Great Literary Works

Freud in Nabokov's Despair

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:56:00 +0000

Although Nabokov dismissed Freud as a trivial and vulgar thinker and derided him at every turn, the presence of Freud and Freudianism is quite conspicuous in his works. With great vigilance, Nabokov anticipates and short-circuits potential Freudian interpretations of his work through parody, travesty, and psychoanalytic pastiche.

Taking as points of departure Jenefer Shute's framing of Nabokov's conflict with Freud as an attempt to ensure hermeneutic control over his own texts and the cultural fields within which Nabokov's works were written and read, I analyze a literary mechanism within the 1966 text of Despair that both relies on and undermines a Freudian reading.

I identify a set of objects whose Freudian valence could easily mislead the unwary reader into taking them symbolically, thus overlooking their function as important clues to events in the novel. I also posit that prevailing discourses, coupled with what might be called the "cultural competence" of the reader or scholar, are co-determinants of literary devices, semantic structures, and textual patterning in Nabokov's texts.

In the case of the 1966 version of Despair, the resulting text is a palimpsest, as Nabokov adds, deletes, and reconfigures passages in translation, and the text itself is overwritten by discourses in the target culture. Moreover, by attending to cultural debates extant in mid-1930s émigré Berlin, where the Russian original was composed, it is possible to see within the canonical 1966 version vestiges of this originary text.

While I do not tackle the larger question of the nature of Nabokov's reliance on Freud head on, my analysis provides some purchase on this fraught relationship, its literary manifestations, and what may be learned by pursuing a line of questioning that Nabokov himself sought to stymie. [source]

Essay Topics for Kafka's Metamorphosis

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:17:00 +0000

A first help to give a frame to your paper

1. Comment on the significance of the title "The Metamorphosis."

2. Construct an interpretation of The Metamorphosis based on your account of why Gregor Samsa "found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous vermin."

3. What role do the boarders play in The Metamorphosis?

4. Compare the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa with the awakening of Edna Pontellier.

5. Can Freud's notions of Eros and the death instinct illuminate Gregor's plight?

(From: Malaspina University College)

Lecture on "The Metamorphosis" by Vladimir Nabokov

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:50:00 +0000

Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. "To take upon us the mystery of things"—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol's "The Greatcoat," or more correctly "The Carrick"); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis)—so what? There is no rational answer to "so what." We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.

I want to discuss fantasy and reality, and their mutual relationship. If we consider the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" story as an allegory—the struggle between Good and Evil within every man—then this allegory is tasteless and childish. To the type of mind that would see an allegory here, its shadow play would also postulate physical happenings which common sense knows to be impossible; but actually in the setting of the story, as viewed by a commonsensical mind, nothing at first sight seems to run counter to general human experience. I want to suggest, however, that a second look shows that the setting of the story does run counter to general human experience, and that Utterson and the other men around Jekyll are, in a sense, as fantastic as Mr. Hyde. Unless we see them in a fantastic light, there is no enchantment. And if the enchanter leaves and the storyteller and the teacher remain alone together, they make poor company.

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The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code sequel

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Dan Brown has admitted that the success of The Da Vinci Code left him "temporarily crippled" when it came to writing his new conspiracy thriller, The Lost Symbol, which is published at midnight tonight.

In a rare interview, the reclusive author said that he was already writing The Lost Symbol when he started to realise that The Da Vinci Code "would be big". "The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware," he told Parade. "Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke – you're temporarily crippled."

But Brown overcame the paralysis – "I realised that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story" – taking five years to pen the new adventures of his dapper symbologist hero Robert Langdon. His publisher, Random House, has lined up a 6.5m print run, one million of which are due to land in the UK. Waterstone's is predicting it will become the fastest-selling fiction hardback of the decade, other than Harry Potter – it has been the top seller at Amazon.co.uk for weeks – and bookshops are planning early openings tomorrow morning to catch readers on their way to work.

Early sightings of the closely-guarded text indicate that Brown has kept to the formula that made The Da Vinci Code the UK's bestselling adult paperback novel of all time, with 4.5m copies of the title sold since its publication in 2003. Readers of the Mail on Sunday were treated to a pull-out supplement containing The Lost Symbol's first two chapters, opening with an initiation into a masonic lodge "just blocks away from the White House", and with the arrival of Professor Robert Langdon in Washington DC, still sporting the "charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers" that give him more than a passing resemblance to his creator.

"There are parallels between it and all my other books. I'm back in the same world of symbols, secret societies, art, and history," Brown told Parade. Early reviews have borne the author's description out, with the LA Times judging that The Lost Symbol will "feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books". Meanwhile the New York Times greeted the title with a largely positive early review, judging that Brown is "bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead" and that the novel was "impossible to put down". Criticism from the New York Times centred on an over-use of italics, of which it said "the author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls". "And Mr Brown would face an interesting creative challenge if the phrases 'What the hell ...?,' 'Who the hell ... ?' and 'Why the hell ... ?' were made unavailable to him," the review continued. "The surprises here are so fast and furious that those phrases get quite the workout."

But overall, it said, Brown's "excitable, hyperbolic tone is one of the guilty pleasures of his books. ('Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish.' His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. 'It's ... Latin.'')"

Only four people at the book's UK publisher Transworld have read The Lost Symbol, with passwords and encryptions used on internal and external communications to keep its contents secret. Jon Howells at Waterstone's is set to become the first person in the UK outside Transworld to read the novel, taking delivery of a copy at 7.30 this evening and aiming to finish it by tomorrow morning, while Borders has lined up a speed reading champion, Anne Jones, to tackle it tomorrow morning.

"The Lost Symbol is expected to be the biggest hardback fiction release of the year, likely even this decade," said Borders senior fiction buyer Ruth Atkins. "We've had a record-breaking number of customer pre-orders and we're expecting to welcome lots of less frequent book-buyers into our stores. We'll also be opening our stores an hour earlier to cater for those people on their way to work who can't wait until lunchtime to get their hands on the next Dan Brown blockbuster."

But not everyone is as excited about its publication. Less-than-enamoured readers on Twitter have begun responding to mentions of Dan Brown by asking "Dan who?" and have even created a #danwho hashtag which they are hoping to get into the site's trending topics, while at US publishing website GalleyCat, suggestions to name "Dan Brown Day" have included "Brown-Out", "The Day Fiction Died" and the "Beigeocalypse". Booksellers reeling under the pressure of falling sales will be hoping that his many fans disagree.[source: www.guardian.co.uk

Free credit scores guide

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:45:00 +0000

Credit scores affect whether you can get credit and what you pay for credit cards, auto loans, mortgages and other kinds of credit. For most kinds of credit scores, higher scores mean you are more likely to be approved and pay a lower interest rate on new credit.

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Lenders look at your credit score all the time. They look at your scores when deciding, for example, whether to change your interest rate or credit limit on a credit card, or whether to send you an offer through the mail. Having good credit scores makes your financial dealings a lot easier and can save you money in lower interest rates. That's why they are a vital part of your financial health.

There are different means of calculating the credit scores. One of the most widely used credit scores are the FICO scores. When lenders talk about "your score," they usually mean the FICO® score developed by Fair Isaac Corporation. It is today's most commonly used scoring system.

The credit scores are the basis for most of the financial investments and tools available to debtors today. Without a good credit score the chances of getting beneficial loans like home loans, educational loans, etc are minimized. It also reduces the chances of getting employment, as most employers do check the credit rating before hiring. Also poor credit scores keep on adding to harassment and constant nagging from lenders to pay back their debts.

From Holmes to Harry Potter; British popular fiction.

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:42:00 +0000

BESTSELLERS are in the air at the moment. A recent BBC television series "Reading the Decades" took a ten-yearly census of the books that had got people reading, talking and, most importantly, buying, during the post-war period. Now Clive Bloom extends that enquiry back to the beginning of the 20th century, by when Britain could be said to have become unequivocally literate (at the outbreak of the first world war only 1% of the population was still unable to read).

The reasons behind this sudden need to investigate what kinds of books people want to buy (or borrow, for Mr Bloom pays special attention to the role of local libraries in keeping sales of authors such as Catherine Cookson and Frederick Forsyth in their millions) are not hard to guess. The recent...

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noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:51:00 +0000

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Life of Pi by Yann Martel

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:57:00 +0000

In his American debut, the prize-winning Canadian fiction writer Yann Martel begins with an explanation of how this particular tale first transfixed him. It was a story, he recalls, to "make you believe in God."

That's ambitious, even for an accomplished fabulist and metaphysical philosopher, but it's also a very clever way to start people turning pages. Right out of the gate, "Life of Pi" is full of fierce but friendly storytelling energy. It's a real adventure: brutal, tender, expressive, dramatic and disarmingly funny.

Piscine Molitor Patel, named for a Parisian swimming pool, is the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, "once the capital of that most modest of colonial empires, French India." Such exoticism serves him well; Pi's early surroundings, as he and Martel describe them, are wondrous. "I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet," he says. "It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses."

That's exquisite, but only if the author can provide examples. Happily, Pi's analysis is repeatedly borne out by Martel's astonishing abilities as an informed and impassioned describer.

Pi spends his precocious adolescence studying readily available zoology, and, to the eventual dismay of his parents, three unique religions. "They didn't know that I was a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim. Teenagers always hide a few things from their parents, isn't that so? All sixteen-year- olds have secrets, don't they?" His spiritual affairs are rendered with loving care, and the inevitable farcical debate among Pi's religious educators is hilarious, if a touch overextended.

Soon thereafter, Pi and his family and many of their animals plan to emigrate to Canada on a Japanese freighter, but partway through their voyage the ship sinks. The disaster strands Pi in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a lifeboat with a seasick orangutan, a wounded zebra, a frenetic hyena and an eerily placid Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

By this point, two things are clear: 1) that "Life of Pi" is very difficult to stop reading, and 2) that none of its details is a throwaway, least of all a tiger named Richard Parker. Explanation comes by way of an interesting sub- story, one of many well-placed digressions. Another is the grimly memorable lesson Pi's father once taught him about the dangers of tigers.

And a third, which synthesizes those others, is the moment in the lifeboat when Richard Parker first lays eyes on Pi and the narrator considers himself a goner. Martel imparts a great pang of suspense -- made all the more titillating by what follows, a nuanced and absorbing description of the animal's sublime beauty.

After some unsparingly gory conflict in the boat, Pi and Richard Parker are left alone together. It spoils nothing to say that they coexist on the open ocean for more than 200 days. ("A story is always better appreciated if its ending is known first," the author states in a disclaimer early on.)

As Pi somehow finds the resources to sustain his life, Martel finds the wherewithal to sustain the spirit and vitality of his narration. The sense that this is not a coincidence provides much of the book's delight.

Splashing through the story, like the sea creatures swirling around Pi's besieged vessel, are abundant epiphanies -- some shimmering just below the surface, others lurking but less visible. Martel's prose is suitably buoyant throughout. How nimbly he navigates through an examination of natural and religious order, of the comforts of containment and the chilling prospects of freedom. One might infer plenty of influences from the author's mannerisms, but his creed is his own: Martel puts his faith in the act of storytelling.

Though it's still difficult to stop reading when the pages run out, Martel closes the book elegantly. (A good thing, too. As Pi puts it, "What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.") At the end of his ordeal, Pi's story seems so fantastic that people refuse to believe it -- so he decides to revise accordingly.

"Life of Pi" may or may not make its readers believe in God, but they will surely want to believe in Pi Patel. Thanks to Martel's handling, his story is the sort of novel one might share with one's children (of appropriate age), confident in its power to nudge them toward becoming properly curious lovers of books and life.

Jonathan Kiefer is a Berkeley writer.

This article appeared on page RV - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/06/23/RV18924.DTL#ixzz0QKokK7TE

Exiles in the Garden by Ward Just

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:47:00 +0000

The Reluctant Emigrant

Every now and then, with a thrill of connection, you come across a passage in a book that feels as if it had been written with exact foreknowledge of your state of mind: a soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. During a long-ago solo trip to Rome — a self-assigned distraction after a difficult breakup — I remember opening George Eliot’s “Silas Marner” while sitting at the window of a high room in a cold albergo (once a nuns’ cloister) as strains of conversation floated up from the courtyard. Describing her protagonist’s new start in a new town, Eliot wrote of the relief that “minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love” may feel on finding themselves in a “new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap.” In such a setting, she wrote, “The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

For Silas Marner, this “exile” was self-sought. But for Eilis Lacey, the biddable daughter at the center of Colm Toibin’s new novel, “Brooklyn,” her leave-taking from Enniscorthy, in Ireland’s County Wexford, and her resettlement in New York in the fall of 1951 are imposed on her by her energetic, well-meaning older sister, Rose. Young, docile and incurious, unscarred by heartbreak or reversals of fortune, Eilis has no desire or need to quit her widowed mother, her friends, her familiar surroundings. Her “old faith and love” are intact, and she seeks no distance from her memories. But she submits to Rose’s plan for her transplanting, bending to a superior force of will, wishing to do what her mother and sister expect of her, wishing to please. “Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbors, the same routines in the same streets,” Toibin writes. “She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared.”

Confused by her family’s “almost unnaturally happy” mood in the days before her departure, Eilis is relieved to hear her mother, in response to a friend’s casual inquiry, blurt, “Oh, it’ll kill me when she goes.” But go she must, Eilis assumes, even though she “would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose could go instead.” But the Lacey women cannot speak plainly to one another. “They could do everything,” Toibin writes, “except say out loud what it was they were thinking.” And so, too young to understand the consequences of her reticence, too obedient to bolt at the dock, too humble to imagine that her own life is her own business, Eilis boards the liner for America, an irrevocable step that her mother, her sister and Eilis herself might never have wished her to make had they thought it through. America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn’t such a person; detachment isn’t part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is. What were they thinking? They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say.

Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. His characters and plots vary widely. In his beautiful, painful novel “The Blackwater Lightship,” he coaxed a touchy, lone-wolf woman to stiffly re-embrace her mother, their reconciliation precipitated by her brother’s battle with AIDS. In his best-known novel, “The Master,” he animated the inner world of Henry James. And in his story collection, “Mothers and Sons,” he tapped the hidden bonds and vexed motivations of diffident men and women — from thieves, shop owners and farmers to a grandmother who plays favorites and gay men who rally to the side of a friend whose mother has died. In one of these stories, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a woman listens to a song, recorded by her long-dead sister, taken from an album her son has found in the garage. The song “gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister’s face.” She did not want that clarity, Toibin adds. “She hoped she would never have to listen to it again.”

In another story, “A Priest in the Family,” an aged mother accepts the fact that her son, a priest, will go on trial for molesting teenage boys. “When people stopped to talk to her, she was unsure if they knew about her son’s disgrace, or if they too had become so skilled at the plain language of small talk that they could conceal every thought from her, every sign, as she could from them.” Yet when her son urges her to leave town during the trial, to “spare” her, she refuses. “When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance,” she observes, “he had the face of a small boy.” She tells him: “Whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going away. I’ll be here.”

Through all these books and stories, intimations of attachment, abandonment and strong feeling (felt but rarely spoken) fall like a plumb line. Toibin’s new novel stands apart because its protagonist has such an uncritical nature that she doesn’t see she has grounds for complaint, much less possess any impulse to initiate confrontation. But slowly, equably, and without malice, Eilis exacts a bittersweet revenge for the expatriation she never intended — or, rather, one unfolds for her unsought, organically.

In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis — a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion — Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis’s passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal. Accompanying her on the ghastly voyage from Ireland to America, where the sea swell has all the passengers green and reeling, he soon brings her to a Brooklyn boarding house run by a respectable Irishwoman. Eilis numbs herself against nostalgia until letters from home awaken her homesickness. Then she grieves. “She was nobody here,” she thinks. “It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty.”

Unlike Silas Marner, unlike intentional voyagers everywhere, Eilis hasn’t sought the consolations of anonymity. And so, when she meets a man, an Italian-American named Tony, she does what her instinct dictates: puts down roots. When her family calls her back to Enniscorthy, Tony seems to her like “part of a dream from which she had woken.” And yet, back in Ireland, Eilis knows that if she were in New York it would be Enniscorthy that seemed like a “strange, hazy dream.” Is it surprising if a seed grows where it lands, once it’s been scattered? Can it be helped? In “Brooklyn,” Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim.

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noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:35:00 +0000

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The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

List Price: $24.00
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781596912885
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Seven months pregnant and far from home, Becky Jack walks into the office of a Hollywood producer to sell her first screenplay and, much to her shock, meets silver screen heartthrob (and the object of her celebrity affection) Felix Callahan. They spend an awkward and unexpected day together and, though his cursing and drinking contradict her strict Mormon values, Felix and Becky somehow form an unshakable friendship.

Through the next decade, Felix and Becky experience tests of their bond they could never have anticipated. The everyday challenges of raising four unique children and running her household are exacerbated when Becky’s community expresses increasing curiosity and doubt about her handsome, dashing best friend. When her sweet, supportive husband Mike expresses discomfort with Felix’s role in Becky’s life, Becky protects her marriage and ends her friendship. But as the years go by, both Mike and Felix’s gorgeous French wife Celeste realize that the strange love their spouses have for each other is utterly platonic. Felix and Becky see each other through the good times, like co-starring in a romantic comedy written by Becky and even walking the red carpet together, and the bad, when Celeste leaves Felix for another man and then, worst of all, Mike loses his battle with cancer. After Mike’s death, Becky finds herself restarting her life as a widow, and eventually wondering if, after everything, she can find a new way to love Felix, ’til death do they part.

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Flinx Transcendent by Alan Dean Foster

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:05:00 +0000

After thirty-five years and more than a dozen Pip & Flinx novels, Alan Dean Foster delivers the final installment in this hugely popular series

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Quick and Dirty Guide to Reading Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:41:00 +0000

3 Simple Rules of the Road of Poetry
by Dr. Rampey

Some of my colleagues might really frown on this, but I've found that poetry is an obstacle for many students because they lack a basic technique for making sense of it. They've heard all about the sound and the rhythm and the imagery and all that good stuff. And yeah, yeah, that's important, but it has to come later. It has to come after you figure out what the darned thing means in the first place. Contrary to what you might think, you already have the skills to do that. Here are three quick tips that might take the mystery out of reading poetry.

Absolute Rule #1:

Do NOT read line by line! I've found that this is the biggest mistake readers can make. Here's an example of the first few lines of Hamlet's famous soliloquy:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep.
This is what many students who read poetry line by line are hearing in their heads when they read that:
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep.
For sure, that doesn't make any sense at all. So, let's try something different. Let's IGNORE the line breaks. Instead, pay careful attention to the punctuation, and read SENTENCE BY SENTENCE rather than line by line. Then what you hear in your head will sound more like this:
To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die: to sleep.
Doesn't that sound better? Now at least we have a prayer of making sense out of this. Let's go on to the next tip...

Rule #2:

Remember that in poetry you often will encounter words out of their normal word order -- just as you do in some song lyrics. Here are some familiar examples:

ORIGINAL LYRIC	IN NORMAL ORDER
My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing.	My country, I sing of thee, of thee, sweet land of liberty.
'Round and 'round the cobbler's bench, The monkey chased the weasel.	The monkey chased the weasel 'round and 'round the cobbler's bench.
From this valley they say you are going.	They say you are going [away] from this valley.
Mind the music and the step, And with the girls be handy!	Mind the music and the step, and be handy with the girls!
All up and down the whole creation, Sadly I roam...	I roam sadly all up and down the whole creation...
In Dixie Land I'll take my stand...	I'll take my stand in Dixie Land...
A wonderful Savior is Jesus my Lord, A wonderful Savior to me; He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock, Where rivers of pleasure I see.	Jesus my Lord is a wonderful Savior, a wonderful Savior to me; he hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock where I see rivers of pleasure.
His movements were graceful; All girls he could please.	His movements were graceful; he could please all girls.

So, you get the idea. Remember that the normal word order you are used to is SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT (or S-V-O). If a sentence is puzzling you, look for the subject and the verb, and re-phrase the sentence in it's normal order. Let's try it with another line from Hamlet:
This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did,
And I with them the third night kept the watch;...

* 1) Take the first clause, up to the word "did."
* 2) Look for the subject. It can only be "they".
* 3) So, what did "they" do? The main verb is "impart", and the auxilliary verb is "did". So, they "did impart".
* 4) What did they impart? "This".
* 5) To whom did they impart this? To "me".
* 6) In what manner did they impart this to me? "In dreadful secrecy".

So, we have...
They did impart this to me in dreadful secrecy,...
Now, let's do the same to the second clause of the sentence. The subject is "I", the verb is "kept", the object is "the watch", and the rest of the sentence falls in place. So, our whole sentence reads:
They did impart this to me in dreadful secrecy, and I kept the watch with them the third night.
This really does get pretty easy after you do it a few times. Just remember that your mind wants to hear S-V-O, so give it what it wants. Now there's just one more thing...

Rule #3:
Don't let single words, or omissions of words, trip you up. You will come across some unusual words or familiar words that are used in unusual ways. When you're reading, don't move on to the next sentence until you know what each word means. Often in literature textbooks, footnotes or marginal notes will help you out. Use them! Other times, you may have to resort to a dictionary. Let's take a few examples from above. Remember Hamlet's
To be, or not to be...
So, what's this "to be" anyway? Think about it for a moment. What could you substitute? If you be, you are -- right? If you are, you "exist" or "live." Now, that gives you a better idea what Hamlet is wondering about.
How about "From this valley they say you are going" which we re-worded to read, "They say you are going [away] from this valley"? We did have to add "away" to make it sound normal to us. So, if something doesn't sound right even after you have put it in S-V-O order, try adding something.
Sometimes, you'll see some just plain unusual words or usages. For example, the first song lyrics in the table above:
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
So, what's the deal with this "'tis" and "thee"? No one talks like that! No, they don't any longer, but they did once, and it's just a fact that you will see some older forms and usages in poetry, so you need to get used to them. The"'tis" (also occurring in the first Hamlet quotation) is simply an old contraction of "it is. So, there we have "it is of thee I sing", or, in more normal order we would omit the "it is" anyway: "I sing of thee". And "thee"? Well, if you've spent much time in church, you know that "thee" is an older form of "you". Still, "I sing of you" just doesn't sound quite right to us. So, again you need to think a little bit and try a substitution. How about "about"? Then we'd have, "I sing about you", and, as we know, that makes perfect sense in the context of the song.
Finally, there may be words you just don't know or words that are used in ways that are not familiar to you. In the second song lyric in the table above, what's a "cobbler" around whose bench the money is chasing the weasel? How about in the second quotation from Hamlet when the speaker says he will keep "the watch"? Um, "watch" -- wrist watch? Probably not. So, these are cases in which you might need a dictionary.

Last Words:

Just remember the three skills you already have:

* 1) You know how to read in sentences.
* 2) You know that your mind wants to hear S-V-O.
* 3) You know to be wary of what still doesn't sound right even after you've done both of the above.

Now, you can go on to learn about sound and rhythm and imagery and all the other devices that make reading poetry such a rich experience!

If you have any question, you can contact Dr Rampey at LRampey@warrior.mgc.peachnet.edu.

The Devil's Company by David Liss

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:26:00 +0000

By Jody Seaborn
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, July 12, 2009

"The Devil's Company" is the third novel from San Antonio author David Liss to feature Benjamin Weaver, a former pugilist who now makes his profit as a "thieftaker" — that is, as someone hired to recover stolen goods. Weaver has an admirable though sometimes violent sense of justice, and his vocation has earned him a degree of notoriety from the press — he even has a few star-struck fans in high places. When he takes a job that turns into a blackmail trap, Weaver is forced to join the British East India Company to protect himself and a few relatives and friends from financial ruin and debtor's prison.

Weaver narrates this historical thriller, or literary or intellectual thriller, if you prefer, recalling events that have taken place in 1722 London some 30 years after their occurrence. To stay true to an 18th-century first-person narrative, Liss writes in a style suggestive of the period, wrapping his prose in a great coat with a well-placed periwig on top. It's a risky contrivance, full of potentially phony distractions, but Liss perfectly echoes the tone, language and manners of the 1700s while keeping his characters and action accessible to contemporary readers — though as a fan of 18th-century literature (few eras produced so many enduring works as caustic or inventive) I regret that Liss achieves accessibility partly by avoiding the quirky punctuation — those seemingly randomly placed semicolons, colons and dashes — common to the century's writing.

As with any good thriller, there is plenty of espionage and machinations, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. Stratagems are invented and prepared, hardly anyone is who they seem to be and few situations are settled until the end. The novel suffers slightly from the hazards of the genre: The occasional convenient coincidence helps the plot along, and there are a couple of twists not worth going back several pages to unknot. But "The Devil's Company" offers more than intrigue: The origins of corporate power and reach — what one character calls "the warping power of greed" — inform the book's action, giving it some relevance to current events.

The British empire was ascendant in the early 1700s, its rise significantly abetted by "mercantile conquest" from the likes of the East India Company. If any business of the period was too big to fail, the East India Company was it. I don't want to make too much of this thin, timely layer beneath the book's surface suspense, but it's there and Liss, to his credit, adds it skillfully and subtly.

Liss clearly is a student of the period he chronicles. There are wispy hints of the coming gin plague — the abuse of the readily available drink reached epidemic proportions by the middle of the 18th century. There are quick references to arcane things like the window tax (the more windows a building had, the higher the taxes a landlord had to pay). To escape the tax, landords simply boarded up windows, contributing to the tightness of dark, airless rooms.

Liss also paints a good portrait of life in 18th-century London — the filthy, coal-smoky, grimy rot of it all, where class differences were sharply defined and prejudices openly expressed. Weaver, a Jew, endures frequent insults; other outsiders suffer worse fates. Despite Samuel Johnson's well-known quote that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life," life in the metropolis must have been, for most of its citizens, unpleasant and unhealthy.

These historical details give "The Devil's Company" a richness that make it more than an enjoyable diversion, though, dear reader, it is foremost and most agreeably that.

jseaborn@statesman.com; 445-1702

David Liss

What: Reading and signing

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd.

Information:472-5050; www.book people.com

Finger Lickin' Fifteen: Mytery Novels by Janet Evanovich

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:15:00 +0000

Don’t kid yourself — going to sleep is a scary business. Which is why children are comforted by hearing the same stories over and over at bedtime. Certain kinds of mysteries have a similar effect on grown-ups, delivering familiar themes and ritualistic procedures that promise a safe haven in a world of darkness. Which is why rational adults who can’t bear to open their 401(k) statements will rush out to buy FINGER LICKIN’ FIFTEEN (St. Martin’s, $27.95), the “new” Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich. Whatever bad news might be coming, the madcap heroine in these comic farces won’t be delivering it.

Life is always hectic in the blue-collar Trenton neighborhood where the disaster-prone Stephanie works as an enforcement agent in her cousin Vinny’s bail bond firm. This time, a lunatic known as Marco the Maniac takes a meat cleaver to a celebrity chef bound for the big barbecue cook-off to be held at Gooser Park. Eye on the reward, Stephanie’s obstreperous fat friend, Lula, decides to enter the cook-off, which she reckons will attract the killer. In a plot complication that’s no more plausible but reinforces the sexual dynamic between Stephanie and the men in her life, she’s hired by the dangerously attractive Ranger (“a man of mysterious talents”) to investigate the humiliating break-ins that have tarnished the reputation of his fancy security firm.

Like Little Annie Fanny in the vintage Playboy cartoon, Stephanie tends to shed articles of clothing as she becomes splattered with paint or doused with barbecue sauce during the course of her duties. Since fire often figures prominently in Stephanie’s misadventures, you can also count on a few cars and one or more rooms of her apartment going up in flames. Of course, the most spectacular conflagration is reserved for the barbecue.

But even as these catastrophic events are unfolding, the author allows her heroine to keep in touch with the supportive people and familiar places that represent home base. Rest assured, there are disorderly dinners at her family’s home and a rowdy wake attended by Grandma Mazur at Stiva’s Funeral Home, along with the usual high jinks from the colorful crooks and perverts Stephanie encounters on the job. It’s not all mechanical nuts and bolts, either. Evanovich writes with flair in an absurdist vein that her imitators can only envy. (“The bacon diet is unhealthy,” Stephanie solemnly advises Lula. “You had packs of dogs chasing you down the street when you were on the bacon diet.”) And while Evanovich may go overboard on the comic mayhem, she does it only so the kids are sent off to sleep smiling.

Recurring characters and themes may maintain the continuity of a mystery series, but reopening a case solved in a previous book is a high-risk venture. So is taking the hero out of his jurisdictional depth. C. J. Box tries both tricks in BELOW ZERO (Putnam, $24.95), the ninth novel in his sturdy series with Joe Pickett, a stand-up Wyoming game warden and an all-around good guy.

When Joe’s teenage daughter starts getting text messages from someone claiming to be her adopted sister, who died six years earlier in “Winterkill,” Joe drops his normal duties to search for the girl. And as soon as that search turns into a hunt for a serial killer who goes after people with big carbon footprints (“One society wedding produces 707 tons of carbon into the atmosphere”), Joe finds himself working with the F.B.I. on a case of domestic terrorism. When an agent reminds Joe that he’s only “one guy in a red shirt in a state pickup,” you can understand the author’s impulse to give his hero a career boost. But Joe seems happier as a feet-on-the-ground game warden, and it’s still his true element.

Jim Kelly might not care that he’s recycling some pretty stale conventions in DEATH WORE WHITE (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95), a police procedural set on the Norfolk coast of England and featuring two detectives, a soured veteran and his youthful superior officer, neither of whom can stand the way the other one works. But despite using retread devices like odd-couple partners and a son obsessed with the case that gave his father a bad name, Kelly adds an inventive twist by coming up with what might be called a locked-car whodunit. The pickup truck in which a man is found murdered is caught in a pileup of eight vehicles trapped on a detour road when a blizzard blankets the coast, “a murder scene with no footprints in and no footprints out.” As the details of the plot build up, the immediate puzzle gives way to a broader picture of the region and its residents, so dependent on the sea — and one another — for their livelihood and even their lives.

And now for something way off the beaten track: a first novel set in Delhi that offers penetrating insights into the new India — which, as Tarquin Hall would have it, is more like the old India than many people care to admit. Vish Puri, the founder and director of Most Private Investigators Ltd., has the physique, the mustache, the sartorial taste and the egocentric airs of a Punjabi Hercule Poirot. But while Poirot solves crimes of consequence, the endearing Puri keeps his business going with “prematrimonials,” which largely entail vetting would-be grooms. In THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANT (Simon & Schuster, $24), Puri’s work on a possible murder case leads him to a rural district in eastern India for a dramatic look at the caste system at its worst. But the ordinary cases that come his way are no less revealing of his country’s discreet vices and not-so-discreet corruption. [NY Times Book Review]

The Other by David Guterson

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:14:00 +0000

Two boys meet in a track race in which narrator Neil, poor and striving, loses by a hair's breadth to John, cushioned by a private education and a family fortune. Their friendship develops during hikes through the wilds of Washington State, fuelled by dope and sealed, naturally, by mingling their blood. While Neil becomes a "loyal citizen of the hamburger world" with a wife, dull academic job and aspirations to write a novel, John retreats into Gnosticism and a search for self-sufficiency, eventually persuading Neil to help him disappear.

Guterson packs contrasting materialist and survivalist archetypes into his characters' rucksacks and marks out the narrative trail with signposts to Hemingway, Kerouac and Mark Twain, which - with hard-wrought descriptions - can make The Other a slog. But, as on any trek, there are moments when the landscape opens up into breathtaking perspective. When Guterson wittily exposes the insecurities, compromises and delusions that make up America's myths of itself, he makes the hike worthwhile.

The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Tel is known for his successful 2003 novel, FREUD’S ALPHABET, and his previous short story collection, ARAFAT’S ELEPHANT. The “possibilities” in Beijing --- and with a conceivable stretch, any city in the world --- are lessons to be learned. China, arguably, is the seat of the largest economic and cultural shift in history. THE BEIJING OF POSSIBILITIES captures the essence of that rapid change in a collection of endearing short stories, set in a country where storytelling is an art form.

The first short story, “Year of the Gorilla,” takes place in the spring of 2008. “Gorillagram” was a fad, in which a “singing telegram” of sorts was delivered by a pitifully paid immigrant worker in a gorilla costume. Two months before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, quasi-capitalists find themselves with sudden wealth. “A businesswoman walked by, a red handbag swinging from her shoulder. Suddenly [the Gorillagram man] heard a roar and a Honda moped was accelerating past, two men on it. The passenger grabbed the handbag!” The Gorilla-man didn’t monkey around. He attacked the two moped thieves, dusted off the red purse and returned it to the lady. A cell phone with video capabilities captured the gallant crime thwart. The Internet and newspapers spread word of the Gorilla Hero. Recipients of Gorillagrams now assumed he was a celebrity, and his tips evaporated like mist in the desert.

Confused by a rash of crimes leading up to the Olympics, police arrest the poor man and make him a laughingstock. Police ask, “So, Gorilla, is it true that you’re opposed to the development of capitalist enterprise in China?” The Gorillagram fad ran its course; bipedal capitalists feared arrest, when the government wanted to rid Beijing of all “foreigners” --- anyone who does not speak the same regional dialect from one of approximately 50 in China. Lesson to be learned: Government employees unversed in capitalism prevent others from becoming capitalists.

Red-purse thieves notwithstanding, with China’s history of honesty and respect for elders, Tel’s second tale is more complex. Newlyweds find hidden away in the apartment they’ve just acquired a canister filled with things only of sentimental value --- except for an expensive jade spoon. With intentions of honesty and respect, they struggle to find the rightful owner. Years of communism prevent the aged owner from claiming anything of value. The couple knows she is the owner and mails the contents. Return to sender, with a note that the spoon did not belong to her; if it did, she had no knowledge of it. Ay, there’s the rub. One member of the couple had left out the spoon, thinking it would not be missed after 40 years. Guilt causes everything to go back, along with money the couple cannot spare. Like an albatross, it keeps coming back, until the guilt-ridden couple spends a month’s income to appease their guilty consciences. Consciences appeased, the money and spoon finally do not return. Had the value of honesty held true, the jade spoon would have come back the first time for the couple to keep. Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive. (Not Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott in Marmion, 1808.)

China’s one-child and “delayed generation” policies are essential to prevent a drain on natural resources and hyper-population, and is a point of contention amongst Western nations. China still requires couples to have only one child, and each couple is encouraged to wait until at least age 25 to produce their one child. “A married couple without an heir, what are they but living ghosts? They had tried for five years already without success. So they decided to buy a child. A boy would be beyond their means, but a girl...people were practically giving them away.” Males in China are far overrated; ask any woman. Which male came to be without a woman? Not unlike America in the 1950s, with the mantra of Keep them barefoot and pregnant (though the term was coined in 1963), women in China are still often considered to be less than equals. Fortunately, progress is being made. The Internet has informed members of China’s majority gender what happened to John Wayne Bobbit.

This collection of short stories often touches on reproduction, a subject, like politics, that is difficult for many Chinese nationals to openly discuss. Set judgments and preconceptions aside to enjoy what is being revealed. Try to imagine living an entire life with government controlling thoughts and actions --- to the point of having children, even farmers who need children as farmhands, as was the case in agricultural America in the 1930s. Then try to imagine sudden freedom. Well, quasi-freedom. Many residents of the former USSR went through a similar awakening. “Tank Man” in 1989 stood alone in front of a tank at the center of Tiananmen Square, defying the military to take on an unarmed, lone individual. One person can make a difference. The government backed down, and the course of China was changed forever. Alas, many Americans unaccustomed to any type of control (self or otherwise) choose to escape from reality, with a variety of excesses.

The title short story, “The Beijing of Possibilities,” examines the subject of reproduction and self-worth. “She’s going to have a baby. It’s due any day now. She’s a virgin, but even so. She’s twenty-nine and lives with her father, a fisherman, in a village in Hainan. She no catch.... This is how: A woman from a nearby village moved to Beijing and found a job as a shelf stacker and fell in love. She married her sweetheart, a native Beijinger; she legalized her status; she became pregnant. The two of them are living in one room --- they’re in no position to care for a child, but they don’t want an abortion either. So here’s the arrangement: The woman back in Hainan is to be the foster mother. She’ll do everything a real mother does, almost, and she’ll be paid an allowance as well. Maybe in five or ten years’ time, the biological parents will demand the child back.” The Hainan villager goes on to become against her will a Beijinger and an outcast in that society. Someone from her own village pauses to speak with her briefly and treats her kindly, and it’s left up to the reader to determine if she achieves the goal of self-valuation.

Superstitions are touched upon. There is a reason Olympic opening ceremonies began at 8:00 P.M. on 08/08/08. The lucky number eight, especially eight times over, rules supreme, while 14 is China’s equivalent of the Western world’s triskaidekaphobia. Phone numbers have eight digits instead of our customary seven. In a country unaccustomed to excesses, the greeting Have you eaten? replaces How do you do?

This collection is filled with witticisms: A gem cannot be polished without friction. You cannot expect both ends of a sugarcane to be as sweet. One story examines acceptance of “arranged marriages” in a philosophical tale about a man whose employment is secured by a corporate headhunter. He ponders that circumstances were meant to be, he and his company worked together as a team. He then considers that if his parents’ marriage had not been arranged --- and those of his forebearers --- then he would not have come to be, to work at The Double-Happiness Ball Bearing Factory. But, alas, some sections are tedious, or perhaps misunderstood. A clever pun in America may mean little in England, though the same language (more or less) is spoken. Taking these tales with a grain of salt --- which means nothing in China --- may help to understand that innuendo speaks volumes but says little.

Chong Qing is the world’s largest city, with more than 33 million people. China is a complex quasi-continent, with a quarter of the world’s population, and the same land mass as all countries in Europe --- and triple the number of languages. Given huge distances, dialects take on characteristics of different languages. Ni hao (hello or how are you) in Beijing becomes zha xi de lek (phonetic: zah-z-d-lek) in the Tibet regional dialect. Jonathan Tel successfully incorporates the philosophies of China’s many regions in this Sino version of Aesop’s Fables.

--- Reviewed by L. Dean Murphy (DeanMurphy@Verizon.net). Murphy has reviewed books since correctly predicting SCRUPLES to be the number one bestseller for 1977, and later published in Writer’s Digest an exclusive interview with Judith Krantz. Murphy is an Orlando-based writer whose first novel, THE ART OF MURDER, is in its third trimester. His second in the Evan Goode mystery series, TWO BODIES, is embryonic. He currently reviews books for www.Bookreporter.com, Publishers Weekly, http://ChristianBookReviews.net and www.MostlyFiction.com.

The Compass by Tammy Kling and John Spencer Ellis

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:56:00 +0000

What Will Move Your Compass?

THE COMPASS is a life transformation novel that will guide you on a journey of self-discovery. At the core of THE COMPASS are specific lessons about belief systems and understanding who you really are in order to live out your destiny. Jonathan, the main character, escapes his suburban life after a tragedy that alters his plans for the future.

Paralyzed by grief, he decides to journey across the globe in an effort to realign his inner compass. He sets off with a backpack leaving behind his career, friends, family, and home. His travels begin in the dry desert of Nevada, and continue on to the pristine mountains of the Adirondacks, and then to a medieval village in Romania. In each destination Jonathan encounters one pivotal person who offers a major life lesson, and he begins to realize that each individual was placed there for a reason.

THE COMPASS is a metaphor for the journey of our lives.

In the tradition of THE ALCHEMIST, THE COMPASS provides you with specific life lessons about authenticity, self-empowerment, and believing in your dreams. As humans we are all connected—by love, pain, and sometimes even by tragedies or events we cannot control. Each one of us travels a unique path, yet we are linked by experiences and emotions. In this connectedness, there is life.

On Sale: Now
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781593155421

author website: http://www.thecompassbook.com

The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

noreply@blogger.com (eastern writer) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:43:00 +0000

Charles Dickens was the type of author who “even those who never in their life read any novels, would read his.” His stories have endured the test of time since the mid-1800s. As THE LAST DICKENS opens, the latest story from the novelist’s pen was eagerly awaited by the public. Published as a serial, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD kept people hanging until the next installment. But when he died with it unfinished, it left readers in a frenzy to know what he intended. Had Edwin Drood survived in the end, or would his body be found somewhere?

In 1870, the year of Dickens’s death, Boston publishers Fields, Osgood & Co. had the only American rights to print the works of Charles Dickens. Often, that legal right meant very little back then, since, whenever a publisher expected a manuscript, literary thieves called bookaneers would hang around the docks or roam the streets, ready to pilfer whatever they could get their hands on. Even at the public readings, these bookaneers, having schooled themselves at shorthand, would steal the words right from Dickens’s mouth.

So it was that Daniel Sand, a delivery boy from Fields & Osgood, ended up being chased down by such a thief. Young Daniel was a trusted employee when he died, leaving his sister Rebecca, a bookkeeper at the publishing house, deep in mourning. For James Osgood, Daniel had also been a promising lad, one he held out much hope for, so the stories of drug use playing a part in his death hits Osgood hard. Barely able to believe it, he goes in search of the truth. And along with his search for what really happened to Daniel, he hopes to find more of THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, praying with great fervor that Dickens had left new chapters, or at least some notes. Anything.

Having exhausted his few leads in Boston, Osgood’s quest takes him across the seas to England, where he secures a room in the Falstaff Inn across the road from the gates to Gadshall Place, Dickens’s estate. He can’t help but wonder: Did Charles Dickens glean ideas for his stories here in the English countryside? Could he have written them based on events of the day, things he read about, people he encountered?

The streets of London turn unkind to Osgood. He finds himself facing great peril, realizing too late that he may have underestimated the danger he has gotten into. But he worries less for his personal safety than for Rebecca’s, for she has accompanied him on his trip as his assistant. She has also winnowed her way into his heart, whether he wishes to acknowledge it or not. Osgood must keep a clear head and stay focused on his mission, for the shady characters who seem to be following him have little value for lives other than their own. As it becomes apparent that Dickens likely stashed more of Edwin Drood somewhere, the tension ratchets up to a fever pitch and the Americans must run for their lives.

Matthew Pearl, the internationally bestselling author of THE DANTE CLUB and THE POE SHADOW, brings Charles Dickens to life as wholly as Dickens brought Tiny Tim to life. Fans of the famous writer will rejoice in the wealth of life details and trivia along with the incredible period detail. THE LAST DICKENS is truly a history lesson going hand in hand with a juicy mystery, as entertaining as it is educational. You can’t help but come away with the highly satisfying feeling that you rubbed shoulders with literary giants.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers, www.bookreporter.com

Essay on Rudyard Kipling by George Orwell

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:22:00 +0000

It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the
long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry,
but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about
Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets
of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar
position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary
generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of
that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and
Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily
explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge
that Kipling is a 'Fascist', he falls into the opposite error of
defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that
Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by
any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when
Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning
rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter
and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the
slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that
kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism
in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to
have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and
then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue
to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that
he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane
or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays. An interesting
instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without
any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the
line from 'Recessional', 'Lesser breeds without the Law'. This line is
always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a
matter of course that the 'lesser breeds' are 'natives', and a mental
picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a
coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite
of this. The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost certainly to the
Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are 'without the Law'
in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The
whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a
denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas
are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law--
Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word--
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Much of Kipling's phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in
the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: 'Except the
lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord
keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.' It is not a text that
makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time,
believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes
that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is
no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true
belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually
hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or
power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up
with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is prefascist. He
still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish
HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and
the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling's
jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the
nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook
are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period
1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows
little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer
War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase
(even more than his poems, his solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED,
gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian
of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its
shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang
out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was
political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for
this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest
victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before,
and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out
of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected,
the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand
what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic
forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not
seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial
administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.
Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a
Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the
Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not
foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into
existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for
example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber
estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to
the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the
nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both
attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move
forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that
after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who
despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without realizing
that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does
possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and
that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for
this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing
parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham,
because they make it their business to fight against something which they
do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at
the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which
those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and
those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought
to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our
'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian
is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the
central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be
difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words
than in the phrase, 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you
sleep'. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect
of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see
that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be
exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but
even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very
sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other
men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators,
soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is
sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a
young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine
surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic
led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The
nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his
idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that
they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is
instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of
India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have
achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a
single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say,
E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling's is the only
literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and
he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to
exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did
not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private
sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling's contemporaries
did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew
nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of
view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with 'the
wrong' people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly
suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is
traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early.
With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist
or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he
was a vulgar flagwaver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is
true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After
his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says
that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a
popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that 'unpopular' means
unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling's
'message' was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has
never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were
anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.
Kipling's official admirers are and were the 'service' middle class, the
people who read BLACKWOOD'S. In the stupid early years of this century,
the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet
and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his
more sententious poems, such as 'If', were given almost biblical status.
But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention,
any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could
not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the
inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a
rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not
always. That phrase about 'the flannelled fools at the wicket and the
muddied oafs at the goal' sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is
aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of
the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so
far as their subject-matter goes. 'Stellenbosch', which must have been
written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was
saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

Kipling's romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have
mattered if he could have held them without having the class-prejudices
which at that time went with them. If one examines his best and most
representative work, his soldier poems, especially BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS,
one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an
underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer,
especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the
private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is
always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but
with all the aitches and final "g's" carefully omitted. Very often the
result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social.
And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve
Kipling's poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply
going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard
speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly
lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the
other about a wedding):

So it's knock out your pipes and follow me!
And it's finish up your swipes and follow me!
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow me--follow me home!

and again:

Cheer for the Sergeant's wedding--
Give them one cheer more!
Grey gun-horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore!

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known
better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the first of
these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overriden
his impulse to make fun of a working-man's accent. In the ancient ballads
the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to
Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a
piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled--for 'follow me
'ome' is much uglier than 'follow me home'. But even where it makes no
difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is
irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the
printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary
alterations when they quote him.

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading
BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for
him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of reading a book of
verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the
class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only
that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic,
feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the
Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but
'What have I done for thee, England, my England?' is essentially a
middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately
with 'What has England done for me?' In so far as Kipling grasps this, he
simply sets it down to 'the intense selfishness of the lower classes'
(his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of 'loyal'
Indians he carries the 'Salaam, sahib' motif to sometimes disgusting
lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common
soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the
'liberals' of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected,
meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes
he safeguards. 'I came to realize', he says in his posthumous memoirs,
'the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he
endured'. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but
not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football
match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had
never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that
bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary
soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in
his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other
troops, frequently run away:

I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man,
Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see,
Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran,
An' I thought I knew the voice an'--it was me!

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the
debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow.

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were
hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic
strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men
ordered to attack impossible objectives ARE dismayed, and also that
fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the
long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say
of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India,
that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we
have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could
otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental
histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more
accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to
know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on
Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to
publish [Note, below], I was struck by the number of things that are
boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American.
But from the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge a vivid
and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army--
the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the
pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the
floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats
and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the
bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the
cholera-stricken camps, the 'native' concubines, the ultimate death in
the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic
music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier
passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea
of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they
will be able to learn something of British India in the days when
motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine
that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example,
George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's
opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was
not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like
WAR AND PEACE, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as
Sebastopol or THE COSSACKS, not because the talent was necessarily
lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such
books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a
great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man
of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire
was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers
find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the
centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of
what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable
combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which
Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm
trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was
that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

[Note: Published in a volume of Collected Essays, THE WOUND AND THE
BOW. Author's footnote 1945]

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to
the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use
without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we
admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters
referring to the Russian soldiers as 'robots', thus unconsciously
borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if
they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined
by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or
overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It
will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.
The white man's burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context
by many years. The phrase 'killing Kruger with your mouth', for instance,
was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling
who first let loose the use of the word 'Huns' for Germans; at any rate
he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the
phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them
phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be 'For I'm to be
Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May'), but which one is
bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt
of the NEW STATESMAN, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times
during the Munich period did the NEW STATESMAN find itself quoting that
phrase about paying the Dane-geld[Note, below]? The fact is that Kipling,
apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap
picturesqueness into a few words ('palm and pine'--'east of Suez'--'the
road to Mandalay'), is generally talking about things that are of urgent
interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and
decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence
from him. 'White man's burden' instantly conjures up a real problem, even
if one feels that it ought to be altered to 'black man's burden'. One may
disagree to the middle of one's bones with the political attitude implied
in 'The Islanders', but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude.
Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This
raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

[Note: On the first page of his recent book, ADAM AND EVE, Mr. Middleton
Murry quotes the well-known lines:

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as
a 'Freudian error.' A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling
--i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his
thought for him. (Author's footnote 1945.)]

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling's metrical work as 'verse' and not 'poetry',
but adds that it is 'GREAT verse', and further qualifies this by saying
that a writer can only be described as a 'great verse-writer' if there is
some of his work 'of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry'.
Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which
case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name.
The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling's work
seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able
to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to
start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling's
verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one
gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite 'The Pigtail
of Wu Fang Fu' with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is
much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what
poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like 'Gunga
Din' or 'Danny Deever', Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the
taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life.
But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced
by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is
merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares
for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
'Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!'

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as 'Felix Randal' or
'When icicles hang by the wall' are poetry. One can, perhaps, place
Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words 'verse' and
'poetry', if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet
what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of
work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to
be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age
we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should
say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems--I am deliberately
choosing diverse ones--are 'The Bridge of Sighs', 'When all the world is
young, lad', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', Bret Harte's 'Dickens in
Camp', 'The Burial of Sir John Moore', 'Jenny Kissed Me', 'Keith of
Ravelston', 'Casabianca'. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet--
not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable
of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with
them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it
were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too
well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, 'good' poetry can
have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few
people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a
certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable
to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One
can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still
possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and
the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of
the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very
word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen
disgust that most people feel when they hear the word 'God'. If you are
good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest
public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes.
But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested
reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry,
however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right
atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill
produced a great effect by quoting Clough's 'Endeavour' in one of his
broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could
certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that
the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not
even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much
better than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and
probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems
travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world
of school prize-days, Boy Scout singsongs, limp-leather editions,
pokerwork and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music
halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus
confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough
to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a
sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But
what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful
monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly
every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world
is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is
'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself
thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you
happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a
fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One
example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again!'
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but
at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you
will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone,
and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So
the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling's power as a good bad poet I have already
suggested--his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him
to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although
he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a
Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call
themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices
of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the
opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even
disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain
grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In
such and such circumstances, what would you DO?', whereas the opposition
is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where
it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of
its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out
with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by
events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the copybook headings',
as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British
governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his
political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he
imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he
gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine
what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his
favour that he is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to ÉPATER LES
BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world
of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem
less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the
same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of
cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND SUPERMAN.

source: http://www.george-orwell.org

Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Post-colonial theory, a mode of thought which accepts European Imperialism as a historical fact and attempts to address nations touched by colonial enterprises, has as yet failed to adequately consider Ireland as a post-colonial nation. Undoubtedly, Ireland is a post-colonial nation (where ‘post-’colonial refers to any consequence of colonial contact) with a body of literary work that may be read productively as post-colonial.

Although colonialism, as a subject for Irish criticism and theory, has been tentatively broached (for example, see Celtic Revivals (1985) by Seamus Deane) Edward Said’s lecture “Yeats and Decolonization”, published as a pamphlet by Field Day in 1988, was an important catalyst for post-colonial study of Irish literature and culture. The premise of this now seminal study is that Yeats was a poet of decolonisation, a muse expressing the Irish experience of the dominant colonial power of Britain. Rather than reading Yeats’s poetry from the conventional perspective of high European modernism Said explains that “he appears to me, and I am sure many others in the Third World, to belong naturally to the other cultural domain” (3).

Using this as his point of departure, Said enters into a line of argument which claims that Yeats was a central figure in debating and asserting an overt drive towards the construction of a national Irish identity as a vital act of decolonisation. Further, Said places Yeats within a global framework of anti-Imperialism, drawing parallels between the Irish poet and Third world writers and theorists such as Fanon, Neruda and Achebe. Though an incredibly influential essay, the reverberations of which may still be felt in Inventing Ireland and other texts, it is also a work that demands close analysis and is replete with short-sighted and ill-informed ideas.

Said locates Ireland among territories like India, South America, Africa and Malaysia as a site of colonial contention. In doing so he emphasises Ireland’s role, and thus Irish literature, in colonial history as a member of the peripheral (from a Eurocentric viewpoint) Third World. According to this “bog dwellers” are paralleled as the Irish counterpart to “innumerable niggers, .... babus and wogs” (6). Yet, this argument, in retrospect, does not hold.

Denis Donoghue (“Confusion in Irish Studies”) has explicitly condemned post-colonial theory for adopting a global paradigm of colonial experience as a discourse which treats all Empires as homogenous. Said’s essay, displaying many of the pitfalls critiqued by Donoghue, does indeed offer a simplistic formulation of colonial experience. A formulation convenient for both the nationalist politician and for the scholar searching for an uncomplicated post-colonial framework to elicit meaning in Irish literature. But this is centrally flawed, heedless to the individual national and regional encounter with Imperial powers in Ireland, or any colonial country. Despite acknowledging the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain, “it is true the connections are closer between England and Ireland than between England and India” (15), and the complexity of Yeats’s own position, “he belongs .... to the Protestant Ascendancy whose Irish loyalties .... were confused” (13), this is apparently only in order to gloss over such glaring disparities.

Said also wishes to present Ireland as a Third World nation, both England’s poor “other” and belonging to the “cultural domain” of the developing world in opposition to the First World of European modernism. It is not unfair to describe such sentiments as verging on the ahistorical. To discuss “Ireland’s backwardness” (14) and Third World status is to blatantly ignore the historical and economic fact that Ireland was, and is, a relatively wealthy member of the First World. As Liam Kennedy (Modern Ireland 107-121) clearly explains, even if Ireland has been a nation less wealthy than Britain or France, to consider Ireland as an underdeveloped peripheral nation is farcical:

The conclusion is inescapable: average incomes in Ireland, even half a century earlier in time than in the case of African and Asian countries, belonged to a different economic league. That league was a West European one, with Ireland enjoying much the same average living standards as countries like Spain, Norway, Finland, Italy (110).

What makes the Irish example so interesting and difficult for the post-colonial theorist is the fact that Ireland was victim, accomplice and beneficiary to British and European Imperialism. The sense of hybridity in post-colonial culture, that “cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other” (Bhabha 207) is essential to an understanding of Irish identity. Eight centuries of fluid movement between Ireland and Britain has produced some of the most complex cultural identities possible, and can be seen to manifest themselves today in the North as enigmatically as they ever have in Irish-British relations.

Irrespective of these problems (and there are others) one cannot ignore the fact that an “imperial relationship is there in all cases” (Said 15). “Yeats and Decolonization” is significant for the dual effect it had of bringing post-colonial theory into Irish cultural criticism and for moving Ireland closer to the post-colonial arena. And this is not to forget the most positive element of Said’s essay; his placing of Yeats as an important artist within the Irish context of nationalist aspirations and decolonising enterprises.

Though perhaps not as satisfyingly as the reader would hope, Said depicts Yeats’s “insistence on a new narrative” for Irish people as central to the emergence of Irish nationalism. The reclaiming of Ireland, of the geographical space and the imagining of a community in his poetry, acts as a resistance to colonialism. For Said “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats’s Poems 322) represents Yeats “at his most powerful” where “he imagines and renders” (24) the results of the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain. The poem has been further discussed in this vain by Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland 312-315) who interprets the “swan as the invading occupier and the girl as a ravished Ireland” (315). This reading, to Donoghue’s mind, exemplifies the confusion of his lecture “Confusion in Irish Studies”, yet there is something profitable to a post-colonial reading of “Leda”.

The poem was to have originally been written for publication in the Irish Statesman on the subject of the Russian Revolution but, as Donoghue notes, Yeats claimed that “as bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it” (Yeats’s Poems 587). However, “Leda” was composed in September 1923, a fact Kiberd finds persuasive in pointing to a return to politics with the subject and imagery of the Civil War. The final question:

Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (322)

suggests various meanings for the poem grounded in ambiguity. If one takes the Swan to be colonial Britain and Leda a feminised and dominated Ireland it would appear Yeats was offering a deep and prophetic commentary on the consequences of colonialism. According to Greek mythology, following the rape of Leda, Clytemnestra was born who would later kill Agamemnon. Here Yeats indicates that the birth of the new nation of Ireland after the withdrawal of England, the dropping from the “indifferent beak”, was destined to a chaotic and violent life. Anti-colonial nationalism, in effect based on a colonial model of state, searching for a return to a pre-colonial Ireland without acknowledging the hybridity of a new Irish culture, would inevitably lead to civil war. Unfortunately Yeats does not offer a solution to the problems of reasserting an Irish nation after colonialism, but his commentary does offer an insight to the complexities a post-colonial nation may encounter.

That “Yeats and Decolonlization” was published in 1988, merely a decade ago, bears witness to the fact that post-colonial discourse has only begun to contribute to both Irish culture and an understanding of that culture. As this process continues, with the publication of works by scholars like Lloyd and Kiberd, the example of Ireland should (hopefully) warp and twist the shape of current models of post-colonial thought. Certainly Ireland shall add to post-colonial discourse while post-colonialism will open up new critical spaces for the study of Irish literature and culture.

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This project was completed under the direction of Dr. Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/

The Believers: Keep the faith

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Zoë Heller's dark and funny farce of politics and family life impresses Joanna Briscoe

The Believers
by Zoë Heller
308 pages
£16.99

"Eagerly awaited" is a claim that usually carries a squeal of optimism, a dash of spin, the book's readership quietly enthusiastic rather than salivating at the bookshop door. However, five years after Notes on a Scandal - a novel that was Booker-shortlisted, translated into 29 languages and adapted into an Oscar-nominated film - Zoë Heller's latest offering, The Believers, is, quite genuinely, eagerly awaited.

This third novel is more mature than Notes on a Scandal, and radically different in tone and subject matter. The Believers is at heart an American novel: a larger, more considered, layered and utterly assured study of a family driven by political passion whose personal lives refuse to comply with prescribed ideology.

In a 1962 prologue, Audrey Howard meets the politically fervent, loud and energetic Joel Litvinoff while living a quiet London life as a typist. On their second meeting, he suggests she elope with him to his native America and she accepts the challenge. Forward to 2002 New York, neatly avoiding the heartsink of yet another 9/11 novel with glimpses of Ground Zero, and Joel is a celebrated radical lawyer, while Audrey has spent her life upholding both the uncompromising socialist politics the couple espouse and the almost mythical creation that is her husband.

The Believers focuses on this American-English Jewish family shortly after Joel suffers a stroke in the courtroom. His subsequent coma precipitates the unravelling of a family whose supposed political unity has always - quite naturally - been riddled with hypocrisies and clashing convictions. Audrey is by now a hilarious, foul-mouthed harridan: part monster, part inspiring law unto herself, her approach so excoriatingly direct that the reader waits in wincing glee for her next spitting and swearing tirade. The "mark of her unparalleled intimacy with the legend" that is Joel is a "deadpan unimpressibility". She's always been a reluctant mother, but a flicker of maternal impulse is inspired by her adopted son Lenny, to whose drug addiction and wastrel ways she is oblivious, while her two biological daughters, Karla and Rosa, receive little beyond scornful chastisements and dictates about how to live their lives.

Rosa has spent four years in Cuba, wedded to the cause of revolutionary socialism. She had imagined herself "striding along in history's vanguard, like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructivist poster", only to return to New York and attend an Orthodox synagogue. To her atheist family, this is an outrage.

Karla is the rejected, overweight oldest child, abused guardian of family delusions ("there was something in the brutal candour of her mother's sallies that pleased her"), and now the unhappy wife of a man who both resents and looks up to the feted Litvinoffs. An entirely unexpected adulteress, she begins an affair with a man she meets through work. The Litvinoff children's "impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing" among liberal intelligentsia has left them naive in many ways. Dogma has replaced emotion.

Joel's prognosis is increasingly grim: Rosa is left to struggle with her faith, Lenny with his addictions, and Audrey with everyone she encounters. Into the drama strolls Berenice Mason, armed with proof of her longterm affair with Joel in the form of a young son and paternity payments. This cracks even Audrey's carapace, and the resulting abusive outbursts are gems.

The Believers is an astonishingly well-observed slow burner, its virtuoso prose compressed and beautiful. Zoë Heller possesses true brilliance as a writer. Whether this novel hangs together cohesively is another matter: its intention is at times elusive, its momentum uneven. Despite the buildup of multiple viewpoints and dilemmas, the story itself maintains only a light hold on the reader, its hooks less deep than those of Notes on a Scandal, a novel whose sinister monomania extended an ever-tightening grip. Heller can only be admired for her refusal to crowd-please and for her almost cussed choice of subject matter, but extended scenes of dialogue can lose impact and slow the pace.

As a large, intelligent and stunningly written novel of a dysfunctional New York family, The Believers is strongly reminiscent of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Litvinoffs' knee-jerk 60s radicalism could be an easy target for mockery, but Heller's touch is light, and she reserves her more vicious satire for the bit-part players. This is a subtle, funny and dark family farce about faith and identity. It fails to satisfy completely, but in its thundering confidence and lyricism, The Believers is the work of a writer at the top of her game. [www.guardian.co.uk]

High Literature vs Popular Literature

noreply@blogger.com (son of rambow) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:08:00 +0000

In “Popular Literature” class—when I was a student at American Studies Gadjah Mada University majoring ‘American Literature and Culture’—my classmates and I used to have lively discussion on “dichotomy” of popular literature—often considered as low quality literature—versus high-brow literature. Why should this dichotomy exist? Who has privilege to decide which kind of literature is considered pop and which is high? And why should some people feel that they have that privilege?

Some literary critics said that when a work was produced only to follow what public wanted to read—just for fun or entertainment, no “deep meaning” under the surface of the story—then it would be categorized into “pop literature”. In addition to that, people also said the work was only for commercial’s need, because the writer needed money when writing. On the contrary, when a work was produced not only to follow public’s needs, it was written more to fulfill the writer’s ambition to communicate “something important” to readers, so that the work had “deep meaning”, then the work could be categorized into “high-brow literature”.

However, when talking about Jack London’s works, who would say that his works do not have deep meaning whereas London himself said that he wrote them only for money? Literary critics even classified London’s works into high-brow literature.
Besides that, critics said that the parameter of high-brow literature was when one work deserved to be included into canon. The canon here usually refers to “big anthologies” such as Norton Anthology, Heath Anthology, etc. Again, I want to ask, who has privilege to select which works to be included into those anthologies?
The publication of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN can be considered one way of women’s struggle to include women’s works into high-brow literature. In the ‘preface’ of its first edition published in 1985, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote:

“… no single anthology has represented the exuberant variety yet strong continuity of the literature that English speaking women have produced between the fourteenth century and the present. In the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN, we are attempting to do just that.”

“Complementing and supplementing the standard Norton anthologies of English and American literature, NALW should help readers for the first time to appreciate fully the female literary tradition which, for several centuries, has coexisted with, revised, and influenced male literary models.”

Furthermore, in the sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature appearing in the beginning of the twenty first century, Nina Baym, the general editor, stated in the preface:

“That the “untraditional” authors listed above have now become part of the American literary canon shows that canons are not fixed, but emerge and change.”

It can be included that in the long run dichotomy of pop and high literature will disappear peacefully. It is up to public to value and to choose which works they will read. I am of opinion that in society where people are mature enough to choose which works to read, bad writings will be left behind. [source: http://afemaleguest.blog.co.uk