on fairy tales

"The overwhelming bulk of the rest of so-called 'children's literature' attempts to entertain or to inform, or both. But most of these books are so shallow in substance that little of significance can be gained from them. The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life."
...
For a story to truly hold the child's attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality--and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child's predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and his future.
...
'Safe' stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments."

-Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

on technology

"The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, 'good' would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what 'looks good' would be ignored.

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of 'style' to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic descritption of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tre. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."

-Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Wonder and Passion: Poetic Lyricism of the Sublime in Narrative Prose

Life intervened this semester, and I clearly have not been diligent in keeping up with this blog. I ended up struggling to even show up to my classes, much less derive exceptional benefit from them. I've still got to finish my Children's Literature and Microeconomics courses in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I'll try to retrospectively post some work along and along.

This is the second big paper I wrote for my Introduction to English Studies class. I think I finally got the organization right, even though the topic wasn't particularly compelling. It was fun to explore the notion of the sublime as it was something we'd discussed in class and that had caught my interest in Danielle's thesis last year. (The difficulty with posting these papers is their specificity: what may make for a compelling argument to my TA won't mean a thing to someone who didn't read the abstract novella we were assigned as reading material. C'est la problème.)

Jeanette Winterson’s novella The Passion displays aspects of poetic lyricism by implying the existence of the notion of “the sacred.” Longinus defines this notion, also referred to as “the sublime,” as man’s ability to transcend the human condition with emotions and language, a sense of “otherness” only able to be suggested (Patten). Lyric poetry encompasses the sublime because of its ability to invoke a heightened reality beyond the particulars of human experience. Central to this concept is its mystery; the sacred is necessarily veiled, leaving characters unsure of whether what it encompasses is wonderful or terrible. A sacred reality supersedes the human experience by inspiring awe and veneration. The Passion follows the interwoven tales of two characters, Henri and Villanelle, throughout the course of the French Revolution, dealing in great measure with the grittier aspects of humanity. But by intimating the concept of the sacred, Winterson elevates the narrative to the status of a lyric poem. The notion of the sacred draws attention away from the realities of the human condition presented in the story and thus arises as a central component of the lyricism in Winterson’s prose.

One suggestion of the sacred included in the novella is Henri’s acknowledgement of the overwhelming emotion he feels while watching snowflakes fall. His awe over this natural phenomenon removes him from his present experiences of a “zero winter” and gruesome war. In an aside following a recounting of a New Year’s Eve mass service, he marvels at something so indescribable as the uniqueness of snowflakes:

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember. (Winterson 43)

The sacred lies behind the falling snow in the emotion that it inspires, revealed by the disbelief of Henri’s rhetorical questions. Such an observation is too great to hold in mind and spurs Henri to find a way to function in spite of it. His nod to the existence of a sublime reality is his affirmative answer to rhetorical questions dealing with an emotion too great for human capacity.

While his questions of how to persist in the face of the sacred may be posed rhetorically, Henri implies an affirmative answer to the issue raised. In doing so he acknowledges the grandeur of the snowfall as a source of the sublime. He makes the proposition that every snowflake is different and offers a contingency with the clause “if that were true.” Following this contingency are the problems that would necessarily arise from its truth. The implied syllogism is that if every snowflake were different, then the world could not go on, one could never get up off his knees, and one could never recover from the wonder of such an incredible natural event. Up until this point, however, Henri has not affirmed or denied the accuracy of his initial proposition. If every snowflake were not different, he would have no need to offer a solution for the problem of the world ending and never being able to recover from wonder. But Henri does offer a solution, the process of forgetting, and that solution affirms his belief in the truth of his initial statement.

Forgetting, Henri believes, enables the world to continue and man to function in the face of an overwhelming wonderment, which in this case serves the function of the sacred. The claim that “there is only the present and nothing to remember” may seem to mitigate any comprehension of the sublime or an “other” reality, but instead it heightens such notions by acknowledging their impossibility. The wonder of innumerable, individually distinct snowflakes is too great to hold in mind. This wonder is the subliminal reality recognized and hinted at by Henri that draws him above his experience of the present and lends to the lyrical nature of the novella as a whole.

Villanelle likewise wonders at the sublime, but for her it is the emotion of passion that provides an elevated reality. Describing passion, she says, “Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between [G-d] and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse” (Winterson 68). This epistemological observation sets passion as its own source of the sacred by superseding traditional boundaries. The statement draws attention to life’s polarity by drawing out pairs of opposites. If on one hand is a swamp, the lowest point, on the far other are mountains, the highest peaks. Fear repels and drives away; sex is the closest expression of attraction and intimacy. G-d is divine goodness; the Devil is worldly evil. These are the clear opposing boundaries by which life is understood, but passion as the sacred exists at none of these extremes.

Passion, instead, is an in between emotion, and this removal from the boundaries of every day extremities serves to intimate the notion of the sacred yet again in lyrical fashion. Villanelle views passion as something that cannot quite be grasped, and for all her insight she fails to define it for herself. It is an emotion and a concept that she cannot understand alone, only in relation to other concepts that she can easily recognize and define. Villanelle can only speak about passion as something that is other than swamps, mountains, fear, sex, G-d, and the Devil. Passion is sublime in that it is comprehended by its “otherness,” its place apart from the normal extremes by which humans measure experience. The sublime is sublime because it is other than human, and the notion of the sacred as passion can only exist in a semiotic system of differences (Culler 57).

Perhaps the most common source of a sacred other in lyricism is the sense of the divine. Winterson’s pervasive references to Christian religiosity throughout the narrative call out a higher purpose for the events of the story. Repeated nods to religion by both Henri and Villanelle depict the traditional sacredness inherent to the concept of the divine. Henri says describing a New Year’s Eve church service,

From the church came the roar of the last hymn… This was no lukewarm appeal to an exacting [G-d] but love and confidence that hung in the rafters, pushed open the church door, forced the cold from the stone, forced the stones to cry out. The church vibrated. (Winterson 43)

Henri’s description of the church service sets it in contrast to his own “lukewarm people” (7) with strong and animated verbiage—roaring, hanging, pushing, forcing, crying out, vibrating. Henri’s people, on the other hand, are “a people of longing who are not easily touched,” who “will the darkness to part and show [them] a vision” (7). The sublimity of the divine associated with religion draws people out of themselves into a communal whole. It manifests itself in a congregational voice uttering a final hymn, full of a force that Henri feels keenly.

Henri goes on to question the source of this force, asking “what gave them this joy? What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better?” and wondering if it was “their little [L-RD]” (Winterson 43). While his questions reveal layers of doubt in Henri’s mind about the existence of G-d in a traditional sense, he achieves closure by acknowledging that what he saw in the church, no matter its source, was a real response to a sacred other. Its power was strong enough to warm winter and give hope to cold and hungry people, and Henri recognized that as something worthy of being sung. The sense of the sublime found by so many in religious notions of G-d and divinity revealed itself to Henri in the congregation’s response, and it provided an escape from the harshness of the cold winter and brutal war swirling about them outside the walls of the sanctuary.

The higher sublime reality manifests itself in the narrative’s instances of emotion that cannot be contained, passion that cannot be defined, and a pervasive sense of religiosity strung throughout, all of which serve to remove the text from the issues at hand and elevate it to the status of a lyric poem. As in poetry, which can likewise only make suggestions towards the sublime, the narrative acknowledges through the tools of exclusions, differences, and responses a force wholly other than the humanity of war, sex, and poverty. Both Henri and Villanelle gesture toward the sacred as they narrate their stories, and the novella thus projects an amplified resonance impossible to achieve if concerned only with the human condition and not the element of the sublime that calls to a reality outside of it. 

C'est presque le fin du semestre, et je suis fatiguée et très stressé. Après, je me reposerai, et ce sera bon, et je regarderai mes cours dans littérature des enfants et microéconomiques. Et, bien sur, la belle langue de français! Toujours la français, pour mon fleurir.

Beat'ing the Renaissance: Postmodern Ideals vs. Sidney's Standard of Poetry

Greetings from the middle of week two of midterms! I just received a grade and feedback on my first big paper for Introduction to English Studies, where we've spent the first half of the course studying poetry. The prompt for this paper was to investigate in 1,000 to 1,200 words whether and how it is appropriate for a literary critic or general reader to evaluate twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry according to the expectations of Sir Philip Sidney (whose  essay "Defense of Poesy" has been the focalizing text of the course thus far), hinging the argument on a close semantic reading of a modern/postmodern poem chosen from a provided list.  In hindsight I realize that I didn't address the prompt explicitly, and the material probably would have been better suited to a term paper where I'd have room to explore the connections between Beat poetry and Renaissance standards. Nevertheless, below is my hard-earned B attempt.

     The Beatnik poetry of the 1950s, particularly Gary Snyder’s “How Poetry Comes to Me,” fails to meet Sir Philip Sidney’s Renaissance standard of true poetry by embodying the postmodern ideals of reflexivity, epicureanism, fragmentation, and subjectivity regarding experience that are antithetical to that standard. In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney defines true poetry as being “an art of imitation… with this end, —to teach and delight” (Sidney 11). Postmodernism is a contemporary, cross-disciplinary movement that questions traditional objective notions of meaning, particularly within a literary context (Klages). While not then recognized under the designation of a specific title, the concepts associated with postmodernism began to materialize in the 1950s with the emergence of the Beatniks, or Beats, a counterculture of writers and poets who exhibited many of the postmodern ideals. As the movement strengthens in the twenty-first century and the notions of meaning and purpose associated with Sidney grow more and more antiquated, replaced by ambiguous concepts of literary theory (Culler 2), it is imperative to examine whether Sidney’s criteria applies to the poetry of changing generations.
     In his Defense, Sidney sets forth as the marks of true poetry a certain “teaching” and “delighting” with the ultimate intention of increasing knowledge that moves toward virtuous action (25). He claims that heroical poetry is the “best and most accomplished kind of poetry” because it not only teaches and moves to truth, but to the “most high and excellent truth; who maketh magnanimity and justice shine through all misty fearfulness and foggy desires” (29). Sidney uses the characters of Ulysses, Achilles, and Aeneas as examples of heroic figures that fashion forth the merits of virtue in their best attire. The concrete narratives and clear depictions of virtue present in heroic poetry stand in direct opposition to the characteristics of postmodern poetry.
     While specific postmodern ideologies are as difficult to nail down as a comprehensive definition of postmodernism itself, the rhetoric of the twentieth century poetry that it encompasses has a few trademark characteristics. Fragmentation, or randomness, of narratives and ideas; reflexivity, an artistic self-consciousness of art’s own production; epicureanism, a philosophy that insists the highest good is found in pleasure; and a subjectivity regarding experience are all marks of this poetry. These characteristics do not possess the same ability as heroic poetry to clearly depict virtue because they shroud their literary manifestations in obscurity and abstractions.
     The Beat generation, although associated as much with certain styles of dress and the settings of North Beach in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City as it is with any explicit doctrine or concept, embodies this postmodern ambiguity. According to an article by Dr. F. Allen Briggs in a 1960 volume of The English Journal, the core philosophy of the Beats involves “a frenetic insistence on epicureanism, a frantic seizing of the joys of the present in the face of a persistent belief that only the present exists” (312). Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac are perhaps some of the most notable Beat writers, and their respective works “Howl” and On the Road are broadly-scoped demonstrations of the ideology that would later emerge under the banner of the postmodern movement.
     Gary Snyder’s “How Poetry Comes to Me,” reproduced below, is an exceptionally succinct case study for the application of Sidney’s criteria to Beat poetry, because it displays the qualities of postmodernism that are in opposition to his standard:

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light (Snyder 361)

The title, meter, and content of the poem present the reflexive, epicurean, fragmented, and subjective aspects of postmodernism that fall short of Sidney’s criteria for true poetry.
     The title of the poem alone is an example of the poem’s reflexivity, which extends to the epicurean tendencies of the work. Immediately, Snyder draws attention to the act of the art’s creation by titling it in a way that indicates the following words will explain his creative process, not attempt to impart any sort of meaning to the reader. This sort of self-awareness is a manifestation of the epicurean values of the Beats, dictating that the highest good is pleasure for the individual (Klages).
     The fragmented rhythm of the poem’s free verse form displays a lack of structure that is inherently postmodern. In his Defense, Sidney does make qualifications regarding verse by stating, “There have been many most excellent poets who never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets” (13). The lack of steady rhythm does not disqualify Snyder’s poetry according to Sidney’s criteria, but the fragmentation of ideas that it represents does. The mostly random meter can best be categorized as an oft-interrupted anapest applied to three complete sentences that do not adhere to the boundaries of the lines. The basic subject-predicate combinations of those sentences, “It comes,” “it stays,” and “I go,” are in no way connected to the poem’s outer form. As Ezra Pound said of rhythm: “Rhythm must have meaning. It can’t be merely a careless dash-off, with no grip and no real hold to the words and sense” (“Rhythm and Versification” 497). The rhythmic free-for-all of this poem is inherently postmodern: it provides no “grip” on the words and sense of the poem, and in turn it can be extended to the fragmented, random narratives typical to postmodern literature, specifically Ginsbergs’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On the Road.
     The way and manner by which the poetry comes, which is the content’s primary concern, is of particular relevance, as it reveals the subjectivity of Snyder’s encounter. His choice of the words “blundering” and “frightened” to describe poetry’s course in coming to him is curious, as these are two adjectives not generally attributed to the heightened language of poetry. Further, the poetry’s location at the edge, where it hovers on the brink and stays on the outskirts of the “light,” is an example of the typical postmodern subjectivity, or its existence in reality only as the speaker perceives it. This is not Sidney’s noble rhetoric that clearly depicts virtue through all “misty fearfulness and foggy desires” (29). On the contrary, Snyder’s poem makes no effort to reveal any sort of truth at all. It concerns him and his art alone, and that encounter itself is a “blundering,” “frightened” affair. The poetry itself is as subjective as Snyder’s experience meeting it. The poem may very well delight the reader by abstractly revealing Snyder’s artistic process, and in so doing perform a kind of teaching akin to Sidney’s poetic criteria, but to what end? Along with much of the Beat literature, it is characteristically aimless.
     Where Snyder’s poem and Beat literature in general fall short of Sidney’s standard does not concern the relation of a counterculture rising in opposition to an established tradition as much as it does that counterculture’s lack of enduring purpose. Rather than to the Renaissance’s standards of virtue, truth, and justice, modern poets are called to no standard at all. Postmodernism cares naught for what one says or how one says it; it only matters that one has spoken. If the Beats have no higher purpose, no “golden world” to strive to represent and toward which to aspire (Sidney 10), their work will only ring loud until their experiences are obsolete and then fall deaf on the ears of those who long for the heightened experience of meaning. Rhetoric, after all, is useless play at games of dress up if it has not some figure such as virtue to adorn.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I haven't posted in a while, but the semester is in full swing. One of the things I'm discovering is the incalculable value of assigned readings: I am desperate to find time to get to all of them, because even if we don't discuss them in class, I glean so much from every page. It makes me glad that I have these few years to wholly devote to an education-- what a blessed life.


Below is a journal posting from my Pre-Civil War American Literature class. This is a weekly assignment for which we write a (very) short exposition of a certain aspect of one of the texts we've encountered during the week. At the time we were covering war poetry, and I was drawn to Millay's work after being snagged by an opening line of another of her poems, "I know I am but summer to your soul," several years ago. 

Apostrophe to Man

 (on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.

I forgot for a moment
I forgot for a moment France; I forgot England; I forgot my care:
I lived for a moment in a world where I was free tobeWith the things and people that I love, and I was happy there.
I forgot for a moment Holland, I forgot my heavy care.
I lived for a moment in a world so lovely, so inept
At twisted words and crooked deeds, it was if I slept and dreamt.
It seemed that all was well with Holland--not a tank had crushed
The tulips there.
Mile after mile the level lowlands blossomed--yellow square, white square,
Scarlet strip and mauve strip bright beneath the brightly clouded sky, the round clouds and the gentle air.
Along the straight canals between striped fields of tulips in the morning sailed
Broad ships, their hulls by tulip-beds concealed, only the sails showing.
It seemed that all was well with England--the harsh foreign voice hysterically vowing,
Once more, to keep its word, at length was disbelieved, and hushed.
It seemed that all was well with France, with her straight roads
Lined with slender poplars, and the peasants on the sky-line ploughing.

The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay sets the feminine ideal of self sufficient domesticity at odds with the concept of war, as demonstrated in the following line from Apostrophe to Man:

“Breed, crowd, encroach…”

These are three loaded words, bearing the particular burden of war unique to women. The language she uses is decidedly bitter, indicative of the feminine ideal being infringed upon by the realities of war. “Breed, crowd, and encroach” immediately connotes the Biblical exhortation to “be fruitful and multiply,” but it places an alternatively negative spin on the traditionally positive instruction. To breed is animalistic and inexpressive, characteristics that can probably be extended to the author’s conception of war. “Breeding” and “crowding” bear no resemblance to making love, raising a family, or building community—relational ideals of femininity which are suspended in times war, when fathers, sons, and brothers are often absent from the landscape of home.

In I Forgot for a Moment, Millay delivers further glimpses of what perhaps may be construed as bitterness toward war. When she dreams that “all was well with Holland—not a tank had crushed/The tulips there,” she imparts a disturbing mental picture to the reader. The image of flowers, a distinctly female symbol, being crushed by the wartime tanks is a concept consistent with the language used in Apostrophe to Man. Like tanks upon a field of tulips, war “encroaches” upon the feminine sensibilities, and Millay’s poetry gives voice to the women whose pain is inherent in that reality.

from "The Riots"

Yesterday at my internship at the University of Georgia Press, I began proofreading a manuscript that I am really enjoying. The training I'm receiving at this internship is indispensable, no matter how the four long hours of copy comparison at a desk in a silent office may drag on. Who knew there were so many things that can go wrong on a page of a book? Widows and orphans and ladders and the like (oh, pardon my insider publishing jargon).

If this mode of work can be the tool by which I support a life of love and grace and learning and glorifying the L-RD, I think I'm alright with that. But I wanted to share an excerpt from this manuscript that I found particularly engaging. Here the narrator, a young woman who grew up in Oregon and is now living in New York, is silently addressing the proprietor of a downtown hardware store. She has just had her heart broken in a huge and awful and typical way, and she feels a paternally-imparted need to build something with her hands (her father was a carpenter). I love it for all of the parallelism it presents to me, and because when I lived in the East Village I felt that the man at the hardware store on First Avenue (where I bought screws to hang the frames I was buying at thrift stores and coolers to hold the beer for the beach) was someone who had answers.

"I want you to tell me something. I want you to explain how I might resolve my heart, or how to build a wooden box. Explain to me how I could be so blind, how I could let him twist me into this--for what? Yes, for what, exactly--and also how do I make sure the joints match up, and do you recommend glue or nails or both?"