaced from living on farms and who are forced by economic pressures to move into towns and cities but who have no experience no education no skills for City Life uh you know we don't need very many uh people who are tractor mechanics say in in big cities right uh we don't need very many people who know about growing crops in big cities maybe a few but not a whole lot so what are people going to do as they move by the thousands and in the 18th and early 19th centuries in England by the literally hundreds of thousands into big sprawling cities like lundon and guess what happens all of a sudden you have this huge group of urban poor with all of the problems that are attended upon that crime overcrowding Health difficulties public health problems because of lack of adequate uh sanitation and adequate living facilities uh crime prostitution and so forth the the first metropolitan police force was created believe it or not in London in the 1830s the 1830s my God England had been around for a long long time without any Urban police force how did they do it well they didn't have the kinds of problems that I'm talking about for one thing and people could take care of such S as were committed on a local level in a neighborhood level there would be constables and there would be people who could uh uh bring about an enforcement of the law on a local level somebody uh comes into your shop and steal something you set up what was known as a hue and cry that's a legal term in England uh and English law the heu and cry you know stop thief stop thief you know and uh MERS of the neighborhood would come and surround the person and then they would take them before the uh the local uh justice of the peace right then and there and Punishment would be Meed out right then and there by the way in most cases uh that's how Justice was handled for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years but then all of a sudden the cities are overwhelmed you know and uh all of the kinds of problems that we associate with modern cities came into existence around the end of the 18th century and the early stages of the 19th century so uh Romanticism in part at any rate emerges as a critique as a critique of some of the problems of urbanization and of urban blight and also of the displacement of peoples from traditional communities small rural Village communities into cities we're going to talk about this a little bit later on there's an 18th century writer who wrote a very famous poem called the desert Village and it was something that was happening all over England where villages were being emptied out by people being forced to move for various reasons into the towns and cities one of the reasons for that was the enclosure acts the enclosure acts parliament passed a series of Acts that were known as enclosure acts which cut off Acts to public lands common lands of ordinary people and turned those into private lands which became huge Holdings by a few very rich people so that when you travel around England or places like England uh nowadays you will see that there still are some of those great houses with lots of lands and so on and so on and so on well that's the sort of thing that was happening in the 18th and 19th centuries and what happened to the people who previously had lived on those lands some of them were able to stay as more or less tenant Farmers but the majority of them were forced off the land and one of the things that people had been able to do from the early earliest times all the way back into the Early Middle Ages and maybe even earlier than that was that people would be assigned plts of land so that I'd have my pot of land you'd have your pot of land you'd have your pot of land and so forth and these pots of land in early times were supposed to be sufficient to feed a family so the plots would vary in size by the way depending upon uh the arability of the land but in addition to that there were also lands that were known as Commons and everybody had access to the common land so that you could grow some additional vegetables there or you could uh you know graze some cows there or some sheep there or something like that so that you weren't confined to the pot that was designated as yours alone and many people could not manage subsistence farming without access to those common lands and when those were enclosed and as we now say privatized people could no longer support themselves in their families and they were forced by economic conditions to move into the cities now not only does that cause the problems that I mentioned a moment ago but also notice what is lost people whose families had lived for centuries in traditional communities were now uprooted disrupted what happens to a family when all of a sudden it moves to the big city I mean first of all what is a family I mean in those traditional communities a family was not Mom and Popp and the kids you know the notion of family is mom and pop and the kids is a very recent notion a very recent notion the traditional family is really an extended family mom pop the kids cousins Aunts Uncles grandparents nieces nephews and so forth often all living together as extended families you know well what happens when families are dislocated from their traditional sites and moved into cities you know it may be that in order just to make ends meet you know the father has to go off one place and work the mother has to go off to another place and work who's going to take care of the kids you know uh all kinds of problems begin to ensue in these traditional societies that I'm talking about the kids would grow up along with the parents and the grandparents and the cousins and uncles and what you know aunts and nephews and whatnot uh all together okay um so all kinds of things are happening now that doesn't mean that we haven't gained a lot through industrialization urbanization and so forth but we've also paid a price and the romantics are very sensitive to the kind of price that we have paid so you will notice then if we can go back to the slide here the tendency to glorify the natural world not the artificial World created by humans but the natural world it's not that people didn't love nature before the 19th century it's that it became a kind of cult in the 19th century you know oh my god let's get out into nature that really makes sense for somebody who shut up inside an office or a factory the rest of the time right let's go to the seashore let's go to the mountains let's go to you know the woods or you know camp out or go fishing or you know whatever it is that you like to do out there in the outdoors okay um previously people didn't have to go to the outdoors they lived in the outdoors so there's a stress often on the value of Rural Life In traditional communities and often this will be romanticized as we say a stress on the value of Rural Life or at least a life lived close to Nature I mean we're not all Farmers right but we certainly can can value nature and cherish our time in nature there's also a stress on the innocence of childhood with a corresponding sense of loss in growing up because growing up to a large extent can be a matter of conforming right learning to conform learning to conform children are very spontaneous aren't they they're curious about everything they're spontaneous they have fun you know and then we come along at a certain point in their young lives and we start structuring them not in certain necessary ways I mean after all you have to have times when you're going to eat or go to sleep and so forth I'm not talking about that but we start structuring their lives more and more and more with all kinds of rules for example school where everybody sits in a desk in a room in which all the desks are organized in rows right and ranks it's a military design it's a military design you know I mean it was quite consciously set up as a military design originally okay and everything is very structured now you study arithmetic now you study music now you study you know history or whatever it may be okay and of course a high value is placed on Conformity to the rules and the system okay and the romantics are going to say well of course once again obviously you gain in this system but what have you lost maybe you've lost I don't mean you I mean all of us me too have lost some sense of our innocence and of our spontaneity in the process there's also a valuing of subjective experience not just objective knowledge okay if you're a student of the natural and social sciences you hear a lot about objective knowledge don't you and the means by which you not only acquire but also test objective [Music] knowledge The Romantics are going to turn this around they're not against scientific knowledge by any means but they're going to turn this around they're going to say what's getting ignored in the process is the importance and the value of subjective experience personal emotional intuitive imaginative spiritual subjective experience and that too can be a guide to knowledge and some of the most important truths about ourselves and our relation to the world around us including our relations with one another and that's something that we are indebted to the romantics for for their emphasis on that they're constantly suggesting to us the limits of objectivity it's not that objectivity is bad especially in scientific investigations but there are limits to objectivity especially in the ways that we are forced to distance ourselves from nature to treat nature as an object as a thing to be studied unemotionally and dispassionately we give something up in the process we may gain a lot but we also lose something because this can also carry over into our relations with our fellow creatures or even our relations with ourselves so the romantics will deliberately cultivate feeling and Imagination and romantic poetry constantly is exploring cultivating promoting feeling and Imagination we don't just get depictions of nature we are invited to feel something about nature okay on the seashore in the mountains wherever it may be which of course ultimately leads to a cultivation of sympathy or as we nowadays say empathy that is to say a kind of true fellow feeling kind of true fellow feeling am I part of nature or is nature simply something out there that's actually an interesting question you know often when we talk about nature we're really talking about something out there right but what if nature is something in here as well as out there I mean I'm part of nature right and nature is part of me and you and so forth which also means that you and I are part of one another too I mean that's that that logically follows doesn't it I mean if if we are all part of the same nature not here we are over here and nature is somewhere else out there but if we are all part of the same nature then we are part of one another too okay so if that's true then notice that's going to have a profound influence on how we behave toward one another and how we interact with one another right there's an elevation of the individual and of individuality Among The Romantics and we're going to see this as more important among some of the romantics than of others remember what I said about family relations somebody like Byron is going to stress individuality in a fairly extreme way whereas somebody like colid is going to do so in a much less extreme way and Keats it's going to be difficult to see how he does this at least how he does this very directly and of course there then is the Paradox of the individual as distinct from others yet ultimately connected to others I mean after all you know you and I are distinct from one another as individuals and yet there's another sense in which we are ultimately connected or at least that's the view that the romantics would be proposing in general I mean some of these are going to push it much harder than others watch when we get to Wordsworth Wordsworth is really going to push this idea very hard whereas some of the other Romantics will will go along with it but they won't push it quite so hard so there's a new conception of spirituality that develops which is often unconventional it's often unconventional for its time for its time okay now in poetry that is going to lead to a development of the poet's own personal voice in poetry now let me be as clear as it is possible to be I hope about this in general and you might argue for some exceptions to this but in general among many earlier poets and there are exceptions to what I'm about to say there are poets who would deliberately try to adopt a kind of public Voice or public self in their poems not something which was distinctively personal but even what might appear to be personal was actually something that was public and more or less conventional okay this was the way a poet was supposed to speak the whole notion of originality begins to shift at this time you know if you go back to the Ancients and I'm just going to take somebody like Homer as my example but we could take lots of other writers but let me go back to to Homer if we go back to Homer what does originality mean hmer didn't make up the stories that he tells I mean homeric Scholars have been able to dig out all kinds of already existing narratives that were available to a homer whoever Homer may have been and what Homer has done is to have come long and he has brought together these different already existing poetic narratives in a tradition of poetic narrative that was passed on orally not in written form but orally by Poet singers for Generations actually it's demonstrable for hundreds of years and so there's a sense in which Homer while enormously important for what he did was not doing something original in the sense of being all his own all made up by Homer see what I'm getting at that he's a traditional poet who is operating in a tradition and the role of the poet was to bring together the elements of the tradition and pass it on and then the next poet would be benefiting from Homer and bringing together Homer and other elements of the tradition perhaps and passing that on in a long oral tradition before anything even gets written down okay now you might say well that may be true of Homer but Homer is really way back way back then isn't he yeah he's way back then but something of that you can find in a choser something of that you can find in a Shakespeare something of that you can find in a Milton certainly something of that you can find in a pope that even as late as the 17th and 18th centuries when people talked about genius they didn't talk about genius as being something that was internal to a particular individual what they meant by genius was more the platonic idea that there is some kind of force some kind of spiritual force that some people can tap into and that that is what speaks through through us that's actually by the way what Plato says in a dialogue of his called the ion you know that that's what the poet is the poet is a kind of medium through whom some kind of spiritual force is speaking and that's genius see but it's not I'm a genius it's said fortunately for reasons that I can't account for that genius has chosen to speak through me okay in the 19 century you begin to see a shift where people begin to think in terms of some individuals having genius or being genius okay that's an internalizing and a personalizing of the whole question of poetic administ uh excuse me of poetic inspiration and creation okay so that notice there comes to be less emphasis eventually on technique in the traditional sense of technique and more emphasis on individual inspiration now that doesn't mean that modern artists aren't interested in technique I'm not saying that but if you know something about tradition artists you'll know that and I'm talking about in the sense in which I'm using that term traditional as in part of a tradition technique becomes something which is supremely important let me give you one example in Ireland the FI The Poets in a Bic tradition were apprenticed for According to some sources as long as 24 years count them 24 years before they could be recognized as Poets of any consequence you know I mean up to that point you're an apprentice you're still learning because the craft was considered to be so complex and you look at early Irish poetry and it's it's IM amazingly complex I've actually translated some of this and it's extremely complicated and it took years and years and years and years and years for people to learn the different forms and the different rules and the different complexities and opportunities within that system of poetry okay um that's not the sort of thing that we tend to think of in terms of poetic inspiration and Creation in our time now that doesn't mean that we don't want our poets to be familiar with techniques to experiment with techniques to try them out to have a sense of form of course we do but we tend to lay even greater emphasis upon the personal and the irational and of course there are metaphorical gender shifts this is something that we're going to see in various cases where uh you may find all kinds of things happening here uh a romantic poet who will be uh using specifically feminine kinds of metaphors for what the male poet is attempting to give birth to but say so we'll be on the alert for that sort of thing when it comes up okay we're going to begin with Blake next in our next class but Blake is we're not going to be going to Blake this evening what I'd like to do now is to go to another another one of well let's see I need to get back to the desktop and I need to get to this folder and then let's see here okay let's tie in some of the things that I've been talking about to the Social and historical context in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries and this is where I'm going to be talking about history history so how are we doing is this oh oh oh oh oh thank you my pal back here in the booth is pointing out to me that I needed to uh to click on the other icon to get this to work properly okay remember I was talking about population shifts and so forth from uh rural settings into the uh the cities let's actually look at some of the facts these are the things that influenced millions of people and it was out of this kind of social milu that the poets were writing at least in part in the mid to late 17th century London had about half a million inhabitants but by the 1801 census London it increased to about 1.1 million persons now do you know what that would have been in those days I mean that's absolutely incredible how do you double in size in a relatively short period of time and of course the increase in population was largely among poorer people these were not people who could afford to build new houses in the suburbs you know we talk about Houston and Houston is growing very very rapidly it has grown very rapidly and you know we're going to double in size in about the next 11 to 12 years now the way in which we're going to accommodate that in large part not totally but in part is going to be through new building but that implies that there are going to be people moving into the area who are going to be economically capable of either renting those apartments or buying those houses or condos right but the people people were talking about the vast majority of the people were talking about who were moving from the country into a city like London they didn't have money so larger and larger and larger numbers of people were forced into relatively fixed urban areas not totally fixed but relatively fixed urban areas and there are figures where they talk about you know as many as 17 people living in a uh a one-bedroom apartment the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment I mean can you imagine the conditions just the physical conditions and if there were any illness of course the illness would spread like the proverbial wild fire not only among a particular family but from one family to another to another to another another to another Public Health became a huge problem public sanitation became a huge problem and we have lots of writers talking about that sort of thing okay total population growth for England in a half century was about 25% that's incredible isn't it and where are those people going to go not to more Farms there weren't more Farms as a matter of fact there were fewer Farms because of the enclosures and whatnot so that's primarily going to be in Urban Development not totally but primarily by 1801 30% of the Mainland population lived in towns 30% now that's the beginning of a trend which is still going on you all have probably seen these things are reported in the newspapers every once in a while that according to census figures in the United States it's somewhere around 2 2 and a half% of people live in rural settings in the United States the rest of us live in towns and cities two two and a half% I mean that's I'm not talking about people who take their vacations out in the country I'm not talking about people who may be well enough off that they can have a country home I'm talking about people who live in the country I mean that's that's a huge difference isn't it so whereas a century earlier you know somewhere around say 1700 the beginning of the 18th century about half of the gross national product was from agriculture this figure went down to about a third by 1800 and Manufacturing trade and transport took over most of the economy see the reason why I'm giving you these these facts is to set the stage because there were people who within their own lifetime were seeing these changes take place and in many cases they were horrified they weren't all horrified but in many cases some were horrified by what they were finding you don't have to write all of this down but just to just to know what I'm talking about here exports of textiles textiles clothes right I mean well material anyway much of which would be made into clothing Rose from 50% of total exports in 1750 to 60% by 1800 and cotton took over 39 % of exports by 1810 using fibers imported from America from manufacturing trade so notice that England is increasingly turning into a big Factory what by the middle of the 19th century people are going to typify by the term M town miltown is in the Mills coal output doubled between 1750 and 1800 as steam pumps developed and power requirements for engines increased coal output I don't know how many of you have been to uh to London how many of you have been to London anybody you know one person in this group too okay um well one of the things you'll notice if you go to London if you were old enough I mean I know that you guys are not old enough to to remember this but if you were old enough is that London is actually very clean now it's a very clean City and you can actually see you know uh White Stone in the buildings and so forth I mean you might not think that but if you could go back 30 40 50 years a 100 years was black grimy s and that was from the coal not only manufacturing using immense amount of coal but people in their homes and apartments using coal and then finally the government stepped in and said look we've got to do something about this and they required a filter to be placed on any uh chimney you know that emit the soot from uh coal fires coal furnaces coal fireplaces and whatnot and within a decade or so it was amazing the city started becoming clean again and the air became relatively clean again yeah don't for yeah I was going to say you might want to say relatively cuz my parents live there and I go like three or four times a year and um like they have a flat there and it's right across from the American Embassy so it's right in the middle of downtown and um the rules are like they clean they have to clean the buildings like every 2 years because it gets so gross with all the pollution there and you walk around downtown for a little while and I mean you really feel the pollution on you I mean it is cleaner and when you look at the historical buildings they'll show you like the places where they've cleaned and the places where they haven't and you see a hug uge difference but it still gets gross I mean it's a hugely polluted compared to the US yeah well then that becomes another kind of issue you know which we could maybe debate about but the but I'm talking about this in relative terms that that you're not old enough to to I don't know if your parents are or not uh to remember this but London used to be a much dirtier city than it is now I'm not saying anything's that everything's perfect now but and you're you're no doubt right um the uh but but this also is indicative of the kind of problem that I'm talking about you see that uh one of the prices we pay or at least so far have been paying for living in cities like this is a fair amount in some cases an unconscionable amount of pollution and these people already were worried about that you know what were we doing to ourselves I mean they didn't understand the medical aspects of it in the same detail that we do but they knew that it wasn't good for you James Watt patented his separate condenser steam engine uh in 1774 and this was improved in 1781 uh and you don't have to remember that unless you want to uh but the point is that this really transformed the world the development of the steam engine really transformed the world I mean if you were going to come up with what are the top 10 inventions that have really made the most difference in the development of humankind I mean one of them would have to be the wheel you know another would have to be the development of Agriculture and so forth we could go down our list but certainly one of them would have to be the development of the steam engine because all of a sudden the world changed with the development of the steam engine not only did this transform the cotton industry and other Industries as well but by 1804 steam engines were powering local motives the whole rail system began to develop there was no such thing as that in England and elsewhere how did people get around people didn't get around if you were very well off and you were willing to endure long-distance carriage rides uh yeah you could get from one place to another more or less though there were some places that were pretty much inaccessible most people never moved from where they were born and grew up part of the reason was how would they how would they then all of a sudden the trains came along and it became possible to go across the whole country in a day or so you know and people to get to places like go to the seaside I mean people who never been to the seaside excuse me could go to the seaside people could go to sports events one of the biggest Transformations that took place in the 19th century as a result of the development of a quick efficient transportation system was the development of sports so that sports sports sporting events so that Sports were no longer just local activities but became larger sporting events where you could have large masses of people like our crowds okay I mean obviously if you're going to have uh people going to uh a baseball game so let's say you have to have the means of transportation to get thousands and thousands of people to the stadium where the baseball game's going to take place we take that for granted that sort of thing did not exist until relatively Modern Times And so Sports were local games played within small towns and Villages and sometimes they would compete against you know one Village group would compete against the next Village group you know that sort of thing and then ships in 1812 I mean can you imagine the difference that this made in Sea travel not only in the speed and efficiency of of sea travel but also the development of Commerce and by the way these these ships in general were safer than the old uh the old uh uh wooden ships sailing ships the so-called tall ships uh at the same time a guy named Henry modley invented the screw cutting lathe a fact which you will be able to wow your friends with now along with the micrometer which made precisely accurate manufacturer of machine parts possible you see until you have the technology to develop machine parts how do you make machines right how do you make an automobile engine well you have to have the technology to make the machine the parts of the machine in the first place and you have to be able to do that precisely precisely from this point on machines could make more and ever more complex machines in other words machines could now make machines which could make machines which could make machines and notice that the individual person in this becomes less and less important I'm not talking about the engineer or the inventor I'm talking about the guy who operates the machine now of course there're always going to be skilled machinists and these are very creative and bright people I'm talking now about the person on the assembly line you know who simply you know is part of a much larger mechanized system from Farm to city has agricultural technology improved and improved Tech uh improved production farming required fewer workers there was a whole Revolution which I'm not going to go into detail about here but there was a whole revolution in agricultural technology uh new kinds of plows and plowing systems and so forth people were learning more about about agriculture there were actually people who were doing scientific studies of Agriculture and improving production far beyond what it had been before you you drive out in the country right I mean maybe some of you grew up in the country actually I grew up in a very small town uh but the uh you know with Farms all around you you know and if you drive even if you're from Houston or someplace like Houston you drive out in the country and you see the farms and so forth and you can have a quite large farm with only maybe one guy or two people doing the plowing and the furrowing and the planting and uh you know coming and doing the uh you know the the Gathering of the crops and you know the processes that you go through through after the Gathering of the of the crops you know a relatively small number of people can do that sort of thing where it used to require on the same siiz Farm dozens and dozens of people was very very labor intensive but as the technology improved fewer workers were required and therefore where did these people go where did they go well they went into the towns and cities where they could find only limited employment if any at all and as I've said lived mainly in poor housing under unhealthy conditions and again while the upper and middle classes generally prospered the lower classes by far the majority experienced lower standards of living I mean think about it for a moment if you're a a small farmer living in a rural community you may not have a lot of money but you're going to be able to feed yourself and your family okay I'm not talking about the big farmers who are rich some of them are rich anyway I'm talking about the little guy you know they might not have a lot but they'd get by anyway and they'd have decent food you know and a place to live and and generally healthy environments for themselves and their their children okay but they move into the town without any skills Urban skills or education for that with no kinds of training programs like we have and it was extremely difficult for them simply to get by and many didn't social problems widespread unemployment theft prostitution endemic alcoholism there were places like in Jinn alley in London where you could go and for a penny you could uh take the tube there was a a a big Cask which was filled with Jin which was uh really just rot gut and they would try to cover up how raw the alcohol was with juniper some of you know what I'm talking about maybe all of you know what I'm talking about with the cheaper Gins you know that distinctive gin odor that's Juniper from juniper berries well you can dump a lot of juniper into real really really cheap alcohol and you can cover up the rawness of the cheap alcohol and so it was the cheapest form of alcohol that they could produce in the 18th century and so people in Jin alley used to go in for a penny you could get enough Jin that would get you pretty well along let's say um and so alcoholism was absolutely endemic you know among people who had nothing their lives were going nowhere you know I mean it was was awful cultural critiques you find them Hogarth Hogarth anybody know who Hogarth was artist of the 18th century did Engravings usually critical of society and satirical he had Prince depicting Jin Aly and the degradation not only a fashionable rakes but also of the seduction of country girls into prostitution now we can be as Superior as we want to be but we don't have to face those things most of us and you know here would be young women who would go into the City and I mean what if you're starving I mean literally what if you are starving or you have a child and your child is starving and you can't go to the doctor because you don't have any money and your child is going to die these people became vulnerable unfortunately to becoming prostitutes and so prostitution became a major kind of cottage industry and uh of course the men in many cases turn to lives of crime you know theft petty theft of one kind or another and as I've mentioned Goldsmith the deserted village talks about this at some length it's a poem how wealthy people came in and took over the land either bought it all up and displaced the local farmers or by the passing of the enclosure acts privatized what previously had been public common land and of course with the same result the small farmers were displaced or Gray's Elegy Written In A Country churchard probably most people have read that or at least heard parts of that in high school if if not in a college course it's a very very popular and very teachable poem in which gray is celebrating the common life of rural people that the Great and The Powerful all end up in the same graveyard as people who don't have any money may have little in the way of education and those people who may not have very much money May really be very good and decent human beings and a far greater quality in all important senses than the person who quote Rose to Great Heights or Robert Burns who wrote a whole bunch of poems celebrating Scottish Folk life just the life of ordinary Scottish people again that emphasis on the value of the rural and of traditional communities in rural settings okay um celebrations of rural nature and of the the natural sentiments natural feelings not just the great education I mean there's nothing wrong with education of course education is wonderful but you don't have to have a college education to be a really decent moral person following one's best moral sentiments that's the kind of thing that you find in this poetry okay so what we're going to be taking up then is going to be a whole group of poets in England who more or less are characterized by the kinds of features that I've been talking about for the last while but this is also an international movement Romanticism is developing on the continent as well as in England though sometimes it takes different forms on the continent Germany has a very great romantic literature and of course eventually music Opera think of romantic Opera in in Germany and of course developing also uh in Italy romantic Opera I mean most operas most of the classic operas uh uh if you were to go to see them or or even just to read summaries of their plots in many cases I mean that's pure Romanticism of a certain kind over and over and over again okay in America it's all moving over here now here in the American colonies and then in the young American Republic we w't facing the same kinds of problems and certainly not at the same rate of development yes there were some large cities like New York and Boston and Philadelphia but they were relatively small compared to the great cities of Europe in the beginning of the 19th century and the problems that they had were not as great in scale at any rate as the problems in England and European countries not yet at any rate and yet by the 3D fourth fifth Decades of the 19th century you have what in America is called transcendentalism you've heard of transcendentalism right and the American transcendentalists who are some of them Emerson thorough yeah you know a whole whole group of people right not just Emerson and thorough those are the biggies and we usually run into in in school and uh and what are the transcendentalists talking about they're talking about the same kinds of things that the English romantic writers are talking about they're saying that there is some kind of reality with which transcends that which we see and touch and feel and smell and here though our way of encountering that is to move through that which we experience with our senses especially not in the artificial environments created by humans but out there in nature out there in nature Emerson you know was a Unitarian Minister and even the Unitarian Church was too hidebound for Emerson and that's saying a lot by the way uh and so Emerson resigned his position as Minister and he said the reason why is you're not going to find God in the church this is Emerson this is not me don't write letters to me about this please uh this is Emerson speaking he said you're not going to find God in the church you know where you're going to find God you're going to find God out there go out in the woods and that's where you're going to experience God and that's really what he was talking about he was talking about experience he's not saying God isn't everywhere I'm now I'm looking at this from the point of view of obviously somebody as a believer in God um where are you going to have a a religious experience what Emerson is going to say is you've got to get out get out there in the mountains get out there in the woods get out there in the seashore get out there on a lake someplace that's where you will experience the Divine the Transcendent the transcendental if you wish transcendental is simply a term which means Beyond this level of ordinary experience in sunsets in mountains in waterfalls that's where you will experience the Divine and the Divine in and through nature of which we are or at least ought to be a part okay not distanced from why do you think his Protegé Henry David thoro went out to live at Walden Pond the whole experiment of going to live at Walden Pond was to see if you could live a life very simply very naturally with very few things he didn't carry much stuff out with him did he and he just built a shanty that he bought from an Irish family which was just nothing it was just a little Shack there was a political statement in that by the way and he carries all the wood and the nails and whatnot out there to Walden Pond and builds it so he can experience life in nature that's where one experiences the Divine in nature so okay [Music]

Literature_Lectures

15_Marilynne_Robinson_Housekeeping.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Today I wanted to begin with that question I left you with: What does Housekeeping have to do with the Identity Plot? Did you see elements of the Identity Plot in this novel? Who did and what did you see? Yes. What did you see?Student: Oh…Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh. Now you have to make good. Yeah. Student: Well--Professor Amy Hungerford: I can come back to you. Student: Would you?Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, I would. I would be quite happy to do that. Is someone else more ready to say what this novel has to do with the Identity Plot? Yes.Student: Well, outwardly speaking Ruth struggles with her own identity and how to fit it into societal conceptions of what it means to be a normal person, to have a home and function in society.Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. And what details, for you, most mark that conflict in Ruth? Where do you see that happening?Student: Well, you see it a lot in her hair and in her dress. Professor Amy Hungerford: In her hair and her dress. Yes. So, by contrast with Ruth, you see Lucille doing a lot of work on her hair, trying to make clothes, become close with the home economics teacher, chiding Ruth for not looking normal when they walk down the street. So, you really do see it in that dynamic, especially between the two sisters, and, as you say, in clothes and hair. Where else do you see this? That sense of being at odds is one part of it. Where else do you see it? Okay. You're not talkative today. Let's try something easier. I'd like to read the first sentence of the novel: "My name is Ruth." What can we say about that sentence as the opening sentence of a novel? Any thoughts or observations about it? Yes. Student: It recalls Moby-Dick. Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. It absolutely does. And what's the first line of Moby-Dick? Students: "Call me Ishmael." Professor Amy Hungerford: "Call me--" Oh, in chorus. That was beautiful. So, you may have read Moby-Dick, even if you didn't read this. So, "call me Ishmael." Okay. Absolutely. Marilynne Robinson, as is going to emerge in my lecture today, is very much preoccupied with the nineteenth century. She is very interested, especially, in these classic American writers of the American transcendentalist school--and that's Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau--also very interested in Dickinson, Emily Dickinson. She has a sensibility that maps very closely with theirs, and I'll get into that towards the end of my lecture today. But, just as a narrative strategy, how is "Call me Ishmael" different from "My name is Ruth"? Anyone have ideas about that? What's different about those two sentences? Yeah.Student: Well, "Call me Ishmael" sounds like it's more of a choice on the character's part to identify themselves, where Ruth is something that was given to her, and it wasn't something that she chose for herself.Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Very good. Yeah. So, Ishmael says, "Here's what I want you to call me," and Ruth says to us, "This is what people do call me." Yes. Student: One is interactive and one is declarative?Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. Yes. So the "Call me" implies a "you." It reaches out of the text and uses that implied second person "you", "Call me Ishmael." "My name is Ruth," simple declarative sentence. It gives you that sense that Ruth is more separate from you, perhaps, as a reader, than Ishmael is. Ishmael wants to enter into dialog with you, wants you to reach out towards him. Ruth offers you herself as something like the objective contemplation of a stranger, as a stranger. That's what a stranger says to you: "Hi. My name is Amy." That's the kind of address a stranger gives you. What else do you notice about those two sentences? Any other differences you can think of, or similarities, even, between the two? What about those names, Ruth and Ishmael? Yes. Is your hand up? Your hand is, yes, dangerously floating. Yes, you. Student: Both biblical names?Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Absolutely. Both biblical names, and they have certain similarities, too. Yes. Student: Well, both Ruth and Ishmael were sort of strangers in the cultures that they lived in. Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. Can you explain more about that?Student: Well, Ishmael was the first son of Abraham, but he was not really brought into the family, and eventually he was left in the wilderness. The story is that from him sprang up the Arabic tribe.Professor Amy Hungerford: That's right. So he's Hagar's son. He is the son of Abraham's--or Sarah's--serving woman. So, Abraham is unable to conceive a child with Sarah, so he sleeps with Hagar and Hagar bears him a son, Ishmael. So, he's from the family of Abraham, but he is outside that family. Now what about Ruth? Do you want to continue? Yeah. Student: Ruth married into a Jewish family. She herself was not from a Jewish family. She was from another genetic tribe, but, when her husband died and her father-in-law died, instead of returning to her own people she stayed with her mother-in-law.Professor Amy Hungerford: That's right. So she stays with her mother-in-law, Naomi, and they go back to the land of Judah, and there she becomes known as a righteous woman, a humble, loving and righteous woman. She is a daughter to her mother-in-law, Naomi. She in fact stays with Naomi because she loves her, and there is this beautiful line, when Naomi urges her to go back to her own mother and stay in Moab, her own land. She says to Naomi, "Where you go, I will go." It's probably a line you've heard, and it goes on. It's a very beautiful--I actually meant to bring my Bible with me but I seem to have forgotten it--a very beautiful line. So, it highlights her faithfulness. It's faith to Naomi that brings her into the realm of Judah under the protection of the God of the Israelites and causes her to become married to Boaz, who is of a noble family. And Ruth, finally, is the great-grandmother of King David. So, she is an alien, a stranger, who comes into the Israelite fold and ends up being in the lineage of their greatest king. And, in the New Testament, of course, that also means that she is of the House of Jesus, because Jesus is of the House of David. So, in Christian teaching, the story of Ruth is about the foreshadowing of the gentile inclusion of the Jewish redemption. So, the Jewish messiah is the world's redeemer, and the presence of the alien, the stranger, in his bloodline suggests that expansion of the promise. So, Ruth is a very important character. She is identified both by her status as a stranger and by her absolute centrality to a strong identity, either as Israelite or as Christian, in these two versions of this story of lineage. It is no accident that this is the name that Robinson has chosen for this character. Lots of elements of that story enter into Ruth's story. So Ruth, like her namesake, cleaves to a woman relative, and this is Sylvie. She cleaves to and becomes faithful to Sylvie, her aunt, in place of her own mother. So, there is an exchange, as in the biblical story, between the mother that she has lost, in this novel through the mother's suicide. She is replaced with an aunt. There is also that sense that she follows the aunt into a wandering life. So, in the biblical story, the wandering has a very clear end. It's a wandering back to the mother-in-law's land, back to Judah. You will have to think about, as you get to the end of this novel, whether there is an end to the wandering in Housekeeping, or whether it is an unmitigated wandering. Related to that question is another one about narrative, and that is: where does this voice come from? What account of this voice are we given? Who is speaking to us and from what position in the world? This is a question I will get to. By the end of this lecture, we will come to an understanding of that question. So, the biblical reference, as well as the Melvillian reference, suggests wandering. And it suggests a complex picture of identity, and I think that's what you get in the novel that connects it to the conventions of the Identity Plot. So, there is one element, which is the whole theme of Lucille and Ruth, which I was talking about, coming from your comment. That's the simple version. There is a more complicated version that I just want to show you on 96,97. This is when Lucille and Ruth are playing hooky from school. They've made their summer very long, starting at March. I don't recommend this, by the way. And they are walking around by the railroad tracks, and they come upon some hobos. This is the top of 96: We in our plaid dresses and Orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some sleek train [That's an Ishmael reference right there. Ishmael is the only person to escape the Pequod to come back and tell the story, so there's an element of that Melville reference right here, too.] some flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai and they might have been touring legislators or members of a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected a train to leap out of the water, caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward and then to continue across the bridge. The passengers would arrive sounder than they departed, accustomed to the depth, serene about their restoration to the light, disembarking at the station in Fingerbone with a calm that quieted the astonishment of friends. Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather, youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation like a difficult memory or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots. There's a lovely movement in that passage. So, first she moves from a fantasy that would make the hobos and Lucille and Ruth part of comprehensible wholes, comprehensible social groups, going to identifiable places, moving through spaces that made sense. So, if they were legislators, members of a dance band, or the girls were part of some large family, if they were all on some pleasure craft, it would explain the inappropriateness of their clothes and how they were ruined, if there had been a disaster. All these are ways of imagining a stable and socially legible identity for all the people in the scene, hobos and girls alike. Then it slips into this moment where the difference between Ruth and Lucille and the hobos is insisted upon when she says, "As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born." By turning to the hobos, and in her mind addressing them, she pushes them further away from her and Lucille, and begins to craft a distinction between them. They, Ruth and Lucille, are rooted in Fingerbone by the very weight of their family lying at the bottom of the lake. So, it gives them a rootedness to the place that the hobos can't claim. The hobos' transience is highlighted by this imagined address to them. When she further dreams of the resurrection of the whole train, all the family at the bottom of the lake, it allows her to imagine herself and Lucille in this warm, coherent embrace in a more fulsome way. So, the family, then, isn't just imagined to distinguish them from the hobos, but to imagine a more fully alive presence to her, a family that will restore her identity and her legibility to herself, not just to the hobos or the town. And I love this repeated structure, verbal structure, "say": the proposition, "Say that Helen lifted our hair," a very intimate gesture, "Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips," so that it invites us in to the sensual commerce of a family, and that's what she uses her imagination to do. But then, how it ends, you can't miss this: "Lucille and I could run off to the woods." The restoration of the family, the resurrection, is precisely what then will liberate them to do exactly what they're doing now, running off to the woods, being truant. So, in this beautifully crafted passage, where we see Ruth's imagination moving from one fantasy to another, you see how the act of trying to restore her own legibility through this narrative, through that repeated "say," the propositions, finally gets her back to where she was before. So that the restoration of a secure identity in a family is, in fact, what then propels her out, to imagine once again her separateness from it. So, what Robinson gives us, I think, in this version, not so much in the story of Lucille and Ruth and the difference between the two of them, which parses the problem as being those who conform and can be legible to the world and those who are not and have to be separate from the social world. Lucille goes to the home economics teacher. Ruth goes with Sylvie. That's a very simple split. This passage, and the way Ruth's mind works, makes it much more complex, so that it's the identity that allows for the final alienation. The identity or the security in the family is what allows for the finding of one's separateness in the woods. So, there are two kinds of identity at issue, the single and the communal, or you could say the contemplative and the social. I think it's ultimately the contemplative, or the singular person, that interests Robinson even more. But I will say that in the initial reception of this novel--because the Identity Plot is so fixed in the pattern of literary work in this period and also fixed in the concerns of critics--early readings of this novel really were all about that simpler version of identification. People read this as a feminist novel that was really all about women being liberated from a confining domesticity and finding their individual identity out there in the world some other way, so that housekeeping and its rejection were the major terms of the criticism. And, if you've ever seen the film "Thelma and Louise," you can sort of see the way it chimes with a lot of what was being thought in popular culture on these questions. You can think of Helen sailing off the cliff into the lake, which was seen as empowering, in her car. It did not take long for readers of this novel to abandon that, because of the predominance of the themes that I'm going to talk about next, and that's the question of: how can you be a coherent person in this world? What does that look like? Ruth is very troubled by this quality. It comes though in tiny ways, like on 78, with other characters. Lucille, we are told, is caught cheating, by her teacher, on a test: Lucille was much too indifferent to school ever to be guilty of cheating, and it was only an evil fate that had prompted her to write Simon Bolivar and the girl in front of her to write Simon Bolivar when the answer was obviously General Santa Anna. This was the only error either of them made and so their papers were identical. Lucille was astonished to find that the teacher was so easily convinced of her guilt, so immovably persuaded of it, calling her up in front of the class and demanding that she account for the identical papers. Lucille writhed under this violation of her anonymity. What does it mean to call that instance a violation of her anonymity? Well, what's imagined here is that two minds, by some mysterious process, sort of melded with one another and produced the same answers, the exact, identical exams. Lucille is so easy with the idea of that kind of melding that she is stunned by being called out, not as a violation of her honor, but as a violation of her anonymity. She wanted to be without name, essentially. That's what being anonymous means. You're without a name. You kind of blend in with the crowd. That's exactly what she was doing when her mind blended with that of the girl in front of her and they produced identical papers. It's a funny little logic. It's a tiny detail that you can see, now, "rhyming" with other details in the novel. If you think of the conversation between Lily and Nona, the two maiden aunts that take care of the girls for a while, that funny conversation on page 38, where, essentially, these are two women who have totally melded into each other. They say the same things. Their conversations are just the ritual assurance of a shared thread of thought: "Someone filled the teapot." "Children are hard for anybody." "The Hartwick has always kept them out." "And I understand that." "I don't blame them." "No." "No." And it goes on. These are two people who, like Lucille and the girl in front of her, their minds have melded this time by long habit, by long living together, and by their love for each other. It gets darker, though, on 105. It's hard, as it turns out, to maintain your separateness, or to maintain a sense that you really are an entity as a person. "Where's Lucille?" [says Sylvie to Ruth, having woken up on a bench.] "Home," [says Ruth.] "Well, that's fine," Sylvie said. "I'm glad to have a chance to talk to you. You're so quiet, it's hard to know what you think." Sylvie had stood up, and we began to walk toward home. "I suppose I don't know what I think." This confession embarrassed me. It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible--incompletely or minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares. But my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality. "Well, maybe that will change," Sylvie said. We walked a while without speaking. "Maybe it won't." I dropped a step behind and watched her face. She always spoke to me in the voice of an adult dispensing wisdom. I wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like, and if not, whether she too felt ghostly as I imagined she must. This is an instance where what Ruth experiences might be said to be total identity, a very stable identity. She cannot alienate herself from herself to know what she is thinking. So, if you think about that construction, "I don't know what I think," it posits an "I" who could know the self. That's two entities, not one. So, if you don't know what you think, maybe it's because there isn't that objective distance between an "I" and a self. You're not self-alienated in that way that, remember, Ambrose always is in Lost in the Funhouse. That's his curse, that he is alienated from himself, and he can never integrate. So, it's like he's Lily and Nona in one person, two entities but somehow the same. Ruth, on the other hand, is like an indivisible substance, but because it's indivisible it seems, the logic here imagines, it's ghostly. Somehow, it's like an essence or something unsubstantive, because it doesn't have that alienation built into it. How can you exist in the company of other people, if the structure for even knowing oneself doesn't seem to exist in the mind? There are other manifestations that have more to do with nature, and you can find one of these on 115,116, the bottom of 116- 15. This is when Lucille and Ruth spend the night outside. It's one of two very important moments when Ruth spends the night outside. Here's one with Lucille, and there'll be one right after the page where I asked you to stop for today, with Sylvie. For a while she [Lucille] sang "Mockingbird Hill," and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun. Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille's pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track or trace if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent. So, Ruth feels her boundaries overrun when the content of her mind and the quality of the world become indistinguishable, the darkness in the mind and the body indistinguishable from the darkness outside her. And this is a positive condition for her, insofar as it seems to eliminate the need for things like memories, traces, remnants, that list that we're given. And I'm going to talk much more about the question of loss on Wednesday. That's the theme for that lecture on this novel, so I'm going to leave that as something for you to think about: what is the status of loss in the novel? But for now what I want to note is how the overrun boundaries of the self is imagined as redemptive. So, the loss of identity, as against some other outside thing--be it nature, another person, another piece of the community, another group--that is imagined not as a problem but as something to be embraced. These observations about Ruth's permeability, and the general permeability of persons one to another, brings us back to that question that I asked a little while ago. Where does Ruth's voice come from? And here I want to note that language is imagined to be all mixed up with the material of the world. And, if you look on page 85, you can see one example of this. (Oops. Sorry. I think that's not the-- Sorry. Yes, this is the one I want.) I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. There were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read Powers Meet, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in an anonymous hand: I think of you. Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise. Words are all bound up in the material of the world, the stuff that gathers in the corners of a house. And, moreover, they are words that are very evocative, "Powers Meet," as if somehow language and leaves meeting in the corner of a house signifies the various powers of the cosmos coming together: "Powers Meet." "I think of you" and its anonymity, its character as coming from an envelope flap, the kind of piece of paper that travels from one person to another, suggests a communicativeness, a general intent surrounding these pieces of matter, leaves and paper. So, two things associated with language, the words themselves, and also intention, gather around these debris. If that is true, we might also think of 126, the dictionary full of pressed flowers. This is another beautiful image. So, Lucille has asked Ruth to look up "pinking shears" in the dictionary, because she's trying to make her dress and she doesn't know what the pinking shears are that are called for in the pattern. And so she asks Ruth to look it up. Ruth finds, pressed in to old dictionary, flowers that her grandfather has gathered, all filed under their alphabetical name. And, she is much more concerned with the flowers than she is with getting the definition of "pinking shears." So, here you have two visions of language: one--the "pinking shears," language, the horde of words--is for identifying things so you can do practical tasks. And, in this case, the practical task is Lucille's effort to blend in with the town. Ruth's conception of language is that it is a horde of expressive gems or (Well, that's not a good way of putting it) it's a vocabulary of the world that includes not only words but also flowers. And that there are beauties of each, all in their place, in this dictionary. So, if language comes, almost viscerally, from nature, here we can see exactly how Robinson is in the realm of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, and here I'm going to read you a little bit from Emerson's essay Nature. This is what he says about being in the woods. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity leaving me my eyes which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages in the tranquil landscape and especially in the distant line of the horizon. Man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. So, the transparent eyeball, "I am nothing. I see all," that is the sense you get of Ruth's voice, that Ruth's voice is like the voice of that transparent eyeball. The difference between Emerson's vision and Robinson's, I think, is the way Robinson is willing to let the human environment, the built environment, the house, become part and parcel of that woodsy whole that Emerson so wants to immerse himself in. So, the house is opened to leaves; leaves are mixed up with pieces of paper with words. And so, you get that sense of a creation that is saying something to this consciousness, in the same way that Emerson imagines, but it can happen in a house. She embellishes this vision of a speaking, material world. So, Ruth's sense of self mirrors that fluidity that you get in the transparent eyeball. There is also something that you can see. (Wait. Hold on. I'm now trying to find the page number that I need. This is 16 through 19. Here it is.) That fluidity of consciousness that the transparent eyeball gives you is beautifully on display in this passage towards the beginning of the novel, when Ruth is thinking about how her grandmother responded to the death of her husband and the departure of her daughters. I'm not going to read this whole thing because it would simply take too long, but I just want to show you what happens over these three pages. So, on the top of 16, this is another one of those hypotheticals: One day my grandmother must have carried out a basket of sheets to hang in the spring sunlight, wearing her widow's black, performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith. Say there were two or three inches of hard old snow on the ground, with earth here and there oozing through the broken places, and that there was warmth in the sunlight, when the wind did not blow it all away. And say she stooped breathlessly in her corset to lift up a sodden sheet by its hems, and say that when she had pinned three corners to the lines it began to billow and leap in her hands, to flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements. That wind! she would say, because it pushed the skirts of her coat against her legs and made the strands of her hair fly. It came down the lake, and it smelled sweetly of snow, and rankly of melting snow, and it called to mind the small, scarce stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick. Did you catch that little transition there, transition from proposition, "Say that this happens, say this is what my grandmother did and saw and smelled," to a seamless inhabitation through that free, indirect discourse. Ruth enters the mind of her grandmother and starts to inhabit her memories of her husband from long before the time when Ruth was born. We smell the wind, with Ruth, through the grandmother, and we know that it reminds her of the flowers that she and Edmund would pick. And then, you get a long meditation of the most private thoughts that the grandmother has about her husband, and what he's like in the springtime. And this is at the bottom of 17, and it concludes with this line: "At such times…." She's just imagined him as a primitive man rather than formal Edmund. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and his Methodism, but all the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own. It's that "soul all unaccompanied" that most concerns Robinson as a writer. And here Ruth imagines a kind of free access to that other soul that is her grandmother. And, if you look in the middle of 18, there is one of these amazing tense shifts. Ruth is going from meditating on her early widowhood as a memory, to a time a little less far back, to the wake of her daughters' departures, the grandmother's grief at their departure. And now [That's the "now" referred to in the middle of 18.] And now to comfort herself my grandmother would not reflect on the unkindness of her children or of children in general. She had noticed many times always that her girls' faces were soft and serious and inward and still when she looked at them just as they had been when they were small children, just as they were now when they were sleeping. If a friend was in the room, her daughters would watch his or her face intently and tease or soothe or banter and any one of them could gauge and respond to the finest changes of expression or tone, even Sylvie if she chose to, but it did not occur to them to suit their words and manners to her looks and she did not want them to. In fact, she was often prompted or restrained by the thought of saving this unconsciousness of theirs. She was then a magisterial woman not only because of her height and her large, sharp face, not only because of her upbringing, but also because it suited her purpose to be what she seemed to be so that her children would never be startled or surprised and to take on all the postures and vestments of matron to differentiate her life from theirs so that her children would never feel intruded upon. She's careful to guard their separateness. And then, you get this wonderful meditation--quite mysterious, and I don't actually have a full account of it--why the grandmother finding the potatoes in the garden comes to be a moment of revelation. Maybe this is something you can think about. Why is it specifically that detail that Robinson chooses to make a moment of epiphany when the grandmother says: "What have I seen? What have I seen? The earth and the sky and the garden not as they always are," and she saw her daughters' faces not as they always were or as other people's were and she was quiet and aloof and watchful not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her. So, in that three-page passage, Ruth's voice inhabits her grandmother's mind at widely varied moments in the grandmother's life: important, extremely intimate moments, even the strange moment of epiphany in the garden. No one is anywhere near or around. It's a very mysterious kind of epiphany. Who knows, really, what it means? And yet Ruth can tell us about it. Robinson has described her writerly project as giving us access to the kinds of things that people would say if they could, and I just want to read you this quotation from Robinson: "One of the primary mistakes people make is to take people's spoken language to be equivalent to the level of their thinking. I think it's one of the oddest errors." What she takes herself to be doing is to be providing for Ruth's mind a language that can match the flexibility of this young person's consciousness, its range, its permeability, and also in that very supple voice to be her identity, so the voice becomes who Ruth is. So, no matter how far she ranges across her boundaries of person, no matter how indistinct the darkness in her mind is from the darkness outside her body, that voice can still be heard. And it can still be identified as hers, even as it ranges in and out of her grandmother's thoughts, in and out of Sylvie's thoughts, in and out of Lucille's thoughts, in and out of her mother's thoughts. So that, in the end, is what constitutes something like identity in this novel. Now, on Wednesday, in the very short time I will have, I'll talk about what that voice has to do with the question of loss which haunts this novel in every sentence, as I'm sure you've noticed, very elegiac sense to this novel. So, I'm going to reconcile this argument that I've made today with an analysis of what that is doing in the novel.

Literature_Lectures

6_Guest_Lecture_by_Andrew_Goldstone.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: Today it is my very great privilege and pleasure to introduce Andrew Goldstone, a TF in this course. Andrew is going to provide for you today the only relief you will get all term from my voice, so enjoy it! On the syllabus it says that I would be presenting a lecture on censorship in this slot. Andrew Goldstone: That's been suppressed, actually.Professor Amy Hungerford: It's been suppressed. That's right. So, I will talk about censorship somewhat in my last lecture on Lolita, and in preparation for that, for next week I'd like you to finish the novel and then read his essay, "On a Novel Entitled Lolita." It should be bound at the back of your book. Andrew is a fourth-year student in the Ph.D. program in English, and he is writing a dissertation on the autonomy of the work of art in modernism: on that as a problem, on that as a subject to be questioned and understood in a deeper way than it has been up until now. It's a wonderful dissertation. It prepares him very well for the lecture he's going to give you today. So: Andrew.Andrew Goldstone: Thanks, Amy. So, on Monday we had three main themes that were used to introduce this novel to you. First is the idea that the novel invites ethical questions but also holds them off through parody in the same way that it uses the tropes of romanticism and romantic love and parodies them. Secondly, we looked at Humbert's techniques of rhetorical seduction and related that to a kind of intellectual problem that Nabokov sets himself of trying to make you identify with this villainous character. And that leads to the third big question we looked at, which is the place of Nabokov in this novel amidst the many layers, whether he crosses them or confuses them. And that's the question that I'm mostly going to focus on today. I'm going to bracket the ethical question, leave that for Monday's lecture, and the way I want to approach this question of the style in the novel and the question of aestheticism is by placing Nabokov in the context of literary modernism. So, I'm going to outline for you a little bit what I mean by that term, and then I'm going to look at some specific predecessors that Nabokov refers to, and the way he uses them. And then, at the very end, I'm going to try to connect that to Nabokov's exile and the themes of exile. So, let's start with an example. If you look on page 15, Humbert describes his adolescence, his education: At first I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion--I am so oppressed, doctor--set in, and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. [Well, that's why I'm in graduate school!] Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches: [Humbert's poem]: "Fraulein von Kulp may turn her hand upon the door. / I will not follow her. / Nor Fresca. / Nor / that Gull." So, this is a spoof of a poem by T.S. Eliot which I've given you a piece of on your handout, so let's look at that for a second, Eliot's 1920 poem, Gerontion. I'm just going to read a little bit of this so that you have the flavor of the thing that Nabokov is burlesquing: Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gatesNor fought in the warm rainNor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house. And the poem goes on, and this is the tone of a poem. It's a poem of crisis, a poem of a kind of hollow speaker, someone who emerges as, more or less, buried alive. And this is supposed to reflect both personal crisis and a historical crisis. And it comes to a moment where the possibility of rejuvenation is described as devoured by a series of caricatures of Europeans, and that's this second part on your handout, the people that devour rejuvenation. So: By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark roomShifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp--[There she is--]Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttlesWeave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty houseUnder a windy knob. What in Eliot is crisis, in Nabokov is just a joke. In other words, these terrifying figures in Eliot--Fraulein von Kulp--are just some of Humbert's nymphets. A fraulein is just a young woman; Fresca, another Eliot character: the fresh woman, right, a young woman again. So, I called this a burlesque of Eliot's modernism. It takes something meant to be really serious, and turns it in to a dirty joke. And that's the first way Nabokov will relate to literary modernism. That's quite interesting, that he takes this approach, because Eliot in some ways comes very close to the kind of ideas about art that Nabokov himself holds. Eliot says poems should be autotelic. That means they should be an end unto themselves. Nabokov will say in that afterword you're going to read, "the novel has as its only purpose to afford aesthetic bliss." So, the parody is of something very close to home. And this poem that I've given you will come back on page 134. You don't have to turn to that now, but you should think about that return. It's much more serious and strange. Okay. So that's enough on Eliot. Now I want to really clarify for you what I mean by this term "modernism." It just means the art and literature of the early twentieth century, especially the "high art," although its roots are definitely in the nineteenth century, especially the French nineteenth century, fiction and poetry. In English it begins with the late novels of Henry James around 1900, in poetry with Eliot and with Ezra Pound. In prose its main exemplars in English would be James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. And you should know about this movement that it had very rapid success. So, although its first centers are London and Paris, it's already taught as classic literature in American universities before the war; it's already classic. So, now, here's just a list for you: eight features of literary modernism that are all important to Nabokov. Eight features of literary modernism: An obsession with the idea of art's autonomy, the idea that art is its own law, that it responds to no other laws, that it has no other purpose than its own purposes. In other words, art for art's sake. That's Eliot's autotelic poem. The only purpose of the work of art is to afford aesthetic bliss. Second, a sense of crisis, a radical break in culture, an overturning of conventional artistic forms that goes with a sense that civilization itself is being overturned. Third, the idea that the paradigm of experience is artistic experience, that the norms for everyone should be artistic norms of careful perception, deep reflection, that the idea that culture itself is the saving, most important activity that people can engage in. Fourth--and this goes along with that--a rejection of convention, especially sexual convention, sexual morality, and that's the obvious connection to this book, the very deep roots of modernism. However, at the same time there's an idea that the artist is a kind of technician, someone whose values are craft, form and style rather than message, personal expression or wisdom of any kind. Sixth, this is a term from the critic Joseph Frank: spatial form, the idea that in place of a linear narrative you have a system of cross-references and repeated motifs that give the structure of works. In place that is only visible, in other words on rereading, only visible on rereading. And then, this anticipates my last points: Modernism is self-consciously international. In other words, it will look to international tradition and has as its ambition to be a culture not just for one nation but for many, maybe for all. It goes along with this eighth characteristic that's important: the artist is seen as a kind of spiritual exile, someone who is alienated from a home society and a home culture, whether or not he or she has actually left it, as Nabokov did. So this is what I mean by International High Modernism. You should add to this list of writers especially Faulkner and Hemingway, and you should remember that there's a parallel American tradition, the realist tradition that we saw Richard Wright referring to: that is Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and then going back to the nineteenth century, writers like Mark Twain. I had a teacher who used to compare Lolita to Huck Finn. They are two novels about traveling across America and an unconventional couple. Right? So, anyway. Okay. But now, that modernist tradition is something that Nabokov owes a lot to, but he always tries to distinguish himself from it. For Nabokov, the highest value is originality. He says this in his last Russian novel, The Gift. Or, he doesn't say it; his autobiographical hero says it: "Any genuinely new trend in art is a knight's move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror." Okay. Any genuinely new trend is a knight's move. I just remind you, in chess the knight doesn't move in a straight line. It starts out in a straight line and then it hops off on a diagonal. Unlike any other piece, it skips over pieces in the way. So the knight, far from going on a straight course, surprises you. You might think of walking in here expecting Professor Hungerford on censorship and getting me instead. But this is a very important idea for Nabokov both as a way of treating predecessors and as a way of writing. And I want to show you that way of writing very early in the book on page 10 now. Let's take a look at that. This is at the top of the page: My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: Okay. So this is a knight's move: from traumatic event of the mother's death--should be the center of the sentence; it's just dismissed--hopped beyond into this stylistic wash, a golden haze. And he goes on to describe the sensations of early childhood. So, the strategy of the knight's move is to frustrate your expectations, to leap over the apparently important events into something else characterized by a kind of aesthetic play, and these parentheses are a real icon of that. A critic has counted 450 sets of them in this novel, the parentheses, an important example of the knight's move. And I want to show you another kind of knight's move, and to do that I'm going to talk just for a moment about Nabokov's relationship to the French writer, Proust. Proust is the great aestheticist of modernism, the novelist who writes about art, who holds up art as a value, as well as giving a theory of memory--memories are important in Lolita; that really comes from Proust--a theory of memory that has a lot to do with the work of the artist. Nabokov, in 1966 he said this: "The greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose"--this is convenient; take this down--"are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation"--that is, The Metamorphosis--"Bely's St. Petersburg," a pretty obscure Russian avant-garde novel, "and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time." I'm not sure the fairy tale should remind you of that first meeting between Humbert and Lolita that we looked at on Monday, described in fairy tale terms. But actually, the thing I want to think about is a crude pun there, a "fairy" tale. Proust is himself gay. One of his big subjects is homosexuality, and Nabokov's reaction to this is really homophobic. This is not just about Nabokov's personal prejudice. It's about a relationship to predecessors who are seen as too similar. The danger for Nabokov--remember that his value is originality--the danger is that he will fall too in love with something too like himself. He has to hold off this possibility of being too attracted to these male predecessors who are too similar to him. This should cue you to think about the theme of doubling in this novel, to think about the possibility of desire between men here, to think about the word "queer," the treatment of Gaston Godin, that funny French character in Beardsley, to think about Humbert's constant protestations that he's attractive to all women, about his supposed virility. And it should just make you wonder whether pedophilia is in itself a kind of knight's move from homosexuality. In other words, is there another form of perverted desire hiding behind the one that's in front of us? Just a suggestion: look on page 20, still in Humbert's early life, near the bottom: It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. So, we have a kind of image there of the autonomous aesthetic pleasure, right, the pleasure of imagination that's taken alone, according to one's own thoughts rather than in some broader, more social form. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. So, the object of this wonderful aesthetic reverie, the nymphet, turns out to be an adult male. And I just want you to ask yourself why that could be. But, Nabokov's relationship to this modernist past is not just the burlesque that he visits on Eliot, is not just this complicated attraction and dis-identification that he works on with Proust. An element of admiration is also present, and that's really part of his relationship to Joyce. Remember that he names Joyce as the greatest master of twentieth-century prose. I'm just going to name for you four features of Joyce's style that are important to Nabokov: stylistic virtuosity, the ability to imitate any style; at the same time, a scrupulous attention to the banality of everyday life and all its detail; yet, the third characteristic, the constant use of a superimposed structure. So, in Ulysses, famously, Joyce puts the narrative of the Odyssey on top of a day in Dublin, or in Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a linear narrative in which a young boy grows up is structured as a series of structurally paralleled chapters in which moments in each one correspond to the ones in successive chapters. And this comes with a kind of suggestion that that banal reality is redeemed by the artist's activity. Fourthly, Joyce loves puns. So does Nabokov. This is incredibly important, and there's a direct glance at that just ahead of where you read, so don't turn here. I don't want to spoil what's coming up, but on page 221 there is a reference to--don't look, don't look--to a writer named Vivian Darkbloom plagiarizing from Joyce; Vivian Darkbloom you remember from Monday. That's the anagram of Vladimir Nabokov, so it's an explicit recognition. And the thing that's being plagiarized, I've actually given you on the handout. It's a little piece of Finnegans Wake, which is Joyce's work in which almost every word is a pun. I'll just read you a sentence of this so you know what it's like: "Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of no-vembrance." And that spells out "rainbow." Right. The important thing here is that Nabokov acknowledges this debt to Joyce as not just a parody, but a real debt. And so now I want to think at more length about another Joyce allusion which shows how complicated the relationship to his predecessor is. And, with Eliot, I read the Nabokovian version first. This time I'll give you the Joyce first. So this is on your handout as well from Chapter 2. This describes the hero, Stephen Dedalus, as a young boy trying to write a poem. And eventually in the novel he will succeed in writing a poem, but here he doesn't manage to. And so, this is a kind of forecast of what will happen later on. The further complication is that here he's writing a poem and then he remembers an earlier attempt; that layering of memory, and that kind of layering, is actually a prototype for the layering in Lolita: The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. [Skip a little.] On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: "To E-- C--." He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath, he fell into a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father's second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates: Roderick Kickham, John Lawton, Anthony MacSweeney, Simon Moonan. The version of this that comes up in the novel is in the midst of Humbert's diary, and the diary itself, I should say, owes a lot to Joyce. And I've given you a piece of that diary to look at on your own on the handout. But this is the moment that directly alludes to Portrait, and it's really very important for understanding Nabokov's technique. So, page 51, near the bottom: Thursday: We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's Encyclopedia I found a map of the States that a child's pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale School. And I think of that front and back of the page as another kind of knight's move. You think you're looking at one thing, and you land on another. It is a poem I know already by heart: Angel, Grace Austin, Floyd Beal, JackBeal, MaryBuck, Daniel… [and so on; I'll come back to this list, actually; just skip to the bottom on page 52] Talbot, EdgarTalbot, EdwinWayne, Lull,--[a lull in the book, right?] Williams, Ralph Windmuller, Louise A poem, a poem forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this Haze Dolores: she, in its special bower of names with its bodyguard of roses, a fairy princess between her two maids of honor. That's the fairy tale again. In a way this is just like the Joyce. A list of names leads up to this aesthetic sensation, the revelation of a poem. The ordinary materials of life become the basis for a kind of artistic achievement. However, obviously this is not like the Joyce, where there is a realistic depiction of a young boy trying to write, getting bored and failing. Here something else is happening, because the list of names is not ordinary. Right. There is that bower of roses. That refers to Mary Rose Hamilton; Haze, Dolores; Hanek, Rosaline. And then there's Emile Rosado and Carmine Rose--a red rose--Angel, Grace-- really!--Stella Fantasia. And then even the ordinary names are kind of plants, because almost every name on this list comes back elsewhere in the book. You could look, for example, for Louise Windmuller or Vivian McCrystal. And then, right in the middle (oh, and then we have Shakespeare too: Miranda Anthony, Miranda Viola) and right in the middle you have a kind of explanation planted: McCoo, Virginia; McCrystal, Vivian; McFate Aubrey. McFate, which as you know is something Humbert gets kind of obsessed with, is the icon of the difference between the realistic world of Joyce and the already artificial, already aestheticized world of this novel. No one was ever really named McFate. McFate is a kind of parody of real randomness. You might think of it as having the same relation to real fate as Chicken McNuggets do to chicken. In other words, you might think of it as a kind of artificial, processed, bland, easily consumable version of fate. I really mean that. One of the funny things about that debt to Finnegans Wake is, Finnegans Wake as a book of puns is unreadable. Nobody reads it except specialists like me. Lolita was a bestseller. Nabokov made so much money from it he was able to retire to Switzerland. And you should ask yourself what about this novel makes that possible; why is that, that you have this McNugget version of the modernist novel? And I don't really mean that to disparage the novel, but it makes it clear that there's some kind of difference between this and the works that Nabokov is looking back to. I want to think a little bit more about this idea of a McFate. There is a kind of short circuit between the Joycean idea of taking ordinary life and transforming it into an aesthetic order, because the ordinary is already aesthetic in the book. In other words, chance is already fated. The thing that stands for randomness in this book, the thing that looks like ordinary detail, has already been arranged to give you artistic pleasure. That's why Humbert can be instantly delighted in the list of names. This doesn't look forward to Humbert's poem; it already is a poem and it is a poem to the crazed, aroused mind of Humbert. So, the artificial has taken the place of the real here, and this novel really reminds you of that all the time. On 84, Humbert's thinking of killing Charlotte, and he says, "No man can bring about the perfect murder. Chance, however, can do it." Chance can do it, and of course the perfect murder does happen. Charlotte Haze dies as if by a total accident, but we're aware that the accident is so perfect that it was arranged. So, this is the, kind of, hand of Nabokov, taking a narrative of real events and twisting it into something that makes a kind of sense, taking fate and making it McFate. And I want to show you one more example of that, in the scene where Humbert and Lolita have reached the hotel, the Enchanted Hunter. This is on page 118 near the bottom. "In the slow, clear hand of crime, I wrote 'Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale.' A key, 342, was half shown to me, magician showing object he is about to palm and hand it over to Uncle Tom." The coincidence--normally, in real life, it would be a delightful coincidence to go to a hotel room that has the same number as your street address--here it's a kind of too-easy icon of the correspondence between the place where Humbert meets Lolita and the place where he rapes her. And the book just tells you that, right, in one of those parentheses--"the magician showing the object he is about to palm"-- the ordinary event which is really trickery, a suggestion that nothing has been left to chance in the novel; nothing is ordinary. Now, as I come to my last section here, what I want to suggest is that this kind of transformation of arbitrary, real fated events into conspicuously artificial tricks (which you might think of a knight's move on the real: fate; McFate) is a response in particular to exile, in particular to Nabokov's condition of exile. An exile, living in a foreign country, lives in a kind of denaturalized world, a world where, instead of everything making instant sense everything has to be decoded. Right. Nothing is initially known to make sense; everything has to be figured out and reinvented. In that afterword to this book, Nabokov says he had to invent America. That's because he didn't know it already; it wasn't given to him. Now, in a way this is a terrible state, a state of discontinuity with the world you exist in. But it has a payoff, kind of, a payoff which is the possibility precisely of inventing, and this is visible everywhere in this book. One example is the transformation of housework. This is on page 179. "My west-door neighbor"--west door--"who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if these verbs are all wrong)." Of course, the point is that they're all wrong. The point is that this clichéd suburban life of mowing the lawn, washing the car and so on has been transformed--precisely because Humbert is a foreigner--into something you can laugh at, something you can enjoy, something that you can apply the knight's move to. And this is, even a couple pages before, explicitly described as something particular to foreigners. Because, you remember, Gaston Godin says about the school that Lolita's going to go to, the girls are taught "not to spell very well, but to smell very well." And Humbert comments that it's "with a foreigner's love for such things"; the foreigner's love for this kind of move is a response to this denaturalized world of the exile. It's important, in this connection, to remember that the knight's move as a way of avoiding obstacles, in particular, keeps skipping over forms of violence. There is that mother's death at the beginning. There is another moment in which Humbert is tracing his hand along Lolita's leg and he discovers a bruise there that he'd given her accidentally. That's early on in the book. In other words, this surprise is a violent surprise. You can even look at the mention of a knight's move in this book. That's page 192: One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position--a knight's move from the top--always extremely disturbed me. The knight's move--which is just a playful way of describing where the window is, right-- the knight's move is nonetheless a kind of wound or damage. So, even as it's the prototype for originality, it's also something very disturbing and harmful. And that conjunction, I want to suggest, that conjunction has to do with the traumatic event of having had to emigrate, having had to take up another language. Nabokov will say that his private tragedy is that, let's see: [His] private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, the frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. Here, being in exile prevents Nabokov from making that knight's move. And you might think about that homophobic attitude to a Proustian past, the fear that it's too like what he wants to do. But the main point here to think about is that feeling of damage. On the other hand, the critic Michael Wood has pointed out that Nabokov didn't lose Russian. He didn't lose it on the way while he was riding the boat; he decided to stop writing in it. And Wood says this: "Nabokov could appreciate language itself only after he had made himself lose a language and had found another in the ashes of his loss." A kind of economy, a balance between the loss of one language and a particular set of techniques that comes in its place. These techniques are really I think the source of the most appealing writing in this book, and so let's look now at one of those evocations of the American landscape which I just think maybe are the closest the book comes just to pure beauty. On page 152--oh, and by the way, this book was written on road trips. Nabokov's wife, Vera, drove him on thousands of miles of trips around the country while he was writing this novel and hunting butterflies, so think about that--but here is 152, evocation of the landscape: By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition, because of those painted oil cloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in central European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bedtime with the rustic green views they depicted: opaque, curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence, or hills of greenish gouache. So, so far the American landscape is already a work of art, already part of a European memory. Then something else happens: "But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain"--in other words, the already worked-over, domesticated plain--"beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist." "Inutile loveliness" is kind of the key word of Nabokov's technique, and he says the novel has as its only purpose to provide aesthetic bliss. So, here is inutile loveliness coming just from seeing the landscape as a stranger. Humbert goes on: There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot, still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quicksilverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. So, a European artist actually appears again there, with Claude Lorrain, but kind of made strange: given that knight's move, given a new twist. So--instead of familiar, incorporated into this profoundly strange, vast landscape that gets Humbert's most appealing rhetoric--the rhetoric of an exile. But, I don't want you to think that this just means everything's okay. Of course, everything is not okay. Even Humbert will tell us so. Just a few pages later, on page 175, he talks about his journey: We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour-books, old tires, and her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep. We have to pair that with that other evocation of the landscape to see this alternate idea, that actually this distanced criss-crossing of the landscape could be damaging. Think of those other violent knight's moves, like skipping past the mother's death. Somehow this is skipped past, that--the sobs in the night. There's another version, yet another version, that relates back to that funny figure of Gaston Godin. And I spoke about Proust; Gaston Godin has a picture of Proust on his wall, and in fact, he has pictures of all great figures of French modernism--André Gide, the dancer Nijinsky--all figures of this kind of aestheticism, this belief in the power of art, and all gay, as Godin himself is. And Humbert has a kind of hatred for that, which he voices on page 173. Sorry, 183: There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum, repulsive, fat, old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language. There he was, in priggish New England--[here are we!] crooned over by the old and caressed by the young, oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody, and here was I. And the contrast here is between someone who has remained tied to that European past, remained comfortably alienated--and by that very means been able to fit into society--with someone who is in a much more ambivalent position, someone who's trying to become an American writer, as Nabokov says he's doing: trying to invent America, trying to bridge the gap between Russian and English, but always finding that English is only a kind of second best. And in fact it's more than that: he translated Lolita back in to Russian later on, and he added a second afterword where he said this: That wondrous Russian tongue that, it seemed to me, was waiting for me somewhere, was flowering like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had held in safekeeping for so many years, proved to be nonexistent. And there is nothing behind the gate but charred stumps and a hopeless autumnal distance, and the key in my hand is more like a skeleton key. So, there's a kind of lost paradise of European culture which he can't get back, even with this spectacular effort in English. So, that suggests that it's not all to the good; it hasn't been saved by taking up these knight's move techniques, the defamiliarizing techniques; there's still a record of damage. And so, I'm going to end a little early, just throwing out an analogy for you. And it's an analogy that Nabokov himself tries to debunk completely in that afterword. So, you should be skeptical of it, but then you should also ask yourself whether you can really do completely without it. Might it be that Nabokov's own relationship to American culture, his relationship to the English language that he transforms, is like Humbert's relationship to Lolita; that is, might it be that it's a kind of kidnapping of an American innocent by a cosmopolitan European for his own ends, ends which are seen as a kind of perversion? That's that element of violence that keeps coming back, the trail of slime across this dream of transforming reality, in this Joycean way, into something saved, the dream of turning fate, the fate of a dead mother--or, in Nabokov's own case, a father killed by assassination, a brother killed in a concentration camp--turning that into this beautifully worked out, playful system, defined by puns, and images, and a spell of rhetoric. In other words, could it be that all of this modernist technique that Humbert succeeds in putting to his own ends--that Nabokov succeeds in putting to his own ends--is not an unambiguous good, but a record of a kind of damage? Now, on Monday you're going to hear about this novel's confrontation with the idea that art could be saving, that it could somehow be redemptive, but here I think is a hint that it's something that the novel simply laughs at hollowly. And you might think of one last example. all these things I've been saying about the delight in words is put in the mouth of that horrible woman, the headmistress of the Beardsley School, Miss Pratt, on page 197. Miss Pratt says to Humbert, "I'm always fascinated by the admirable way foreigners, or at least naturalized Americans, use our rich language." In other words, that the aesthetic discovery of English is something that just kind of fits comfortably into this prejudice of the dull suburban American. So, I'll just end there with this thought, this doubt, about Nabokov's own use of modernist technique in this novel, about the emphasis on the aesthetic here: whether it could be--not just that triumph of the imagination that Humbert sees in the list of the names--but a mark of a wound that can't be healed.

Literature_Lectures

13_Toni_Morrison_The_Bluest_Eye.txt

Professor Amy Hungerford: So, today we will talk about The Bluest Eye. This novel has a lot to do with the questions that John Barth was thinking about, in a very different register, in Lost in the Funhouse. This is, of course, the story of a little girl who is totally remade by a story that's told to her, and I just want to point this out to you, on page 182 of The Bluest Eye. This is the letter that Soaphead Church writes to God explaining his action. He has, remember, tricked Pecola in to thinking that if something happens to the dog that he sends her out to feed, it will be a sign that God has answered her prayer for blue eyes. And, of course, what he has given her to give to the dog is poison. So of course the dog dies, and this convinces Pecola that her prayers have been answered, and it pushes her over the edge in to something like schizophrenia. But Soaphead is very satisfied with his work, and this is how he describes that work: "I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her. I played You," he says to God, "and it was a very good show. I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her two blue eyes, cobalt blue, a streak of it, right out of Your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes, but she will, and she will live happily ever after. I, I have found it meet and right so to do." That last line, "meet and right so to do," is from the Anglican liturgy, or may also occur in the Catholic liturgy. It refers to the Last Supper; "It is meet and right so to do" to commemorate Christ's last supper with his disciples through the sacrament of the Eucharist. So, he makes that story he tells her, one, into a sacramental story, as if he is giving her God's gift. But it is very patently a story, and we get that because he says "she will live happily ever after." So, what he has invited her to do is to fully inhabit the dream of the white aesthetic that her mother has absorbed through the movies and has used in naming her. Remember, in the novel we're told that Pecola's name is close to a name from the 1934 movie Imitation of Life, which has a complicated story. But it's about race relations, and it features a little girl named Peola who ends up passing for white because she so hates the blackness of her mother. So, Pecola's mother absorbed that white aesthetic, projected it on to her daughter, and her daughter finally so longs to inhabit that story that she goes to Soaphead Church. And this is how she ends up, and the cost of inhabiting that story is derangement. If John Barth's characters inhabit stories, stories that precede them in the world-- Remember, this is why it's important that the narrator of the first story in that collection is the sperm. The sperm comes already stocked with the phrases and patterns of prior literature. Well, Toni Morrison advances an analysis that is not so different. Pecola came into the world, essentially, through her mother and the society that surrounded her, stocked with the story of white aesthetics, the story that told her that she and her family were ugly and irredeemable. The quality of Morrison's fiction could not be more different from the quality of Barth's fiction, and I want to suggest to you that that's because in Morrison's fiction--this is her first novel begun in the early '60s, published in 1970--in this novel, she is absorbing something from that '60s culture, reflecting on it, that Barth kept very much at arm's length. So, the abstract question of what kinds of narratives produce the identity of a person becomes for Morrison a political question. Remember that divide I was describing in the 1960s political world, where some activists by the mid '60s began to drop out of activism because they were convinced that it was more important to know themselves than to actually go and try to promote a positive program in the world. And there was the counterculture gaining steam, advocating a playful engagement with the world that would be uninterested in questions like the Vietnam War. "Turn your back on the war," says Ken Kesey. Drop out. Drop acid; that's the thing you should be doing. Well, the cultural politics of the late '60s try to merge these two kinds of resistance to convention. So it merges the cultural focus of the counterculture--that's why it's called the counterculture; it produces a culture against the prevailing culture--and that politically activist body of thought coming out of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement in the '60s. So, this produces a cultural politics, the cultural politics of the late '60s and into the '70s, and I would say even up through the culture wars of the 1990s. This is the legacy of the 1960s in literature. So, Morrison takes the insights of Barth, and she turns them to political purpose. One of our questions today is going to be: Why does Toni Morrison, in 1970, sit down to write a novel, instead of a tract? Why is she interested in literature, as opposed to something like sociology? She has such a strong and passionate desire for justice for African Americans. Why is literature her chosen venue? Now, I'm sure there are a thousand reasons, but we're going to--I'm going to--bring some of them out of the novel that we can read right there. Just without going into biography or psychology, we're going to think about how the novel presents itself as doing a kind of work in the world that Barth's writing never tries to do. So, that's where I'm going to go today. Let me also point out that, like Pynchon, Morrison wants to imagine the novel as a medium that can hold the human within it. So, a second question that I want to get at today is, given that commonality--Remember, I ended my lecture on Pynchon by arguing that sentiment remained important in Pynchon's work; despite all that word play, all that self-conscious irony of the story, all that humor at the level of names, what really finally mattered was not that search for meaning, but the moment when you could touch another human being. And Pynchon is interested in certain kinds of essences--like dandelion wine, or tears, or the sailor's mattress--that hold in them, in suspension, the cycles and movements of human life. Morrison has that same desire to hold the human in her fiction, and so this is one reason why Morrison chooses the novel. This is the first of the reasons: to hold the human in suspension in the novel. Now it takes a very particular form, and if you think to the passages about Pauline, there is the section on Pecola's mother, Pauline, where we see large blocks of italics of her voice coming to us. This is a very obvious example of how that works in Morrison's fiction. This is an effort to let the voice of the unheard speak through her fiction. So, why write a novel instead of writing a tract or becoming a sociologist or a politician? One reason, for Morrison, is that the novel allows the voices of the oppressed to speak in a way that they could not otherwise. This entails a certain assumption about her own position as a writer. She writes from within a black community she knows well. This novel is set in Lorain, Ohio, her hometown, and so she takes on that task because she feels she is equipped for it; she can speak in a communal voice or she can make her voice available for the voices within the community that she knows. Now, how many of you have read Beloved? Ah, great. I usually don't put it on the syllabus because I assume most people have read it. But, if you recall, this effort to recover the voice of the unheard is absolutely central to Beloved; it is the premise of Beloved. Toni Morrison found an account of a woman in a newspaper in the mid nineteenth century who tried to kill her children instead of allowing them to be recaptured into slavery, and she thought about what kind of story that woman would have to tell about her life, or what kind of story could be told about that woman that the papers, that historians, would never know and would never be able to recover. Fiction, because it is imaginative, gives you a way to get at what academics of the traditional kind cannot transmit about the past, but also, in this novel, about a life that is closer to her current moment, the moment of writing. So, by including Pauline's voice, she allows Pauline to begin to tell her own story of how she became married to Cholly Breedlove and how she evolved in to the fairly hateful woman that we see her to be when we see her as Pecola's mother. You might find, and I have to admit I myself find, that particular example quite clunky in a literary sense. Why did Morrison suddenly turn to those italicized blocks? And, I don't know if you read the-- I think you have the postscript, the afterword, that Morrison appended to this edition of the novel. If you haven't read it, I would suggest that you do. It's quite interesting. She notes there that she herself is very unhappy with that section of the novel. She herself finds it clunky from the perspective of twenty years later. She writes the afterword in 1993. So, it's unsatisfying to her, but there are more successful versions of it. And you see that, for example, when the women are gathered around Aunt Jimmy's bed, and they're talking as she is in her final sickness. And they're talking with one another about their aches and pains. That's one example of how those voices come into the novel. There are just many dozens of these examples, so any time you hear a character begin to speak, you have that sense that you're hearing something that you wouldn't otherwise hear if Morrison was not there to open your ear to it and to embody those voices. It's one of the great strengths of her writing is that ability to embody the voice. So, that's one reason why you write a novel instead of being a sociologist. Another reason is to push the boundaries of what's credible, to push those boundaries so far that you can see the abject very clearly in front of you within a literary form, and so she chooses Pecola as the ugly child. She seems to have no redeeming intelligence. She has no one who really loves her, except maybe a few whores who live above her house. She has no conversation that we really recall. She doesn't say anything particularly witty. Probably what we remember her for is simply that desire to have blue eyes. We don't really get inside her head, even, and so this is a place where Morrison's desire to speak for those who can't speak for themselves runs up against a wall. But she's very interested in what happens when the imagination hits up against that wall. How far can we go towards inhabiting the subject position of an abject person? That's what she's testing in this novel. And she herself speaks of a silence at the heart of it, and that silence is in part the silence about Pecola's experience of the rape, when she's raped by her father. We don't really get a sense of what she thinks, what she experiences. If you think again back to Barth, remember that quotation of silence at the very center of Menelaiad. So, Morrison is again engaging a problem that other writers are engaging at this time, but she's setting it in a very specific historical moment with very specific historical and political connotations and implications coming out of her examination. So, silence is at the heart, but it's hedged around so that we can see it as a silence. So, extremity does that for her. I would argue that the third reason she uses the novel instead of a tract is to generate sympathy. And this, again, I was arguing, is part of Pynchon's project. Usually, someone like Morrison is separate in people's categories of contemporary fiction from writers like Barth and Pynchon. I am going to argue that they actually occupy much of the same space. What does sympathy look like in Morrison? Well, she sets herself a task that, I would say, is almost as hard as the task that Nabokov has set himself, and in fact maybe it's even harder. Nabokov set himself the task of making us like Humbert Humbert. Now how many of you liked Humbert in the end? He's getting less popular as the weeks go by. More of you seemed to like him when we were in the throes of reading his seductive voice. But Nabokov set himself the task of seducing us with Humbert's voice. Morrison, as part of this novel, sets herself the task of making us sympathize with a drunk who has no verbal capacities who rapes his own daughter. Now, does she succeed? Well, let's take a look. On page 146, we're a little ways into the story of Cholly Breedlove, and this is in the scene where he has just left the funeral of his aunt with a girl named Darlene. And they're playing and flirting and making out in the field. She's gotten her clothes dirty: "You ain't dirty," he says to her. "I am too. Look at that." She dropped her hands from the ribbon and smoothed out a place on her dress where the grape stains were heaviest. Cholly felt sorry for her. It was just as much his fault. Suddenly he realized that Aunt Jimmy was dead, for he missed the fear of being whipped. There was nobody to do it except Uncle O.V., and he was the bereaved too. "Let me," he said, and he rose to his knees, facing her, and tried to tie her ribbon. Darlene put her hands under his open shirt and rubbed the damp skin. When he looked at her in surprise she stopped and laughed. He smiled and continued knotting the bow. She put her hands back under his shirt. These little gestures that Morrison grants to Cholly in this scene--tiny gestures of tying the girl's bow, leaning over her, concerned for her looks as she goes back to her mother, telling her--reassuring her--that she's not dirty, and in a novel that is so full of demonized cleanliness his gentle assurance that her dress though stained, is not dirty in the moral sense--this is a mark of kindness, the mark of humanity. So, Morrison begins with small details like this to build up our sympathy for Cholly. It gets more intense when he meets his father in the city. This is on page 155. This is when he first sees him playing craps in the alleyway: A man in a light-brown jacket stood at the far end of the group. He was gesturing in a quarrelsome, agitated manner with another man. Both of them had folded their faces in anger. Cholly edged round to where they stood, hardly believing he was at the end of his journey. There was his father, a man like any other man, but there indeed were his eyes, his mouth, his whole head, his shoulders lurched beneath that jacket, his voice, his hands, all real. They existed, really existed, somewhere, right here. Cholly had always thought of his father as a giant of a man, so when he was very close it was with a shock that he discovered that he was taller than his father. In fact, he was staring at a balding spot on his father's head, which he suddenly wanted to stroke. While thus fascinated by the pitiable clean space hedged round by neglected tufts of wool, the man turned a hard, belligerent face to him. [And then assumes that Cholly has come at the behest of a woman that he's slept with to squeeze money out of him.] So, in this scene, we once again see that humane touching impulse. He wants to touch his father's head, touch the sign of his father's mortality, the fact that his father is growing older. He sees in his father's body his own face, hands, voice, and we can feel that with him. And then, when he flees from that scene, finally, and soils himself, he becomes another one of those abject characters. And he goes to hide under a pier, finally bathes in a river at night. This kind of detail gives us two things: both the beginnings or another iteration of the reason why he becomes who he becomes, the drunk, the rapist, but it gives us more than that. It gives us a sense of his complexity. It makes us want to like him, and, in fact, by this point I would argue that probably most readers do like him at this point in the novel. Can Morrison sustain this to the very end? Well, in a way I want you to be the judge, but if we look on 206, I would argue that we're beginning to see that effort. This is at the very end of the novel, speaking of Pecola: Oh, some of us "loved" her [and that "love" is in quotations] the Maginot Line and Cholly loved her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye. For one thing, Morrison endows these sentences with a lyrical quality that makes us feel their power. But there's one line she uses to describe Cholly that I think trumps all the others, and that's this one about the love of a free man: "The love of a free man is never safe." Safety is not exactly of value in this novel. If it were, the safe white household in which Mrs. Breedlove works would look a lot more appealing than it does. There is a certain safety for Frieda and Claudia in their intact household, but there, too, it is fraught with suffering. Their mother is cruel to them. She yells at them. Safety is not really to be had there, and the safety that is had comes at great cost. When Cholly is described as having freed himself, earlier in the novel, part of that story which we don't get explicitly is that he has learned to turn his hatred, finally, against the white men, symbolized by the white men who discover him making love to Darlene in that earlier scene. We're told that initially he hates her instead of the white men, because hating the white men would undo him to such an extent he was not ready to see that oppression for what it was. Later in his life, we're told, he kills three white men. We don't know the circumstances, and at that moment, we're told that he's a free man. Freedom, when applied to a black man, cannot be a wholly negative quality. In the context that Morrison evokes, of a society still plagued by the remnants of slavery, to call Cholly free can't be to dismiss him. It gives a certain honor and weight to his anger. And to re-evoke that word, to come back to that word, in describing his love for the daughter he rapes, I think, is quite controversial. It suggests that there was some value in the thing of himself he gave to her. Now, this is not exactly what you'd want to call a feminist position, although Morrison certainly is I would say a feminist writer in the largest sense of that word. But what she has tried to do here, in keeping with the challenge that I think she must have set for herself, is to make us see Cholly complexly enough to sympathize with him even after he commits this crime. So she takes a certain kind of risk, but that's why she does it. She wants us to see him in a sympathetic light. This is what a novel can do. It requires that lyrical quality of voice; it requires the buildup of history, and it requires, in this scene, the return to that precise language. So, a very common literary technique--we see it all the time in the things that we read together--is to return to the terms you used in an earlier moment to ring the changes on those terms again, to use that word. Well, that's what Morrison uses to produce this sense of value in Cholly at the end of the novel. In this sense it participates or is in conversation with a tradition of the nineteenth-century novel in America. So, one of the most prestigious novels of the nineteenth century is of course Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a hugely successful novel, abolitionist novel whose aim was to create a sense of the slave's humanity for white readers so that white readers would become inspired to the abolitionist cause. What was repulsive about that novel to someone like Morrison is the starched white virtue and the starched white culture to which the African American characters in the novel were recruited. So, in that novel, their humanity and the sympathy that that would evoke from the reader depended on their looking as white as possible, and therefore there was this great privileging of the light-skinned black in that novel and a sense of Christian value redeeming the darker-skinned characters. They needed it--more, it seems, than the light-skinned characters--so the darker your skin is in Uncle Tom's Cabin the more religious you are. So it's a whitewashing of the African American figure. So, Morrison takes something of the sympathetic project of Uncle Tom's Cabin and that tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, but she transforms it by making us sympathetic to someone like Cholly who Harriet Beecher Stowe would put so far outside the pale of humanity we wouldn't- he wouldn't even be visible on her screen. So, this is her project. Sympathy, however, relies on some darker and more ambiguous techniques that Morrison is also committed to, and one of those is what I'm going to call negativity. Morrison is very careful--in this novel, especially--to talk about what people are not. And you see an example of this on page 55, when she's describing the prostitutes. This is after she's been telling stories--Miss Marie has been telling stories--to Pecola about her husband. They did not belong [This is at the bottom of the page]. They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels with great and generous hearts, dedicated because of the horror of circumstance to ameliorating the luckless, barren life of men, taking money incidentally and humbly for their understanding. Nor were they from that sensitive breed of young girl gone wrong at the hands of fate, forced to cultivate an outward bitterness in order to protect her springtime from further shock, but knowing full well she was cut out for better things and could make the right man happy. Neither were they the sloppy, inadequate whores who, unable to make a living at it alone, turned to drug consumption and traffic or pimps to help complete their stream of self-destruction, avoiding suicide only to punish the memory of some absent father or to sustain the misery of some silent mother. Except for Marie's fabled love for Dewey Prince, these women hated men, all men, without shame, apology or discrimination. They abused their visitors with a scorn grown mechanical from use: black men, white men, Puerto Ricans, Mexican, Jews, Poles, whatever. All were inadequate and weak. All came under their jaundiced eyes and were the recipients of their disinterested wrath. They took delight in cheating them. On one occasion the town well knew they lured a Jew up the stairs, pounced on him, all three, held him up by the heels, shook everything out of his pants pockets and threw him out of the window. Neither did they have respect for women who, although not their colleagues so to speak, nevertheless deceived their husbands regularly or irregularly. It made no difference. Sugar-coated whores they called them, and did not yearn to be in their shoes. Their only respect was for what they would have described as good Christian colored women, the woman whose reputation was spotless and who tended to her family, who didn't drink or smoke or run around. These women had their undying, if covert, affection. They would sleep with their husbands and take their money, but always with a vengeance. Nor were they protective and solicitous of youthful innocence. They looked back on their own youth as a period of ignorance and regretted that they had not made more of it. They were not young girls in whores' clothing or whores regretting their loss of innocence. They were whores in whores' clothing, whores who had never been young and had no word for innocence. "Whores in whores' clothing." That's the negativity, one version of the negativity. It refuses all those conventional stock stories of what whores can be in the novel. So, the very first instance of it singles out the novel: "They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels with great and generous hearts," and so on. But all those other versions are equally fictional types of prostitutes. So she rejects the stock literary cupboard of stories about prostitutes. "They were whores in whores' clothing." There is an assertion of their opacity right there. They are opaque to literary embellishment. They are what they are; they just are whores. But the negativity, the repeated "nors"--neither were they this, nor were they that, they were not this, they were not that--it is a kind of engine of narrative. And it limns the place where they might come to stand in and of themselves, without embellishment. So, the effort to help us to sympathize with marginal characters--Cholly Breedlove, prostitutes--is an effort at limning a space where they can stand in and of themselves, and it creates narrative for us to sympathize through. It creates a credibility for her voice; it creates a sense of where they can occupy a space, these characters. What's more, Marie, as we know, is the one person who really tells stories in this novel. So Morrison also gives her a special gift as a character, a gift that Morrison's own gift echoes. She's allowed to tell stories for Pecola's delight. She's the only one who does that sort of thing for this child. Pecola herself, though, is the ultimate negativity, and this is on 205. You can see how this works. This is in the middle of that page. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed, all of our beauty which was hers first and she gave to us, all of us, all who knew her, felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us. Her guilt sanctified us. Her pain made us glow with health. Her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used to silence our own nightmares and she let us and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. Pecola is the embodiment of the negative, so she represents all that the community does not want in itself: the excess blackness, the ugliness that the white aesthetic says can't be changed or redeemed. She represents the poverty that they all strive to escape, or at least keep a bit at bay. So, Pecola as the negativity is--through the whole novel, in the structure of the whole novel--the absence that keeps the narrative engine working. It has to keep working because she's always there as the negative pole waiting to be touched--even in the least bit--by the narrative's revelation. So she embodies that, the desire to know another person, which, in Menelaiad, if you'll remember, is Menelaus's undoing. He diddles on and on, his voice asking, "Why? Why? Why'd you choose me, Helen? Why? Why do you love me?" He can't take any answer, and it makes him ridiculous and it ruins his marriage. That effort to know another person is much more than a diddling on, in Morrison. That effort to know another person isn't by definition put off limits, in Morrison. The effort at trying is far more honored. The alienation from self which produces a kind of irony and a pleasure in humor in both Barth and Pynchon, that self-consciousness that you see in both novels, is not a source of humor in Morrison because the alienation is produced by an unjust society. It's not a laughing matter. It's not so much the universal human condition as it is in Barth, to be alienated from yourself. The self-alienation that Pecola embodies as the negative is the product of oppression, racial oppression. If there is an opportunity for humor in Morrison's work, it's not going to come from that fountain of irony.So, is irony dead in Morrison? Well, maybe. If we see irony in Morrison's work, it's in the specific local language of the characters, and I would submit to you that where we see something funny, it's always with a tinge of darkness, as in Claudia and Frieda's mother when she complains. I don't know if you remember this scene when she complains about Pecola drinking all the milk. She goes on and on and on in this baroque aria of indictment and it's funny, and what we're told about this mother is that on her grumpy days this is what she does. She complains about the whole world until she's got everything covered, she's covered every complaint she could possibly have, and then she sings. And the fact that she turns to singing after having done that suggests a kind of continuity, that there is an operatic, artistic quality to the complaining. And Morrison gives it to us in her voice, and that is the kind of pleasure that Morrison's novels give us; that's the kind of humor that her novels give us. It's not going to be the funny, sad situation of the perpetually alienated Ambrose. It's going to be a woman in her kitchen who's out of milk now, doesn't know where she's getting the next quart, and yet, and yet, uses that verbal facility to make something in its place, in the place of the milk that's not there, something to entertain her daughters as they listen. So, there is a deeper, even darker side, I would suggest, to the generation of sympathy in Morrison's novels. And that's the last point I want to make for you today, and I think we can see it most--well--I'm going to show you one example, and then quick flip to the more important one. On 176, when Soaphead reaches for his ink to write his letter to God, a bottle of ink, we are told, was on the same shelf that held the poison. Writing and poison are extremely close in this novel, and--what's more--something like reading and being raped are very close to one another. And you can see this on 200. In the conversation between Pecola and her alienated other self, that other voice keeps prodding her about a second rape, the second time, keeps saying "the second time." We are not shown that in the narrative, so why is this something that enters in to it here? The other voice says to her: "I wonder what it would be like," [referring to the rape.] "Horrible," [says Pecola's voice.] "Really?" "Yes. Horrible." "Then why didn't you tell Mrs. Breedlove?" "I did tell her." "I don't mean about the first time. I mean about the second time when you were sleeping on the couch." "I wasn't sleeping. I was reading." This is a weird moment. You could read that as an odd detail. She really means that there was a second rape and it happened not when she was sleeping, although she had said that before, but when she was reading on the couch. But I think there is a darker meaning to this, that it's actually the act of reading that is folded into the act of being raped. And this is not, I think, foreign to the whole setup of this novel, that reading of that little passage, because of course, as you will have noticed, you have the Dick and Jane primer at the beginning of each chapter made into nonsense by being run together. So, remember in the first few pages of the novel you have "Here is a house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty" and then mother, father, Dick and Jane. This is the white aesthetic embodied in the primer. The message is that when you learn to read you are imbuing yourself, imbibing the white aesthetic. If you are a young black girl learning to read, you are bringing into yourself a deadly kind of poison, and it's the poison that destroys Pecola's mother and Pecola herself in her desire for the blue eye. The primer is run together so that we can see how it becomes nonsensical in the context of Pecola's life. But there is a profound indictment of reading, and so you have to ask yourself what kind of reader does Morrison want? And this, I think, has a complex answer. It is not just that Morrison wants to indict a certain kind of reading on the Dick and Jane model. It's deeper than that. In her Nobel-Prize-winning speech, she writes about her ideal reader. Actually, I think it's either in one of her essays, or in that speech. She writes about her ideal reader being what she calls "the illiterate reader." By that she means the reader not stocked up already with the imaginative inventory of the Western canon, a reader who instead has some sense of an oral tradition. But there is more to it than that, to imagine a reader who is that poorly prepared to meet a novel of the ambition that Morrison's novels embody. If you read Beloved without knowing how to close read the way we do in class, it's extremely hard to get a lot out of it. There are very difficult passages in that novel. She learned a lot from Faulkner. That's one of the ways that she learned to incorporate voices into her novel in a way that they would sit by themselves, seemingly unmediated by a narrator. She learned a lot from Virginia Woolf. She wrote her MA thesis on Woolf and Faulkner, on suicide in Woolf and Faulkner, so she herself is highly educated, deeply trained in the modernist avant-garde, and yet she looks for a reader that has rejected all of that that she calls on so skillfully. Reading is such a vexed activity for Morrison that she represents both reading and writing as something like the equivalent of being the victim of rape. That pushes the idea of sympathy into another register altogether. It's a text that is essentially theorizing itself as reaching out to you--not in the sense just of making you feel like Cholly's an okay guy, that he's human and not some monster--but actually reaching out to you and doing to you what Cholly did to Pecola. That's an odd thing to do to your own book, so I want you to think about the kind of reader that Morrison imagines, and what her novel is trying to do with and to that reader. I will come back to some of these themes when we talk about Woman Warrior on Wednesday.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_17_Literary_Prophecy_Hosea_and_Isaiah.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: We're going to move on now to our second literary prophet and this is the prophet Hosea. He was a native of the northern kingdom. So Amos and Hosea you're going to associate with the Assyrian crisis and they are prophets of the northern kingdom of Israel. He's prophesying in the time of Jeroboam II. Jeroboam reigned until about 747. And then he continues to the last king who is, confusingly, named Hosea. So he prophesies in the 740s, '30s, '20s, somewhere in there. He doesn't seem to have seen the fall of Israel though. Now, Hosea is considered by many to be the most difficult of the prophetic books. The Hebrew is very difficult and it sometimes seems rather garbled. It's very hard to render it intelligibly. But structurally, we can divide the book into two main sections. Chapters 1 to 3 have a certain coherence to them, and then chapters 4 through 14. 1 to 3 tells of the prophet's marriage to a promiscuous woman named Gomer. His marriage is a metaphor for Israel's relationship with God. And these chapters also contain an indictment or a lawsuit. Remember this riv form, lawsuit form. We're going to see it both in Hosea and Isaiah today. Then chapters 4 through 14 contain oracles primarily, oracles against the nations but also against the Kingdom of Israel. We're going to be focusing primarily on chapters 1 to 3 since these are so distinctive to Hosea and we'll refer occasionally to some of the other chapters where they might pronounce an important theme for Hosea. So again, the historical background for the Book of Hosea is the Assyrian threat. The Assyrians are wiping out a number of the smaller states in the Ancient Near East in the middle of the eighth century. And Israel obviously could not be far behind. The line that was taken by Hosea was to condemn the attempts that were made by various kings, by Israel's kings, to withstand defeat or to avoid defeat at the hands of Assyria. If Assyria was going to conquer Israel, Hosea said, then it was God's just punishment. And to fight against it, to fight against the inevitable was simply another kind of rejection of God, another rejection of his plans and purpose. It demonstrated a lack of trust or faith in the power of God. Hosea 10:13 spells out the disastrous consequences of trusting in human power or foreign alliances rather than trusting in God. And this is a theme that we'll see occurring again and again. Hosea 10:13, "You have plowed wickedness, / you have reaped iniquity-- / you shall eat the fruits of treachery-- / Because you relied on your way, / On your host of warriors." He was suggesting inaction. Now, that surely would have been viewed by the king and the court as against all reason. But this was Hosea's insistence. Israel was faced with a choice. In whom should she place her trust? In God, or in human leaders and their armies? Hosea 1:7 goes so far as to suggest that actually the moment of decision has past for the northern kingdom. There's still some hope for the southern kingdom, but the northern kingdom has obviously made its choice and it was the wrong choice. Hosea says that God says, "…I will no longer accept the house of Israel or pardon them. (But I will accept the House of Judah. And I will give them victory through the Lord their God;" -- a victory through the Lord their God. "I will not give them victory with bow and sword and battle, by horses and riders." If you think that's what gives you victory you're mistaken. Some see that verse as perhaps a later interpolation into Hosea; it has such a positive assessment of the southern kingdom. But there is this sense of impending disaster that resonates throughout the Book of Hosea. Chapter 8:7, "They sow wind, / And they shall reap whirlwind-- / Standing stalks devoid of ears / And yielding no flour. / If they do yield any, Strangers shall devour it. / Israel is bewildered;" So the catastrophe is unavoidable, and Hosea's often been described as painting a portrait of unrelieved gloom. He's very grim. He seems to hold out no real hope for Israel. She has to pay the price for her infidelity to God. But we need to look a little more closely at some of the themes of the book before we accept that evaluation entirely. And I think the one overarching theme that helps us organize most of the material in the Book of Hosea, and one that shows its deep indebtedness to or interconnectedness with the Book of Deuteronomy, is the theme of covenant, particularly Deuteronomy's notion of covenant. So I put covenant at the top there and we see this theme being played out in several different ways. The first I've just discussed: as Yahweh's covenant partner--as the vassal of the covenant partner, Yahweh, the sovereign--Israel should be placing her confidence entirely in Yahweh. Any foreign alliance, any alliance with Egypt against Assyria for example, is against the terms of that covenant, that exclusive treaty between God and Israel. And she should not be relying on her military might, but relying on the sovereign, the suzerain. So anything short of complete trust in Yahweh's power to save the vassal Israel is a violation of the terms of the covenant. So we see it in the notion of its confidence, exclusive confidence and trust in God and his power. A second way in which the theme of covenant is expressed is found in Hosea's denunciation of social injustice and moral decay, and of course this is a theme that's common to the prophets. Here he follows Amos. But he's now the first to couch his charge in the form of this formal riv, or lawsuit, in which God is said to bring a charge against Israel for violating the terms of the covenant, for breach of covenant. This happens in chapter 4, the first three verses of chapter 4--Israel is charged. And Hosea employs language that deliberately invokes the Decalogue: Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel! For the Lord has a case [=a lawsuit] against the inhabitants of this land, Because there is no honesty and no goodness And no obedience to God in the land. [False] swearing, dishonesty, and murder, And theft and adultery are rife. Picking out key terms from the Decalogue: false swearing; murder, theft and adultery, which of course occur in a threesome in the Decalogue. These things are rife. "Crime follows upon crime! / For that, the earth is withered: / Everything that dwells on it languishes-- / Beasts of the field and birds of the sky-- / Even the fish of the sea perish." Unlike Amos, Hosea also engages in a prolonged or sustained condemnation of Israel's religious faithlessness, which is figured in terms of adultery. And so here again, the theme of covenant is dominant and organizes the prophet's presentation. To represent Israel's faithlessness he invokes other types of covenantal relationships as metaphors, most notably the metaphor of marriage. Marriage can be referred to as a brit, as a covenant between a husband and wife, and so it's an appropriate metaphor. And we see it primarily in chapters 1 through 3. He addresses the relationship between Yahweh and Israel through the metaphor of marriage, and Israel is the unfaithful adulterous wife. He describes, in lurid terms, her lecherous addiction to images and idols, her adulterous worship of Baal. He points to the nation's leaders and their failures, the kings and the priests, their failure to prevent the peoples' waywardness, their debauchery. The first chapter is reported in the third person. And this contains God's command to Hosea to marry a promiscuous woman as a symbol of God's own marriage with a faithless wife, Israel. "Go, get yourself a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom; for the land will stray from following the Lord." (1:2) So he marries this woman named Gomer and she bears three children who have very inauspicious names. These names are symbolic of God's anger over Israel's religious infidelity: (1) Jezreel. Jezreel because God plans to punish Jehu for his slaughter of the house of Ahab. Even though Ahab was no favorite of God, you still should not raise your hand against the Lord's anointed. And so Jehu will have to be--Ahab will have to be avenged. Jehu will have to be punished at Jezreel, which is where the murder happened. (2) Lo-ruhamah, which means "not loved, not forgiven," because God will no longer love or forgive or pardon the House of Israel and (3) the third child's name is Lo-ammi , "not my people," a sign that God has dissolved the covenant bond. He's rejected Israel as his people--divorced Israel. There really could be no more stark and shocking denial of the covenant than this. Chapter 3 contains a first person (Hosea's first-person) account of God's command to him. There it's said that God commands him to befriend, although he seems to hire, a woman on condition that she not consort with others. The woman, again, symbolizes Israel, who's brought into an exclusive relationship that requires her to remain faithful to one party in contrast to her customary behavior. And then sandwiched between chapter 1 and chapter 3, both of which have the accounts of these relationships that are metaphors for God and Israel's relationship--sandwiched between them is the almost schizophrenic chapter 2. It contains, again, this sustained violent, very violent account of the faithless wife, of faithless Israel and God's formal declaration of divorce. "She is not my wife and I am not her husband." This would effect a divorce, this statement uttered by a husband. We have that in verse 4. And yet, this chapter also contains a very gentle, very loving portrait of reconciliation. And it's in that portrait of reconciliation that we see another aspect of the covenant concept emerge. An aspect that was, again, most pronounced in the Book of Deuteronomy. As Israel's covenant partner God loves Israel and he actually longs for her faithfulness. This steadfast covenantal love -- one of the words that's used repeatedly is hesed, but it refers to a special kind of steadfast love, loyal love -- this covenantal love will reconcile God to wayward Israel just as Hosea is reunited or reconciled with his faithless wife. And the prophet imagines a return to the wilderness. God is imagining -- it would be wonderful if we could return to the wilderness and covenant again, and this time it would even be a permanent, an eternal marriage. And the three children who were cast off at birth, they will be redeemed and accepted by their father. Those are some of the ideas contained in this passage. This is Hosea 2:16-25, the reconciliation: Assuredly, I will speak coaxingly to her And lead her through the wilderness And speak to her tenderly. I will give her her vineyards from there And the Valley of Achor as a plowland of hope. There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, When she came up from the land of Egypt. (So the period of the Exodus and wandering is romantically imagined as, this time, of a very good and close relationship between God and Israel.) "And in that day you will call me Ishi and no more will you call me Baali." (This is a pun. Both of these words can mean my husband. Ishi is "my man," a male. And Baali is "my Lord." Women would have used both for their husbands. But Baal, obviously, has connotations with the god Baal. So instead of calling me Baali, "my Baal," you will call me Ishi, "my husband" using a word that's free of Baal connotations.) "For I will remove the names of the Baalim from her mouth, And they shall nevermore be mentioned by name. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; I will banish bow, sword, and war from the land. Thus I will let them lie down in safety. And I will espouse you forever:" (back to the marriage metaphor.) … "I will espouse you with righteousness and justice, And with goodness and mercy, And I will espouse you with faithfulness; Then you shall be devoted to the Lord. In that day, I will respond -- declares the Lord -- I will respond to the sky, And it shall respond to the earth; And the earth shall respond With new grain and wine and oil, And they shall respond to Jezreel." [the first of the children]. "I will sow her in the land as My own;" (Jezreel was a fertile valley not just a place of war and death.) "And [I will] take Lo-ruhamah [not loved] back in favor; And I will say to Lo-ammi, [not my people], "You are my people" And he will respond," [You are] my God." So Hosea isn't unrelievedly gloomy and grim. It does provide these images, these very stirring images of hope and consolation and reconciliation. Amos also held out hope in the form of a remnant that would survive the inevitable destruction. So we need to think about the two traditions that prophets like Amos and Hosea are drawing on in this combined message of doom on the one hand, and hope on the other. Really, what the prophets are doing is drawing on two conceptions of covenant: the two conceptions that we saw in our study of the Pentateuchal material and on into Samuel. On the one hand they recognize the unconditional and eternal, irrevocable covenant that God established with the patriarchs as well as the eternal covenant with David, with the House of David. Those covenants were the basis for the belief that God would never forsake his people. But on the other hand, of course, they place emphasis on the covenant at Sinai. It's a conditional covenant. It requires the people's obedience to moral, religious and civil laws in the covenant code. And it threatens punishment for their violation. So the prophets are playing with both of these themes. Israel has violated the Sinaitic Covenant and the curses that are stipulated by the covenant must follow: national destruction and even exile. They will follow; they have to. But alienation from God is not, and never will be, complete and irreparable because of the unconditional covenant, the covenant with the patriarchs, the covenant with the House of David. So Israel will be God's people forever despite temporary alienation. The notion of election, an act of purely undeserved or unmerited favor and love on God's part not due in any way to a special merit of the people undergirds the prophetic message of consolation. And Hosea paints a very poignant and moving portrait of this special and indissoluble love that God bears for Israel. And in doing so, he draws on a second metaphor. So we've had the metaphor of husband and wife, which is a kind of covenantal relationship. We also have the metaphor of parent-son, which can also be understood in terms of a covenant with obligations. The parent-son relationship entails loyalty and love, but also obligation. One of the obligations that is understood to fall on the parent is the obligation of disciplining a rebellious or ungrateful child, while never forsaking that child. So that's a model that works very well with the prophetic message. Hosea 11:1-4, and then skipping to verses 8 through 9, I fell in love with Israel When he was still a child; And I have called [him] My son Ever since Egypt. Thus were they called, But they went their own way; They sacrifice to Baalim And offer to carved images. I have pampered Ephraim, --another name for Israel, right? Ephraim-- Taking them in My arms; But they have ignored My healing care. I drew them with human ties, With cords of love; But I seemed to them as one Who imposed a yoke on their jaws, Though I was offering them food… How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How surrender you, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah, Render you like Zeboiim? [other foreign places]. I have had a change of heart, All my tenderness is stirred. I will not act on My wrath, Will not turn to destroy Ephraim. For I am God, not man, The Holy One in your midst: I will not come in fury. You have these alternating passages of violent rejection and tender, tender love and reconciliation. And with these alternating passages, the prophet is able to capture or convey a passionate struggle taking place in the heart of God. They're giving us that passionate, emotional portrait of God. It's the struggle of a lover who's torn between his jealous wrath and his undying love. And it's a struggle that is won ultimately by love because God cannot let Israel go. We're going to see that each of the prophets we'll look at holds these two covenantal ideas in tension, and they will emphasize one or the other depending on the particular situation, the particular historical situation. Sometimes when it's a time of relative ease or comfort, then the prophet emphasizes the violations of the Sinaitic covenant, the punishment that will inevitably come for these violations, and they'll downplay God's eternal commitment to his people. But in times of despair and suffering and destruction then the prophet may point out that violations of the covenant were the cause of the distress but they will emphasize God's undying love for Israel and hold out hope therefore for a better future. Now, we're going to leave the northern prophets and move to southern prophets. Isaiah is the longest prophetic book. The interpretation of many passages in the book of Isaiah as symbolic references to Jesus make it one of the most quoted books of the Bible by Christians. Isaiah was a contemporary of Amos and Hosea. Second half of the eighth century. He was active for a little bit longer period. He was active into about the 690s, somewhere in there. But he prophesied in the southern kingdom of Judah when the Assyrian empire threatened and destroyed the northern kingdom (the northern kingdom falls in 722) and then of course was threatening Judah. So he's active for over 50 years and he counseled Judah's kings. He counsels them through two sieges. I've listed these for you: The siege of 734, where he counsels King Ahaz, and then the siege of 701, where he counsels his son, Hezekiah or Hizkiah, Hezekiah. I'll give you a little bit of historical background to these sieges so you understand them, but those are the main dates that can help orient your approach to Isaiah. We have excellent evidence, by the way, for all of these events in the Assyrian sources, and also archaeological finds. The archaeological finds show destruction by the Assyrians at the places that we believe were destroyed at the times they were destroyed. But this is what happened. In 734, you have the Assyrians, who at this time are under Tiglath-Pileser, and they're extending their control through the region. So they're coming from the northeast. First they're going to hit Aram in Syria, and then advance on the northern kingdom of Israel. So Aram and Israel join together in an alliance. They were trying to resist the advancing Assyrians. Judah refused to join the alliance. The southern kingdom refused. So in anger, Aram and Israel moved south and lay siege to Jerusalem. So the first siege, the siege of 734 was actually a siege of Jerusalem by the northern kingdom of Israel in alliance with the Aramaeans. They were trying to force Judah's cooperation in standing against Assyria. King Ahaz of Judah decided to appeal to Assyria for help, to Tiglath-Pileser for help. He submits to the Assyrians as a vassal. He pays tribute. We have a record of the tribute that was paid in the Assyrian records, in 734. And this action is condemned by the biblical writers. The Deuteronomistic historian in Second Kings 16 condemns this action. Isaiah also condemns it. So, Judah has made itself vassal to Assyria. And this is the case until Ahaz's son Hezekiah decides that he will assert the nation's independence. The Assyrians are angry about this. This is now after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. The Assyrians are angry and under Sennecharib they attack. They devastate many of the cities in the countryside (and again archaeology confirms what we know from the Assyrian records) and they advance on Jerusalem and lay siege to Jerusalem in 701. And just as he had counseled King Ahaz, Isaiah now counsels Hezekiah. In the end Jerusalem wasn't destroyed. Heavy tribute was paid to the Assyrians but eventually the Assyrians did withdraw. They were overextended to a large degree. That's the general historic background. We'll come back to some of the details in a minute. But let me first give you a sense of the general structure of this very large book. The claim that the prophetic books are anthologies, anthologies of oracles and other materials compiled by the prophet or by his disciples, that is to say, schools that kept a set of prophecies and then added to those core prophecies because of their firm belief in their continuing relevance--that portrait of the anthological nature of prophetic books is really demonstrable in the Book of Isaiah. I've put the basic structure up there for you. The first 11 chapters contain memoirs. Chapter 1 sets out some of the basic themes of Isaiah but we have a lot of first-person narrative. Then we have various oracles against Israel. Some of this material refers to the attacks on Jerusalem, especially the siege of 701. And there seems to be a kind of concluding hymn in chapter 12. We then have about 11 chapters of oracles against foreign nations (that's a form that we also saw in Amos and Hosea -- denouncing foreign nations) from chapters 13 to 23. I'm skipping over chapters 24 to 27. They are a little apocalypse, a sort of mythological vision of the end of days, and that probably dates to a much later time, the sixth century. That was the time in which the apocalyptic genre was really developing. So we skip over that (we don't think of that as associated with the historical Isaiah) and move on to chapters 28 to 33. Here, we turn from oracles against foreign nations to oracles against Judah and Israel and the relationship with Egypt. This is a time when we're caught between these two powers -- Egypt and Assyria. Judah is trying to figure out with whom to make alliances. Should she cast her lot with Egypt, and so on. And these are from a slightly later period down towards the siege of 701 and they include accounts of Isaiah's counsel to Hezekiah in 701. 34 and 35 we'll kind of skip over for now. These also are post-exilic insertions. And then chapters 36 to 39 -- this is third-person, historical narrative and it is, in fact, 2 Kings chapters 18 to 20. That material has simply been inserted here. So, those three chapters appear here in Isaiah. It's the story of the invasion of Sennecharib and the interactions of Isaiah and Hezekiah during the siege in 701. So I'm stopping at chapter 39 even though there are 66 chapters in the Book of Isaiah because most scholars agree, I think this is really a very strong consensus, that the remaining material is not the work of Isaiah of Jerusalem. It dates to a period long after Isaiah's lifetime. I've already mentioned the apocalypse which we think is probably from the sixth century. That's embedded in there, chapters 24 to 27. But the remaining material we speak of in two main sections. We refer to these as Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah. Chapters 40 to 55, which we refer to as Second Isaiah, assume a historical setting in which Babylon is dominant, not Assyria. And so we see that as coming at a much later time. Chapters 56 to 66, we refer to as Third Isaiah. This material contains oracles that are spread throughout the eighth to the fifth centuries. So we'll consider those on another occasion, in their proper historical context. Right now we're looking at the material that is most likely attributable to First Isaiah, to Isaiah of Jerusalem. The book also contains material that is a repetition of material found elsewhere. I've already noted 2 Kings 18 to 20 appears here. But in addition, you have snatches of verses that appear in other places. So Isaiah 2:2-4, are found in Micah, the Book of Micah 4:1-4. Jeremiah 48 is essentially equivalent to Isaiah 15 and 16. So this kind of repetition among or between different books illustrates, again, the anthological nature of the prophetic corpus--that these were works that were compiled from material that sometimes circulated in more than one school. So if we turn now to the major themes of Isaiah, let's note first the common ground between Isaiah and the prophets Amos and Hosea that we've already discussed. Isaiah is consistent with Amos and Hosea in denouncing again the social injustice and moral decay, which is the cause of God's just and inevitable punishment. Isaiah 5 extracting from verses 8 through 24: Ah, Those who add house to house And join field to field, Till there is room for none but you To dwell in the land!... Ah, Those who chase liquor From early in the morning, And till late in the evening Are inflamed by wine… Ah, Those who… vindicate him who is in the wrong In return for a bribe, And withhold vindication From him who is in the right. He joins Amos in the assertion that cultic practice without just behavior is anathema to God. Isaiah 1:10-17, "Hear the word of the Lord, / You chieftains of Sodom; / Give ear to our God's instruction, You folk of Gomorrah!" (So he's referring to his fellow countrymen as Sodomites, or people of Sodom and Gomorrah, who, of course, were the paragons of immoral behavior). "What need have I of all your sacrifices?" Says the Lord. "I am sated with burnt offering of rams, And suet of fatlings, And blood of bulls; And I have no delight In lambs and he-goats… Your new moons and fixed seasons Fill me with loathing; They are become a burden to Me, I cannot endure them. And when you lift up your hands, I will turn My eyes away from you; Though you pray at length, I will not listen. Your hands are stained with crime-- Wash yourselves clean; Put your evil doings Away from my sight. Cease to do evil; Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice; Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan; Defend the cause of the widow. These are harsh and shocking words: I'm sick of sacrifices. I'm sick of your festivals and holidays as long as you are, of course, committing these terrible acts. And like Amos and Hosea, Isaiah asserts that morality is a decisive factor in the fate of the nation. Again, the passage that begins, Ah, Those who add house to house And join field to field, …In my hearing [said] the Lord of hosts; Surely, great houses Shall lie forlorn, Spacious and splendid ones Without occupants. …Assuredly, My people will suffer exile For not giving heed, Its multitude victims of hunger And its masses parched with thirst. So there are, of course, commonalties but Isaiah differs from Amos and Hosea in this. He places far greater emphasis on the Davidic Covenant than on the Mosaic Covenant. This is a key feature of Isaiah. The wilderness tradition, the Exodus tradition, the covenant at Sinai, these are so important to Amos and Hosea and are referred to by Amos and Hosea, but they have less of an explicit influence on Isaiah's prophecy. They're not not there. But they have less of an explicit influence. Instead, Isaiah has an overriding interest in Davidic theology, the royal ideology that centers on Zion, an ideology that we discussed earlier. So we see this in his riv, his covenant lawsuit, which focuses a little less on the violations of the nation than it does on the failure of the kings and the leaders who have misled the nation and who will now have to be punished as was stipulated in the Davidic Covenant. We also see it in his firm belief in the inviolability of Zion. This is a clear doctrine with Isaiah: the inviolability of Zion. Yahweh has a special relationship with the Davidic royal line and the Davidic capitol, Jerusalem or Zion, and he will not let either perish. And that belief undergirds and informs his consistent advice to the kings of Judah. Times of great danger are opportunities to demonstrate absolute trust in Yahweh's covenant with the line of David, with the House of David. The king must rely exclusively on Yahweh and Yahweh's promises to David and his city, and not on military might or diplomatic strategies. So if we look at Isaiah's dealings with King Ahaz -- the first siege in 734 -- this is described in Isaiah, chapter 7 and 8. Isaiah, who also has children with portentous names (this is a fad I guess among the prophets -- his children's names are: "only a remnant will survive," and "hasten for spoil, hurry for plunder" which indicates the destruction and exile) -- he goes to visit the king. And his advice to the king is: be quiet and do not fear (chapter 7:4). The crisis will pass. 7:9: "If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established." This is an evocation of Zion theology. God is in the midst of the city. That means the Lord of Hosts is with the people. Isaiah then offers Ahaz a sign of the truth of his prophecy. And that is, namely, that a young woman who has conceived will bear a son and will call him Immanuel. It's Hebrew Immanu el, "God is with us." Immanu = "is with us", El. So this woman who has conceived will bear a son and will call him Immanuel. This is in 7:14. Now, in the New Testament, Matthew, in chapter 1:22-23, takes this verse as a prophecy of the birth of Jesus. This is based on a Greek mistranslation of the word "young woman" as "virgin." The Hebrew term that's used is not in fact the term for virgin, but it was translated into the Greek with a term that can mean virgin. And moreover, the verb that's used in the Hebrew is in the past tense. A woman has already conceived. The birth is pending. It is imminent. This child will be born. God will be with us. The identity of the woman that Isaiah is speaking about is a matter of some dispute. So some scholars take the verse as a reference to Isaiah's own wife. She's already had two children with portentous names and now she's pregnant with a third. But the others take the verse as a reference to the king's own wife, who will bear his son Hezekiah, King Hezekiah. There are some problems with chronology. It doesn't quite work out that he would be the right age. But the fact is Hezekiah was a celebrated king. He did in fact manage to keep Judah intact against the Assyrian threat and kept Jerusalem from falling in the siege of 701. And 2 Kings, the Book of 2 Kings, chapter 18:7, says of Hezekiah, "The Lord was with him." God was with him. Connecting it to the name Immanuel -- God is with us. God is with him. Very similar, very, very similar in the Hebrew. In fact, sounds the same. So in keeping with this interpretation -- the idea that the child (who he says will be able, in a sense, to save Judah) is the child of the king to be born, Hezekiah -- in keeping with that, scholars see the famous verses in Isaiah 9 as praise of King Hezekiah. These verses are verses that announce, "for unto us a child is born" -- a wonderful counselor, a mighty God, an everlasting father, a prince of peace, referring then to an unending peace in which David's throne and kingdom are firmly established. And again, these verses have also been decontextualized and are utilized in Christian liturgies to this day, again, as if they refer to the future birth of Jesus. In any event, Ahaz doesn't heed Isaiah's call for inaction. He says he should be doing nothing. How could any king really follow such advice, to seek no political or military solution? And so he appeals to Assyria for help against Aram and the northern kingdom of Israel who are laying siege to him. And this is a disastrous development in Isaiah's eyes. If we move to the second siege in 701, we see that Isaiah really takes a similar stance. Hezekiah tries to form an alliance with Egypt now to stave off the Assyrian threat. And Isaiah castigates the king and he castigates the king's men for abandoning Yahweh and relying on the frail read of Egypt. And we find here an example of the bizarre and demonstrative behavior of the prophet. We'll see this in many of the prophets. We'll see it particularly in the prophet Ezekiel, but we see it with others, where they would engage in these symbolic acts that were meant to shock and attract attention. Isaiah paraded naked through the streets of Jerusalem to illustrate the exile and the slavery that would follow from this mistaken reliance on Egypt. He denounces the political advisors who counsel the king to form an alliance with Egypt because they are simply trusting in horses and chariots rather than God. And Isaiah counsels differently. He says, "For the Egyptians are man, not God, / And their horses are flesh, not spirit" (31:3). The king should simply trust in God. In the narrative account that we have of the siege of 701 that's found in chapters 36 and 38 -- it's also duplicated in 2 Kings -- Isaiah counsels Hezekiah when the siege is underway not to capitulate to the Assyrians. This might seem to contradict his earlier message that Assyria was the rod of God's anger and that Hezekiah should not resist. But in fact, there's a basic consistency to Isaiah's counsel. Just as his earlier counsel to trust in God rather than Egypt was based on his trust in God's promises to David, and the inviolability of the royal city, so now his counsel to resist, not to open the doors of the city to the Assyrians, is based on his belief that Yahweh could not possibility intend to destroy his royal city. Isaiah 37:33-35: Assuredly, thus said the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not enter this city; He shall not shoot an arrow at it, Or advance upon it with a shield, Or pile up a siege mound against it. He shall go back By the way he came, He shall not enter this city--declares the Lord; I will protect and save the city for My sake And for the sake of my servant David. Again, for the sake of the Davidic Covenant. And the fact that Jerusalem did in fact escape destruction after this terrifying siege by the Assyrians only fueled the belief--fueled the belief in the inviolability of David's city, Zion. Isaiah 6 contains a striking account of the call of Isaiah. Many of the prophetic books will feature some passage which refers to the prophet's initial call. And it's something we might expect to find at the beginning of the book. So obviously, chronology is not the organizing principle in the Book of Isaiah. But I want to draw your attention to God's extraordinary message to Isaiah at the time of his call or commission: Go, say to that people: "Hear, indeed, but do not understand; See, indeed, but do not grasp." Dull that people's mind, Stop its ears, And seal its eyes-- Lest, seeing with its eyes And hearing with its ears, It also grasp with its mind, And repent and save itself. Well, there's a nice literary chiasm (before we get to the substance of it) in the last line: you have "heart," "ears," and "eyes" and then these are repeated but in reverse order, eyes, ears and heart. But in this passage we return to the kind of bleakness that we saw in Hosea. Destruction is inevitable. God's message via his prophet will not be understood. And indeed, God will see to it that the people do not understand the message. They do not heed the call to repent, do not save themselves, and so do not escape God's just punishment. It's a fascinating, if theologically difficult, passage. God tells Isaiah to prevent the people from understanding, lest through their understanding they turn back to God and save themselves. And again, we see God, or perhaps his prophet, caught in the tension between God's justice and God's mercy. As a God of justice he must punish the sins of Israel with destruction. He indicated he would do so in the covenant and he must be faithful to those terms. But as a God of mercy he wishes to bring his people back. He wishes to send them a prophet to warn them of the impending doom and urge them to repent so that he can forgive them and announce his plan of destruction. Yet, how can he both punish Israel and so fulfill the demands of justice, and yet save Israel and so fulfill the demands of mercy and love? Verses 12 and 13 in chapter 6 answer this question with an idea that we've seen a little in Amos and Hosea. When Isaiah asks how long the people will fail to hear, fail to understand, to turn back to God and save themselves, God replies, Till towns lie waste without inhabitants And houses without people, And the ground lies waste and desolate-- For the Lord will banish the population-- And deserted sites are many In the midst of the land. But while a tenth part yet remains in it, it shall repent. It shall be ravaged like the terebinth and the oak, of which stumps are left even when they are felled: its stump shall be a holy seed. So God will punish. God cannot not punish Israel. And so the demands of justice will be met, and God will have upheld the terms of the conditional Mosaic Covenant. But God will at the same time effect the salvation of his people in the future. He has sent a prophet with a call to return and in due time a remnant of the people -- a tenth Isaiah says -- will understand and heed that call. They will receive God's mercy and the covenant will be reestablished. And in this way the demands of love and mercy will be met, and God will have been faithful to his covenantal promise to the patriarchs and the royal House of David. The people's delayed comprehension of the prophet's message guarantees the operation of God's just punishment now and his merciful salvation later. While the notion of a remnant leads to the idea of a future hope, it wasn't a very consoling message at the time. Because the prophets were essentially saying that the current generation would all but cease to exist. Isaiah 10:21-23, Only a remnant shall return, Only a remnant of Jacob, To Mighty God. Even if your people, O Israel Should be as the sands of the sea, Only a remnant of it shall return. Destruction is decreed; Retribution comes like a flood! For my Lord God of Hosts is carrying out A decree of destruction upon all the land. Well, we've seen that the prophet's message of destruction and punishment and doom is very often accompanied by, often alternates with, a message of consolation and a promise of restoration, restoration of a purged or purified remnant in the land of Israel. This is where the prophets differ from the Deuteronomistic historian. The Deuteronomistic historian is more concerned with the justification of God's actions against Israel than with painting a vivid portrait of the time of a future restoration. But this period of restoration is elaborately envisioned in some prophetic writings. And it even takes on an eschatological tenor. The word "eschatology" means an account of the end. So in some of them, this becomes an eschatological vision: that the restoration will happen at the end of days. And the restoration will bring about some sort of perfect end time. So in Isaiah, for example, the return will be a genuine, whole-hearted and permanent return to God. It will be the end of sin. It will be the end of idolatry. All the nations of the earth will recognize the Lord of history. A new epoch will open in world history. It's an enormous transformation. And Isaiah is the first to envisage this kind of transformation, the end of the dominion of idolatrous nations. When God comes to Jerusalem to save the remnant of Israel and gather in the dispersed exiles it will be a theophany, a self-revelation of God, of worldwide scope. Isaiah 2:2-4, "In the days to come, / The Mount of the Lord's House / Shall stand firm above the mountains / And tower above the hills;" So this little hill -- if you've ever been there, it's really not very big -- that the temple stood on, will tower like some large impregnable mountain, over all other hills and mountains, And all the nations Shall gaze on it with joy. And the many peoples shall go and say: "Come, Let us go up to the Mount of the Lord, To the House of the God of Jacob; That He may instruct us in His ways, And that we may walk in His paths." For instruction, [torah] will come forth from Zion, The word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Thus He will judge among the nations And arbitrate for the many peoples, And they shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up Sword against nation; They shall never again know war. Note the direction that Israelite thought is taking. The J source in Genesis assumed that all humans had knowledge of Yahweh from the time of creation. And remember that that was one of the distinctive traits of J as opposed to P for example. They assume, however, that humans turned from Yahweh. So Yahweh selected one nation to know him and covenant with him. The Book of Deuteronomy accepts that Yahweh is Israel's God. Other nations have been assigned to the worship of other gods and that's just fine. But in classical prophecy, universal claims are made on behalf of Yahweh. According to the prophets, God will make himself known to all the nations, as he once did to Israel, and the universal worship or recognition of Yahweh will be established at the end of days. This is very different idea. And so as a consequence of this idea, the very notion of Israel's election is transformed by the prophets. In the Torah books, the election of Israel means simply God's undeserved choice of Israel as the nation to know him and bind itself in covenant to him. But in the prophetic literature, Israel's election is an election to a mission. Israel was chosen so as to be the instrument of universal redemption, universal recognition of Yahweh. When God comes finally to rescue the Israelites he will simultaneously reveal himself to all of humankind. They'll abandon their idols, they'll return to him. A messianic period of peace will follow. And eventually, we're going to see the idea that the mission for which Israel was elected was to become a "light unto the nations." This is a phrase that we're going to see in other parts of Isaiah, Isaiah 49, Isaiah 51, later. The royal ideology of Judah plays an important role in the eschatological vision of Isaiah because this new peaceful righteous kingdom is going to be restored by a Davidide. It's going to be restored by a king from the Branch of Jesse. David's father name was Jesse. So when you say the branch, or from the stump of Jesse, then you are referring to a Davidide. Isaiah 11 refers to the restoration of the Davidic line, which implies that it had been temporarily interrupted. So Isaiah 11 may be post-exilic. It may date from a time when people were hoping for a messiah to arise and restore the line of David. Isaiah 11:1-12,16: But a shoot shall grow out of the stump of Jesse, A twig shall sprout from his stock. The spirit of the Lord shall alight upon him: A spirit of wisdom and insight, A spirit of counsel and valor, A spirit of devotion and reverence for the Lord. He shall sense the truth by his reverence for the Lord: He shall not judge… by what his ears perceive. Thus he shall judge the poor with equit And decide with justice for the lowly of the land. He shall strike down a land with the rod of his mouth And slay the wicked with the breath of his lips. Justice shall be the girdle of his loins, And faithfulness the girdle of his waist. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard lie down with the kid; The calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together, With a little boy to herd them. The cow and the bear shall graze. (I think the bear is vegetarian, not killing the cow but eating the grass with the cow.) Their young shall lie down together; And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw. A babe shall play Over a viper's hole, And an infant pass his hand Over an adder's den. The hostility, the animosity between humans and serpents or snakes which was decreed at the fall, the expulsion from Eden, is reversed in this end-time. This is a return to the situation in paradise. In all of My sacred mount Nothing evil or vile shall be done; For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord As water covers the sea. In that day, The stock of Jesse that has remained standing Shall become a standard to peoples-- Nations shall seek his counsel And his abode shall be honored. In that day, my Lord will apply his hand again to redeeming the other part of his peoples from Assyria-- as also from Egypt. Pathros, Nubia, Elam, Shinar, Hamath and the coastlands…Thus there shall be a highway for the other part of his people out of Assyria, such as there was for Israel when it left the land of Egypt. So this new ideal Davidic king will rule by wisdom and insight and the spirit of the Lord will "alight on him." That's a phrase that we saw being used in the case of judges and in the case of Saul or David. It doesn't refer to military might and strength here. It refers to counsel and a spirit of devotion to God. And this king's reign will begin an ingathering of the exiles of the nation and a transformed world order. So to conclude: Isaiah is typical of the prophetic reinterpretation of the ancient covenant promises, giving Israel a hope for a better, ideal future. And like the other prophets, he declared that the nation was in distress not because the promises weren't true but because they hadn't been believed. The nation's punishment was just a chastisement. It wasn't a revocation of the promises. The prophets pushed the fulfillment of the promises beyond the existing nation however. So only after suffering the punishment for the present failure would a future redemption be possible. So the national hope was maintained but pushed off to a future day. Alright, we'll deal with some more prophetic books when we come back. Please be sure to take the handouts in the box at the side of the room.

Literature_Lectures

22_PostColonial_Criticism.txt

Prof: Well, post-colonial studies is really by far the most varied and eclectic of the identity fields that we're passing in review in this portion of the course: eclectic really of necessity, of course, because of the immense variety of the materials covered, but also because of swirling issues and controversies within post-colonial studies or "po-co," as it's affectionately known, which kind of pose a number of questions from the side that keep things lively, to say the least. We are taking up only one strand, one developmental strand, in post-colonial studies today, a kind of progression from the work of Said to the work of Bhabha which is relatively easily mapped, simply in terms of the intellectual agendas of each of them, but there's a great deal else going on. I suppose I should just mention in passing certain topics that we won't be discussing, at least except possibly in passing and that, however, you might really be interested in considering if you do have an interest in this field. The first issue, of course, is who says "post-colonial," and who says that we're necessarily out of colonialism? Just because the local viceroy packs up and goes home doesn't necessarily mean that things change all that significantly in the so-called postcolonial setting, and it needs to be taken into account, seriously considered, whether or not one isn't still in colonial or colonial studies and that the moniker "post-colonial" might therefore be inappropriately applied. There's also the question that arises in the study of the so-called third world, which is obviously in itself a controversial term. It arises as that which is not comprised as either of the great sort of trajectories of the superpowers during the Cold War. There is no Cold War, at least allegedly no Cold War any longer, and so the question of the status, nature, and structure of the third world is obviously wide open. But the issue I mean to touch on in terms of post-colonial studies is whether, in fact, crises and concerns with respect to the third world are necessarily always to be understood in terms of coloniality. Is it just that certain parts of the globe have been colonized that constitutes them as they are and shapes their identity? Said in a very interesting way takes this up in trying to figure out how it is that German Orientalism so very closely resembles French Orientalism, even though the Germans had no colonial interests in the Middle East. During the whole period--the early nineteenth century in particular, when German Orientalism is practically indistinguishable from the French, takes up the same concerns, and has the same interests-- how is it that the French are undoubtedly in some sense, in Said's view, determined by their colonial interests, and the Germans, who seem so much to reflect French attitudes, have no colonial interests, at least in the Middle East? Said sort of quite honestly tries to come to terms with this. His answer is, "Well, German Orientalism is simply derived in scholarly terms from French Orientalism. It has the stamp of that thinking and reflects that thinking," and so there you are. He could have said on the other hand, however, that a certain mindset toward the third world-- and this is the point I have been making about this particular issue-- dictates a certain way of structuring one's thought about that world, irrespective of whether or not there are colonial interests involved. That's what I mean by raising the question, "Is coloniality always at issue in cases of this kind?" There's a kind of confusion in thinking about these things, a confusion which is distilled in the history of the British East India Company-- which is both nationalist and, as it were, globalizing--but a confusion which comes out in more recent history of coloniality, and that is: well, what drives coloniality? Is it always nationalism or, as seems increasingly the case in the modern world, is it transnational interests in globalization? In other words, is the relationship between the colonist and the colonized a relation of some sort of metropolitan nation with respect to a provincial empire, or is it a relation which is dictated and generated by the economic interests of globalization? This is a complex subject which generates a great deal of debate in the field that we take up today, but in a way, we can't just say, "Well, nationalism isn't important anymore, now it's globalization" because actually nationalism seems to have reappeared in the Bush foreign policy, even possibly to be continued in the Obama foreign policy, and so there's a complex relationship still between nationalism and globalization that needs to be considered and thought about if these social relations are to be clearly understood. Finally, there is within post-colonial studies-- especially among those who represent the various colonized interests of the world-- there is the question, to borrow an expression from Gayatri Spivak, "How should the subaltern speak?" It has to do most vividly with the very question, "Which language should the subaltern speak in?" Spivak's own question is, "Can the subaltern speak at all?" and Said raises that question, as you notice, during the course of his analysis; but the related issue is, okay, suppose that the subaltern can speak--suppose Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for example, can write a novel. What language should it be written in? Ngugi campaigned in his more recent career not to write in English and also to urge other African writers to write in native languages and not in the language of the colonizer. This is a frequently heard opinion from within post-colonial studies, but debate swirls around it because, of course, the means of circulation of literary influence is languages that draw upon international publishing possibilities and not languages that can only be grasped and published and disseminated locally. So there, too, you have a complicated issue or controversy on both sides, of which there is much to say; but as I say, for us today it's simply a question-- or more simply a question, because when you've got Homi Bhabha on the syllabus there's no such thing as simplicity-- so I should say it's a question of following the trajectory or development specifically between Said and Bhabha. In beginning to think about Said, I thought we wouldn't think about him. We'd think instead, for a moment at least, once again about Virginia Woolf. In the second chapter of A Room of One's Own, this young woman, Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael--whoever she is, is sitting in the British Library. She's thought that she'd spend the morning trying to figure out what scholars think about women. After all, the subject is women and fiction. I'm supposed to be addressing these undergraduates on this subject: "what do I know about women? I'd better go to the library and find out." So she expects just to find a couple of books and she'll be all set. Instead she is simply overwhelmed, and there's this avalanche of material. She submits maybe a dozen or two call slips and then sits back waiting for the material to appear. Of course, the point of it is that everything in the British Library on what turns out to be the voluminous subject of women is written by men, right? Everything. She begins to take note of the way these things are described in the sort of pre-computer database. That is to say, how do you classify the various things that men have to say about women? This is the way it goes: "condition of Middle Ages of; habits in the Fiji Islands of; worshipped as goddesses by; weaker in moral sense than; idealism of; greater conscientious of; South Sea islanders age of puberty among; attractiveness of; offered as sacrifice to; small size of brain of; profounder sub-consciousness of; less hair on the body of; mental, moral and physical inferiority of; love of children of; greater length of life of; weaker muscles of; strength of affections of; vanity of; higher education of; Shakespeare's opinion of; Lord Birkenhead's opinion of; Dean Inge's opinion of; La Bruyere's opinion of; Dr. Johnson's opinion of; Mr. Oscar Browning's opinion of; and dot, dot, dot--the list can continue. In other words, she sits there. She's simply overwhelmed, and what she of course is telling us is that there's lots and lots and lots and lots of opinions on record about women, all of them expressed by men. So now thinking about Edward Said, if Edward Said had taken up Virginia Woolf's project, if Edward Said had undertaken to write A Room of One's Own, the title of it would have been Female-ism, right? That's precisely what he means by "Orientalism," the vast body of information-- some of it scholarly, some of it just sort of sheerly doxological-- the vast body of information about peoples called "Oriental" by and large, especially in the nineteenth-century tradition. Said's main concern is the peoples of the Middle East, and he shows how it is that there's a certain reason why this is an appropriate term to use for that tradition of scholarship and philology in the nineteenth century. In any case, the vast body of material published about these people-- and it's perfectly true that there are the infinitely long shelves of the library devoted to multivolume treatises on this topic, all of them written by us in the West-- us--about this other who is perpetually in our imagination and constructed by us in the variety of ways that Said discusses on page 1811, the right-hand column. He says toward the bottom of the column: Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. Just as in Woolf, men's opinions about women getting themselves expressed in books make the subject of woman clear to an audience of men. All right. So before moving in with some more depth and precision into Said's text, let me quickly explain what I mean by saying that Said and Bhabha constitute a kind of sequence. I'm thinking in particular of Elaine Showalter's distinction between feminist and gynocritical criticism. You remember the distinction which is echoed, by the way, in Gates's essay. The distinction is: first you get criticism in which the treatment of women in literature by men is the focus of attention, and then subsequently you get criticism in which the women's tradition, the voice of women themselves, is the focus and, as Showalter believes, the more fruitful terrain for criticism. You can see that in that context, by way of making that distinction, you can see that Said is decidedly phase one because, of course, Orientalism is about the treatment of the Middle Eastern other by the West. It can be slotted into that same moment. Then Homi Bhabha obviously in a variety of ways takes up the subject position of the colonized, of the subaltern. He doesn't leave out the subject position of the colonizer because he sees them as being radically interrelated, but he plainly is as interested in a variety of ways of talking about the traditions of the colonized as he is of talking about the way in which colonization takes place and expresses itself. So in that sense, we can see Said and Bhabha as belonging to these two phases as mapped by Showalter. As I say also in passing by Gates--and I'm sorry for the confusion of this heading [gestures to board]-- actually there's another way in which Said and Bhabha can be understood as phase one and phase two. That has much more to do with the tradition of literary theory, which in their ways both Showalter and Gates have rejected, insisting that one needs to commandeer white male literary theory for one's own purposes. I suppose it's a question of how this issue doesn't come up in Said and Bhabha. It could perhaps be answered by saying that precisely in the situation of colonialism, the intellectuals--third world, colonized intellectuals-- nevertheless are educated in high-octane male metropolitan institutions, by which of course one means primarily Oxford and Cambridge. In a certain sense, they come to identify-- and this is not actually a thing apart from Bhabha's argument about hybridity-- they come to identify in some measure with the educational agenda of the colonizer and participate in it. Now that's speculative. It may simply be that we have missed out on those moments when Said and Bhabha, too, may be talking about the way in which the white male tradition of literary theory needs to be appropriated; but for the moment what I want to point out is this: Said's Orientalism works very much in the historical moment of what we call structuralism. That is to say, it's primary concern is with the binary opposition, a mutual and interdependent binary opposition of central self and decentralized other including, as we'll see in a minute, the way in which the construction of the otherness of the other is actually covertly also at the same time a means of constructing, defining, and delimiting the nature of selfhood, or in this case of being Western. There is a fundamental binarism in Said's point of view, which by the way has often been criticized, and it's been criticized most often from the standpoint of Bhabha-- if only because he's constantly referring to Derrida's famous essay, "The Double Session," which is about Mallarmé, and also because he appropriates a great deal of the language and style of Derrida. You can see that Bhabha takes, with respect to the binarism of structuralism, a deconstructive attitude. In other words, his sense of these relations breaks down into, at the very least, a redoubling sense of what he calls "double consciousness" so that one can't clearly identify colonizer and colonized as a binary opposition. It's more complicated than that, and it's a series of issues that turns on a highly Derridian sense of what one might mean by difference. All I want to say is that the relation, Said-Bhabha, is phase one-phase two in that regard as well. By the way, this is a tendency that one can find in other forms of theory having to do with identity. The relationship between the classical feminism that we have been discussing so far and the gender theory that we will be discussing on Tuesday, especially in the case of Judith Butler, is once again a relation that could be understood as between structuralism and deconstruction. There, too, you have a not completely overlapping but, from the standpoint of our concerns in literary theory, nevertheless rather interesting way in which this succession, Said-Bhabha, is phase one-phase two in two different ways that can be identified, I think, usefully. All right. So that then about their relationship. So what about Said? How do we get at the issues that Said wants to talk about and understand the way in which he thinks they have integrity? I think I'd like actually to begin with a word or two about truth, because Said makes it clear that in a way, the demonization of Orientalism that his project undertakes isn't really undertaken because Orientalism is necessarily a pack of lies. Maybe he waffles a little bit about this, but it's not really ultimately the point for him whether Orientalism lies or tells the truth. This is the way he puts it on page 1802 in the right-hand column: … [A] third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient... Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse… In other words, one of Napoleon's adjutants during Napoleon's campaign through Egypt wrote a ten-volume Eastward de l'Egypt. Many of the texts which Said mentions in passing in his introduction to Orientalism are just as long. You've got fifty-volume, sort of gigantic scholarly undertakings, and you've got to admit, well, if they are saying that much, there's got to be something in it that's true. There is, after all, a great deal of knowledge of a certain kind, at least, that has gone into thinking of this kind, and so one can't just say, "My point is that none of it's true." Said is at pains to make a distinction, therefore, between truth and value. It's not that Orientalist discourse is necessarily true or false. It is the case though that it is insidiously devaluate of its object of attention-- that there is an implicit euro-centrism which Said does go so far as to consider a form of racism in Orientalism, quite irrespective of any measure or degree of truth that what are, after all, the meticulous researches of a lot of these characters turn up. For example, on page 1812, the left-hand column, he says: My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis [this is about a third of the way down] on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as "natural" descriptions of the Orient. Now we might pause for a minute over that as a possible object of critique because at the end of his essay, or at the end of the introduction as you have it, you notice Said saying, "Look, I don't take up here the question of how one might actually write correctly > about these people." He doesn't take up, for example, the question of what it might be like to be sort of a representative of these minorities or colonized figures and to write about oneself. He doesn't really take up the question of whether the bias of somebody else writing about me, a man writing about a woman, is worse than the bias of my own preconceptions and prejudices about myself. He admits that he doesn't really have an advanced theory that secures one kind of representation as true or authentic and secures another kind of representation as bias and inauthentic. He says, "Another scholar will perhaps take this up. I leave it alone in my book," and it is left alone, the problem being that the claim remains that he does-- anticipating many other people who have written on this subject-- he does impugn Orientalism as mere representation: that is to say, as the opposite because it is a representation, the opposite of a natural evocation of an ethos or world. So we just do want to put a little question mark in the margin and then say, "Well, fine. Granted this is all representation, where is the text? Where could the text be that would be natural?" Is there, for example, any such thing, as we've asked ourselves over the course of the semester, as a natural sign? The sign being arbitrary, it does place us already pretty securely in the realm of representation. So all of these questions are then posed by Said's sense of the relationship between truth and value in the history of Orientalist scholarship. Now where is he coming from? He's quite open about it, and it's perhaps worth pausing over an idea common to the two scholar-theorists who matter most to him, Michel Foucault and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. First of all, just to pass in review the way in which he's indebted to Gramsci on page 1803, the left-hand column, Said says: Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In other words, it's not just a question of having forced down your throat certain ideas of concepts or laws, for that matter, but a circulation of knowledge, so called, of feeling about things, of ideology, which through consent establishes certain attitudes of bias. This is the distinction that Gramsci makes between the way in which one is imposed on by actual power and authority and the way in which one is imposed on by the circulations of what we've been exposed to in the past as being called "ideologemes." So to continue: In any society not totalitarian [says Said], then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony. This is a term that you will frequently encounter, particularly in Marxist criticism, but it is also a term very closely related to what for most Western readers is more famous in the work of Michel Foucault, the term "power" or sometimes "power/knowledge." As you will learn in the excerpt from Foucault that you'll be reading on Tuesday, Foucault like Gramsci makes a distinction between power merely as that which is exercised by the police, by the legal arm of society, by the dictator, by the government, and by power as the ways, the frequently insidious ways, in which knowledge is circulated and made hegemonic-- that is to say, made authoritative. Foucault is fascinated by the structure of this circulation of knowledge. That is, in fact the essential subject matter of all of his late work, the way in which we are thinking that we are sort of free contemplative agents in the world, in fact browbeaten by structures of opinion circulating around us that lull us into feeling that we are in the presence of the truth, whereas of course, we're only in the presence of one form or another of motivated bias. Both Gramsci and Foucault make the distinction between absolute power and, as Gramsci calls it, hegemony and, as Foucault calls it, power/knowledge. Said is talking here about power/knowledge. He's not talking about the imposition of law through force or any other means on a colonized world. He's talking about the way in which opinions construct that world and simultaneously reinforce the authority of those who generate the opinions. I think it's important to point this relatively subtle distinction out: he does, however, disagree from Foucault in one respect. On page 1813 he goes back to what we already know about Foucault, which is Foucault's interest in the author function as opposed to the author. Authors, generally speaking, Foucault wants to say, are not authorities but simply vessels of forms of opinion. Certain authors who come very close to being authority we call founders of discursivity, but even in their cases it's the nature of the discourse and not their existence as authors which is important. Said wants to say, "I take authors a little bit more seriously than that," and he does on page 1813 in the right-hand column where he says: Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for very little; empirically [that is to say, "through my experience"], in the case of Orientalism, and perhaps nowhere else I find this not to be so. In other words, the author is the central philologist, and social historians, explorers, and demographers who have written so extensively on this part of the world are authorities. They are the oracles from which generalized and ultimately commonplace opinions disseminate as power/knowledge. It's not a question, therefore, of a kind of silent drumbeat of opinion expressing itself over and over again, which is more what interests Foucault. So Said, as I say, distinguishes himself subtly from Foucault in that regard while nevertheless confessing openly the influence both of Foucault and of Gramsci on his way of approaching his material. So as a circulation of power, the effect of Orientalism is something that ultimately concerns Said.Well, he says this somewhat rhetorically because it obviously does concern him that it has an effect on the peoples in question, but what ultimately concerns Said is the effect of Orientalism on the Euro-centric mind, indeed the degree to which it even can be said to construct the Euro-centric mind, page 1806, the right-hand column: … [M]y real argument is that Orientalism is-- and does not simply represent--a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with "our" world. Now here you can see the degree to which Said is saying something very similar to what Toni Morrison said in her essay. The existence of black as absence needs to be understood-- for example, if we are studying the history of American literature-- as the means of constructing whiteness, of that which liberates whiteness from the forms of constraint under which it's been chafing at the bit. Morrison, of course, develops this argument beautifully, and she quite clearly takes it from the fourth chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind as a way of understanding the master-slave dialectic. In other words, in Hegel it's clear as Hegel develops the idea that master and slave are absolutely necessary to each other in a structure of mutuality. The master isn't the master, can't define himself as free or superior without the existence of the slave. The trickiness that the slave learns being in the position of subordination involving the development of all sorts of complicated skills means ultimately that the slave becomes, as it were, that which drives the master technologically and ultimately controls the master in a kind of fable of class reversal, which continues to reverse itself again and again and again on various grounds. This is the fable, which at the same time is a philosophy of class relations that structures Morrison's argument and which, I think, also structures Said's. I want to make the transition to Bhabha because obviously this is a form of binarism. The two signifiers in relation to each other need each other in the way that we described when we were discussing Saussure and structuralism. I can't simply say that a red light has positive value. You remember the whole argument: I have to see the red light in the context of the semiotic system to which it belongs. I have to see it as being different from, or opposed to, something else in order to grasp it. I cannot know it positively, in other words; I can only know it negatively. This basic concept of structuralism in the Saussurian tradition is what creates, is what shapes binary arguments of the kind that one finds in Said. That we know ourselves negatively as the not-other is the basic principle, the theoretical principle which underlies obviously aspects of the argument which are also, as Said says, empirical. Yes, I can say it's a structuralist idea, but I really believe it because I've seen it in operation. It's not just structuralism in other words. It shares, however, with structuralism a theoretical predisposition. Bhabha, if you look at page 1879, openly criticizes the premise of binarism of this kind-- not just any binarism, but he actually does go directly back to Hegel. In other words, he identifies the source of thinking of this kind, bottom of 1879, right-hand column, when he says: It is this ambivalence that makes the boundaries of colonial "positionality"-- the division of self/other--and the question of colonial power-- the differentiation of colonizer/colonized-- different from both the Hegelian master/slave dialectic or the phenomenological projection of Otherness. He goes on to mention other things, but I just want to focus on this as a moment in which Bhabha is distinguishing himself as clearly as he can from the project of Said. Now the passage I just read begins with the word "ambivalence." What does Bhabha mean by ambivalence? Let's try to start there and see if we can work our way into Bhabha's complex thinking on these matters, first by way of the notion of ambivalence. I'm going to put this in terms of an historical example because I hope that will make it a little clearer. There is the ambivalence of the colonizer toward the colonized. In other words, it's not just one mindset that drives colonization. In the historical experience of England in the East India Company, there are two distinct phases, phases which actually repeat themselves recurrently even throughout the twentieth century. The first in the eighteenth century is the period of the government of the East India Company by Warren Hastings who in a certain sense was interested in what we call "going native" and also encouraged all of his provincial administrators to do likewise. Hastings, in other words, in Saidian terms knew a great deal about the Orientalized other. He knew all the local languages and dialects. He knew all the customs. He really knew everything there was to know and in a certain sense was a person who did go native while at the same time wielding with an iron grip of authority power over the colonized other. He himself then embodies a certain ambivalence in not giving an inch as to the actual control of authority, while at the same time seeming to become one with the other. Then there is the historical ambivalence which expresses itself in a completely different attitude, an attitude which surfaced in the East India Company early in the nineteenth century under the supervisorship of Charles Grant. There had been a tremendous revival of fundamentalist religion, mainly Methodism, in England, and this evangelical enthusiasm spread itself into the interests of the empire. Charles Grant and others like him no longer had any interest at all in going native but, on the contrary, insisted that a standard of Englishness and, in particular, the standard of the English Bible-- the coming of the English book that Bhabha talks about at the beginning of his essay-- be firmly implanted, and that the imposition of Englishness on the colonized other be the agenda of colonization. The famous historian Thomas Babington Macaulay codified this attitude in a famous, and soon to be infamous, document he wrote called "The Minute on Education," which insisted that the education of the Indian people under the regime of the East India Company be conducted strictly according to English models: that missionaries no longer try to adapt their ideas to local customs and folk ways but that everything be strictly anglicized. This is a completely different attitude toward colonization, and it can be understood as a sort of historical ambivalence. I'd actually like to pause over an example of what you might call the Warren Hastings moment, a vicious example although an absolutely fascinating one in the disturbing masterpiece by John Ford called The Searchers. I hope some of you at least know that film. The John Wayne character is sort of a lone stranger-- which is of course not infrequent in the western-- who shows up at the house of some relatives and hears that a daughter has been abducted by native Americans, by Indians. Now the thing about John Wayne is that in this film is that he's a vicious racist, that he absolutely hates the Indians, but he is not a vicious racist from the standpoint of ignorance. He is in fact a person who has himself, in a certain sense, gone native. He knows all the Indian languages and dialects. He knows all their customs. He has throughout a lifetime made a careful study of the people he hates, and this is a volatile mixture to be exposed to in a film because we are much more comfortable with the idea that hatred arises out of ignorance, right? What is so deeply disturbing about John Ford's The Searchers is that it is a portrait of absolutely vicious racism: again Said says, "Hey, it's not necessarily truth, but we do have to acknowledge a certain local, thick description. We have to acknowledge that there's quite a bit of information > at this person's disposal, and all of that is borne out in the characterization of John Wayne in this film. Warren Hastings was a lot like that. Warren Hastings knew everything about people whom he ultimately didn't really respect and whom he insisted on ruling with the iron fist of authority. That's the kind of thing that Bhabha is thinking about when he thinks about the ambivalence of the colonizer, the relationship between knowledge and value as it's already been enunciated in Said but also the fact that there is more than one mindset for the colonizer. There is the local knowledge mindset, and there is the sort of raising the absolute unequivocal standard of the colonizer that these are two different attitudes, each of which dictate different strategies, particularly strategies of education. So that's the ambivalence of the colonizer. Then there is the ambivalence of the colonized, and that, too, has to be understood as a complex relation to co-optation. The anecdote with which Bhabha begins, I think, is fascinating and well worth attending to. You have not a colonizer but someone thoroughly co-opted, an evangelical converted Christian of Indian descent who represents, in a way, that the people he finds sitting under the trees reading the Bible consider to be completely authentic because he believes and is perfectly happy to believe that the Bible, and for that matter Christianity itself, is an English gift. But he's met with the response of people who resist that, who say, "This is very interesting stuff. We wish we could have some local authority for it. Our understanding is we got this book directly from God, right? That's our understanding and we have our own attitude toward it. Sure, maybe we'll get baptized one of these days, but in the meantime we got to go home and take care of the harvest, so we'll get around to that. Don't worry about it. By the way, if we get baptized we certainly can't take the Eucharist because that's eating meat. We don't eat meat. We are who we are." You can see that these cunningly insinuated provisos to the attitude that the missionary wants to inculcate in them in a very real way completely undermines his purpose. They don't think of it as the English Bible. They won't accept it as the English Bible. They will only accept it as an authority that's mediated by their own values, which transforms the document. You can see it again--this is1813, as Bhabha points out. This is precisely at the moment when we're moving, when the regime of authority is moving from the Warren Hastings paradigm to the Charles Grant paradigm. It's no longer possible to think in terms of adapting the Bible to local beliefs and circumstances. This is a moment in which the complexity of the attitude of the colonized is brought up. There's the attitude of the suborned missionary, and there's the more complicated and interesting attitude of the people he encounters sitting under these trees. Turn to page 1881, the left-hand column. This is a very difficult passage. Everything in Bhabha is difficult. I think I want to gloss it by suggesting to you that what he's talking about is that the ambivalence which-- and we might as well say right out that he has a term for this ambivalence, and it's "hybridity"-- is the double consciousness of the colonized hovering between submission-- that is to say, submission to authority but with a difference, submission to authority on one's own terms, and on the other hand, acquiescence in authority as given, which of course is basically the position of the missionary. With that said, I'll read the passage in which Bhabha describes this hybridity in the double consciousness of the colonized: The place of difference and otherness, or the space of the adversarial, within such a system of "disposal" as I have proposed, is never entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional. [Not just, in other words, again as a question of us versus them.] It is a pressure, and a presence, that acts constantly, if unevenly, along the entire boundary of authorization [which is also authority], that is, on the surface between what I've called disposal-as-bestowal [I take that meaning submission-- simply "okay, fine, I give in"] and disposition-as-inclination [which is "hey, I kind of like that, I go along with it, I give in spontaneously"]. Now to give in simply as a form of recognizing that one's beaten, as a form of submission, puts one in the position of what Bhabha calls "sly civility." This is the position that I'd like to go back to for a moment as being very closely related to what Gates calls signifyin'. Bhabha gives a number of examples of this sly civility in his text, but of course it's all present in the clever and wonderfully rich ironies of these figures sitting under the trees in his opening anecdote. Let me just give you an example of how sly civility works as a form of signifyin' and as a stance of colonized resistance, a recuperation of the will, perhaps in a post-modern sense, which is nevertheless not rebellious, not in any way envisioning an overthrow of authority, but is a means of living in the framework of authority. Just a quick example and then I'll let you go. Two African-American people are having a conversation in the presence of a white person, and they cheerfully and with broad smiles on their face refer to this person in his presence as Bill. Now "Bill" is a derisive and derogatory term for white people, and the white person standing there has two choices in response to hearing himself referred to as "Bill": he can either take umbrage and say, "Why are you saying that about me? I'm a nice guy. You don't want to say that," in which case the needling effect of the term has taken hold; or he can play the fool and pretend that he doesn't know that he's being signified on and pretend that, well, it's perfectly okay to be called "Bill." Either way you see it's a win/win situation. This guy, Bill, is the slave owner, right? He likes to get along with people, so he's sitting around having this conversation and he hears them calling him "Bill," right? Because there is an element of good nature in his slave-owning personality, he's stuck. He can either complain that people are treating him unfairly-- which of course is neither here nor there in terms of the structure of power involved-- or he can play the fool and pretend that he doesn't even notice that he's being made fun of. Either way, this is an example of that sly civility which signifies on the man and which makes it clear that while the structure of power can't be overthrown anytime soon, there nevertheless is a way of living-- at least of keeping one's sense of humor within the existing structure of power-- while giving the man a hard time. That is the set of attitudes that Bhabha is articulating in his notion of the hybridity of the colonized, which takes the form in performance-- we're going to have a lot more to say about performance on Tuesday-- in performance of this sly civility. I think it's on page 1889 that he gives us that expression, which I think you should keep hold of-- which I would compare very closely with what Henry Louis Gates calls "signifyin'." Okay. See you on Tuesday.

Literature_Lectures

14_Influence.txt

Prof: So I'll tell you a little bit about Harold Bloom's career later in the lecture. Those of you who know How to Read a Poem, the books on religion, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, and perhaps only know those books, may feel a little surprised at finding him on a literary theory syllabus, but the great outpouring of work beginning with The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Poetry and Repression, and a great many other books in the seventies put Bloom in the very midst of the theoretical controversies then swirling. He was associated with the so-called Yale School. In fact, he was willing to put his name as editor and also a contributor on a volume that was called Deconstruction and Criticism. I think though that, even in reading what you have before you, you can see how relatively little Bloom has to do with deconstruction. Certainly in his more recent career he's distanced himself from theory. He hasn't really changed his views of anything, although he doesn't any longer read poems through the machinery of the six revisionary ratios. Perhaps I should stop there and say the six revisionary ratios won't be on the test. > Now I think that nothing could be more exciting than to understand clinamen, tessera, sort of kenosis, askesis, demonization, apophrades--whoa!--and to wander in the realms of these ideas, and actually to use them as the machinery for practical criticism: to take a poem and to see what you can actually do with these ideas really is, and I'm serious, an exciting process. You may very much resent not having these six ratios on the exam, and you may wish to hear more about them. You'll hear something about a few of them in passing today, but if you do wish to hear more about them, perhaps your sections will > provide some guidance. In any case, the contributions of Bloom to theory in my opinion, and I hope to bring this out in the long run, have primarily to do with the fact that I think he can legitimately and authentically be called an important literary historiographer. That is to say, together with people like Tynjanov and Jakobson earlier in the course and Hans Robert Jauss later in the course, Bloom does seriously deserve to be considered a literary historian-- that is to say, a person with a theory about literary history on a par with those other figures. This hasn't always often been remarked. As a matter of fact, the general critical attitude toward Bloom is that he's hopelessly ahistoricist, cares nothing about history, and cares nothing about the way in which the real world impinges on literature. In a certain measure, as we'll also see, there is some truth in this, but he has a powerful argument about the relationship among texts as they succeed each other in history. It's an argument which I think really we ignore in our peril. It's an important one and it is a psychoanalytic one, which is one of the things that places him at this point in the course. You'll remember the sort of tripartition of the subject matter of our course which-- it's all headed up in the syllabus and all clearly to be understood. First we have logo genesis, the production of literature by language. Then we have psychogenesis, the production of literature by the human psyche. Then we have sociogenesis, the production of literature by social, economic, and political and historical factors. Okay, fine, well and good, but you may have noticed how much trouble we have had getting into psychogenesis. We keep saying we've arrived > at psychogenesis, but we actually continue to be working obviously with linguistic models. Here is Lacan telling us the unconscious resembles a language, that it's structured like a language; Brooks telling us that it's the verbal structure arising out of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy that constitutes the narrative text. We keep sitting around twiddling our thumbs, waiting for somebody to say something about the psychogenesis of the text. Well, Bloom brings us closer, and he himself, when he speaks of the poet in the poet, is concerned to describe what he calls an "agon," a psychological agon or struggle between the belated poet and the precursor taking place at that level in the psyche; but even Bloom, of course, is talking about the relation of text to text. He is talking about relations which are arguably verbal. Verbal influence, by the way, he always professes contempt for. He calls it moldy fig philology, but I think that as you study the examples of literary influence in Bloom's text, Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading and so on, you will see that there is a kind of dependence on verbal echo and verbal continuity, and that his theory, the strong version of his theory, struggles against but, I think, nevertheless does link itself to. I want to move into a general exploration of the topic of influence by talking, in fact, about how unstable the relationship between an idea of influence which is, let's say, psychological or world-based and an idea of influence which is word-based can be. It's not as simple and straightforward a distinction as one might imagine. So we linger in these linguistic models and there's a long tradition in which the confusion between the psychic and the linguistic is manifest, and it has to do with the very traditional subject of imitation. Plato and Aristotle agree that art, poetry, is an imitation. It is, both of them say, an imitation of nature. Plato thinks it's done badly, Aristotle thinks it's done well, but both agree that poetry is an imitation of nature. Then as time passes, this idea of mimesis, the imitation of nature, gradually becomes transformed so that by the time you get to the Silver Age of Roman literature, a high-water mark of elegance in the Latin language, you have rhetorical theorists like Quintilian and Cicero and others talking not about mimesis but about-- in Latin, of course--imitatio, seemingly the same idea. They are still talking about imitation, but the strange thing that's happened is now they're not talking about the imitation of nature anymore. They're talking about the imitation of literary models: in other words, the imitation of language, the way in which we can establish canons by thinking about the relationship of particular poets and other writers with a tradition of literary expression from which they emerge. So this then, imitatio, becomes a language-based theory of influence arising seemingly spontaneously out of a nature-based theory of influence. Now take a look at the first passage on your sheet from Alexander's Pope's "Essay on Criticism." He's talking about Virgil here. Homer, the argument is, has to have imitated nature. After all, there were no literary models to imitate, so if Homer imitated anything it must have been nature. Well, fine. Homer imitated nature, but then along comes Virgil-- in this same period, by the way, when rhetorical theories were redefining imitation as the imitation of verbal models-- along comes Virgil and he says, "I'm going to write my own national epic and you know what, I'll just sit down and write it." But then he starts looking at Homer; this is all what Pope is thinking as he prepares to write the couplet that's on your sheet. Then he starts to write, but then he rereads Homer. At first he feels terrible because he realized that Homer has said it all. There are two poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. There's nothing left to say. Homer has covered the entire waterfront, and so Virgil is sort of stuck. What is he going to do? Well, what he can do, if he can't imitate nature anymore because Homer has done that, is he can imitate Homer. The result is that he comes to a sort of realization that Pope epitomizes in this couplet: But when t' examine ev'ry part he came [that is to say, every part of Homer's compositions, every part of his own composition as he undertook to write his own epic] Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. So here you have emerging the idea that to imitate nature and to imitate art-- to imitate the things of the world, the people of the world, and to imitate language-- is part and parcel of the same process. To do one you necessarily and perforce do the other. That's what I mean by saying that we're still struggling to get away from the logogenetic > model to the psychogenetic model. Even in the most traditional expressions of how influence works, like Pope's, we are still concerned to distinguish, and find it very difficult to distinguish, between nature and art. When Samuel Johnson, fifty years after Pope, is still saying, "Nothing can please many, or please long, but just representations of general nature," he is in this idea of representations and in the idea of general nature teetering between a sense that it's things in the world that art imitates and it is existing literary models that art imitates and from which art takes its cue. So there's a kind of collapse then in the idea of imitation. There's a kind of a collapse, a surprising collapse perhaps when you think about it, between the notion of the imitation of nature and the notion of the imitation of art. Now if we turn then to the two texts that you've read for today, both of which are theories of influence, you can see that T.S. Eliot, too, is a little bit unclear as to the relationship of these two sorts of imitation. For Eliot the individual talent that inserts itself into, that engages with, tradition has to cope with what Eliot calls "the mind of Europe," page 539, left-hand column. I'll read a fairly extensive passage because this is one of the most accessible summaries of what Eliot has to say: [The poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe-- the mind of his own country--a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind… Let me just stop there and say this seems as much unlike Bloom as it can possibly be because Bloom, the Romantic, is all about one's own private mind, the struggle of the individual mind to define itself over against all of those minds jostling for attention that precede it to over them to the point where they are, in effect, effaced, and the belated ego can finally establish itself as prior to all preceding egos. This sort of struggle seems--and I say "seems" because I'm going to be lingering over this for a while-- seems to be absent from Eliot. Eliot seems to be all about self-effacement, about the recognition that the mind of Europe is more important than one's own mind, and that if one is to contribute anything as an individual talent to tradition, that contribution has to be a matter of the most acutely sensitive awareness of everything, not that one is struggling to be but that one is not. It seems, in other words, like a very different perspective. To continue the passage: … [The mind of Europe is] a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route which does not superannuate either Shakespeare or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsman. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist any improvement. In other words, the relationship between tradition and the individual talent is a relationship of entering into a vast matrix of literary, philosophical, and other sorts of expression that changes and yet never really transforms itself and certainly can't be understood as a grand march or progress toward some great goal, because nothing is ever lost and nothing radically innovative can ever really be introduced. I hope you are thinking and reflecting on a passage of this kind about a good deal that we've passed through already: Gadamer's sense of tradition as something which depends absolutely on the awareness of continuity, on the willingness to meet the past halfway, to enter into a merger of horizons in which the past and the present can speak in an authentic way to each other; and that in other ways this idea, or possibly also the Russian formalist idea in its Darwinian sense, that the dominant and the recessive elements of any literary text are always present at any time. It's just that they tend perpetually in a kind of oscillation to be changing places with each other. So the whole gamut of literary possibility, of expressive possibility, is, according to theories of history of this kind, is always already there, and one's own entry into this vast sea of expressive possibility is always a subtle thing that certainly can't in any way be seen to showcase or to manifest any sort of original genius as the Romantic tradition might want to insist on it. So this is basically the perspective of Eliot and one from which certainly you know Bloom would obviously seem to be diverging. Now I want to argue that actually there is a tremendous amount of continuity between Eliot and Bloom, and that Bloom's > Anxiety of Influence--I've never discussed this with Harold, by the way. Those of you who may be taking his seminars, I leave it up to you whether you want to take this up with him. As I say, I leave that up to you, but I think a strong argument can be made, and I have made it in print so Harold has seen it, that Bloom misreads and is a strong misreader of T.S. Eliot: which is to say--such is the logic of strong misreading--that T.S. Eliot said everything Bloom has to say already. I do believe this, > despite this extraordinary appearance of total difference in perspective, the traditional versus the Romantic and so on. I don't want to go into detail in this argument for fear of being considered obsessive, but I'd like to make a few points about it in passing, because I think it's such a perfect exemplification of how The Anxiety of Influence works. Bloom has always denied the influence of "Tradition in the Individual Talent." He acknowledges influences, but they are Emerson, Nietzsche, the great Romantic poets, and so on. He has, as I say, vehemently denied the influence of Eliot, yet as one reads Eliot--and I'm going to spend some time with Eliot now-- it seems to me that at least in skeletal form, in suggestion, Bloom is all there already, which is, after all, all Bloom ever says about the relationship between a precursor and a belated writer: so it can't be surprising, can it? All right. Now first of all, it's very important to Bloom to show the way in which the new reconstitutes the old: that is to say, the appropriation of the precursor text, which is not a notional text although it-- and that's one of the things that's sort of counterintuitive about Bloom's writing in this period. He insists that there is a particular precursor text. The precursor text for "Tintern Abbey" is "Lycidas." Don't tell me about other > precursor texts. It's "Lycidas," and he shows how this is the case, but the relationship between the belated text and the precursor text is such that we can never read the precursor text the same way again. The strong misreading of the precursor text is so powerful, in other words, that it becomes our strong misreading. We just can't think about "Lycidas" in the same way on this view after we've read "Tintern Abbey." If this seems counterintuitive, just think about certain examples that might come to mind. The most obvious example is the famous text by Borges called "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." I imagine a number of you know that text, but what it consists in basically is-- it's a kind of an anecdote about a Frenchman writing, as I recall, in the end of the nineteenth century in Spanish a text, and his text is as it turns out verbatim, word for word, Cervantes' Don Quixote, only it's not Cervantes' Don Quixote; it's Pierre Menard's Don Quixote. Think how different it is. This is a Frenchman at the end of the nineteenth century writing in Spanish. That's pretty impressive, much more impressive than Cervantes merely writing in his own language, and it's a completely different historical perspective. Whereas Cervantes thinks he's being a little bit ironic about his own historical moment-- the death of chivalry and all that-- think about how ironic you can be about that historical moment writing several centuries later with everything that you know now. What a tour de force to be able to write Don Quixote at the end of the nineteenth century in another language, a whole new ball game! How can you ever read Cervantes' Don Quixote in the same way? It seems naïve, right? Now that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is actually to belittle Pierre Menard, but you can see this as a theory of strong misreading. Pierre Menard thinks he's doing something new, right? The fact is, he's not doing anything new at all. His belief that he's doing something new is precisely his misreading of the precursor text-- and by the way, you don't have to have read the precursor text-- but that misreading, after all, is something in its very power which, as it were, infiltrates our own understanding of the precursor text, making it impossible for us to read it the same way again. Think of Joyce's Ulysses. We all know that Ulysses, like Virgil's Aeneid, is based on The Odyssey and that it, as it were, recycles The Odyssey; but it seems to be looking at The Odyssey through the wrong end of a telescope. It's dragging all the sort of heroic dimension of the poem down into a kind of nitty-gritty account of everyday life in recent society. In other words, it implicitly, precisely in following The Odyssey debunks the heroic myth of The Odyssey. How can we read, in other words, The Odyssey in the same way again after we've read Ulysses? Now it has to be said, and Bloom would say this, Ulysses is not a strong misreading of The Odyssey because it's perfectly conscious of what it's doing. It knows exactly what it's doing with respect to the text of The Odyssey, so it's a deliberate misreading which has other virtues. It's not quite the same thing, but what it does have in common with Bloom's theory and what it has in common also with Eliot's idea about the relationship between the individual talent and tradition is that it reconstitutes tradition. It doesn't just provide something novel. It makes us see tradition itself in a different way. Turn to page 538, the right-hand column about halfway down: The existing monuments [says Eliot] form an ideal order among themselves which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered. We can't quite see it the same way again, so it's a dynamic, mutual relationship between tradition and the individual talent: the strong precursor and the belated poet, in each case, which is mutually transforming. The basis, the principle of transformation, is the belated poet's strong misreading of the precursor which simultaneously asserts the egoistic priority of the belated poet: I'm doing something new; I'm going where no one has ever gone before. I'm doing so so powerfully that it's a question of whether there actually was anybody before, on the one hand, and the strong precursor who turns out, as one reflects more and more and more about the relationship, to have said everything the belated poet says already, right? So simultaneously, Bloom's theory of literary history, his literary historiography, places a premium on innovation and on conservatism, or tradition, simultaneously. Unlike Gadamer, leaning toward the conservative or traditional, and Iser or the Russian formalists, who lean toward the innovative, the Bloomian idea simultaneously countenances the idea of tradition as something absolutely continuous and also of tradition as something which is constantly being remade or at least rethought. That, I have to tell you, is very similar to T.S. Eliot's position. So now again the famous aphorism of Eliot on page 539, the left-hand column at the bottom: Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know. Rather good, I think. The famous aphorism of T.S. Eliot can also be understood as something that Bloom, in his own way, might very well say. The past is what we know, but we're not aware of knowing it. In other words, I write the past when I write my belated poem, but I don't think I'm doing it. I think instead that I'm doing something new. In the first provisionary ratio, clinamen, I am swerving from the past: I swerve out and down, I find my own space like a Lucretian atom. If it weren't for swerving--and Lucretius says all the atoms would fall in the same place-- that wouldn't be good, so they all swerve so they can all fall in their own place. Well, that is the belated poet's sense of what he's doing in relation to the precursor. He's swerving out and down from the precursor poet, but of course he's not. > Again--and we'll come back to this--he's not. He's actually falling in the same place, but the strength of that swerve, the rhetorical gesture of the swerve, is so powerful that we do feel transported. Once again we feel both at once, the innovation and the necessary conservatism, or preservational aspect, of the new poet's composition. All right. So I think, as I say, that Eliot's aphorism, too, very much anticipates Bloom's view of the agonistic struggle among poets. Then finally Eliot's famous emphasis-- and of course, nothing could seem to be less gloomy than this-- Eliot's famous emphasis on the poet's impersonality, on the wish to escape personality: he says, in the right-hand column, page 541, end of section two, "But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things"-- in other words, to enter a world of art, in effect, to abandon the sense that what's important is my personal psychological agony; to enter, by contrast, the mind of Europe; to recognize the complete insignificance of any individual mind, certainly my own; and to immerse oneself as a poet, as an artist, and as a creator, if one can still retain this term, in that which is infinitely more vast than one is oneself. Well, that doesn't sound very Bloomian, but look on page 1160, the right-hand column, at Bloom's fifth revisionary ratio, askesis. > He's talking about what the later poet, the belated poet, does in order to find space for himself. What can I do in order to make myself different from other people? Well, you'd think the answer would be make yourself bigger than anybody. Wallace Stevens has a wonderful poem called "Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," and the rabbit swells up to become so big that it just kind of overwhelms everything. I always think of this as Bloom's belated poet, but if you have askesis as one of the authentic revisionary ratios, something very different is happening to this same end. About halfway through the definition, definition five--and by the way, the masculine pronoun is something that Harold has never apologized for. What he means is that a poet is gendered masculine but that, of course, any woman can be a poet. We'll come back to distinctions of that sort later. He does think of Emily Dickinson, for example, as a strong poet. Obviously, that's a controversial aspect of Bloom's work, but he uses the masculine prologue unapologetically. Of course, his theory is very much caught up in the idea of Oedipal conflict which, as Freud is always being criticized for, is, unless you project it into the realm of the symbolic as Lacan and feminist Lacanians do, undoubtedly a masculist idea. If the essential generational conflict of human beings is between father and son, well, obviously > problems can be seen to arise from that, and in Bloom's rhetoric, in his vocabulary, the masculist Oedipal conflict is still central. In any case, returning to this point about the effacement of the self, in the very act of trying to find a place for oneself as an innovator-- an effacement which, however, once again seems to me to catapult Bloom back into the position of Eliot that he is trying to misread strongly. He says, "[The poet] yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment." In other words, he curtails himself; he shrinks himself; he makes himself less than he might have been, of course, in order to be more than he has been. He yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment so as to separate himself from others including the precursor. So in askesis--and also in kenosis, by the way--there is a self-shrinking or self-effacement on the part of these particular moves of strong misreading with respect to the precursor. It's not, in other words, just a question of the rabbit as king of the ghosts. It's not a question of a massive ego swelling to the point where it fills all space. It is more complicated than that, and in being more complicated it is frankly more Eliot-like. All right. So turning then more directly to Bloom, his career begins--it has always involved a sense of struggle in the relationship among poets. In his earliest work--Shelley's Mythmaking, Blake's Apocalypse, and The Visionary Company-- the idea of struggle was embodied plainly as what he called Protestantism. In other words, he saw the tradition he was talking about arising in relation to the Reformation, that time when, as I said in my thumbnail history of hermeneutics, everybody suddenly realized he had his own Bible and his own relationship with God: in other words, that time when human individuality emerges, which is also, of course, called by many others the emergence of the bourgeoisie. In that moment, the idea of Protestantism-- purely in the sense, as a character in Durrell says, "that I protest"-- emerges so that each poet takes, in some sense, an adversary stance toward previous literary models. This is present in Bloom's work from the beginning of his career. The word "Protestant" gradually gives way to the word "revisionary," and then that's the word that he uses primarily in The Visionary Company, for example, and then finally becomes the notion of misreading. The protest of the belated figure is the protest which takes the form of transfiguring the precursor text in such a way that one can find oneself to be original. It is an Oedipal struggle. Now this idea of Oedipal struggle, which is largely unconscious, is not new to Bloom, just quickly to review the next three passages on your sheet. Longinus, the author whose actual identity we cannot quite determine but whose On the Sublime, an extraordinarily interesting text, is available to us to read--I've got two passages from him. The first is: As if instinctively [this is in the moment of the sublime] our soul is uplifted by the true sublime. [Fine. That's what you would expect anybody to say.] It takes a proud flight and is filled with joy and vaunting [and this is where the surprise comes] as though it had itself produced what it has heard. In other words, there's a kind of possession by the other that takes place which is simultaneously experienced psychologically as possession of the other, right? It is speaking through me. It's making me very excited like a little kid. They're watching TV, somebody hits a home run, and the little kid goes like this [gestures] and thinks he thought he hit the home run. He's completely into the fantasy of being that hero, right? It's the same thing with the response to something that we haven't said, such that in a certain moment we think we have said it. It's a mutual possession. It possesses us, causing the psychological reaction that we think of ourselves as possessing it. It seems to me that there is real insight in what Longinus is saying and that it has an important influence on Bloom's position. Another passage from Longinus--and by the way, I think what Longinus says here is absolutely true: Plato is constantly abusing Homer, and yet nothing can be easier than to show the ways in which the great Homeric actions and even tropes help shape Platonic thought. It's a fascinating topic and Longinus, it seems to me, again is exactly right about it: "There would not have been so fine a bloom of perfection on Plato's philosophical doctrines unless he had with all his heart and mind struggled with Homer for primacy." He even thinks in Bloomian terms of that of wanting to be first even though in some part of your mind you know you're second-- he even struggles for primacy, showing perhaps too much love of contention and breaking a lance with him, as it were, but deriving some profit from the contest nonetheless; for as he says, "This strife is good for mortals." Quickly, a more commonplace example taking from Sainte-Beuve, a famous essay of his called "What is a Classic?"-- which is all about influence. There's a tradition of essays called "What is a Classic?" Eliot wrote a great one in 1944, and these are very much a contribution to the history of the theory of influence. So Sainte-Beuve writes: Goethe spoke the truth when he remarked that Byron, great by the flow and source of poetry, feared that Shakespeare was more powerful than himself [it's true, Byron was always abusing Shakespeare] in the creation and realization of his characters. He would have liked to deny it. The elevation so free from [this is Goethe talking] egoism irritated him. He felt when near it that he could never display himself at ease. He never denied Pope because he did not fear him. He knew that Pope was [and you know how short Pope was] only a low wall by his side. So in other words, he chose as his literary model somebody he knew he was better than-- not true, by the way, but he thought he was better than Alexander Pope, and he perpetually denied a very, very powerful influence on his writing, quarreling constantly with Shakespeare and bardolatry and excessive love of Hamlet and all the rest of it. He's constantly sort of denying any influence or power over himself on the part of Shakespeare. He chooses, in other words, for his precursor a weak precursor instead of a strong precursor. All of this is a continuous theme in the psychodynamic of Bloom's theory as he elaborates it. So what complicates Bloom's argument, apart from the vocabulary and the philosophical range of thought, is what I began with: the traditional idea of influence as an art-nature problem, trying to figure out, in fact, whether the crisis of influence is the sense of one's orientation to nature, one's ability to imitate nature and have nature available to one, or whether it's word oriented, which it seems to be more in Bloom: the sense of one's relationship with text. But notice on page 1157 that Bloom really doesn't want to say it's just about text. He doesn't really want to say that it has exclusively to do with the strong precursor understood, as it were, as an author. There is in some sense a text of nature as well, so that Bloom says, bottom of 1157, right-hand column: … Freud's disciple, Otto Rank, show[s] a greater awareness of the artist's fight against art, and of the relation of this struggle to the artist's antithetical battle against nature. In other words, nature is death. Nature is that into which--should he not sustain himself in the triumph of his assertion of priority nature-- the author will fall back in the form of death. Wait until they try to transcribe that sentence. Okay. Well, but you > got what I mean. This is an interesting problem, and Bloom wants to insist that part of the struggle of the belated poet is a struggle for immortality. Part of what it means to come first and to know nothing ever having been there before you is also to suppose that you are going to be last, that you're going to be immortal, that you really do not belong in an unfolding, inexorable sequence of the sort that we call history; but that you are rather something, a force, a genius, or a power that transcends history. This entails as much the "lie against time," as Bloom calls it, holding off death as it does, insisting on there having been no beginning, no priority, and no genesis in what you do; you were there first. All right. To illustrate this very quickly, let's look at passages five and six on your sheet. Wordsworth, the particularly important strong misreader and belated poet with respect to Milton, in Bloom's view: Wordsworth writes in a kind of programmatic or promissory poem-- written actually in 1800 and not published until 1814 as part of the preface to a poem of his called "The Excursion"-- he wrote a prospectus to "The Recluse," that's what at one time "The Excursion" was supposed to be part of, and he says: "I am not interested in writing Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost for me is a thing of the past. It's just archaic. Who would care about the things Milton cares about: 'all strength, all terror, single or in bands that ever was put forth in personal form, Jehovah with his thunder and the choir of shouting angels and the imperial thrones, I pass them unalarmed.' Paradise Lost, that's just playing with toy soldiers. That's nothing compared with what I myself am going to do: 'not chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus nor aught of blinder vacancy scooped out by help of dreams can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our minds, into the mind of man, my haunt and the main region of my song.' I'm not talking about God. I'm not talking about heaven. I'm not talking about hell. I'm not talking about war in heaven. I'm not talking about anything mythological or archaically heroic. "I'm talking about this. I'm talking about the mind of man. I'm talking primarily about my mind, but my mind is your mind. Mind is universal, and in talking about mind I'm not falling back into the pit of nature. I'm keeping my focus not on the sky gods, not on the "transcendent, starry junk," as Wallace Stevens called it, of my precursors, all those people with their outworn superstitions. I'm not interested in any of that, but I'm not interested in any of this either. I'm not interested in nature. I'm not interested in that in which I would be buried if I reduced myself to that. I am interested in consciousness, the psyche. In other words, my focus is," Wordsworth says, "altogether psychological." All right. No interest in Paradise Lost. That's just archaic. Well, look at passage five: three statements by Satan which Bloom insists--it's not so much Milton, because Bloom follows Blake and Shelley in this. It's not so much Milton who is the strong precursor of Wordsworth. It's actually Satan, right? > It's Milton's Satan who says, "The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Okay. Gee whiz. > I guess Satan is writing the prospectus to "The Recluse," isn't he, because that's what Wordsworth is saying in the prospectus to "The Recluse." "I know no time," says Satan, "when I was not as now." That's what the belated poet always says, "I came first." Elsewhere in the poem Satan tells his troops, "You know what. God keeps saying he created you. Do you remember being created? I don't remember being created. I've always been there." Right? That is, in effect, what he says again, what he repeats in this passage, "Finally, myself am hell." Well, that's, of course, rather an uncomfortable thing to say, but at the same time it's the rabbit as king of the ghosts, isn't it? It is whatever you can throw at me, I'm it already. Right? Because "the main haunt and sole region of my song is the mind," is my own mind. All right. So Satan has already said in Paradise Lost everything Wordsworth can possibly say in the prospectus to "The Recluse." He has strongly misread Paradise Lost such that he thinks he's doing something completely new, while revealing precisely that the strong precursor poet has always already written what the successor poet can write. The tension, the dynamic in other words, between conservation and innovation is intact in all such moments, in all the moments, that involve the anxiety of influence. I'm sorry I have so little time for this. Give me a minute or two because we have to honor Tony the Tow Truck, and it's rather obvious that for Lacan, Tony the Tow Truck is a text in which Tony settles for the objet petit a, right: little Bumpy the Car, an imperfect being but a helpful one and a friend-- "that's what I call a friend"; whereas the objects of desire, Neato, Speedy--whoa, those are cars. The objects of desire are improper object choices on the face of it. That's what an American ego psychologist would say, but they are, in a more Bunuelesque way of putting it, obscure objects of desire as they motor on down the road which are simply unavailable to Tony as object relations at all. So Neato and Speedy are the big other--right?--and Bumpy is the object petit a. All right. Now it's just perfectly obvious that for Harold Bloom, Tony the Tow Truck is a strong misreading of The Little Engine that Could. It's perfectly clear because Bumpy is the hero of The Little Engine that Could. The misreading involves making Tony the hero who needs the help of Bumpy. In other words, Bumpy, in the folkloric sense of the story, becomes the helper and not the hero, but we can see, after all, that the essential narrative model-- the model of the small turning out through perseverance and energy to necessarily reinforce the strength of the strong-- is about the strong and the weak. Both The Little Engine that Could and Tony the Tow Truck are about the strong and the weak, that the strong must in some sense or another be supplemented or supplanted by the weak if the strong is fully to self-realize. We can't ever read Tony the Tow Truck, the character, Tony, quite the same way again after the appearance of Bumpy, and yet Bumpy is nothing other than the hero of The Little Engine that Could, a subject position that has been appropriated by Tony in this text. So the relationship is again an agonistic one involving the transposition of heroism from one character-focus to another while at the same time-- as anybody can recognize who has read both stories to their kids-- simply rewriting the story in a way that The Little Engine that Could completely anticipates. All right. So much then for that. We'll be returning to more Lacanian pastures on Tuesday when we study Deleuze and Guattari and Slavoj Žižek.

Literature_Lectures

Lecture_9_The_Priestly_Legacy_Cult_and_Sacrifice_Purity_and_Holiness_in_Leviticus_and_Numbers.txt

Professor Christine Hayes: Today we're going to be turning to Leviticus. And Leviticus is a primary document of the Priestly School. And we identify this work as Priestly because it deals with matters that were of special concern to and under the jurisdiction of priests: the sanctuary, its cultic rituals, the system of sacrifices, the distinction between the holy and the profane and the pure and the impure. So the Priestly materials are found as a block in Leviticus, a large part of Numbers, and then they're scattered throughout Genesis and Exodus. And because of these common themes, we say that they were produced by a Priestly School: we hypothesize a Priestly School. We don't quite clearly understand exactly what that means and who and exactly when. These materials emerged over a period of centuries; that's clear. They reached their final form in the exilic or post-exilic period. But they certainly often preserve older cultic traditions and priestly traditions as well. We can break the book of Leviticus down into the units that are listed on that side of the board. You have in chapters 1 through 7 the sacrificial system. Chapters 8 through 10 recount the installation of Aaron as high priest and the Aaronides then as the priestly clan within Israel. Chapters 11 through 15 cover the dietary system, the dietary laws as well as the ritual purity laws. Chapter 16 describes the procedure to be followed on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur. Chapters 17 through 26 then are a block of material that's referred to as the "Holiness code" because of its special emphasis on holiness. So most scholars think that that block of material comes from a different priestly school, and so we designate that H: holiness. The relative dates of P and H, P now meaning the non-H parts of the Priestly materials, they're much debated; but I think increasingly, the consensus is that H--the block of material in Leviticus 17 through 26 and then also its got passages scattered around other parts of the Bible--but the consensus increasingly is that H is later. It's a redactor or editor of the other priestly materials. So P is a difficult term of reference, because P can refer to the entirety of Priestly writings altogether. But when we think about H and talk about H then P in contrast to H means the Priestly writings that are not H: so maybe a small P and a capital P, I don't know. Now, the Priestly materials have for a long time been I think a devalued part of the Hebrew Bible. And scholarship of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century is generally characterized by a deep-seated bias that views impurity rules as primitive and irrational taboos, and sacrifice as controlled savagery that's empty of any spiritual meaning. Religion without such rites is evolutionarily superior or higher; more spiritually meaningful. And with those kinds of attitudes, it's not difficult to understand why scholarship on Leviticus and those parts of the Bible tend to be rather dismissive. In the later part of the twentieth century, the situation began to change. As anthropologists and ethnographers began to study the danger avoidance practices of many cultures, the taboos and rituals of many cultures, including modern Western culture, new avenues for understanding the danger avoidance practices of the Bible began to emerge. Anthropologist Mary Douglas changed forever the way scholars would approach the impurity rules of the Bible, because she insisted on their interpretation as symbols, symbols that conveyed something meaningful to those who followed them. Biblical scholars like Jacob Milgrom and more recently Jonathan Klawans, attuned to developments in the social sciences, have made very great advances in our understanding of Israelite purity practices. They've tended to view the elaborate and carefully constructed texts of P as part of a system whose meaning derives from the larger cultural matrix or grid in which those materials are embedded. How much the system laid down by P represents what ordinary Israelite Judeans thought and did; how much these rules were actually enacted and followed; how much they drew upon older random practices, brought them together, modified them, imposed some semblance of order upon them; how much the represent just he ideal construction or blueprint of an elite group: these are all unanswerable questions. The fact is, no one really knows. But we do know from living cultures that people do engage in all kinds of ritual and symbolic actions because of genuine beliefs about the importance of those actions, because those rituals and symbols are extraordinarily meaningful to them. And in any event, our primary concern is with the program of the texts as they stand before us: is there a symbolism operating here? What are the key ideas and the key themes of the Priestly material? How do these ideas or how does this material jive with other aspects of Israelite religion that we've talked about so far? What ultimately is the purpose toward which these materials are aiming? Well, like the rest of the ancient world, Israel had a cultic system, and that cultic system featured a sanctuary: a sacred space with holy objects; sacred objects, where priests performed a variety of ritual acts. So Israelite-Judean religion on the ground shared many cultic forms and practices and rituals with Canaanite and Ancient Near Eastern culture generally. Sanctuaries in the ancient world were understood to be the dwelling place of the deity. Sacrifices were offered to the deity in his or her sanctuary. P describes a portable sanctuary, a mishkan, that's used in the wilderness period. Now, if you look on your handout, there's a reconstruction of this tent-like sanctuary at the top as well as a schematization of its contents below. So woven curtains hung from wooden frames that could easily be assembled and disassembled. And these curtains surround the sacred precincts. You see that in the top picture. And within those precincts, within that enclosure, there's a large, open courtyard. That was accessible to all Israelites. The main sacrificial altar with a large ramp stood in that courtyard as well as a basin that was there for ablutions. And then halfway across the courtyard, there was a screen that marked the entrance to another little enclosure, which is the shrine proper, the sanctuary proper; and only priests have access to that area. The shrine or sanctuary housed an incense altar. And then on one side a seven-branched lampstand or menorah. And on the other, a table, which held loaves of bread that were changed on a weekly basis. The backmost square-shaped chamber of that inner shrine was the inner sanctum or the holy of holies. And that was accessible only to the high priest and only on the Day of Atonement following a series of heightened purity observances. Inside that holy of holies was the ark. It was about four feet by two-and-a-half feet. It was a wooden ark covered in gold. On top was a kind of covering. It's referred to as a kapporeth: we don't really know what this word means, it's traditionally translated "mercy seat," I think that's how the JPS might translate it. But it's some kind of gold cover and then there were two cherubim, these enormous winged lions that flanked the ark. Likely they were connected to that mercy seat cover. If so, then what they were was a throne. And we have in Ancient Near Eastern iconography thrones of this type. We have pictures of gods and kings seated on these seats, the sides of which are these giant winged cherubim, and then their feet rest on a footstool. Likewise, in some biblical verses, God or Yahweh is described as enthroned upon the cherubim. The ark then is said to serve as his footstool. So that's sort of the box that he would have rested his feet on. The ark itself contained the tablets of the covenant. And so it was a testament to the covenant between God and Israel. Interestingly, unlike most ancient sanctuaries, the Israelite sanctuary did not contain a statue of the deity. And that's I think evidence of the very strong aniconic tendency of Israelite religion. Nevertheless, God was believed to be present in the sanctuary. Often in the form of a cloud that will fill, that will descend to fill the tabernacle, particularly as it's assembled in a new encampment, and then God will descend down and the cloud will fill the tabernacle. So it is God's presence there that sanctifies, which simply means "makes holy, makes sacred," to sanctify, to make holy, the tabernacle. And to understand this, we need to understand the Priestly conception of holiness. Now, the Hebrew word "holy" has a root meaning of separate. Separate. That which is holy is separate. It's withdrawn from common, everyday use. In the Priestly view, only God is intrinsically holy; intrinsically holy. God can impart holiness to, he can sanctify, persons and places and things when they're brought into a specific kind of relationship with him, a relationship that's best described as a relationship of ownership. What is holy is what is in God's realm, something that's separated to him. That which is outside God's realm is common. The Hebrew word for "common" is sometimes translated by the English word "profane." That has a negative connotation in English, but in fact it really doesn't bear that negative connotation. Profane simply means not holy; not sacred. We use it differently now. But the fact is that the common or profane state is the natural default state of most objects and things. This table is just profane. It's common. It's available for everyday use. It's not separated or marked off for special kind of treatment because it's holy. For a common object to become holy, you need a special act of dedication to God, an act of sanctification to transfer the thing to God or God's realm or God's service. So holiness entails necessarily separation in both its positive and negative aspects. It entails separation of an object to that which sanctifies it, which is God; and it involves separation from, in the form of safeguards against, anything that would threaten to remove its sanctity. So separation from that which threatens its sanctity. Holy things are holy because they are removed from the realm of the common by means of rules or safeguards that demarcate them as different and separate and determine that we use them differently. The preservation of holy status therefore depends on those rules and safeguards. Their observance protects the holy object from profanation, from being profaned, reverting from holy status back to common status. Now, it's evident from the schematic representation or the way I've described the sanctuary that holiness increases as you move deeper into the sanctuary. And the principle here that holiness increases as proximity to God increases. The principle is graphically demonstrated in spatial terms. So in the biblical view, the area or the land outside the Israelite camp is just common, profane land. The Israelite camp bears a certain degree of holiness. Then as you move in, the outer courtyard, the outer enclosure of the sanctuary, bears a slightly higher degree of holiness. It's accessible to Israelites who are pure. The sanctuary proper, which is in closer proximity to God, bears a still higher degree of holiness: it's accessible only to the priests, who are said to be the holy ones within Israel. And then the inner shrine is the holiest area: it's accessible only to the holiest member of the nation, the high priest. You have similar concentric circles of holiness characterizing the priestly conception of time. There are ordinary, common, profane days, work days. Then there are certain holy days: for example, the New Year or the Passover holidays--that's where our word "holiday" comes from, holy day--and they are separated and demarcated from common time by special rules that mark them as different. Holier than these days is the Sabbath, which is demarcated by even further rules and observances. And the holiest day is Yom Kippur, known as the Sabbath of Sabbaths. This day is separated from all other days by additional rules and observances in keeping with its profound holiness. The holiness of persons, of objects, of time and of space all converge on Yom Kippur, because it's only on this most holy day that the most holy person, high priest, enters the most holy of holies, the innermost shrine, and performs a ritual upon the most holy of objects, the mercy seat and ark itself once a year. Well, now we need to consider the deep connection that exists between holiness and purity. Because the two are not identical despite massive amounts of scholarship that confuses this issue: thinks holy means pure, thinks common means impure, and it just doesn't: these are different binary oppositions. The two are not identical. To be holy means to belong to or to be in the realm of God. Things can't become holy and can't come into contact with the holy or the sacred if they are not first pure. Purity, which is the absence of impurity, is a prerequisite for access to the holy or for holy status. To be in a state of purity simply means that one is qualified to contact the sacred: to enter the sacred precincts, to handle sacred objects, and so on. To be in a state of impurity simply means that one is not qualified to contact the sacred. So if you're impure at home and just minding your own business, it's no big deal. It's only a problem if you decide you want to go to the sanctuary. So purity and impurity are states of qualification or disqualification for contact with sancta. The holy is by definition pure: by definition. Only that which is free of impurity can contact the holy. If an impure object--and you will see here these overlapping pairs, which were also in your handout--if you can imagine the lower pair sort of being plunked down on top of this pair, that will give you an idea of what we're trying to convey with this image. Okay? Things are either holy or common. But if they're holy, they must be pure. Common objects can be pure or impure; it just depends whether or not they've been in contact with a source of impurity or not. Alright? If--but notice that the holy and the impure are never conjoined--if an impure object comes in contact with a holy object, then the holy object is immediately defiled; it's immediately rendered impure. The word "defiled" means to take on some form of ritual impurity. And it loses its holy status automatically. So it becomes both impure and profane. To be restored, then, you're going to have to have two things happening. First of all, it's got to be purified--you've got to get rid of the ritual impurity, so there'll have to be some ritual procedure that purges the impurity. So once you've done that, you've made it pure; but it's still common, profane. So it has to, if it's to be made holy again, it has to be rededicated or given over to God again, re-sanctified: maybe a little holy anointing oil poured on it, that's one means of sanctification; simply handing it over to God, elevating it towards God is another way of re-sanctifying something. But there has to be two steps: a purification and then a sanctification to make it holy again. Increased access to the holy requires increased, an increased degree of purity. That's the connection between holiness and purity. So the purity that's required of a priest, who has access to the sanctuary proper, is higher than that of an Israelite, who has access to the outer courtyard only. The purity required of the high priest is even greater. So to be pure, one must separate ones self from sources of impurity. What are these sources of impurity? And I hope you've had a chance to look at the reading material, because I'm going to go through this relatively quickly. Jonathan Klawans has been the most vocal proponent of the claim that biblical texts speak of two distinct types of impurity: ritual impurity and moral impurity, which I have up here . You've read the short article he has in the Jewish Study Bible, but he's also written about this at great length in other places. And according to Klawans and others, ritual impurity arises from physical substances and states which are not in themselves sinful. There's no intimate connection with sin when we're talking about ritual impurity. In fact, a lot of ritual impurity is unavoidable and sometimes even obligatory, right? Sexual contact makes one ritually impure, and yet God commands humans to be fruitful and multiply. Burying the dead makes one ritually impure, but God commands proper care of the dead. So there's nothing inherently sinful about contracting ritual impurity. Ritual impurity, which is generally permitted, is distinguished by the characteristics I've quickly jotted down here. It's contagious, that is, it's transferred to other persons or objects, depending on how receptive they are--perhaps by physical touch, perhaps in the case of severe impurity by sharing an enclosed space, by being together under an overhanging roof, tent. Ritual impurity is also impermanent. It can be removed or reduced through rituals of ablutions or just the passage of time or other sorts of ritual observances. Ritual impurity also defiles or renders impure sancta, and so it has to be kept separate from sancta. In very severe cases, it can even defile some common objects, and in those cases, the source of impurity might have to be isolated or excluded if necessary. Now, the concept of ritual impurity was a central and integral feature of most, if not all, ancient religions. And the biblical laws of purity and impurity strongly resemble those of other Ancient Near Eastern cultures: Egyptian, Mesopotamian, even Hittite culture. And certainly, there are Ancient Near Eastern and Canaanite roots for Israelite purity practices. But the system of ritual purity and impurity that is crafted in the Priestly writings of the Hebrew Bible represents an attempt to monotheize, to monotheize Israelite purity practices and to create a system that differentiated Israel from her close neighbors. So, for example, impurity was often connected with belief in evil spirits and impure demons. It's quite possible that Israel's purification rituals may have originated and even long endured as rituals of exorcism that expelled a demon who was believed to be causing the affliction in question. That may be their origin and source; but in the Priestly writings, impurity is generally divorced from any association with evil spirits. Some scholars theorize that the ritual purity system reflects an original concern with health or hygiene. But this isn't very convincing. Only one set of diseases is said to generate ritual impurity, and many substances that are widely considered unhygienic by most cultures--for example, human and animal excrement--these are not sources of ritual impurity to Israel's priests. So Klawans is among those who insist that any effort to understand the purpose and the meaning of Israelite purity practices as schematized by the monotheizing Priestly writers in Leviticus 12 through 16--and again whether actual Israelite Judeans did this or understood things this way, we'll never know--but to understand the schematization of, the monotheizing schematization of Israel's purity practices, we would do better to ignore questions of origins and to attend to the larger symbolism of impurity and holiness in these writings: in particular, we need to try to understand the antithetical relationship between impurity and holiness. The two are opposites. They are opposed and antagonistic towards one another. So Klawans points out, as you know, that there are three main sources of impurity in P. First of all, corpses and certain carcasses are a source of ritual impurity: sara'at, which is this--we translate it "scale disease," it's been called leprosy. It's definitely not leprosy. People who know such things have read the details in the biblical texts and it's not what is truly known as leprosy. But it's some sort of skin disease, flaking skin disease or other sorts of boils and skin states that seem to be associated, at least in the Israelite mind, with decomposition and death. We have a couple of passages, one in the book of Numbers, one in the book of Job, which describe this condition in a way that identifies it with death. An aborted fetus is often described as looking like it has this condition, for example--not often, it happens once in the book of Job. But the point is there's a connection between this condition, this skin condition, and its decomposition and death. The third source of ritual impurity would be genital discharges, both normal and diseased. So Klawans notes in the article you read that the physical substances and states that are labeled impure and are therefore designated as antithetical to the realm of holiness are states that are associated with death on the one hand, and procreation on the other. Why should this be? The Priestly conception of god, you will recall, is of an immortal and asexual being. Think back to the first creation story, which is the Priestly creation story. To enter the realm of the holy, in which there is neither death nor procreation, requires a separation from death and procreation. It is association with death and sexuality that renders one impure and disqualifies one from entering the holy sanctuary. That is not to say that one shouldn't deal with death or sexuality in the ordinary course of life. On the contrary, God explicitly commands humans to be fruitful and multiply, and he does that in the P-source, right? In Genesis 1. He commands proper care of the dead, and he also does that in the P-source. It simply means that one cannot enter the holy sanctuary, God's realm, when impure through contact with death or sexuality. So according to Klawans, ritual purification involved separation from those aspects of humanity, death and sex, that are least God-like. To enter God's realm requires imitation of God or imitatio dei, right, an idea that I put up here, imitatio dei: imitation of god. And Klawans further argues that the concept of imitatio dei also explains the practice of sacrifice which, on the face of it, contradicts the idea that you must avoid death in connection with the holy, right? Because sacrifice entails killing right in the sanctuary, killing of animals right in the sanctuary. So Klawans argues, and I quote, that "sacrifice involves in part the controlled exercise of complete power over an animal's life and death." Which is, he says "…precisely one of the powers that Israel's God exercises over human beings. As God is to humanity, humans in imitation of God are towards their domesticated animals." So the process of sacrifice, I won't go into his argument here, but Klawans develops a strong argument that the process of sacrifice can be understood itself as an act of imitatio dei, because sacrifice involves a variety of behaviors in the biblical text that are analogous to behaviors attributed elsewhere in the biblical texts to God: the care and feeding and raising of domestic animals, the selection of one that is deemed perfect, control over its life and death and so on. And these are all spoken of in terms that are analogous to terms used to describe God as the shepherd of his flock of Israel and in control of life and death and so on. So Klawans argues that the process of sacrifice, which grants the offerer complete control over life and death, is a kind of imitatio dei. But Klawans also asserts, and I quote, that "Imitatio dei does not exhaustively explain sacrifice in ancient Israel," and in fact, we should be surprised if any one single theory would indeed explain sacrifice. So he just says that there are really two organizing principles or overriding concerns in the Priestly traditions and the Priestly materials regarding sacrifice. The first, as we've seen, is imitatio dei. But the second is a desire to attract and maintain the divine presence, the continued presence of God in the sanctuary. The majority of the sacrifices that are described in the opening chapters of Leviticus, in Leviticus 1 through 7, are voluntary sacrifices. These are sacrifices that are offered as gifts or in times of celebration. I put a little list of them up here, but the first three are the ones that will concern us now. We have first of all, the whole offering or "burnt offering," it's sometimes called. This is when an animal is entirely burned to create, as the text says, a pleasant smelling odor or pleasant smelling smoke that ascends to God. So according to P, the priests are to offer two such burnt offerings with pleasing-smelling odors to the Lord every day: one in the morning and one in the evening on a regular basis from the community. The second kind of offering that's described is the grain offering. This is a gift of flour and oil and incense, which is burned after a portion is removed for the priests as dues to the priests, the rest is burned on the altar again with a sweet smell from the incense. Third, we have a set of offerings known as well-being offerings, "peace offerings" it's sometimes translated. These offerings are generally consumed by the offerer and his family, very often in a festive situation, as a big feast, after certain portions are donated to the priests, again. Well-being offerings are of three main types. You have the thanksgiving offering. You have a freewill offering--just because someone wants to do this, a freewill offering. And you have a vow offering that would be offered on the successful completion of a vow, for example. And these sacrifices are all entirely optional. They were offered in celebration. They were offered in thanksgiving or upon the successful completion of a vow. In other words, the sacrificial cult was primarily a vehicle for worshipers' expression of a wide range of emotions: joy over the birth of a child, thankfulness for a good harvest and so on. Now, texts from Ancient Near Eastern cultures suggest that a central function of the rituals that were performed in sanctuaries was to secure the perpetual aid and blessing of a well-disposed deity. And in important ways, the Israelite cult is strikingly similar, particularly in the sacrifices I've just described. The Israelites certainly hoped to secure the perpetual aid and blessing and protection of a well-disposed deity. Blessing and benefaction flow from God's presence in the midst of the community in his sanctuary: when he is there, there is blessing. So Klawans follows earlier scholars in suggesting that the rituals and sacrifices performed in this sanctuary were designed to ensure God's continued residence within and blessing of the community. In particular, the daily burnt offerings sacrificed by the priests twice each day, and emitting this pleasing odor: these were an effort to attract the deity. Likewise, the gifts--the other foods and pleasing odors of the sacrifices brought by individual worshipers--attracted and maintained the continued presence of God in the sanctuary. So this is the second overriding concern or organizing principle of the sacrifice: not simply that there should be imitatio dei within God's realm, but also that the activities there should attract and maintain the presence of the deity for the well-being of the community. But just as God is attracted by certain kinds of behaviors, so he is repelled by others. And in the Priestly system, grave sins generate an impurity, now a moral impurity, so now we're coming to the second kind of impurity, moral impurity that repels the divine presence. Okay? So moral impurity is the second kind of impurity that's described by Klawans and others. In contrast to ritual impurity, moral impurity does arise from the commission of sins. Ritual impurity does not: there's nothing that's prohibitive about-- you're never told not to become ritually impure, okay? There's nothing sinful about it, inherently. But moral impurity arises specifically from the commission of certain heinous sins specifically. The three that I've listed here are the biggies: idolatry, homicide and sexual transgressions. These are spelled out in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20, those two chapters. Besides defiling the sinner, moral impurity symbolically defiles various sancta, especially the sanctuary, but also God's name and also the Holy Land itself. Moral impurity differs from ritual impurity not simply because of its origin in sin, but also in the fact that it's not contagious, alright? You don't contract impurity by touching a murderer, the way that you contract ritual impurity by touching somebody with gonorrhea. Also, moral impurity is not removed or reducible through rituals, through washings and launderings, ritual ablutions and the like. That does not touch moral impurity in a person. Moral purity of persons can be achieved only by punishment for heinous sins: for example, the punishment of chirate, or cutting off, is a divine punishment of being extirpated from the House of Israel; death, alright, that's one way to be rid of moral impurity. Also it can be achieved by simply avoiding or abstaining from defiling, immoral acts in the first place: that's another way to achieve moral purity. Also, if you atone for unwitting sins that you perhaps later realize and regret; acknowledge and confess, then that can also have a reduced moral impurity. Very severe moral impurity defiles the innermost areas of the sanctuary as well as the land. Now, the sanctuary can be purified of moral impurity, and I'll come back and talk about that in a second; but the land really cannot. Land that is repeatedly defiled, or the holy land of God that is repeatedly defiled by sexual transgressions, for example, cannot be purified. Eventually it will simply "vomit out," the biblical text says, it will simply vomit out those who dwell on it. This is a reference to exile. This is consistent with the representation of the expulsion of the Canaanites from God's land. Remember when God said, "The sin of the Amorites is not yet complete, when they have sinned so much and to such a degree, they will be vomited out and then your tenancy can begin"? The land will purge itself of the impurity by vomiting them out. And this is consistent then with the repeated warnings in Leviticus to the Israelites not to engage in similar abominable and sinful practices--the sexual transgressions, the bloodshed, the idolatry--because they too will pollute the land until it vomits them out. They will be expelled. The land is also defiled by illicit homicide. There is legal homicide, of course, judicial death and so on in the Bible, but illicit homicide, whether intentional or unintentional, murder or accidental homicide. The manslayer bears blood guilt, what is referred to as "blood guilt." That's a kind of moral impurity, and his life is forfeit because of that. In cases of deliberate murder, blood guilt and impurity are removed only by the death of the murderer himself: only blood atones for blood. In cases of accidental homicide, the perpetrator can take refuge in one of five cities that are designated for this purpose: the five cities of refuge. They can live there until the death of the high priest, and the death of the high priest symbolically serves to purge or remove the blood guilt or impurity of the accidental homicide. Idolatry also defiles the land. Offenders are subject to stoning and the divine penalty of chirate, of cutting off. The Bible repeatedly warns that idols and their cultic appurtenances must be completely destroyed from the Holy Land, right? The Israelites have to eradicate that, they're polluting the land. Now, in contrast to the land, God's sanctuary can be purified for moral impurity by means of a special sacrifice. And this is the fourth sacrifice listed here, the hatta't, which is the purification sacrifice. It's often erroneously translated as a "sin offering." It's better translated as a purification offering. How does it operate? The blood of the animal, the blood of the sacrifice is the key to the whole ritual. Remember that impurity and sin are often associated with death. Holiness, that which is holy, is often associated with life. And if the two are antithetical then it makes sense. If impurity is associated with death, it makes sense that its antithesis, holiness, would be associated with life. According to the Priestly source, blood, the blood that courses through one's veins, represents the life force. Remember in the Noahide covenant, in Genesis 9, which is a Priestly passage, the Priestly blood prohibition: You may not spill human blood. And you may not eat animal flesh that has the lifeblood in it because the blood is the life and that belongs to God, that's holy, right? So the life force is holy and the life force is in the blood. Leviticus 17:11 says this; it repeats the blood prohibition, and then it offers a rationale. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have assigned it to you for making expiation for your lives upon the altar." I've assigned it to you to use in sacrificial practices. It is the blood as life that effects expiation, purging and atonement. So the Priestly texts couldn't be clearer: blood represents life. The blood of sacrificial animals is assigned by God as a detergent, if you will, to cleanse the sanctuary of the impurities that are caused by the sinful deeds of the Israelites. Sacrifices that purge the sanctuary of ritual impurity, primarily the hatta't, always involve the manipulation of the animal's blood, daubing it on the altar and on Yom Kippur, actually entering the innermost shrine and sprinkling it on the throne of God and the footstool, the ark itself. It symbolizes the victory of the forces of life, oath and holiness over death and impurity. Other purifactory rights that are listed in the Bible will sometimes involve the use of reddish substances as a kind of surrogate of blood. It's a widely--it is widely and mistakenly thought that the purification offering purifies the sinner or the impurity bearer or the offerer. This can't be true. The hatta't, the purification offering, doesn't rid a ritually impure person of their ritual impurity. You can't even offer a sacrifice unless you're already ritually pure, because you couldn't get into the sanctuary to offer your sacrifice if you weren't ritually pure. You can't approach to offer a sacrifice if you're not in a state of ritual purity already. So purification offerings are brought after the genital discharge has healed and passed; after the scale disease has healed and passed; after the appropriate ablutions have been observed and the person is essentially pure. But there's one more step they have to take before they're integrated back into the community. The hatta't also does not rid a sinner of their moral impurity, because the offering is brought after the sinner has confessed, after the sinner has repented. The purification offering acts on the sanctuary, not on the offerer. It purges the sanctuary of the defilement that is symbolically--it has symbolically suffered from the offerer's state of ritual impurity or sinfulness. Once the sanctuary is purged, the offerer has settled his debt, he's repaired the damage he caused. He's fully atoned, "at one" again with God. And God is no longer repelled by the impurity that marred his sanctuary. The defiling effect of lesser transgressions is calibrated to the sinner's intentionality and the presence or absence of repentance. So inadvertent sins can be purged, the sanctuary defilement that they cause can be purged by bringing a purification sacrifice. What about deliberate sins? As long as there is repentance, the biblical text says, then they are converted into inadvertent sins, and they also can be purged, or the impurity they cause can be purged with a purification sacrifice. But brazen, unrepentant sins, unrepented sins, or unintentional sins that are never realized…these stand unremedied, and they defile the sanctuary. So for this reason, the sanctuary has to be regularly purged of the accumulated defilements accruing to it as a result of such sins. Leviticus 16 describes the annual ritual which is carried out on the day of atonement or day of purgation, it can be called, Yom Kippur, when a hatta't sacrifice, a purification sacrifice is brought on behalf of the community to purify the sanctuary of the impurities that have been caused by Israel's sin. And the high priest loads all of the sins and impurities of the Israelites on the head of a goat, which then carries them off into the wilderness away from the sanctuary. Purification of the sanctuary was believed to be critical to the health and the well-being of the community. If the sanctuary is not purged of impurity, it can become polluted to the point when God is driven out entirely. Jacob Milgrom has argued that there's a kind of Archimedean principle at work here: every sin creates an impurity that encroaches upon the realm of holiness and displaces a certain amount of holiness. And eventually, God will be completely displaced and the community will be left in a godless state, without blessing or protection. So Milgrom sees the symbolic function of the purity system this way: if the sanctuary symbolizes the presence of God, and if impurity represents the wrongdoing of persons, then by saying that impurity is anathema to God and pollutes his temple, the priests are able to graphically convey the idea that sin forces God out of his sanctuary and out of the community. Jacob Milgrom sees a moral message at the base of this complex, symbolic picture. And that is that humans and humans alone are responsible for the rein of wickedness and death or the rein of righteousness and life. Human actions determine the degree to which God can dwell on earth among his people. So the goal or the objective of the Priestly construction or representation of Israel's impurity laws was, in Milgrom's view, to sever impurity from the demonic and to reinterpret it as a symbolic system reminding Israel of the divine imperative to reject sin, to behave in ways that attract the presence of God and do not repel him. You also read an article by Milgrom where Milgrom talks about Priestly cultic imagery serving as a kind of theodicy. A theodicy of course is a response to the problem of evil. How can an all-powerful, good God allow so much evil to exist and even go unpunished? And according to Milgrom, this is the priestly answer: every sin pollutes the sanctuary. It may not mark the sinner, but it does mark the sanctuary. It scars the face of the sanctuary. You may think you've gotten away with something, but every act of social exploitation, every act of moral corruption, pollutes the sanctuary more and more until such time as God is driven out entirely and human society is devoured by its own viciousness and death-dealing. So again, the ethical message here is that humans are in control of their destiny and the action of every individual affects and influences the fate of society. This is really the Priestly version of an old biblical doctrine, a doctrine of collective responsibility. Sin affects…individual sin affects the entire fabric of society. There's no such thing as an isolated evil; our deeds affect one another. And when evildoers are finally punished, they bring down others with them. Those others, however, aren't so blameless, Milgrom says, because they allowed the wicked to flourish and contribute to the pollution of the sanctuary, the corruption of society. So P's cultic imagery is informed, according to Milgrom, by the same communal ethic that we will see running through the Bible, much of the Bible, until a later period. It's simply conveying that ethic in its own modality through the symbolism of the sanctuary and the cult. The 11th chapter of Leviticus deals with the dietary laws. We don't have time to go into them at any great length. I will say that Milgrom has also argued that the dietary laws of Leviticus are similarly part of a symbol system that emphasizes life over death. This is the following evidence that he cites; the mainstays of the dietary laws are these: first, the prohibition against eating animal blood from Genesis 9, which symbolizes the life. We also, in Leviticus 11, meat dietary laws that are governed by criteria such as cud chewing and having a split hoof; you can only eat animals that chew the cud and have a split hoof. And those criteria seem arbitrary and meaningless in and of themselves, and he says they are. But look at their practical effect: that limits the number of animals that one can eat to a mere handful out of the hundreds upon hundreds of creatures on the earth, that basically leaves you with--my animal husbandry is not good here--but it leaves you with the bovine and the ovine classes--I guess ovine are goats and some such--so it leaves you basically with goats and sheep and cattle. Some have hypothesized that whatever the origin of various food taboos in Israel, the Priestly texts have tried to create a dietary discipline that drives home the point that all life shared also by animals is inviolable, except in the case of meat, which has been conceded by God, and provided that the animals are slaughtered properly, painlessly, and that their blood, which is symbolic of the life, is not appropriated but returned to God, its sacred source. So perhaps as it stands, the system of dietary laws does in fact emphasize reverence for life. But they also serve another very important function, and that was the formation and maintenance of a differentiated ethnic identity or in Priestly parlance, the formation and maintenance of a holy peoples separated out from other nations by rules that mark her as God's people. It's surely significant that the dietary laws are followed by a powerful exhortation to be holy in imitation of God, Leviticus 11:43-45. So we've just had the prohibition of not eating certain kinds of small animals, designated as anything that swarms. And the text says, You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through anything that swarms; you shall not make yourselves unclean therewith and thus become unclean. For I the Lord am your God: you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves unclean through any swarming thing that moves upon the earth. For I the Lord am He who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy. Look at how much this is emphasized. The dietary laws are presented by the priests not as a hygienic regimen--who knows if that's how they started--not as a sensible way to avoid various diseases that are caused by the lack of refrigeration in the desert. Whatever the actual origin of these various dietary taboos, they are here embedded in a larger ideological framework concerning the need for the Israelites to separate themselves and to be holy like their god. The dietary laws are connected then with this theme of imitatio dei, of imitation of God. As God is holy, separate and distinct, so you shall be holy. I just want to take two last minutes to quickly point to this theme of holiness that continues in the section referred to as the Holiness Code. This theme, and the exhortation, "you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy," they find their fullest expression in the block of text; Leviticus 17 through 26 that's referred to as the Holiness Code. There's an important difference between Leviticus 1 through 16 and the Holiness Code. According to Leviticus 1 through 16, Israel's priests are designated as holy: a holy class within Israel, singled out, dedicated to the service of God and demarcated by rules that apply only to them. Israelites may aspire to holiness, but it's not assumed. However, in the Holiness Code, we have texts that come closer to the idea that Israel itself is holy by virtue of the fact that God has set Israel apart from the nations to himself, to belong to him, just as he set apart the seventh day to himself to belong with him. Holy things only exist because of safeguards, rules that keep them separate, that demarcate them. And these safeguards and rules are naturally addressed to human beings. They are the ones charged with the task of preserving the holy in its residence on earth. So although holiness derives from god, humans have a crucial role to play in sanctification, in sanctifying the world. That's illustrated in the case of the Sabbath. God sanctified the Sabbath at creation; he demarcated it as holy. But Israel is the one to affirm its holiness by observing the rules that make it different, that mark it off as holy. So Israel doesn't just in fact affirm the holy status of the Sabbath, they actualize the holy status of the Sabbath. If Israel doesn't observe the prohibitions that distinguish the Sabbath as sacred, it's automatically desecrated. "You shall keep the Sabbath, for it is holy for you. He who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does work on it, that person is cut off from among his kin." You automatically, it is automatically desecrated and profaned if you don't observe its rules. So there are two components integral and inseparable in the concept of holiness: initial assignment of holy status by God and establishment of rules to preserve that holy status, and secondly, actualization of that holiness by humans through the observance of the commandments and rules that mark that thing off as holy. That's going to lead us very nicely into an understanding of the laws that mark off Israel's status and keep Israel distinct among the nations, which we'll be looking at on Wednesday. So please take a look at the materials that were sent out: the Ancient Near Eastern collection and some of the questions to guide you through this material.

Literature_Lectures

8_Semiotics_and_Structuralism.txt

Prof: So I'm going to be pointing to the board, at least in theory. I suppose I expect to be pointing to the board a little bit more today than ordinarily. The usual function of my [chalk] equivalent of Power Point isn't quite the same today because I'm taking an interest in some of these diagrammatic matters as well and, as I say, I will be pointing to them. All right. So to begin I'm actually going to postpone something that you're probably already wondering about, although it will come into this lecture on a couple of occasions-- that is to say, the full relationship in terms of the influence of both movements-- between the Russian formalists and Saussure's notion of semiology and semiotics-- until next week when we discuss Roman Jakobson's essay, "Linguistics and Poetics," where I think the relationship between the two movements in which he himself was involved will become clearer and will come into focus more naturally than if I tried to outline what the connection between the two movements is now. So that is an aspect of our sequence of lectures, beginning with the last one, that will be postponed until next week. Now semiotics is not in itself a literary theory. As we'll learn from Jakobson next week, literature can be understood--or what he calls the study of literature, "poetics"-- can be understood as a subfield of semiotics, but semiotics is not in itself a literary theory. In other words, perhaps to your frustration, what you read today has nothing at all, in and of itself, to tell you about literature. This isn't the last time this will happen during the course of the syllabus, but then of course, our job is to bring out the implications for literature of texts that we read that don't have any direct bearing on literary study. The important thing about Saussure and the discipline of semiotics is the incredible influence that it has had on virtually every form of subsequent literary theory. That's what we need to keep in mind. Semiotics evolves into what is called "structuralism," which we'll be considering next week. That in turn, as it were, bequeaths its terminology and its set of issues and frameworks for thinking to deconstruction, to Lacanian psychoanalysis, to French Marxism, and to binary theories of race, colonization and gender-- in other words, to a great deal that we will be studying subsequently on this syllabus. So while again, what we read for today is not in itself literary theory, it is nevertheless crucially formative for a great many of the developments in literary theory that we'll be studying. Now as an anecdotal or conjectural aside-- I've always found this so fascinating I can never resist talking about it-- there are various texts in our field-- the history of criticism, literary theory-- texts that are considered foundational but which curiously enough, a la Foucault, don't actually have an author. Aristotle's Poetics we know actually not to have been one of the texts written by Aristotle but rather to be a compendium of lecture notes put together by his students. This is one of the reasons why in the golden age of Arabic scholarship in the Middle Ages, there was so much dispute about the Poetics. The manuscripts we find from this period are full of marginal notes where the scholars are chiding each other and saying, "No, no, no. It can't be that way." In other words, in a way it's a disputed text and it is not written by Aristotle, but it's also a foundational text. Aristotle is considered the "father of criticism," and yet he is also what Foucault would call a "founder of discursivity." Well, the odd thing is it's exactly the same with Saussure, who can be considered the father or patriarch of a certain kind of literary theory as I have just indicated. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is not something written by Saussure but is a compendium of lecture notes written by his students in a series of lectures that he gave from 1906 to 1911 and then gathered together in book form by two of his disciples who were linguists. Now it's odd that this text does have the same formative function. Scholars who go to Geneva go for a variety of reasons when they look at the Saussure archive. Some of them are predisposed to dislike Saussure and to hope that they can somehow discredit him by learning more about things that he thought that aren't actually in the text. Others like Saussure and feel that he needs to be rescued > from his compositors, and yet others go in an attitude of worship and hope that the archive will yield to them full confirmation of the integrity of the text we call the Course in General Linguistics; so that in a way, the study of the Saussure archive, given the volatile relationship of that archive with the actual text that we have, is a kind of map that, if one were to study it, one could associate with the history of thinking about literary theory in the twentieth century. This is really all neither here nor there. I just find it interesting that two people who are incontestably > founders of discursivity in the field that we study are in fact not strictly speaking authors, > somehow or another confirming the insight of Foucault in the essay that we began by reading. Anyway, enough of that. We have to try to figure out what Saussure is up to. Let's move on to begin to do so. What is semiology? It's the study of existing, conventional, communicative systems. All of these systems we can call "languages," and "language"-- that is to say, the words that we use when we speak to each other-- is one of those systems. Other systems: the gestures that mimes use, semaphores, railroad semaphores and a stoplight--red, green, yellow--are all semiotic systems. In other words, all of them are modes of communication with which we function, the intelligibility of which allows us to negotiate the world around us. Semiotics has expanded into every imaginable aspect of thought. There is a Darwinian semiotics, understanding the relationships among species in semiotic terms. There is, in other words, a semiotics of virtually every imaginable thing understood as a language made up of a system of signs-- signs we'll be getting to in a minute-- but in the meantime, it's important to understand what semiology actually is. That's what it is. Oh, I meant to ask you. How many of you did not bring the passages that I sent to you by e-mail last night? All right. We have them here and they'll be passed around. We have about twenty-five copies, so don't take one if you don't need it. I am going to be turning to the second passage on the sheet in which something about the nature of these systems, I think, can be made clear. "Language," says Saussure, "is not a function of the speaker." Here of course he is talking about human language. "It is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual." Now what does this mean? The fact that human language is not my language-- that is to say, the fact that it doesn't originate in me, the fact that it's not, in other words, my private language--suggests, of course, a certain loss because it means that when I speak, when I use language in speech, I'm using something that is not strictly my own. It's conventional--that is to say, it belongs in the public sphere to all of us, and there's perhaps a certain sort of Romantic loss in that. Wouldn't it be nice if language in some sense were my own? But the incredible gain which makes language something like the object of science that Saussure is hoping to secure-- this is one of the things, obviously, that he has in common with the formalists-- the incredible gain is that if language is not private, if it's not my own, if it's not something that I can make up as I go along, and if, in other words, it is conventional, belonging to all of us, then that's precisely what allows it to be communicative. It is a system of signs, in other words, that we can make use of, that we recognize as signs precisely because they exist among us as something that can be shared in common. This then is the object of Saussure's attention as a linguist and as a semiotician. Now what's implied in this idea is that language is something that we use. The best way to say it and the quickest way to say it is that I don't speak language. Language as something that exists as an aggregate all at once, arguably--and this is something that's going to come up again and again as we come back to these coordinates that we'll be touching on from time to time today also-- arguably, language as an aggregate is something virtual. You remember that Freud said we have to infer the unconscious from the erratic behavior of consciousness. There's got to be something back there, so we're going to call it "the unconscious" and we're going to try to describe it. It is very much the same with language, or "langue" as Saussure calls it. What we do is speak, and when we speak, of course, we say correctly that we "use" language, but we still need to know what language is and we need to understand the relationship between language and speech. Now we can understand language as a kind of aggregate of everything that's in the lexicon, in the dictionary, together with everything that would be in some sort of ideal or utterly systematized set of rules of grammar and syntax, but there is no real aggregate of that kind. In other words, it exists, it's there to be put together partly as a matter of experiment and partly as a matter of conjecture by the linguists; but as a composite thing existing in a spatial simultaneity, synchronically, language is something that in a very real sense, as is the case with Freud's unconscious, we infer from speech. Now speech is what we do. Speech is the way in which we appropriate, deploy and make use of language, and Saussure calls that "parole." Parole is the unfolding in time of a set of possibilities given in space, that set of possibilities being what Saussure calls "langue." Now language is a system of signs. What is a sign? Saussure's famous diagrams make it clear enough. [Gestures to board.] We have above the line a concept and we have below the line a sound image. In other words, I think of something and that thinking of something corresponds to a sound image that I have ready to hand for it. That can be understood in terms of thinking of the concept "tree"-- that's why this is in quotation marks, I speak Latin--and knowing that the sound image correlative to the concept tree is "arbor," right, I can think of > something like that [drawing of a tree], something in some way resembling that. By the same token--I still speak Latin--the sound image corresponding to it is "arbor." I may or may not get back to this today, but in this question mark [on the board next to a sign diagram in which the signified tree is written over the signifier arbor, neither of them in quotation marks] is the secret of deconstruction, all right?-- just > to keep you poised and on tenterhooks. In the meantime, what Saussure is doing with this relationship above and below the line is, he is saying that there is an arbitrary relationship between the concept and the sound image. The concept he calls a "signified" and the sound image he calls a "signifier." A sign, in other words, is made up of two sides in, as it were, a thought moment: a relationship between that which is signified and that which signifies it. It's to be understood that we have to think of them together. They're not divisible. Their relationship is necessary but, as we'll see in a minute, arbitrary, and each sign is like that. The way in which we put signs together is to take these bundles, these binary relationships between a concept and a sound image, and adjust them in an unfolding sequence. That's how we speak. That's how we make a sentence. All right. So in a way the idea that a signifier, a sound that I make, arbor, refers to a concept and by implication, by a very powerful and strong and necessary implication, not to a thing--is not in itself new. The idea that a word signifies an idea and not an object is already fully developed in John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and is more or less commonly agreed on ever afterwards and is, as I say, in itself a conventional thought that Saussure adapts and makes use of. But what is new in Saussure and what really is foundational in semiotics as a science is two things that Saussure then goes on to say about the sign. The first thing he has to say is that the signified-signifier relationship, as I said, is arbitrary. And the second thing he has to say is that the way in which we know one sign from another-- either studying language in the aggregate, whereby clusters of signs exist in associational relation to each other, or studying it in speech acts, in speech, whereby signs exist next to each other in a sequence-- the way in which we understand what a sign means is differential. So that what's new in Saussure's thinking about the relationship between signified and signifier is that the sign tied up in this relationship is both arbitrary and differential. Okay. This is a first walk through some essential ideas. I want to go back to the distinction between language and speech and refer you to the first passage which-- now all of you have it--is on your sheet, because like the Russian formalists, Saussure is chiefly concerned in outlining what he means by "semiology" to establish the semiological project as a science. Like the Russian formalists--and in a way like the New Critics-- talking about their "academic" colleagues, Saussure is vexed by the messiness and lack of system in the study of linguistics. This is what he says in this first passage. He says: If we study speech from several viewpoints simultaneously, the object of linguistics appears to us as a confused mass of heterogeneous and unrelated things. This is speech. [Gestures towards the horizontal axis of the coordinates on the board.] I'm a linguist and so what do I do? I study speech, I study speeches, and if I do so, and if I keep thinking about it in a variety of ways, all sorts of frameworks jostle for attention. Saussure continues: This procedure opens the door to several sciences, psychology, anthropology, normative grammar, philology and so on which are distinct from linguistics but which claim speech in view of the faulty method of linguistics as one of their objects. As I see it, there is only one solution to all the foregoing difficulties. From the very outset [and this is > a really peculiar mixed metaphor] we must put both feet on the ground of language and use language as the norm of all the other manifestations of speech. It's as if he's trying to hold language down. > "Stay there. Stay there." We put both feet on the ground of language so that we have it intelligible to us as a system, as something that can be understood, precisely, differentially, that can be understood in the variety of ways in which language organizes signs. It might be worth pausing over the variety of ways in which we can think of signs in language, all of which have to do with the way in which a given sign might be chosen to go into a speech sentence. Take the word "ship." "Ship" is very closely related in sound to certain other words. We won't specify them for fear of a Freudian slip, but that is one cluster. That is one associational matrix or network that one can think of in the arrangement of that sign in language, but there are also synonyms for "ship": "bark, "boat," "bateau," a great many other synonyms-- "sailboat," whatever. They, too, exist in a cluster: "steamship," "ocean liner," in other words, words that don't sound at all the same, but are contiguous in synonymity. They cluster in that way. And then furthermore "ship" is also the opposite of certain things, so that it would also enter into a relationship with "train," "car," "truck," "mule," modes of transportation, right? In all of these ways, "ship" is clustered associationally in language in ways that make it available to be chosen, available to be chosen as appropriate for a certain semantic context that we try to develop when we speak. So that's the way a sign works in language. This is the tip of the iceberg for any given sign. By the way, in what I'm saying, I oversimplify by supposing that the basic unit of language is a word. The linguists know that that's not at all necessarily the case. Linguists can work at different levels of abstraction with language. Sometimes the basic unit is the phrase, but some other times the basic unit is the phoneme-- that is to say, the single sound unit-- or if one's studying language as a system of writing it might be the syllable. It could be the letter understood either graphically or audibly, and the variety of ways in which one can choose a basic unit in the study of linguistics means that you need a special word for that unit, which is characteristically "the tagmeme." In other words, whatever you are thinking of as your systematizing, your understanding, of language, and as the basic constituent unit-- "the word" being probably one of the less popular choices, > even though that's the one I've just used--the blanket term for that is "the tagmeme." So you can understand the associational nature of signs also as tagmemic. Then of course, since there is a certain amount of semantic payoff, let's say, even when you're talking about a phoneme-- especially because, as Saussure will say, and as I'll get back to, in the misleading onomatopoetic drift of language, perhaps a certain sound has certain connotations, meaning the sound may cluster in an associational network. But depending on the unit chosen, the associational networks will differ. But at any level they will still exist as a matrix. In other words, how else could we have any sense of systematicity in language? It is always probably the case that when I speak I won't choose just any word. e. e. cummings actually boldly experimented with this principle and he attracted the attention of the linguists, particularly a linguist named Dell Hymes. e. e. cummings wrote sentences like "He danced his did" where "did" is obviously not a word you would have supposed to be in any way involved in a relevant associational cluster. "He danced his did": that is in every sense a misfire, as one school of thinking about language would call it, and yet at the same time, cummings thumbs his nose at us and deliberately uses that word almost as though he were issuing a critique of semiotics but at the same time such that semiotics would probably have available to it its ways and means of refutation. A certain amount of ingenuity is all that's required to notice that the "d" sound or "duh" reiterates the "d," the "duh" sound in "danced," and that there are all sorts of combinatory pressures on his consciousness to choose "did" as opposed to some other seemingly irrelevant word. So in any case, you can still, even with these egregious examples, understand language even in its infinite variety nevertheless as associational and as clustering its available signs in ways that make them more readily to hand for choice than they might be, all other things being equal. Well, in any case, so language is a system of signs. The signs are both arbitrary and differential. Now what does this mean? This is actually the second thing, maybe, that we learn under the influence of what we call "literary theory" and the thinking that surrounds it about the nature of perception. If the sign is both arbitrary and differential-- that is to say, if there is no such thing as a natural sign, something that is linked by nature, by the nature of the thing and the word together with the thing-- if on one side of the border, as Saussure puts it, we look at a cow and say, "ochs," and if on the other side of the border we look at a cow and say, "boeuf," and if we cross a considerable body of water and we look at a cow and say "cow," plainly the relationship between the thing and the sign-- the matrix signifier, signified--just doesn't exist. So signs are arbitrary-- and they're also differential. I have to be able to distinguish between all the signs I use in any communicative sequence. How do I do it? By putting in signs which are not other signs. The sign is not linked to the natural world by any natural means, and the sign is not linked to other signs by any natural means. I don't know a unit of language-- which I use to communicate with you-- positively. I know it negatively. I know it only because it is not everything else. Its direct relationship with the thing that's most closely adjacent to it somehow either through similarity or dissimilarity can never be a relationship of identity. It's not that other thing, but, generally speaking, the point about a sign is that it's not any other thing. This is true even in homonyms. This is true even of seemingly identical signs, because each has its use value and is only intelligible as that which it exists to mean in a certain context. So it is always the case that I can only know what I know if it's a question of being communicated with, having something rendered intelligible for me, negatively. I can't know it because it just is that sign. I don't know it positively. I'm about to give an example of this which I hope will flesh out what I'm trying to get across; in the meantime, let's look at a couple of passages in Saussure that may make the point. Now not on the version of the sheet that I passed out today > but on the version that I sent electronically last night, there is a fifth passage, and that passage is actually a combination of formulations by Saussure that are in two separate parts of your text. The first one is on page 844. Can this possibly be correct? I > hope it can. No, it is not correct. It's page 845, the lower left-hand column where Saussure says: Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others as in the diagram, [just below it]… In other words, the value of a term--I say something, I utter a sound--the value of that sound cannot be determined except by its context. I can't know it except by the way in which it differs from everything that surrounds it. He goes on to say--this is on page 847 about halfway down the left-hand column: … [A] segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its noncoincidence with the rest. Arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities. And then again another passage on page 846, the right-hand column halfway down: "… [C]oncepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms of the system." Now probably this is hard to accept intuitively. We feel as we process the world around us that we know things for and as what they are. I look at something and I know what it is, forgetting that possibly I only know what it is because of a context in which indeed it is not those other things that are linked to it. Now I want to take an example. I could use any example but I'm going to use something which plainly does move around among various semiotic systems. It's a piece of language but it also belongs to other sorts of semiotic systems as we'll immediately see. I want to use the example of the red light. Now in a stoplight, which is probably just about the simplest semiotic system that we have-- it only has three, one is tempted to say, variables plainly differing from each other: red, yellow and green--we have two ways of thinking about the red light. If we think that our knowledge is positive, we say "red" in a red light means stop. It comes spontaneously to us to say "red light" means "stop." Now if all we have to go on is just this semiotic system, it's going to be kind of hard to put up resistance to that sort of thinking because by the same token we'll say "yellow" means "pause," "green" means "go." These three lights with their respective colors just do positively mean these things. Everybody knows it, and I'm certainly not thinking when I approach an intersection that when the red light goes on-- I'm not saying to myself, "Oh, not yellow, not green." > My mind just doesn't work that way. All right, but still it's a red light, right, and our hypothesis is that the red light has positive value in the sense that it means a certain thing. It means, we say, "stop." Well, suppose the red light appeared on or as the nose of a reindeer. In that case the red light would be a beacon which means "forward," "go," "follow me," "damn the torpedoes." Right? > We've got to get these presents distributed. No time to waste. And we race off--perhaps risking an accident, who knows? > --we race off under the compulsion of the meaning of the red light, which is "go," right? Now by the way, there's an anecdote, the truth of which I've never been able to ascertain, that during the cultural revolution in China, Madame Mao very much disapproved of the fact that red lights meant "stop" because red is, of course, the color of progress. It ought to mean "to go forward" with everything behind it, but needless to say her thoughts on the subject were never implemented because > if one day red light means "stop" and the next day red light means "go," there might be a few problems. This, by the way, is a way of showing the fact that everything which appears in a semiotic system is conventional, right? I mean, there is an emptying out of positive meaning in the very awareness that, after all, the red light could mean "go"-- I'm about to go on and give more examples. It's conventional. Whatever the convention is within a system of differences, that's what makes the sign intelligible. All right. Just some other examples: a red light over a street door. Well, that doesn't mean "stop." That means "go in," "come in," right? And of course it exists in a semiotic relationship to a white light over a street door which means "this is my house; if you wish you can ring the bell but I'd just as soon you stayed out." This light is probably on to keep burglars away and so: "stop," right? The red light is intelligible, in other words, within that semiotic system. Now over an auditorium door--and of course we've already been gazing at that light back there, and it's not a good example. I wish it didn't say "exit," but it does say "exit," because that kind of weakens my point, but over many auditorium doors a red light just hangs there. Obviously, it doesn't mean "come in" in the sense of the red light over a street door. It means "go out," right? "This is the way out. This is the way you get out of here," not "This is the way you get in here." There are a lot of ways in which a red light means neither "stop" nor "go," but we are sort of confining ourselves so far to the ways in which a red light has something to do with locomotion or the lack thereof. In each new system, you can see it takes on a new meaning always with respect to whatever it is not. Well, we can continue. On a light-up valentine it means "don't stop, go." It has the function, in other words, of negating its own meaning in another semiotic system, in this case the semiotic system of the stoplight. On an ambulance or a police car--admittedly, many of these lights are blue these days but let's suppose that, tradition prevailing, that they are still red-- they mean "get out of the way" or "stop," right? In other words, they probably bear a distant relation to the semiotics of the stoplight, and that's probably why red was chosen for ambulances and police cars: because they put into your head the notion of "stop." But it's a notion that's complicated in this case by the equally imperative notion "get out of the way," which doesn't at all necessarily entail stopping but rather accelerating in a different direction. All of that somewhat complicates the picture, but at the same time, I think you can see that there is a connection between those semiotic systems. It's a weak system in terms of color. In the case of the ambulance and police car, it's more a question of brightness. As I say, red tends to be chosen, but then if you get lab experiments showing that that particular color of gas blue is somehow or another sort of more invasive of your consciousness than red is, then you move away from the arbitrariness of the choice of red as a color. As I say, there's a certain instability which could never apply in the semiotics of the stoplight because there it's not so much a question of the brightness of the color-- although that has been experimented with, as you know--but rather the insistence that the color is just that color. Then finally--and here is where, in a way, this is perhaps the most interesting thing because it forces us to show the complexity, to see the complexity, of semiotic relationships: a red light, just to return to the Christian holiday, a red light on a Christmas tree. Now our first thought is, Oh, aha, that has no meaning, right? It's no use talking about the negative relationship between a red light and a green light and a yellow, white, or blue one--whatever the other colors on the Christmas tree are-- because they all have the same value. They're all bright, they're all cheerful, they all say "Merry Christmas," etc., etc., etc. So what are you supposed to do with that? Here you've got a red light which doesn't seem to enter into this sense of the arbitrary and differential. Well, that's because it's actually not a gross constituent unit in a semiotic system, right? "Bright lights" is the gross constituent unit and the variety of those bright lights, which is a matter of aesthetics, is, ironically enough, neutralized by the common signifier governing our understanding of them, which is "bright lights"-- in this case, particularly on a tree or festooning another ornament that has some sort of comparable value. Once you get that, once you get the value, "Christmas tree," as opposed to "red lights," "red lights" being perhaps a part of some Christmas trees, then you see that you're back in a semiotic system and a very obvious one, because a Christmas tree is a not-menorah, not-Kwanzaa candles. A Christmas tree, in other words, is a sign that can only be understood intelligibly in terms of a certain cultural understanding. We think of course, oh, we know what that is, and of course probably we do, but we're misled in supposing that that's the key to the understanding of it as a sign, because it's very possible to imagine a circumstance in which someone wouldn't know what it was, forcing us despite its familiarity to ask ourselves, "Well, what is it and how do we know what it is?" Then we realize once again that we can only know what it is if we come to understand-- in this case, probably, it's best to say a cultural system, understood as a semiosis, within which it appears. So this last version of the red light introduces interesting complications which I don't think should confuse us. I think they should actually show us a little bit more about how we can understand the organization of the things around us and within us as systems of signs. We know that we've already learned from Heidegger and the hermeneutic tradition that we know them as something, but it remained to show how we know them. That is to say, we don't know them positively. I mean, Heidegger raises the interesting fact that we spontaneously recognize something. But that's one of the things which could be dangerous for semiotics because it would make us think or assume that we know things positively-- without thinking, in other words, "I know that that's an exit sign, I don't know that it's a white thing with red marks on it, but I know that it's an exit sign"; but I can't know that, the Saussurian argument goes, without knowing that it is not all the things that it's not. If it were all the things that it's not, or if it were identical to all the things that somehow or another it's not, then I would be in a very difficult situation because I wouldn't have any means of knowing it in particular. The very fact that I need to know it in particular is what makes me need to know it negatively. In other words, we now know two things about how we perceive things from the standpoint of this subject matter, and it's very useful to put them together, the fact that we always know things first-- but at the same time the fact that it's misleading to think that our knowing them first means that we know them positively; we know them first but we also know them negatively, in negation of other things. Okay. So let me just return once again to the way in which sign systems are intelligible because lots of- there are going to be lots of moments in a course like this in which what we seem to be saying is that, "Oh, we can't know anything," or "We don't know what we know," or "How do we know what we know?" Maybe we're skirting rhetorical questions of that kind, but we're really not. What we're talking about today is how we do know things. Right? If we take semiotics seriously, it gives us a rather sophisticated means of understanding precisely how we know things, but it insists that we know things because of their conventional nature: that is to say, because they are conventions existing within a system of conventions insofar as we recognize them-- things, signs--as existing, because if we're thinking about a thing, we're thinking about that thing as a sign in semiotics. If we don't know that, if we don't recognize its existence in a system-- if we can't think what system it belongs to, perhaps to put it in a better way--that's tantamount to saying we really don't know what it is. I think the more we think about it, the more we realize that we only know what it is if we know the system that it belongs to, which is to say, all of the things related to it which it is not. Right? Okay. So the intelligibility of sign systems is their conventionality. That's why it's impossible for anybody to come along and say, "Oh, I don't like the fact that the red light is red. It's symbolically the wrong move. Let's make the red light the symbol of 'go.'" And now with the ecological movement it would be very difficult to make the green light the symbol of "stop," and in any case all sorts of complications would arise. > Right? But in the meantime you see that we can't mess with conventional systems by imposing the individuality of our will on them and expecting anything to change. A seeming exception is the fact that sometimes individuals can, through the exertion of their influence and prestige, actually change the way we speak about things. This is a seeming exception. Think about the way Jesse Jackson almost single-handedly convinced us that we should use the expression "African American" even though it's a cumbersome, polysyllabic expression which you would think somehow or another would be intuitively rejected because it's so hard to say, but it worked. He convinced us all to say "African American." You say to yourself, "Ah ha! There is an example of somebody taking language by the scruff of the neck and changing it as an individual, exerting an individual will over against the conventional nature of language." The semiotician's answer to this is it never could have happened simply as an act of agency, as an act of will. It had to be acquiesced in. You needed the community that makes use of linguistic conventions to acquiesce in a change of use. Remember, language exists synchronically: it only exists in a moment, in a moment of simultaneity. We study language diachronically--that is to say, we study its history. We study its unfolding in time. Now this unfolding is not, according to the semioticians-- and here's another link with the Russian formalists-- is not a question of studying the way in which language is changed from without-- that is to say, studying the way in which, for example, an individual can rise up and insist on changing one of the signs; but rather a sequence of synchronic cross-sections. From moment to moment, language changes, but if we're to understand it as language we have to honor its simultaneity. In that case, we understand it as a sequence of cross-sections rather than something that somehow organically changes through time. At each cross-section, people are either willing to use a certain sign in a certain way or they're not. That's the crucial thing: if they're not willing, the use of the sign doesn't work, which confirms the idea that nothing can be changed simply by individual agency in and of itself. All right. I need to come back to synchrony and diachrony. I'll do so next time and probably in subsequent lectures because we're going to keep using these coordinates. We're going to keep using the things that exist in space, virtual or not, and the things that unfold in time in their relationship with each other as we continue to try to understand these basic principles which shape so much of subsequent literary theory. Thank you.

Literature_Lectures

4_Configurative_Reading.txt

Prof: So before we go on to talk a little bit about the American historicist hermeneutical scholar E.D. Hirsch, and then Wolfgang Iser--for whom you have your reading assignment-- I want to go back to Gadamer a little bit and say something more about his taste, that is to say, the kind of literary and intellectual canon that his approach to hermeneutics establishes. You remember Gadamer is very much concerned with the norm of classicism, which later in his essay he is inclined to call "tradition" instead, and the reason that's so important to him is that he actually has a very conservative view of what the reader can accomplish in understanding another horizon. Gadamer, in other words, doesn't think that the reader can perform any great miracles in intuitively feeling his or her way into the mind of another time and place, so that the value of classicism and of tradition for Gadamer is that there is evident common ground in certain texts. Sometimes we refer to them as "great books"-- in other words, the sort of text that speaks, or we feel as though it's speaking, to all places and times. Of course, it's contested whether or not there is really any merit in talking about texts that way. But Gadamer's view is very strongly that this conservatism about the canon, which is intimately related to his conservative doubt about the actual capability of a reader to span enormous gaps-- and I use that word advisedly because it is the word that Iser uses to talk about the distance between the reader and the text, and the way in which that distance should be negotiated-- so in any case this conservatism, it seems to me, however, can be questioned. I thought that we'd begin then by turning to page 731, the left-hand column, the footnote. You're beginning to realize, I'm sure, that I like footnotes. Gibbon of course was said to have lived his life in his footnotes. Perhaps I live my life in the footnotes of other people. In any case, in this footnote Gadamer says something-- I think it's very rare that we can actually just sort of outright disagree with Gadamer, but he says something in this footnote that I believe we can actually disagree with. Toward the bottom of the footnote, 731, left-hand column, he says, "… [J]ust as in conversation, we understand irony to the extent to which we are in agreement on the subject with the other person." We understand irony only, he means, to the extent to which we are in agreement with the other person. If you are expressing an opinion, in other words, which differs radically from my own, I can't understand, according to Gadamer, whether or not you're being ironic. This seems to me to be just patently false. Think about politics. Think about political talk shows. Think about political campaigns. When our political opponent is being ironic about our views we understand the irony perfectly well. We're used to it, we have accommodated ourselves to it, and of course it's the same in reverse. Our opponent understands our ironies, and there is, it seems to me, a perfect kind of symbiosis, ironically enough, between political opponents precisely maybe in the measure to which their ironies are mutually intelligible. It probably teaches each of them a good deal to be able to accommodate, to encounter, to get used to the ironies of the other, and I think this applies to conversation in general. It's very easy to pick up most forms of irony. We don't have an enormous difficulty grasping them, and it doesn't seem to me that our capability of grasping irony is founded on a necessary, underlying agreement. That's what he's saying. Now if this is the case, it seems to me that one has found a loophole in Gadamer's conservatism about what the reader can do. His premise is that in order to understand, there has to be a basis of agreement; but if what we've just said about understanding each other's ironies, even where there is pretty wholesale disagreement, is true, that ought to apply also to our capacity to read work with which we distinctly disagree, with which we feel we can never come to terms in terms of affirming its value, but which we nevertheless can understand. If understanding is not predicated on agreement, the possibility of opening up the canon, as we say, insisting that it doesn't have to be an absolutely continuous traditional canon, is available to us once again and Gadamer's conservatism on this issue can be questioned. Now it's not that Gadamer is insisting on absolute continuity. On the contrary. You'll probably remember that he says early in the essay that in order to recognize that we are in the presence of something that isn't merely within our own historical horizon, we need to be "pulled up short." In other words, to go back to that example once more, we need to recognize that there's something weird about that word "plastic," and in being pulled up short we recognize the need also for the fundamental act of reading in Gadamer which is the merger of horizons: in other words, that we are dealing knowingly with a horizon not altogether our own that has to be negotiated, that has to be merged with our own for understanding to be possible. In fact, Gadamer even insists that if we don't have this phenomenon of being pulled up short, our reading is basically just solipsistic. We just take it for granted that what we're reading is completely within our own horizon and we don't make any effort at all to understand that which is fundamentally or at least in some ways different. Gadamer acknowledges this, even insists on it as I say, but he doesn't lay stress on it because the gap that is implied in the need to be pulled up short is not a big one. That is to say, it's one that we can easily traverse. Take the example of "plastic" again: "Oh, gee, that's a strange word," we say, so we go to the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], we see it meant something different then, our problem is solved, and we continue. No big deal, right? But there may be ways of being pulled up short, occasions for being pulled up short, that Gadamer thinks exceed the imaginative grasp of a reader. As you'll see when we return to Iser after I've said a few things about Hirsch, this, as you'll see, is the fundamental difference between Gadamer and Iser. Where for Gadamer, the gap between reader and text, between my horizon and the horizon of the text, is perforce a small one, for Iser it needs to be a much larger one in order for what he calls the "act of the reader," the reading act, really to swing into high gear, and we'll see that this has implications for the obvious difference between their two canons. All right, but now I want to say something about the passage from which I quoted over against the passage from Gadamer at the end of the Gadamer lecture. You remember Gadamer said we have to be open to the otherness of the past in order that for us it may "speak true," but if we simply bracket out our own feelings, that can't possibly happen so that we have to recognize that in this mutuality of the reading experience we really are in a conversation. We're open to being told something true by someone else. Hirsch on the other hand says, "Oh, well, no. The important thing is to know the exact meaning of that other person because that's the only way to honor the otherness of the person. Kant says people ought to be an end and not a means for us; we ought to understand them on their terms." Gadamer's claim, however, was that if we do that, we are in fact suspending the way in which it might be that they speak true. We are honoring instead the integrity of what they're saying without thinking about whether or not it might be true. So I introduced Hirsch in that context, and now I want to go back to him a little bit and I want to work with two passages which I have sent you all in e-mail-form and which I have neglected to put on the board, but they're so short I don't think that will be necessary. The first of the two passages I want to talk about is Hirsch's argument that "meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of words"-- meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of words. In other words, the text is what makes the ascertainment of meaning possible and available to us, but meaning is not in the text. Meaning is in the intention of the author, and that is what we need to arrive at as we work through the text. Meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of words. Now think about this. What it means is that in understanding a text, we are attempting to grasp it in paraphrase. We are, in other words, attempting to grasp it in a sentence that might read something like, "What the author means to say is-- " Right? So that it's not what the text means--which might be anything, according to Hirsch, if you just appeal to the text; it's what the author means to say. Okay. So what's implied here? On the one hand, you could say this is just absolute total nonsense. We use a text to find meaning in something that we don't have available to us. Why don't we just find meaning in the text, which is available to us? That would make more sense. It's up to us to construe the text. We can't possibly know what the author meant except on the basis of our determination of the meaning of the text, so why not just focus our attention to meaning on the text? Hirsch was a student of Wimsatt. Hirsch was engaged in lifelong disagreement with Gadamer but he was a student of Wimsatt, the author of "The Intentional Fallacy." Obviously, Hirsch was a rebellious student > and insisted that, far from wanting to take Wimsatt's position, appealing to intention was the most important thing you can do, the only thing you can do which establishes-- according to the title of his first important book on hermeneutics-- "validity in interpretation." All right. It's very difficult intuitively to assent to Hirsch's position, and I'll just tell you by the way that I don't, I can't, but I will say in passing in defense of Hirsch that if we reflect on the matter, we realize that in common sense terms, appealing to an author's intention is precisely what we do for practical reasons. Let me give you an example. You're all students. You are sitting in classrooms that in many cases oblige you to take exams. Your instructor tells you when you write your exam, "Don't just parrot the words of the authors you're studying. I want to know that you understand those authors." Think about it. You prove to your teacher that you understand the authors by being able to put their meaning in other words-- in other words, to say the author is intending to say something, not just that the text says something and this is what it says, with your exam then being one long screed of quotation. Ironically, the instructor doesn't really want just quotation on an exam. He wants explanation, and the form of explanation is paraphrase. You can't have paraphrase unless you can identify a meaning which is interpersonal, a meaning which can be shared among a group that understands it and can be expressed in other words. That's the key. If you can put it in other words, those other words take the form of an appeal to intention. All right. That's an important argument in Hirsch's favor. We realize that practically speaking, the necessity of appealing to paraphrase in order to guarantee mutual understanding certainly does seem to be something like agreeing or admitting that meaning is an affair of consciousness, not of words--my consciousness, the author's consciousness, the consciousness that we can all share. That's where we find meaning, and meaning takes the form of that kind of paraphrase that everyone can agree on. So much then to the advantage or benefit of Hirsch. There are lots of things to be said against it, on the other hand, which I don't want to pause over now because I think a course of lectures on literary theory will inevitably show the ways in which paraphrase is inadequate to the task of rigorous interpretation. Cleanth Brooks, a New Critic, writes a famous essay called "The Heresy of Paraphrase," insisting that proper literary interpretation is a wooden, mechanical, inflexible exercise if it reduces the incredible complexity of a textual surface to paraphrase. So it's a complex issue, and I should leave it having said this much, at least for the moment. Now one other thing that Hirsch says, the other thing that I quoted, is in effect--I'll paraphrase now--> that what Gadamer omits to realize is that there is a difference between the meaning of a text and the significance of a text. That is Hirsch's other key position, and we can understand it by saying something like this: the meaning of a text is what the author intended it to mean-- that is to say, what we can establish with a reliable paraphrase. The significance of the text, which Hirsch does not deny interest to, is the meaning for us--that is to say, what we take to be important about this meaning: the way in which, for example, we can translate it into our own terms historically, we can adapt it to a cause or an intellectual position-- the ways, in other words, in which we can take the meaning of a text and make it significant for us. The difference between meaning and significance then is something that Hirsch takes very seriously and he insists-- and here is, of course, where it becomes controversial-- he insists that it's possible to tell the difference between meaning and significance if, good historicists that you are, you can pin down accurately and incontestably the author's meaning, appealing to all the philological tricks that you have, throwing out irrelevancies and insisting that you finally have the meaning right-- of course, how many times has that happened? which is obviously one point of disagreement with Hirsch. Then, once you've done that, once you have secured the integrity and accuracy of the meaning, Hirsch says, "Okay, fine. Now you can do anything you like with the text. You can adapt it for any sort of possible purpose, but the crucial thing is to keep the distinction between meaning and significance clear." Obviously, Gadamer refuses to argue that we can distinguish in that way reliably. We don't know--because it's a question of merging horizons, my horizon and the horizon of the text-- we don't know with any guarantee where meaning leaves off and significance begins, so that the splitting apart of the two terms is something that simply can't be accomplished by the way in which we enter the hermeneutic circle. That's Gadamer's position, and it is the position of anyone who opposes that of Hirsch, although what he means by the distinction is clear enough. "Yes, yes," you say, "I see exactly what he means." Nevertheless, to secure the distinction in actual practice, to say, "Okay. This is the meaning and now this is how I'm going to make it significant"-- well, it seems unlikely indeed that this is something anyone could ever accomplish. All right. Finally, to turn to Wolfgang Iser: Iser is concerned with what he calls the act of the reader-- Akt des Lesers is the title of one of his books-- and in so doing he establishes himself as a person very much in the tradition of phenomenology deriving from Husserl and more directly, in Iser's case, from an analyst of the way in which the reader moves from sentence to sentence in negotiating a text, a Polish intellectual named Roman Ingarden who is quoted frequently in the essay that you have. Those are the primary influences on Iser, but he himself has been tremendously influential in turn. Iser's interest in the reader's experience is part of a school of thought that he helped to found that grew up around the University of Konstanz in the sixties and seventies, and which resulted in a series of seminars on what was called "reception history" or alternatively "the aesthetics of reception." Iser's colleague was Hans Robert Jauss, whom we will be reading later in the course. The influence of the so-called Konstanz School spread to the United States and had many ramifications here, particularly and crucially in the early work of another critic we'll be turning to later in the semester, Stanley Fish. So reception history has been a kind of partly theoretical, partly scholarly field, one that's really still flourishing and has been ever since the early work in the great Konstanz seminars of Iser, Jauss and others. Iser, later in his career--he died just a couple of years ago-- taught annually at the University of California, Irvine, and by that time he was very much engaged in a new aspect of his project, which he called the anthropology of fiction-- that is to say, "Why do we have fiction? Why do we tell stories to each other?" All of Iser's work is grounded in the notion of literature as fiction. He's almost exclusively a scholar of the novel-- and by the way, one of the first obvious differences you can notice between Iser and Gadamer is that whereas Gadamer is an intellectual historian whose canonical texts are works of philosophy, works of social thought as well as great works of literature, for Iser it's a completely different canon. He is exclusively concerned with fiction and how we read fiction, how we come to understand fiction, and how we determine the meaning of a work of fiction. As I say, in the last phase of his career when he started thinking about the anthropology of fiction, he raised the even more fundamental question-- I think a very important one, though not necessarily to be aimed exclusively at fiction-- the anthropological question of why we have fiction at all, why it has been a persisting trans-historical phenomenon of human culture that we tell stories to each other, that we make things up when after all we could be spending all of our time, well, just talking about things that actually are around us. In other words, how is it that we feel the need to make things up? All right. Now as you read Iser you'll see immediately that in tone, in his sense of what's important, and in his understanding of the way in which we negotiate the world of texts he much more closely resembles Gadamer than Hirsch. We can say this in two different ways. We can say that Iser's position is a reconstruction of what Gadamer has, essentially, to say about the merger of horizons. For example, on page 1002, the bottom of the left-hand column over to the right-hand column, he says, "The convergence of text and reader"-- Gadamer's way of putting that would be the merger of the reader's horizon, my horizon, with the horizon within which the text appears-- "brings the literary work into existence." This is implied in Gadamer as well. It's not your horizon; it's not my horizon; it's that effective history which takes place when our horizons merge. That is the locus of meaning for Gadamer. By the same token, what Iser is saying is that the space of meaning is "virtual"--this is the word he uses. It's neither in the text nor in the reader but the result of the negotiation back and forth between the text and the reader, he says, that sort of brings the literary work into existence in a virtual space. "… [A]nd this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader." So you see this is Gadamerian. This is the result, this is the fruit, of the hermeneutic engagement between horizons that results in meaning. It's put in a different way by Iser, but it is in a large degree the same idea. He also plainly shares with Gadamer the assumption, the supposition, that the construal of meaning cannot be altogether objective. In other words, Iser is no more an historicist than Gadamer is but insists rather on the mutual exchange of prejudice between the two horizons in question. So he argues on page 1005, the right-hand column: One text [this halfway down the column] is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potentia, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way. This of course brings us to the issue of "gaps" and the role that they play in the act of reading as Iser understands it. It's an interesting term. I don't actually know whether Iser, to be Hirschian, means > what I'm about to say about gaps, but plainly a "gap" is an abyss, it's a distance between two points; but what's really interesting is that we think of spark plugs--we think of gapping a spark plug. I don't know if you know how a spark plug works, but for the electrical current to fly into operation in a spark plug, the two points of contact have to be gapped. They have to be forced apart to a certain degree. Too much, there's no spark. Too little, you short out. Right? There's no spark. So you have to gap a spark plug, and it seems to me that the "ah-ha" effect of reading, the movement back and forth across the gap between the reader and the text, can be understood in terms of a spark, right, as though the relationship between the reader and the text were the relationship between the two points of a spark plug. Whether Gadamer means that when he speaks of gap or whether he simply means an abyss or a distance to be crossed > I couldn't say. Much like the opportunities in the word "plastic," I think it's useful to suggest that this sense of gapping a spark plug may have some relevance to our understanding of what goes on in this reading process. Now how then does he differ from Gadamer? One way that is I think not terribly important but I think is interesting in view of what we've just been saying about Hirsch and another way that's absolutely crucial that we've implied already and to which we need to return. The way that's perhaps not terribly important at least for present purposes-- although this is a distinction that's going to be coming up again and again later in the semester-- is the way in which he actually seems to distinguish-- this is page 1006 in the upper left-hand column-- between "reading" and "interpretation." This is at the very top of the left-hand column. He says: "… [T]he text refers back directly to our own preconceptions-- "--Gadamer would call those "prejudices"-- "which are revealed by the act of interpretation that is a basic element of the reading process." So there's a wedge there between the concept of reading and the concept of interpretation. I would suggest that it's not unlike the wedge that Hirsch drives between the concept of meaning and the concept of significance. In other words, meaning is construal. Significance is the application of that construal to something. I think that the distinction Iser is making between reading and interpretation can be understood in much the same way. Iser doesn't make much of the distinction. In other words, it's not an important part of his argument, which is why I say that the difference with Gadamer-- who never makes the distinction between reading and interpretation-- in this matter is slight, but the other difference is very important, and that is--to return to this point-- that Iser stresses innovation as the principle of value governing the choice and the interpretive strategies of reading. Innovation is what Iser's canon is looking for. That's what makes it so different from Gadamer's conservative continuous traditional canon. Iser's understanding of gapping the spark plug is a much more bold affirmative of the imaginative powers of the reader, a much more bold process than the hesitant conservative process suggested by Gadamer. Now in order to illustrate the way in which what Iser calls virtual work gets done in this regard, let me just run through a few passages quickly. If Gadamer says, in a way, that he doesn't really stress in the long run that in order to know that there is actually a difference between the reader's horizon and the horizon of the text you need to be "pulled up short," something needs to surprise you-- well, Iser throws his whole emphasis on this element of surprise. If it doesn't surprise, it isn't worth it; it doesn't have value. And we'll talk in more detail about the ways in which it doesn't have value in a minute. If the element of surprise is to become absolutely central and paramount in the reading process, the gap has to get bigger. > It has to be a bigger distance, a broader abyss, and that's what Iser is working with in the passages I'm about to quote. As I say, I'm going to quote three, more or less rapid-fire. The first is on page 1003, the upper left-hand column: "In this process of creativity"-- that is to say, the way in which a text induces the feeling of surprise in the reader-- "the text may either not go far enough, or may go too far…" Now I admit in this particular passage you get a hint of Gadamer's element of conservatism. The text may go too far. In other words, it may make demands on us that are too great. For example, we're reading Finnegan's Wake. We haven't got a clue. The text has gone too far. We can't get from sentence to sentence, and even within the sentence we have no idea what the words mean, so we're lost at sea unless, of course, we really rise to meet the challenge; but typically or characteristically in Iser's terms the text has gone too far: "… [S]o we may say"-- he elaborates here'--"that boredom and overstrain form the boundaries beyond which the reader will leave the field of play." In other words, if there are no surprises, it's just a yawn. Why bother to read at all? If the surprises are too great, then they induce overstrain and we throw away the book in frustration and despair. So the distance of the gap needs to be between the outer limits of boredom and overstrain according to Iser. Continuing to page 1004, the upper right-hand column: "… [E]xpectations"-- this word is what Iser thinks governs the sort of dialectic that the reading process is playing with. Reading consists, according to Iser, in the violation of expectations. For the violation to work the expectations have to be there.So that's the dialectic; that's what's negotiated. There has to be a sense, moving from sentence to sentence, that something is likely to happen next. If that underlying sense isn't there, then whatever happens is simply met with frustration, but if we have the expectation that something's going to happen next, and then something different happens, or if the suspense of wondering what will happen next is in play so that anything can happen-- but the experience of suspense has been gone through, then in those cases that's all to the good; that's a good part of the reading process. "… [E]xpectations," says Iser, "are scarcely ever fulfilled in a truly literary text." You see, that's where the evaluative principle that completely revolutionizes Gadamer's canon comes in. In other words, innovation, the principle of change, the principle of violated expectation, is what imposes or establishes value in the literary text-- not continuity, not a sense that across the abyss truth is being spoken to us, but rather the sense that across the abyss we are being constructively surprised. Right? That's what has changed between these two positions. "We implicitly demand of expository texts," he goes on to say-- and he may be alluding to Gadamer here because after all Gadamer is talking primarily about expository texst, works of philosophy, works of social thought, which of course aren't trying to surprise > or trick us. They're trying to lay out an argument which is consistent and continuous and keep surprise to a minimum. It's difficult, philosophy and social thought, but it's not difficult because of the element of surprise. It's the vocabulary, it's the complexity of the thought, and so on that makes it difficult. Iser acknowledges this. He says, "… [W]e implicitly demand of expository texts… [that there be no surprise] as we refer to the objects they are meant to present-- [but it's] a defect in a literary text." That's the difference for Iser between nonfiction and fiction. With nonfiction, we don't want to be surprised. It poses other kinds of difficulty, let's say; but in the case of fiction, in order to be engaged, in order to enter the hermeneutic circle properly, we need the element of surprise, as I say, as a way of distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction. Let's turn to page 1010, the lower right-hand column. The word "defamiliarization" we will encounter soon when we take up the Russian Formalists. "Defamiliarization" means precisely pulling you up short or taking you by surprise, making you feel that what you thought was going to be the case or what you thought was the state of affairs is not the state of affairs. The poet Wallace Stevens puts it beautifully when he says that poetry should make the visible a little hard to see; in other words it should be a defamiliarizing of that which has become too familiar. That's an aspect of the reading process, and so Iser says: "This defamiliarization of what the reader thought he recognized is bound to create a tension that will intensify his expectations as well as his distrust of those expectations." In other words, the tension itself of simultaneously having expectations and feeling that they should be violated, that probably they will be violated, being on the alert for how they're going to be violated-- this is a kind of tension, a constructive tension which constitutes for Iser the psychological excitement of reading. All right. Having said all of this, obviously what Iser means to say is that the reader should work hard, that the virtual work done by the reader to constitute, to bring into existence, a virtual meaning should be hard work, and there's not much work to do if two things are the case: first of all, if the text just seems real. In other words, if there's no spin on reality, if there's no sense of this being a fictive world, if it just seems to be about the everyday, about life as we live it, the life that we find ourselves in-- then according to Iser, at least, there's no violation of expectations. The gap isn't big enough. This is, of course, disputable. There is a kind of a vogue recurrently in the history of fiction for a kind of miraculous sense that this is just exactly the way things are. People enjoy that in ways that Iser may not be fully acknowledging in this argument, but there's no question that it doesn't involve the violation of expectations. There's not much gap at all. It's another kind of pleasure that Iser is perhaps not taking into account that we take in that which seems to be simply incontestably real as we read it, and Iser leaves that out of account. On the other hand, he says that there is no use either, no value either, in that form of engagement with a text in which an illusion is perpetually sustained. In other words, an illusion is created; a never-never land is created. We know it's an illusion, but we get to live in it so comfortably with so little alteration of the nature of the illusion or of the way in which we negotiate the illusory world, that it becomes kind of womb-like and cozy. Here of course, Iser is referring to what he calls "culinary fiction," the sub-genres of literature like, well, nurse novels, bodice-rippers, certain kinds of detective fiction-- although a lot of detective fiction is much better than that description would imply: in other words, novels in which undoubtedly it's an illusory world. Things just don't happen the way they happen in nurse novels and bodice-rippers--in which somehow or another the pauper marries the prince. This doesn't happen, but at the same time it's a world of illusion in which the reader lives all too comfortably. Right? So these are forms of the experience of reading fiction of which Iser disapproves because there's no work being done. The virtual work of the reader does not involve surprise, does not involve the violation of expectations. The relationship between text and reader must be a collaboration, Iser argues. The poly-semantic nature of the text-- that is to say, the fact that the text sort of throws up all sorts of possibilities of meaning if it's a good text-- > and the illusion making of the reader are opposed factors. In other words, there is something in the reader that wants to settle comfortably into the world of the nurse novel, the bodice-ripper, the formulaic detective novel-- that wants just to sort of exist comfortably in those worlds; but a good text is perpetually bringing the reader up short and preventing that comfort zone from establishing itself, so that the tension between the tendency on our part to sustain an illusion and the way in which the text keeps undermining the illusion is again that aspect of the psychological excitement of reading that Iser wants to concentrate on. Now a word about Tony the Tow Truck in this regard. I brought the text with me. You can look at it now or at your leisure. I wanted to call attention to a few places in the text in which it is a question of expectation and of the way in which this expectation can be violated. Now it's only fair to say that if we're going to read Tony seriously in this way we have to put ourselves in the shoes of a toddler; that is to say, as readers or auditors we have to think of ourselves and of the psychological excitement of experiencing the text as that of a toddler. It's not so very difficult to do. For example: I am Tony the Tow Truck. I live in a little yellow garage. I help cars that are stuck. I tow them to my garage. I like my job. One day I am stuck. Who will help Tony the tow truck? All right. Now this is a wonderful example of the tension between having expectations, the expectation that someone will help Tony, and being in a state of suspense, not knowing who it will be. Now from the adult point of view, this is culinary because we know that we're in the world of folklore and that in folklore everything happens three times. We know that two vehicles are going to come along and not help Tony and that the third vehicle will, because everything, as I say, happens in threes in folklore. Notice Tony the Tow Truck <<emphasizes consonants>> --next week when we read the Russian formalists, we will learn the research finding of one of the early formalists to the effect that "repetition in verse is analogous to tautology in folklore." We have exactly that > going on in Tony the Tow Truck, "t- t- t," and then the three events, Neato the Car, Speedy the Car, and Bumpy the Car coming along in sequence, with Bumpy finally resolving the problem. So in any case we have an expectation. We have the dialectic of suspense on the one hand, how will this be resolved, and inevitability on the other, "Oh, it's a folk tale, it'll be resolved, don't worry about it." We have this suspense, as I say, between expectation, the possibility of violation, and simply not knowing. Okay. Now we continue: "I cannot help you," says Neato the Car. "I don't want to get dirty"… "I cannot help you," says Speedy the Car. "I am too busy"… I am very sad. Then a little car pulls up. I think it's wonderful because it "pulls up" just like Gadamer being "pulled up short," and there is, it seems to me, there's another crisis of expectation in this line in that especially as a toddler I need to negotiate that expression idiomatically. I'm three years old. Maybe I don't know what "pulls up" means. It's probably not very good writing for a toddler precisely for that reason, but at the same time it lends itself to us because we recognize that there's a reading problem or a piece of virtual work that needs to be overcome before you can get on with it. You have to find out what "pulls up" means in the same way that the adult reader of Pleasures of the Imagination has to find out what "plastic" means. As I say, it's a wonderful irony that this particular difficulty in reading is precisely what Gadamer calls being pulled up short. All right. So you solve the problem and then, lo and behold, it turns out that: It is my friend Bumpy. Bumpy gives me a push. He pushes and pushes and-- I'm on my way. "Thank you, Bumpy," I call back. "You're welcome," says Bumpy. Now I think we get another expectation. This is the kind of story that has a moral. It's a feel-good story. Something good has happened. A sense of reciprocity is established between the tow truck and the person who helps the tow truck out of being stuck-- a fine sense of reciprocity, so the expectation is that there will be a moral. The tension or suspense is: what will the moral be? There are a variety of ways, in other words, in which this story, just like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, could end. It's by no means clear that The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner will end with "Love all things, great and small things." It could have ended any number > of other ways, and just so this story could end a number of ways. It happens to end "Now that's what I call a friend." Well, fine. The moral is that reciprocity is friendship and so good, all to the good, but as I say there's a moment of suspense in the expectation at the point in the text when we expect a moral but we don't know what the moral is going to be. Once again, there is that moment of suspense that the reader is able to get through with a kind of pleasurable excitement and then overcome as the moral is actually revealed. So even Tony the Tow Truck, in other words, is not absolutely culinary and can be treated in ways that I hope shed some light on the reading process. All right. The time is up, so let me conclude by saying that if there is this remarkable distinction between Gadamer and Iser, between canons, where the methodology of Gadamer seems to impose on us a traditional canon and the methodology of Iser seems to impose on us an innovative canon, isn't there some relief in historicism after all-- because the whole point of historicism, as Gadamer himself puts it, is that it lets the canon be? We're not interested in establishing a principle of value that shapes a canon. We're interested in hearing everybody on his or her own terms and letting those texts be. In other words, doesn't historicism open the canon and indeed make the process of reading, the experience of reading, archival and omnivorous rather than canonical? If every text just is what it is and we can't bring, methodologically speaking, any kind of preconception to bear on what's a good text or what's a bad text, haven't we solved the problem of the limitation imposed on the reader by any kind of canon formation? Well, that's the case only, I say in conclusion, if we can distinguish between meaning and significance. In other words, only if we really are sure that the historicist act of reading is effective and works, if I know the meaning of a text. Well, fine. Then later on, if I wish, I can establish a canon by saying certain texts have certain significance and those are the texts that I care about and want to read, but I can only do that if I can distinguish between meaning and significance. But if meaning and significance bleed into each other, what I'm going to be doing is establishing a canon, as it were, unconsciously or semiconsciously. I'm going to say, "Ah, this is just what the text means," but at the same time, I'll be finding ways, without realizing it, of affirming certain kinds of meaning and discrediting certain other kinds of meaning-- all the while saying, "Oh, it's just meaning. I'm not doing that." But if in fact my reading practice can be shown not clearly to distinguish between meaning and significance, well, then that's what would happen. So it's still up in the air and it's still perhaps inescapable that we read, as it were, canonically, but by thinking of various approaches to hermeneutics in these terms, I think what's shown is that there is a relationship between methodology and canon formation, that certain things follow from our assumptions about how to read. Evaluation would seem rather at a distance removed from simple considerations of how to read, but in fact I think we've shown that evaluation is in one way or another implicit in certain methodological premises as they establish themselves in the work of these various writers. Okay. Thank you very much.