Modern and Contemporary American Literature - Maria Garcia Lorenzo y Ana Zamorano

Modern and Contemporary American Literature

MARÍA M. GARCÍA LORENZO ANA ISABEL ZAMORANO RUEDA

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

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© Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Madrid,2013

www.uned.es/publicaciones

© María M. García Lorenzo y Ana Isabel Zamorano Rueda. Todas nuestras publicaciones han sido sometidas a un sistema de evaluación antes de ser editadas. ISBN electrónico: 978-84-362-6532-3 Edición digital: febrero de 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Comments .......................................................................................

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FIRST STUDY BLOCK 1900-1945 UNIT ONE. A NATION’S COMING OF AGE ................................................................. 1. PRESENTATION: Clues to the period ........................................................... 1.1. The United States at the turn of the century........................................ 1.2. Literary Modernism(s) in America ....................................................... 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Sherwood Anderson’s Revolt ........................................... 2.1. Approaching Anderson’s «Hands» ........................................................ 2.2. Revisiting «Hands» ................................................................................ 3. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 3.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 3.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 3.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 4.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 4.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

21 21 21 26 34 34 37 44 44 45 46 46 46 47 48

UNIT TWO. «MAKE IT NEW»: EXPERIMENTS IN POETRY ......................................... 1. PRESENTATION: New poetry ....................................................................... 1.1. European, Asian and African influences: the International Style ........................................................................................................ 1.2. Technical and thematic innovations ..................................................... 1.3. The aim of poetry................................................................................... 2. TEXT ANALYSIS ........................................................................................... 2.1. APPROACHING Modernist poetry .......................................................

49 49 50 53 56 58 58

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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

2.2. REVISITING Modernist poetry ............................................................ T.S. Eliot’s «The Hollow Men» .............................................................. Ezra Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro» ............................................ Williams Carlos Williams’ «This is Just to Say»................................... Wallace Stevens’ «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock» ............................ Robert Frost’s «After Apple-Picking» .................................................... 3. EXERCISES ................................................................................................... 3.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 3.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 3.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 4.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 4.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

66 66 71 74 76 78 82 82 83 84 84 84 85 85

UNIT THREE. «AN AGE OF MIRACLES AND SATIRE»: JAZZ AND DEPRESSION ........... 1. PRESENTATION: A lost generation .............................................................. 1.1. Babbitts and Gatsbies ............................................................................ 1.2. Agony of the American Dream: Coming to terms with the wasteland ........................................................................................ 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed Adam ................................... 2.1. APPROACHING Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby .................................... 2.2. REVISITING The Great Gatsby ............................................................. 3. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 3.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 3.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 3.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 4.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 4.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

87 87 90 92 100 100 102 116 116 118 118 119 119 119 121

UNIT FOUR. «IF ONLY I STILL HAD FAITH IN WORDS»: EXPERIMENTS IN FICTION ........................................................................................ 1. PRESENTATION: Disbelief in words ............................................................ 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: William Faulkner’s innovative fiction .............................

123 123 131

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

2.1. APPROACHING Faulkner’s «Barn Burning» ....................................... 2.2. REVISITING «Barn Burning» .............................................................. 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Ernest Hemingway’s search for grace............................. 3.1. APPROACHING Hemingway’s «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» ............. 3.2. REVISITING «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» ......................................... 4. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 4.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 4.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 4.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 5.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 5.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

131 135 142 142 146 155 155 157 158 158 158 159 159

UNIT FIVE. THE «NEW NEGRO» AND THE «NEW WOMAN»: RACE AND GENDER IN THE MODERNIST PROJECT................................................................. 1. PRESENTATION: Race and gender in Modernist America ......................... 1.1. Harlem and the «New Negro»............................................................... 1.2. The «New Woman» and the new century ............................................. 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Langston Hughes’ poetic claims ..................................... 2.1. APPROACHING Hughes’ «I, Too» ........................................................ 2.2. REVISITING Hughes’ «I, Too» ............................................................. 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Zora Neale Hurston’s proud fiction ................................ 3.1. APPROACHING Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits» ............................... 3.2. REVISITING «The Gilded Six-Bits» ..................................................... 4. TEXT ANALYSIS: Edith Wharton’s revisionist fiction ................................. 4.1. APPROACHING Edith Wharton’s «Roman Fever» .............................. 4.2. REVISITING «Roman Fever» ............................................................... 5. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 5.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 5.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 5.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 6.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 6.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 6.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

161 161 162 166 170 170 172 175 175 177 183 183 185 190 190 192 193 193 193 194 195

Mock exams for first study block ........................................................................

197

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SECOND STUDY BLOCK AFTER 1945 UNIT SIX. «SICK WITH APPEARANCES»: MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA ........................ 1. PRESENTATION: Between realism and expressionism ............................... 1.1. The extraordinary in the ordinary ........................................................ 1.2. Review of dramatic elements ................................................................ 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Arthur Miller’s drama of the common man ................... 2.1. APPROACHING Miller’s Death of a Salesman ..................................... 2.2. REVISITING Death of a Salesman........................................................ 3. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 3.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 3.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 3.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 4.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 4.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

205 205 209 211 213 213 215 225 225 227 228 228 228 228 229

UNIT SEVEN. THE UNITED STATES AFTER WORLD WAR II .................................... 1. PRESENTATION: After Modernism .............................................................. 1.1. Literary Postmodernism(s) ................................................................... 1.2. A generation of «furtives»: the Beats .................................................... 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Allen Ginsberg’s Beat manifesto ..................................... 2.1. APPROACHING Ginsberg’s Howl ......................................................... 2.2. REVISITING Howl ................................................................................ 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Thomas Pynchon’s entropic visions ................................ 3.1. APPROACHING Pynchon’s «Entropy» ................................................. 3.2. REVISITING «Entropy»........................................................................ 4. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 4.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 4.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 4.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 5.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 5.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

231 231 234 243 246 246 248 253 253 255 260 260 262 263 263 263 263 264

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UNIT EIGHT. DISSENTING VOICES IN THE 1960’S.................................................. 1. PRESENTATION: After the «tranquilized fifties»......................................... 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Adrienne Rich’s empowered voice .................................. 2.1. APPROACHING Rich’s «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» ................ 2.2. REVISITING «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law»................................ 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Amiri Baraka’s black power............................................. 3.1. APPROACHING Baraka’s Dutchman.................................................... 3.2. REVISITING Dutchman........................................................................ 4. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 4.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 4.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 4.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 5.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 5.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

267 267 270 270 273 280 280 283 290 290 291 293 293 293 293 294

UNIT NINE. NEW FICTIONS................................................................................... 1. PRESENTATION: Postmodern narratives..................................................... 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Ursula K. Le Guin’s challenge to Logocentrism ............. 2.1. APPROACHING Le Guin’s «She Unnames Them» .............................. 2.2. REVISITING «She Unnames Them».................................................... 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Raymond Carver’s subversive Realism ........................... 3.1. APPROACHING Carver’s «Cathedral» .................................................. 3.2. REVISITING «Cathedral» ..................................................................... 4. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 4.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 4.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 4.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 5.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 5.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

295 295 302 302 303 309 309 313 319 319 320 322 322 322 322 323

UNIT TEN. THE VOICES OF MULTICULTURALISM..................................................... 1. PRESENTATION: Metaphors for the «e pluribus unum» ............................ 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: N. Scott Momaday’s construction of identity .................

325 325 332

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2.1. APPROACHING Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain .................. 2.2. REVISITING The Way to Rainy Mountain ........................................... 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Sandra Cisneros’ gendered borderland .......................... 3.1. APPROACHING Cisneros’ «Woman Hollering Creek» ........................ 3.2. REVISITING «Woman Hollering Creek» ............................................. 4. EXERCISES .................................................................................................... 4.1. Test yourself ........................................................................................... 4.2. Explore ................................................................................................... 4.3. Key terms ............................................................................................... 5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 5.1. Recommended readings ........................................................................ 5.2. Critical works cited ................................................................................ 5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit .................................................

332 334 340 340 342 347 347 348 349 349 349 350 351

MOCK EXAMS FOR SECOND STUDY BLOCK................................................

353

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................

359

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INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

1. OUTLINE OF THE VOLUME Modern and Contemporary American Literature is a survey textbook specifically designed for independent students of contemporary American Literature. It assumes the difficult and ambitious task of doing justice to one century of a rich, multifaceted literature. This volume tries to overcome the difficulty of periodization by establishing two main study blocks: Modernism and Postmodernism. These blocks are conceived as instrumental compartments to delineate two main moments in the recent history of the United States: before the Second World War and after. Shifty and delusive as those labels are, they nevertheless provide comprehensive nomenclatures for a set of common attitudes, interests and cultural modes. Readers should therefore contemplate these two blocks, and the authors and works included in them, as moments or cultural spirits rather than literary movements. The literary works discussed in each Unit are felt to offer pertinent samples of the American literature of the twentieth century. They should be approached as illustrative of a social and cultural climate, and also as the authors’ personal response to such climate. Readers should therefore notice the specificity of the stylistic and ideological traits contained in each work. With the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, these readings are anthologized in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th edition, edited by Nina Baym. All the excerpts quoted from this anthology are hence indicated with the acronym NAAL. In order to facilitate the readers’ location of critical references, these are indicated with a parenthetical notation in which the name of the author and the page number are given. If the Unit cites more than one work by the same author, the year of publication is also mentioned. A final observation about the writing of this volume concerns the use of the adjective «American» to designate the people and the issues related to

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the United States. The authors of this volume are aware that «American» is on occasions a politically incorrect term, particularly in those cases in which other issues of the American continent are implicated. «North-American,» moreover, presents the same problem as «American» in that it is not specific enough. «American,» nevertheless, will be used throughout the volume to follow common practice. This opening chapter of the volume aims at introducing the Units that follow, and at guiding readers in the most adequate use of the book. Thematically, its ten Units have been outlined in the knowledge that the present design is just one of the many possible methods of distributing the subject. Not only have aesthetic or chronological reasons been taken into account in its organization, but the readers’ learning and reading processes as well. The Units have been articulated in such a way that the longest pieces of reading are not allocated consecutively. Thus, Unit Three —which discusses the one novel required by the volume— follows a chapter devoted to poetry where a selection of brief poems is analyzed. In the awareness of the disadvantages of arranging Units according to «movements,» «periods,» or «genres,» functionality finally advised a combination of organizational instruments. This way, different authors, texts, styles, social issues and intellectual aspects are properly covered. Readers will surely find authors or texts attended to under one certain epigraph, while also mentioned in other chapters of the volume. For instance, although The Great Gatsby is analyzed as a representative work of the Lost Generation (Unit Three) it could easily be included in the chapter dedicated to fictional experimentation (Unit Four). Similarly, Death of a Salesman illustrates the maturity of American drama in the twentieth century (Unit Six), but it could well represent the spiritless years after the Second World War discussed in Unit Seven. An interesting issue arises when dealing with American literature of the twentieth century: to what extent are the works surveyed here «American»? Many of the most prominent authors of the first half of the century decided to abandon their homeland in order to take up residence and career in Europe. Others resorted to rhythms and/or diction original of foreign lands. Similarly, Unit Ten provides an instance of literature that intertwines English and Spanish. Readers are thus encouraged to take this aspect into account and to reflect on the American literature of the twentieth century as deeply self-questioning. 14

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Pedagogically, each Unit is composed of several sections, each with a specific purpose:

 A program and learning outcomes are stated at the beginning of each Unit. They function as a preparation for the contents that follow, since readers are expected to focus on the issues thus pinpointed.

 All Units include suitable guided readings to the course’s set readings (the TEXT ANALYSIS epigraph) that exemplify those aspects previously discussed. Readers are expected to read literary texts thoroughly and critically. In order to achieve this, they will find two different sections, named APPROACHING and REVISITING, committed to the analysis of literary texts: — The «APPROACHING…» sections have been designed as a warmingup phase prior to the actual reading of the literary text. They introduce readers to relevant contextual matters, and also provide them with a series of reading strategies (introduced by the phrase Bear in mind…) that highlight those aspects of the text that should be particularly observed. This brief list of recommendations is intended to situate readers in new social or artistic scenarios, anticipate potential difficulties they might find in their learning, and ease their first contact with the literary text. — The «REVISITING…» section is a return to the literary text, once the reader has become familiar with its basic contents with the help of the previous section. Conceived as an array of questions and minitasks inside white boxes signed with the symbol , «REVISITING…» will lead readers through the formal and thematic patterns of each literary text, help them track literary devices or motifs as they read on, and find relevant examples of each. Grey boxes marked with the symbol will serve as abstracts and reminders of the most significant aspects covered by the Unit.



 At the end of each Unit readers will find a set of different EXERCISES for self-assessment, review and inquiry: — «Test yourself» questions are study questions, designed to make readers apply the ideas and critical vocabulary contained in the Unit, as well as to revise the literary work previously read in order

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to provide substantial and pertinent examples for the concepts discussed. These questions subdivide into author questions —on the specific authors and texts surveyed in the Unit— and summary questions —formulated as revision activities to recall the totality of the Unit. Each Unit contains the necessary information to easily provide appropriate answer to these questions. — With a view to enrich the readers’ approach to literary works, the section called «Explore» proposes further study to complement the Unit’s work. The questions here contained encourage readers to provide personal interpretations based on the information supplied by the volume and the literary text itself. This section also suggests critical inquiry into other cultural manifestations of the period (art, movies, music, etc) to round up the ideological or formal items surveyed in the Unit. — Readers will also find a compendium of the main terms used in each Unit. «Key terms» is more than a static glossary of important terms: it is designed as an invitation to readers to review the Unit in search of a definition and suitable examples for each word, hence its inclusion in the part of the Unit dedicated to assignments. It also encourages readers to assemble their own glossary of the critical terminology that they are expected to understand and handle adequately.

 Each Unit incorporates a BIBLIOGRAPHY section, subdivided in three. Firstly, «Recommended readings» invites students to consolidate the knowledge acquired with complementary reading, a bibliographical support that, on most occasions, is available on the Internet (please be aware that the addresses here suggested might eventually change or disappear). It then lists the critical texts that have provided references along the Unit. Besides acknowledging sources in the academic style, this subsection facilitates editorial information in case readers wish to pursue further critical inquiry. The section named «Literary works mentioned in this Unit» aims at supplying a concise outline of the literary works mentioned but not analyzed in the previous pages. Readers are thus succinctly introduced to the work and its essential details (author, year of publication, and central idea). 16

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

2. LEARNING OUTCOMES This volume addresses some of the issues that configure this fertile and influential moment of American literary history. Here are some of the abilities students will progressively acquire: — To examine how literary works reflect American society and culture. Several political and social developments feed and show up in the works under discussion: the two World Wars, technological progress, the lives and rights of minority groups, women’s emancipation... — To analyze the ideological, social, and artistic issues that inspire the contemporary landscape. Science, technology, and the media have dominated the American culture since the end of the nineteenth century. A change in the perception of experience necessarily implies a parallel change in the portrayal of such experience. — To explore the variety of genres in which a similar variety of voices express themselves. Although the academic canon has settled the term «American Literature,» the plural form of the phrase illustrates the diversity of voices, the multiplicity of values and beliefs, and the kaleidoscopic nature of the United States in the contemporary era. This plurality, however, also involves a shared tradition of literary forms and myths difficult to ignore. — To develop critical strategies to approach literature. The readers’ previous knowledge of literary elements such as imagery, prosodic features, characterization, etc. counts as an effective utility in order to face the tasks demanded by Modern and Contemporary American Literature. Nevertheless, they will be supplied with extra critical equipment to develop a comprehensive reading and a critical awareness of the literary text. Interpretation and evaluation require such equipment, as well as a personal involvement and —hopefully— a delight in the text. — To practice discussion skills and expository strategies. Readers are invited to meditate on the literary works with a view to expose the outcome of such meditation in a well-organized, well-documented and coherent way.

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All in all, the volume’s essential goal is twofold: the readers’ understanding of the vast and complex American literary production of the twentieth century, and their active response to the literary works proposed.

3. RECOMMENDATIONS Readers are heartily advised to pay attention to the following suggestions: — The APPROACHING… sections, in particular the recommendations listed under Bear in mind…, should be checked before the actual reading of the proposed text or texts. The REVISITING… section can be examined beforehand or afterwards, although most readers may want to read without the interceding presence of the section, which might supply an excess of information about the work. Logically enough, the tasks included in each Unit, self-assessing or interpretative, should be attempted after reading through the literary works proposed. — The proposals of the Explore section are, as mentioned above, discussion questions. In other words, they are exercises in exploration and interpretation. They should be approached as individual responses to the texts, debatable and open. — The Key Terms section provides readers with an inventory of the critical terms used in the Unit, which for easy location have been highlighted in bold type. Instead of supplying basic definitions for such terminology, this record is designed to encourage readers to find a proper explication for each term in the Unit, and to complete the section with suitable examples extracted from the readings. The volume aspires to set premises for future readings, and to develop the reader’s fondness of literature. In this light, it is highly convenient that readers approach the text not as a collection of clues that they must unveil, but rather as a texture of words and ideas whose making the readers can bring to light, in the same way as the flavor of a dish can be sensed in its totality, and also traced back to its ingredients.

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FIRST STUDY BLOCK 1900-1945

UNIT ONE A NATION’S COMING OF AGE

Program 1. PRESENTATION: Clues to the period 1.1. The United States at the turn of the century 1.2. Literary Modernism(s) in America 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Sherwood Anderson’s revolt 2.1. APPROACHING Anderson’s «Hands» 2.2. REVISITING «Hands» 3. EXERCISES Learning outcomes — To understand the particular historical, social and intellectual conditions of the United States between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. — To analyze the impact of such conditions on the literary production of the nation. — To examine the phenomenon of Modernism and explore its diverse literary manifestations as seen in Sherwood Anderson’s «Hands.»

1. PRESENTATION: CLUES TO THE PERIOD 1.1. The United States at the turn of the century Broadly speaking, the starting years of the twentieth century rejected former beliefs and values and searched for new ones. It goes without saying that this changing era did not start abruptly: Europe and America alike had undergone deep political transformations and intellectual restlessness from the second half of the nineteenth century. The United States, in particular, had been engaged in a Civil War that initiated significant social and economic changes, and the nation was still to undergo profound transformation in their public and private affairs. The intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century had been highly enticing, and it proved decisive for modern artistic expressions:

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 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), despite the controversy they raised, paved the path for existential reflection: the very essence of the human being —what it meant to be human— needed reevaluation. The semi divine and rational nature of humankind, as conceived in many works of art, suffered a severe drawback.

 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) stressed the dependence of human lives on economic imperatives. According to Marx, history and people’s lives were controlled by a minority who owned the means of production and distribution.

 Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) claimed that human behavior was shaped by an inaccessible section of ourselves. Freud stated that the unconscious is the custodian of socially unacceptable impulses and desires that must remain repressed.

 Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was first published in 1916. It is little coincidence that such innovative works as The Wasteland and Ulysses (1922) or Mrs Dalloway (1925) appeared shortly afterwards. Einstein’s scheme of time, space and matter quickly took ground among intellectuals and artists alike. Particularly interesting for this volume is how writers understood and recreated the convergence of observer and observed and the space-time continuum. Space and time had been conceived in Newtonian physics as separate and distinct categories and, therefore, each knowable for itself, but Einstein asserted that they must be placed on a continuum. Thus, the physical world joined human experience in a dynamic flux that resisted categorization and absolute representation.

 James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion appeared in several volumes between 1890 and 1915. The anthropologist offered an ample profile of the religious and folkloric systems held by several civilizations. It also emphasized religious beliefs as cultural phenomena, and as interconnected symbolic schemes that were shared by many societies. Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance was published in 1920 and, like Frazer’s study, claimed that pagan rituals had survived into modern culture. These groundbreaking texts coincided in the argument that human actions and personality —either particular or collective— were far from 22

A NATION’S COMING OF AGE

being the result of conscious effort and will. Freud and Frazer in particular disclosed the unreliability of superficial reality and rational thinking, and stressed the irrational instead. The postulates of the Enlightenment, then, were being seriously interrogated and progressively abandoned. Among those particularly damaged were the ones concerning the coherent, knowable, and rational self, able to discern the world through reason, and capable of achieving universal and eternal truths through science and gnosis. Authoritative voices and institutions, the dominant references of the rational world, characterized the pre-Modernist age. The new era, however, rejected the authority of the fallible establishments and set out to replace the lost references. Similarly, Modernist authors understood the subject as fragmented in the psyche, and deconstructed its deceptive wholeness of being. On identical grounds they challenged the notion of life as a line that could be comprehended and represented as such. In the positivist intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, the observation and logical analysis of objective data configured thought and gnosis. But twentieth-century scientific research on matter and the universe would soon see concepts like «probability,» «relativity» and «quantum gaps» replacing positivist terms such as «causality,» «certainty» and «wholeness.» Additionally, the 1927 Heisenberg’s «uncertainty principle» stated that it is not possible to simultaneously determine the position and momentum of a particle, which would highly shape the representation of people and events in literature. Human beings and their environment, therefore, were understood under new conditions and were also to be grasped and explained in new terms. Industrialization and technology, moreover, transformed life entirely in its widest scope, from domestic habits to personal relations. The Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad met in Utah in 1869, thus completing the American railway system; in 1889, the first skyscraper was erected in Chicago; Henry Ford founded his company in 1903; in 1905, the first movie theater was opened in Pittsburgh. A mass society was under way, and its most accomplished representation was the assembly line. Life became faster in many aspects, among which physical mobility became one of the most interesting for sociological and artistic reasons. To begin with, the advent of automobiles provided Americans with a machine that entailed mythical power and freedom, instead of entrapping them like the machines represented in late nineteenth-century works. In addition to this emerging mythology of car power, the technologies of rapid mobility as seen in

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automobiles, trains and airplanes forced a shift in the perception and understanding of time. Temporal and spatial dislocation would soon permeate the art of the first decades of the twentieth century. The United States had been a fragmentary, agrarian country in the nineteenth century, but the turn of the century witnessed the consolidation of a nation, a world power immersed in the increasing process of industrialization and mechanization just mentioned. The first years of the century revealed the intellectuals’ affirmation of an American culture. V. W. Brook’s book America’s Coming of Age (1915) can be considered a new «American Scholar» address to his generation, similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s in the previous century, calling for an era of independent, creative living, a rejection of the irrelevant past and present to embrace a freshly assertive future. Another thinker of the time, George Santayana, claimed in 1911: The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel tradition has established over what ought to be assumed and what ought to be hoped for has broken down. Henceforth there can hardly be the same peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. (Quoted in Ruland and Bradbury: 270).

Another important ingredient of the new American panorama was the disappearing frontier in its double role: as economic factor and as myth. The closing of the frontier in the 1890s —more specifically, historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced such closing in 1893— implied a «running out of West,» i.e. the disappearance of an economic and psychological territory for opportunity and freedom. In his famous essay The Frontier in American History, Turner claimed that such had been the importance of the frontier in American history and life that its disappearance inevitably opened a new, uncertain era for the United States. Although Turner’s thesis has long been discarded, and despite the fact that it mainly referred to the economy and politics of the nation, literary critics have easily adopted its stress on individualism and opportunity as essentially American features. Its imprint on twentieth-century life and culture, consequently, cannot be overlooked. To begin with, the frontier as the fundamental American myth —that is, as ideal territory where answers for personal and collective existence are provided— was in danger of extinction, mainly because the frontier used to resolve the clash between the natural, «uncivilized» American and «civilization» (both terms should be used with 24

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restraint). At the turn of the nineteenth century, the nation was well immersed in a process of industrialization and mechanization that threatened the pastoral image that the Americans had about themselves. The following Units will explore the evolution of the myth as it hinged itself into different historical situations. The myth of the frontier used to be, also, articulated in gender, class and ethnic terms, as a masculine, middle-class and white principle. The period under observation here will see an important progress in the conquest of rights for women and minority groups, clearly ignored by the myth before. As with other cultural premises, frontiers and boundaries undergo revision. Lastly, the insistent advance of mechanization and technology instigated a revaluation of the pastoral myth that had impregnated the way the Americans understood and represented themselves. The so-called American Dream had its parallel in a fantasy of the open land and of a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature (Kolodny: 4). The American literature of the twentieth century would consequently mirror the disintegration of such fantasy, and the resulting efforts to cope with its disappearance. Part of the American process of national definition was its isolation from European and world affairs, particularly concerning World War I until America’s involvement in 1917. The ongoing intellectual ruin found then a counterpart in the physical ruin of people and places. The war intensified the horror and lack of confidence in institutions and metanarratives. In particular, it seriously questioned the human capacity to organize and direct life through reason. The principles of the Enlightenment —seriously undermined by modern scientific thought— were thus forced to give way to other systems of beliefs, or at least to other attempts to shape the subject’s relationship with nature, society, or the cosmos. Marxism came to the front in the American nineteen thirties, a time of grave social disturbances; Freudian psychology progressively became highly popular, even in literary arenas, and Catholicism became an apt option for others, like the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot. The dissolution of America’s sense of itself was already observed in the Realist and Regionalist trends of nineteenth-century literature. Characters were portrayed as trapped in a depersonalized system where their own personal decisions were useless, and where destruction was a constant menace. Materialism defied the Jeffersonian ideal —that is to say, an agrarian, America-as-a-virgin-land utopia where independence and

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individual choice were basic values. The economic landscape was changing radically, redistributing capital and creating new industrial leaders. The literary outcome of this situation was the representation of bewildered characters caught between nostalgia for the past and fear of the future.

1.2. Literary Modernism(s) in America The whole sense of loss and uncertainty, and the need for spiritual relief, shaped the literature of the day. A significant part of the American literature of the twentieth century was concerned with quests, a doomed search for sense and logic in the face of a chaotic perception of experience: The unknown appeals of brutes, The chanting of flowers The screams of cut trees, The senseless babble of hens and wise menA cluttered incoherency that says at the stars: ‘Oh, God, save us.’ (From Stephen Crane’s War is Kind, 1899)

The modern mind was not born with the twentieth century, but rather with the end of religion as organic reference of human existence. The dissolution of this worldview took place as the Middle Ages ended with the advent of the reasoning mind of the Renaissance. The later period of that modernity is our field of study here, that era in which human rationality questioned itself and the world around, challenging nineteenth-century moralism and conventionality. That critical age of revision and desperate search for certainties and referents is what we broadly call Modernism. It entailed a whole new conceptualization of experience, and it subsequently reshaped moral values and codes of conduct. Diverse precise dates have been provided over the years to locate the exact birth of Modernism, such as the opening of the London PostImpressionist Exhibition in 1910 or the beginning of the First World War in 1914. In fact, the spirit that ultimately led to the Modernist culture and to the reinvention of art was well under way in Europe in the late nineteenth century. A string of small avant-garde movements were already bringing new ideas and beliefs into visibility in the second half of the Victorian era. The emergence of American Modernism has been usually associated to the 26

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New York Cubist and Postimpressionistic exhibition of 1913. Daniel J. Singal, however, accurately observes that American poets Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein were by then already absorbing and distilling new ideas in their European enclave (16). Similarly, American universities were engaged in the dissemination and exploration of all intellectual breakthroughs in every area of knowledge well before that date. Due to the constellation of ideas impregnating the intellectual atmosphere of the day, manifold artists interrogated established thoughts and forms in their respective fields, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs to Mahler’s later compositions, and from Picasso’s Cubist creations to Louis Armstrong’s rhythms. All artistic endeavors searched for some kind of pattern that could restore the damaged old order. From the French Symbolists on, artists had decreased subject matter to explore human perception and consciousness. They deviated from Victorian compartmentalization and repression of experience, and instead highlighted the openness and continuity of life. Human experience was conceived as dynamic and fluent, which made abstract conceptualizations and absolute knowledge impossible to attain —and represent. It was the art of a new world, the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos. It is the art consequent on Heisenberg’s «Uncertainty principle», of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology. It is the art consequent on the dis-establishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions. (Bradbury and McFarlane: 27)

Art embraced a revolt against the nineteenth-century commitment to mimesis, that is, the reproduction of reality as accurately as possible. In the late years of the century, the Impressionistic painters had already revolted against this conception of the artist’s role and method by seeking the emotion encompassed in a scene, rather than the accurate representation of such scene. Cubism, Expressionism and other forms of non-representational expression further moved from the mimetical intention in art. Music

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underwent a similar reconsideration, from its classical harmonic compositions to the experiments in rhythm sought by blues and jazz musicians. Victorian dichotomies (good/bad, human/animal, man/woman, civilized/savage) and the resultant polarization and hierarchization of experience were overcome by Modernist art in its search for the expansion of consciousness and for the reunion of separate spheres of perception and emotion. By overlapping disparate fragments or planes of existence, wholeness was attempted. Bradbury and McFarlane use the term «Modernism» in its extensive sense, that is to say, as an international artistic sensibility that sprang from the European bohemia and embraced all avant-garde authors and works from 1890 to 1930. (It needs to be mentioned that Modernism coexisted —and frequently overlapped— with other art philosophies of its day such as Dada, Surrealism, or Futurism.) Singal proposes that Modernism should be seen as a culture —a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values and modes of perceptions— that came into existence during the mid to late nineteenth century, and that has had a powerful influence on art and thought on both sides of the Atlantic since roughly 1900. (7)

Other critics restrict the term to what will be labeled «High Modernism», i.e. the trend including the most innovative authors, whose works range from about 1910 to 1930. Far from dismissing the weight of the artistic avant-garde in turn-of-the-century Europe, its interrogative spirit should be considered as the awakening of the new culture. This culture would further be outlined by the outbreak of the First World War and, in the United States, by the particular social and economic conditions that the following Units will discuss. In the present volume, the term «Modernism» will be used in its all-inclusive meaning, containing the most radical formal manifestations as well as milder forms of interrogation of former ideas and literary practices. Broadly speaking, then, the term «Modernist» comprises those artists who sought to emphasize the alienation and inconsistency of modern life and traditional forms of thinking, living and creating. It also includes the efforts to mirror the psychological processes of the human mind, unrevealed by previous modes of art. This involved the challenge to the commonlyaccepted notion of reality, which was assumed to be objective, independent 28

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of the observing subject, absolute and unique. It finally encompasses the urge to overthrow the moral polarization of existence, particularly in terms of class, race and gender. Taking into consideration the multifaceted nature of the era, literary Modernism refers to those authors and literary works operating with:

 A necessity to investigate new forms and styles to convey the interrogative mood of the era. Prose and poetry question former conventions to install some freshness among the signs of decadence.

 A stress on fragmented forms and discontinuity, to the point of apparent collage, which mirrors the dissolution of beliefs in institutions, Newtonian science and history.

 Settings and plots that evoke collective or individual past.  Reevaluation and reinterpretation of myths to convey a sense of order and meaning to an increasingly meaningless existence.

 Characters in isolation and alienation who lack the energetic drive observed in the American literary characters of previous decades. Unmotivated, benumbed or doomed characters reflect the overwhelming power of the social and economic forces at work.

 An emphasis on the individual and the inward workings of consciousness, over the social and public domains. Formal devices such as the interior monologue or the fallible narrator, to be explored later in the volume, illustrate the interest raised by modern psychology.

 The search for impressionism and subjectivity, thus discarding the apparent objectivity of the nineteenth-century third-person narrator, and favoring multiple perspectives, unedited reports, and inexistent or hazy moral positions.

 Attention to the new social concerns demanded by the increasing demographic variety, among which writers would explore the emergence of previously silenced voices, and the changing power relations between races, sexes, and classes. The general impression given by Modernist literature was that of a disunited world in constant transit. Much influenced by post-Impressionist

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art, literary authors attempted to verbally reproduce the broken up images of Cubism and the shattered forms of Expressionism. In an attempt to find a unifying principle for the intensely individualist practices of the Modernists, some scholars have proposed single defining characteristics of the movement. For instance, Christopher J. Knight argues that Modernism was defined by a doctrine of perception that focused on the object. Thus, representation was replaced by presentation, invoking a new understanding of objectivity. The artist, then, should be involved in the act of perceiving the object with a view to reveal its intrinsic value. The poetry of T. S. Eliot is considered «impersonal» due to its emotional detachment from the object it presents, and Ernest Hemingway’s style is usually characterized as objective —in its double meaning of object-focused and emotionally removed. But such unification of the Modernist variety, though highly instrumental, would erase much of the ideological and formal richness that American Modernism has to offer. Although the frontier is a nuclear myth in the literature and culture of the United States, two other prevalent ideas underwent serious resistance in this era: the City upon the Hill and the American Adam. The Puritan Fathers of the seventeenth century had defined the American colonies as a mythical City to which all eyes would look in admiration. In moral terms, the «City upon the Hill» symbolized a predominant place of virtue and progress, under God’s grace and providence. However, T. S. Eliot’s influential work The Wasteland (1922) provided a new spatial image that suited the dominating feeling of ruin and consumption, God-forsaken, in which the «American Adam» could hardly dwell and survive. Manifold images of wastelands of physical, sexual, or moral nature invaded Modernist works. Observe Eliot’s apprehension of such barren existence: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. (NAAL: 1587)

Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized the archetypal hero of the American expansion and the embodiment of national virtues 30

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and aspirations: «Plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world.» This mythical figure stood for individualism, self-reliance, mobility, innocence, lack of commitment and youth. Ihab Hassan agrees with several critics when he points out that the Adamic myth «refuses to accept the immitigable rule of reality» (6). The American Adam painfully trying to cope with the Wasteland configured the literature of the era. Two main literary myths of this age epitomized the ways in which the American Adam survived in the wasteland: Babbitt and Gatsby, both to be analyzed in the Unit dedicated to the Lost Generation. Modernist literary expressions reflected the disquietude of the Americans: mechanization, alienation, loneliness, and uncertainty. In general, these worries could be summarized in the assertion that American literature of the early twentieth century was concerned with spiritual survival in an inextricable universe. Each author highlighted his or her particular cause of restlessness, and each one verbalized such restlessness with personal strategies and tones. Hence, speaking of a unique Modernist movement in the United States is, if anything, a misleading enterprise. In addition, the period was not characterized by one defining feature, as had previously happened with Romanticism or Realism. This variety derived from the lack of fixity and the prevailing disbelief. But the brutal separation of the past represented by the vanishing old myths entailed a global revision of American life and thought. In literature, particularly in the United States where realist fiction was deeply rooted, the modern spirit stressed the necessity to question and contest the concept of «the real.» Since it is «the real» what originates and informs the literary text, Modernist literary works would challenge traditional assumptions about reality, and would illustrate the drive to come to terms with and articulate modernity. Although the main Modernist feature was rupture with the past, conventional literary forms could be suitably revised and adapted to the new vision of reality. A variety of literary approaches to that modernity coexisted in American Modernism. Such variety reflected the different styles of perceiving and representing the world in an extremely complex moment. If we attempted to frame these early years of the century into literary movements or currents, the endeavor would result in a kaleidoscopic scenery: — Romanticism: The romantic rejection of reason and institutional certainty in favor of the individual’s felt experience persisted in the

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Modernist sensibility. For instance, the poet Wallace Stevens postulated that reality came to being when it was experienced by the imagination: «One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost» (From «The Snow Man,» NAAL: 1441). Imagination, the defining constituent of the romantic movement, similarly empowered the Modernist artist to create some sort of coherence in the form of aesthetic order. However, Modernist aesthetic principles would present substantially different traits from the ones displayed by the romantic sensibility. — Realism: The preferred literary approach of the late nineteenth century involved a set of assumptions about reality and artistic representation that the new creators were not prepared to accept. Although accurate pictures of society and the human experience were still produced, they hinted at the authors’ changing attitude towards the dubious accurate representation of the real. Writers such as Willa Cather or Edith Wharton revealed such shifty awareness in their works. Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) is highly illustrative in that respect, since its very title suggests more than one understanding of experience. «My» stresses one’s own position and view against others’, thus questioning one of the basic axioms of realist fiction: that there is just one objective reality. The following excerpt has been extracted from the latter: I told him I had always felt that other people— he himself, for one knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her. He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took hold of him. «Maybe I will, maybe I will!» he declared. He stared out of the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. «Of course,» he said, «I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation.» (3)

Realism would thus be challenged and renewed by the aesthetic upheavals of the late nineteenth century. 32

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— High Modernism: Units Two and Four will deal with the most avantgarde strategies among American authors. Extreme formal innovations in the realm of American letters, especially in the field of narrative, occurred less frequently than in its European counterpart, but some poets and storytellers made a point of expressing life in utterly new ways. The zenith of Modernism or High Modernism comprised a number of those authors who reconsidered traditional literary assumptions and the role of literature in the modern era. — Naturalism: Disparate are the theories concerning the naturalist trend in writing: an extreme Realism, a philosophical overtone, a genre in itself... With respect to American Naturalism, we should highlight two important aspects: its interest was mainly environmental (whereas European Naturalism was also concerned with biological and hereditary issues), and it revealed a debt to the Calvinist substratum of American culture. Although the days of naturalist writers seemed already extinguished, the spirit of the movement remained in the attention paid to the sense of imprisonment in America’s progress. The portrayal of human beings deprived of free will allowed authors to retreat from making moral judgments, a most suitable position in a world that defied understanding and moral conclusions. These naturalistic outskirts were not necessarily attached to the realistic strategies that some critics hold to be fundamental in the previous naturalistic works.

A milieu of social, political and intellectual circumstances configured what has been known as Modernism. It was not the only aesthetic trend of its day, and it absorbed and partook of the plural European avantgarde. The term is anything but monolithic, for it comprises different practices and ideas about the new era that emerged at the turn of the century. As a whole, however, Modernism stressed the necessity to break away with old social and artistic values, and to search for new modes of expression that best accounted for modernity and modern life. American Modernism entailed a revision of the myths that had constructed the culture and art of the United States, myths that were to be replaced with adequate modern alternatives.

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2. TEXT ANALYSIS: SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S REVOLT 2.1. APPROACHING Anderson’s «Hands» Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) belonged to a generation of midwestern writers who remained traditionalist but proved to be rebels nevertheless. They portrayed small-town life and examined elemental struggles, but revitalized what the eastern taste called «regionalist» literature. Also, Anderson is one of the writers who heralded the literary innovation of American literature in the twentieth century, and one of the first American authors to «become aware of the implications in the work of Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein» (White: 3). In turn, he was to leave a permanent mark on the works of such authors as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, to name only a few. When he published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919, it definitely presented a new proposal in the American literary landscape: it offered a new understanding of the short story form, contributed to the transition of narrative techniques to the modern era, and prepared the path for some of the leading writers of the twentieth century. Much of his writing dealt with the individual’s painstaking search for meaning and certainty in small communities, an environment he had known well before moving to Chicago to pursue a literary career. This novel/collection was set in a small town that Anderson claimed was the sole product of his imagination. However, it holds a great resemblance to Clyde, the little city where Anderson spent his childhood. The realism with which he approached the characters, speech and manners of a midwestern town inspired later authors. But his depiction of the human struggle for integration and compassion surpassed the temporal and geographical limits that configured the setting of the work. Much in the trail of D. H. Lawrence, an author that Anderson knew and greatly admired, Anderson sought a mystic encounter between individuals that permanent barriers made troublesome. Like Lawrence, also, he deplored the age of the machine and pursued plainer states of being. In Winesburg, Ohio Anderson described and reported life in a small midwestern town in a highly unconventional way. He structured a «novel» (notice the inverted commas) around a series of connected stories, 34

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independent but conceived as a whole, in which he explored the psychological dimensions of his characters. The small town of Winesburg was thus intended to represent a microcosm, a collection of human samples of social and emotional diversity. However, its most outstanding features were tone and subject-matter, for the latter offered a totally unprecedented picture of American life. Like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio typifies the literary revolt from the village pursued by American writers from the early twentieth century. Masters had debunked the ideal picture of small-town life that was commonly embraced by the American popular mind. This myth of a harmonious existence in small communities had evolved from pioneering days, when nature and civilization found a site for reconciliation in these homely places. Masters, and Anderson after him, disclosed that the expected values of friendliness and honesty were in fact a fallacy that disguised hypocrisy, hostility, bigotry and frustration. Moreover, he portrayed the inexorable advance of progress and the marks it left on the public and private lives of Americans. Not only did «Hands» illustrate the social atmosphere of the United States in the early century, but also heralded the modern short story to be written in the country. This story is one of the twenty-two pieces of which Winesburg, Ohio is composed. Some consider the complete collection a novel in itself, while others miss the continuity of plot proper to the novel form. In any case, the very form of Winesburg, Ohio invites us to reflection: it hints at a totality —a global picture of a community— while such totality is rendered in terms of fragmentation and isolation. The different fragments of the global picture participate in the same spatial and temporal setting, and the narrative voice that embraces them offers an effect of wholeness, but Anderson achieved a sense of disconnection by reserving a separate chapter for each one. There is no evidence of Anderson’s having read James Joyce’s Dubliners before he wrote Winesburg, Ohio. However, these two volumes are the first representatives of what Forrest Ingram has called the short story cycle, that is, a particular design that combines the individuality of each story and the totality to which they belong (13). Two reasons can be argued for Anderson’s innovative structure. To start with, he felt dissatisfaction with the pressing demands of conventional storytelling, or poison plot, especially those concerning the writing of short stories:

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There was a notion that ran through all story telling in America, that stories must be built about a plot, and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point to a moral, uplift people, make better citizens, etc., etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of the plays on our stage were plot plays. «The Poison Plot» I called it in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me to poison all story telling. What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at. (Quoted in White: 255)

Also, Anderson felt more comfortable with the short-story form because his job at the moment hindered his exclusive dedication to literature, so he found it difficult to write for extended spans of time. Nineteenth-century short-story writers had accustomed their audience to high-pitch endings —either surprising or moving. Preceding plots, especially after Edgar Allan Poe’s example, were intended to achieve a preconceived effect, and every element of the story worked in the same direction so as to produce that final impression. This implied that the narration flew along a rising tension. However, Anderson configured each story in such a way that plots seemed rambling, and denouements challenged the readers’ expectations, which were mainly based on convention. He thus anticipated the Modernists’ concern with truth to life’s actual mechanisms, not to literary stereotypes, which allowed him to focus more on ordinary people and their ordinary lives than on the surprising architecture of commercially successful stories. The rambling quality of his plots was also accountable to the oral tradition of storytelling, which Anderson recuperated in order to release narrative from strict framings of plot and structure, and to communicate a familiar, small-town air about the events narrated. But, as explained above, he was far from presenting an idyllic image of countryside life, or a mere regionalist portrait of a midwestern village. The author portrayed the personal and the collective in perpetual collision, and he cast a critical eye on the difficulties of communication and relationship in the demythologized scenery of rural America. The taboo themes that he explored in this context allowed Anderson to deepen into the characters’ psychology. In other words, he shifted the traditional focus of short-story writing —action and plot— to characters. «The Book of the Grotesque» is the introductory sketch to the collection, and it was at first thought to give title to the whole work. This first story 36

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presents readers with an old writer who once wrote a book, named «The Book of the Grotesque,» which he never published. This old writer believes in the idea that life is composed of many different, irreconcilable truths. Such a denial of an absolute and unique truth impregnates the form and the subject matter of his book. Correspondingly, Anderson applied the voice and the attitude of this old writer to the stories following. Before you proceed to Sherwood Anderson’s story bear in mind…

 That Anderson purposely addressed a different way of short-story writing that emphasized mood over plot.

 That mechanization was pervading national landscapes and mindscapes.

 That Newtonian Physics was being replaced by Einsteinian proposals about space and time, among whose consequences were the sense of fragmentariness about self and experience.

 That identity and personality were understood as greatly based on the psyche and that internal workings of the mind defined the self as much as speech and action.

 That human beings and their relation to the environment had undergone an important transformation and were therefore depicted as alienated and isolated.

2.2. REVISITING «Hands» A first version of «Hands» was first published in Masses in 1916, and later appeared as part of Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. With this volume Anderson abandoned the well-established literary tradition of presenting life as a process, as an organized and coherent set of experiences and situations. The novel form had evolved from this assumption, and its basic ingredients (plot, setting, temporal sequence, etc.) were articulated according to it. Instead, Anderson designed his volume as a series of «significant moments» in the lives of several characters. This fragmentariness is a ubiquitous device in Modernist texts, and reflects the impossibility of perceiving the world as a unified totality —that is, straightforwardly discerned by the senses and easily represented by art.

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The narrator is a most relevant element in any narrative, because (s)he serves as a bridge between the events narrated and the reader. The figure of the narrator shapes our reading because it articulates how we read and how the information gets to us. In the case of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson was fully aware of the importance of this narrative ingredient, and he employed the narrative voice that best suited his purpose to recreate an alienated world. One of the main narrative features in «Hands» is the oral tradition of storytelling that pervades it, in particular the use of authorial comments addressed to the reader. «Let us look briefly into the story of the hands» (NAAL: 1425) is one among several examples of authorial address to be found in Anderson’s story, with which he established a point of closeness and complicity with his reading public. In «Hands» we also observe a heterodiegetic narrator, that is, an external narrator who does not participate in the events. Like classic omniscient narrative voices, (s)he has privileged access to characters’ thoughts and feelings: Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. (NAAL: 1423) As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands. At times an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. (NAAL: 1424)

However, this third-person narrator subtly shows and conceals pieces of information in such a way that the story seems to have been composed out of fragments. One of the consequences of such approach to plot is the openness of the story and the different readings of Wing’s past.

 Despite his/her apparent privileged knowledge of events, this narrator shows an inability or reluctance to make full use of such ability. In other words, (s) he seems to focus on Wing Biddlebaum while obscuring specific information that could clarify his character. How do you, as reader, respond to this oblique focus on one character? Can you find hints in the text that support Wing’s character as child molester/homosexual/victim of narrow-mindedness?

The above contributes to the evasiveness that hovers over the story, that air of fragmentariness caused by the separate pieces of knowledge that 38

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characters and readers alike have to face. Thus, this narrator lacks the capacity to embrace and account for the totality of the story, despite his/her apparent omniscience and the complicity with readers (s)he has established. Anderson, therefore, challenged the traditional notion of the third-person realistic narrator and proposed a version that could not satisfy our expectations of an all-knowing, all-controlling voice. The immediate effect of this strategy is the idea of a godless world, or a world deprived of an enfolding authority by which everything and everybody have a place and a mission. The narrative voice in «Hands» participates in the irony of the story. This type of observer is impossible in real life, so it is a clear narrative construct employed to reflect a narrative situation. Sherwood Anderson advanced several of the central concerns of American Modernism. To begin with, the fragmentary design of Winesburg, Ohio indicated the alienation of modern existence, and the tragic loneliness of the individual in a world without certainties. The suggestiveness of the overall structure parallels that of each individual story, dedicated to one character with his or her own private loneliness and tragedy. The inhabitants of Winesburg are thus presented as detached, disconnected from other villagers or any sheltering institution such as family, church or town hall. As mentioned before, the narrative strategy of telling each story from one personal perspective emphasized the idea of disconnection, as well as the impression of a godless existence where characters are left alone to face the harshness of everyday life. All the grotesque characters that Anderson depicts in Winesburg, Ohio are misfits who cannot find their own place: «Wing Biddlebaum […] did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town» (NAAL: 1423). One of the signs and consequences of such loneliness is the failure of communication perceived in each story. In «Hands» Anderson deals with a pathetic inability to express one’s necessities and anxieties, which results in the character’s impossible adaptation to his environment. The fact that he «talked much with his hands» is at once verbally ineffectual and a source of trouble for him.

 Not

only does Wing find it hard to share his feelings: communicative processes seem to be hindered or replaced by inadequate substitutes, as in «I’ll teach you to put your hands on my boy» (NAAL: 1425). Look for instances of blocked communication in the story.

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In Winesburg, Ohio the character of George Willard functions as a connecting element between stories: he is present in each of them and acts as a sort of confessor of every other character, a point of emotional reference for the otherwise completely detached villagers. His presence resembles, however, the role of the literary author who, in the introduction to the stories («The Book of the Grotesque») acknowledges the problematic task of accessing and telling the inner worlds of human beings. In this light, George Willard’s occupation as reporter in the local newspaper offers an example of irony —one among the many present in the story— due to his assumed role as source and articulator of communication. In addition, George has «vague hungers» and «unnamable desires» that evidence the same lack of communicative dexterity that abounds in the whole book. Another unifying principle, to be added to the technical devices previously mentioned, is the theory of the grotesque that Anderson anticipated at the beginning of the volume. In «The Book of the Grotesque» the author depicts an old dying man who recollects the people he has known along his life. They form a procession led by a youth in a coat of mail, a somewhat idealized representation of the author himself. Anderson thus established the relationship that he was to keep with the characters in his work. He understood and defined the grotesques as human beings that capture one truth from life and live by it in utter isolation, unable to share it with other people. They are thus prevented from developing as human beings or overcoming their grotesque nature, fueled by the discrepancy between fantasy and reality, that is to say, between the characters’ expectations and actual life conditions —i.e. irony, in other words. In this light, «Hands» is very conveniently begun in medias res (another reminiscent of oral storytelling), thus calling attention to the suffocating circularity of things. The subsequent retreat into the characters’ inner lives leads to an exaggeration of characterizing features, as the protagonist of «Hands» exemplifies. Nonetheless, the term involves some tenderness towards the grotesques he depicted, and the narrative voice in the stories reveals sympathy. Wing’s character in the story, for instance, is conveyed as fragile and frustrated: his very name suggests the frailness and entrapment of a bird, as does the final scene where he picks up crumbs from the floor. 40

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 The title of the story points to one body part. In fact, this is not the only instance in the story where body parts are mentioned. Can you establish a connection between these body fragments and an impossible unity of identity?

Anderson interpreted life as a collection of suggestive fragments of experience so that, according to Malcolm Cowley, the tales in Winesburg, Ohio «were not incidents or episodes, they were moments, each complete in itself» (6). These significant moments had been labeled epiphanies by James Joyce, who articulated his Dubliners cycle around a series of epiphanic instants in the lives of his characters. The term «epiphany,» originally an aesthetic and creative principle, has survived as a critical term to designate the author’s depiction of characters «who in a notable way either realize, or fail to realize, the inner significance of their lives» (Curry: 247). Each of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio were thus contrived to disclose its protagonist’s realization —or total unawareness of— the essential truth of relevant instants in their lives.

 Can you detect this significant moment or «sudden reaching out» (Cowley: 7) in «Hands»? What strategies does Anderson use to prepare us for this epiphanic revelation? Is there a shift in tone or in narrative perspective? Does the mood of the narrator change? Is this moment built as a climax —i.e. the result of rising tension?

By focusing on the central character, Anderson achieved again the sense of fragmentary experience that defines the volume. Attention is directed in such a way that readers can only concentrate on a single view at a time, never apprehending a global vision of the scene. This narrowness of perspective equals the narrowness of small-town America, with its suffocating atmosphere that frontier life cannot relieve any longer. The protagonist attempted an escape twenty years ago only to find another kind of constriction. Then, instead of the liberation of mobility we find a deceiving change of scenery, where images of decay surround the protagonist.

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 Winesburg

is depicted as a moral wasteland where regeneration seems unlikely. The wasteland conveyed by this story refers to the loss of widelybelieved small-town values, such as communication and empathy. Look for inorganic and organic images of decay in «Hands» (nature, architecture, etc.).

The decline of the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian culture is visible in this story: life has become too mechanized, and Wing’s expressive hands can only be depicted in terms of productivity: With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. […] Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion. (NAAL: 1424)

Anderson did not convey here the wonder many Modernist artists felt for the glamour and liveliness of modern times —however destructive these might be. Another myth contested in Winesburg, Ohio is the pastoral ideal that permeated American literature from its beginnings, where nature played the role of «regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape» (Kolodny: 6). Observe, also, how the notion of the pastoral interacts here with the idea of communication discussed elsewhere in the Unit: In the picture men lived again in a pastoral golden age. Across a green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet on an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them. (NAAL: 1424)

Especially noteworthy is the inclusion of the train in the story, for the railroad had played a highly important part in the industrialization of the American landscape, and as such it had been portrayed by Realist authors. Leo Marx describes the symbolical power of the railroad as «a centrifugal force that threatens to break down, once and for all, the conventional contrast between the city and the country» (32). Although the respective positive and negative connotations of the rural and the mechanic are seemingly clear, it should be noted that the pastoral image of berry-picking 42

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is subdued to the mechanical processes intervening. The presence of railroad tracks or highways scarring the countryside seems to announce that the landscape has been devoured by a modern state of things that does not allow any further division of symbolical or cultural spaces. Nature or less industrialized towns are thus divested of their assumed power to redeem and welcome the subject.

 How

does mechanization intervene in the story? What is the effect of representing nature side by side with technology? Compare natural imagery in the two settings where Wing is seen living. Notice the way it contributes to symbolism, plot, and character construction.

Critics usually agree on labeling Anderson a midwestern author, although geographers themselves differ on the precise limits of the American Midwest. The physical particularity of the region is its plains, a real symbol of space for the American people. Space defies limitations, notions of constriction and boundedness, and has served as a trope for liberty in American literature for several generations. But the physical space of the midwestern area stands in opposition to the Puritan limitations of its existence. The ideal homogeneity of small rural communities is defied here by a grotesqueness that the town is unprepared to accept. Although «Hands» is not as overtly explicit as other stories about sexual and emotional repressions, it illustrates the Puritan background of a midwestern town. The theme of death in life, dealt with later in the century by other writers, appears in all the stories included in the collection in one way or other. This theme touches upon the characters’ inhibited passions, whatever their origin. Each of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio engages in a discussion of this force on the verge of final release, but ultimately repressed. In the stories composing the volume life is represented as an unending movement. Stories lack definite starting and ending points, and their closure suggest continuity, a flux that hinges into other characters’ own fluid existences. Taking this point even further, David Stouck detects the medieval theme of the Dance of Death deeply embedded in the overall structure of the work. According to him, such dance constituted a representation of Death as it took away people’s lives in a procession of dead bodies marching out of this world. Furthermore, the dead danced with the living in an attempt to warn them of their fate. This would account for the

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strange gestures that Wing —together with other characters in Winesburg, Ohio— makes in «Hands»: When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease. (NAAL: 1423-1424)

Most of the characters in the collection were therefore returning «ghosts» in the sense that they were apparently rescued from Anderson’s memories of childhood. However, the Dance of Death scheme is particularly interesting due to the tragic echoes that it reveals in the different stories. For Death in Winesburg, Ohio, as it has been commented above, does not refer to a physical closure but to a spiritual one instead. The fact that the grotesques try to warn their neighbors with their symbolic eccentric behavior is particularly tragic, since communication proves repeatedly ineffectual.

Winesburg, Ohio was highly influenced by the themes and tone in Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, and in turn influenced many works written in the following decades. Anderson’s formal innovations in Winesburg, Ohio include the short-story-cycle form, a dismissal of plot development as the axis of storytelling, emphasis on perspective and psychology, and narrative fragmentariness. He exercised a revolt from the village in his denunciation of authentic small-town life, and stressed the loss of agrarian ideals, the incommunication and alienation of modern life, and the difficult position of the self against an unwelcoming environment.

3. EXERCISES 3.1. Test yourself On Sherwood Anderson a) Why is the closure of the story ironic? How does the author prepare readers for this irony? 44

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b) How is the central character characterized? In other words, how do we readers get to know him, and how much do we get to know? c) How is the sense of fragmentariness achieved? d) How relevant are perspective and narrative voice to our reading of the story? How do they shape our approach and response to it? e) What elements in «Hands» contribute to the short-story-cycle form of Winesburg, Ohio? f) What makes a grotesque of Wing Biddlebaum? Does this character conform to the author’s theory of the grotesque? g) In what ways is «Hands» an instance of the revolt-from-the-village topic? h) What is the function of George Willard in «Hands»? i) In what way is the setting —or settings— of the story relevant to its central idea? j) What strategies does Anderson employ to contest the idea of innocence in «Hands»? k) How is nature represented? Summary questions a) Why should writers search for new modes of expression at the beginning of the twentieth century? b) Why was the field of Physics important in the understanding and representation of experience? c) What modern ideas —social, intellectual, artistic— informed the literature at the beginning of the century? d) How are the old American myths reinterpreted? 3.2. Explore a) Pay attention to Wing’s physical description provided by the narrator. To what extent is this portrait relevant to the story? What responses from the reader do you think it pursues?

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b) George Willard, a writer, represents the function of the artist in modern society. How would you outline that function as presented in the story? c) How are frontier times and values evoked and mourned in the story? d) «Hands» displays different forms of irony. In your opinion, does the story rest on the readers’ expectations about small-town life? e) How far does «Hands» avoid the «Poison Plot» that Anderson censured? What strategies did Anderson employ to escape the restrictive convention of organizing a story around plot? f) Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) dealt with the difficulties of surviving in a modern industrialized society. Though their atmosphere and plotlines are very different, both project the idea of the subject trapped and dominated by the machine. Compare these movies to Anderson’s story, bearing in mind the silent but prevailing presence of the train in it.

3.3. Key terms — — — — — —

Authorial address Death-in-life theme Epiphany Fragmentariness Grotesque Heterodiegetic

— — — — — —

Jeffersonian ideal Modernism Poison plot Revolt from the village Short story cycle Wasteland

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY 4.1. Recommended readings — Sherwood Anderson’s «The Book of the Grotesque»: http://xroads.virginia. edu/%7EHYPER/ANDERSON/preface.html — «American Literature 1914-1945.» NAAL: 1177-1190.

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— Irving Howe’s «Introduction» to Winesburg, Ohio: http://www.pagebypagebooks. com/Sherwood_Anderson/Winesburg_Ohio/INTRODUCTION_by_Irving_ Howe_p1.html

4.2. Critical works cited MALCOLM BRADBURY and JAMES MCFARLANE. Modernism: 1890-1930. Penguin Books, 1976. MALCOLM COWLEY. Introduction. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Penguin, 1976. MARTHA CURRY. «Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce.» American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2 (May, 1980), 236-249. IHAB HASSAN. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary Novel. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. FORREST INGRAM. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. CHRISTOPHER J. KNIGHT. The Patient Particular: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality. Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1995. ANNETTE KOLODNY. 1975. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. U. of North Carolina Press, 1984. LEO MARX. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: OUP, 1964. RICHARD RULAND and MALCOLM BRADBURY. From Puritanism to Modernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. DANIEL JOSEPH SINGAL. «Towards a Definition of American Modernism.» American Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), 7-26. DAVID STOUCK. «Winesburg, Ohio as A Dance of Death.» American Literature, Vol. 48, No. 4 (January, 1977), 525-542. RAY LEWIS WHITE (ed.). The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson: Essays in Criticism. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1966. — (ed.). A Story Teller’s Story. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968.

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4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Willa Cather (1873-1947): Her novel My Ántonia (1918) is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of a Bohemian family who settled in the Nebraska plains. The work tells the misfortunes and also the simple goodness of farming life, in light of the quick changes that overtook the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its most significant feature is the narrative voice employed to tell the story, a narrator who in turn tells the story through the eyes of one friend of Ántonia’s. Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950): His collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) initiated the «revolt from the village» theme in twentieth-century American literature. Masters’ work consisted of over two hundred poems spoken by the inhabitants of Spoon River, an Illinois small community that debunked the ideal image of small-town America.

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Program 1. PRESENTATION: New poetry 1.1. European, Asian and African influences: The International Style 1.2. Technical and thematic innovations 1.3. The aim of poetry 2. TEXT ANALYSIS 2.1. APPROACHING Modernist poetry 2.2. REVISITING Modernist poetry T. S. Eliot’s «The Hollow Men» Ezra Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro» William Carlos Williams’ «This is Just to Say» Wallace Stevens’ «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock» Robert Frost’s «After Apple-Picking» 3. EXERCISES Learning outcomes — To understand the need for newness in the creative process: origin, voice, purpose. — To become acquainted with new formal and thematic concerns in American poetry. — To acquire the necessary critical tools to analyze the poetry of the period.

1. PRESENTATION: NEW POETRY The literary panorama of the last decades of the nineteenth century was invaded by prose fiction. By then, American poets had lost the innovative energy exhibited by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Given this disruption in the continuity of poetic output, many American poets of the early twentieth century failed to find a suitable context for their endeavors and turned to overseas artistic manifestations in search of intellectual stimulus and poetic innovation.

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1.1. European, Asian and African influences: The International Style Despite the overall focus on foreign models, a number of poets remained grounded in the Whitmanesque tradition of vernacular language and native themes. Such was the case of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, representative voices of the so-called Chicago Renaissance. For over a decade (1912-1925), Chicago harbored the creative dynamism of midwestern authors like Sherwood Anderson and the two poets mentioned. Sandburg and Masters relied on the rhetorical strategies inherited from the oral tradition, on a simple and non-academic style, and the poetic potential of everyday life. But the true poetic revolution of the period arrived with the experimental accomplishments of those poets in contact with foreign influences. To varying degrees, they incorporated European, Asian, and African rhythms and forms into their work, absorbed the artistic expressiveness springing from, or belonging to, non-American cultural contexts, and exploited the conceptual and perceptual possibilities of a hybrid poetics. French Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine had a major influence on the American poetry and prose of the day. Baudelaire and his followers conceived the poet as a kind of visionary agent, able to transcend the real world and suggest the world beyond through the evocative power of language. They explored the suggestive capacity of language, especially through metaphor and metonymy, and the musicality of words. Symbolism used elaborate language that could convey the fluidity and rhythm of music, to the extent that the function of words was expanded to encompass meaning and sound effects alike. Impressions were sought instead of descriptions and accounts. The Symbolists made wide use of synesthesia —a sensory experience described in terms of another— later adopted by Modernist writers of both prose and poetry. Mallarmé’s proclamation on verbal craftsmanship was relevant enough: «To name an object […] is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem […] to suggest it, there’s the dream.» The Symbolists had a number of descendants that shared a surrealist approach to art: Vorticists, Dadaists, and Imagists. All of them, the Imagists in particular, contributed to the Modernist non-referential poetic method in their efforts to overcome the dangers of excessive documentation characteristic of the late nineteenth century. The Imagists, the leading 50

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school among American Modernist poets, searched for the immediacy and impression left by images. In «A Few Don’ts of an Imagiste» (1913) Ezra Pound defined the basic instrument of Imagism, the image, as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. […] It is the presentation of such a «complex» instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (Quoted in Eliot: 4)

In this light, the image is «a way of seeing as much as a new thing seen» (Lentricchia: 194), and an intellectual and emotional «complex» in the manner of the seventeenth-century poets, which searches for the indissolubility of the individual self. This conceptualization of poetic composition resulted in very succinct and clearly outlined poems. They greatly relied on the clarity of expression that could be conveyed by the precise image, and also on intense juxtapositions that could liberate the poem from —in Ezra Pound’s words— time limits and space limits. In addition to these two major trends of European origin, other foreign influences entered Modernist American poetry. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had studied comparative literature at their respective universities, and had been exposed to the rhythmic patterns of Romance languages (French in the case of Eliot, Italian in the case of Pound). Frost was also influenced by the Latin syntactic structures of the eclogues and georgic poetry. AfricanAmerican poets such as Langston Hughes made use of their inherited rhythms and speech, and incorporated the syncopated rhythms of jazz to their compositions. Moreover, this Modernist openness to non-native forms of expression led to an interest in Orientalism. The Japanese haiku tradition made a strong impact on both European and American writers in search of new sounds and forms, particularly on those pursuing precision and clarity of imagery. Meanwhile, Chinese ideograms supplied the pictorial quality that can be observed in American Modernist poetry. The «international style» that shaped a significant part of the American poetry of the time distinguished it from nineteenth-century prosodic and ideological models. Some of the American poets of the period were determined to write poetry for a mass audience, in order to steer clear of the elitist compositions of much European verse. Among those writers who set

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out to reflect American scenes and concerns were Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, frequently called the «native» poets of American Modernism. Other authors —T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein…— traveled to Europe to explore the avant-garde landscape. Among them, Eliot and Pound became permanent expatriates, as the aftermath of World War I accentuated America’s provincialism. In addition, the serious estrangement between the common reader and the poet was partly caused by the specific learning required to access the hybrid, Europeanized works of most poets. The acute experimentation distinctive of the Modernist era expanded the gap even further. All in all, the period spawned a group of remarkable poets, whose literary birth is declared to be 1912. Harriet Monroe, a Chicago poet, founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which was exclusively devoted to poetry. Its editorial line welcomed experimental verse, and it went on to publish the early work of many of the key names of Modernist poetry. Other similar magazines contributed to the promotion and distribution of new poetry by accepting those works which major magazines or publishing houses considered too avant-garde —in other words, scarcely commercial. These little magazines also introduced European authors and forms to the American audience, thus making the transatlantic contact possible. Despite its diversity of themes, forms and moods, the American poetry of this era revealed some common trends, the first of which was its openness to international art and literature, as well as to literary philosophies. It also participated in the general interest in emerging theories on the human psyche, from which a new understanding of experience as fluid and complex derived. It evidenced the need to find fresh modes of expression for the changing relationship of the self to the world, and to re-evaluate the role of the artist in the modern world as seeker and provider of order. In short, they demanded newness, and newness they contrived: «Make it new,» claimed Ezra Pound to alleviate the stagnant poetic scene. The Modernist poets stressed the need to create poems which would be different from any other poems. This impetus for novelty and freshness entailed a constant experimentation on the part of the poets, a permanent quest for a language which would reflect the new era. All the poets of the first decades of the twentieth century tried to open poetry to every sort of thematic and formal innovation. Drawing all poetic manifestations together, they shared a marked concern with modernity. In Frank Lentricchia’s words, 52

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The new lyric would be «modern» because it would implicitly stand as a political rebuke to traditional literature: revolutionary because heterogeneous in form, style, diction, subject, social origin, and social reference. [It] would be an expressive medium of the collage of cultures America was fast becoming, the literary resistance to the cultural melting pot, a genuinely American creation. (87)

Although Lentricchia’s view of the Modernist project is far more inclusive and egalitarian than it really proved to be, his statement accurately encompasses the variety and the resistance to expectations concerning the poetry of the period.

1.2. Technical and thematic innovations In one of his letters, dated in 1948, Wallace Stevens described the form and subject-matter of modern art in the following terms: One wonders sometimes whether this is not exactly what the whole effort of modern art has been about: the attachment to real things. When people were painting cubist pictures, were they not attempting to get at not the invisible but the visible? They assumed that back of the peculiar reality that we see, there lay a more prismatic one of many facets. Apparently deviating from reality, they were trying to fix it; and so on, through their successors. (601)

In tune with Stevens’ words, Modernist poetry tried to fix an idea of reality through an apparent deviation from reality. Not only did the forms adopted require renovation, but the artistic material as well. Much of the poetry of the moment could be described as lacking in «ideas,» since Modernist poets discarded ideas and themes per se and pursued the representation of the origins of emotions: «Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,» proposed Wallace Stevens. Thematic concerns lost their prevalence in a period that had lost faith in ontological systems and reason. Even novels were becoming less narrative and more lyrical in their challenge to the readers’ expectations of the sequential and reasoning processes involved in traditional storytelling. The renewed interest in the Metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, recovered for critical analysis and appraisal by T. S. Eliot, reflected the focus on language and form over subject matter.

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With its neosymbolist technique and formalist approach to poetry, Imagism constituted the most important poetic movement of the day. It stressed language and form as both the means and the end of poetry. Pound formulated the poetic program of Imagism around 1912, which could be summarized as follows: — A preference for the use of the language of common speech, seeking the exact word. — Free verse was favored in order to better communicate the poet’s individuality, since the newness of an original cadence implies a novelty of ideas. — A similar freedom was sought in the choice of subject matter. — The use of images in order to depart from generalities and present particulars in an accurate way. — The avoidance of indefinition and the search for clarity. — The belief in concentration as the true essence of poetry, although a significant number of poets turned to the long poem in later stages of their careers. In brief, the Imagists’ aim was to find the exact image capable of suggesting the emotion. Their poems were usually short in length and rapid in rhythm, conveying the same feeling of fragmentary experience detected in Anderson’s fiction. They also exploited the suggestive power of language, as proposed by the Symbolists, since the brevity of their poems only allowed for a well-defined outline of a picture that the reader was expected to take on and complete. Imagist poems were built around a primary metaphor and a juxtaposition of images. Tropes were not conceived as ornaments of speech but as poetic speech itself. Not surprisingly, the recuperation of the English Metaphysical poets had an undeniable influence on the Imagist use of language. As a cultural group the Imagists were rather short-lived, and had expired by 1918. Nevertheless, the influence of Imagism is traceable in the works of other writers of this first study block, including prose writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. An Imagist line has survived to the present, and has greatly contributed to the development of contemporary poetry. 54

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Though Modernist poets were intensely individualistic in their writings, some technical features are worth highlighting as adequate representatives of the whole poetic production of the moment. The surrealist substratum of Modernist poetry aspired to weaken the boundaries between subjects and objects both in grammatical and conceptual terms. The Imagists in particular epitomized this attempt to dissolve the distinction, so as to eliminate referentiality from poetry. The blurring of the boundary implied a fusion of speaker and topic, vision and viewer, in such a way that the object under scrutiny absorbed the totality of the speaker’s attention. The image that conveys the object reflects the speaker’s mind. Correspondingly, the object gains poetic existence because it enters the speaker’s consciousness. In an essay called «Hamlet and his Problems,» T. S. Eliot proposed an objective correlative as «the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,» instead of the direct description of that emotion. More specifically, the phrase alludes to a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (1950: 124-125)

The pursuit of appropriate images was a collective trend among Modernist poets. The visual arts played an extremely important role in the literature of the early twentieth century. Photography, painting, and films provided new approaches to life that literary authors hurried to adopt and adapt. Photography, in particular, captured those constituents of a scene that were left out by regular consciousness. Human vision was regarded too limited to seize all the details, i.e. all the layers of experience that occur in a short segment of time. The expressionistic display of experience proved to be a particularly fitting mode of presenting the fragmentary quality of life, as perceived by the intellectuals and artists of the day. Gertrude Stein, the American gallerist and art collector based in France, sought to create analogues between modern art and the written word, as can be seen in the following lines: A Table A Table means does it not my Dear it means a whole readiness. It is likely that a change. A table Means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. (From G. Stein’s Tender Buttons, 1914)

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In the lines above Stein employed repetition, dislocation, and different angles of vision of the object. She thus attempted to reproduce the visual compositions of abstract art, especially Cubism, of which she simulated a broken spatial wholeness and its subsequent fragmentation. Furthermore, her use of simple words attempted to reproduce the primary colors that painters like Pablo Picasso employed in their creations. As with abstract paintings, subject or theme lost their leading positions in the appreciation of art, so that technique became inseparable from subject. Poetry would become visual —as visual as it could become in a written format. As for sound, audible language became as important as its visual counterpart in the creation of impressions. Modernist poets relegated abstractions like love or death in favor of concrete moments. As they abandoned the search for permanent insight and significance, they explored epiphanic moments, instants of illumination encompassed in a single poem. Such instantaneous clarification was analogous to the momentary but highly evocative vibration of a sound. As regards prosody, the strict pattern of classic English meter is the iambic rhythm. Although rhyme was almost completely disregarded among Modernist authors, some rhyming pattern can be found in the poems under study here. Imagists defended the use of free verse, but they compensated the absence of rhyme and rhythm with certain patterns to create a sense of musicality. New rhythmic structures were sought through the repetition of words —similar to the Cubist repetition and montage of forms— and through the natural cadences of oral discourse. Although «themes» or abstractions were abandoned in favor of the concreteness of experience, the new poetry saw a broadening of poetic interests. From the most grotesque aspects of life to marginalized social types, the Modernists widened the range of focus of previous literary movements. They claimed the right and the need to act freely in the choice of subject matters, disregarding what previous models and authorities had considered suitable for poetry. Most Modernists developed a Whitmanesque interest in city life, granted poetic status to trivial details of ordinary experience, or made audible the voices of minorities. 1.3. The aim of poetry Modernist writers believed in the power of the artist to impose some order or patterns on the chaos and disorientation of modern life. They did not 56

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seek beauty, for the aesthetic pleasure of beauty was not their highest poetic goal. Instead, they sought the momentary clarification that the poetic composition could provide. In one of his early poems, Ezra Pound expressed the conviction that art in general constitutes an exemplary instrument of order: The order does not end in the arts, The order shall come and pass through them. The state is too idle, the decrepit church is too idle, The arts alone can transmit this. They alone cling fast to the gods. (From «From Chebar,» 1913; quoted in Bloom: 64)

In these lines, Pound announces that «gods» —i.e. a transcendent flux of spirit, of significant energy— dwell in everyday experience for the poet to apprehend them. Contrary to the romantic thesis, Modernists held that the universality of art resided in the power of language and form and in its significant strength. An absolute authority like the Transcendentalist «Over-Soul» or ideas of ultimate beauty and truth were discarded by Modernist poets, for whom poetry was not a bond between the personal and the total. Rather, they responded to the requirements of the new century by showing a skeptical attitude towards assumed abstractions that rested on a false global understanding of existence. Another major poet of the time, Robert Frost, explained the workings of a poem in the following terms: The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom […]. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in clarification of life —not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. (From R. Frost’s «The Figure a Poem Makes,» 1939)

Frost defended here that poetic meaning is transitory and private, not eternal and collective. Poetry, unlike the great narratives that account for history and experience by taking truths for granted, cannot aim to provide universals. In that line of thought, the extensive use of imagery by the Modernists did not confer fixed or permanent meanings.

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According to T. S. Eliot, poetry should not convey the poet’s emotions. Romantic and post-Romantic approaches to poetry would disagree with Eliot’s assertion. However, Eliot maintained that the poet’s art did not lie in finding or revealing the speaker’s emotions, but in transforming them into poetry. The poet’s role, according to Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry, should reside in acting as a catalyst to enable the fusion of object and language. The poet’s presence in the poem is not necessary for the evocation of the emotion, given that there is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him «personal.» Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from them. (NAAL: 1584)

In a sense, art compensated for the loss of beliefs and of a cultural system. As with romantic poetry, Modernist poets regarded reality as the source of emotion and also resumed the Romantics’ belief in the creative power of the observer, and in the dependence of apparent reality on the perception of an agent. Unlike the Romantics, however, the Modernists did not regard the universe as a harmonious whole. Any design transmitted by Modernist poetry is projected by the imagination itself. The poet did not hold the visionary role that Whitman assumed, and could not be considered the receptor and transmitter of essential truths or beauty. The prophetic and transcendentalist aura of Romantic poetry was therefore regarded obsolete in the skeptical early years of the twentieth century.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS 2.1. APPROACHING Modernist poetry American Modernist poetry comprised a variety of forms and voices that attempted to «make it new.» They also dealt with modernity in different ways: some remained in the United States and others traveled abroad to 58

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participate in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Europe; a number of them celebrated the urban roots of Modernism while others kept to natural settings. The poets surveyed in this Unit, however, shared the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century and all of them responded to the necessity of interrogation and newness. Though he acknowledged his American literary ancestors, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) felt closer to the European cultural tradition and in fact became a British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927. He thus partook of the British and American canon alike, and his presence in this volume is a tribute to his immense influence as poet and critic on twentieth-century American letters. He was born a midwesterner (St. Louis, Missouri) but graduated from Harvard University. He spent one year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he developed an interest in French Symbolism, and as a graduate student of Philosophy he also went to Germany to conduct research for his doctoral thesis. When the First World War broke out in Europe he was forced to leave the continent and go to England, where he finally settled, married, and started to publish poetry under the guidance of Ezra Pound. «The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,» which appeared in 1915, opened new paths for modern poetry, and The Waste Land (1922) consolidated his position as a major poet and spokesman of the new era. His apocalyptic vision of society, postwar culture and history was to influence a whole generation of poets and prose writers. He was also an insightful and influential literary critic. Eliot’s mythical method was his formulation of Joyce’s organizing strategy in Ulysses, by which the Irish writer had discovered «a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history» (quoted in Faulkner: 103). Well versed in the anthropological currents of his day, Eliot relied on myth as an effective strategy to establish a parallelism between the present and the past, by relying on the commonality of different creative moments. By pursuing this mythical method, he sought to bring light and meaning to a contemporary panorama that had lost them. For instance, The Waste Land was conceived after the legend of the Fisher King, a well-known figure in western tradition that immediately recalled concepts of infertility and loss.

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Eliot’s poetry, like Pound’s, has often been described as elitist on account of its learned references. Besides the mythical method, which implied the poet’s and the readers’ shared knowledge of a cultural context, allusion and quotation from previous literary works required a similar training on the readers’ part. In addition to these features, the reader must be actively engaged in the assembling of the fragmentary parts and ideas. Eliot thus actively pursued the involvement of the audience in the meaning of the text, so that the poem did not depend on the authoritative voice of the poet. (Nevertheless, he claimed that «genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood»; 1950: 200). As mentioned above, the term «objective correlative» was coined by Eliot to name the poet’s suitable choice of images to account for an emotion, and to draw the readers’ attention to it in preference to the creative agent behind the composition. Instead of stating the speaker’s emotion created by some event, the poet locates the origin of such emotion, and evokes it for the reader, through the correspondence of object and word. For instance, in «The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock»: Let us go, then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; (NAAL: 1577)

The image of the etherized patient in the lines above suggests immobility, barrenness of movement and emotion, and scientific dehumanization. The simile is stunning enough to invoke in the reader the same feelings experienced by Prufrock, a representative of modern man in the bleak aftermath of the war. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was among the most distinguished figures of the Modernist period, and he is often paired with Eliot for the influence they both exerted on modern poetry and poetics. He spent twelve years in London, from 1908 to 1920, where he worked as a secretary for Irish poet W. B. Yeats and became acquainted with memorable names of the day such as James Joyce, Robert Frost, or H[ilda] D[olittle]. In 1920 he took up residence in Paris, where he heavily edited Eliot’s The Waste Land into its remarkable form. In 1924 he left Paris for Italy, from where he was brought 60

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back to the United Sates in 1945 under arrest to face charges of treason for his fascist radio broadcasts during the Second World War. He provided the first theorizing of the Imagist movement in poetry, edited the anthology Des Imagistes in Europe in 1914 and was in the forefront of the group for some years. The Imagist anthology collected poems by ten leading authors, among whom were William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Amy Lowell. Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro» is possibly the most famous of all Imagist poems. His poetry and criticism was aimed at producing social and aesthetic change. (His main political and cultural preoccupations were stated in the colossal The Cantos, a work that occupied him from 1920 on.) He was particularly censorious of the commercial interests governing American magazines, and of fin-de-siècle Aestheticism as well. He therefore advocated an energetic poetry that committed to precision and economy, in the style that he had encountered in the European prose masters, such as Gustave Flaubert, writing at the turn of the century. Paradoxically, the novelty he desired to impose on modern art derived from international and ancient sources. Pound was deeply interested in Asian art and literature, and even translated Chinese poetry into English. The Cantos, his complex collection of poems, manifests Pound’s fascination with ideograms —where images stand for concepts— and his debt to the elliptical and concrete style of Chinese poetry. «In a Station of the Metro» evidences the poet’s delight in Asian forms. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a prolific writer who contributed to American letters with poems, plays, essays, stories, novels, and even an autobiography. He was one of the Modernist poets that remained home (New Jersey) when many of his contemporaries searched for new experiences and publishing opportunities in Europe, although university classmates Ezra Pound and Hilda Dolittle influenced his early poetry. He is known for his attention to local issues, and for his efforts to write an accessible poetry that distinguished itself from the bookish and excessively experimental writings of his generation. He is designated as one of the «native» poets of the era, as opposed to the «cosmopolitan» Eliot or Pound. Williams was committed to writing about everyday events in a distinctively American speech, this being an interest he shared with Wallace Stevens and

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Robert Frost. He descended from Spanish, French, British and Jewish ancestors, and in the Williams’ household he grew up listening to idioms other than American English. In order to compose in the American idiom, he listened closely to ordinary conversations in search of typically national rhythms and expressions, even from slang. Regarding form and structure, his poems resemble snapshots that try to capture an instant of time. Like Hemingway a few years later, he applied some of the skills of his profession to his artistic style: while Williams adapted the precision and austerity of medicine, Hemingway developed his highly personal and sparse style from his career as a journalist. Both authors are often compared for their succinct use of language. For his part, Williams made use of imagery and the visual organization of his poems to achieve the emotional impressions that he detected in everyday situations. Williams’ phrase «no ideas but in things» has survived as a sort of Imagist axiom. Following philosophical pragmatists such as William James, who defended that the meaning or reality of something did not depend on the perceiver, Williams’ poetry concentrates on objects themselves and prefers to dispense with the role and centrality of the observer. However, he dismissed the scholarly references that Imagists like Eliot or Pound included in their poems, and sought rather commonplace situations and language. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was, like William Carlos Williams, committed to a life-long profession that he managed to keep parallel to his creative endeavors. Despite his rather conventional and, apparently, nonstimulating post in an insurance company, Stevens was an active participant of the New York cultural scene, and remains an important name in terms of poetic production and theory of the Modernist period. He started to publish his poetry in 1914 in the «little magazines,» the popular publications that supported and encouraged emerging poets. Harmonium (1923), his first volume of poems, collected compositions that had been previously published in those periodicals. «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,» «The Emperor of Ice-Cream,» and some of his other best-known poems appeared in this first collection. Here, Stevens displayed his attraction to imagery and language, under the influence of the Imagist work of his contemporaries. Color and light abound in Stevens’ verse and participate in the celebratory tone of his lines, disclosing the pleasures of the instant. His 62

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love for exotic words, however, appealing to both the visual and the aural senses, made him less popular with the reading public than, for instance, Robert Frost. The Symbolist tradition shows through Stevens’ pleasure in sound and the suggestiveness that prevails in his poetry. Stevens was also deeply interested in perception, since he believed that meaning involved the subjective process of observation. His poem «Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird» (NAAL: 1448) emphasizes perception and subjectivity in its exploration of multiple perspectives. As in a Picasso painting, any of those possible ways is as valid as any other, and can never disqualify the other perspectives. All in all, the beauty and the meaning that the poet exposes depend on the observer, and his or her capacity to pause and distill. This epistemological aspect makes his poetry differ from other Modernist work with its emphasis on the idea that the meaning of the thing is in the thing itself, not in the observer. Not surprisingly, Stevens has been frequently regarded as an obscure poet, a seeker and explorer of abstractions such as «order,» «imagination» and «reality.» His books, in fact, were entitled after his persistent preoccupation with aesthetic order, like the aforementioned Harmonium, Ideas of Order (1935), or Parts of the World (1942). In a time of existentialist despair such as the early twentieth century, Stevens possessed the firm belief that imagination could provide the individual with comfort and meaning: «There must be in the world about us things that solace us quite as fully as any heavenly visitation could» (Letters: 661). Stevens assigned to the imagination the role of investing personal meaning in those mesmerizing words and the experiences behind them. Accordingly, his poetry revealed a persistent interest in the relation between reality and imagination, much in the fashion of all Modernist writers. However, he replaced the Modernist anxiety over the insufficiencies of language with an overt pleasure in the beauty of words: «In kitchen cups concupiscent curds» (from «The Emperor of Ice-Cream,» NAAL: 1442). Robert Frost (1874-1963) is often defined as the «Nature Poet» of American Modernism due to his years as a farmer, which persistently showed through his poetry. Other labels frequently assigned to his work are «symbolist,» «synecdochist,» and «anti-Platonist.» Although he was born in San Francisco his family soon moved to New Hampshire, where he spent most of his life —with the exception of a short European experience between

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1912 and 1915. In England he met Ezra Pound, who helped Frost to publish his first volume and later reviewed it enthusiastically. Thus, Frost published his first poetry in London (A Boy’s Will, 1913), where he came in contact with the European avant-garde and the poetic innovations of the moment. His acquaintance with poets Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and his long admired Yeats proved significant for his subsequent compositions, but no less significant was his contact with the legacy of the English Romantics. He returned to the United States in 1915 due to the outbreak of the First World War, and saw his reputation increase to the point of becoming one of the most popular American poets of the twentieth century. Frost showed both a Naturalist and a Transcendentalist attitude in his precise but lyrical representation of natural scenes. The years that Frost spent farming for a living contributed to the literary and public personae that he created. The meditative, wise man of his poems ran parallel to the stern and enduring self-image that he projected. The rural flavor of his work was entirely different from the sophisticated urban poems of most of his contemporaries. However, he did not present a romanticized version of nature or agrarian life, and the melancholic air of his poems did not derive from a sense of loss or longing. His poetry evoked rural New England scenarios, often displaying its beauty in contrast with some obscure or troubling depth. The agrarian myth of the American countryside was thus challenged or, at least, reconsidered. In this light, Frost participated in the revisionist spirit of his age. In spite of his contact with the highly skeptical artists that he met in Europe, Frost did not show an apparent interest in the maladies of modern civilization. As mentioned before, his poetry addressed natural settings and everyday scenes from New England, and avoided direct references to the agitated new era. His poetry, however, transmitted an idea of change, a shift the speaker perceives and communicates through a variety of images. Regarding form, Frost was equally personal in his understanding of poetic form. He was deeply traditionalist in his preservation of rhythmic and rhyming patterns, and he sought the newness demanded by the age in idiom and subject matter. In his introduction to King Jasper (1935), written by his friend Edward Arlington Robinson, Frost expressed his views on modern poetry and its search for novelty in a passage worth quoting in full: 64

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It may come to the notice of posterity that this, our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new. The one old way to be new no longer served. Science put in into our heads that there must be new ways to be new. Those tried were largely by subtraction —elimination. Poetry, for example, was tried without punctuation. It was tried without capital letters. It was tried without metric frame on which to measure the rhythm. It was tried without any images but those to the eye: and a loud general intoning has to be kept up to cover the total loss of specific images to the ear, those dramatic tones of voice which had hitherto constituted the better half of poetry. It was tried without content under the trade name of poesie pure. It was tried without phrase, epigram, coherence, logic and consistency. It was tried without ability. [...] It was tried without feeling or sentiment like murder for small pay in the underworld. (Selected Essays: 59)

Despite Frost’s concern with natural scenes and their powerful relation to the speaker, the focus of his poetry differs from that of the Romantic poets. He is often situated in the tradition of such lyricists as Coleridge or Wordsworth but, unlike the English Lakists, he never believed in the communion of self and nature. Hence, nature in his poems lacked the redeeming quality perceived in many American writers of the nineteenth and even twentieth century. He therefore participated in the resisting attitude to the pastoral that, for instance, Sherwood Anderson had manifested in Winesburg, Ohio. Instead, Frost perceived nature as alienated from the human mind, which resulted in a slight bleakness of tone: Man’s physical needs, the dangers facing him, the realities of birth and death, the limits of his ability to know and to act are shown in stark outline by the indifference and inaccessibility of the physical world in which he must live. (Lynen: 137)

However, nature’s remoteness and indifference are used to celebrate human awareness of frailty and death, as well as the self’s capacity for emotional response. Frost, therefore, tried to communicate something with his poetry, unlike those contemporaries of his who had «tried without content,» to put it in his own words. His observations and comments on the human condition and its relationship with nature resonate throughout his works. That is the motive behind the progression observed in them, from «delight» to «wisdom,» or from a moment of insight to another of clarification. The structure of his poems, such as that detected in «After

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Apple-Picking,» articulates a discovery brought about by the perception of a natural fact. Here are a few hints for you to take into consideration before reading the set texts. Bear in mind…

 That Modernist poetry departs from some fundamental Romantic postulates concerning the poetic process and its outcome.

 That for Modernist poets perception of the object (situation, thing, etc) prevails over knowledge of the object.

 That contemporary science suggested a new understanding of observer and observed which had an influence on the poetic subject, which loses weight in the creative process.

 That poetic language is not considered a mere vehicle of meaning or an ornament, but an end in itself.

2.2. REVISITING Modernist poetry T. S. Eliot’s «The Hollow Men» «The Hollow Men» was conceived as an epilogue to Eliot’s own composition The Waste Land. It was published in 1925, and its initial epigraph («Mistah Kurtz —he dead») immediately recalls the spiritual and ideological emptiness that Joseph Conrad depicted in Heart of Darkness (1900). «The Hollow Men» displays the characteristic features of Eliot’s poetry: repetition and anaphora, the representation of a fragmented reality through a variety of voices, blank or free verse, and an intense use of imagery and allusion. Eliot’s poem pays some attention to end rhyme in the first four parts, where the final word of the final line of most stanzas rhyme with some word in a previous line. Unlike the blank verse that Eliot had employed in the composition of The Waste Land, «The Hollow Men» was written in a simpler and sparer accentual mode. In his effort to make his lines resemble conversation, he composed this poem in rather short, sometimes harsh, lines, with two or three major stresses among any number of unstressed syllables (Reibetanz: 335). The occasional four-stress 66

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lines reinforce the poem’s ceremonial tone: «Paralysed force, gesture without motion» (NAAL: 1599):

 Scan these excerpts for stressed and unstressed syllables, and notice the poem’s rhythm: We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together […] Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow (NAAL: 1599, 1601)

Parallel and repetitive structures abound in «The Hollow Men.» Not only do they provide rhythm to the poem, but they also emphasize diction and ideas. The use of caesuras, punctuation and enjambment also guides the rhythmic reading of the lines. The title, Eliot acknowledged, blended William Morris’ «The Hollow Land» and Rudyard Kipling’s «The Broken Men.» Some critics, nevertheless, have observed a debt to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: «But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,/[...] They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades/ Sink in the trial» (IV, ii). Other scholars have detected a parallelism between these hollow creatures and the straw figures of fertility rites, whose dead spirits revive in the spring. Others, finally, have traced the title to the Roman ritual of casting straw puppets into the Tiber to divert demonic attention from real human beings. The poem describes the disheartening existence of the inhabitants of an arid landscape, a modern wasteland, and their hopeless acceptance of their fate. It is a sarcastic elegy that involves a quest and a failure, a pattern that other Modernist authors —Fitzgerald, for instance, as Unit Three will discuss— used to organize their works.

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 Look

through the poem for imagery related to wastelands. All diction referring to dryness or barrenness will serve the purpose.

Besides the allusion to Conrad’s character, the poem presents readers with a second epigraph: the «Old Guy.» Both figures introduce the hollow men of the poem by indicating both what they are and what they are not. The hollow people are morally dead as if filled with straw, and are not energetic overreachers like Kurtz or Fawkes.

 The second epigraph mentions the Old Guy. Read the Norton Anthology’s information on this figure, and relate it to the poem’s ideas and imagery.

The structure of «The Hollow Men» is episodic and fragmentary, despite the collectivity suggested by the plural form of the term «men» in the title. As with Sherwood Anderson’s incommunicative characters, the hollow people in Eliot’s poem seem to be predisposed towards spiritual disunion. The physical wasteland portrayed in these lines runs parallel to the moral and emotional barrenness of these human beings, who are left without the solace of an absolute, redeeming presence. Only the negative overtones of the «Shadow» —black, a form of negation— impregnates their lives.

 The poem is remarkably religious in its references to supernatural and metaphysical elements in order to highlight the vacuity of modern life. List those references to mass, ritual, redemption, life after death, etc.

The poem’s structural and thematic quest involves the balance between the physical world and the abstract, a balance that would provide some sense to the desolate lives of the creatures living in the wasteland. The impossibility of reconciliation is conveyed in the contrast between the imagery of motion and the imagery of inaction present in the poem. In other 68

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words, the quest to make meaning of the physical world in light of the abstract is articulated «in terms of motion between opposing spheres of existence, yet the speaker’s inability to find an acceptable truth creates images of frustrated inertia» (Urquhart: 199). The presentation of the hollow men as «leaning together,» in the third line of the poem, advances the generalized immobility sensed throughout its lines, for the leaning movement is directed towards a central point that resembles the implosive force of the «whimper» in the final line. The image of circular motion «round the prickly pear» suggests energy without result. The poem’s five sections communicate the growing tension between motion and immobility, as well as advancement towards frustration and despair.

 The

poem’s kinetic imagery suggests progress in the shifting image of light. How does light evolve from the beginning to the end of the poem?

Action/stasis is not the only binary pair present in the poem: hollow/ stuffed, tenderness/stone... «The Hollow Men» articulates another main opposition: a «here» and a «there,» a physical world and its abstract counterpart. «Here» refers to the wasteland inhabited by the hollow men, a dead land of dead-like people «which do not constitute a message, a meaning, and much less worth» (Emig: 189). The «there» lies in «death’s dream kingdom,» a reference to a territory of unrealized possibilities. Reality and utopia remain on different spheres as far as the hollow men are concerned, as if alienation could preserve the possibility intact, but both kingdoms will ultimately meet in the last section, pointing to a dreadful circularity of existence. The fragmentary arrangement of the poem corresponds to the fragmentary presentation of the characters. Hands, voices, lips, eyes, reveal a synechdochal conception of human beings, which runs counter to the indissoluble selves pursued by Modernist poets. As the culminating point of such fragmentation, a completely disembodied portrayal is also offered: «Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without emotion» (NAAL: 1599). Another sign of rupture is section five’s broken prayer, either interrupted («Life is very long») or discontinuous:

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For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the (NAAL: 1602)

A desolate, fatigued tone impregnates the dreary lives of the hollow people. The poem’s diction and repetitive structures confer a ceremonial air to the sections, but the poem also suggests an exhaustion of language that contrasts the hope apparently summoned by the ritual: In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river (NAAL: 1601)

The passage where several concepts are dismissed as mere signifiers («idea,» «reality,» «motion,» «act,» etc.) is noteworthy. It intensifies the liturgical rhythm of the poem but unveils a skepticism about words and their meaning, for shadows fall in between and destroy the connection (Emig: 81). As a consequence of such disbelief in words, creative aridity arrives: «Between the conception/and the creation/[...] Falls the Shadow» (NAAL: 1601). The myth of the Fisher King resonates in the use of natural imagery. Being familiar with Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Eliot configured many of his works according to the ideas proposed by these anthropological texts. Eliot was particularly fascinated by Weston’s emphasis on the Fisher King as a central figure in the Grail legends. «The Hollow Men,» like The Waste Land before, is concerned with the sterility of the land. The former, however, does not concentrate on a single figure bearing the curse of infertility. Instead, a collectivity of hollow men bears the guilt for the land’s misfortune. They are presented as mutilated as Tiresias in a twilight kingdom that is only a shadow of what it used to be. The title’s reference to the male members of the community implies a sexual dysfunction that, once more, reminds us of Tiresias’ impotence. Vegetation, accordingly, is used as imagery of degradation, not of plenitude. The straw that stuffs the hollow men is a sign of decayed grass, for instance, and «cactus land» and «prickly pear» violently contrast with the desired 70

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multifoliate rose —Dante Alighieri’s symbol of Heaven, but also a traditional symbol of female sexual organs and, therefore, of femaleness itself.

 We

can observe that the poem is constructed from constituents that propose the emptiness of significance. History, popular tradition and religion participate in the creative act but suffer a severe revision to suit the modern panorama. Analyze how «The Hollow Men» alludes to, but also reverses, well-known pieces of western culture like The Divine Comedy, nursery rhymes, or The Lord Prayer.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century as poet, playwright and literary critic. His contact with European literary traditions, French Symbolism and with authors Yeats and Joyce contributed to his particular style, a scholarly combination of allusions, mythical method, impersonal presentation of the object, symbolism and juxtaposition.

Ezra Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro» Highly committed to the search for newness, Ezra Pound’s poetry evidences the brevity, impersonality and indirectness of his Imagist manifesto. «In a Station of the Metro» epitomizes its author’s interest in the image as speech itself and in poetic traditions other than the Anglo-Saxon. It is decidedly illustrative of the use of compression, sharp visual imagery and juxtaposition praised by the Imagists. It is an urban poem, a response to the new technological and capitalist scenario. When, years later, Pound accounted for the creative process behind this poem he acknowledged that he had strived for words capable of expressing the beauty conveyed by the real situation that had so impressed him: a crowd emerging from a metro at a station in Paris. But Pound’s work displays further influences from Orientalism: haiku —or hokku— poetry had a significant impact on his and other Modernists’ compositions. Haiku is a poetic form, consisting of a total number of seventeen syllables, which presents a clear and concise picture. Its intention is to excite

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a particular emotion and provide spiritual insight. The haiku poetic structure reveals the poet’s communion with nature, in which the senses play a significant role. Although they did not seek the fusion between the speaker and the natural world, the Imagists discovered that the haiku met their requirements of precision and compression through the juxtaposition of images.

 «In a Station of the Metro» resembles the haiku form in its brevity and clinical precision. Scan the poem for the number of its syllables.

The fusion of subject and object as creative principle is evident in the poem. The speaking «I» almost disappears in the bringing to life of a scene, so the poetic voice must speak indirectly. As Eliot would declare, modern art sought impersonality. The speaker’s role in the poem is that of a viewer, an observer of the scene, which gains artistic existence because the speaker observes it and makes it participate in his or her consciousness. The viewer comes into contact with a situation in an instant of time, but both the situation and the moment are experienced and objectified by the subject, thus leading to a union of inside and outside, in the same way as the glasscovered Modernist architecture avoided the distinctions between interior and exterior landscape. In other words, the scene is necessarily perceived by a subject who ultimately disappears from the poem.

 Observe how in this poem there is a lack of statement —i.e. there is no «I» declaring his/her testimony. This is reinforced by the syntactic design of the lines: instead of the usual grammatical layout of subject+verb+objects, what does the poem offer?

The poetic value of juxtaposition finds expression in this poem. Its images are neither linked by grammatical connectors nor by the trope of comparison. Instead they are juxtaposed, they stand one beside the other, so that any sense of priority among them is foreclosed. The poem’s most noteworthy feature is its concentration. The use of an image represents the texture («wet») and visual impact («petals,» «black bough») of the scene. Two lines comprise the immediate impression caused 72

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by a fragment of life. «In a Station of the Metro» shows the Modernist disregard for ornamentation in terms of diction or tone, and favors the harsh simplicity and exactitude of ordinary language. It also manifests the instantaneity of the sensation. The impression felt by the viewer lasts a moment, and so does its validity. According to Pound, «[t]he point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated argument.» By complying with this principle, the poet avoids abstraction and rhetoric so that concreteness of the object is achieved. It is worth observing that the choice of words in the poem suggests the bleak impersonality of city life. The rush and overcrowding of Paris commuters is metonymically revealed in the image «faces.» «Apparition» adds a gloomy touch to the picture, and suggests suddenness as well.

 Pound used natural imagery to convey an emotion caused by an urban landscape. Think of the petals and the bough, and consider what physical or biological features of them can contribute to the poem.

«In a Station of the Metro» conforms to the prosodic freedom advocated by most Modernist poets. Its lack of regular rhyme and rhythm welcomes, however, the use of parallelisms in the two lines of the poem. As with other Modernist poets, Pound would adopt repetitive or parallel structures in order to achieve some rhythmic effect. In the case of the poem under study here, the repetition of the agent-less and action-less grammatical structure —including the title of the poem, which could serve as its initial line— underlines the fragmentary effect sought by so many Modernist authors. It also echoes the Modernist fragmented perception of experience as opposed to the comprehensive assimilation of previous periods.

Ezra Pound was one of the best-known poets and theorizers of the Imagist movement. Compression, a preference for juxtaposition, and a prevailing search for concise images to convey instantaneous perceptions characterized his early poetry. He was among the Modernist authors who explored the possibilities of Asian compositions, especially Haiku poems, for their concentration and pictorial precision.

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William Carlos Williams’ «This is Just to Say» William Carlos Williams is often surveyed as an Objectivist poet —an offshoot of Imagism which made strong emphasis on objects and on poems themselves as objects. Williams turned away from the mannerisms he had observed in some of his contemporaries and searched for poems that stood for themselves in their rendering of very specific moments. He was a poet of the local, and with his poems the reader is «asked to attend to the thing in itself: its haecceity or ‘this-ness’ —what makes the object or moment this and no other» (Grey: 407). The poem «This is Just to Say» was, according to Williams himself, written for his wife on the back of a prescription form. It exemplifies, once more, the compression pursued by the Modernist poets in their effort to represent the constituent fragments of life. But for his long poem Paterson, which deals with the life of a New Jersey town, Williams preferred the minimalist short lyrics that «This is Just to Say» typifies. As frequently happens with Williams’ poems, this one shows an apparent simplicity due to its straightforwardness and its lack of scholarly references or cultural allusions. But the poem itself guides the readers’ appreciation of its complex underside, suggesting the extraordinary in the ordinary.

 Pay attention to the poem’s formal structure, and notice how visual it is. Williams’ line breaks create a visual impression on the page that forces the reader to consider words in isolation because they appear highlighted by the very organization of the poem. What is the main word in line one, two, three, etc? To which grammatical categories do they belong in each case? How does Williams use this to assemble the specifics of the moment he is conveying?

Unconventional punctuation invests the poem with a peculiar rhythmic pattern. Although free verse eschews regular rhyme and rhythm, this poem projects a personal organization of lines and words through the absence of the expected punctuation marks. The metric pattern —that is, the method to measure the parts that compose the poem— relies more on line lengths 74

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than on the number of stressed and unstressed syllables. The formal distribution of lines —in groups of four— enhances the idea of a metric pattern in the absence of one.

 Look into the way enjambment works in the poem. (Don’t forget its title: as with Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro,» the title could be said to be its initial line.) How does enjambment contribute to rhythm? Does it quicken or decelerate it?

Like Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro,» this poem shows an absence of theme or main idea to organize and direct it. The first line and the adverb «just» deprive the poem of a superior or ulterior significance, and grants the poem the air of a note stuck on the fridge. The reader’s attention is therefore directed towards the words themselves, not towards the possible messages hidden behind the words. As noted above, throughout his career Williams strove for a poetic language that echoed American speech. It therefore lacks the erudite allusions of Eliot or Pound, and employs common speech instead: it is composed of ordinary words put into poetic form. The explicit «you» in «This is Just to Say» (suggesting a conversational interchange) reflects his interest in common spoken utterances, enhanced by the fluency of its syntax. The term «icebox» is also worth mentioning for it evidences American —not British— speech. Ordinary experience shows through its lines, which suggests a domestic scene through its diction: «breakfast,» «icebox,» etc. In his effort to make the object speak for itself, rather than describing it, Williams often made use of very vivid imagery. Critics as well as readers have coincided in detecting erotic overtones in the poem, due to the sensuality conveyed by the plums.

 Plums are extremely sensual fruits, so that the central image of the poem brings together several sensations. What tactile or visual associations can you identify in the image of the poem’s plums?

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The poem displays a rather ironic tone, for the apologies embodied in the speaker’s words contrast with the delight expressed in the final phrases: «They were delicious/so sweet/and so cold» (NAAL: 1472). In fact, the poem soon disregards the speaking «I» with which it starts and concentrates on the image that occupies the reader’s attention throughout the poem. Williams thus objectifies the experience and depersonalizes it by making the object stand out in its specificity —it’s not just any plums, but those plums.

William Carlos Williams’s minimalist method comprised a preference for the American vernacular, and a photographic style that attempted to apprehend the significant moments of ordinary experience. His geographic and creative distance from the more cosmopolitan poets showed through his simple, non-academic use of language.

Wallace Stevens’ «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock» Stevens wrote «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock» in 1931. These lines problematize Stevens’ pursuit of meaning in life. Critics have interpreted Stevens’ poetry as a celebration of the transient but meaningful satisfactions provided by ordinary experience. The reader’s attention is, as with other poems by him, guided by the aesthetic energy that the poet discovers in reality, an aesthetic and temporary order out of the chaos of life. The poem’s exoticism contrasts with Stevens’ conventional life, and that is precisely the idea dominating the poem: ordinary versus extraordinary experience. Indeed, the poem constitutes a mild reproach to the conventionalities and conformities of middle-class life.

 In your own words, could you state the poem’s theme in one line? What parts of the poem guided your choice: tone, title, diction…?

As often happens with Modernist poetry, the poem lacks a regular metric pattern and a visible structure or stanza. However, a certain rhythmic effect 76

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is achieved. Stevens also attempts at some casual rhyme that contributes to the overall musicality of the poem.

 Look for anaphoras, parallelisms and repetitions in the poem to appreciate its rhythm. As well, try to find instances of end rhyme, internal rhyme or alliteration. As usual with poetry, reading it aloud is a great help to perceive its musical effects.

«Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock» is a far more narrative poem than others in this same Unit. The reader only needs to focus on its syntax, careful punctuation, and adverbial clauses: Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and sleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather. (NAAL: 1443)

In the lines above we can find a very complete statement: subject, verb, direct object, time clause, apposition… In other words, the poet makes a point of indicating the who, what, where and when of the experience. The poem is not so fragmentary in terms of form as in terms of perception of experience. The imagery of the colored ghostly gowns creates a sensation perceivable by the reader. The poet does not attempt to recreate the exact situation in which disillusionment occurred, but the disillusionment itself. Once more, then, a Modernist poem shifts its focus from the subject to the object. It is a poem that gives voice to a topic frequently explored in Modernist literature: the failure of expectations. The disillusionment here is related to the night and its unfulfilled promises, but the exact moment provided by the title reduces a wide span of time to a much shorter segment, quicker and more apprehensible. The poem suggests that the speaker expects something which is unique, different in the night hours, but has to make do with mere reality. The fundamental image by which disillusionment is conveyed is that of color, which loses distinctiveness or totally dissolves in the darkness. The

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reader’s attention is therefore controlled and directed to the diction and the sensorial imagery, more than to the structure or the prosody.

 Observe how color imagery works in «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.» It should be noted that the poem makes use of personal, not generalized, connotations regarding color. List all the colors and try to find their function in the poem. Does «white» stand for the usual characteristics it connotes?

The people who appear in the poem are impregnated with the anodyne quality of the night, and do not possess unusual or special dreams. Meanwhile, the sailor stands for intensity, the actual gift that the night offers to the speaker. Exoticism counterbalances dullness with evocative colors and odd-sounding words like «baboons» and «periwinkles,» much to Stevens’ liking for aural suggestiveness.

 Look

into the synesthesia of the poem’s final line, which reveals the Symbolist influence on Stevens’ poetry. What senses are merged? Why should this poem end with this image?

The speaker’s tone is far from forlorn. He shows a rather playful attitude towards disillusionment, as if he had cast aside the origin of the emotion and had instead detected its aesthetical possibilities.

Wallace Stevens was a poet who celebrated the beauty of the ephemeral in life. The Symbolist legacy is present in the attention he paid to color and sound imagery, which conferred an exotic air to his poetry. But he was also a poet of abstractions who sought order in apparent chaos, and permanently explored the interplay between reality and imagination.

Robert Frost’s «After Apple-Picking» «After Apple-Picking,» published in Robert Frost’s second collection of poems (North of Boston, 1914), is an example of the author’s attempt to 78

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write in the American idiom also pursued by some of his contemporaries. Despite employing the vernacular and stressing common scenes, Frost still sought the beauty of poetic musicality and, therefore, some of his compositions maintained the restraint of the poetic form provided by rhyme, rhythm, stanzaic structure, and so forth. He was not an Imagist poet, since he gave preference to sound over sight. Prosody, then, early on became the central component of his verse, particularly intonation for its musical and dramatic possibilities. Frost’s pleasure in poetic sound is made evident in the sentence «I’d sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.» This poem was written in blank verse: iambic verse, mostly in pentameters, regardless of the varying length of its lines. It mirrors Frost’s preference for traditional poetic forms and his delight in rhythm and rhyme.

 The following excerpt displays Frost’s fondness for rhyming patterns: I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rambling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. (NAAL: 1398) Look for examples of end rhyme, internal rhyme, cross rhyme and alliteration in the lines above, keeping in mind it is only an extract of the complete poem.

This poem, much in Frost’s line, possesses a narrative flavor as a result of its descriptive, commenting, and reporting diction. Unlike Pound’s «In a Station of the Metro» (see above) and its lack of verbs —thus evoking temporal and spatial immobility— this poem stresses action through its peculiar use of words. The title itself already points to change and action. A number of Frost’s poems were entitled after physical occupations («Mending Wall,» «Mowing,» «Going for Water»), which evidenced his personal circumstances as a poet who needed to sustain himself and his family. This particular title offers an interesting conjunction of time («After») and work («apple-picking»), the two basic ideas developed in the poem.

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 Search

for those words in the poem, particularly verbs, that point to action. Then list those terms referring to inactivity. Lastly, write the theme of the poem in you own words basing it on the poem’s duality.

As with other compositions, this poem deals with a simple event that nevertheless discloses complex implications. Professor Robert Penn Warren identified a dialectical structure as the organizing principle in «After ApplePicking,» consisting of its paradoxical association of fact and dream (Warren: 124). Warren argued that the literal level of the poem «dissolves into a kind of dream world —the literal world and the dream world overlapping, as it were, like the two sets of elements in a superimposed photograph» (129). This superimposition —or, rather, juxtaposition of apparently opposite concepts— has its counterpart at the sound level of the poem, whose rhyme and rhythm remind the reader of drowsiness and distorted states of perception. Particularly interesting is the use of the word «sleep» in the poem, a pivotal term that seems to articulate the reflection proposed by the poet. Its repetition also supplies the poem with an additional rhythmic device.

 The recurrence of the word «sleep» is not the only repetitive device in the poem. Search for other words or structures that may contribute to the rhythm of the poem through parallelism or repetition.

Frost creates a persona to construct this poem. The speaker voices his/ her experiences as an aged person who has gained knowledge —not answers, though— from nature, to which the meditative, evocative tone contributes. The speaker exudes nostalgia through references to a lifetime, bygone activities and its accomplishments and failures. As with other poems by the same author, «After Apple-Picking» evidences a narrative quality. The speaker has much of a narrator in this poem, accounting for a series of moments that he resolves though report and description. Diction referring to action, connecting words («and,» «but,» «for,» «no matter»...), and references to time and place organize the speaker’s experience into narrative structures, for he is not only communicating but telling. 80

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A variety of images enriches this poem. Auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic, tactile, and visual imagery reconstructs the experience of apple-picking and aims at «recognition,» that moment of insight that fuels creativity and that must be also awakened in the reader. Tactile imagery is evident in the roundness of apples and the points of the ladder, or the scratchy feeling of the stubble, or the pressure felt by the speaker on his feet. The «rumbling sound» of heaps of apples involves the sense of hearing, the «scent of apples» is an olfactory image, and kinetic images are those of the ladder swaying and boughs bending. Thus, nature envelops the speaker, who acknowledges its presence.

 The poem makes use of visual images as well. Imagery referring to vision is of particular interest here. What kind of sight is the speaker revealing? Clear? Blurry? Distorted? Search for the words in the poem that lead you to your conclusion.

The poem, from its very title on, alludes to the mythical fall from grace «after apple-picking.» The central allusion to the Bible expands to include the reference to labor. In the poem, a rewarding life is understood as productive, busy. Labor and its reward appear in the Book of Genesis as an aftermath of the Fall. They are thus regarded as the curse of humans, but also as their distinctive feature. Other Biblical allusions refer to heaven and earth, and the saved and the damned. The speaker’s weariness overpowers his disappointment: For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. (NAAL: 1398)

Hence, the speaker greets sleep, in its physical or metaphysical sense, and by introducing the figure of the woodchuck and its hibernation he acknowledges an awareness of life that nonhumans lack.

 In

line with Newtonian physics, nineteenth-century models of nature were of an orderly and meaningful system. What kind of nature does Frost represent? Certain? Ambivalent? Let your conclusions about sight imagery guide your reflection.

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Robert Frost has often been defined as a «Nature poet» due to his insistent attention to nature, an attention that reflected aims and concerns different from those evident in Romantic poetry. He relied heavily on sound and prosodic effects to capture what he termed «recognition.» He used traditional poetic devices such as rhyme, meter and stanza in combination with flexible syntax, and blended the legacy of classic pastoral forms with the New England natural setting.

3. EXERCISES 3.1. Test yourself On the poets a) What rhythmic devices does T. S. Eliot use in «The Hollow Men»? b) How does diction interrelate with the liturgical tone in Eliot’s poem? c) How does «The Hollow Men» illustrate his theory of the mythical method? d) Why is «In a Station of the Metro» said to participate in the haiku form of writing? How does it not? e) How does Pound’s poem represent the Imagist poetic program? f) What strategies does William Carlos Williams employ in the absence of rhythmic regularity in «This is Just to Say»? g) How does the objective correlative work in Williams’ poem? h) How would you describe Williams’ style in the poem you have read? i) How is rhythm achieved in Wallace Steven’s «Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock»? j) How does Stevens’ poem evidence his search for a sensuous poetic experience? k) How does synesthesia work in Stevens’ «Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock? 82

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l) What sound effects does Robert Frost use in «After Apple-Picking»? m) Why is Frost’s poetry, however concerned with nature, a challenge to the pastoral ideal? n) What is the function of imagery in «After Apple-Picking»?

Summary questions a) What is the importance of the «little magazines» in the birth and development of Modernist poetry? b) How is the influence of Cubist art traceable in American Modernist poetry? c) What common strategies can be detected in the pursuit of poetic newness? In what sense do Modernist poems reject thematic and formal conventions of the past? d) What devices do the poets use to appeal to the senses? e) How does Orientalism influence Modernist poetry? f) Why is brevity one of the characteristics of Imagist poetry? g) Why is Modernist poetry often considered elitist? h) How do the «cosmopolitan» poets differ from the «native» ones? In particular, what role does speech play in their dissimilarities? i) How does Modernist poetry resemble and differ from Romanticism?

3.2. Explore a) In the light of your knowledge of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theories, how does the signifier/signified pair illuminate Modernist poetry? b) Despite the resistance of the Modernists to every instance of tradition, the poetic legacy of Walt Whitman is visible in some of the poetry of

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the period. To what extent is this true of the poems surveyed in this Unit? Where can you detect hints of Whitman’s poetic persona, mood or interests? c) Robert Frost may strike readers of this volume as different from — less «modern» than— the other poets discussed in this Unit. Ezra Pound wrote an enthusiastic review of Frost’s first published poetry, despite their dissimilar styles and views on poetry. What would have been, in your opinion, so attractive about Frost’s work in the eyes of such an innovative poet as Pound? d) In your opinion, is there a contradiction between the implied reader of Modernist poetry and the ordinary people whose speech and lives are celebrated by many of these poets?

3.3. Key terms — — — — — — —

Allusion Chicago Renaissance Haiku Imagism Juxtaposition Little magazine Mythical method

— — — — — — —

Objective correlative Orientalism Persona Primitivism Quotation Symbolism Synesthesia

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY 4.1. Recommended readings — T. S. Eliot’s «Tradition and the Individual Talent.» NAAL: 1581-1584. — Robert Frost’s «The Figure a Poem Makes.» http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig. html — Wallace Stevens’ «Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.» http://www. writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/not-ideas.html

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4.2. Critical works cited HAROLD BLOOM. Modern Critical Views: Ezra Pound. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. T. S. ELIOT. «Ulysses, Order and Myth.» In Peter FAULKNER, ed. The English Modernist Reader: 1910-1930. Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1986. — «Hamlet and His Problems.» Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950. — (ed.). The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: Faber and Faber, 1954. RAINER EMIG. Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits. London and New York: Longman, 1995. ROBERT FROST. Selected Prose. Eds. Hyde Cox and Edward C. Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. RICHARD GREY. A History of American Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. FRANK LENTRICCHIA. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge U. P., 1994. JOHN F. LYNEN. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven, CT.: Yale U.P., 1960. J. M. REIBETANZ. «Accentual Forms in Eliot’s Poetry from The Hollow Men to Four Quartets.» English Studies, Vol. 4 (1984), 334-349. WALLACE STEVENS. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. TROY URQUHART. «Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’» Explicator. Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), 199-201. ROBERT PENN WARREN. «The Themes of Robert Frost.» Selected Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1951.

4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): The Waste Land (1922) has become a landmark in AngloAmerican literature. Its depiction of a bleak, unproductive world, after the myth of the Fisher King, suggested the dissolution of civilization as it had been

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known, or assumed to be, and introduced new patterns in modern poetry. It especially relied on academic techniques such as allusion, quotation and the mythical method, and emphasized attention to the poetic object. Ezra Pound (1885-1972): The Cantos was an epic, almost life-long, project in Pound’s career. It is a collection of poems, written in a highly elusive and academic style full of allusions and cultural references, and even written in foreign languages, where Pound stated his particular views on the state of culture and the corruption of the modern world.

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UNIT THREE «AN AGE OF MIRACLES AND SATIRE»: JAZZ AND DEPRESSION

Program 1. PRESENTATION: A lost generation 1.1. Babbitts and Gatsbies 1.2. Agony of the American Dream: Coming to terms with the wasteland 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flawed Adam 2.1. APPROACHING Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 2.2. REVISITING The Great Gatsby 3. EXERCISES Learning outcomes — To analyze the causes that gave birth to the «Lost Generation.» — To examine The Great Gatsby as representative text of this specific time and spirit. — To understand the narrative strategies used by Fitzgerald to suit the Jazz Age.

1. PRESENTATION: A LOST GENERATION In a time span of a few years, the United States saw a radical transformation in the social and economic scheme of the nation. The Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end when the Stock Market Crash took place in October 1929. Unemployment and very deficient life conditions prevailed where flappers and jazz had abounded only a few years before. The western world lived through the interbellum years with the impending threat of a second world war. Thus, the imminent tragedy observed in the works of many American writers of the first quarter of the century finally became a harsh reality. The Jazz and Depression periods are easily combined in the same literary spirit, even if a shallow approach might place them in opposite standpoints. The decade of the 1920s has been called «the Roaring Twenties,» «the Jazz

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Age,» the postwar «Big Boom» and other similar terms, all of them of lively and glittering echoes. However, it was also the time of Prohibition (the ban on the production, transport and sale of alcohol from 1919 to 1934), acute corruption, organized crime and harsh social inequalities. According to several historians, the 1930s were already well rooted in the previous decades, particularly regarding governmental lack of interest in social concerns, crop failures, the rise of social, racial and religious bigotry (the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, reawakened then), and a generalized commodification of American life. Therefore, the nineteen twenties and thirties do not stand as distinct social or intellectual moments. If anything, Depression writing intensified the gloomy atmosphere left by World War I, adopted a more social angle, and radicalized Modernist experimentation. Franklin D. Roosevelt put his promise of a «New Deal» into practice as soon as he was elected President in 1932. Despite the fact that many political changes took place and social projects were carried out by the Roosevelt administration, restlessness persisted in the works of the American artists throughout the decade. The 1929 crash, it should be recalled here, was not the sole cause of the pervading despair —it only deepened it. If anything, the economic crisis dissipated the energy of the Roaring Twenties that had served as an antidote to the disquietude perceived since the early years of the century. The rise of superheroes in comic books in the nineteen thirties is particularly eloquent, Superman being the first in 1938 and Batman following in 1939. They were crime fighters who defended the oppressed and the unprivileged while the system remained ineffectual. The fact that a great number of Jewish creators and editors stood behind these comic-strip heroes accounts for the latter’s characteristic double identity. Indeed, fascism was a dominant ideology in Europe and it was surfacing in the States during the Depression. European Jewish citizens were forced to migrate to America, where they sensed that covering their true identity would facilitate their integration and progress. But the period of illusion between the First World War and the Crash was basically distinguished by its economic prosperity and the highest standard of living ever achieved. As Michael Spindler argues, economic wealth caused a parallel literary prosperity that responded to, and helped to define, the social changes it had behind (3). However, one of the most outstanding effects of the period was the exile of American intellectuals and 88

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artists to Europe. Indeed, the cost of living in Europe was much cheaper than in the United States, so the financial aspect of their exile is not to be overlooked. But already uprooted in spirit, and detached from institutions and traditions, writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or Ezra Pound chose a territorial detachment that caustically severed them from their homeland and declared them homeless beings, in a perpetual search for values and beliefs. The European rich cultural scene attracted a whole new generation of American writers in the twenties and thirties, each one engaged in the creation of codes of conduct by which to survive. Gertrude Stein baptized this group of literary pilgrims with the name of «Lost Generation,» a brand they seemingly assumed because they viewed themselves in terms of alienation. Ernest Hemingway, in fact, used the phrase as epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. On the whole, scholars have used the phrase to label expatriate novelists of the nineteen twenties like Hemingway, Fitzgerald or John Dos Passos, but it is not infrequent to find the term associated to poets such as Ezra Pound or novelists who mostly stayed on native soil. The main idea at the core of this period is that of disillusionment, in particular the disenchantment —to the point of cynicism in some cases— after the war. At the end of This Side of Paradise (1920), Scott Fitzgerald described a generation of young Americans who, despite their youth as nation, had apparently arrived to a dead-end: Here was a new generation, a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shake. (351)

It was, in short, a generation who had not been raised to face the horrors of a war and its subsequent hollowness. Instead, they had been born and educated in a context of optimistic idealism that presently seemed totally decadent to them. The disillusionment to be found at the core of the literature of the Lost Generation was predominantly caused by a number of reasons. The First World War could be highlighted as the main cause for its massive destruction. Its cruelest aftereffect was a prevailing lack of faith in institutions, history, and the human being. Another reason behind disenchantment was the hollowness and superficiality of postwar society in general, and the American in particular, nurtured by the economic expansion of the nineteen twenties. Those who had witnessed the brutalities of the

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conflict were appalled by the harsh contrast between the war and the pervading and increasing materialism. Moreover, they felt the deception of such abstractions as «progress,» «liberty» and «democracy» that had justified the war and in peacetime could not restore the preceding faith. Finally, there was a prevailing feeling of dislocation among intellectuals, who felt at loss at the general breakdown of traditional values and references. The members of the Lost Generation sensed a deep distance between themselves and the previous literary generation, that of the Realists and Naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Writers of the 1920s and 1930s were social critics with different angles, but critics nevertheless. Their literature was imbued with the feeling of disillusionment aforementioned, expressed in the two main lines analyzed in the following section.

1.1. Babbitts and Gatsbies The term «Babbittry» was coined after the character created by Sinclair Lewis, George F. Babbitt, who embodied the anesthetized and hollow atmosphere we can observe in the following passage: He sulkily admitted that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch’s till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition era and the cigars to which the beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much [...] He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket —for ever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts. (From S. Lewis’ Babbitt: 4)

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The excerpt above evokes nostalgic feelings for a lost world of masculine enterprise and spiritual fulfillment. In other words, it longs for the frontier spirit of opportunity, communion with nature and renewal, instead of cyclic routine and personal stagnancy. In the years after the First World War, life was sensed as a humdrum existence where conformity and contentment had replaced the former stamina of frontier times. In his study On Native Grounds, literary critic Alfred Kazin defined this passivity as «a collective stupor of the will [...], the depression of the mind» (1982: 207). Modern commodities and consumerism shaped and distinguished this trend. The telephone, electricity, the radio, the sewing machine and —above all other modern contrivances— the automobile changed the life of those Americans who could afford those commodities. The technology previously dedicated to the war was now being used for their pleasure. The Gatsbies, on the contrary, impersonated a romantic representation of heroism, ostentation, and lofty illusions. Jay Gatsby was the memorable character created by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a modern Grail quester trying to achieve his goal among the carpe diem spirit of the 1920s. Wallace Stevens, American poet of the same period, describes this paradox with the comment «disillusion is the last illusion.» The fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald epitomizes this other optic from which to contemplate the «Roaring Twenties.» His stories depict American life as a colorful and bright bubble, always on the verge of bursting. The elusive nature of happiness and nostalgia for the past are leading ideas in his works, as the following passage shows: For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. ‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.’ (From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s «Winter Dreams,» NAAL: 1839)

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Melancholy and lyric despair impregnate the previous lines. In a world where steel has replaced love as symbol of permanence, Fitzgerald’s characters shield themselves behind the glow of tinsel, forever searching for the impossible. Thus, their longings and quests are essentially romantic and tragic, always in conflict with reality’s harsh impositions.

1.2. Agony of the American Dream: Coming to terms with the wasteland The novels and short stories of these years dealt primarily with the shocking and frustrating act of facing reality. Several attitudes were possible here: romantic longings followed by tragic awareness (as observed in Fitzgerald’s work), bold endurance (in Ernest Hemingway’s), adherence to the community (in John Steinbeck’s), exploration of the past (in William Faulkner’s), or social concerns (in John Dos Passos’). The difficulty of coming to terms with an unwelcoming and mind-numbing world fueled the creation of characters who, tragically or pathetically, failed to live up to the standards that American literature and society had set: individualism, freedom, aspiration, and achievement. When the blame for failed heroism was to be put on social or historical circumstances, Naturalism stood out as a highly apt approach for Modernist writers. They interpreted the determined self in a variety of ways, but they coincided in portraying existence as overpowering and constraining, a context in which the freedom of choice of frontier life vanished. As Chabot points out, moreover, young intellectuals were well aware that the beneficiaries of the new, buoyant social order could not remain untouched by the depth and speed of modern life: Although the Young Intellectuals were typically among the beneficiaries of the new social order, they followed the naturalists in drawing up a lengthy and varied list of grievances against the quality of life it made available –it was too exploitative, it was too industrial, it was changing too quickly, its culture had become refined to the point of irrelevance […]. American literary modernism, in other words, involves the recognition that even the seemingly fortunate are victimized by current economic and social life. (2)

The late years of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of Naturalist literature, as Unit One advanced. It responded to the conditions and ideas generated by the rapid changes that took place in the agrarian landscape of 92

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the United States. But Naturalism, as Alfred Kazin pointed out, was more of «a climate of feeling» (1950: 50) than a school in the United States. The intensification of the shift from rural to urban, together with the atrocious experience of World War I, propelled a renewed emphasis on the depiction of the oppressed and the self’s fated endeavors. Moreover, the period’s anxiety about Marxist and Freudian ideas stressed notions of oppression and determinism. In short, what writers explored and revealed was the limitations faced by the individual in search of freedom or personal growth. Donald Pizer argued that the tragic themes that pervade naturalistic works comprise the waste of individual potential because of the conditioning forces of life. The notion that waste constitutes a tragic condition differs markedly from Aristotelian belief that tragedy encompasses the fall of a noble man. [...] The naturalistic tragic hero is a figure whose potential for growth is evident but who fails to develop because of the circumstances of his life. (6)

Another tragic theme Pizer added to the features of American Naturalism was that of the impossibility to cope with shifting and uncontrollable circumstances. He proposed a third theme of tragic import: that of the unachievable sense of oneself, that is, the unattainable knowledge of who one is or why failure arrived (6-7). The «Roaring Twenties» and especially the thirties presented a most favorable context for an intensification of the Naturalist approach in American literature. The economic crash of October 1929 stimulated the apparition of vividly critical voices and the radicalization of leftist ideas. In fact, the thirties came to be known as «the Red Decade» for its social commitment. «Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?» —a popular song dealing with hopeless poverty— became a sort of anthem for the dispossessed ones. Time, however, has erased much of the political tint of these works, and modern scholars agree that it was «a literature of protest at the spectacle of human misery that seemed intolerable in the light of technological progress the century had made» (Allen: 139). But the revival of Naturalism in the Modernist era brought a certain degree of ideological and formal innovation. The nation-wide crisis fostered the belief in national unity, an image of which was attempted by Dos Passos with the all-embracing U.S.A., or by Steinbeck with the mythical universality of The Grapes of Wrath. Although physical survival would appear as a central concern in such poverty-stricken circumstances, spiritual survival emerges as one of the pivotal motifs in the

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texts of the moment. Critic John Aldridge argued that the American bankruptcy was financial as much as it was spiritual: The lost Generation had learned the hard way that all roads, if they are followed far enough, lead back to zero [...]. The ways of adventure, dream, and calculated futility that had promised escape from middle-class mediocrity had led to fanaticism, creative impotence, and anarchy. All the extreme courses of action had been tried and found wanting. (21-22)

Scott Fitzgerald acknowledged in one of his letters that his generation «of the radicals and the breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues.» Although Aldridge confined the Lost Generation to those authors who wrote during the twenties —most of whom were still active in the thirties and forties— he was right in indicating the prolongation and even the aggravation of the Lost Generation’s spirit. In Depression Literature, the need to make sense of a senseless universe was stressed by the increasing conventionality and the suffocating status quo, i.e. by the social and economic forces that surround and trap the self and —far worse— that the self finally accepts. Many literary works of the moment revealed a «matter-of-fact» tone, an implicit acceptance of the inevitability of fate and the absurdity of counterattack. The human being is thus conceived as confined by a set of forces: biological (death, sex), economic (unemployment, banks), social (consumerism, commodiousness) and technological (automobiles, agricultural mechanization). The writings of such authors as John Dos Passos or Sinclair Lewis displayed the prominent position of technology in modern culture: visual and sound images prevail in them, and they stress the outcome of such novelties as the phonograph, the radio, and cinema. However, the most outstanding result of the rising media culture was the immediate gratification it provided, an instantaneous satisfaction of the senses that replaced the doomed longing of the spirit —momentarily, at least: Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex, crimes, explosions, wrecks, love, nests, fire, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated

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and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust: 192-193)

John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, published the same year as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, advanced the themes and techniques that he would years later explore in his trilogy U.S.A. His distrust of institutions and his concern for the oppressed individual shaped his works, while he concentrated on his characters as social types and paid attention to history instead of myth. Manhattan Transfer is, then, The Great Gatsby’s other side of the coin. Dos Passos was particularly interested in urban landscapes and the ways in which the city revealed itself as a huge economic and cultural machine. His prose attempted to reproduce the complex, discontinuous, fast workings of the machine and its oppressive effect on the individual. The novel’s opening excerpt will provide an appropriate example: Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding in the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press. (15)

Despite the manifest lyricism of the passage, images of waste and destruction pervade it. People and nature alike, trapped in the unconscious brutality of technology, seem to succumb to its overpowering advance. In this light, human beings are represented as basically lonely and alienated, determined and doomed. Lonely characters and the glorification of the individual self had always populated American literature, but in previous decades the self’s affliction was a personal one, since society was pictured as a solid, clearly defined background. The social and economic crisis of the twenties and thirties was portrayed as a cancer of the whole system, a collective malady in which each individual participated on equal terms. Hence, much of the literature was highly concerned with social issues, some with a Marxist inclination. The new Naturalists would engage in social matters in quite different styles and tones. John Steinbeck, for instance, attempted to provide a biological and holistic explanation to human actions and agonies. He was sent to California by a newspaper to report on the situation of the migrants

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that had been forced to leave the Dust Bowl states —Midwest states thus called because of the four-year draught between 1935 and 1939. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), one of the literary milestones in American letters, was the literary outcome of Steinbeck’s research and personal response to what he witnessed. The novel dealt with a family of Oklahoma farmers evicted from their land due to poor crops and the banks’ abusive practices. The Joads, as thousands of American sharecroppers of the thirties, were forced to uproot home and family and travel along Highway 66 in search of a better future. They were portrayed as caught in the shift from an agrarian and industrial mode of production, as well as the victims of unequal distribution of wealth. Despite its claim for a social and political reform, Steinbeck’s masterpiece resorted to mythical and archetypal devices that enhanced his social thesis at the same time as they placed the novel beyond a specific time and place. The lines that follow reveal Steinbeck’s somewhat romanticized vision of the vanishing relationship between humans and the land, which he understood as part of the dissolving sense of union of the nation: And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land. (132-133)

The novel made the reader progressively aware that the Joads’ problem was both a national and universal problem, an issue that required the strength of the group. The alliance of harsh determinism and romantic expectation configured a hopeful text that responded to the «New Deal» proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Steinbeck is one of the writers who in the first decades of the century resorted to primitivism, i.e. an interest in characters and modes of life 96

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deprived of the complexities and meaninglessness of modernity. While other Modernist artists looked for a primordial past in African culture —Picasso’s paintings, Josephine Baker’s dancing, jazz music— some American authors sought the primitive in native agrarian communities, which represented a seeming resistance to the advances of the industrial and the urban. Rural settings, plain folk and simple manners provided Steinbeck’s stories with a soothing response to injustice. The all-embracing concept of the American Dream has been one of the motivating forces of American culture. The spirit behind it, however, was previous to the foundation of the United States. Ideals of perfect social organizations abounded in the Classic era and in Renaissance times, but the arrival of Europeans to the new continent conjured possibilities of realization. The scope of the dream broadened to incorporate the founding principles of the nation and the inalienable right of the individual to freedom and happiness. But the dream found disparate realizations according to the origin, sex, age and class of each individual, and American literature has mythologized it through the ages in works as different as Fenimore Cooper’s or Walt Whitman’s. It encompassed both spiritual and material aspirations, ranging from an ideal commonwealth of freedom and progress to a personal economic improvement, and it always entailed a prospect for the future. Henry Adams coined the phrase «American Dream» in 1930. It certainly was a paradoxical moment to come to life, one in which disbelief in personal improvement and prospects seemed to prevail. The early years of the twentieth century cast a gloomy shadow on any form of future, and projected a sense of loss on the dream. The overwhelming urbanization of the American landscape, moreover, made it impossible to escape to the wilderness in order to find an alternative scenario for the survival of the dream, like the one offered by the frontier in the nineteenth century. Modernism defied the traditional aura of the American Dream because the age refused to shelter dreamers. In fact, several literary works of the day portrayed sleepless characters, disturbed by a restlessness that would not let them dream, either at a literal or a figurative level: You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images

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Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands. (T. S. Eliot, «Preludes,» 1915)

If images of the modern wasteland are ubiquitous in the literature of the period, so are the references to the dubious promise of the Dream. In the present Unit, appropriate excerpts have been quoted to reflect Steinbeck’s challenge of the agrarian flavor of the initial dream, as capitalization perverted the self’s communion with nature; similarly, Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer portrayed the arrival of immigrants to Ellis Island, the reputed gateway to the land of opportunity, that the author depicted as deprived of hope or promise. The senselessness of aspiration hints at another literary issue to be discussed here: that of the hero. In previous literary texts, Americans saw themselves as symbols of the American Dream, the true personifications of the promise and success evoked by the term. The young, innocent and resourceful American Adam was represented as the apt inhabitant of such land. But Americans were now forced to look for heroism and values in popular culture, such as the superheroes mentioned above or the emerging myths and codes provided by Hollywood. Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is the Modernist version of the old American myth, forced to live in a world that didn’t welcome romantic seekers. The interbellum period harbored bootleggers and flappers, that is, members of a new materialistic and consumerist culture that undervalued the self-improving stamina of former cultural icons. Hence, the innocent Adamic heroes of Fitzgerald’s works —Jay Gatsby or Dick Diver in Tender is the Night— embody the agonizing values of a past community, «taking up the role the flapper had contemptuously abandoned for what was called in the 20’s ‘freedom’» (Fiedler: 313-4). However, this historic moment of moral uncertainty and generalized disbelief reinforced the symbolic efficacy of one of the prevailing motifs in American Literature: the Arthurian cycle. As Alan and Barbara Lupack hold 98

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in their work King Arthur in America (1999), many American authors have distilled the moral knighthood of Arthurian legends, and found ways to Americanize them. By democratizing the myth and adapting it to the American Dream, a good number of writers have associated the glorious ideal of Camelot’s knights to equally glorious native aspirations. Arthurian imagery has undergone serious revision in the American letters since the age of literary Realism, when the harsh truths of reality started to cast severe shades of disillusionment upon the splendor of the myth. Modernist literature, therefore, stressed those aspects of the Arthurian cycle that best fitted the moral and intellectual atmosphere of its day. These pages have already referred to the myth of the wasteland as closely related to the Fisher King’s barren kingdom. The Grail quest, which so powerfully resembled the American frontier spirit, acclimatized its elusiveness to the hopelessness of the twentieth century. As for the knight errand character, democratized and adjusted to the American meritocracy in the figure of the American Adam, he became the tragic spokesman of a period in which heroic achievements seemed unlikely. Authors such as Eliot, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner or Fitzgerald understood the modern world as one in which values, when in existence, were not solid or communal enough to be championed by only one representative. Thus, the character engaged in an elevated quest of any kind was conceived as doomed, with a tragic destiny that could be blamed on either individual or collective flaws —or both, as the following study guide on The Great Gatsby will hopefully show.

The nineteen twenties and thirties were critical and especially creative years in the literary history of the United States. After the gaiety and glamour of the Jazz Age came the poverty and the social restlessness of the Depression. However, one decade cannot be understood without the other. Writers of the Lost Generation explored the shallowness of modern life, often with a naturalistic view of contemporary conditions. The literature of the nineteen thirties, more specifically, radicalized its approach and explored the rough effects of the social and economic crisis on the individual and the community. From the media-influenced but lyrical prose of Dos Passos to the idealistic flavor of Steinbeck’s work, the authors writing in this period debated nuclear American myths such as the American Dream and the American self-reliant hero.

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2. TEXT ANALYSIS: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S FLAWED ADAM 2.1. APPROACHING Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Franklin Scott Fitzgerald’s work has become identified with the Jazz Age, a time for which he showed a mixture of feelings: «It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire» (from The Crack-Up: 14). He pictured the era with great accuracy, but he also succumbed to its excesses. His stories and novels mirrored the carelessness, the superficiality and the cheerful excesses of those years of compulsive consumerism and glamour. They also reflected the impact of the capitalist and consumerist society on the changing values of the Americans. He was born in Minnesota in 1896. His wealthy background provided a permanent ingredient in his fiction, although he always tried to color richness with glamour and distinction. Much of Fitzgerald’s biography inspired his work, in particular his ambivalent response to the Jazz Age: on the one hand he savored the gaieties of the moment, but on the other he resented the superficiality around him. The novelist incorporated part of his love relationship with the beautiful socialite Zelda Sayre, later his wife, into The Great Gatsby. When they became engaged he was forced to earn enough money to support Zelda’s luxurious way of life. She canceled their engagement when his position in a New York advertising company proved insufficient. Fitzgerald returned home and finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which brought him the glory and the money to marry her. Often designated «the great American novel,» The Great Gatsby stands as one of the main representatives of American literature in general and, more specifically, as highly illustrative of the Lost Generation and the Jazz Age —a phrase the author himself coined. In a letter to his editor three years before the novel’s publication, Fitzgerald expressed his intention to write «something new —something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned» (in Turnbell: 146). It casts a critical eye on materialist acquisition, but it also distills a nostalgic flavor about vanishing ideals. Its romantic echoes contrast sharply with the bitterness of Tender is the Night (1934), a novel that reflects the author’s weariness and hopelessness about the future. 100

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Fitzgerald considered several tentative titles such as Trimalchio (the pretentious party giver in Petronius’s Satyricon), On the Road to West Egg, Gold-hatted Gatsby or the High-bouncing Lover before the definitive The Great Gatsby, and he even tried to change the latter to Under the Red, White and Blue shortly before the novel’s release. It was published in 1925, a true child of the Roaring Twenties. It is a novel of deep contrasts, built on binary oppositions, the first of which is the dramatic clash between the memory of the Great War and the happy, carpe-diem environment of the twenties. It depicts the glittering atmosphere of an uncaring and well-provided generation, eager to leave behind the horror and senselessness of the war. These Americans, as portrayed in the novel, live fast, trying to make the most of each moment, unconcerned by the consequences. It contains idyllic notes about money: beauty, luxury, shopping and traveling sustains the plot as if they were structural elements of the work. Although the tragedy makes itself palpable throughout the story, lyric notes permeate the text too, in particular those referring to Gatsby’s persistent aspiration despite his isolation. Gatsby is in the trail of self-made men frequently recreated in American letters and other cultural expressions. His character covers the two chief lines of the American Dream, the spiritual and the material, blending both aspirations into one. He embodies the meritocratic spirit, that is, the basic notion of hard work and its recompense that is so deeply embedded in the American cultural framework. However, Fitzgerald questions the limits of such a dream, and its collision against actual conditions of existence. The novel, moreover, hints at Gatsby’s dubious methods to acquire his fortune. Like many financial barons of the twenties, he seems to have made money on obscure activities that lurk at the corners of his success and join the other signs of corruption in the text. Unlike Ernest Hemingway, who had witnessed the horrors of the war personally, Fitzgerald’s only experience of the conflict was his time at the officers’ training camp. Nevertheless, his characters sense life like Hemingway’s veterans and expatriates, branded by an abrupt turning point that force them to seek comfort in a hollow world. Malcolm Bradbury categorized The Great Gatsby as example of the post-war novel, that is, «the novel penetrated by war, making of it an apocalyptic metaphor, the sign of a world severed from its past, changed, darkened, modernized» (59). Bradbury accurately indicated the sense of disconnection from the past as one of the

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defining features of the literature of the twenties, as the novel under study presents. The Great Gatsby is a far more complex and subtle text than what it may appear to be during a shallow reading. Before you start, you can bear in mind…

 The ambivalent position of the narrator, who is a participant, an observer and a reporter of events in the story.

 The narrator’s peculiar perspective about people and situations.  The retelling of the American myth of opportunity and prosperity.  The Arthurian pattern underlying the plot.  The depiction of a mechanized wasteland.  The powerful symbolic network.  The intertwining of class- and gender-related issues. 2.2. REVISITING The Great Gatsby Like his contemporary T. S. Eliot, Fitzgerald attempted to revive the myths and beliefs that had formerly sustained a culture and its members. Accordingly time and its effects, and the impossibility to recuperate old values or relive past moments pervade The Great Gatsby, shape the central character, and articulate the plot. But the novel cannot be properly approached without a deep look into the narrative voice that organizes its plot, presents characters and situations, and casts a specific tone on them. The narrator of The Great Gatsby is one of the most relevant instruments of meaning and perspective that Fitzgerald used in the construction of the novel. Fitzgerald modeled his novel’s narrator upon Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which an observer was also an actor in the events narrated. Nick Carraway is a homodiegetic narrator, i.e. he participates in the story as a character, but he is also external to the story when he retrospectively narrates it, so he must be labeled an extradiegetic narrator too. In his formal study of The Great Gatsby, Peter Messent follows Genette’s narratological terminology (31) to argue that temporal distance (between 102

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action and telling) in the novel does not entail a shift in the narrative mood, that is, the way in which narrative information is regulated and provided (13). Messent accounts for the narrator’s unreliability when he debates Nick’s use of indirect forms of speech, as in the excerpt that follows: It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth [...]. She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. (141)

 Notice

the fusion of voices in the passage above. Nick is telling what Gatsby told him, so the two narratives merge into one. Can we be sure whose opinion and tone we are facing? How does this —and other similar examples in the novel— enlighten or obscure the story?

The novel’s dislocations of narrative time must be also attributed to the narrator’s interest in presenting events in the most favorable way for Gatsby, and he even admits the non-linearity of his narration: «He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumours» (97). Paralepsis —the provision of information that is actually unavailable for the narrator at the time of action— or «unavowed paralepsis» (Genette: 203) are other instances of Nick’s position as unreliable narrator. His role as interpreter of Gatsby’s personality and the events concerning him is evident in passages as the following: He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. (153)

Excerpts as the previous are also examples of Nick’s linguistic obliteration of Gatsby’s character. Nick filters Gatsby’s story and discourse to the point of making it impossible for the reader to discern voices. Indeed, Messent states that Gatsby’s formidable character is the result of Nick’s interpretation

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and translation of the story, which transform Gatsby into a powerful figure of mythical echoes (42).

 Nick

Carraway’s filtering of the story certainly shapes our reading of Gatsby. It is true, as Messent argues, that Gatsby is aggrandized by Nick’s rendering, but could you think of instances where the narrator conveys a skeptical or mocking portrait of Gatsby?

As first-person narrator Nick’s apprehension of characters and events are expected to be shaded by his own implication in the story, but Fitzgerald’s contribution to the generalized Modernist skepticism is Nick’s intense emotional involvement (his own surname suggests that he was «carried away» by Gatsby). The author employed a morally divided narrator to present readers with a main character of difficult moral categorization. Nick’s ambivalence regarding Gatsby embodies Fitzgerald’s own mixed feelings about his age. But Nick’s function as a narrator goes even further: he lacks the skill, or maybe the background, or the maturity, to faithfully render such an overpowering story: He smiled understandingly –much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced —or seemed to face— the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished —and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. (49)

From the previous passage —which discloses Nick’s first meeting with Gatsby— we can distill the narrator’s optic and apprehension of the things he witnesses. He is a very perceptive storyteller, sensitive to both the responses of his senses and to emotional stimuli. These aspects make an unreliable narrator of him, because the story is strongly filtered through him before arriving to the reader. But his passion, and the melancholic tone 104

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he casts on the narration, compensates for his unreliability, for the interest of the novel is not exactly what Gatsby did but the effect of his dream on an average American like Nick. At the ideological level, Nick holds a double view of the Jazz Age that mirrors Fitzgerald’s. On the one hand, he enjoys the life of glamour and merriment; on the other, he scorns its emptiness. In this line, Michael Spindler argues that Nick evokes «both a sensuous attraction of the life of the rich and bring[s] a moral consciousness to bear on their waste and corruption» (155). This novel comprises a critique of the modern mechanized world. The pastoral or natural as opposed to the mechanical is only one of the symbolic binary oppositions the novel is built upon. Indeed, this particular antithesis (pastoral/mechanical) is the most significant one in the novel in the light of the past ideals that seem to inspire the central character, and possibly the most recurring in American literature.

 Make

a list of all the mechanical artefacts around Gatsby’s life, and analyze them in relation to Gatsby’s self-creation and ambitions. How do they contribute to Gatsby’s characterization? Do they have any function in the plot?

Fitzgerald presented a very careful characterization of the people in his novel. His skills at individualizing his characters through onomastics — sometimes his naming of characters was quite bizarre— is widely acknowledged. Many of the people in The Great Gatsby are composite characters, that is, characters created from people the author actually knew but that he adapted to his aesthetic needs. Gatsby, for instance, was such a case. In a letter to writer and college mate John Bishop, he acknowledged: [Y]ou are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself –for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself –the amalgam was never complete in my mind. (Quoted in Bruccoli: 126)

This blurriness permitted Fitzgerald a certain degree of distance from his story, which also allowed for some universality in his characters.

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 You can know whether you have read a novel attentively when you are able to define each main character. Can you provide three defining characteristics for Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan and Tom Buchanan? Can you say which scenes in the novel led you to your opinion of these characters?

Jay Gatsby combines the features of an American self-made man and a chivalric knight. He engaged himself in the conscientious self-training that we could perceive in Benjamin Franklin or Parsifal. A frequent tag to define this character has been that of «American Adam,» which attempts to allude to his innocence and his disconnection from social matters. However, not only does Gatsby display a very questionable kind of innocence, but also his carelessness about social issues involves only the responsibilities of commitment to the community. In other words, the protagonist of The Great Gatsby is too engaged in class matters to be defined as a typical Adam. Another referential myth is thus interrogated and revised. As for his self-construction, it is developed in economic as well as physical terms. If Daisy’s main distinctive feature is her voice, Jay Gatsby is perfectly identified by his hair, which he revises and modifies according to the occasion. The personality of Jay Gatsby can be approached from Descartian dualism. Descartes observed discontinuity between thought and nature, between the inner life of consciousness and the outer life of the social world. Gatsby is pictured as a Platonic man, totally committed to an illusion that embraces his own identity, his aspirations, and Daisy Buchanan. The dualism that defines Gatsby’s character is articulated as a figure repressed and limited by uncontrollable circumstances and psychological inadequacies. Thus, he is tragic in the Naturalist and the Aristotelian senses of the word, that is, as a determined man and as a prominent social type who undergoes a severe fall. Fitzgerald’s works discussed the tragic gap between personal idealism and the actual world, as the novel under scrutiny here evidences. Here follows an example from The Great Gatsby: His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people —his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth

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was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God —a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that— and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (95)

These lines settle Gatsby’s character as fundamentally romantic and, above all, self-made in the most literal sense of the term. His ability to shape circumstances collides with his inability to recover the past or its values. Daisy Buchanan’s first name implies simplicity, but it also evokes the gold core of the flower, surrounded by the purity of whiteness. That gold core, i.e. that focus on money and luxury, fits perfectly into the emblematic feature of this character: her «voice full of money.» Her maiden name should not be overlooked, since «Fay» immediately calls up Morgan le Fay, the wicked enchantress whose evil powers contributed to the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom. Daisy’s voice is a metonymic device that characterizes and identifies her throughout the work. According to Nick, the narrative and moral center of the story, it is whispery, enchanting and, most of all, delusive. Attention should thus be paid to the diction used by Fitzgerald in his description of Daisy’s voice, which stands for her whole character. The narrator’s biased account of Gatsby runs parallel to his attitude towards the female characters in the story, which mirrors «a culture which defines women legally, emotionally and psychologically as children» (Fetterley: 93).

 Nick usually describes women as separate items (chin, eyebrow, voice), as if they were unfinished beings. His reification of women characters undermines their subjectivity and objectifies them. Look through the novel to find this synechdocal presentation of female characters.

Tom Buchanan is the antagonist figure to Gatsby’s idealistic character. Once again, the narrator’s partial presentation of people and situations influences our perception of a character. Morally speaking, Tom Buchanan

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and Jay Gatsby could be said to be equally ranked. However, Nick deprives Daisy’s husband of the knightly air that he attributes to Gatsby: As for Tom, the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. (24-25)

Myrtle’s character is portrayed, unlike Daisy and Jordan, as a sensuous creature, and representative of the dark women in American literature. The American dark ladies —as opposed to the «light» or blond ones— have a mystic aura because they are frequently constructed as outcasts —more often of a sexual kind— and therefore destined to fatality, like Myrtle here. The «fresh green breast» of the New World that the novel mentions tragically collides with the ripped-off breast of Myrtle at the end of the text. Wilson is described as «spiritless» and «anaemic,» epithets that immediately deprive him of the energy and the aspiration of the successful American. He is a Babbitt that lets himself get fastened to the mechanization of modern life (we should remember his job is to fix cars, these being a most powerful symbol of modernity). He, then, represents the fated American dreamer who will never undergo the rags-to-riches mythical process of vertical progress. Jordan is a peculiar female character among the stereotyped female characters presented by the novel. Her masculine name matches her masculine features —she has a somewhat athletic body— and her engagement in activities traditionally associated with men —sports, financial autonomy, disengaged sexual affairs. Jordan represents the flapper, the economically independent modern woman who avoids conventional female roles and pursues her own pleasure and entertainment. She thus represents a destabilizing figure that may cause imbalance in the complex gender texture to be analyzed later. Nevertheless, she is characterized in fragments along the novel, and her name suggests the same reification perceived in «Daisy» and «Myrtle.» The Great Gatsby offers a rich symbolical network with powerful imagery. Provided that the novel deals with wealth, status and power, Gatsby’s car is central to the plot. Since the first models were manufactured in the United 108

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States, the automobile has become a symbol of the Americans’ search for freedom and progress. However, as with other technologies mentioned in the novel, cars are seen as extensions of the human being that develop the self in artificial ways and ultimately prove destructive. Gatsby’s car is particularly illustrative in this respect. It is another sign of its owner’s ostentation, but with its «many layers of windshields» the car functions as a deceptive mirror of the characters’ lives and as a symbol of their narcissism, as Roger Casey points out (51). Furthermore, the green interior of Gatsby’s auto stands for a fake replacement of nature in the wasteland of the Valley of Ashes.

 What does the green light connote in the text? With whom is it associated? Why does it possess a «colossal significance» (90)? Notice also how it appears in the novel’s final lines.

The valley of ashes represents a moral wasteland without hope of regeneration, where God is replaced by the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The bleak description that Nick offers is very significant: This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (26)

The fertile wheat fields and gardens have been replaced by ghastly elements. It is certainly a deadly scenery, where Tom has an adulterous affair with Myrtle, Daisy kills her husband’s lover, and George Wilson decides to kill Gatsby. Dr. Eckleburg’s billboard, overlooking the Valley of Ashes, is an advertisement for an optician. This figure is what, according to George, provides relief and moral judgment in the modern world. It stands for the all-pervasive consumerism of the moment, but it also makes reference to the help the dwellers of the valley need in order to «see.» Indeed, one of the recurrent motifs in the novel is the imperfect «vision» of some characters —either about themselves or about life in general.

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Moreover, the story is deeply concerned with (distorted) vision and optics. It is said that a drawing designed for the first dust jacket of the novel inspired this memorable symbol. The dichotomy between reality and illusion configures the very personality of the central character, but is also encompassed in the blurring property of smoke, dust, alcoholic drinks, and dim light. Gatsby’s library contains hundreds of volumes that remain unread, even unopened. The solace and illumination that reading could bring are thus replaced by the social functionality of the books, which are kept for show. Deformed perception and subsequent fallible communication of the perceived hover over a good number of Modernist works, from which this novel is not different regarding that aspect, as Nick’s characteristic narration demonstrates. Particularly interesting is the novel’s insistence on photography, a reflection of the high moment of advertising during the nineteen twenties. Laura Barrett states that the novel’s prose pursues the same effect as modern photography, long discarded as conveyor of clarity and realism, which does not reflect reality but replaces reality (542).

 Review the novel for instances of deceptive or defective vision. You may find the idea of Gatsby as a product to be advertised particularly helpful, for Gatsby —in this beginning of consumerist culture— makes of himself a commodity to be consumed.

The culture of material success shapes Gatsby’s quest, and transforms his love, Daisy Buchanan, into another property, a prized possession. Both Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan incarnate the highly consumerist Twenties in their belief that everything and everyone, even women, can be paid for and consumed. In this sense, the character of Tom Buchanan represents the crudest side of a patriarchal society that objectifies women and, therefore, abuses them. Judith Fetterley reads this novel as a fable of the New World in which America is conveyed through the female image of the woman central character: «Both the sense of wonder and the sense of loss are associated with women, and women are the object of the novel’s moral indignation just as they are the object of its romanticism» (95). Indeed, 110

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every woman character in Fitzgerald’s stories was a projection of the masculine romantic spirit. As Elizabeth K. Aldrich argues in her study of Fitzgerald’s women characters, Zelda Fitzgerald had such an influence on his husband’s life and career that she inspired many of his female characters. Indeed, «the transmutation or translation of living woman to symbol» (151) was an insistent trait in the author’s work. Such was the case too with Daisy Buchanan, the central female character in The Great Gatsby, in which she was created as the embodiment of Gatsby’s aspirations. As his letters and imaginative writings recorded, F. Scott Fitzgerald conceived life in chivalric terms. He was extremely fond of medieval times and Arthurian legends in particular, and his novels show a strong resemblance to chivalric narratives. Over the years, The Great Gatsby has been thoroughly analyzed as an example of Fitzgerald’s as well as the period’s interest in Arthurian imagery and motifs. It reveals a somewhat distorted version of the original Grail quest —that is, the brave search inspired by noble aspirations—, a wasteland in need of restoration and a modernized Camelot that tries to revive the splendor of the legendary Arthurian kingdom. Despite its allusions to the knightly quest, instances of dishonesty abound in the novel: cheating, infidelity, betrayal, and even the rather obscure origin of Gatsby’s fortune. Gatsby as an unworthy Grail quester parallels Daisy as unworthy embodiment of the Grail. Their irresponsible behavior corresponds to the moral wasteland that Dr. Eckleburg so vacantly watches. As mentioned, decadence takes on a moral attire in this novel. But decadence is present as a broader term, an abstraction that comprises the nation’s decline as well as the historical evolution of the United States from the days of the first settlers. The novel’s insistence on time is made evident through its formal recuperation of former moments and anticipation of future ones, as well as in Gatsby’s intention to relive the past. Fitzgerald wrote this work shortly after the First World War, which is considered one of the temporal milestones of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby suitably reflected such a brusque turning point in our appreciation of history, and the notion that the present implied an abrupt contrast with the past pervades the literature of these years. At the end of the work, the narrator becomes aware «of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes —a fresh, green breast of the new world» (171).

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 Check for the last word of the text and relate it to the idea suggested by the paragraph above this box.

The novel is highly nostalgic in its tone, and its insistence on past moments and Gatsby’s longing for them exhibit a Modernist concern for whatever has disappeared from the modern scenario. As a matter of fact, nostalgia was a subject that many authors of the period shared, despite their disparate origins, styles or concerns. Among them, Fitzgerald distinguished himself as the writer who made an aesthetic principle of the nostalgic feeling, both in his life and his work. According to D. G. Kehl, Sehnsucht —an intense, indefinable, insatiable longing— is a more accurate term to label the nostalgic flavor in The Great Gatsby (309). Sehnsucht is felt along the novel through specific diction with distinguishable echoes of yearning, such as «loneliness,» «sadness,» «lost,» and «desire,» to name only a few. In the same line, Kehl maintains, Sehnsucht «is corroborated further by particular sensory images» (317), and he names the auditory, the visual and the olfactory as the typical senses involved when vehement, irrevocable longing is to be conveyed. When Gatsby the great longer is introduced, and shortly before the symbol of the green light is presented to readers, Fitzgerald arranges an adequate atmosphere for his apparition: The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone – fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. (25)

The novel was written in a highly evocative style, symbolic and impressionistic, partly to suit Gatsby’s character and partly to avoid the straightforward solidity of nineteenth-century Realism. Fitzgerald’s use of language corresponds to the symbolic structure of the work and its distinctive emphasis on point of view. This combination of strategies amount to a clear but evasive prose, where descriptions and reports are given in detail but the 112

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pervading sensation is that of a non-definitive picture of the main character or his ambition.

 Read the following excerpt, representative of the novel’s stylistic strategies: There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy —it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions. (ch. 8) Besides Fitzgerald’s characteristic use of sensory imagery, notice how he uses the underlined appositives (information attached to some referent in order to complement it). What kind of role do these appositives have? What do they add to their referents?

The Great Gatsby manifests the tenacious concern of American letters with concepts of place. It outlines a geographical map of the moral wasteland of the United States. To begin with, the novel is set on a territory subdivided into East Egg and West Egg, two enclaves separated by an extension of water that establishes an economic boundary on its inhabitants and their visitors. The border is symbolically moral, as well, as those inhabitants «unpolluted» by money and waste dwell in West Egg. Moreover, Nick Carraway narrates the story from the Midwest, where he returns after Gatsby’s death. His journey back rounds up his own personal, circular story and appropriates the traditional movement of American pioneers. Nick’s words at the end of the novel provide a significant counterpart to the modernized setting of Gatsby’s New York. The following excerpt contains an allusion to the works of Willa Cather, where farming life and heroic pioneers were praised: That’s my Middle West –not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps

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and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. (167)

Geographical differences are thus incorporated into the dualities explored in the novel. The East/West Egg differences can be extrapolated to the national map, in an allegorical strategy to mirror the highly developed eastern states and the «immature» western states, where Nick and Gatsby were born. Despite Nick’s attempt to become the moral center of the novel, however, it should not be overlooked that Daisy and Tom, two midwesterners, cause the greatest havoc in the story, and that one of Nick’s ancestors bought his way out of the Civil War. The novel is often regarded as a powerful representative of the American value system due to the exploration of several themes and ideas that were being questioned and discussed in the Modernist era. As mentioned before, The Great Gatsby examines the validity of the American Dream, the moral solvency of the self-reliant and aspiring American citizen, and even the dubious notion of progress in the light of waste and decay. But Fitzgerald concentrates the debate on more concrete topics such as class issues, which cannot be overlooked when examining the novel. The rags-to-riches motif is analyzed in a class context where the successful are members of the leisure class and those who fail are included in the working class. Wilson, for instance, is depicted as unfit to improve socially and economically, while Gatsby has managed to cross class borders —however vague his methods were to do so. The following encounter between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby is meaningful in itself: Gatsby turned to Tom, who had accepted the introduction as a stranger. ‘I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr Buchanan.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously not remembering. ‘So we did. I remember very well.’ ‘About two weeks ago.’ ‘That’s right. You were with Nick here.’ ‘I know your wife,’ continued Gatsby, almost aggressively. ‘That so?’

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Tom turned to me. ‘You live near here, Nick?’ ‘Next door.’ ‘That so?’ (ch. 6)

 Fitzgerald’s careful use of dialogue contributes to atmosphere and moves action forward. What is, in your opinion, the function of the scene above? What does it tell us about Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby? Are they on equal terms here?

The Great Gatsby has often been classified as a social satire due to its merciless exposition of the American class system. The inequalities observed in the story reveal the failure of basic political ideals and national myths such as the equal condition of all human beings. In fact, in this novel crossclass coupling acquires the same dramatic consequences as class mobility, or racial miscegenation. Disregarding the novel’s mythic proportions, Richard Godden offers a Marxist reading of the text and accounts for Gatsby’s final downfall in the following socio-economic terms: An upwardly mobile Gatsby seeks status via the release and theft of the feminine leisure class body. In response, Tom extends the hegemony of his class to the abused industrial male. The double death secures Buchanan’s grip on the leisure class ‘token’ and releases him from the growing threat of his own uneasy liaison with the industrial class. (359)

As for gender relations, Fetterley argues that Fitzgerald depicts women as objects and projections of the male characters. Male characters certainly hold the dominant position in the cosmos conveyed by the novel, despite the growing independence of women after the First World War. Men are still depicted as producers of goods and controllers of the capital, which implies that they are more independent than women. Furthermore, women are seen as consumers of this leisure society («What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?,» asks Daisy), to be in turn consumed by men. As is the case with all of Fitzgerald’s works, money plays a key role in characters’ interactions and gender relations, and

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he depicts a modern capitalist society in which patriarchal patterns are perpetuated through updated modes of domination. Edward Wasiolek explores sexual confusion in the novel as a result of sexual liberation and unrestrained capitalism. He points out the sexual hybridism in Gatsby’s guest list (Francis Bull is the name of a woman, while Newton Orchid is a man’s name), as well as Gatsby’s sexual ambivalence and Nick’s androgynous character. Subtle indeed is the hypothetical sexual encounter Nick has with Mr. McKee at the end of chapter two, conveniently introduced by an ellipsis: «All right,» I agreed, «I’ll be glad to.» ... I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. (39)

Gender roles are then exposed as seriously threatened at the same time as consumerist values seem to redefine and resettle the patriarchal system.

The Great Gatsby is highly illustrative of the Jazz Age, its splendor and its miseries. It portrays the United States as a consumerist and vacant place, a moral wasteland deprived of divine guidance and comfort. Its central character epitomizes the American Dream as interpreted in the modern world, and Fitzgerald resorts to Arthurian imagery to articulate Gatsby’s vision and quest. Technically speaking, the novel discards an all-embracing perspective and rendering of the events, and favors a partial perspective mostly carried out by the unreliable Nick Carraway.

3. EXERCISES 3.1. Test yourself On F. Scott Fitzgerald a) Could Nick Carraway be considered a reliable narrator? Why? b) How would you describe the style of The Great Gatsby? What stylistic aspects lead you to your definition? c) How does the Arthurian cycle shape the novel? 116

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d) Why is Gatsby’s car so powerful a symbol? e) What does the novel reveal about the context in which it was written? f) Explore the dichotomy East-West as seen in the novel. ¿What does each cardinal point suggest? Which characters are associated to each side of the country? g) How are women categorized in the novel? In other words, what moral or physical features serve to perceive them as characters embodying different values? h) What does «the green light» stand for? i) Why do Daisy and Tom Buchanan survive in the story, despite their corrupted value system? j) How is Sehnsucht perceived in the novel? k) What makes of Gatsby’s illusion a polluted version of the American Dream? l) What is heroic about Gatsby’s character, to Nick’s eyes? m) Bearing in mind Donald Pizer’s discussion of naturalistic themes, in which two senses is Jay Gatsby a tragic character?

Summary questions a) Images of the wasteland can be found in different formats and situations. ¿What examples do the works mentioned in this Unit offer? b) Why is exile such a widespread option for the American intellectuals and artists of the period? c) What does the adjective «lost» imply in the phrase «Lost Generation»? d) What is the difference between «Babbitts» and «Gatsbies»? e) How does the naturalistic optic render the spirit of the twenties and thirties? f) How is industrialization conveyed in the excerpts by Lewis, Dos Passos and Steinbeck quoted in this Unit?

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3.2. Explore a) The final passage of the novel The Great Gatsby provides food for much thought. Does Nick convey hope here, or does he rather succumb to the impossibility of the pastoral and chivalric fable? b) Scott Fitzgerald described the «Jazz Age» as a time of miracles and satire, which strike us as apparently polar opposites. What do you think he meant by miracles and satire? What instances of them can you find in The Great Gatsby? c) Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, far from being totally opposed characters, form a sort of synthesis that reunites different views of the world around them. Discuss. d) Besides paralepsis, The Great Gatsby offers examples of paralipsis or silencing of information available to the narrator at the time of action. Can you detect these paraliptical moments? What would you say is their function in the novel? e) What reasons —social, ideological, aesthetic— would you say underlie Nick Carraway’s ignorance of class issues in his rendering of Gatsby’s story? f) This Unit has already analyzed Nick’s biased attitude toward women characters. Expand the idea of Nick’s prejudice by examining his presentation of racial or ethnic issues. g) John Steinbeck’s work dealt with the disempowered and the outcasts. Its spirit —which often revealed a romantic idealism— has survived in American culture, in particular in the lyrics of some well-known songwriters. Can you trace the plights of the underprivileged in the songs of, for instance, Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen?

3.3. Key terms — — — — 118

Antagonist Appositive Babbitt Composite characters

— — — —

Extradiegetic Flapper Gatsby Homodiegetic

«An Age of Mirales and Satire»: Jazz and depression

—  Jazz Age —  (Unavowed) Paralepsis —  Paralipsis

—  Red Decade —  Sehnsucht —  Unreliable narrator

4.  BIBLIOGRAPHY 4.1.  Recommended readings — Robert L. Biral’s «The American Hero-Quester.» Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/1/79.01.01.x.html — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s «Echoes of the Jazz Age.» Scribner’s Magazine, 1931. http:// www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/romantic/gifs/182.gif — Charles Scribner III’s «Celestial Eyes ò from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece.» http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/essays/eyes/eyes.html

4.2.  Critical works cited Elizabeth K. Aldrich. «‘The Most Poetical Topic in the World’: Women in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald.» In A. Robert Lee (ed.), Scott Fitzgerald: The Promises of Life. London and New York: Vision Press, 1989, 131-156. John Aldridge. After the Lost Generation: A Critical Survey of the Writers of Two Wars. New York: McGraw, 1951. Walter Allen. 1964. Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the 20s to Our Time. London: Hogarth, 1986. Laura Barrett. «’Material Without Being Real’: Photography and the End of Reality in The Great Gatsby.» Studies in the Novel, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), 540-557. Malcolm Bradbury. The Modern American Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.). Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Roger Casey. Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American Literature. New York and London: Garland, 1997.

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C. BARRY CHABOT. Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism. Tuscaloosa and London: U. of Alabama Press, 1997. JUDITH FETTERLEY. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. LESLIE A. FIEDLER. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day, 1975. GÉRARD GENETTE. 1972. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. RICHARD GODDEN. «The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn.» Journal of American Studies, Vol 16, No. 3 (December, 1982), 343-371. ALFRED KAZIN. «American Naturalism: Reflections from Another Era.» New Mexico Quarterly, 20 (Spring, 1950). 50-60. — 1942. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York: Harvest, 1982. D. G. KEHL. «Writing the Long Desire: The Function of Sehnsucht in The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward Angel.» Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 2000/2001), 309-319. ALAN LUPACK and Barbara TEPA LUPACK. King Arthur in America. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999. PETER MESSENT. 1990. «Speech Representation, Focalization and Narration in The Great Gatsby.» New Readings of the American Novel. U. of Edinburgh Press, 1998, 8-43. ARTHUR MIZENER (ed.). 1972. Scott Fitzgerald and His World. Thames Hudson, 1987. DONALD PIZER. 20th-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Southern Illinois U.P., 1982. MICHAEL SPINDLER. American Literature and Social Change: From William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller. Macmillan, 1983. ANDREW TURNBELL (ed.). The Letters of Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner’s, 1962. EDWARD WASIOLEK. «The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby.» International Fiction Review, Vol. 19 (1992), 14-22.

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4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit John Dos Passos (1896-1970): Manhattan Transfer (1925) is the choral story of disoriented New York inhabitants in the Roaring Twenties. U.S.A. (the complete trilogy was first published in 1938) is an innovative, all-embracing novel that resembles Manhattan Transfer in its polivocal portrait of the United States. F. S. Fitzgerald (1896-1940): His first published novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was his first literary manifesto on the post-war years and their disenchanted spirit. It dealt with a Princeton student with an aimless, selfish life who suddenly has to abandon his careless living to go to war. Tender is the Night (1934) is among his best known works. It insists on the representation of life as glittering and sensuous but hollow. This novel tells the doomed love story of a psychiatrist and his patient, and in particular it focuses on his moral degradation, parallel to her mental decline. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951): His novel Babbitt (1922) tells the monotonous life of a prosperous businessman in a midwestern town. It reveals the harsh contrast between the commodities of modern America and the non-existent or ill-fated illusions of its inhabitants. John Steinbeck (1902-1968): The Grapes of Wrath (1939) has become one of the masterpieces of American literature. It narrates the story of the Joad family, traveling from Oklahoma to the promising California to found a new home. Reality, however, will soon shatter those expectations and make them reconsider themselves and their relation to others. Nathaniel West (1903-1940): The Day of the Locust (1939) is a novel dealing with the consumerist mass, depicted as voracious animals that demand their periodic share of media spectacle. In particular, it exposes the flimsy nature of Hollywood illusions, as flat and artificial as the movie sets created for every shooting.

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UNIT FOUR «IF ONLY I STILL HAD FAITH IN WORDS»: EXPERIMENTS IN FICTION

Program 1. PRESENTATION: Disbelief in words 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: William Faulkner’s innovative fiction 2.1. APPROACHING Faulkner’s «Barn Burning» 2.2. REVISITING «Barn Burning» 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Ernest Hemingway’s search for grace 3.1. APPROACHING Hemingway’s «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» 3.2. REVISITING «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» 4. EXERCISES Learning outcomes — To discern the purposes of Modernist writers to decry traditional fiction. — To examine the technical devices they employed to adjust fiction to the new era. — To analyze the connection between formal strategies and thematic issues.

1. PRESENTATION: DISBELIEF IN WORDS At one point of the novel Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos, 1925), one of the characters complains about his lack of linguistic resources to accurately depict an elusive and deceitful reality: «If only I still had faith in words» (327), he grieves. This character, a reporter, is particularly affected by this inability to reproduce life through words, a frustration to be shared by several other texts of the moment. Take, for instance, Ernest Hemingway’s position as proclaimed in one of his novels: I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that

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were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. (A Farewell to Arms: 185).

Hemingway denounces the abuse of words to the point of depriving them of significance. His experience in the First World War led him to bitterly associate ill-used language with futility, violence and death. On his part, and always in his evocative manner, Fitzgerald highlights the evasive, hazy quality of words, as in the following scene: Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something —an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (F. S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: 107).

Scott Fitzgerald suggested that words can poorly convey the delicate works of the mind —especially those of memory. Language, then, falls short when a deep and powerful emotion or idea is to be transmitted. William Faulkner as well had reservations on the capacity of language to describe or report experience: I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. (As I Lay Dying, NAAL: 1922).

Faulkner’s character in As I Lay Dying insinuates the sheer vacuity of language, conventional as it is. But in this same Unit we will examine 124

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Faulkner’s fiction as example of how some Modernist texts evidence not only the incommunication between characters (as Fitzgerald’s excerpt manifests) but also the extremely difficult communication between author and reader. One final passage, taken from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, will further illustrate the loss of faith in words and its immediate consequence on the writing-reading process. The excerpt below tells us how the narrator, a young boy who wants to become a reporter, finds himself unable to offer a comprehensive and accurate account of events: It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about. (4)

Through this voice, Anderson declares that telling is a doomed task. If anything, the writer’s mission is to recreate his or her characters’ interior processes. Modernism was a movement remarkably concerned with the levels of reality and the nature of reality itself. It goes without saying that language is the primary instrument at the author’s disposal, who will always be subjected to its deficiencies and fallibility. However, some American Modernist authors would expand the capacity of the written language in order to verbalize experience. Life defies such articulation into words because life itself proves inarticulate. The belief in reality as a knowable, apprehensible totality that exists independently of the self was already under quarantine thanks to early-century philosophical and scientific thought. Linguistic devices, consequently, could only attempt a conventional reconstruction of experience, in which a partial and unreliable view was provided. Fiction —more specifically the novel form— had been the genre that best reconstructed real life through language. The methods and objectives of the fictional forms would undergo a serious revision, since they had been previously consecrated to the representation of a superficial reality. If the fiction writer was to depict the complex mosaic of experience and the depth of human consciousness, his or her instruments required reconsideration. American narrative fiction was to be reconsidered by the most experimentalist of Modernist authors, in the line of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce or Virginia Woolf in Europe. Unit Two surveyed the ways in which Modernist poets adapted the poetic form to render multifaceted, ephemeral experience. This Unit explores the

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disparate strategies used by authors to adjust the act of fictionalizing the world to their disbelief in language, trying to come to terms with the disbelief. The discontinuity of the lyrical language can hardly be tailored to the report of actions and situations as understood by conventional fiction, so Modernist novelists and short story writers revised narrative conventions in order to bring experience closer to the realm of lyrical perception and expression. That the two authors surveyed in this Unit wrote a fairly amount of poetry is by no means accidental: they adapted the poetical strategies used by such contemporaries as Pound or Eliot to best suit the immediacy and fragmentary nature of the modern life they wanted to recount. As mentioned above, the Modernist moment questioned the human cognitive abilities to apprehend and comprehend reality, as well as the artistic ability to reproduce it. These two ideas constituted the basic assumptions of Realism. Often called «difficult,» «excessively concerned with form» and therefore «elitist,» the most avant-garde Modernists responded to the disbelief in words and in the reproducibility of experience. They were therefore engaged in the proposal of new methods of, if not understanding life, at least representing it. Although avant-garde Modernism was late and mild in American literature, we can still observe important technical innovations among many authors of the moment. In particular, those associated with narrative voice and point of view were revised and experimented upon in order to resist previous modes of storytelling —which implies resistance to previous modes of understanding and rendering experience. Such a resistance was not as robust as it was in Europe because, to begin with, the American nation was still quite young and not as heavily established as in Europe. Also, the novel form was notably recent in America: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered by many the first American novel, was published as late as 1885. Thus, there was still much to be explored and told through this particular form. American Authors did not fully disregard traditional fictional structures as valid methods for interpreting and reproducing reality. Finally, American literature has a solid tradition of finding its own way of representing the real through the fictional. The Romantic and the Gothic trends observed in a great part of American texts betray the questioning of reality as worth reporting, or even reportable. Realism in the United States was especially vigorous only when reality offered something positive for the individual; otherwise, life had been tinctured with romance, Naturalism, or Modernist individualization of the reporting act. 126

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Writers of the period put into practice a series of formal innovations whose common motivation was the rejection of an essentialist approach («What is it?») in favor of its perception («How is it perceived?») and its presentation to readers («How can it be represented in words?»). Taditional modes of narration were replaced to suit this new demand, so the first narrative constituent to undergo serious revision was the narrative voice. The traditional narrator had ideological and cognitive implications. In other words, an omniscient, all-knowing, all-controlling, all-understanding narrative voice assumed the figure of a god-like conscience and voice, who embraced all events and was able to tell them because he had a mission and a place for each and every one. Thus, storytelling was understood as an act of truthful representation of characters and situations, inserted in a frame of assumptions and reliability. Modernism questioned this conception of reality as a fixed and independent entirety, so it could hardly admit a narrator who provided such an account of existence. The most adequate voice for the period’s incoherent, fragmentary perception of reality was, therefore, the limited narrator. In other words, authors gave preference to a fallible, unreliable narrative voice —like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby— that could at best provide readers with a subjective view of situations. A shift took place, then, from action to agent, and from objective to subjective experience, which implied that the events in a story only acquired entity when they entered the conscience of the narrating subject. In this light, the unconscious working of the human mind would find a most useful recreating tool in the interior monologue, which attempted a reconstruction of the otherwise non-recordable psyche. As Robert Humphrey defends, consciousness includes speech and pre-speech levels; since the latter does not involve a communicative basis, it is not controlled by reason nor organized by logic. Accordingly, [W]e may define stream-of-consciousness fiction as a type of fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on exploration of the prespeech levels of consciousness for the purpose, primarily, of revealing the psychic being of the characters. (24)

Updated theories on the representation of unspoken material focus on the narration or quotation of such thought material: interior monologue quotes the character’s thoughts (not necessarily with quotation marks); free indirect style (speech or thought) reports the character’s consciousness «but keeps to the kind of vocabulary that is appropriate to the character»

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(Lodge: 43) while deleting some of the usual tags in reported speech (like «he thought» or «she wondered»). In the same line of subjective perception and articulation, we should bear in mind that there cannot exist just one perspective of experience if multiple perceivers are involved. The authorial and authoritative voice who used to endow the story with coherence and unity, and who served as a leading guidance through the characters’ actions and situations, would prove useless in regarding the world as we truly perceive and live it. Along the lines of the stress on perspective focalization bears an extremely important role. The difference between focalization and narration arises from the difference between the observing agent («Who sees?») and the linguistic agent («Who speaks?») as explained by the critic Gérard Genette. To focalize is to present a scene or an object through the subjective perception of a character. William Faulkner, for instance, employed fifteen first-person narrators to tell the events and emotions contained in his novel As I Lay Dying (1930). A given text may experience many shifts in focalization, as the narrator concentrates on different focal characters. As modern science and psychology were by then claiming, time cannot be taken for an absolute category. Rather, it is understood as relative and subjective, therefore inseparable from personal perception and understanding. The notion of time as a sequence, or a lineal continuum of moments, was discarded by the most innovative authors of the period. Since the management of time depends on the character’s apprehension and response to it, the narrative rhythm of the story may be remarkably altered. For instance, a brief segment of «real» or story time may expand for pages of narrative time, while the consciousness of the affected character is engaged in his or her response to a given event. For such cases the pause —a tempo in which action is stopped— would be employed. A substantial part of Modernist fictional works handled time as fluid and non-linear, and the stories of this moment were usually told out of sequence. In other words, the expected chronological disposition of events was replaced by a seemingly random arrangement. This temporal dislocation or anachrony obeyed to the workings of the characters’ memory rather than to the inherent logic of events that we take for granted. Such fracture of narrative time had obvious repercussions on the plot of a story, which underwent a revision in the Modernist decades. In more 128

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«traditional» narratives, events were disposed along a temporal line and the story’s chronological structure was made clear to the reader. This temporal organization and the succession of events favored the concordance of cause and effect: something happened because something else had happened previously. Modernist artists, however, understood life as discontinuous and fluid, plotless and deprived of a guiding principle, so they found plot inadequate to shape experience into such a severe frame. Consequently, many literary works lacked openings and endings in the usual sense, as if the story were only a segment, a sample, taken from life. Plot used to be conceived as the device that provided unity and coherence to stories, so the disappearance or relaxation of plots developed into a feeling of narrative fragmentation and disorganization that challenged the readers’ expectations and role, since (s) he was forced to reassemble the narrative events in a logical manner. The use of loosely organized stories implied that plots were less directional, that is, that they were not meant to disclose some mystery or question proposed about some character. Instead, Modernist story lines sought to bring to light some revelation on the part of one character, an epiphanic instant. In this outline of formal strategies, film techniques stand out as especially relevant. It is worth mentioning here that the Modernist movement —in its broader sense— and filmmaking set out roughly at the same time. Moreover, the apex of Modernism coincided with the establishment of the cinematic form we know today, that is, image plus sound. Though films were not an American invention, the film industry and the star system were born in the United Sates. They became a mode of expression and an escape from hardships for the whole nation. But films were not a mere entertainment, another craze among the many of the Roaring Twenties. It proved a most successful instrument to render human life and consciousness that developed parallel to the Modernist literary strategies employed for the same purposes. The expressionistic language of films during the twenties and thirties was reflected on the literary language of the day, just as television’s particular language and format have already influenced contemporary literature. Although poetry absorbed screen features too, fiction and drama evidenced the influence of filmmakig best, due to the narrative process involved in both movies and written stories. For instance, the occasionally amazing matching of images or events in juxtaposition contributed to the representation of life as fragmentary, disconnected, and above all unsheltered by an overall idea or purpose. Literature imported montage as well from

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cinematic language. It consists of the arrangement of fragments that does not obey to a logical principle. Literary texts of the day sought the representation of events as perceived by several observers. Camera work, with its capacity of assuming multiple viewpoints, allowed such rendering of experience, which poets and prose writers imitated. Finally, film lends to literature a peculiar understanding of rhythm or the articulation of events in time. Terms like «slow motion» or «flashback» are often used to label narrative strategies such as deceleration or analepsis (to be analyzed below). Urban life and technological progress imposed a new tempo to experience, a rapid and ephemeral perception of events that film techniques promptly emulated. Another major contribution to the language of High Modernism was advertising. Surrealist artists soon discovered the close relationship between the formal strategies of early twentieth-century advertising and the unconscious. The pictorial language of posters, billboards, neon signs, and all kinds of logos invaded the urban landscape. They were meant to be captured in a very short fragment of time, in accordance with the rapid tempo of city life. The information conveyed reached its objective at a glance, while the unconscious retained an image that the conscious self was too limited to perceive and store. The language of dreams and hallucinations is that of the optical unconscious, a term coined by philosopher Walter Benjamin to describe this modern mode of perception. John Dos Passos transmitted this mode in the following passage from Manhattan Transfer, in which a tormented character tries to account for his misfortunes while the language of the city interweaves with his own: With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind and painted phrases until he began to swell, felt himself stumbling big and vague, staggering like a pillar of smoke above the April streets, looking into the windows of machineshops, buttonfactories, tenementhouses, felt of the grime of bedlinen and the smooth whir of lathes, wrote cusswords on typewriters between the stenographer’s fingers, mixed up the pricetags in departmentstores. Inside he fizzled like sodawater into sweet April syrups, strawberry, sarsaparilla, chocolate, cherry, vanilla dripping foam through the mild gasolineblue air. (315-316)

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landscape: the metalinguistic devices (capitalization and italics) convey the typical advertising strategies to call attention, while colors, shapes and textures intermingle and add up to his emotions.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: WILLIAM FAULKNER’S INNOVATIVE FICTION 2.1. APPROACHING Faulkner’s «Barn Burning» William Faulkner is arguably credited with having introduced Modernist innovation into American fiction. Indeed, he presented the American audience with a much controversial prose between the late twenties and thirties, which reputed him as excessively mannerist and obsessed with the morbid. Novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932) reveal his interest in new forms of storytelling, in the characters’ psychological processes, and in the depiction of the American South as an extreme and decadent territory. William Cuthbert Falkner (the «u» in «Faulkner» would be added years later) was born in Albany, Mississippi in 1897. His family moved to Oxford when he was four years old, and the town became Faulkner’s home and inspiration for almost the rest of his life. Although his family’s past pressed on him as much as on most of his characters, he searched his own identity parameters. To his community’s disapproval he dropped out of high school, traveled to Canada to join the RAF during World War I —never entering combat— and left the University of Mississippi without a degree to pursue a career as a writer. During his early years as a poet, Faulkner evidenced the influence of the French Symbolists, whose compositions he adapted and translated frequently. His first published work, a poem, appeared in the New Republic in 1919. «L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun» was an adaptation from one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s works. The Symbolist aesthetic imprinted Faulkner’s prose and poetry with a distinct evocative power and verbal musicality. Faulkner’s works, accordingly, avoided the directness of descriptions and reports but aimed instead at representing experience as precisely as possible by awakening sensations with the help of innovative literary methods. Like many of his contemporaries, Faulkner was extremely self-conscious about the artistic process. He was concerned with the capacity of language to picture life accurately, and with the limits of traditional literary techniques

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as discussed in the first section of this Unit. Such disbelief, as scholar Richard Gray argues, is invariably there thickening the texture of Faulkner’s writing —adding a further dimension of self-consciousness by implicitly questioning the scope and success of his own verbal constructs. (175)

In this vein, Faulkner was particularly engaged in the search for devices to expose the psychic content and processes of each character, in order to render them private and different from other characters’ and from action. Thus, one of his most recurrent devices is the interior monologue, the literary strategy that attempts to deliver the characters’ stream of consciousness. Faulkner’s use of synesthesia must be commented as one of the legacies of Symbolist poetry. His application of synesthetic devices to fiction occurred mostly when he dealt with characters unmediated by a superego. Such is the case, for instance, of his children and retarded characters, who have a very low social consciousness and are unable to operate with common patterns and categories. The following excerpt from As I Lay Dying is illustrative enough: in it, the child character of Vardaman —one of the fifteen narrators of the story— combines the impressions and concepts of two different situations, hence the incoherence: But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there. «Jewel’s mother is a horse,» Darl said. «Then mine can be a fish, can’t it, Darl?» I said. Jewel is my brother. «Then mine will have to be a horse, too,» I said. (NAAL: 1894).

But synesthesia is only one of the methods through which Faulkner was able to fuse, comprise, and reduce the complexity and immediacy of experience and adjust it to the tyranny of the fictional form. Storytelling conventions imply a diachronic rendering of events; however, human experience is synchronic and instantaneous, although the workings of the mind may expand such a moment back to the past, or to several senses operating at once. Temporal dislocation or anachrony, therefore, emerges as another substantial feature in Faulkner’s prose, since in it time is not a continuum but a set of moments coexistent in the character’s mind. Synchronicity, that is, the lyrical juxtaposition of objects or events in disparate moments, was among Faulkner’s preferred strategies: 132

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It was a summer of wisteria. The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father’s cigar as they sat on the front gallery after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies blew and drifted in soft random —the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr. Compson’s letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin’s sitting-room at Harvard. It was a day of listening too —the listening, the hearing in 1909 mostly about that which he already knew, since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 and on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple where descendants of the same pigeons strutted and crooned or wheeled in short courses resembling soft fluid paint-smears on the soft summer sky. (Absalom, Absalom!: 31).

Besides the Symbolist presence in Faulkner’s work, Sherwood Anderson’s influence on Faulkner’s work deserves some attention. Faulkner had devoted almost all his artistic energies to poetry (Marble Faun was published in 1924), when he started his career as a prose writer with the publication of narrative sketches in several New Orleans papers (later collected in New Orleans Sketches). It was there that he met and established a friendship with Anderson, who encouraged him to write a novel. In search of material for his work, Faulkner traveled abroad like many of his contemporaries had done before, but subsequently returned home to explore the artistic possibilities of the American South. New Orleans Sketches and Soldiers’ Pay, his first novel, already evidenced Faulkner’s debt to Anderson in their accent on local color, lyricism and the self’s relationship to the environment. Anderson’s advice to concentrate on local matters developed into Faulkner’s creation of the mythical Yoknapatawpha Country, the setting for Sartoris —dedicated to Anderson—, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury. By this time, he was already acknowledging the influence of the avant-garde aesthetics of the moment. The American South generated a peculiar literature after its traumatic defeat in the Civil War. It grew isolated in economic matters, which led to a parallel identitary isolation from the rest of the nation. The myth of the Old South referred to a glorious and romantic vision of those states that were vanquished during the Civil War, but that tried to maintain an idealized image of the plantation system and of slave owners. This myth

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struggled to survive in a highly mechanized country that was quickly imposing urban, modern, and «northern» habits and values on the agrarian areas of the country. The past acquires mythic and nostalgic echoes in southern literature, and its characters feel the heavy burden of traditions and historical sins. Time, tradition and heritage play crucial roles in the literature of southern writers, Faulkner among them. The South is more often than not perceived as both place and time, that is, as a complex texture of history and geography that deeply shapes the creative endeavors of those who live there or write about it. A series of authors writing in the Modernist period offered their own vision and interpretation of American identity, thus constituting the literary moment labeled the Southern Renaissance. William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston (whose work is to be analyzed in the following Unit), or playwright Tennessee Williams are among the leading names integrating the rebirth of southern literature. They shared an interest in time as history and tradition, in the organization of society according to class, race and gender, and in the particular position of the agrarian South in the fast process of industrialization underwent by the United States in the early twentieth century. They also shared their contemporaries’ anxiety about the self’s predetermined condition, in particular the importance of one’s economic situation, sex and skin color. Therefore, southern writers already possessed their own deterministic view of existence, one that soon contributed to the Naturalist approach manifested by much of the American Modernist literature. Ultimately, they transcended regionalist boundaries and explored the universal human condition. Several stereotypes and popular myths inspired Faulkner’s fiction: the Old South, black Americans, the land as possession and identity, social classes, and women. He was an interpreter of history in his reevaluation of the self’s attachment to nature, time, and the Other. His particular version of the Modernist interrogation includes this revision of history, and also the particular quests on which characters set out to impose some order or unity on a seemingly chaotic world. As was the case with other writers of the Southern Renaissance, Faulkner was intensely concerned with time, both as chronological measure and as collective memory. He once stated that «No man is himself, he is the sum of his past […]. And so a man, a character in a story at a moment of action, is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him» (quoted in Chabot: 73). 134

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Faulkner participated in the skepticism about heroism that prevailed in Modernist times. Traditional heroes stood for a value system shared by one community, solid and unanimous enough to be represented by a single person, but the dissolving faith in political authorities and long-established values made it difficult for heroes to appear in the literature of the time. Instead, diverse degrees and forms of anti-heroism populated Modernist prose and poetry. Faulkner’s versions of the anti-hero encompassed the grotesque, the retarded, the obnoxious, and the miserable, engaged in a «frantic steeplechase toward nothing,» as he wrote in a letter to poet and scholar Malcolm Cowley. The young protagonist of «Barn Burning» exemplifies this pursuit, as he must make an ultimate choice and adhere to one of the two positions presented to him. Before you start reading «Barn Burning,» you should be prepared to find some particularities of Faulkner’s distinctive style. Bear in mind… That Faulkner investigated narrative perspective and its possibilities  in the representation of a fragmentary reality. That he also employed narrative anachronies to break up the storyline.  That he used the vernacular language of the south.  That he did not overlook social issues.  That he highlighted the importance of the past in private and public  matters.

2.2. REVISITING «Barn Burning» «Barn Burning» was first published in Harpers magazine in 1939. Although it merges Faulkner’s characteristic dislocations with the more straightforward prose of his early writing, the story offers a representative sample of innovative Modernist techniques. The story evidences Faulkner’s careful arrangement of narrative events and point of view, as well as his interest in the representation of the subject as embedded in time and tradition. The temporal setting of this story is the years after the American Civil War, yet in it Faulkner investigated those issues that were contemporary to him. It deals with the injustices of the sharecropping system, as it depicts

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the struggles of white, poor sharecroppers against white rich owners. The oppression undergone by the farm tenants and their migration in search of better life conditions were common themes in the literature of the nineteen thirties. «Barn Burning» is also a story about the pressure of ancestry (the «fierce pull of blood,») and the inevitability to accommodate to hateful life conditions, that is, ideas addressed by Faulkner’s contemporaries. As with other Modernist works, this one places the central character on a quest in search of values to survive morally in a world of social inequity. The work of modern mythologists of the period highly contributed to the full exploration of the possibilities offered by ancient myths and patterns that were deeply embedded in universal literature. The structural framework of the story is that of a rite of passage and an archetypal quest. Common as it is in American literature, this mythical kind of pattern prevailed in the Modernist period, as previous Units have already discussed. Sarty Snopes undergoes a process of initiation in which he is obliged to make an essential decision about his own life and community. He stands for a traditional type of hero because he represents those values that many understand and praise, such as courage and honesty. The archetypal outline of this character also involves a high cost, and the ritualistic elimination of the father, as an essential procedure to continue his quest. «Barn Burning» is frequently defined as a Bildungsroman, that is to say, a story of learning into adulthood. It is the story of a boy’s difficult choice and his coming of age, quite a recurrent plot in American literature due to its persistent attention to youth and its promises: «You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.» [...] You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would?» (NAAL: 1958).

In this particular story the young character, Sarty, is forced to abandon his father’s model and find a new code of behavior, which suits the period’s persistent search for values and references for the new era. But the story’s rendering of Sarty’s learning process is meaningful enough. It is told through a third-person limited viewpoint confined to the central character’s consciousness. Narratologist Gérard Genette replaced the phrase «point of view» with focalization so as to avoid the visual aspect implied by the former term. This is of particular importance in a story like «Barn Burning» because of the sensorial richness of passages such as the following: 136

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The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans. (NAAL: 1955)

 Like

other Modernist authors, Faulkner gives preference to perception over accurate knowledge. Besides the excerpt above, there are other instances in the story where the narration appeals to the senses. Pay particular attention to coldness, and contrast it with the story’s title.

Readers get acquainted with the events mostly through the boy’s perception, not his voice. One of the protagonist’s characteristic features is his speechlessness. The anonymous, omniscient narrator has several functions in this story: he verbalizes Sarty’s experiences and thoughts, fuses a ten-year old conscience with a thirty-year old one, and also synchronizes different temporal levels. Moreover, the narrator provides supplementary information and verbal skills in those cases in which the character’s knowledge proves insufficient. As the excerpt that follows shows, the narrator supplements what is missing is Sarty’s personality —conceptually and verbally: Hit’s big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive... (NAAL: 1959)

 The

excerpt marks a turning point in the rendering of Sarty’s direct thought (the thinking version of direct speech). Read all the sections in italics and find out why.

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Sarty’s silence participates in the hindered, partial, or impossible communicative acts that were recurrent in Modernist literature. They mirrored the alienation of the self in a modern environment through isolated characters or unreliable narrators. Faulkner’s usage of retarded or child characters reinforced the idea of experience as hardly translatable to the verbal code. In the case of «Barn Burning,» the initial scene advances such idea as the young Sarty is expected to speak at the courtroom. The author places him in the difficult position of having to please both justice administers and his own family through his words. In the opening passages he is consequently depicted as a character that is linguistically and emotionally unskilled to satisfy the demands of actual experience. The narrator seems to pay particular attention to Abner’s motivations for barn burning and physical abuse, as if struggling to explain his unexplainable conduct. In her analysis of the story, Susan S. Yunis agrees with other critics that this narrative strategy controls the readers’ response to such an unpleasant character as Abner, in order to engage the readers in the same game of doubtful loyalty as the story exposes. Moreover, she concludes that by focusing on Abner the narrator silences the personal pain of a powerless character, whose only tactic to control abuse is to displace his attention to the abusive other (24). Thus, Sarty exhibits the same habit as his father shows of inhibiting personal injuries, until the rage is finally released. Other critics have understood Sarty’s silence as the narrator’s strategy to make two psyches —young and mature Sarty— converge, a tactic that evidences the boy’s personal development into adulthood. The narrative strategy of focalizing one particular character —Sarty Snopes— directs the readers’ sympathies and makes them participate in the character’s dilemma. This choice over the boy’s father facilitates a thorough exploration of the moral dilemma proposed by the story, while Abner’s viewpoint, by itself, would have hardly sustained such a conflict. Faulkner’s fine use of imagery is noticeable in this story, as visual, olfactory, auditory, and gustatory images pervade the text. The opening scene of the narrative, as discussed above, provides an illustrative sample of the working of images upon the child’s conscience, as he is depicted at the court surrounded by a downpour of sights, sounds and smells. In this like vein, Sarty’s privation of sight and hearing as he is running at the end of the story is meaningful enough. Imagery is of particular interest in the characterization of the father: 138

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He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth —a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin. (NAAL: 1958)

 Read

the excerpt above carefully and analyze the diction used to characterize Abner Snopes: color, shape, tactile imagery... Extend your analysis to other characterizing passages of the story.

The animal imagery employed to characterize Ab Snopes reinforces his lack of humanity. The implicit allusion to Prometheus is quite significant. It continues the mythical path opened by the archetypal quest, but it concentrates on Abner’s character rather than on the little boy. Also, the final reference to the heroic character of Abner presents a paradoxical contrast with the devilish description made of him, and with his criminal behavior. By mentioning Abner’s participation in the Civil War, Sarty reveals a hint of admiration towards the father figure, who is thus rendered as a bold man in his courageous defiance of a value system. However, once more, the narrator shapes Sarty’s appreciation by indicating readers that Sarty’s belief is ironically wrong: «He was in Colonel Sartoris’ cav’ry!» not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, [...] for booty —it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own. (NAAL: 1967)

To further the story’s imagery, Abner’s frozen leg stands for the numbness in which the disempowered stand, stoically enduring their injuries. Both Abner and Sarty participate of this numbness, evidencing an emotional paralysis. The story offers a vision of disempowered masculinity as silent and bearing, waiting for the right moment to effect the right action. Abner in particular is symbolically emasculated by a

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system that hinders his role as provider of the family. His fires are a complex trope, due to the multiplicity of meanings that readers may draw out from them. They may symbolize Prometheus’ achievement, i.e. the control of power but, provided Abner’s inhibition of rage, they could also refer to his management of emotions in his own benefit. The image of the fire of Hell is so effectively installed in the Western world that the identification of Abner with Satan is quick, and so is his burning down of barns with a mode of condemnation for the sins of the land. Contrasting with Ab’s unnaturalness, the final passage presents Sarty in a scene conveyed through natural imagery, as the new day witnesses his new life. The renewal in the final scene is typical of Bildungsromane such as this one, in which the synesthetic «liquid silver voices» of the birds summoning Sarty contrast with the «dead voice» of his father: He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing —the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. (NAAL: 1967)

«Barn Burning» also articulates Faulkner’s concern for time and its effects. Here he dismissed his usual brusque anachronies and rather settled for the use of prolepsis. Genette defined this narrative concept as the anticipated narration or evocation of an event to take place later. By resorting to prolepses, Faulkner reinforced the central character’s development into the future. Most important, he intensified the notion that there is no definitive dividing line between the past and the present, and that past actions will forever shape the present: «Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, ‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again’» (NAAL: 1958). Faulkner’s first version of the story had the previous quotation in italics, so as to separate typographically the two temporal planes. However, his subsequent modification synchronized the two levels of consciousness and time without demarcation lines. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of both temporal moments resembles Sarty’s juxtaposed moral options, coexisting in his young value system. 140

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 Underline

all proleptic instances in the story. Is there any example of paralepsis?

Faulkner’s style is characterized by his long, meandering sentences, and his complex syntax. These stylistic devices function as reflections of his characters’ complex psychological workings, of which one example is the following: He could not hear either: the galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the very urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, stained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling road incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running away, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying «Pap! Pap!», running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, «Father! Father!» (NAAL: 1966-1967)

 Roads are like sentences, in a sense. The excerpt’s syntax resembles the «long, swirling road.» Examine its use of embedded and juxtaposed clauses, qualifiers, and tempo —i.e. how narrative time seems to have been expanded.

Faulkner’s relish for the vernacular of the South is heightened in this story. It expresses the flavor of the land from which he is writing, as well as it conveys the southern traditions so connected to oral transmission. It helps the author to characterize groups of people by their speech, from which readers may infer social status.

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The de Spain family is characterized through their huge mansion and state, more as a collective (the white and rich) than as a group of individuals. They represent the social group that profited from past slavery and present cheap labor. A Marxist reading of the story is possible, since class confrontation and oppression —in the past as well as presently— impregnates «Barn Burning.» Race issues are explored in it as well. Particular attention should be paid to the scene at the de Spain’s mansion’s doorway, in which the black servant blocks Abner Snopes’ entrance to the mansion: «‘Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here’» (NAAL: 1960).

 Explore the scene carefully in terms of class and race. Who is presented as better off in that scene? What prevails: money or ethnics? Why should Ab Snopes react the way he does?

Faulkner was one of the most innovative authors among the American prose writers of Modernism. He experimented with perspective, temporal dislocation and interior monologue, and therefore challenged traditional narrative conventions. He relished the evocative power of symbols and the musical flavor of the southern dialect. His characters are pictured as extreme, embedded in land, time and history, and struggling for physical and moral survival.

3. TEXT ANALYSIS: ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S SEARCH FOR GRACE 3.1. APPROACHING Hemingway’s «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» Ernest Hemingway’s major contribution to American literature is his personal style and the series of tough, enduring characters he created. In a time of scarce motivation and relaxed ethics, his characters transcended the mere diagnosis of a changed world and epitomized an active response to the moral paralysis around them. Hemingway’s prose presents a world of disorder and confusion where characters try to live up to harsh circumstances with as much dignity as they can. 142

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Hemingway learned the habit of close observation early: his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, used to take his children out to the fields to collect samples from the natural world. Hemingway would shape and focuse his observational skills years later during his apprenticeship as reporter. His particular style was based on a behaviorist principle: experience is recordable, while the human psyche is restricted to the experience the observer may observe and record. His fiction was for that reason intensely focused on the sensorial, especially the visual, which makes his stories very translatable into film narrative. Hemingway left the United States and went to Europe to work as an ambulance driver during the Fist World War. He gathered his impressions of this brusque milestone and its consequences in In Our Time, published in 1925. The volume consisted of a collection of stories dealing with the life of a young man in the postwar years, trying to come to terms with the physical and emotional pains left by the conflict. Though these early stories were set in his native country, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, the same year of the publication of The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. It was Gertrude Stein who baptized him and his fellow exiles as «a lost generation,» alluding to the sense of loss and the perpetual search they all pursued. Hemingway enjoyed the image of the expatriate and made good use of it in his works. A brief but neat definition of the displaced hero can be found in The Sun Also Rises: ‘You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang round cafés.’ It sounds like a swell life,’ I said. (96)

A friend and admirer of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, Hemingway’s works show the great influence of many of his contemporaries. Part of his apprenticeship consisted of the practice of the Imagist devices he had learned from Pound and Eliot. In fact, the latter’s «objective correlative» had its parallel in Hemingway’s concern with finding and expressing the actual combination of fact and action that derives in emotion, which his camera-like style pursued. The «mythical method» employed by Eliot, and applied to The

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Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, impelled the writing of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, published in 1926. The Arthurian cycle informs this work as it had Eliot’s and Fitzgerald’s before, although Hemingway preferred the myth of the Fisher King to convey the social and moral breakdown of the western world. Like the Fisher King, condemned to sexual and natural infertility, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises is physically and morally mutilated by the war and its consequences. The First World War made an intense and permanent impression on Hemingway’s work. Romantic views of the war had attracted him to the Italian front, where his worldview was entirely altered. Robert Aldridge explains the reaction of those Americans who, like Hemingway, witnessed the war: As spectators, guests of the war by courtesy of the management, they were infected with irresponsibility, thrilled at second hand by danger, held to a pitch of excitement that made their old lives seem impossibly dull and tiresome. As participants, they learned to view all life, all human emotion, in terms of war, to pursue pleasure with an intensity made greater by the constant threat of death, and to hold tight to themselves and to the concrete simplicities (until the simple and concrete seemed to be all there was, all that was worth knowing) when the world around them seemed to be breaking into pieces. (10-11)

The «concrete simplicities» found stylistic and ideological echo in Hemingway’s work, as the following pages will examine. But the danger and excitement that Aldridge mentions had a particular importance in the development of Hemingway’s career as a writer. He was considered a hero when he was the first American wounded in Italy, in 1818. The event contributed to the persona he developed along his life, that of a stoic nature man enduring in the face of adversity or confusion. In this respect he resembled Robert Frost, for their public and literary self-images pervaded throughout their careers. They both portrayed and defined these personae in nature, although Frost’s natural landscapes lacked the redeeming peculiarity that impregnated Hemingway’s work. Also, the Italian incident gave him material for many of his works, for his awareness of death served as a stimulus to reflect on the significance of life and death in the modern world. He incorporated his personal experience into his prose in the form of a trope that the critics soon labeled the symbolic 144

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injury. This trope consisted of a traumatic episode, after which the modern self had to readjust to life in the awareness that the past could not be recovered and the present could not supply new certainties or codes of behavior. Politics and religion were discarded as valuable sources of meaning, but Hemingway found in physical, outdoor activities the necessary mechanisms of readjustment in which he soon set his characters. Violence and death are always present in Hemingway’s stories, more as a form of life than as a mere accident or anecdote. Hunters, soldiers, matadors and doctors embody different angles of the same interest in death, and they provide their respective resourcefulness in the face of danger. The apparently insensitive protagonists of his fiction are accordingly involved in appropriate activities: war, bohemian life, crime, life in the open... Even the events entailed by ordinary life are articulated in violent terms and displayed as most trying situations for the individual. In his view, the unreasonable wound inflicted by modern life can be mitigated by the personal grace of the self that endures the pain. The author’s fascination with bullfighting can be accounted for from this perspective, since the three acts of the bullfight provide a pattern in which death may be confronted with grace and courage. If Faulkner’s characters are entrapped in history, Hemingway’s are confined to an existence where masculinity is questioned and whose battles they cannot win. His typical male character faces spiritual or physical devastation. The existentialist component in his work steps forward here since, given a situation of profound insight, the human being catches a glimpse of the nada (as expressed in his story «A Clean Well-Lighted Place») that lies at the center or even ahead. This nothingness forces a cult of total sensation in life, in the first place. But in the second it provides an opportunity for man to define himself, to create and maintain an ideal of behavior in the face of defeat. Sartre’s existentialism, always at issue in ideological approaches to Hemingway, claimed the condemnation of human beings to freedom in a world deprived of divine intelligence or purpose. Such overwhelming freedom allows them to perceive themselves through action as moral selves, as it will be discussed below with reference to «The Snows of Kilimanjaro.» You can prepare yourself for Hemingway’s story if you bear in mind… The shifts in focalization to represent different levels of consciousness.  The author’s use of lean syntax and diction. 

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The complex symbolical structure.  The gender-related issues in the characters’ relationship.  The adaptation of the hero figure to a modern scenario. 

3.2. REVISITING «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» As indicated above, Hemingway’s work is a portrait and a glorification of manhood. Hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, or warring in Italy are physical actions that, to Hemingway’s eyes, project and at the same time test virility. Living in a time when social and gender patterns were rapidly changing, Hemingway examined representations of masculinity and femininity in his prose, as well as the relation between both sexes. Masculine authority and identity are, therefore, central concerns in his fiction, as «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» demonstrates. Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s reputed biographer, states that this story was the novelist’s imaginative interpretation of what would have become of him as a writer if he had accepted a New York woman’s offer to finance him a safari in 1934. Published in Esquire in August, 1936, it was inspired by Hemingway’s trip to Africa two years before. It is the story of a writer who, in his agony, finds it impossible to transcribe his final moments. Paradoxically, his dying delirium provides insight, illumination, and understanding, as his imagination —the only part of him that remains intact and pure— rises above the camp and soars across the sky. In line with the narrative voices surveyed up to this moment, this story shows a subtle mode of narrating events. As a reporter, Hemingway liked to be on the spot himself in order to apprehend the facts and the substance behind them. His accurate observation of action and detail breathed life and insight to the usually plain vignettes of journalism. During his days as a correspondent he most probably realized the power of camera work. Images in movement provide an impression of reality, of actual experience, of immediacy: what appears, is. Hemingway’s language tried to convey the same force of actuality by neat exposition, so that readers might «see» and «hear» directly. Like the poets of his time he tried to get down to the objects (actions, mostly) that produced emotions, not to the emotions themselves. This directness of style made the presence of a guiding or intrusive narrator unnecessary. The narrative voice observed in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» is 146

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hardly visible, that is to say, the narrator’s role is reduced to a mere voice that reports in an unobtrusive, detached way. This effaced narrator resembles a camera in his/her reporting activity, since only the physical acts —action, speech— can be rendered by this type of narrative voice. Only a shift in focalization allows an intrusion into the main character’s consciousness. For instance, the narrator can enter Harry’s mind through the use of free indirect thought, in a sort of threshold for the italized sections of the story: She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? (NAAL: 1988)

The previous passage shows a striking difference from the aseptic participations of the effaced narrator: It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low this time, and then glided down and levelled off and landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat. (NAAL: 1998)

 Compare

the narrative voices as seen in both excerpts: contents, focalization, syntax, tone… Why is a shift in focalization necessary here?

In this story, Hemingway used a metalinguistic strategy to exhibit the dual narrative in a graphic way. The italicized sections provide a formal innovation on the part of Hemingway, and they expose the workings of Harry’s mind that would otherwise remain undisclosed. As a result of Hemingway’s love for action his characters are doers, not thinkers, since it

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is facts what the human being needs to face in his/her daily encounter with life. Consequently, he was not interested in psychological depths, which implies that he seldom used the interior monologue. The past as an important constituent of the Modernist sensibility has been repeatedly mentioned in previous analyses. This story presents instances of anachronies, that is, temporal dislocations from the narrative present. The six sections that organize the story deal with different situations experienced by the protagonist in the past, recalling Harry’s former days as a creative, energetic person in command of his own life, and each section is dedicated to one aspect of his life.

 Examine

the analepses presented through Harry’s viewpoint. What are their function? What kind of contrast do they communicate? Don’t overlook the ironic disparity between past creativity and present decay.

«The first and most important thing for writers today is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.» Hemingway’s own words account for the leanness of his style. Like a substantial number of his literary contemporaries he served apprenticeship in journalism, and throughout his life he constantly shifted from reporting to fiction and vice-versa. But none of his fellow authors’ fictions were as influenced by journalism as Hemingway’s were. He joined the Kansas City Star in 1918, and during the seven months he worked there he assimilated the newspaper’s style sheet that would later filter through his very personal use of language. The most relevant rules contained in the style sheet were brevity, compression, avoidance of nonessential words, and accuracy of grammar and diction. Hemingway’s style echoed these fundamental prescriptions, and throughout his career he showed a preference for the frugality of words. He usually wrote in staccato sentences, that is to say, short, abrupt sentences that contributed to the overall meager style. He also preferred simple clauses, and avoided subordination. Transition words were usually avoided, too, which results in a violent and disturbing effect of disjointed events: Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp. She was wearing jodhpurs and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a Tommie slung and they were coming along behind her. She was still a good-looking

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woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant body. She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face, she read enormously, liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank too much. (NAAL: 1989)

In his permanent attempt to elude overblown pieces of prose Hemingway also disregarded superfluous words, among which he more than frequently included adjectives, until he considered that he had accomplished «to tell simple things simply.» (Readers may have observed by themselves that Hemingway did in fiction what William Carlos Williams did in poetry: a minimalist but expressive approach to life.) As mentioned before, he retreated from abstractions and ran away from debating metaphysical concerns. Since his characters are made to face concrete facts, not philosophical ideas, his prose is mostly confined to the physical world. He therefore paid close attention to rendering the visible —behavior, dialogue, setting— in a palpable way. Such a concentration on the concrete had the occasional side effect of understatement. Interviewed by George Plimpton in 1958, Hemingway declared his personal stylistic dogma: I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seveneighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in it. (In Bruccoli: 125)

Although the «Iceberg principle» refers to withheld pieces of narrative information, it may also elucidate his use of understatement. Understating involves dealing with an event with less force than the occasion would presumably demand. A subtext —an undercurrent text composed of less conspicuous elements than dialogue or report— runs underneath the scant language employed by the author. While the explicit text evokes those undercurrent feelings and ideas, they are not overtly expressed. This narrative technique suits Hemingway’s depiction of a violent, insensitive world. The initial lines of «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» offer a fitting example of understatement, where the deadly danger of Harry’s gangrene is verbally diminished: «The marvellous thing is that it’s painless,» he said. «That’s how you know when it starts.» «Is it really?»

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«Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.» (NAAL: 1983)

 Pay attention to the way in which Hemingway uses narrative modes in this story (report, description, speech and comment). Which mode would you say prevails? How present, for instance, is speech? Why is dialogue important? Notice how, at times, the narrator hardly intervenes in characters’ exchanges of words and scenes are created (narrative moments where story time —duration of the events narrated— and narrative time —space needed to narrate them— approximate the most).

This story presents a moment of revelation as some character envisions it. In «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» such revelation is shown in a paradoxical way, since the protagonist has already ceased to live when the illumination arrives to him. His approach to the snowy top of Mount Kilimanjaro is only a fantasy of final accomplishment. Hemingway’s Harry could be said to illustrate the spirit of the Lost Generation, of which the author was one of the most reputed members. As he acknowledges his disorientation in life Harry finds meaning in the creative act, detached from his homeland and traditions. In Unit Three the modern interpretations and uses of the Arthurian cycle were discussed in relation to Fitzgerald’s fictional world. Where the author of The Great Gatsby had seen redemptive possibilities in the figure of the knight and his quest for a grail, Hemingway was more concerned with the archetype of the Fisher King, whose health and the fertility of the land are inextricably linked (Lupack: 156). Like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist of «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» is characterized as mutilated, this time physically as well as creatively. The idea of restoration is similarly explored in the story, as the hero’s awareness achieves a metaphysical level at the end of the narrative to equal the spiritual elevation suggested by the opening epigraph. In the Esquire version of the story, Hemingway used the name «Scott» instead of the «Julian» that he later used for further publications (NAAL: 1996). The former name was an allusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, a personal friend of his, of whom he thought as a suitable impersonation of the decadent 150

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wealthy (Fitzgerald himself asked Hemingway to remove this allusion from the original story). Other allusions have remained and impregnate «The Snows of Kilimanjaro»: literary works and artistic movements intensify the idea that Harry keeps contact with the artistic world despite his creative stagnancy. But the art alluded to is meaningful enough, since it reinforces the dichotomy reality/subreality inherent to the text: And there in the café as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat. (NAAL: 1992)

In one of his letters to Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway termed one of the chief motifs in his fiction as «grace under pressure» (Baker: 199). The pattern alludes to endurance amidst suffering, the resolute fortitude of a character despite pain or chaos. Hemingway’s interpretation of grace was not a religious but an ethic one that rested on human good works and personal worth. The character of Harry epitomizes such notions of grace under pressure and endurance. The closing instants of his life convey the necessity to persist. His final experience resembles an ecstasy, a profound feeling of grace. Contrary to the expected agonies of a death by gangrene, his dying moments involve a beatific trance after which, Christ-like, he gains peace and salvation. Harry «writes» in his final hour, thus ensuring the survival of imagination. By recovering his rich creativity he achieves a form of grace and obtains «the house of God.» Among his recognition of existentialist nothingness, the discipline of the code —in this case the artist’s discipline— can provide partial and transient meaning. To quote Warren, It is the discipline of the code that makes man human, a sense of style or good form [...]. The discipline of the soldier, the form of the athlete, the gameness of the sportsman, the technique of an artist can give some sense of the human order, and can achieve a moral significance. (87)

The symbolic injury is present in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro,» where Hemingway insists on the symbolic power of the wound in a particular way. A close reading of the text reveals that Harry has been living a death in life, and therefore must survive morally through a life in death. Like other characters depicted by the author, the protagonist of «The Snows of

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Kilimanjaro» must adjust to a sudden and tormenting situation. He is pictured as powerless, beaten down by a scratch that escapes control and, finally, destroys his physical self. The symbolic injury is a sign of modern age, but it also brings the character a strong motivation for moral improvisation, in order to accommodate to the unavoidable. Hemingway’s hard-boiled characters inspired many of the silent, tough heroes to be seen in modern films, novels and comic books. For all the above, women characters occupy a peculiar place in Hemingway’s work. They embody the promises of a younger America while they also represent the advances gained in the social and political arena. Those «promises,» it should be remembered here, had a masculinist flavor, so Hemingway’s bitter treatment of female characters responded to the failed expectations of the American male. The fear of the female sex, or horror feminae, is ubiquitous in his work. Hemingway’s critics and biographers have resorted to his domineering mother and henpecked father to explain his chauvinist treatment of women characters. Other scholars point at sociological circumstances in order to approach the sexist taste of his work. According to Harold E. Stearns, a contemporary to Hemingway, intellectual life and the artistic energy of the moment were negatively influenced by increasing feminization of a culture in which male and female roles were quickly changing. He also defended that the male artists were consequently driven to creative anemia, so that the blatantly masculinist writings of such authors as Hemingway could be understood as a strategy of resistance. «The Snows of Kilimanjaro,» in particular, can be read as a rewriting of the Samson myth, where Harry would stand as a powerful man who has been weakened and defeated by a Delilah: «If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamed Old Westbury, Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on—» «Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll always love you. Don’t you love me?» «No,» said the man. «I don’t think I so. I never have.» «Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.» «No, I haven’t any head to go out of.» «Don’t drink that,» she said. «Darling, please don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can.» «You do it,» he said. «I’m tired.» (NAAL: 1985)

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This story exemplifies, therefore, Hemingway’s definition of masculinity. The environment, as usual in his stories, is described as hostile and presents a threat to man’s power and control. Animals and wife alike seem to pertain to the same threatening system that condones Harry’s mobility and creativity.

 Examine

the characterization of Harry’s wife in the story. How is she presented to us? Look into the way she speaks to her husband, but also the things she does and what surrounds her. What are the implications of her competent shooting?

The natural environment per se does not seem to be enough to test masculinity, when frontier times are long gone and new times demand a new code. In fact, the African wildness is not presented as a challenging environment, and we are told that, ironically, an accident and a set of adverse circumstances have produced Harry’s mortal wound. There are no traces of any heroic or daring action. Not surprisingly, the italicized sections deal with war scenes, bars, and other «masculine» activities. In his agonizing creative process, therefore, Harry merges his lost masculinity and his lost creativity, recuperating both at once. In Hemingway’s stories, his male characters are seen in testing situations that prove their physical and mental strength. As men of action, they adjust to a senseless world with acts, performing a personal code of honor, courage and endurance that will help them to carry on. Again Jake Barnes, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, explains this existential position: Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about. (The Sun Also Rises: 124)

«The Snows of Kilimanjaro» offers Harry’s similar reaction to the inextricable angles of life, which he thought he could overcome.

 Look

through the story and find one excerpt that could exemplify the protagonist’s grace under pressure.

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Despite the leanness of his style, Hemingway was also a poet who had drawn from the Symbolists. «The Snows of Kilimanjaro» makes a symbolic use of several elements, among which Harry’s gangrene is of crucial importance. It parallels his moral degradation, since he has abandoned his creative energies and has been living on his wife’s money instead of adhering to the American principles of hard work and perseverance. On account of this corruption, the story reconciles the physical and the moral through the protagonist’s ailment. The image of the gangrene suggests progression and aggravation, only improvable with a radical form of intervention. As the man of action and outdoor activities he was, Hemingway relied on natural imagery repeatedly. The hyena emerges as a threatening and nasty representation of impending death. However, it also responds to the notion of the hyenas being hermaphrodites because their external sexual organs are superficially similar in both sexes. This sexual confusion is amplified by the matriarchal structure of the pack, where a female dominates the group and rejects nomadic males.

 Revise your approach to Helen’s characterization. Did you include animal imagery as a characterizing strategy? What does Hemingway suggest by connecting Helen’s character and the hyena? And by relating Harry to the leopard?

The snow towering Mount Kilimanjaro indicates its overwhelming height, but it also suggests conservative power. Indeed, the immutability caused by the snow stands in opposition to the progressive decadence of Harry’s body and spirit. Furthermore, the snow guarantees water in the driest time of year, so by using this image Hemingway exorcises all notions of a wasteland from that specific location. The height of Mount Kilimanjaro is an effective image of ethic elevation. It evokes physical inaccessibility, but also spiritual recompense. Harry’s «rise» at the end of the story could be interpreted as a glorious recognition of his last creative attempts or as a spiritual fulfillment after the ethic decadence he has been undergoing. 154

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 The mountain top can be also read as a symbol of purity. What did Harry do in his life that leads him to assume he merits this? Reread the sections dedicated to his past life.

Hemingway’s style was sparse, direct, and frequently understating. His narrators were detached and avoided commentary and intrusion, so the narration greatly relied on dialogue and action. As for themes, Hemingway was interested in representing forms of virility, and in portraying characters that, though displaying a symbolic injury, endured and found ways of moral adjustment to a nonsensical world.

4. EXERCISES 4.1. Test yourself On William Faulkner a) What characteristics of the Southern Renaissance can you trace in «Barn Burning»? b) Why is this story defined as a Bildungsroman? c) How does Faulkner challenge narrative conventions in «Barn Burning»? d) Who does the reader side up with? Explore how the audience finds it as difficult to establish affinities as Sarty himself in the story. e) Why does the narrator focus on Abner’s motivations? f) What is the importance of history and the past in this story? How do narrative techniques enhance the relevance of time in the lives of the central character? g) Can you detect any traces of Faulkner’s early writing as a poet?

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h) How do class and race interrelate in the story? i) What are the main symbols used by Faulkner in «Barn Burning»? On Ernest Hemingway a) Why are two typographies used in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro»? b) What are the main symbols and myths in Hemingway’s story? c) How is the woman character characterized in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro»? d) How is «grace under pressure» articulated in this text? e) What is the function of cultural allusions in Hemingway’s story? f) What is the role of the italicized sections in the development of Harry’s character? g) How would you describe the narrative voice(s) in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro»? h) How does Hemingway make use of narrative modes? i) Why is the opening scene an example of understatement? j) How is Hemingway’s inclination to violence discussed in this story? Summary questions a) How do William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway fit in with the writers of the Lost Generation? b) What is the function of anachronies in the two stories analyzed in this Unit? c) How do the protagonists in both Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s stories pursue significance and certainty? d) What film techniques can you observe in the two stories? e) To what extent are the narrators pivotal elements in the stories they narrate? How do they shape our reading? 156

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f) What common elements can you trace in the main characters’ epiphanies?

4.2. Explore a) Faulkner is often approached as a «Southern Gothic» writer. Southern Gothic is characterized by the bleak settings, grotesque action and extreme characters that populate its pages. Also, the writers of the Southern States are concerned with time and with the guilt inherited from their ancestors. To what extent does the label «Gothic» apply to «Barn Burning»? Is the story disturbing in any sense? b) Some scholars have read «Barn Burning» from a Marxist viewpoint, that is, as a representation of class struggle. Bearing in mind the rendering of the characters’ economic situation, to what extent do you agree with this interpretation? c) Critic and poet Robert Penn Warren saw noteworthy similarities between Fitzgerald’s «sad young men» and Hemingway’s expatriates. Explore similar tracks in the characters depicted by both authors, paying attention to their restlessness and efforts to cope with a perverted world. d) Analyze and discuss the Satan figure in «Barn Burning» versus the Christ figure in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro.» To what extent are they modern or Modernist representations of archetypal characters? In other words, how effective are they as myths and therefore as referents for the interpretation of their respective stories? e) How does sense of place operate in the two stories examined in this Unit? Does setting exert a particular influence on character, plot, mood…? f) How do you account for the riddle at the beginning of «The Snows of Kilimanjaro»? What would you say is the connection between the brief text and the story itself? g) How do gender-related issues in Faulkner’s story compare to those observed in Hemingway’s? What values and beliefs inform each representation?

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h) According to Robert Penn Warren, «[s]ubordination implies some exercise of discrimination —the sifting of reality through the intellect. But in Hemingway we see a romantic anti-intellectualism» (106). Discuss in relation to grammatical structures in «The Snows of Kilimanjaro.» i) Compare Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s descriptive strategies. Bear in mind that, despite their obvious dissimilar style, they achieve the same vividness of perception. j) Films contributed to the elaboration and/or diffusion of old and new ideas. The myth of the Old South was widely displayed by films of the nineteen thirties, in particular by the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1939). From the information provided in «Barn Burning,» how do both visions of the south differ? Which elements are highlighted? Which ones are downplayed? 4.3. Key terms — — — — — — — — —

Anachronies Analepsis Bildungsroman Effaced narrator Epiphany Focalization Free indirect style Grace under pressure Interior monologue

— — — — — — — —

Montage Prolepsis Scene Southern Renaissance Subtext Symbolic injury Synchronicity Understatement

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5.1. Recommended readings — Manfred Jahn’s «Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative.» 1999. University of Cologne. http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm — Bryant Mangum’s «Introduction to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.» Virginia Commonwealth University. http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/ hemstories.htm

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5.2. Critical works cited ROBERT ALDRIDGE. After the Lost Generation: A Critical Survey of the Writers of Two Wars. New York: McGraw, 1951. CARLOS BAKER. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner, 1981. MATTHEW BRUCCOLI, ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. GÉRARD GENETTE. 1972. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. RICHARD GRAY (ed). American Fiction: New Readings. London: Vision Press, 1983. ROBERT HUMPHREY. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. DAVID LODGE. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992. ALAN LUPACK and BARBARA TEPA LUPACK. King Arthur in America. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999. SHLOMITH RIMMON-KENAN. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 1983. ROBERT PENN WARREN. Selected Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. SUSAN S. YUNIS. «The Narrator of ‘Barn Burning.’» The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), 23-31.

5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit John Dos Passos (1896-1970): Manhattan Transfer (1925) is a choral novel that inspects the lives of a wide range of characters as shaped and determined by the oppressive forces of New York City. William Faulkner (1897-1962): As I Lay Dying (1930) is a highly innovative novel that describes the agony and subsequent burial of Addie Bundren and the related experiences of her family. Its fifty-five sections account for the Bundren’s actions and psychological processes as reported by fifteen different narrators.

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Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is the story of Thomas Sutpen, who works his way from poverty to powerful landowning. He dismisses his wife and son after discovering that she has some black blood in her veins, which —from Sutpen’s optic— also makes their son unfit to inherit Sutpen’s possessions. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). The Sun Also Rises (1926) tells about a group of friends in postwar Europe, all of them physical survivors but emotional victims. Jake Barnes, the central character, became impotent after a war wound. He thus lives a personal wasteland of sexual fruitlessness that he tries to overcome creatively. In Our Time (1925) is a collection of stories in which young Nick Adams learns his first adjustments to the world. The connecting theme underlying these stories is that of growing and coping with existence in the confusion and hopelessness after the First World War.

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Program 1. PRESENTATION: Race and gender in Modernist America 1.1. Harlem and the «New Negro» 1.2. The «New Woman» and the new century 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Langston Hughes’ poetic claims 2.1. APPROACHING Hughes’ «I, Too» 2.2. REVISITING «I, Too» 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Zora Neale Hurston’s proud fiction 3.1. APPROACHING Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits» 3.2. REVISITING «The Gilded Six-Bits» 4. TEXT ANALYSIS: Edith Wharton’s revisionist fiction 4.1. APPROACHING Wharton’s «Roman Fever» 4.2. REVISITING «Roman Fever» 5. EXERCISES Learning outcomes — To understand the conditions in which these social and literary figures emerged. — To get acquainted with other Modernist voices and complementary notions of Americanness. — To examine the literary strategies developed to convey specific racial and gender issues.

1. PRESENTATION: RACE AND GENDER IN MODERNIST AMERICA Although «Modernism» is far from being a clear-cut term and therefore allows the inclusion of multiple texts, it was white male authors who defined the project and welcomed or ignored other revisionist proposals (Scott: 4-7). The authors of this volume want to bring to the forefront some of those

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voices that participated in the construction of what we now understand as «Modernism» with the revision of other social values and artistic traditions. In particular, this Unit intends to evaluate how African Americans and women interpreted the modern scenario, provided their own worldviews in their writings, and resisted established artistic and ideological paradigms.

1.1. Harlem and the «New Negro» The waves of African Americans who departed from the agrarian and racist south towards the urban north were a social phenomenon known as the Great Migration. Although they relocated in several northern industrial cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia or Detroit, New York received the largest number of black immigrants. In the early 1900s, some middle-class African Americans moved from the decaying «Black Bohemia» of midtown New York into the newly built suburb of Harlem, a two-square mile area. By 1920, a quarter million African Americans were living in the Harlem district, which became the «black capital» of the world. In his historical study of the Harlem community, James Weldon Johnson reported the demographic, economic and intellectual growth of this city within the city: At the beginning of the year 1917 Negro Harlem was well along the road of development and prosperity. There was plenty of work, with a choice of jobs, and there was plenty of money. The community was beginning to feel conscious of its growing size and strength. It had entirely rid itself of the sense of apology for its existence. It was beginning to take pride in itself as Harlem, a Negro community. (231)

As the reference above indicates, self-consciousness and racial pride are pivotal concepts when approaching this moment of splendor in Harlem. The African Americans who shared it decried old stereotypes about black people, especially romanticized views like the Uncle Tom figure propagated by the plantation system to legitimize the unlegitimizable. Harlemites energized black social discourse and creativity to unexpected extents. Such was its artistic and intellectual vitality that white downtowners, intellectuals and benefactors were also attracted to the Harlem community. Several were the reasons why this city within the city became the destination of such a remarkable affluence of immigrants. The low price of real estate in 162

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the sector was a paramount factor: African Americans embarked in the purchase of realty, which provoked a withdrawal of the white population and investors from the area. Harlem rose as a black business center in direct competition with white economic activities. Also, during the First World War workers of European origin ceased to fill job positions in New York. The deficient postwar economy of the agrarian south left many African Americans jobless, so vast numbers of black workers arrived from the southern states attracted by the prospect of employment, but also eager to leave behind the severely racist communities of the south. Meanwhile, northern cities also sheltered immigrants from other countries with an African legacy, especially from the Caribbean region. Lastly, migration and economic conditions transformed Harlem into an ethnic capital, where a sense of race pride and heritage developed. In the nineteenth century, many white Americans who lived in abolitionist states considered themselves non-racist. Due to the massive immigration underwent by the northern states in the early twentieth century, it was certified that racism was truly an issue to be faced and discussed nationwide. Harlem’s intellectuals and artists disseminated the necessity of a revision of civil rights and artistic canons alike, and demanded the dignity so long denied to African Americans in the United States. The summing up of social, economic and intellectual energies transformed Harlem into the headquarters of the «New Negro» spirit. Philosopher Alain Leroy Locke defined the figure of the New Negro in his study of the same name published in 1925. The volume contained essays by Locke himself and some literary and critical pieces of the emerging figures of the Negro Renaissance. The essential philosophy of the New Negro was the revelation of the old Negro as a mythical figure, socially constructed to suit the purposes and conscience of whites. In a nation that holds newness as a fundamental ideal, and whose truly national character was thought to be the New Man (Adam), rising figures such as the New Negro or the New Woman suited as well as challenged the essential components of race and gender of the myth. The explosion of talent, vigor, and race pride that took place in Harlem in the early 1900s is known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement. The creative outburst attracted sponsors and patrons, both black and white, who economically supported the works of the Harlem community and contributed to the expansion of the African American art

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and ideology. Creativity adopted a variety of forms: music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature... all of them striving to make conscious use of Africanisms as valid cultural and aesthetic practices, and to celebrate black heritage. This drive towards a black aesthetic contested and resisted white supremacy. However, not all Harlemites shared the same methods or aspirations. Black American literature has existed since slavery times, although its power and reception run parallel to the slow process of racial self-awareness. It was in this period of cultural and political self-consciousness that African American literature lived a moment of revival, to which several publications contributed. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, explored the essence of his race in his study The Souls of Black Folk (1903), where he stated the «legitimate demands» of his people. Du Bois broke with the political views of Booker T. Washington, the so far leader of black activism, and claimed more ambitious and egalitarian aims for his people. He was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, the first American all-black movement against racial discrimination, which later developed into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois accounted for the African Americans’ position in literature and society with the expression doubleconsciousness. In his own words, the phrase implies «this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others [...]. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings» (NAAL: 896). He considered this «two-ness» of African Americans both an obstacle in the black people’s path towards self-consciousness, and an instrument of awareness about their actual condition in American society. Du Bois expressed his wish to merge both selves into a «better and truer self» without losing any of the older selves in the process. Hence, his viewpoint about the racial question was integrationalist. With respect to art, the Modernist authors covered so far conceived their creative endeavors as repudiations of tradition and civilization in their accepted senses. However, they understood their cultural environment as Eurocentric (that is, white and western), a frame of mind and work in which many African Americans could not find a personal or an artistic definition. The New Negro struggled for such a definition of identity in modern terms, i.e. with a new social and intellectual background. According to scholar Houston Baker, art offered the only arena in which African Americans could 164

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express themselves, having been excluded from education, politics, and business (90). Poet and fiction writer Langston Hughes published an essay in The Nation in 1926, in which he claimed the necessity of African Americans to express themselves through their art, and to find their own literary identity: We the younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (From Langston Hughes’ «The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,» 1926)

Hughes claimed for independence of standards and for the coronation of the «racial mountain» that stands in the way of any black artist. According to him, such Negro artist should avoid conforming to white patterns, and consequently disregard «the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.» This literary movement beheld the debate on whether or not art should become an ideological weapon used for political purposes. Authors took sides on this respect: while Hughes maintained that art could repair the traditional white representation of the black race, Zora Neale Hurston rejected this opinion. The debate would persist throughout the twentieth century. One of the principal achievements of the Harlem Renaissance was the recovery and celebration of the black rhetorical tradition. This tradition was developed in the United States first in musical forms such as spirituals, blues, jazz and gospel —and, about fifty years later, rap music too. In his book The Afrocentric Idea, Professor Asante labeled these black expressions as «guerilla rhetoric,» since they were used to resist the established order and helped to preserve their African roots. (Some African Americans, however, found these African origins too vulgar to claim their race.) In the black rhetorical tradition language and music are closely interrelated. Most languages from the West of Africa —from where significant numbers of inhabitants were captured and slaved— posses pitch, timbre and timing, that is, structural elements of music. Speech absorbed some racial features that ultimately shaped the «whiteness» of the English language into another

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sign of blackness. Moreover, during the early glorious days of radio broadcasting, black announcers and disc jockeys promoted the diffusion of a distinctive ethnic speech, often regarded nonsensical or illiterate by white speakers. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance incorporated this continuum of black creative expression, that Asante called orature, into literary texts. The creative energy of the Harlem Renaissance came to an end with the arrival of Depression time, because its benefactors could hardly support the artists any longer. By the nineteen thirties, moreover, African American activists were well aware that an improvement in civil rights would hardly be the consequence of artistic excellence. However, the movement left an indelible print in the history of the United States. The texts by African Americans discussed in this Unit bring to light two intersectional but diverging attitudes towards race and its demands. While Langston Hughes’ poem defends ethnic self-respect against the dominant race, Zora Neale Hurston’s story seemingly disregards the representation of black and white issues in opposition.

1.2. The «New Woman» and the new century Nathaniel Hawthorne, the nineteenth-century American author, once resented the number of «scribbling women» that populated the literary panorama of his time. Such contempt for women of letters was a product of the gender codes of Hawthorne’s days, as well as of the stereotypes propagated by literary texts themselves. Women writing and women in writing were equally ostracized to sex-based cultural categorizations. The progress in social rights pursued by women from the late nineteenth century on ignited some political changes that ensured a parallel advance in the cultural position of women. But the literature of Modernist America failed to debate the issues behind and beyond the flappers, just as it failed to propose a general interrogation of civil rights. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were among the writers who accurately portrayed the new apparel and habits of the modern woman, but little space was left for the woman question itself. As for women writers, they were excluded from the male Modernist project with the exception of those who took up residence in Europe, where they found a more congenial environment for publishing. 166

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Women’s struggle towards selfhood included serious endeavors to define their artistic identity. Many woman writers of the early decades of the twentieth century redefined women’s roles in their works, as they strove for a place in the American canon. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that the highly innovative style of white male authors conformed to their desire to detach themselves from the commercial success of nineteenth-century women writers (149), despite the fact that such prominent figures as Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf contributed to shape Anglo-American Modernism. However interrogative it proved in other aspects, the masculinist and Eurocentric bias of the Modernist movement left the white male supremacy unquestioned. It largely ignored women’s literary achievements and silenced their creative endeavors. Even those who had reached critical acclaim in the early years of the twentieth century, like Willa Cather or Edith Wharton, suffered this repression from the Modernist community, and saw their participation in the Modernist spirit belittled. The academia either diminished the appraisal of their work, or considered them as residues of a bygone age. Nina Baym resents that male critics have pursued Americanness in American Literature, and «they have arrived at a place where Americanness has vanished into the depths of what is alleged to be the universal male psyche» (139). This male configuration reduced the vastness and variety of American literature to a very meager canon, arranged around «American» myths such as the frontier, the promise of the land, or the American Adam. These cultural constructs projected women as defenders of a social order that the male hero wanted to escape, or as reflections of the natural vastness that men desired to conquer and control. As Unit One discussed, this approach to the national experience was fundamentally male, and excluded women authors: [W]omen are not likely to cast themselves as antagonists in a man’s story; they are even less likely, I suggest, to cast themselves as virgin land. The lack of fit between their own experience and the fictional role assigned to them is even greater in the second instance than in the first. If women portray themselves as brides or mothers it will not be in terms of the mythic landscape. (Baym: 136)

Therefore the canon demanded serious revision, a process that would also recognize other social minorities. Modern and Contemporary American

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Literature pays attention to such revision in the present Unit as well as in Units Eight, Nine and Ten. The fine-de-siècle upheaval of certainties and beliefs surveyed at the beginning of this volume saw another social development of significant importance. The figure of the «New Woman» as a social and literary type emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when the economic and social order was rapidly changing. The expression «New Woman,» as it came to be known in the eighteen nineties, referred to those women who had begun to be fully aware of the limitations imposed on women on account of their sex. They were middle-class women who reached higher education, entered the business world, and claimed economic and social independence as they rejected those restrictive values and roles traditionally identified with womanhood. In this respect they consciously involved themselves in activities or attitudes conventionally understood as masculine, ranging from smoking to sexual freedom. The First World War accentuated social and economic transformations, when a noteworthy part of the male population was drafted and their workplaces were taken over by women who became equal participants in production, consumption and leisure. In short, conscious choice became a characterizing feature of the New Woman, a capacity that female authors would fully explore in their works between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this state of affairs, the American letters started to reconsider women’s conventional social role, especially in relation to the institution of marriage. At the same time, critical works of the period engaged in the discussion of the notion of «home» in terms of dependency, security, and financial need. All the previous implied a shift of focus regarding home, marriage, and man-woman relationship in literary works by and about women. Despite the new attitudes and concerns on the part of women characters, the domestic realm remained as the typical setting of these plots, since the association between women and private life has pervaded fiction since Pamela, sustained and legitimized by an ideological system: This is why in the 1880s and 1890s and on into the twentieth century, in spite of an active feminist movement and the expansion of opportunities for women outside the home, the novel showed no signs of evolving a different framework for even some of its women characters. (Stubbs: xii)

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One of the milestones in women’s struggle for equal rights was the Woman Suffrage Movement, starting in 1848 and ending in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Its long and complex history certified the parallel course of women’s striving for independence and opportunities. Once the suffragists reached their objective, this feminist wave soon withered away. The figure of the flapper, now an old-fashioned term that used to mean «immoral adolescent girl» in the late nineteenth century, emerged in the Roaring Twenties. The word, however, was quickly adjusted to the whole new state of things. «Flapper culture» came to imply modernity and consumerism, and it embraced both sexes. But, women being the ones who were undergoing the greatest change into modern times and customs, it was fairly usual to find the term applied to the young woman of the twenties who disregarded traditional notions of femininity, bobbed her hair, drank and smoke, and let her outfits expose her naked limbs. The critical force that had characterized the New Woman was therefore subsiding into the self-indulgence observed in characters like Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan. Few works embody women’s social and creative confinement as explicitly as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s «The Yellow Wallpaper.» This story, first published in 1892, tells about a young writer going through post-partum depression, who is forced to take a rest cure by the males around her. Her psychological and physical imprisonment seeks release through a creativity that has been forbidden to her, but that she nevertheless pursues by projecting a moving figure on the patterned wallpaper that, like her, looks for a way out. Gilman’s story unveils the reclusion suffered by women in general, and by female artists in particular. The literature of the New Woman writer, such as Gilman’s or Kate Chopin’s, and of women authors who felt close to this initial feminist movement, would exploit several metaphors of confinement and release in the context of a restrictive patriarchal society. Some critics defend the idea of a specifically female literature, one in which we can trace «an imaginative continuum, the recurrence of certain patterns, themes, problems, and images from generation to generation» (Showalter, 1977: 11). Others disagree on this point, and deny the existence of a distinctly female sensibility and tradition. The debate is interesting enough to remain open but, insofar, the present Unit will highlight some common traits observed in American «scribbling women» in light of the social and economic changes underwent by the United States in the early

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twentieth century. Readers, nevertheless, are invited to examine the literary works written by women that each Unit proposes, and to judge by themselves.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: LANGSTON HUGHES’ POETIC CLAIMS 2.1. APPROACHING Hughes’ «I, Too» Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was one of the countless immigrants who left the rural communities of the United States and moved to the urban areas in the early years of the twentieth century. He arrived in Harlem from Missouri in 1921, where he met the vigorous New Negro Movement and participated in the artistic milieu with his stories and poems. His first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. That same year his essay «The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,» discussed above, defended the possibility of a Negro art that did not necessarily comply with the elitist inclination he observed in the writings of other African Americans. Hughes attempted to create poetic language from the rhythms of vernacular speech and from the musical traditions of the African Americans, particularly jazz and blues, thus providing his poetry with originality and releasing it from the strict formality of the English pentameter. The Weary Blues paid homage to traditional blues rhythms and lyrics, as the following lines from the title poem show: I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— «Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.» (NAAL: 2029)

In addition to black rhythms, his compositions show vernacular speech and a wide range of characters that included the working class, vagabonds, and other social outcasts, a variety that defied the endeavors of other Harlemites who strived to represent black art as the accomplishment of an educated few who could speak for others. Hughes’ strategy, Chabot debates, 170

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accepted and even celebrated the differences in the specific values and cultures developed by African Americans and implicitly argued that these differences represented the specific contributions that African Americans might make to the culture as a whole. This strand of the Harlem Renaissance often risked the use of dialect, whereas the former usually developed a diction comfortably within standard, or even elevated, English. (145)

Hughes consequently challenged the intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance —mainly Du Bois and Locke— who urged the creation of a sophisticated art that could please white benefactors, reach white audiences, and show that black artists could meet white aesthetic demands. These leaders pursued the minimization of differences between races, and claimed that the use of dialect risked a revitalization of the ethnic stereotypes they were struggling against. Hughes, on the contrary, favored racial differentiation in his works. Like the work of other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes’ bears the mark of primitivism. In their search for newness of theme and form, and in their resistance to nineteenth-century values, Modernist authors became interested in those cultures disdained by the sophisticated intellectuals of the previous century, believers of scientific and moral progress and distrustful of civilizations other than their own. Members of the New Negro Movement like Hughes or Hurston were passionately interested in their racial identity, and for that reason looked to a collective, primitive past still present in linguistic or musical expressions. Contemporary and later reviews have deemed Hughes’ poetry simplistic, even infantile or unpoetic at times. Some critics claimed that his focus on the Negro commonfolk and their language downplayed his art. In a time of formal innovation and stylistic virtuosity, he certainly stood out as a poet of simplicity. He actually made of straightforwardness an aesthetic tool and a political instrument with the creation of his fictional character Jesse B. Semple, nicknamed «Simple.» Hughes published «Simple» stories for twenty years, between 1943 and 1963, depicting the adventures of what he termed an Everyman and an authentic character —in other words, unmediated by his social context. Correspondingly, Hughes’ poetic voice tried to emulate the voice and experience of the simple, common African American folk. The poem analyzed below is offered as sample of his straightforward style and his stimulating theme.

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Despite its brevity and apparent simplicity, Hughes’ poem demands particular attention to some details. Bear in mind… Its opening allusion, which recalls Walt Whitman’s idea of  Americanness. Its rhythmic proposal.  Its domestic imagery.  Its use of pronouns, which organize experience in terms of race.  Its racial demand. 

2.2. REVISITING Hughes’ «I, Too» «I, Too» was published in The New Negro in 1925. Hughes had written it in a rather disheartened state of mind when, bankrupt in Europe and trying to return home, he was refused a job on a ship because of his color. The poem complied with the aesthetic program Hughes declared in his 1926 essay «The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,» in which he defended the unused folk material that the artist had at his disposal for creativity. As with other poems by Hughes, superficial simplicity hides complexity. In the essay cited above, Hughes declared: One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, «I want to be a poet —not a Negro poet,» meaning, I believe, «I want to write like a white poet»; meaning subconsciously, «I would like to be a white poet»; meaning behind that, «I would like to be white.» And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. […] But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering «I want to be white,» hidden in the aspirations of his people, to «Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro— and beautiful»?

«I, Too,» derived from this spirit of ethnic pride and poetic consciousness. The poem first strikes its readers with its immediate reference to self. The personal pronoun «I» in the title could be read as a sign of leadership, the voice of a spokesman for a collectivity, but it could also refer to a single individual who strives for particular recognition against others. 172

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 «I, Too» is a poem about racial difference and otherness. How do pronouns intervene in this dialectics?

The first line of the poem is an allusion to one of the sections in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, where the poet stated «I hear America singing.» Whitman’s lines, renowned for the literary bridge they laid between the one and the many, encompassed the voices of the workers who celebrated their participation in the nation’s healthy progress. The authors of the Harlem Renaissance claimed their righteous belonging to a nation whose democratic ideals had severely ignored them. For this reason, Hughes demanded a place among those American voices, as well as recognition of his own singing voice in its democratic and literary sense. Nevertheless, Hughes’ allusive line acknowledged his literary debt to Whitman, regarding, in particular, his sense of self-discovery, his self-emancipation, and his empathy with the ordinary people. Like other writers of the Negro Renaissance, he was also representing the black race for the white people, constructing an image of blackness that could challenge and reverse the «Old Negro» conception that the white population held. In tune with the Whitmanesque spirit that inspires the poem, the speaker presents himself as the spokesman of a collectivity and the representative of his culture. At the same time, it draws a distinct and direct picture of racial segregation, and of the position of African Americans in Hughes’ contemporary landscape.

 Examine

the adverb «too» in the poem. In your own words, what is implied in this adverb? How does Hughes’ slight addition to Whitman’s phrase convey a new meaning? How do we read Whitman differently thanks to this mere adverb?

Against traditional prosodic patterns, Hughes disregards regularity of meter and adapts the lines of the poem to its quasi-narrative mode. Following the typical syncopation of black rhythms, in «I, Too» readers may observe that some of the lines are composed of only one word that

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gains full significance and rhythmical importance due to its isolation. «Tomorrow,» «Then» and «Besides» are adverbs, that is to say, in terms of grammar they are modifiers of parts of discourse with a higher degree of semantic power. Hughes, however, emphasizes these words, just like jazz musicians usually emphasize weak beats, and syncopates —abbreviates— the poem’s rhythm.

 Besides

syncopation, jazz and blues compositions make ample use of repetition. What repetitive structures can you trace in the poem? Pay attention to the way they play a part in rhythm.

The diction of the poem suggests common experience and domestic affairs: «kitchen,» «table,» «brother.» It reveals Hughes’s preference for colloquial language, which runs parallel to the fluent, almost narrative, cadence of the composition. He even uses markers of direct speech in «‘Eat in the kitchen.’» The poet uses domestic imagery to communicate the idea of a whole nation. The «kitchen,» usually the most familiar and intimate place in the house, stands for the reserved room where the speaker is kept to avoid public exposure, in a sort of emulation of the Cinderella myth of dispossession and alienation. Segregation —i.e. unequal treatment rooted in physical or ideological difference— is made evident through the binary oppositions: private/public, I/they, and also the adjective «darker» —which implies another, and less dark, component in the comparison.

 As you can see, Hughes constructs an idea of blackness based on difference —that same difference employed for discrimination against African Americans. Can you define this «New Negro» identity conveyed by the poem?

The speaker represents himself as beautiful, hence contesting the widespread racist notion among Caucasians that non-whites are physically disagreeable. Moreover, the speaker builds upon the prevalent image of 174

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«happy darkies,» and transforms it into a positive and also menacing aspect of blackness: But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. (NAAL: 2028)

These three lines contain a notion of development that the next stanza reinforces. Provided the temporal shift, Hughes’ celebration of the nation —unlike Whitman’s— is postponed to a future time when non-whites’ participation in history will be acknowledged. Nevertheless, the circular structure of the poem, ending almost in the same line as the one that opened it, reiterates the speaker’s demand in the present tense.

 The

demand contained in Hughes’ poem is accompanied by a suitable tone. How does the speaker address his readers? What attitude can you perceive in his words? Can you define it?

3. TEXT ANALYSIS: ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S PROUD FICTION 3.1. APPROACHING Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits» Although not actual inhabitants of the Harlem sector, several authors have become associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Such is the case of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). She was born in Alabama but her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, a town that would become the inspiration and setting for a good number of her works. She managed to go to Barnard University with the financial support of a grant, where she read Anthropology. She was the only black student there. Her anthropological curiosity led her to survey African-American folklore and speech, and she even traveled to Bahamas to research on the connection between African American and African Caribbean folklore. Scholars have included Hurston mostly in the New Negro movement, but she also participated in what has been called the Southern Renaissance.

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Like Faulkner, she was engaged in revising the myth of the Old South, particularly those aspects concerning the benevolence and paternalism of the whites towards the blacks. Hurston defended the idea that African Americans were to reject the deterministic connotations of their race, and show themselves as complete and undiminished human beings. Despite the fact that she has also received the label «regionalist writer,» her fine observation of local custom and speech is shared by many short-story writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Except for Poe’s stories, which usually take place in a nebulous region «out of Space» and «out of Time,» the American short story has tended to be firmly rooted in specific place —whether place, setting, and background are essentially a stage where the action of a story occurred, or imply the preoccupation with locale of so many of the mid-nineteenth-century regionalists, or involve the more contemporary concept of place as a moralsociological-cultural reality. (Peden: 156)

This rootedness in time and place of Hurston’s fiction reveals, more than a regionalist interest in the local, an anthropologist concern for cultural practice. Furthermore, her anthropological fieldwork regarding African American language greatly shaped the style she used in her works. With reference to specific ethnic aspects, she did not show the racial demands perceived in Hughes’ texts, or the anger of other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for which she was much reproved by her African American contemporaries. Instead, Hurston chose to celebrate survival despite oppression. Eatonville was an all-black town where Hurston did not sense racial difference. It was upon moving to Jacksonville at thirteen when she felt what it was to be seen and understood as not equal to the eyes of the white people. However, she did not regret her difference among the whites: in her very emphatic essay «How it Feels to Be Colored Me» she maintained that she was not «tragically colored» (NAAL: 1711), nor predetermined to wretched existence. Hers was an inclusive, optimistic apprehension of life: I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. [...] I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong. (NAAL: 1712)

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Critics engaged in the analysis of Hurston’s work disagree on its political dimension. Some critics defend Hurston’s «universality,» implying that her stories transcend the black community and its asymmetries regarding social and economical conditions. Others point at her incisive exposition of ethnic conflicts through colliding worlds. Finally, there are specialists who suggest that her political agenda was alert on sexual politics «concerning the exploitation, intimidation, and oppression inherent in so many relationships» (Headon in Glassman and Seidel: 32), which evokes all sorts of oppression. Indeed, «The Gilded Six-Bits» focuses the readers’ attention on the two black protagonists, but Hurston included in it some elements of the white, racist community that should not be overlooked. If women writers of the Modernist period were severely disregarded by their male contemporaries, Hurston’s case was outstandingly painful. When she died in 1960 her books were out of print and her name had been forgotten. Feminist revisions of the history of American letters rescued her work from oblivion and made it gain a relevant position in the heritage of African American literature. Before you start reading Hurston’s story bear in mind… Its use of English, in particular African American vernacular speech.  Its realistic, pastoral and picaresque elements.  Its intertwined class, race and gender issues.  Its characterizing strategies. 

3.2. REVISITING «The Gilded Six-Bits»: «The Gilded Six-Bits» was published in Story in 1933. In it, Hurston evidenced her resistance to the conflicting ethnic attitudes of her day. As Elaine Showalter explains, she survived both the pressure of the academic community to distance herself from black culture and the pressure of the white literary community to romanticize it. […] Hurston’s determination to write from inside black culture and to withstand fashionable issues of racial tension or oppression […] antagonized her male contemporaries. (1991: 123)

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In view of the opposition she raised among many of her male contemporaries, Hurston had to develop her artistic voice outside the main African American cultural circles of the moment. The story has the air of a tale that has been cherished and retold for generations. It combines realistic and romantic elements: on the one hand, it outlines some of the life conditions of African Americans in the southern states; on the other, it presents the two protagonists as excessively childish and playful in a quasi fairy-tale atmosphere. The detachment from the crudest aspects of the rural south romanticizes the couple’s relationship and the portrayal of their initial happiness. The story’s ending has a similar make-believe flavor. This story, like others by the same author, asserts «a promising world outside the dominant culture, a world created by human beings as a stay against confusion, as a potent denial of sacrifice and suffering» (Baum in Glassman and Seidel: 107). The opening lines in «The Gilded Six-Bits» could be read as an example of realistic accuracy in its attempt to situate the setting of the story. However, an ironic reading of this beginning is possible: It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G and G Fertilizer works for its support. But there was something happy about the place. The front yard was parted in the middle by a sidewalk from gate to door-step, a sidewalk edged on either side by quart bottles driven neck down into the ground on a slant. A mess of homey flowers planted without a plan but blooming cheerily from their helter-skelter places. The fence and house were whitewashed. The porch and steps scrubbed white. (NAAL: 1713)

 Consider how the negro-ness of the story’s background is insisted upon, followed by a «But.» What is the idea implicit in the contrast? Why should happiness be unexpected in the setting described in the first sentence of the story?

The lively tone of this passage contrasts with the gloomy actuality of a fertilizing plant, which immediately suggests an ugly and smelly dominating 178

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presence. This abrupt shift in tone introduces us to the cheerful existence of the main characters, who live without ostentation («a sidewalk edged on either side by quart bottles driven neck down into the ground») amidst fruitful carelessness («A mess of homey flowers planted without a plan but blooming cheerily»). The yard, therefore, functions as a framing setting that excludes other forms of understanding experience, and that contains a selfsustained system that requires preservation. The picaresque and the pastoral intertwine in this story. The term «pastoral» refers to the traditional tale of collision of two different worlds: one of pastoral or rural simplicity and innocence, and a more sophisticated and corrupted one. The «picaresque» as present in the story reminds of the folktale tradition of the intrusion of an amoral character that seeks a sexual encounter with a woman and deceives her as well as her husband. In this line, the initial lines of the story present a kind of Arcadian scene, a modest but harmonious black Eden surrounded by a world of abundance. This initial fairytale-like portrait foreshadows some form of disaster, which soon arrives. The plenitude and sophistication of modern life tempts the young girl with its counterfeit promise of the American Dream. Illusion and reality are therefore pivotal elements in the story, which Missie May will have to learn to differentiate. Characterization is carried out after the traits discussed above. The two main characters are depicted to represent a tradition, a culture of habits and repetition of linguistic and behavioral acts, while Otis D. Slemmons is portrayed as cut off from past and tradition. His unrootedness, thus, becomes his most suspicious feature, in sharp opposition to the protagonists’ firm sense of belonging. The foreigner is depicted as the character in a picaresque tale, almost caricatured, with some of his physical features overmarked: «He’s got a five-dollar gold piece for a stick-pin and he got a ten-dollar gold piece on his watch chain and his mouf is jes’ crammed full of gold teethes. Sho wisht it wuz mine. And whut make it so cool, he got money ‘cumulated. And womens give it all to him.» (NAAL: 1715)

The lines above show that Joe’s character describes Slemmons in terms of money and sex, settling the association for the readers to situate him as Joe’s antagonist and his participation in the story.

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Missie May is portrayed as young and sensuous, the perfect epitome of innocent lush: Missie May was bathing herself in the galvanized washtub in the bedroom. Her dark-brown skin glistened under the soapsuds that glittered down from her wash rag. Her stiff young breasts thrust forward aggressively like broad-based cones with the tips lacquered in black. (NAAL: 1713)

 Observe the glistening aspect of the girl’s body. How does it connect to the story’s title?

Missie May’s husband, on the other hand, is barely described at all. Her physicality contrasts with Joe’s scarce physical presence, for her participation in this story depends on the value that Slemmons finds in her body. Joe is described as tall and fit, again a mechanism of antithesis to differentiate him from Slemmons, who is «many-gutted» (1715) —which in Joe’s view is a sign of opulence. Hurston’s use of stereotypes may have been either a strategy of resistance —by laying bare and deconstructing the whites’ opinion of blacks— or a commercial arrangement, forced upon her by a white benefactor, that she managed to shape to her needs. In any case, the author made use of the stereotypes that whites had of African Americans, as Hughes did in «I, Too.» Her representation of black characters in terms of child-like simplicity and sensuality ratified, but mocked at the same time, the expectations held by whites, for the story suggests that the couple’s happy microcosm can resist the incursions of unwanted ideologies. Hence the irony implicit in the clerk’s remark: «’Whisht I could be like these darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries them» (NAAL: 1721). As mentioned above, class, race, and gender issues intervene in this story and take our appreciation of it beyond the mere folkloric account. Missie May has been presented first as a glistening body and then as a housewife picking up money. The girl’s first encounter with Slemmons is meaningful enough: «Ah went down to de sto’ tuh git a box of lye and Ah seen ‘im standin’ on de corner talkin’ to some of the mens, and Ah come on back and went to

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scrubbin’ de floor, and he passed and tipped his hat whilst Ah was scourin’ de steps. Ah thought Ah never seen him befo’.» (NAAL: 1715)

 What contrast is established between the two characters in the excerpt above? Look at what they are doing and also at their physical posture.

Women’s sphere, role, and expectations are made clear through the female characters in the story. Missie May strikes us as a believer in the system that divides life into two sex-based territories: «‘Don’t you mess wid mah business, man. [...] Ah’m a real wife, not no dress and breath. Ah might not look lak one, but if you burn me, you won’t git a thing but wife ashes’» (NAAL: 1714). Both women in the story are assigned roles as wives or sexual objects, with a particular emphasis on possession. Unrelated to economic circles, they are forced to participate in them as consumers, spectators, or products. Moreover, women are depicted as perpetuators of this sexist cosmos, where marriage legitimizes a certain form of possession as long as it entails procreation. Notice Joe’s mother participation in the story: «You ain’t ast ‘bout de baby, Joe. You oughter be mighty proud cause he sho is the spittin’ image of yuh, son. Dat’s yourn all right, if you never git another one, dat un is yourn. And you know Ah’m mighty proud too, son, cause Ah never thought well of you marryin’ Missie May cause her ma used tah fan her foot round right smart and Ah bee mighty skeered dat Missie May was gointer git misput on her road. (NAAL: 1720)

 Examine how Missie May’s «value» is restituted in the story. How does she regain her place in the system?

The story’s main symbols are those related to the theme of reality and illusion that articulates «The Gilded Six-Bits»: the coin, the candy kisses and the fertilizer plant. The gilded coin is like the serpent in the Garden, since the fake coin and the other signs of richness displayed by Slemmons

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cause Missie’s fall. The candy kisses stand in opposition to the previous symbol, for candy is cheap, familiar, and authentic while Slemmons’ promises are deceptive. However, the candy kisses can be also seen as the prize the girl obtains for her maintenance of domestic habits, in accordance with patriarchal structures.

 What does the fertilizer plant stand for in the story? Notice how it can have both positive and negative connotations, since its main function is to feed the earth and make it productive.

Like Langston Hughes, Hurston uses the style of folkloric transmission and includes Negro songs, tales, and sayings in her stories. In her essay «Characteristics of Negro Expression» she defended the great contributions of her race to the English language, among which she highlighted metaphor and simile. According to her research, the Negro’s ubiquitous mimicry and embellishment respond to an urge to enact the spoken, that is to say, to illustrate language with language to supplement the bareness of English. «The Gilded Six-Bits» offers some examples of this feature, like «Like Samson awakening after his haircut» (NAAL: 1717) or «The sun swept around the horizon, trailing its robes of weeks and days» (NAAL: 1719). But Hurston’s African American vernacular is, mostly, a strategy of ethnic empowerment: black speech is brought to the center of discourse.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and social moment in the history of the United States in which racial confidence and pride was divulged and promoted by intellectuals and artists alike. It largely resorted to primitivism to encourage African American forms of expression, and pursued the empowerment of black identity. Thus, writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston employed the black vernacular, explored black rhythms and folklore, and supplied a voice for a plurality of African Americans. However, Hughes’ tone and subject-matter differed from those observed in Hurston, for his racial awareness showed an evident political agenda that Hurston’s works seemed to lack.

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4. TEXT ANALYSIS: EDITH WHARTON’S REVISIONIST FICTION 4.1. APPROACHING Wharton’s «Roman Fever» Born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862, Edith Wharton was the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize and to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale. She was a very prolific writer indeed: nineteen novels, eleven volumes of short stories, nonfiction studies (her first published work dealt with interior design), poetry, criticism, and reviews. She started her literary career as a short fiction writer with the publication of The Greater Inclination in 1899, a collection already revealing Wharton’s interest in unhappy marriages in which the female members of the couple found no options. Her first published work also displayed her talent for the development of narrative situations, and her fine usage of psychological Realism. She therefore participated in the realist aesthetic that characterized the literature of the nineteenth century, which sought the accurate representation of reality; however, while social realists attempted to convey the social and economic inequalities of an industrialized country, the psychological realists explored the motives and aspirations of characters beneath the social surface. Whatever realistic approach to existence she claimed, however, she shared with her friend Henry James a protomodernist curiosity about the nature of reality and the artist’s ability to accurately represent it. Both James and Wharton wrote ghost stories in which they could examine the unreliability of the senses, the importance of the narrative perspective employed, and the self’s confinement in a rational comprehension of the world. Like Henry James, Wharton dedicated her artistic energies to the depiction and examination of upper class Americans, and like James before her she incorporated her knowledge of foreign customs and values into her work, despite her persistent interest in the Americans themselves. She was a tireless traveler, and she even moved to France on a permanent basis around 1910. Her realist work was thus rather detached from the social inequalities and exploitative practices of her day. Notwithstanding her concentration on the privileged, she called attention to other forms of inequality and injustice, namely the strict social codes that confined the richness of life to the morally adequate and the socially accepted. As Evelyn E. Fracasso argues, «the theme of imprisonment» is ubiquitous in Wharton’s fiction (8). The image of the prison itself, however, adopts assorted forms

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and may affect both women and men. In The Age of Innocence, a novel on imprisoned selves with doubtful alternatives, she articulated the idea as expressed by the masculine protagonist: In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. (36)

Wharton’s psychological Realism, then, focused on penetrating those codified «representations» and liberating her characters’ repressed thoughts and emotions. In particular, she analyzed women’s feelings of incarceration and hopelessness, her own life informing and inspiring the portraits of a good number of her female characters. Following the social imperatives and conveniences of her time she married a wealthy man, Edward Wharton. According to her letters and private documents she soon felt stifled in her role as wife, and imprisoned in a marriage that had proved sexually and emotionally unsatisfying. She divorced her husband in 1913, a time in which divorce was a legal option but a socially unacceptable practice. After her divorce she devoted her life to writing, traveling and cultivating a significant circle of friends which included reputed artists and thinkers of her generation. Wharton usually analyzed the meaning of such difficult words as «freedom,» «choice,» «duty» and «responsibility,» especially in relation to women’s lives. Deeply embedded in her plots was the view of marriage as a source of suffocation and unhappiness. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out the ambiguous feminist flavor of her works, an ambivalence regarding what constituted womanhood and what it should become. Wharton’s fiction permanently denounced women’s difficult place in a patriarchal society, but —in tune with her rejection of divorce or any other form of challenge to conventions— failed to propose viable alternatives. However, sharply aware of the smothering limits of the system as she was, she did seek to circumvent its laws in a number of devious ways: in life, through the energetic decoration of (her own) houses; in art, through the impassioned «making up» [...] of uncannily vengeful ghost stories; through intermittent, hesitant, flickering, but persistent visions of female triumph in the «secret garden» of heterosexual eroticism; and through hints at an untellable tale of female power and guarded allusions to the alien language in which it would have to be told. (Gilbert and Gubar: 132)

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Love and/or money as essential components in plots by or about women found a compromise in nineteenth-century fictions with the portrayal of financial security and passion in the same masculine figure. On the same path as those texts around the turn of the century that laid bare the purely economic dynamics of nineteenth-century marriage, Wharton’s plots and denouements had money as its main drive. Guy Reynolds proposes that the writer also incorporated the very critical ingredient of male crisis, which adopted several forms of weakness or inadequacy in Wharton’s works and welcomed a «re-orientation of stereotyped gender characteristics» (56). Due to her depiction of twentieth-century sexual politics she has been labeled a transitional writer and a herald of modernity. Wharton’s story is deceptively simple, so we recommend you bear in mind…

 Psychological Realism as the means to disclose the characters’ private response to experience.

 The uses of focalization.  The challenge to nineteenth-century constituents of women’s fiction, namely female stereotypes and domestic settings and plots.

 Man/woman relationships at various levels: artistic, linguistic, social, sexual.

 Setting —time and space alike— as a crucial component of the story. 4.2. REVISITING «Roman Fever» This story was first published in Liberty in 1934, that is to say, three years before Wharton’s death. It may strike readers as a simple tale of manners, but some of its formal and ideological aspects participate in the Modernist revisionist spirit. Just as the New Negro writers interrogated accepted notions of black identity, Wharton and other New Woman authors questioned and challenged conventional images of how women should write or be written. Accordingly, «Roman Fever» offers new readings of femininity and female relationships. It also suggests the urgency of revising role expectations in a moment when women started to establish different relationships with the world and with their own bodies.

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«Roman Fever» is, as Susan Elizabeth Sweeny indicates, an autobiographical and ironic title. Wharton herself visited Rome in the early 1930s, a city she had first known when she travelled through Italy with her husband at the beginning of the century, and where she knew malaria firsthand. Henry James’ Daisy Miller was a probable influence on Wharton’s story as well, James being one of Wharton’s closest friends. It belongs to an in-between territory in women’s literature that Showalter defines as a «historical transition [...] from the homosocial women’s culture and literature of the nineteenth century to the heterosexual fiction of modernism» (1991: 86). In nineteenth-century fictions, female bonds such as women’s friendship or mother-daughter bonds were portrayed as safe modes of affective relationship for women. «Roman Fever» is a text that abandons the ideal locus of feminine communities that protected women’s need of affections, and switches to a modern sphere where the house is discarded as setting. In addition to the shift mentioned above, «Roman Fever» rests upon, but also subverts, several commonly-shared aspects of what has been called women’s literature of the nineteenth century: the marriage plot, archetypal female characters, domestic ideology, and female bonds. The literature written by women has often resorted to imagery of imprisonment, as well as to representations of the divided consciousness that hinders the perception of female subjectivity as a unified self. The concept of the divided self has been replaced by multifaceted notions of identity emerging in the twentieth century to be analyzed later in this volume, but those authors writing at the turn of the century found it fairly adequate to express gender-based distinctions. In other words, female characters of the period are frequently seen in conflict between their public identity and their secret, private selves. Such split entails a duplicitous role-playing that comprises a survival strategy in a sexist society. Wharton’s women, then, are perceived as prisoners of a socioeconomic system, accepted notions of womanhood, and their own sex. The open-air introductory scenario of «Roman Fever» already suggests that some form of uncovering is to follow. Indeed, the two protagonists of the story seem to have lived the lives they were allotted on account of their sex, but it is time for self-exposure. Also, Rome offers different readings for the protagonists and the readers alike. As Mrs. Slade says at one point, «‘I was just thinking […] what different things Rome stands for to each 186

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generation of travelers’» (NAAL: 847). Certainly, the city’s connotative weight is powerful but variable, as the story will prove.

 If

you look closely into «Roman Fever» you will find several images of permanence versus renewal. List them and consider their role in the story, bearing in mind that both concepts may have positive and negative connotations.

Wharton’s fine use of narrative voice is of paramount importance in a story like this, where false impressions and mistaken beliefs play crucial roles. Like most contemporaries of hers, she made use of focalization in order to highlight angles of experience instead of providing a comprehensive account. If Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio stressed the tragic difficulty of communicating with other human beings, Wharton made a similar point: [F]or a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to attach to the other’s name. (NAAL: 845)

 What kind of narrator can we find in the story? How much information does (s)he handle? How much does (s)he provide directly to the reader? Is comment part of the narrative act?

«Would she never cure herself of envying her?» (848) is one example, out of several in the story, of free indirect thought by which the narrator’s voice fuses with one of the character’s mental process. Psychological revelation, dialogue and action replace physical characterization. This suggests that the characters’ external appearance is irrelevant to the development of events, and that the author may seek to lead the reader’s attention to the rising tension between characters, from which the essential information is obtained. According to Alice Petry, «Wharton is predisposing the reader to perceive the ladies as stereotypical matrons» (163).

 How

does Wharton undermine such initial view of the two women as «stereotypical matrons»? Pay attention to color, setting, tone, dialogue…

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The story shows an emphasis on veiled violence. The two women —«intimate» since childhood— face the Colosseum as they talk, this being a former site of physical strength and hostility for survival. Mussolini’s Rome in 1934 was itself a scenario of repression and violent outbursts that cannot be ignored. Also, knitting stands for aggression and resistance at once, far from the «general symbol of complacent middle-age» (Petry: 164) the women’s daughters think. Both women «had lived opposite each other— actually as well as figuratively—for years» (NAAL: 845). Rivalry shapes their relationship, so that Mrs. Ansley’s final remark in the story «rounds off the series of blows initiated by her ancient rival» (Bowley: 38).

 The

ending words of the story have Mrs. Ansley «move ahead of Mrs. Slade» (NAAL: 852). In what way is she really ahead? How many readings does the line have?

Gender issues intervene in the competitive relationship of the two protagonists. As women in a patriarchal system, they have been forced to contend for the best possible husband, a good provider of welfare and position. They repeat this scheme of things themselves when daughters are compared and two Italian aviators enter the scene. This doppelganger (double or counterpart) mechanism is visually represented through the women’s opposite households and their present position at the terrace: facing each other, as if looking to their image on the mirror. It is after the disappearance of their husbands that past events and passions can emerge: once their roles as wives have been fulfilled, it is their turn to take masks off. Opponents as they are they share a similar life course and they see each other reflected on the other as their American family houses did.

 Consider the role of men in «Roman Fever.» What is their participation in the story? How visible are they? How much does the narrative voice concentrate on them? In consequence, how do we read women characters?

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of many women who barely shared time and interests with their husbands and spent the most time with friends and family. «Roman Fever» both represents and subverts the female complicity observed in nineteenthcentury texts where, forced by the social organization of space and relationships, women characters constituted strong female communities. History repeating itself casts a deterministic shadow on the lives of women in this story. Three generations of women take part in Wharton’s text, and all are fated to the same pattern. They are also likely to face similar dangers, that is, misdemeanors that may contravene established rules and roles for women. The thematic structure of transgression and later confession is repeated too. Great-aunt Harriet’s story is revisited and serves a different purpose from its initial one: warning young girls against indiscretions. Sweeney proposes that «Roman fever» «functions as a metaphor for both the seductive nature of illicit knowledge and the punishment for experiencing it» (315).

 Examine the title of the story. What does it symbolize? How does time change or keep its (the title’s) meaning, generation after generation? Do not overlook all its connotations: physical ailment, obsession, sex…

«Roman Fever» hints as well at the sexual and social politics that govern communication among and between the sexes. Incommunication, which in previous Units has been explored as a sign of the day, is presented here in terms of gender and power relations. At this point it is worth remembering that many of the Modernist formal innovations attempted to reflect the linguistic inefficiencies at reproducing either public or private experience. «Roman Fever» plays with foreshadowing elements that draw attention to both hidden and revealed messages —in the stories and in their tellings, of which the most powerful symbol is the letter. The contorted story of the letter —fake origin, missed target, unexpected reply— embodies the misread or unread story of the women characters, forced to amend imposed silences on their lives. As if to show the complexity of overcoming social silence, the ending of the story is appropriately ambiguous.

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The «New Woman» was a term aimed at defining the variety of demands, interests, and values developed by women citizens from the late nineteenth century. A general dismissal of traditional female roles was at the core of the first wave of women’s liberation movement. The American literature of the early years of the twentieth century responded to the social and political social changes, and writers such as Edith Wharton mirrored the effects of modernity in the lives and minds of their women characters. She particularly unveiled the role of economic matters in marriage and relationships, and therefore focused on the ideological as well as the practical aspects of women’s independence.

5. EXERCISES 5.1. Test yourself On Langston Hughes a) How does primitivism inform Langston Hughes’ poetry? b) How would you define the tone employed by the speaker in «I, Too»? c) In what way does the allusive line «I, Too Sing America» imply a racial demand? d) How is the poem indebted to Whitmanesque verse? e) What kind of imagery does the poet use in order to convey the main idea in the poem? f) How does syncopation work in Hughes’ poem? g) How is orature traceable in this poem? h) What is the function of the pronouns «I» and «They»? How do they interrelate? i) In what way does Hughes’s poem depart from the postulates of such black leaders as Du Bois and Locke? 190

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On Zora Neale Hurston a) How do the pastoral and the picaresque combine in Hurston’s story? b) How does the irony in the opening lines shape our reading of the story? c) What is the importance of the setting in the creation of atmosphere? d) How do class and gender issues intertwine in Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits»? e) How are women collectively portrayed in the story? f) How are man-woman relationships approached as commercial transactions? g) What are the main symbols in Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits»? h) What traces of Negro expression did Hurston incorporate into «The Gilded Six-Bits»? i) How does this story differ in tone from Hughes’ poem?

On Edith Wharton a) Why is «Roman Fever» a transition story between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, regarding its representation of women’s lives? b) How would you define the narrative voice in the tale? c) What methods of characterization are used in the story? d) Why is setting important in Wharton’s story? e) How is the «New Woman» figure embodied in «Roman Fever»? How does the representation of three generations of women contribute to our understanding of new conditions for them? f) What particular, contesting angle about women’s relationships is Wharton offering here? g) How is the idea of communication used in the story?

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h) What instances of violence —physical or otherwise— can we find in the story? i) Why can «Roman Fever» be analyzed as a piece of psychological Realism?

Summary questions a) How do race and gender participate in the main objectives of literary Modernism? b) To what extent were economic conditions determinant in the emergence of the New Negro and the New Woman? c) How do the writers of the Harlem Renaissance move from the oral to the textual? d) Can you find a difference of tone and mood between white writers and black writers of this period? e) Find imagery of self-assertion and empowerment in the three texts analyzed in this Unit. f) What technical or thematic innovations do these texts present? g) How do the writers surveyed in this Unit make use of accepted notions of racial and sexual identity (myths and stereotypes)? How do they resist them?

5.2. Explore a) From your knowledge of American history and literature, how does the «New Negro» differ from the «Old Negro» as represented in the texts written in the nineteenth century? b) According to your own reading of the story, to what extent is Hurston’s «The Gilded Six-Bits» political? What kind of political message, if any, does the text convey? 192

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c) In your opinion, what kind of audience —what race, class, or gender— were Hughes and Hurston pursuing with their work? d) Hurston, like William Faulkner, gave dialect a relevant role in her prose to outline the characters’ social and economic condition. How are they similar in their use of dialect? How are they different? e) Elaine Showalter defends that unhappy endings characterize the transitional fiction of the woman writers at the turn of the century, as they «struggled with the problem of going beyond the allowable limits and breaking through the available histories and stories for women» (87). Discuss in relation to «Roman Fever.» f) To what extent is the double consciousness announced by W. E. B. Du Bois applicable to Edith Wharton’s female characters in «Roman Fever»?

5.3. Key terms — — — —

Doppelganger Double consciousness New Negro New Woman

— — — —

Orature Primitivism Psychological Realism Syncopation

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY 6.1. Recommended readings — W. E. B. Du Bois’ «Of Our Spiritual Strivings.» In The Souls of Black Folk. NAAL: 895-901. — Langston Hughes’ «The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.» University of Illinois site of Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ poets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm — Alain Locke’s «Enter the New Negro.» At the University of Virginia’s site for the Harlem Number of the Survey Graphic (March 1925): http://national humanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/migrations/text8/lockenewnegro.pdf

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6.2. Critical works cited MOLEFI KETE ASANTE. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple U. P., 1987. HOUSTON A. BAKER, Jr. «Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.» American Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1, Special Issue: Modernist Culture in America (Spring, 1987), 84-97. ROSALIE MURPHY BAUM. «The Shape of Hurston’s Fiction.» In Steve GLASSMAN and Kathryn Lee SEIDEL (eds.), Zora in Florida. Orlando: U. of Central Florida Press, 1991. NINA BAYM. «Melodramas of Beset Womanhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.» American Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), 123-139. C. BARRY CHABOT. «Harlem and the Limits of a Time and Place.» Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism. Tuscaloosa and London: U. of Alabama Press, 1997. EVELYN E. FRACASSO. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales. Westport, Conn,: Greenwood Press, 1994. SANDRA M. GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: Volume I: The War of the Words. New Haven: 1987. DAVID HEADON. «Beginning to See Things Really: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston.» In Steve GLASSMAN and Kathryn Lee SEIDEL (eds.), Zora in Florida. Orlando: U. of Central Florida Press, 1991. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930. WALTER PEDEN. The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1945-1970. Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1975. ALICE HALL PETRY. «A Twist of Crimson Silk: Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever.’» Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1987), 163-166. BONNIE KIME SCOTT, ed. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Indiana U.P.: 1990. ELAINE SHOWALTER. A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1977.

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— Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1991. PATRICIA STUBBS. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel: 1880-1920. London; Methuen, 1981. SUSAN ELIZABETH SWEENEY. «Edith Wharton’s Case of Roman Fever.» Wretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe. New York: P. Lang, 1993. 313–31.

6.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): She was one of the defendants of women’s creative and social independence at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her story «The Yellow Wallpaper» has become one of the icons of the literature of the New Woman, and its protagonist —a recent mother confined to her bedroom— still represents the hardships of the female artist facing male authority and misunderstanding. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): Her Bildungsroman Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) tells the emotional development of a female protagonist, forced to transform loneliness into independence. Hurston’s use of folklore and vernacular speech evidences her preference for African American traditions, but the female sexuality she debates presents the novel in a thoroughly updated air. Edith Wharton (1862-1937): Her work The Age of Innocence (1920) narrated a love triangle in the New York society of the 1870’s. It also explored the hypocritical order of social composure and withheld emotions of its moment. As in most of her works, it explored the network of the social and economic system that intervenes in love relationships.

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Read the following excerpts and write a commentary on them, using the questions that follow as a guide. Remember to: — Focus on the questions themselves. — Use critical terms accurately. — Organize and develop your ideas. — Provide suitable examples from the texts to support your arguments. — Write in legible, coherent, proficient English. Also, you should try to avoid: — Pouring out all you remember of a certain topic, unrelatedly. — Describing authors’ lives and works. — Exposing ideas without textual references. — Incoherent, fragmented pieces of information. — Sloppy, illegible language.

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1) We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

1.1 Briefly describe the excerpt’s rhythmic strategies. 1.2. What is the function of the allusion contained in the excerpt? 1.3. What kind of imagery does the poet use? 1.4. How does the excerpt satisfy the claim «Make it new»? 1.5. Relate the excerpt to the notion of impersonal poem.

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2) Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down to the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odour of jonquils and the frothy odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees. And inside, as we wandered through Marie Antoinette musicrooms and Restoration Salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College Library’ I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

2.1. What is the importance of the narrator in this excerpt? 2.2. What does the «owl-eyed man» represent? 2.3. How is Sehnsucht revealed in the passage? 2.4. Analyze the phrase «enchanting murmurs» as characterizing strategy in the complete text. 2.5. Relate the excerpt to the «age of miracles.»

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3) But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

3.1 Analyze the excerpt’s rhyming and rhythmic features. 3.2. Discuss the excerpt’s different kinds of imagery. 3.3. How does the excerpt reveal the American idiom as poetic language? 3.4. Comment on the poem’s persona. 3.5. How does the poem’s sense of nature resemble or contrast with that of the Romantic poets’?

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4) «You were fixing to tell them. You would have told them.» He didn’t answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger: «You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning, would? Don’t you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh?» Later, twenty years later he was to tell himself, «If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.» But now he said nothing.

4.1. Comment on the function of focalization in the excerpt. 4.2. In light of the excerpt’s allusion to kinship and heredity, how do these outline the complete text? 4.3. Relate the excerpt’s prolepsis to the text as Bildungsroman. 4.4. How does the excerpt contribute to the father’s characterization? 4.5. How do class and race interrelate in the complete text?

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5) It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G and G Fertilizer works for its support. But there was something happy about the place. The front yard was parted in the middle by a sidewalk from gate to door-step, a sidewalk edged on either side by quart bottles driven neck down into the ground on a slant. A mess of homey flowers planted without a plan but blooming cheerily from their helter-skelter places. The fence and house were whitewashed. The porch and steps scrubbed white. The front door stood open to the sunshine so that the floor of the front room could finish drying after its weekly scouring. It was Saturday. Everything clean from the front gate to the privy house. Yard raked so that the strokes of the rake would make a pattern. Fresh newspaper cut in fancy edge on the kitchen shelves.

5.1. Explain the function of «But» (line 4) in the excerpt. 5.2. What is the importance of the imagery related to domesticity as seen in the excerpt? 5.3. Comment on the symbols of the excerpt. 5.4. Discuss the use of the vernacular in the complete text. 5.5. Relate the complete text to the sentence «I belong to no race nor time.»

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UNIT SIX «SICK WITH APPEARANCES»: MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA

Program 1. PRESENTATION: Between Realism and Expressionism 1.1. The extraordinary in the ordinary 1.2. Review of dramatic elements 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Arthur Miller’s drama of the common man 2.1. APPROACHING Miller’s Death of a Salesman 2.2. REVISITING Death of a Salesman 3. EXERCISES Learning objectives — To understand the importance of the Modernist spirit in the rise of modern American drama. — To review and properly operate with dramatic terminology. — To analyze Death of a Salesman as example of the American social drama of the twentieth century.

1. PRESENTATION: BETWEEN REALISM AND EXPRESSIONISM The syllabi of American Literature courses usually pay scarce attention to drama, unless the course is dedicated to the twentieth century. Critics agree on the year 1916 as the moment when American drama reaches maturity and artistic height. The American experience had not found a suitable way of expression in the dramatic form prior to this moment. Several causes can be pinpointed for this late emergence. To begin with, the Puritan antagonism to leisure and its fear of the misinterpretation of reality resulted in the American colonies waiting till the eighteenth century for stage performances; meanwhile, seventeenth-century England enjoyed a most fertile and healthy dramatic literature. Also, attention must be drawn to the prevalence of European works: British patterns and themes dominated

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American theaters, even when the authors were American. In addition, Americans grew accustomed to dramatic plays as forms of entertainment, while theater producers sought commercial success in their productions. This view of drama as leisure activity nurtured genres such as the vaudeville and the musical comedy —which easily found a place with the advent of films. Lastly, in terms of profits cinema and television writing have provided playwrights with a more dependable medium, not to mention the reward of widespread recognition. The Modernist revolution of forms and ideas offered the right moment for underused or unknown artistic models, among which drama stood out in the literary landscape of the United States. Early in the twentieth century, a number of provincial theaters sheltered some initial attempts to provide the American stage with some depth and artistic ambition. Little companies such as «The Provincetown Players» or «The Washington Square Players» promoted classical as well as «serious» European plays. Additionally, they encouraged the work of those local authors who strove to break through in the literary panorama. These companies staged experimental plays that aspired to revitalize the conformist theater of the day. The Provincetown Players developed from a group organized by playwright Susan Glaspell and her husband in 1915, to which Eugene O’Neill was introduced one year later. They staged their innovative proposals at the Wharf Theater, a converted fish warehouse that would witness O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff in 1916. O’Neill’s play is claimed to have inaugurated modern American drama as we know it today. During the twenties and thirties O’Neill and his followers would liberate it from unwelcome European influences and from commercial impositions, and would transform Broadway into the world center of dramatic art. The drama of the nineteen twenties was characterized by a psychological approach to the self and the world, while in the thirties and forties it manifested the social and political color that the period demanded. The American drama of the early twentieth century moved away from the romantic and melodramatic formulae of the nineteenth century. Melodrama was a very popular mode that appealed to emotions and was resolved happily, and that used stock and static characters such as the virtuous or the villain that never grew or developed. Twentieth-century American drama responded to the sensational drama of the previous century, 206

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and explored new modes of representing human experience: Realism (which investigated social issues, real life conditions, ordinary people and situations), Symbolism (which favored suggestion over realistic detail), Naturalism (which explored the forces that shaped and determined human behavior) and Expressionism, which sought the expression of moods and emotions by means of distortion or exaggeration. As we have already certified, Modernist literature responded to the period’s concern about human consciousness and unconsciousness. The new psychological approach to the self disclosed the hidden processes of the mind, and proposed that our actions were mere surfaces. The dramatic genre is a form whose essence consists in offering a representation of appearances, i.e. of whatever appears visible to the audience. Hence, the dramatists of the age tried to convey those occult processes mentioned above, beyond the usual gestures and situations on stage. O’Neill himself proposed the use of masks for stage performance to achieve that aim, which he declared the outcome of the following: [W]e have endured too much from the banality of surfaces. We are ashamed of having peaked through so many keyholes, squinting always at heavy, uninspired bodies —the fat facts—with not a nude spirit among them; we have been sick with appearances and are convalescing; we ‘wipe out and pass on’ to some as yet unrealized region where our souls, maddened by loneliness and the ignoble inarticulateness of flesh, are slowly evolving this new language of kinship. («Strindberg and Our Theatre,» 1924)

Or, as Tennessee Williams would state in 1960, I dare to suggest, from my POV, that the theater has made in our time its greatest artistic advance through the unlocking and lighting up and ventilation of the closets, attics, and basements of human behaviour and experience. («Tennessee Williams Presents his POV,» 1960)

Twentieth-century American plays tried to equal the novel form in its representation of the psychological landscape of the self. Postimpressionist artists like Vincent Van Gogh inspired writers with his use of non-representational techniques, such as color or line, in search of the unseen emotions behind the surfaces. In the same line, playwrights engineered diverse strategies to show the characters’ hidden conflicts and

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inner drives, much in the trail of the Modernist spirit that presided over all artistic forms of the day. It could be said that the stage, then, departed from the verisimilitude that most films were already providing. German Expressionism shaped such innovative vigor, and contributed to the concordance between the expression of the play and its contents. The prevalent feature of this dramatic mode is, as Styan maintains, «a rigorous anti-realism» (1). Eugene O’Neill is one of the few American writers who are remembered as playwrights, and whose plays are still frequently staged. He is the only American playwright to have been honored with the Nobel Prize for literature. His career embraced the symbolical (or evocative) as well as the naturalist (or representational). In fact, he even combined the realistic and the expressionistic styles in some works like The Emperor Jones, where the introductory and final scenes aimed at verisimilitude rather than evocation. His expressionistic plays evidenced his effort to experiment with language and structure, in order to bring to life the unseen operations of the human mind. Masks, spoken thoughts, asides and onstage choruses evidence such an interest. Among the expressionistic characteristics that he inherited from European drama, and that were to influence future playwrights, are the following: a dreamlike atmosphere, to which lighting effects contributed (the setting was equally designed to appeal to the emotions); an episodic plot consisting of a cinematic cutting of scenes, which created a sensation of disjointedness (action is thus subordinated to language); and lyrical, often delirious monologues and dialogues, which departed from conversation in the proper sense. A significant part of O’Neill’s work was inspired by these suggestive devices as much as it was by Freudian and Jungian theories on the unconscious and the tragic nature of the human being as exposed in Greek drama. In The Emperor Jones, O’Neill dealt with the psychological ordeal underwent by Brutus Jones, the dictator of a West Indies island. He loses his way in the forest and is forced to face his physical and emotional isolation, his humanity and his guilt. The sound of the tom-tom signals the beating of the protagonist’s heart, which grows faster and louder as the plot progresses. Another externalization of Jones’ state of mind can be detected in the following stage directions, where his regression to a primitive condition in the face of evil is laid bare: 208

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The witch-doctor springs to the river bank. He stretches out his arms and calls to some God within its depths. Then he starts backward slowly, his arms remaining out. A huge head of a crocodile appears over the bank and its eves, glittering greenly, fasten upon Jones. He stares into them fascinatedly. The witch-doctor prances up to him, touches him with his wand, motions with hideous command toward the waiting monster. Jones squirms on his belly nearer and nearer, moaning continually. (47-48)

As Styan points out, «[t]he paradox here is that these effects must be as real as possible if they are to work, an assumption that runs counter to the concept of expressionism» (102). Set and custom designers, electricians, musicians and other professionals of the aesthetic were involved in the production of these plays to such an extent that serious American drama soon came of age.

1.1. The extraordinary in the ordinary Besides this new attention to the human unconscious, the pioneers of American modern drama would bring the «common man» onto the stage, that is to say, figures that fell far from nobility of birth or destiny, and whose passions and failures were recognizable and generally shared. Drama, therefore, revealed the nation’s powerful self-consciousness at the moment, in particular after the First World War and during the harsh Depression years. O’Neill and his contemporaries shaped their plays with the two main features that characterized the beginning of modern American drama: the exploration of the unconscious and the incorporation of the common man. The self had been up to that time depicted as struggling with the gods; now the struggle was perceived to be with oneself. Playwrights conceived conflict as inherent to those who strive to belong, to recognize themselves as part of a social system in which they play a part. In this light O’Neill himself, and the playwrights to follow, moved away from character abstractions in search of more human and recognizable figures. Furthermore, the integration of realistic elements such as an American setting with American characters conferred his plays with a new exploratory dimension. Such is the case of Desire under the Elms, premiered in 1924, which is said to be the first major American tragedy. A local flavor

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was achieved thanks to dialect, a familiar natural environment, and the representation of the Cabots, a New England farming family in whom spectators could easily detect echoes of some Greek tragic figures. The pastoral and the tragic, the common and the cosmic, run parallel in the play. Susan Glaspell’s Trifles offers a similar instance of the innovative use of localism. This play, first produced in 1916, was based on an actual event she covered as a reporter in Des Moines. The play tells about women’s confinement and harsh life conditions in rural Iowa, and about the reasons behind the murder of a man. In addition to the usual features of localcolor writing (speech, customs, realistic representation of place) Glaspell used more experimental strategies, such as banishing the main characters from the stage and making the setting and the onstage characters express the formers’ conflicts. In the quotation that follows we can examine the suggestive components in this introductory stage direction, which fuses realistic detail, a sense of disaster, and a separation of male and female spheres: The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright, a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order —unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the bread-box, a dish-towel on the table—other signs of incompleted work. At the rear the outer door opens and the SHERIFF comes in followed by the COUNTY ATTORNEY and HALE. The SHERIFF and HALE are men in middle life, the COUNTY ATTORNEY is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women —the SHERIFF’s wife first; she is a slight wiry woman, a thin nervous face. MRS HALE is larger and would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly, and stand close together near the door. (NAAL: 1412) SCENE:

The common language and the common lives were complemented with expressionistic resources. Such conjunction of styles provides the audience with enough distinguishable references, while it avoids an excessive particularization. In other words, common and local characters and events can be projected to universal dimensions, thus enlarging the scope of significance of the play. 210

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Serious American drama was born in the Modernist era. Several artistic and economic reasons energized the creation and flourishing of a national dramatic genre that surveyed national themes and characters. Eugene O’Neill was among the most prominent playwrights of the moment. His expressionistic strategies and his emphasis on common people and situations inaugurated a trail of American drama that lingered through the first half of the twentieth century and is still evident in contemporary drama. Other playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century further explored O’Neill’s conjunction of the realistic and the expressionistic styles.

1.2. Review of dramatic elements The essence of the dramatic text is necessarily linked to its finality: every play is written for its performance on the stage. Bearing its representation in mind, the playwright arranges the dramatic elements of the play in order to convey how he or she wishes it to be put up. Form has a major role in the development of action. Particular attention should be paid to the division in acts and scenes, and to whatever situation originates the break between them. Acts are normally intended to indicate changes of time, setting, characters onstage or mood. But the analysis of a play also requires attention to the work’s components and its organization. In drama, like in fiction, the elemental constituent is that of the story being presented. The story of a play, however, is not told but represented. As with fiction, plot is not the same as story: story is «what happens,» that is, the array of events that constitute the play, while plot is the way the narrator or author presents the story to the reader or audience. The dramatic plot is formed by the following elements: — Dramatic action requires conflict between opposing forces: the self against another self or the universe (external conflict) or self against itself (internal conflict). The conflict creates the complications, originates the unfolding of events and the tension to breed action, until the arrival of climax.

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— The exposition is the introduction of characters and setting, and the basic situation or point of departure of the action. — The rising action presents the central conflict, the complications, the suspense, and crises. — A crisis is a minor climax at the end of an act or scene —other than the last one. — Climax is the point of greatest dramatic tension, and when the conflict is resolved. — Falling action makes reference to subsiding intensity. — The denouement is the resolution, and concludes the action. Any literary work concerning people and their ventures requires methods of characterization, i.e. strategies used to reveal characters’ individualities at four levels: physical, social, psychological, and moral or ethical. In fiction, characters are presented through the point of view of an observer, either the narrator or some of the other characters. Dramatic characterization employs a display of visual and verbal strategies to make the characters’ personalities known to the audience. They can be presented directly through their words and actions, indirectly through other characters’ comments, or through stage directions, which are the author’s guidelines for the staging of the play. Other dramatic elements to take into account when analyzing characters regard their verbal acts: monologue (extended speech by one character), soliloquy (extended speech by one character who is alone on stage, used to express private thoughts), and aside (the character’s direct address to the audience, unheard by other characters). These three techniques replace the narrator or the chorus, generally absent from modern dramatic works, in their function of providing an insight into the characters’ motivations. Regarding the interrelation of characters and conflict, two dramatic techniques deserve especial attention: dramatic irony, used to let the audience know more than the character about a specific situation or event, and anagnorisis, the central discovery made by the tragic hero, particularly the discovery of his or her responsibility for the reversal and fall that completes the action of a tragedy. 212

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2. TEXT ANALYSIS: ARTHUR MILLER’S DRAMA OF THE COMMON MAN 2.1. APPROACHING Miller’s Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was born in New York, the child of a Jewish family who underwent great financial strive during the Depression years. He worked in a variety of jobs during the thirties and forties, from dishwasher to mouse attendant in a laboratory. This varied labor experience resulted in a number of characters with outstanding manual skill in his plays. He enrolled in Journalism at the University of Michigan, where he absorbed the intellectual and social climate of the nineteen thirties. It was during his university period when he started to write. Plays came first, for theater stages as well as for radio programs, but Miller’s extensive production also includes script writing, journals, short stories and even a novel (Focus, published in 1945). An expressionistic Realism had dominated the American dramatic landscape in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The Theater of the Absurd would color the plays of authors writing at both sides of the Atlantic in later years, but the works of American dramatists were already leaving an impression on foreign productions too. Such was the case with Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a play that proved as innovative in formal matters as rich in ideological issues. Arthur Miller acknowledged the influence of several authors on his work. He was especially fond of Ibsen, one of whose plays he adapted for presentation in 1950, but the stamp of Eugene O’Neill and Bertold Brecht is traceable in Miller’s works as well. The influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is seen in the theme of death in life, or emotional paralysis, in Death of a Salesman. The Southern writer Tennessee Williams left also a traceable mark on Miller’s work, as we will see in the play analyzed in the present Unit. Miller’s literary concern with the theme of moral responsibility had its real-life counterpart in the McCarthy era. In 1952 his friend Eliah Kazan, also the director of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, named Miller as sympathizer of the American Communist Party. Miller was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 to be interrogated about his suspected left-wing sympathies, and to be invited to collaborate with the Committee by naming those acquaintances and friends suspect of the same

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un-American activities, which he refused to do. The Crucible (premiered in 1953) dramatizes this persecution in a parallel historical moment, the witchhunt that took place in Salem in 1692. Miller had written several college and amateur pieces before his first Broadway production, The Man Who Had All the Luck, which opened in 1944. His apprenticeship already encompassed the basic preoccupations he would develop in his most acclaimed works, especially those concerning family ties, responsibility, and the self’s frustrations. In particular, All My Sons (which premiered in 1947) anticipated the narrative techniques and father-sons anxieties that Death of a Salesman would further analyze. Critic Leonard Moss identified an archetypal pattern in these plays, in which a son «looks to his father […] for moral direction […], instead finds corruption […], and severs the bond of mutual respect» (Moss: 45). Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway, New York, in 1949. However, Miller had begun the project when he was still in his teens and working for his father’s firm. It had been a short story until Miller at length altered it to its final dramatic structure. He nevertheless kept its basic ingredients intact, that is, the story of an unsuccessful salesman who undergoes a tragic end. The play became an immediate success, praised by reviewers and audience alike, and wan all major theatrical awards of the moment. As happens with other works by Miller, this play stemmed from personal experiences. His father had a coat factory where he had the chance to meet several salespersons of all sorts, but his own uncle became the model on which to outline the travelling profession and the Loman household as they are depicted in the play. Miller’s work exhibits a realist and naturalist approach to life: as a realist, he always revealed a concern to offer a densely populated social world. His characters are manufacturers, salesmen, longshoremen, lawyers, surgeons, policemen, writers; they constitute the society whose values they both exemplify and betray [...]. They exist at a tangent to the social world whose centrifugal force has flung them to the periphery. (Bigsby: 70-71)

However, he —as also Tennessee Williams would— redefined and complemented the notion of «reality» by exploring psychological depths and personal drives uncovered by a more generalized view of existence. As a naturalist, he explored the frustrations caused by the limitations that social 214

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conditions cast upon the self. The social determinism that would be expected from this Naturalist approach was overshadowed by the self’s capacity to make individual choices, as the protagonist of Death of a Salesman evidences. The Ibsenesque technique used by Miller in this play consisted of a series of allusions and foreshadowings that progressively lead to the disclosure of hidden sins. This gradual revelation contributes to the rising tension of the play until the climax certifies the horror lurking behind apparently quiet, domestic scenes. In addition to Ibsen’s strategy, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944-45) pioneered the memory play or dramatization of mnemonic workings that constitute the basic structure of Death of a Salesman. The threat on the common and the ordinary, and the characters’ responses to the threat, is one of Miller’s repeated motifs, as revealed in this play. You may overcome the play’s initial obstacles if you bear in mind…

 The realistic and expressionistic use of the stage.  The anachronies or temporal dislocations of the plot.  The use of a common man as dramatic hero.  The retelling of the American Dream from the perspective of those who fail, and the reversal of the myths of the American family and the open road.

 The family as the ideological core of the conflict.  The symbolic network sustaining plot and characters.  The accurate vernacular speech. 2.2. REVISITING Death of a Salesman Contemporary critics of Death of a Salesman were especially attracted to the formal innovations presented by the play. Miller’s objectivization of mindscapes allowed for psychological revelation since, in his own words, life is formless […], its interconnections are concealed by lapses of time, by events occurring in separated places, by the hiatus of memory [...]. Art suggests or makes these interconnections palpable. Form is the tension of these interconnections, man with man, man with the past and present

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environment. The drama at its best is a mass experience of that tension. (Manuscript notebooks at the University of Texas)

Miller’s tentative title for his work had been The Inside of His Head, which insinuated the play’s intention to expose Willy Loman’s mind to the spectators. The formal strategies employed by the author aimed at the exhibition of such mental processes as memory, conflict, or self-delusion. The temporal and spatial dislocations that nevertheless maintained a continuous action and tension provided an agile strategy through which to reveal the protagonist’s constant recall of the past. In filmmaking, some editing techniques such as dissolves (gradual transitions from one scene to another) and fades (progressive darkening or lightening of the screen into a new scene) soften the transitions between different shots. Drama does not allow such strategies, and other tactics must be sought. In Death of a Salesman, interruptions and a sense of fragmentariness were avoided as the different temporal and spatial segments smoothly integrated into the main action. As critic Dennis Welland claimed, «every action of the present works toward revelation of the past» (38). A set designed to reflect a house and ingenious stage effects contributed to soften the transitions demanded by the text. However, Miller also used repetitions of motifs that function as linguistic hinges between the action and each analepsis. Not surprisingly, the most important crisis of this memory play occurs at one of the analeptic moments. Readers/spectators perceive a growing tension as the characters’ lives are deeply affected by a secret that is progressively disclosed, since Biff’s discovery at the Boston hotel illuminates past and present moments in the play. The stage set conceived by Miller contributes to the expressionistic structure that sustains the play. The fluidity of time discussed in the previous paragraphs harmonizes with the «dissolving» walls of the Lomans’ house. Also, memories of actual events can coexist with dreams and with present situations onstage.

 The

light effects that accentuate specific spots or situations are also expressionistic strategies. Keep track of how light games play a part in the hallucinatory atmosphere that surrounds Willy. To what extent does the setting contribute to his characterization as an unbalanced person?

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Ben’s character could be defined as another expressionistic strategy. Although he is part of the family and therefore has an actual existence, he lacks an operative personality in the play and, thus, his part is rather functional and symbolic. He emerges onstage conjured by Willy’s imagination, accompanied by the sound of the flute, with the sole purpose to evoke or reinforce the salesman’s aspirations. Another unusual dramatic strategy was to present a common man —an Everyman that could speak for any person— as a tragic figure. The classical conception of a tragedy and a tragic character involved an elevated social type whose decline meant significant consequences for himself and his fellow citizens. With his play, Miller seemed to suggest that great falls are within the scope of ordinary people. In order to defend Willy’s tragic stature, the author published an essay in 1949 in the New York Times, called «Tragedy and the Common Man,» in which he accounted for the tragedy that may reside in the realm of the domestic. Miller’s words are eloquent enough in the following passage: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing —his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea and Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his «rightful» position in his society […]. Its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. (Miller 1949a: 1)

However, some critics disagree on Willy Loman’s tragic stature and label the protagonist of this play a pathetic figure. They claim that Willy’s character lacks the introspective solitude of traditional tragic heroes —mainly rooted in classical and Renaissance plays. Moreover, they regard his decline as barely relevant, particularly when he falls, as Sheila Huftel puts it (in Jacobson: 247), from «an imagined height.» Whether highborn or common, tragic heroes are flawed and therefore make errors of judgement. The Greek term for this tragic flaw is hamartia, whose translation into English is «missing the mark.» In other words, tragic figures set out on an enterprise that they misjudge, for which reason they fail. Willy Loman’s main hamartia consists of his belief in a sort of indisputable birthright to prosper, on account of his American nationhood: «[T]hat’s the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!» (NAAL: 2365).

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 Can

you think of other misjudgments on the part of the play’s main character? Despite his emphasis on the fallacious American Dream, what other bad decisions has he made during his life?

Arthur Miller’s created world is not an absurd one: events can be accounted for, and reasons identified. Responsibility and moral conscience are therefore core themes in his plays. Despite the lack of a consistent religious worldview, values impregnate speech and action in Death of a Salesman and other works. Such values are generated and transmitted by father characters who take on the central role in the family microcosms of each play, as will be discussed below. Arthur Miller’s persistent attention to social issues was made evident throughout his career through the social play, the modality that best suited his interests. Such was Miller’s concern with social matters that some sociologists have found interesting illustrations of sociological principles in his plays. In his essay «On Social Plays» Miller stated the importance of social forces such as class, family, norms, and labor on the lives of characters (1957: 153). The sociological outline of his characters, therefore, always adds up to and completes their psychological characterization. In Death of a Salesman, the protagonist’s personality is accordingly exhibited in dual terms: his social and his psychological life. But, despite its particular representational strategies, this play shares the theme of alienation with other works written by the same author: the contemporary self as inextricably bound but severely unrelated to the community. As Unit Three contemplated, the idea of America as a land of opportunity is deeply rooted in the national mythology of the United Sates. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman inspects the nature of the myth, and provides adequate dramatic representation of its facts and its fallacies. Unlike Gatsby, however, Willy Loman stands for all those whose ambitions have resulted in failure, thus embodying the falseness of the idea that success is achievable for anyone. Therefore, his characterization is built upon contradictions, the first of which emanates from the disparity between his firm belief in the American myth of success and his own actual life. Significant enough is the opening scene of the play. Unlike success 218

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stories, which start in youth and nothingness and end in achievement, this one begins with an old, fatigued man. Even his children, who are still young and energetic, appear already worn out and frustrated. The «jungle» of modern urban life, embodied in the brick density that surrounds the Loman place, seems to have a Darwinian implication: only the fittest survive. In this light, Willy is represented as unfit, while the successful but mysterious Ben is described almost as a predator: God! Why didn’t I go to Alaska with my brother Ben that time! That man was a genius, that man was success incarnate! What a mistake! He begged me to go. WILLY:

HAPPY:

Well, there’s no use in—

WILLY: You guys! There was a man started with the clothes on his back and ended up with diamond mines! HAPPY:

Boy, someday I’d like to know how he did it.

WILLY: What’s

the mystery? The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it! Walked into a jungle, and comes out, the age of twenty-one, and he’s rich! The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress! (NAAL: 2343)

Some critics have appreciated an overt criticism of the capitalist system in this play, though Miller himself has stated that he never intended a criticism of a specific ideological or political system (Miller, 1957: 29). In fact, he declared in «On Social Plays» that social criticism is not necessarily inherent to a social play. Nevertheless, Death of a Salesman expresses the country’s typical ambivalence towards its capitalist system, and it displays the main character’s deep alienation in a social context where, as sociologist Paul Blumberg points out, «the absolute value of the individual human being is believed in only as a secondary value; it stands well below the needs of efficient production» (294). Willy’s job stands in drastic opposition to his rewarding —though unpaid— indoor activities. The well-known estrangement of contemporary life, then, assumes the form of work alienation in this play. Willy, for instance, never seems to need affection or respect. Instead, he wants to be «well-liked» with a view to promotion or recognition. Sociologists engaged in the study of the aftermath of the Second World War recognized this «other-directed» social type as a symptom of the era (Riesman: 19-20); quite a different type, Ben Loman would represent former social patterns

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(the «inner-directed»), by which the others’ approving response was not indispensable for one’s self-value. Willy himself asserts at a certain moment «We’ve got quite a little streak of self-reliance in our family» (NAAL: 2362), which calls to mind the mythical nineteenth-century heroes that could unfasten themselves from civilization and its rules to pursue their own personal aspirations. However, the play suggests that either the streak is not powerful enough in him, or he missed his opportunity, or the times for selfreliance are long past.

 Death of a Salesman has advertising as one of the staple manifestations of capitalism. How does it contribute to shape Willy Loman’s life? How is Loman himself a product to be advertised and consumed?

The play deals with the decay, perversion, or destruction of social relationships at family level, as well. Professor Irving Jacobson, for instance, indicates that Willy seeks a home outside his home in the face of familial dissolution (248). Among the social determiners of human existence, the family stands out as one of the recurrent motifs that Miller explores in his work. In fact, the author published an article, «The Family in Modern Drama,» where he accounted for his characters’ frustrations as the difficulty to find comfort and warmth in the outside world. By expanding his naturalistic interests to the domestic domain, Miller surpassed the institutional and economic forces that had occupied previous moments of American naturalist writers. In this amplified comment on American reality, revelations of the deficiencies of the capitalist system run parallel to those pertaining to the personal and the familial, in the awareness that both domains of action are interrelated. Willy’s doubtful value system is made evident in his treatment of his sons.

 In

Death of a Salesman we can see Willy Loman sharing his distorted value system with his sons. What instances of «wrong examples» can you detect? How is he encouraging misconduct in Happy and Biff?

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He thus wishes to pass the salesman vocabulary and behavior down to his sons, transforming his own profession into an epitome of the suitable way to the American Dream: I see great things for you kids, I think your troubles are over. But remember, start big and you’ll end big. [...] Walk in with a big laugh. Don’t look worried. Start off with a couple of your good stories to lighten things up. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it —because personality always wins the day. (NAAL: 2355) WILLY:

This sort of capitalist gospel (as ineffectual for his children as it was for him) harmonizes with the consumerist anxiety that Willy embodies, which falls in contradiction with his distress at having to pay bills or clear a mortgage. The climax of the play is strongly related to this self-deceptive discourse. Biff’s anagorisis about his position in the world and about his father’s fallacy foreshadows the tragic denouement: [...] I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is! BIFF:

WILLY: I LINDA:

hear that!

Don’t, Biff!

BIFF: It’s goddam time you heard that! I had to be boss big shot in two weeks, and I’m through with it! WILLY: Then

hang yourself! For spite, hang yourself!

BIFF: No! nobody’s hanging himself, Willy! I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw —the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? [...] Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you! (NAAL: 2388)

Another myth that the play undermines is that of the «open road.» In American literature, the image of the road has traditionally entailed a promise of escape, improvement, self-finding, and return to nature. Mostly, it has meant power and control over one’s destiny. In Death of a Salesman, the road

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is not an actual physical space because it is never displayed onstage. Rather, characters speak of it, and this offstage presence casts an elusive, intangible air on the road and its connotations as ideal space. Such elusive quality suits Willy’s self-deception. It is particularly interesting that the road seems to have taken control over Willy and not vice versa, in an ironic reversal of the myth: I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m goin’ off the road! I’m tellin’ ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. So I went on again –and five minutes later I’m dreamin’ again, and I nearly—. (NAAL: 2329) WILLY:

Willy’s car is an instrument of death and destruction. The play offers several indicators of his dexterity in hand-made work (which the author possessed as well), with its echoes of self-fulfillment and power, of which car driving is a somewhat distorted version. The play lacks overt manifestations of the Lomans’ Jewishness, to the point that critic Leslie Fiedler labeled them «crypto-Jewish» characters, or characters whose manners and speech are «typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else —general Americans» (Fiedler:71). Despite this inhibition of its characters’ Jewish condition, the play has been often analyzed in the context of Miller’s own family background. Chronicler Mary McCarthy recognized the Lomans’ Jewish speech cadences, but faulted the play for insufficient ethnic characterization (in Fried: 120). Other critics have identified two of the central issues at the heart of Jewish-American literature: the family as the fundamental structural and ideological element, and its focus on the common man. The defense of the ordinary, weak man in the face of adversity articulates Death of a Salesman as Willy’s flaws are exposed, but tragedy —instead of pathetism—is attempted. The dramatic conflict of the play, whether it stems from the social environment or from the agitated family relations, concentrates on a common character in search of himself in a context that denies the identity that he pursues. The work being a play, characterization is achieved through dramatic action and dialogue, but naming becomes an essential element in 222

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the identification of the characters’ personalities and objectives. The names of the Lomans are meaningful in themselves. «Loman» per se evokes the family’s social class, and reinforces the idea that the protagonist is not prominent or influential in any way. The author himself, however, stated in his autobiography that the name was not intended as a pun for Willy’s social status; rather, it was an adaptation to English of Lohmann, a character in Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse who desperately calls «into the void for help that will never come» (in Bigsby: 85). Biff’s name indicates some kind of error or misunderstanding, although it might as well allude to the fibs he sometimes tells, and to the delusion he lives. The character who most evidently avoids facing the hardships and responsibilities of actual experience is Happy, an actual «happy-go-lucky.»

 «Willy,» the name of the main character, sounds odd for a man the age of the protagonist. Indeed, his name suggests few years of age. Can you think of the implications of this? How is Willy represented to us through his name: innocent, inexperienced, with a future ahead of him?

Miller also achieved a high level of linguistic realism with the characters’ speech style. Willy’s schizophrenic nature —so pivotal to the play’s set, conflict and development— is staged, as mentioned above, on two levels: the psychological and the social. His frequent inconsistencies and his deceits indicate the disparity between both. Linda Loman, on the contrary, is the one character who seems to stand aside from deception. Her pragmatic personality, however, functions less as a contrast to her husband’s illusions than as an operative image of the fallible institution of the family. The play makes use of imagery to convey the atmosphere and ideas that impregnate it. The Loman’s home, for instance, functions as a metaphor for Willy’s ambitions as well as for his failures. The modern appliances he wants for his house stand for Willy’s idea of success and happiness, while the decay occasionally observed accounts for his disregard of family and emotional matters. Delicate and expensive, the stockings constitute an apt element in Willy’s stock, since they symbolize what he thinks money can buy. They also present a harsh contrast with those old garments that Linda mends to make them last longer.

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 Feminine garments as they are, the stockings can be understood as an objectification of the two women in Willy’s life. What are the characterization techniques of women characters in the play?

The sport shoes that Biff destroys symbolize his rejection of his father’s authority over him, and his loss of faith in Willy’s values. It should be noted that they are part of his athletic equipment, a symbol for the young and energetic type expectable in an American hero. The seeds that Willy insistently plants unsuccessfully stand for infertility, i.e. the failure in his life despite his efforts: «A man can’t go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something» (NAAL: 2385). The plants that never grow nor remain symbolize also Willy’s nonexistent legacy.

 The

stage set at the exposition of the play, suffocated by tall urban constructions, suggests the strain felt by the Lomans, and contributes to shape the audience/readers’ perception of the tension. How does it contrast with the natural landscape that Willy perceives while on the road?

Any form of irony involves some kind of discrepancy. For instance, verbal irony suggests a disparity between what is being uttered and what is being implied. The play’s thematic line is built along a number of ironies, among which dramatic irony stands out as a recurrent device that evokes the disagreement between Willy’s objective and subjective worlds. Dramatic irony occurs whenever the readers or spectators know or understand more about the action than some of the characters do. For instance, the audience can see Linda painfully mending stocks, while in another scene a pair of precious silk stockings is given to the nameless character of «the woman.» However insightful Linda is concerning Willy’s physical and mental decline, she is unable to perceive the existence of Willy’s lover.

 How is Willy’s funeral ironic? In what way does it present a contrast with Willy’s own vision of it?

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In Act One, Linda speaks a rather formal statement about her husband. It is ironical in the sense that it is not expected, and offers a contrast to her usual informal discourse: I don’t say that he is a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. (NAAL: 2350)

Apparently more appropriate for a final speech, these lines seem to encompass the play’s theme and Miller’s intention to draw tragic interest to a common man. Linda’s last speech reveals the irony of what she calls «freedom.» A house free of a mortgage seems to express the modern version of freedom, while the play suggests that in such consumerist scenario that kind of release is never possible.

Arthur

Miller’s literary production was concerned with the moral condition of ordinary human beings. He usually articulated this preoccupation in plots that explore family relations or life in small communities. Although Death of a Salesman presents a realistic account of the capitalist system and its implications, Miller pays also insistent attention to personal and familial circumstances as contributors to the self’s frustration and unhappiness. The play evidences Miller’s craftsmanship in narrative, symbolic and stage strategies, and brings the common man to the stature of a tragic figure.

3. EXERCISES 3.1. Test yourself On Arthur Miller a) Why is Willy Loman termed a tragic hero? Why is this label frequently dismissed?

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b) What realist and expressionist aspects does Death of a Salesman evidence? c) How did Miller manage to handle temporal and spatial transitions? What technical and verbal strategies did he employ to avoid interruptions in the action? d) What is the climax of Death of a Salesman? e) What elements foreshadow the denouement of the play? f) What are the main symbols, and what do they symbolize? g) What linguistic, symbolic, or narrative devices are used to achieve effectual characterization in the play? h) To what extent are stage directions important in the way the reader/ audience perceives the characters and their actions? i) What anagnorises are present in the play? j) Why is Linda’s final speech ironical? k) What are the dramatic and symbolist functions of «Ben’s music» (a flute melody) in the play?

Summary questions a) Why did serious drama take so long to play a meaningful part in American letters? b) What was the importance of Modernism in the birth and development of drama in the United States? c) What European influences are traceable in the American drama of the first half of the twentieth century? d) What were the two main aspects of the plays created by American playwrights of the early twentieth century? e) To what extent did Arthur Miller develop or dismiss the path created by O’Neill and his contemporaries? 226

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3.2. Explore a) «[T]hat Miller is willy-nilly a moralist —one who believes he knows what sin and evil are— is inescapable» (Clurman: xiv). Comment on this idea in the light of such concepts as proper conduct, responsibility, and values as seen in the play. b) Some critics, past and present, have questioned the structural and thematic value of the «Requiem» act. To what extent do you consider it an apt conclusion to the play? Discuss its relevance, taking into account the characters’ progress, the closing up —or not—of conflicts or ideas, setting, tone... c) Willy’s car is as important to the plot of Death of a Salesman as Gatsby’s car is in The Great Gatsby. Both works deal with similar themes and myths, and have cars as objectified representatives of their owners’ ambitions. What similarities and differences can you detect in the ways the authors use these images? d) According to critic Leonard Moss, the language style of Miller’s characters —either elementary or sophisticated—reflects their style of conduct. Would you agree with his assertion? Can you find any instances of linguistic incongruity, that is, any form of discourse that escapes the range of lower-middle class dialect? e) Compare Biff’s final decision to move west to Nick Carraway’s similar option at the end of The Great Gatsby. Discuss, in particular, the symbolic echoes of deciding on the agrarian version of the dream. f) The title of the play combines the specificity of the term «death of» with the rather general reference of «a salesman.» In your opinion, why should the protagonist’s name be absent from the title? What does it emphasize? g) Despite the «Americanness» of its characters, setting and articulating myths, Death of a Salesman has enjoyed great success with international audiences, even in those countries whose economic and social system is not capitalism. How do you account for this success? h) In your opinion, why is Willy’s manual skill recurrently mentioned in the play? How does that information add up to the character’s personality?

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i) When Death of a Salesman opened in 1949, Lee J. Cobb played the leading part. He was a short man, physically unimpressive, who was picked for the part according to Miller’s own vision of his character. Fifty years later, Brian Dennehy —a tall and strong actor, usually seen in policeman parts—played Willy Loman. How do you picture the protagonist of this play? In your opinion, how would the character be transformed, hindered or enhanced by the physical constitution of the actor? 3.3. Key terms — — — — — — — —

Anagnorisis Aside Climax Conflict Crisis Denouement Dramatic irony Exposition

— — — — — — — —

Expressionism Falling action Hamartia Memory play Monologue Rising action Soliloquy Stage directions

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY 4.1. Recommended readings — Eugene O’NEILL. 1923. «Strindberg and Our Theater.» http://www.imagination.com/moonstruck/clsc34w1.html — Arthur MILLER. 1949. «Tragedy and the Common Man.» http://vccslitonline. cc.va.us/tragedy/milleressay.htm

4.2. Critical works cited C.W.E. BIGSBY. Modern American Drama: 1945-2000. Cambridge U.P., 2000. PAUL BLUMBERG. «Sociology and Social Literature: Work Alienation in the Plays of Arthur Miller.» American Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2, Part 2: Supplement (Summer, 1969), 291-310.

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HAROLD CLURMAN. Introduction to the original edition of Death of a Salesman. The Portable Arthur Miller. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. London: Penguin, 1995. LESLIE FIEDLER. Waiting for the End. New York: Dell, 1975. LEWIS FRIED. Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources. New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1988. IRVING JACOBSON. «Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman.» American Literature, May 75, Vol. 47, Issue 2, 247-258. ARTHUR MILLER. «Introduction.» Collected Plays. New York: Viking Press, 1957. LEONARD MOSS. Arthur Miller. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1967. DAVID RIESMAN. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 2001. J. L. STYAN. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Volume 3: Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Cambridge U. P.: 1981. DENNIS WELLAND. Arthur Miller. New York: Twayne, 1967.

4.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Susan Glaspell (1876-1948): Trifles explores the motives behind a brutal crime committed in a small Iowa town. Glaspell depicts women’s life with harsh and grim accuracy, but experiments with form (it is a one-act play) and action (the main characters are off-stage). Arthur Miller (1915-2005): All My Sons (1947) tells the story of a manufacturer of airplane components who, despite knowing his factory is producing defective pieces, refuses to cancel sales. The death of one of his children in wartime causes great family disturbance and exposes his responsibility to others. The Crucible (1953) is set in Salem in 1692, and deals with the dignity and responsibility of a man amidst the severe witchhunt that takes place in the community. John Proctor decides on self-sacrifice instead of accusing others. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953): The Emperor Jones (1921) falls in the category of expressionistic play for its use of sound, color and light, its portrayal of psychological states of mind, and its appeal to intense emotions. It dramatizes

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the interior journey of Brutus Jones, who sets out through a forest from which he re-emerges wiser and redeemed. Desire Under the Elms (1924), symbolical as well as realistic, dealt with the oppressive atmosphere of life among the Cabots, headed by the Puritan Ephraim. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): His play The Glass Menagerie (1944-45) explores, as usual with this author, the ineffectual and oppressive middle-class Protestant standards, along with the lives of sordid characters who struggle to survive in a hostile environment. It is a «memory play» that tells about a former Southern belle who now lives in emotional and financial decadence, and destroys any of her children’s prospects of happiness.

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UNIT SEVEN THE UNITED STATES AFTER WORLD WAR II

Program 1. PRESENTATION: After Modernism 1.1. Literary Postmodernism(s) 1.2. A generation of «furtives»: The Beats 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Allen Ginsberg’s Beat manifesto 2.1. APPROACHING Ginsberg’s Howl 2.1. REVISITING Howl 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Thomas Pynchon’s entropic visions 3.1. Approaching Pynchon’s «Entropy» 3.2. Revisiting «Entropy» 4. EXERCISES Learning objectives — To get acquainted with the political, social, and cultural changes that took place in the United States after the Second World War — To examine Beat literature as expression of the period — To understand the literary text as intersection of discourses

1. PRESENTATION: AFTER MODERNISM Operating as a natural milestone in the history of the twentieth century, the Second World War marked the beginning of a time of stability and economic prosperity. Although the States emerged as a world power after the conflict, the Americans felt disturbed by the use of the atomic bomb in the name of progress and democracy. History and technology had showed their dark side, with dramatic consequences. Postmodernity, or the decades after the end of the war, would be shaped and shaded by this initial awareness of the failure of applied reason. The end of the conflict inaugurated the Cold War era, a political phenomenon as well as a state of mind. The globe had been suddenly

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divided into two political zones, which also demarcated two ways of understanding the subject’s relation to the world. The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a race of warfare technology that also energized the development of transportation and communications. The States assumed the role of international defender of democratic values, according to which Communism was to be suppressed in Asia and elsewhere. Similarly, national unity was desirable to withhold external threats. In this line, the anticommunist fever reached its climax with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who extended his witch-hunt of communist activities to any subversive practice or thought between 1950 and 1954. Numerous American citizens were blacklisted and tried for their political affiliations, and many were subsequently ostracized. World War II brought the nation out of the Depression, and after the war the Americans resumed the material abundance of the 1920s. General Eisenhower, who had coordinated the Allied forces during the war, ran for the presidency of the nation with the support of the Republican Party. After winning the elections in 1953 he assumed the role of restorer of the backbone of American civilization, capitalism, and the individualism it entails. After two decades in which the Americans had sacrificed for the collective benefit —the Depression first and the war later— the cult to the individual returned, adopting the form of competitive but homogeneous consumerism. Life became institutionalized, while American citizens were surrounded by images of traditional standards and values. Fashion stressed standard notions of femininity (thin waists and rounded hips) and masculinity (broad, square shoulders). Advertising as well as television and radio shows focused on domesticity and familiar bonds. Any idea or product that suggested opposition to the image of the average American —white, male, heterosexual, married, with a family and a profession— became suspicious immediately. The failure to yield to the consumerist tide was also taken for an irregular practice. The ideological homogeneity did not have in leftist ideas its sole threat: racial relations became increasingly violent, despite the school integration decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. Intolerance persisted, parallel to a growing resistance on the part of the black community and other marginal groups. Economic and social progress did not reach all races and classes on equal terms. Quite on the contrary, it helped to widen the disparity 232

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between the privileged and the disadvantaged. While the economically favored moved out of the urban areas to the suburbs, racial ghettos proliferated in the cities. The image that best represented the cultural landscape of the fifties was that of the suburban family home, an ideal image from which the racial and ethnic minorities were excluded. It epitomized basic notions of the American mainstream ideology, propagated by television and radio shows, advertising, the film industry, and other media forces: the family system, consumerism, prosperity, and protection. America sought relief from postwar anxieties through the guaranteed sameness of mass production and through new cultural forms. The Top 40 format combined the search for newness with the rapid consumption of the new. Consumer society always presses for novelty, which forces the apparition of diverse formulas to satisfy this quick demand. Blending, cross-fertilization, and recuperation of old styles emerge as powerful strategies to «renew» the market constantly. Although these formulas are best understood as bound to the popular culture —music, fashion, television, etc— «highbrow» culture would start nurturing itself from them. Rock and Roll, which sprang from African American ragtime and blues and whose spirit is traceable back to Walt Whitman, was born in 1954. It soon became associated with rebellion against conformity. The recent history of rock music has proved that corporate and marketing interests have come into play and rock has been transformed into a maker and marker of cultural hegemony. But in the assenting zeitgeist of the 1950s, rock music and rockers incarnated the same self-realization and independence as the Beat ideology discussed below. The nineteen fifties was a «baby boom» period that would produce a very profitable youth market, and an acute generation gap emerged in consequence. Youth culture was nurtured by the cinematographic myths of the era, fashion, music, and specifically targeted advertising. Its system of values was largely different from the parental code, and it soon became the seemingly most adequate instruments youths had to resist the mediocre establishment. Films, advertising and television —the latter made its entrance on the cultural stage by the late forties— altered perception to such an extent that aesthetic patterns underwent permanent revison.

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1.1. Literary Postmodernism(s) The decades after the Second World War are difficult to pin down as a single literary period. The term «Post-Modernism,» used in the previous paragraphs, refers to a temporal segment («after Modernism») rather than a literary trend. Such is the difficulty to define and assess the period of the last decades and its literature that Leslie Fiedler, the reputed critic of American literature, claims: «Established critics may think that they have been judging recent literature; but, in truth, recent literature has been judging them» (in Cunliffe: 329). Although the concept «Modernism» included several versions of the modern era, these still subscribed the idea of newness and reaction to established aesthetic and intellectual models. But «Postmodernism» embraces so many different modes and moods that it seems too general to be used for explicitness. However, it is a highly operative term for our survey of American literature, due to its effectiveness as encompassing word for the variety of literary practices in the United States after the Second World War. The task of delimiting the existence of a movement per se, that is, an aesthetic sensibility separate and distinct from others, is also at issue. For some, Postmodernism does not follow after Modernism, but from Modernism: Postmodernism would therefore be only an extension, or a late mode, of Modernism. Postmodernism, however, shows an interest in popular art and in marginal discourses and voices that were unknown to Modernism. While Modernism questioned reality and the self’s perception of it, argues critic McHale, Postmodernism emphasizes ontology, identity, and constructions of the self. Fiedler, on his part, claims the death of the Modernist sensibility and form. Initially, Postmodernism was an architectural movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties that rejected the Modernist attraction to novelty for its own sake. Post-Sructuralist thought, later known as Postmodernism, appeared in the nineteen fifties as a result of the growing influence of European philosophical currents, especially those that developed from Nietzschean theories on the futility of contemplating existence as a system concealing meaning or spirit. French thought in particular undermined the assumed notions about classical reason, which was founded on the dismissal of any other alternative form of knowledge. Structuralism was thus severely 234

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criticized for its reliance on the structures that seemingly underlie empirical events. Such categories as «subject,» «object,» or «will» are, according to Post-Structuralist thinkers, only metaphors that replace existence, and not existence itself. Readers of this volume will expectedly find Modernist features in Postmodernist works, such as fragmentation or viewpoint experiments. However, some overall differences can be detected between the comprehensive understanding of Modernism here used and the equally capacious term that will be discussed below as Postmodernism: — Modernist texts, broadly speaking, attempted the creation of a design to impose an aesthetic order on an incoherent existence, while Postmodern texts delight in anarchy, playfulness at times, for different purposes. — Modernism interwove meaning and authority, i.e. the author played a significant part in the meaning of his/her creation. When Postmodern thought suspects any form of authority —historical, political, cultural— meaning is devalued, and then seeks defamiliarization in the construction of meaning. — While Modernist authors sought newness and uniqueness, Postmodern authors often attempt creations that rely on previously created patterns. — Readers of Modernist texts frequently found the necessity to reconstruct from fragmentation, interior monologue, or anachronies. Readers of Postmodern texts face the fact that his or her method of reading and making sense is inadequate, and must deconstruct them. The literary Postmodernism(s) examined in the following Units, particularly fictional pieces, will vary in significant ways and in some cases —such as the Beat Generation— would resent classification under the same epigraph. All of them, however, deny the existence of a universally valid system of belief and claim the collapse of intellectual authority. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard —after whose The Postmodern Condition the period was baptized— argued that the «postmodern condition» is defined by this skepticism. Contemporary thought and art, then, are characterized by the «incredulity toward metanarratives» (509), that is, all those grand discourses that legitimize knowledge without questioning the

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institutions that lie behind. The totality of the world cannot be assimilated nor accounted for with one such system or discourse. Accordingly, many Postmodernist works will be invested with a strong epistemological component —on many occasions the plot itself being designed as a detective quest. The search for truth and knowledge is thus questioned because the system of ideas normally employed proves inadequate. Multiplicity of discourses and worlds replace the old philosophies. Taking the idea further, Jacques Derrida states that language itself —the bridge between the self and the world—mediates this relationship. Derrida decries the cult for reason or «logocentrism» —the epistemological system that takes for granted the authority of the word and the mind. Language as an arbitrary and volatile system will be present in Postmodern texts more often than not. This interrogation of the linguistic code affects literature seriously: «Although linguistic signs normally demote the non-linguistic entities for which they are signs, this is not the case with literary fiction» (Waugh, 94). In other words, literary linguistic signs refer to literary entities, that is, they are self-contained and self-referential, and constitute an alternative «reality» whose relation to ours in purely arbitrary. Other critics, such as Fredric Jameson, propose that Postmodernism is the result and the expression of late capitalist culture, dominated by the presence of multinational corporations and the triumph of mass communications over the written word. In a cultural landscape where hyperreality and media reproductions eclipse reality, the attention to such reality has ceased to represent a desirable objective of artistic manifestations. The process of art is therefore more attractive than the result of art. But the years after Modernism or Postmodernism do present a set of social upheavals and philosophical preoccupations, among which the following could provide a succinct outline of the intellectual panorama: the complex nature of subjectivity and identity; the relationship between the real and the unreal; history and meaning as constructs; and skepticism about knowledge, scholarship, and information. A significant corpus of literary works responds to this intellectual scenario with noteworthy formal, ideological and aesthetic traits. The term «Postmodernist» was first applied to some narratives of the sixties that consciously interrogated narrative conventions, but it soon spread to all those texts that paid attention to the issues that follow. 236

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Truth and authority After the Second World War thinking practices moved from received, unquestioned truths to relativity of value. Since existence is conceptualized in words which bear no relation to their referent, nothing can be considered absolutely true or universally applicable. While Modernism believed in the Author as controlling agent of the artistic product and creator of aesthetic order, now the notion of authority is brought to the forefront for close examination: since language is only a code that points to itself, any authority or discourse sustained by language can be doubted. Postmodernism questions narrative in its broad sense: any discourse used to account for something. In this light history, science, philosophy, or religion are interrogated and contested for their claim of universality or their search for transcendence. History is particularly examined and undermined as the objective and authentic record of past events, and as such it is considered in need of reevaluation and rewriting. The «official story» discourse started to be much questioned after the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945. If reason and the progress of humanity were behind the atrocities of both World Wars, they could no longer be perceived as legitimizers of other systems of thought. From this viewpoint, Postmodernism holds that there cannot exist one single discourse to apprehend and explain the totality of existence: only a plurality of discourses can therefore account for a plurality of worlds. Experience becomes then a set of possibilities. Postmodern literature has also questioned the metanarrative of scientific or rational discourses, according to which the universe could be discerned through its internal laws and processes. Once empiricist certainties were contested by twentieth-century Physics, the idea of truth behind science collapsed at the idea of unpredictability. The discourses of reason and science were particularly damaged after the Second World War. A number of literary works reflected such skepticism about the power of the human mind to apprehend and comprehend life, and contested reasoning processes both in the characters’ lives and in the readers’ approach to the text. Literary texts were conceived as totalities by the literary critics of the nineteen forties and fifties. Postmodern philosophy, in particular Derrida’s deconstruction, has affected the meaning of literary works by denying their meaning as based on the relationship between language and the world, since language

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is only an instrument that may be mediated. Language is no longer understood as a key to existence but as a shaper of existence, in turn subject to a variety of external conditions. Therefore, the meaning of a text cannot be said to depend on the author or even on the reader, for the linguistic code that has configured such text is a fluent, indefinite entity. The word is not necessarily an elucidator of meaning, so our strives for meaning when we read a text —literary or otherwise— may find a dead-end. The structuralist approach to language established that all elements and its corresponding function fit into a whole. Modernist discourses welcomed this formalist approach, but the Postmodern zeitgeist questions the validity of language as sustainable system or as the instrument for the construction of metanarratives. Language is arbitrary, a set of conventions, where the sign may be granted a multiplicity of signifieds. Notice such idea of polisemy in the following excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, where the protagonist faces the manifold possible interpretations to the enigmatic and paranoid events she is living —parallel to those the reader may make: Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, on to a secret richness and concealed density of dream; on to a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even on to a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors [...] so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are just fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull. (117-118)

(A direct consequence of the growing disbelief in authority is, as the excerpt above suggests, conspiratorial theories and paranoia, which have become the material for much Postmodern fiction.) The sign as a double-faced emblem, in the manner of Saussure’s structuralist theory, is attacked in many Postmodern works, along with its 238

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literary use. As Patricia Waugh has rightly pointed, «Although linguistic signs normally denote the non-linguistic entities for which they are signs, this is not the case with literary fiction» (94). Observe the following somewhat illogical dialogue in Paul Auster’s City of Glass: «What do you do with these things?» «I give them names.» «Names?» «I invent new words that will correspond to the things.» «Ah. Now I see. But how do you decide? How do you know if you’ve found the right word?» «I never make a mistake. It’s a function of my genius.» (78)

Auster mocks the role of the genius, the word-player, and shows a playfulness that a good number of Postmodern authors share. In Auster’s view language is an artifice, not a vehicle for the transmission of meanings. Linguistic signs in literature only refer to literary entities —that is, the objects, events and people in literary works— so they are self-contained, self-referential. Reading, then, could be roughly described as the process by which we attempt to attribute signifieds from our ontological system to the signifiers we encounter in the literary text, which belongs to another ontological system altogether. Metafiction, that is, self-reflexive fiction or fiction that mirrors the processes by which it is constructed and read, is a major trend in Postmodern literature. Metafictive works such as Auster’s City of Glass and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 invite deliberation on these processes and on fiction’s basic components such as plot or genre, i.e. frames —to be analyzed in the following section— and the expectations created in the reader by force of custom.

Ontological categories We live by the set of frames or ontological or cognitive categories defined by culture (gender, class, nationality, age, etc.). In literary criticism a frame is any plan, structure, or support that underlies a literary text. Stories, as well as history or life itself, is constructed, perceived and understood through frames or cognitive models that organize the contact between the subject and experience. Take, for instance, the discourse that

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has sustained racial inequality in the United States, or gender patterns, or the laws of writing and reading entailed in literary genres. Frame-breaking attempts to lay bare these conventional frames that construct and condition life or literature. Frames, categories and models have boundaries that set limits to how we perceive and understand experience. Boundaries, however, can be easily trespassed: for instance, the literary limits of genre, style, traditions, reader/ fictional world or creator/receptor. Among the frames that constitute the literary text, the author as creator as well as fundamental figure in the literary process is one of the most discussed by Postmodern works: Very often the Real Author steps into the fictional world, crosses the ontological divide. Instead of integrating the «fictional» with the «real» as in traditional omniscient narrative, he or she splits them apart by commenting not on the content of the story but on the act of narration, on the construction of the story. (Waugh: 131)

In Postmodern literature, that is in a time of revision of fundamental literary concepts, the author emerges as another linguistic construction who does not exist before or outside language. If traditional notions of text, author, and meaning become shifty, authority —that is to say, the author’s creation and control of the work— is equally interrogated. Readers find themselves active parts of the process of meaning. Take, for instance, this excerpt taken from «Life-Story,» one of John Barth’s short pieces: The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame? (1988: 127)

Barth shatters here the boundaries of time, place and situation. Similar boundaries are challenged by the openness of the Postmodern text which, unlike previous notions of literary works as closed pieces beginning in the author and ending in the reader, offers intertextual connections to other texts. If a text is part of an immense body of texts that shapes its reading, the traditional idea of author(ity) requires revision, for the agent who wrote the 240

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text does not own total control over the structure and the meaning of his or her text. The excerpt from Barth’s story quoted above breaks the frame of the author as a figure assumed to be external to the text, for it makes the author a component of the text —hence the author becomes another creative construction. As Roland Barthes asserts, We know now that the text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author – God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (146)

Thus, Barthes pointed at the solidity of the world represented by Realism. That solidity is lost as the image of the creator is lost as well, what he defines as «the death of the author.» This symbolical death entails that the literary text holds no reference to reality and no origin. Only writing itself, écriture, remains. As Barthes himself explains: [W]riting is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing. [...] As soon as the fact is narrated this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (168)

Such disconnection dissolves the notion of a preconceived meaning in the hands of an author(ity), and places the reader as a dynamic factor in the literary process. Readers are creators of meaning, forced into this position by the presentation of a reality that had lost its consistency, its center, its hierarchies. In his collection The Death of the Novel and other Stories, Ronald Sukenick defined the avant-garde literature of the late nineteen sixties as a set of nonexisting entities: «Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist» (41). Such entities used to establish one basic frame of reference for the approach to the literary text, a humanistic paradigm that undergoes severe review in the decades following the Second World War, and whose revision also affects notions of history and identity.

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Identity The second half of the twentieth century saw the denial of the self as individual, static entity. Identity is understood now as a fluid, unstable construct, subject to a number of coordinates also in flux: sex, age, nationality, race, health.... The human being is not perceived as occupying just one position or category: (s)he can move and be «in between.» As with other conceptual elements in modern life, the notion of self or subject has undergone a deep transformation. The Enlightenment philosophers conceived it as unified and unchanging, and therefore liable to understanding and knowledge; post-Freud thinkers detected the conscious and subconscious constituents of the subject; in Postmodernism, the subject is only a construct of variable components such as language, culture or history, not based on natural principles. If natural and psychological standards have been downgraded in establishing paradigms of selfhood, so have the notions of center and hierarchical organization (nationhood, language, home…). Rhizome-like, identity seems to lack a center, an unchanging point of reference. Observe the following account from the narrator in Paul Auster’s The Locked Room: My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world. (274-275)

Auster defines this non-centeredness in spatial terms, but in subsequent Units American authors of the contemporary era will explore diverse metaphors for fluent subjectivity. Despite the political measures proclaimed in the nineteen sixties to alleviate racial inequalities and intolerance, racism still haunt the diverse racial communities living in the United States. A combination of demographic transformations and cultural movements has brought the voices of the minorities to the forefront. These previously ignored voices have called attention to the plurality of American life and experience, and have questioned the idea of identity in a Postmodern world. Racial and ethnic questions, however, share this space of cultural pluralism with class and gender issues, for all minority groups experience some degree of social or 242

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cultural inequality. Notions of identity, therefore, will play a fundamental part in the imaginative records of dominant and minority groups in the United States. The loss of center and authority in this and other matters has spread to the periphery of American society, where racial, ethnic, gender, class and sexual minorities —or «ex-centric» to adopt Linda Hutcheon’s term— had been defined by their opposition to a dominant stand. From the sixties on, works by Native Americans, Latino/a writers, gays and lesbians, Asian Americans, and other previously silenced authors have claimed their version of history and of Americanness. The disintegration of the idea of a unified history of the United States has given way to other histories, other narratives, and other voices. In Hutcheon’s words, from the decentered perspective, the «marginal» and what I will be calling [...] the «ex-centric» [...] take on new significance in the light of the implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith (that is middle-class, male, heterosexual, white, western) we might have assumed. The concept of alienated otherness (based on binary oppositions that conceal hierarchies) gives way, as I have argued, to that of differences, that is to the assertion, not of centralized sameness, but of decentralized community —another postmodern paradox. (12)

In the last decades, the cultural plurality of the United States has spawned a profusion of literary works where authors employ innovative strategies to describe and affirm their identity. They are usually hybrid, emulating the pastiche techniques of contemporary artists via the combination discourses, of poetry and prose, or imagination and document. This literary strategy defies those texts created by the dominant culture in which the concepts of identity or history are presented as unified phenomena, as Unit Ten will further explore. Not only are traditional literary matters subverted, but ontological issues are equally discussed to challenge the prevailing interpretation of existence and the position of the subject in relation to his/ her experience.

1.2. «A Generation of Furtives»: The Beats The most significant cultural group to emerge in the late forties was the socalled Beat Generation. They functioned as transition writers between Modernists and Postmodernists, prolonging on the one hand the paths

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opened by Modernist poets and inaugurating, on the other, motifs and ideas that would prevail in later years. As it has been mentioned above, the late forties and fifties were distinguished as a period of ideal sameness and homogeneity. The Beat movement chose the margins of the establishment, and rejected the mainstream America. Jack Kerouac’s remark, «It’s a sort of furtiveness... Like we were a generation of furtives,» accounts for the Beat spirit. In their effort to assert themselves as independent selves in every area of life, they embraced and worshipped the social outcasts of their day: from blacks and Mexican-Americans to psychopaths, junkies and criminals. Here are Jack Kerouac’s words: At lilac evening I walked [...] in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night [...]. I wish I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a «white man» disillusioned [...] wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted ecstatic Negroes of America. (On the Road: 169)

The Beats are as difficult to categorize as any other generation or movement in literary history. Professor Ann Charters, for instance, classifies any nonconformist postwar writer under the term «Beat.» Most academic curricula, however, confine the movement to the original authors who first called attention to their unconventional style and ideology. Another troublesome issue when dealing with the Beats is the blending of fact and legend in relation to their actual motivations and activities. To begin with, they lived unorthodox lives, disregarding social and artistic establishments: they rejected white-collar work, the family system, religion, and pop culture. Also, they usually became characters in their colleagues’ texts, which increased the legend about them. Moreover, the media always play a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of subcultures; in the case of the Beats, who were actively involved in their own promotion, the media concentrated on their lifestyle and nonconformism, which were projected as a social danger. The term Beat derived into «Beatnik,» which came to mix the original word and «Sputnik,» the Russian satellite launched in 1957. The last syllable of the satellite provided the American slang with a suffix to form a variety of new words, all of them evoking alienation from the American culture and, therefore, a threat to national ideas and practices. «Beatnik» was thus used to label Beat followers with the stereotype, the 244

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image of the Beats propagated by the media. The actual origin of their name remains quite obscure, although the term reminds of both «beatitude» and «beating down.» The Beats’ heyday spanned from the fall of 1957 —when Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published— until the mid-sixties. They saw themselves as the visionaries who could bring light and knowledge to a stagnant, sickening culture. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Beat poet himself, described the unorthodox lives they led as the true method to be «real realists» by «touching and tasting and testing everything.» They borrowed the figure of the hipster from the African-American jazz tradition, someone in search of new jazz patterns through the use of stimulants. The «square» was the conforming social type that opposed the rebellious «hips» or «Beats.» Norman Mailer —a recurrent partisan of the Beat cause— labeled them «White Negroes» in a 1957 article for their glorification of black culture. Much has been written and researched on the Beats’ allegiance to nineteenth-century Transcendentalism. They were indeed inheritors of the romantic spirit that prevailed in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. However, the Beats’ romantic flavor reached beyond their interest in nature as a source of inspiration and comfort, or in the predominance of the individual over the social system. Thoreau’s claim for civil disobedience is present in the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others. Moreover, Emerson’s concern for oriental philosophies pervade the Beats’ own philosophy and writing, particularly in their quest for expanded awareness and communion with the totality of the universe. Beat writers gave preference to those literary forms scarcely constrained by rigid structures. Accordingly, they felt inclined to write poetry and autobiographical narrative, since both allowed for the spontaneous creativity and the moments of deep insight they stood by. The essential ideological features of Beat literature include a predominantly romantic ideology. They identified with the English Percy B. Shelley and William Blake, Walt Whitman, and the American Transcendentalists as mentioned above. The Beats’ spontaneity and originality were put into practice mostly in painting and jazz music, but poetry and fiction were also tested as capable of spontaneous creation. In this romantic line much has been criticized about their romantic primitivism, the idealization of a pre-industrial primitive folk that the Beats associated with lower-class African Americans. Kerouac

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and other members of their artistic generation had an idealized and somewhat patronizing vision of the black race, similar to the romantic racialism of the nineteenth century —which in truth overlooked racial oppression. Equally romantic was their appeal for members of the underclass like hipsters, hoboes, delinquents, and Kerouac’s «fellaheen» (meaning «the peasantry»), for their uncompromising nature and their rejection of the establishment. The Beat spirit tried to recover the essence of the frontier era to some extent, for it sought independence, intensity, mobility, and closeness to nature. As stated in a previous chapter, the frontier frame of mind implied a masculinist worldview in which women had a marginal position. Youth rebellion is as proper to the fifties and sixties as rock and roll, and the Beats reproduced the resistant soul of youth culture in their own way. Despite the fact that the major works of the movement were nor written by actual youngsters, they paid tribute to youth and its implications: disengagement, adventure and discovery, a language of their own, bizarre alignments, etc. The romantic ideal of individuality was thus fashioned after the youth revolt against «parental» —institutional, historical— authority. As the romantics they claimed to be, the Beats searched for a method to reach beyond the real world of dull surfaces. They pursued transcendence and altered states of consciousness, so they explored the possibilities of drugs, music, or endless driving in a quest for the necessary ecstasies that could illuminate them. Since they were not an exclusively literary movement (there were Beat painters, filmmakers, musicians and photographers) they tried intersections with other artistic fields. The literary members incorporated the inclusiveness of the Beat spirit to their writings, and employed visual and musical strategies to reproduce altered states of perception.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: ALLEN GINSBERG’S BEAT MANIFESTO 2.1. APPROACHING Ginsberg’s Howl Poetry had concentrated around the northeastern region of the United States —particularly New York and Chicago— in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the nineteen fifties poets started to gather in California, mainly in the San Francisco area. As Daniel Hoffman puts it, 246

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In California, traditional home of refugees from the burdens of tradition, they became the bards of the cult of complete personal freedom, of the nascent drug culture, of beatific visions and Oriental religions, of communal living. They were the vanguard and Pied Pipers of the Hippie movement a decade later. (518)

Howl was the product of this environment, and its first public reading remains one of the most outstanding landmarks in the history of American literature. Ginsberg read an incomplete version of the poem on October 13th, 1955 at the Six Gallery, San Francisco, and was later published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956, with an introduction by poet William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg (1926-1997) read English Poetry at Columbia University, so he was well acquainted with the rhymes and images of nineteenth-century poets. He adopted their styles in his initial steps in poetry, until William Carlos Williams encouraged him to write about everyday experiences in everyday speech. Ginsberg then abandoned rigid poetical patterns and turned to the vivid images and fresh language he is best known for. He engaged himself in the recollection of fragments of his own life, taperecording of moments, and scraps from his personal journal, and then composed Howl using this pastiche method. This poem is a Beat manifesto in praise of the American outsiders. It presents a social reality in which the limits between belonging and exclusion are brutally marked by the cultural mainstream. Allen Ginsberg used desolate imagery to convey the idea of alienation, and protested the nation’s surrender to conformity and contentment. He raised scandal due to his acknowledged homosexuality and his use of drugs, and even was under trial for obscenity. Ginsberg and the Beats sought spiritual liberation and their compositions echoed their quest, «manifesting itself in candid personal content and open forms, in verse and prose, thus leading to admiration for Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and other avant-garde writers» (Watson: 5). If all poetical forms are designed for recitation in one way or other, Beat verse was even more focused on orality because it was composed to be read out in club public readings. As surveyed in Unit Two of this volume, «free verse» cannot be regarded as the mere lack of rhyme and rhythm in a poem. It often entails a substitute rhythmic pattern to compensate for the loss of musical power that follows the removal of rhyme and rhythm. Modernist

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poetry, for instance, frequently resorted to phrase and line length to replace metrical feet. Ginsberg would find rhythmic structures for his poems in jazz patterns. Read the poem paying especial attention to the period’s cultural atmosphere, and also bear in mind…

 The distinctive use of the free verse and the long line.  The mechanisms to create rhythm, particularly anaphora and parallelism.

 The poem’s cultural references and allusions.  The surprising use of imagery.  The denunciation of modern life and the regret for its victims.  Ginsbrg’s vision of himself as a messiah with a message to diffuse. 2.2. REVISITING Howl Howl is a literary denunciation of the unbalancing effects of modern culture and the Eisenhower period. It depicts a spiritually void America, ruined by Moloch —Ginsberg’s image for greed and industrialization. It was dedicated to poet Carl Solomon, who Ginsberg met at a mental institution, and whose acute statements after shock treatment provided Ginsberg with much of the material for the composition of Howl. The poem is structured in three parts: the first one censures the lamentable damage done to the poet’s contemporaries; the second one is a poetic charge on the «pure machinery» of Moloch; and the third part extends the boundaries of Rockland —the mental asylum where Carl Solomon was voluntarily confined— to contemporary America. Ginsberg thus associates the spiritual poverty of modern life with mental breakdown, soul and reason being equally injured by literal and figurative machinery. Ginsberg’s style reveals multiple influences. It greatly reminds of Walt Whitman’s poetics (indeed, Whitman’s unconventional life resembled Ginsberg’s, who had Whitman as a character in some of his poems). Whitmanesque long lines, incantory repetitions, and syncopated rhythms can be traced in Howl. Whitman, it should be remembered here, was highly 248

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influenced by opera singers holding notes. Edgar Allan Poe was also a major influence on Ginsberg’s work, for Poe was among the first poets that Ginsberg read as a child. Poe’s long-line structure in such poems as The Raven, and its hypnotic musicality, inspired Ginsberg’s theory of the reunion of body and the mind through both poetic composition and reading (Pollin: 539). Thus, the «inspiration» required to write or read a long line is both a physical and a mental act, as the body inhales a certain amount of air and, at the same time, the poet or reader achieves a sublime state of consciousness. In tune with Ginsberg’s attempt to defy contemporary schizophrenia by reconciling body and mind, he approached poetic composition as an instrument to energize the body: his poems resemble songs or chants with a view to awaken dancing responses in the reader. (In fact, public readings of Ginsberg’s works served this purpose.)

 The

poem abounds with references to intoxicating substances. It also offers a good number of images related to light and illumination. Catalogue all these references and relate them to the extreme awareness the Beats sought.

Ginsberg worked with extracts from his journal that he transformed into long poetic lines, inspired by the poets mentioned above and by the way jazz musicians played their instruments —in particular, those that require the breath power of the musicians. Ginsberg arranged his creations according to what he called «breath units,» a poetical and meditative system by which a line takes the linguistic space provided by one physical breath. He used it to measure lines, one breath equaling one line, but breath also functioned as a measure of life itself, each meaningful moment contained in one breath. Each line was independent and unrelated to the poem as a metric whole, so that syntactic structures comprised the rhythmic energy of the composition. Also employed by Whitman and Williams before, this device «provide[d] him with enormous freedom to improvise and to include in his poetry all imaginable themes» (Rodríguez Mosteiro: 808). Repetition is a forceful device in Howl. The poem greatly relies on reiteration of ideas, words, sounds, and syntactic structures. These devices

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provide the poem with an internal rhyme that replaces the tyranny of end rhyme, and that enlivens the musicality proper to the verse form. The stylistic device of anaphora may be roughly translated as «to carry back.» It is a rhythmic and rhyming mechanism, it should be recalled here, by which the initial word or phrase of a line is repeated along two or more lines of a poem. Thus, a line begins with the anaphoric word or phrase and then continues to explore its own idea or emotion, until the poem carries the reader back to a new line, starting again with the anaphoric structure, and thus preparing the reader for the exploration of new concepts of feelings. Howl is thus composed of lines that remind of jazz improvisation, explorations of tones and rhythms that always return to a certain pattern. In the poem, similarly, the repeated words function to keep the beat. «Who» in the first section of the poem, «Moloch» in the second, and «I’m with you in Rockland» in the third are anaphoric structures that create rhythmic sequences and thematic units.

 What forms of repetition does the poet use in Howl, besides anaphora? Look for examples of alliteration and parallelism in the text. Remember that reading a poem aloud is the best test for its rhyme and rhythm.

Juxtaposition of images is another stylistic device to examine in Howl. Incongruous images are fused to present a shocking, surrealist reality. This strategy of provocative associations challenges the readers’ rational assumptions and expectations. In line three, for instance, «starry dynamo in the machinery of night» is a significant sample of unusual juxtaposition, and we can find others in: who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary Indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa […]. (NAAL: 2577-2578)

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Why are these fusions shocking? What categories or planes of existence are they fusing? Think for instance of the binomials organic and inorganic, or the holy and the unholy.

Allusions are central to the poem. Unit Two already defined the term as the reference to people or events commonly known by the audience. The allusive power of the poem situates concepts in space, history, and art, thus creating a network of cultural references in which the poet’s howl is deeply embedded: who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night (NAAL: 2576)

Paronomasia, or puns, operate on the polysemous character of some words. For instance, «El» in line five refers to both the New York elevated train and to the Hebrew word for God. A similar wordplay can be found in line thirty-two, where the «Wall» stands for both the well-known Wall Street and the Wailing Wall. As mentioned above, Ginsberg’s work was intensely audience-conscious, performative, and oratorical. His poems inherited the rhetorical force of Whitman’s chants, the call-and-response structure of jazz music, and even Hebraic scripture (which, along with the visionary trait of his poetry, reflects his Jewish background). Sentences are placed together paratactically, i.e. without connective words, in order to string them into a discursive juxtaposition. A litany-like composition is thus achieved. Howl reveals the Beats’ belief in awareness through meditation, a practice involving a mental process that Ginsberg transformed into a creative one as he used each breath unit to develop acute mindfulness. As the poem evidences, Ginsberg’s spiritual frame was a complex one: it partook from Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Poet and scholar Paul Hoover quotes Ginsberg claiming that such writing process «is an absolute, almost Zenlike, complete absorption, attention to your own consciousness [...] so that the attention does not waver while writing, and doesn’t feed back on itself

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and become self-conscious» (Hoover: xxx). References to «Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballah» (line twenty-four) hint at distant mindscapes that the poet claimed. Like his Beat mates, he understood the poet’s role and creative process as intensely linked to extreme states of consciousness, whatever the methods employed to achieve such state. As to the poem’s themes, the first idea exposed and explored in Howl is that of the madmen of his time, to his eyes a most acceptable and admirable social kind. Jack Kerouac adhered to this glorification in On the Road, as he equaled madness with total freedom and unrestraint —the Beats’ major goal and frame of mind: «[T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!» (Kerouac’s On the Road: 11)

 Howl praises «madmen» and other marginal figures considered subversive at the time of the poem’s publication. What other ex-centric types are made visible in Ginsberg’s composition?

The poem’s title reflects the anger and anxiety of the speaker, whose pitch encompasses his growing concern. Howl shows an in crescendo tone derived from the accumulative effect of the repetitive denunciations. It reveals an increasing parataxis towards its closing, where the voice gains a climatic pitch through a discourse below or beyond conversational levels: I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free (NAAL: 2583)

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The poem ends abruptly, unpunctuated, as if the voice carrying the howl had been extinguished, or as if stopped by a sudden awakening —or collapse.

The Beat Generation had its roots in the conformist spirit of postwar America. The Beat artists subverted the acquiescent, homogeneous cultural panorama with works that claimed freedom of thought, speech and act, spontaneity of form, and sublime states of consciousness. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl illustrates Beat literature through its particular understanding of poetic material and rhythms, its defense of marginal figures, and its denunciation of modern life.

3. TEXT ANALYSIS: THOMAS PYNCHON’S ENTROPIC VISIONS 3.1. APPROACHING Pynchon’s «Entropy» Thomas Pynchon is a misleading writer who challenges those critics and readers who rely on biographical information to approach his works. Indeed, Pynchon has proved as elusive and puzzling as his works, refusing to make his personal life public with the exception of a few details. He was born on Long Island, New York, in 1937 and graduated from Cornell University sometime in the late fifties. If Postmodern literature is called the literature of entropy or chaos because it has rejected the creation of meaning as its main objective, Pynchon is one of the best literary representatives of the moment. His prose, particularly that of his longer works, is nonlinear and challenging, and he represents the world as a set of possibilities where one fixed referent seems impossible. Fond of polisemy and intertextuality, Pynchon’s works defy authorial control over meaning and obstruct the readers’ search for it. His novel The Crying of Lot 49 is, possibly, his most illustrative work. Structurally complex, cryptic, and drawing from popular culture, this narrative mirrors postmodern life and sensibility in the protagonist’s paranoid search for certainty. Pynchon majored in engineering, so his scientific and theoretical background informs his writing and casts a gloomy shadow on the lives of

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his characters. Indeed, Pynchon’s works communicate the idea that technological progress is behind modern distress, and challenges the meaning of thought. Contemporary scientific discourse permeates his stories and projects on them the notion that an entropic understanding of the universe has replaced any divine or rational organization. Making sense of the world, then, is conveyed as a painstaking task. Communication theory and the physical laws of thermodynamics inform Pynchon’s works, supplying them with terms like «white noise» (referring to the superabundance of communicative acts from where it is difficult to single out independent elocutions) and «heat death» (which is applied to situations where irrevocable disintegration occurs). Entropy, in the second law of thermodynamics, measures the disorderliness of things. Broadly speaking, entropy is the random but irreversible tendency of a system to lose energy and, finally, to run down. Thermodynamics can be defined as the field dealing with energetic exchanges. For instance, cold and hot objects exchange heat in a onedirectional way: from the hot ones to the cold ones. These exchanges take place between systems which are in different states because this difference is what brings forth the transfer of energy: the energetic flow compensates the differences. At a certain point, in systems which are long enough in contact, this energy exchange ends up because the systems reach a common state. In closed systems, where energy cannot go in or out, energy is conserved and entropy increases. «Entropy» was first published in the Kenyon Review in 1960, and later became part of the volume Slow Learner (1984), composed of five stories written between 1959 and 1964. In his «Introduction» to the collection, Pynchon acknowledged his debt to countercultural movements of the nineteen fifties and sixties, in a moment of his career when he was trying to find his own voice halfway between the excesses of the Beats and the scholarly methods of Eliot. This story is a challenging text for several reasons, so readers are advised to bear in mind… The story’s double setting, functioning as closed and open systems.  The scientific concepts structuring and informing the plot.  The allusions in the story.  254

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Its playfulness regarding meaning.  Its unpromising view on culture. 

3.2. REVISITING «Entropy» As stated in the previous section, sameness (energetic, cultural…) causes equilibrium and stagnancy. Pynchon’s story make us reflect on the terms «chaos» or «disorder,» which are often used in a derogative way. The story takes place in Washington, D.C., during the Red Scare time, namely, those years in the history of the United States when leftist ideas were considered threatening for the welfare of the nation. But the contextual information also hints at the cultural heterogeneity of the moment, certainly more plural than the master discourses of the day revealed or desired. As usual with Pynchon’s works, the characters in «Entropy» are engaged in uncertainty and the limits of knowledge. Attempts to weave a meaningful system of ideas and values are challenged by a seemingly nonsensical world that defies deciphering. Entropy has been applied to other systems beyond thermodynamics for quite a long time now. Communication theory, for instance, has drawn from entropic systems extensively. Entropy enters Pynchon’s story in its three main definitions: as the measure of randomness in a closed system, as the measure of thermal energy no longer available to work, and as the measure of the loss of information in the transmission of a message. These three types of entropic occurrences take place in the three households mentioned in the story: Meatball’s, Callisto’s, and Saul’s. When the particles of a system have reached thermodynamic uniformity, energy cannot be generated unless it is provided from outside that system. The author stretches scientific concepts in order to apply them to a cultural condition which seems to be reaching its «heat-death,» that is to say, a state of equal temperature in a system producing exhaustion of energy. If heat is energy exchanged, what Callisto means by «cosmic heath-death» is that state where there is no more exchange of energy. The uniformity (in cultural expressions, in temperature…) of the world outside the building in the story seems to announce such a heat-death, in contrast to the excess of «difference» and energy in Meatball’s apartment —a system of high entropic level. Spatial

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disposition is highly relevant to the story. Pynchon would favor labyrinthine structures for his future novels, but in «Entropy» he chose a binary setting for the unfolding of events. On the one hand, Meatball’s apartment is what could be defined as a highly disordered place. In scientific terms, nevertheless, it is an open system that harbors diverse forms of energy. Callisto’s apartment, on the other hand, is a closed system designed to resist the heat-death that Callisto presumes outside: Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder. Through trial-and-error Callisto had perfected its ecological balance, with the help of the girl its artistic harmony, so that the swayings of its plant life, the stirrings of the birds and human inhabitants were all as integral as the rhythms of a perfectly-executed mobile. He and the girl could no longer, of course, be omitted from that sanctuary; they had become necessary to its unity. What they needed from outside was delivered. They did not go out. (NAAL: 2819)

 Difference

creates energetic transfers. Outside the apartment building sameness menaces the lives of American citizens. Read the story in this light: Meatball’s apartment is rich in difference while Callisto attempts sameness.

In Meatball’s apartment, regardless of all its openness, homogeneity starts announcing its presence in terms of sexual identity, as differentiation collapses under a «deconstruction of the power politics within socially constructed expectations for sexual and gender roles» (Hawthorne: 528). Meatball, for instance, walks around with an «empty magnum» which insinuates impotence, and at the end of the story dismisses the idea of locking himself in a closet in order to adopt a provisional nurturing role among the chaos. Callisto, too, attempts to restore the sick bird’s health by holding it close to his chest. In tune with Pynchon’s delight in intertextual references, the text opens with an epigraph from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Its reference to the exchangeability of the weather in Miller’s novel announces Pynchon’s story’s concern with climatic conditions: «But for three days now, despite the 256

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changeful weather, the mercury had stayed a 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of apocalypse, Callisto shifted beneath the covers» (NAAL: 2819).

 Why is Callisto so fearful of weather conditions? Why should the word «apocalypse» be related to such fear?

Pynchon suggests a cultural uniformity in the United States of the late fifties which is nearing decay. The combat against the exhaustion of functional energy is manifest in the double closure of the story. In Callisto’s apartment, the absence of energy makes it impossible for him to communicate life to the bird he has been trying to relive. Heat-death, in other words, has reached his hothouse. Callisto’s break-leasing party gets so frantic that energy becomes almost unmanageable. As the narrative shifts from upstairs to downstairs space, the point of view shifts as well. Another consequence of this shifting setting is the distribution of characters according to the space they occupy, to the point that characterization techniques are minimal in «Entropy.» Space and action convey all the information that readers need to know. Moreover, Pynchon avoids providing extra details about the characters’ background by making Callisto himself supply those details. This character dictates his autobiography to Aubade, so that an overall narrative voice is not necessary for the provision of a framework that accounts for Callisto’s strange life. Nevertheless, by making Callisto impose third-person perspective on the narrative of his own life, Pynchon merges his authorial voice —the voice of the creator of Callisto— with Callisto’s narrative and Aubade’s writing, thus providing another exercise of blending. The strategy of the autobiography, moreover, makes the scientific context and its implications available to the reader: «[H]e found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American «consumerism» discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He […] envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred,

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since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease.» (NAAL: 2821)

The quoted excerpt leads us to the third type of entropy mentioned at the beginning of this discussion: informational or communicative entropy. It is related to the amount of information or noise conveyed in a signal, and entails the idea that information cannot be conveyed in the totality of the signal («at 100% efficiency,» NAAL: 2821): «I love you. No trouble with two thirds of that» (NAAL: 2822). Information theory proposes that entropy is low when the potential of the message is high —that is to say, when there are several possibilities of meaning: «No, ace, it is not a barrier [of language]. If it is anything it’s a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: ‘I love you.’ No trouble with two-thirds of that, it’s a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, that’s the one you have to look out for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit.» Meatball shuffled around. «Well, now, Saul,» he muttered, «you’re sort of, I don’t know, expecting a lot from people. I mean, you know. What it is is, most of the things we say, I guess, are mostly noise.» (NAAL: 2822-2823)

If messages are ordered, distinct and closed, then entropy is very high and communication is noiseless. Heat death in information takes place when there is no disorder, no potential, no openness for meaning.

Callisto

is trying to communicate and preserve ideas by dictating to Aubade the story of his life. How does Pynchon guarantee the transfer of energy in the literary systems he creates? Are they open or closed? Think of literature as an immense system of interconnected texts and discourses that exchange energy.

Ineffectual communication is neutralized by musical patterns in the story. Musical imagery is important in «Entropy,» for music supplies organized structures of sounds that create meaning and harmony. Music avoids the problem of referentiality and the inconvenience of ascribing arbitrary signifieds to signifiers. The story employs a fugue-like structure with patterns 258

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and counter-patterns through counterpoints or combinations of musical lines. A theme is stated, and then reiterated by a second voice. The exposition of entropy, therefore, very ironically adopts a harmonious frame that reaches its peak with the crescendo of the party’s wildest moment. Aubade’s character senses all acoustic input as sound, as against the noise that pervades the story «to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals» (NAAL: 2821). Aubade reflects Pynchon’s perception of life in terms of modern Physics, as she is described as a «system» whose «feedback» permits alignment to inharmonious external conditions (in Physics, a «feedback» is any electronic or mechanical reflex that lets a system adjust to outside circumstances). Musical imagery permeates the narrative until the «graceful diminuendo» of the bird’s heartbeat announces a closure in narrative and existential terms. In music, this moment of tension in a fugue is called «pedal point,» of which music theoreticians indicate two types: dominant (for increasing tension) and tonic (for releasing tension). Both concepts are accordingly mentioned in the last lines of «Entropy»: «and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion» (NAAL: 2827).

 Meatball’s and Callisto’s apartment do not exchange heat but sound. How does this transfer work? Think of the basic pattern of fugues (exposition, development and «stretto») to answer the question.

Characters in «Entropy» mirror the countercultural ambience that prevailed in the United States from the late nineteen fifties through the sixties and seventies. Any form of counterculture or subculture contested the dominant discourse, adopting several literary forms: as the «Other» histories sought by minorities, as the emerging cyberpunk literature that explored the lives of those at the margins of technoculture, and as the conspiratorial stories that offered alternatives to the established system. «Entropy» briefly explores the second trend of the American subculture of the nineteen fifties, but Pynchon would also develop the third topic in his future novels. Humor is ubiquitous in Pynchon’s prose. He delights in presenting absurd situations, unexpected plot turns, and thought-provoking character names to defy the reader’s encounter with the text. A story like «Entropy»

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advances these Pynchonian traits, and in addition it mostly plays with the overloading referentiality of cultural allusions.

 Think

of the two main characters’ names. How do connotation and/or allusion make you think of those names as symbols? How are your expectations about the symbolic power of language challenged?

«Entropy» acquires a farcical tone in its exploration of solemn issues through bizarre characters and events. Many of the characters at Callisto’s wild party have responsibilities in national institutions, but are nonetheless portrayed as pitiful and unproductive figures. Take, for instance, the government girls who «had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink» (NAAL: 2818), or the ex-Hungarian freedom fighter who loses all varnish of heroism when he is described as a salivating Don Giovanni. Thus, Pynchon challenges usual characterization frames by drawing on irony, that is, the device that offers the opposite to that which is expected.

The Postmodern period, in its broadest sense, reveals an acute questioning of any kind of authority and a deconstruction of meaning. The literary text suffers from these contestations to traditional understandings of the sign, and examines the essential components of the literary scheme. Thomas Pynchon’s «Entropy» displays a Postmodern trait in its questioning of scientific metanarratives and reason, its defiance of binary oppositions, and its playful challenge to the reader’s expectations.

4. EXERCISES 4.1. Test yourself On Allen Ginsberg a) Why is Ginsberg’s poem named Howl? Does it reflect in the tone employed? b) What rhythmic devices does the poem reveal? 260

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c) How does the poet achieve the amazing effects of his imagery? d) To what extent does Howl represent the Beat spirit? e) How is the influence of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe traceable in Howl? f) What is the function of allusions in the poem? g) How does paronomasia work? h) How does the poem challenge the myths about American life that prevailed in the nineteen fifties and sixties? i) Why are references to intoxicating substances important in the poem?

On Thomas Pynchon a) Why is «Entropy» an appropriate title for Pynchon’s story? b) How does informational entropy interact with thermodynamic entropy in the story? c) How do cultural references work in it? d) How does the story herald the Postmodern sensibility? e) How does space configure the theme of the story? f) In what ways is the scientific concept of heat-death important in this story? g) What is the role of humor in «Entropy»? h) Why does Callisto dictate his autobiography in the third person? i) What is the importance of the characters’ names?

Summary questions a) How do Ginsberg’s Howl and Pynchon’s «Entropy» respond to the postwar social landscape of the United States?

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b) Why are outcasts or unappealing figures important elements in the late forties and fifties in America? c) In what different ways does music shape the works of Ginsberg and Pynchon? d) How do the two authors analyzed in this Unit challenge the discourse of reason and logic? e) What are the main ideas springing from the Postmodern zeitgeist? 4.2. Explore a) Howl was brought to court for obscenity but the judge finally sanctioned its commercialization on account of «some redeeming social importance» it had. Can you locate the poem’s redeeming qualities? b) Paul Hoover included some fragments of Howl in his Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, due to its opposition to «the centrist values of unity, significance, linearity, expressiveness, and a heightened, even heroic, portrayal of the bourgeois self and its concerns.» Discuss in relation to the sections you have read. c) To what extent does the lack of biographical information shape or damage your reading of Pynchon’s «Entropy»? d) Compare the urban landscapes portrayed by Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Pynchon in their works. Do they hold different attitudes towards the industrialized sceneries they reproduced? What tone do they reveal? e) Discuss sexual imagery in Pynchon’s story, bearing in mind the ideological heat-death that Pynchon seems to announce in «Entropy.» f) In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon expressed his dislike for «Entropy» on the basis of his attempt to force a theme onto the characters. Do you agree with Pynchon’s impression that «Entropy» became too conceptual, in detriment of characterization? g) Think of «rebels without a cause» of the period, as portrayed in films and other popular forms. Try to connect them to the contents of this Unit. 262

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4.3. Key terms — — — —

Beat literature Breath unit Deconstruction Frame / Frame-breaking

— Logocentrism — Metafiction — Metanarrative

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5.1. Recommended readings — «American Literature since 1945,» NAAL: 2083-2092. — On Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl at the Six Gallery: http://www.english.uiuc. edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/performance.htm — Steven Burt’s Review on Howl and its sources: http://www.slate.com/id/2140162/ — Jason A. Snart’s article «Disorder and Entropy in Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’ and Lefebvre’s ‘The Production of Space.’» http://dc.cod.edu/englishpub/46

5.2. Critical works cited ROLAND BARTHES. 1977. «The Death of the Author.» Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1984. ANNE CHARTERS. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Detroit: Gale Research,1983. LESLIE A. FIEDLER. «Cross the Border – Close that Gap: Post-Modernism.» In American Literature Since 1900. 1975. Ed. Marcus Cunliffe. Penguin Books: 1993. MARK D. HAWTHORNE. «Pynchon’s Early Labyrinths.» College Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), 78-93. — «Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon’s Slow Learner.» Style, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall, 2000), 512-529. DANIEL HOFFMAN (ed.). «Poetry: Schools of Dissidents.» Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Press, 1979.

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PAUL HOOVER (ed.). Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Press, 1994. LINDA HUTCHEON. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1999. BURTON R. POLLIN. «Edgar Allan Poe as a Major Influence upon Allen Ginsberg.» The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Fall, 1999), 535-558. ANA M. RODRÍGUEZ MOSTEIRO. «Ginsberg and the Presence of Walt Whitman in his Poetry.» Fifty Years of English Studies in Spain (1952-2002). Actas del XXVI Congreso de AEDEAN. U. de Santiago de Compostela, 2003, 807-812. RONALD SUKENICK. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: The Dial Press, 1969. STEVEN WATSON. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. PATRICIA WAUGH. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Methuen, 1984.

5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Paul Auster (1944-): His New York Trilogy is by now a classic in contemporary fiction. City of Glass tells the story of Quinn, a detective-fiction writer that assumes the role of a real detective to set out on a quest after an elusive character. On his quest he encounters another detective, called Paul Auster. The novel’s net of real and fictive identities proposes a reevaluation of the notions of subject, author, character, and fiction itself. John Barth (1930-): Lost in the Funhouse (1968) is a collection of fourteen stories arranged as a Künstlerroman or novel of artistic development. Ambrose, the protagonist, matures as a writer of fiction along these unusual stories from which the reader is constantly enticed. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): On the Road (1957) describes the journeys of Sal Paradise —a persona of Kerouac— and his friends across the country in search of beauty

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and beatitude. In tune with the Beat spirit, it challenges political and literary authority. Thomas Pynchon (1937-): The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) narrates Oedipa Maas’ quest upon receiving a mysterious legacy. It is narrated in a humorous but interrogative spirit about the ideals and customs in the United States, and its reflection of the incongruities of mass society make of this novel one of the paramount works of American Postmodernism. A secret postal service, a craftily-organized plot, a number of extravagant characters, and a net of surprising connections configure a witty, puzzling plot that mirrors Pynchon’s entropic sense of existence that percolates through contemporary life.

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Program 1. PRESENTATION: After the «tranquilized fifties» 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Adrienne Rich’s empowered voice 2.1. APPROACHING Rich’s «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» 2.2. REVISITING «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Amiri Baraka’s black power 3.1. APPROACHING Baraka’s Dutchman 3.2. REVISITING Dutchman 4. EXERCISES Learning objectives — To understand the complex social and artistic context of the American nineteen sixties. — To examine the literary strategies of the period’s prose and poetry to reflect the writers’ commitment in social and political issues.

1. PRESENTATION: AFTER THE «TRANQUILIZED FIFTIES» Postmodern reevaluations of the centers and margins of discourse involve the dissenting texts of the 1960s. After the «tranquilized fifties» —as put by poet Robert Lowell— came a time of discord, a period whose intensities and excesses would impregnate literature. The «sixties» as a cultural period is said to begin with the advent of John F. Kennedy to the presidency of the United States in 1960. President Nixon’s resignation and the end of the Vietnam War took place in 1973, considered by many to indicate the end of the period. President Kennedy’s administration announced openness against the monolithic ideology of the preceding years, but the decade proved to be one of the most tumultuous moments in American history. As surveyed in the preceding Unit, the nation aimed at cultural homogenization after the Second World War. However, difference emerged

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everywhere. The apparent tranquility of the nineteen fifties was in fact sheltering a nationwide restlessness that finally broke out in the nineteen sixties. For many thinkers, Postmodernity began in these contradictory but highly stimulant years of conflict and interrogation: the Civil Rights and the Women’s Liberation Movements, antiwar marches, the nuclear threat, the emerging counterculture, the Cold War, space exploration and the rising power of the media characterized this era. Violence revealed itself on newspapers’ front pages and on television screens with the assassinations of such leading figures as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy. The term «Postmodern» began to be uttered in the academic sphere as part of a discourse that questioned intolerance, power, and authority. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 implied the end of the «American Camelot» —his project for a unified and prosperous America. Kennedy’s administration was the first to provide military support to South Vietnam, and this war added a new component of friction to the disturbed climate that had already set in throughout the Sates. It divided the nation into supporters and detractors of the conflict, and entailed an entire loss of innocence and idealism with which the Americans had looked upon themselves in the prosperous preceding years. It held up a mirror that reflected a deep contradiction between the ideals of democracy and freedom they wanted to personify and the atrocities of the war. But the Vietnam War had only widened the cracks already existent in the United States from the end of the Second World War. The country had developed a policy of national and international containment to preserve a number of political and social conditions which could hardly resist any more restraint: When the anti-war movement exploded in protest against the Vietnam War, so did all the other movements against cold-war containment: the feminist movement, the antinuclear peace movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and of course the movement for civil rights not only for African-Americans but also for Chicanos, American Indians, and other racial minorities. (May in Marín: 18)

In this postwar context, American women saw how the end of the conflict extinguished the aspirations and careers that the war had encouraged. When veterans returned home they recuperated the jobs that women had provisionally occupied. Moreover, in the years following the war a conservative attitude in sexual matters arose that affected women and men 268

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alike, but women’s sexual habits were regarded more inflexibly than men’s. Sexual intercourse was only consented when it was heterosexual and intramarital, so that sexually active but unmarried women, gays and lesbians had to face severe social condemnation. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was a ground-breaking study of the condition of American womenhood. It reflected the frustration experienced by women in domestic roles that undervalued their actual capacities, and questioned the belief system that forced them to find reward and self-fulfillment only in the domestic sphere. These were its opening lines: The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night —she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question— «Is this all?» For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire —no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. (Friedan: 15)

Friedan’s book participated in the transformation of a consciousness that was already under revision. It triggered the second wave of feminism, and illuminated the lives and works of many thinkers and artists around the world. The acquisition of a personal voice to claim and represent one’s position in society, and control of the female body were specific strives of this feminist activism of the nineteen sixties. Consequently, Adrienne Rich’s poem analyzed below contains imagery related to body and voice. In regard to the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King’s non-violent and integrationist leadership left an outstanding mark on the history of the United States. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed to desegregate public facilities, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which disallowed racial discrimination in voting practices. Despite these evident achievements,

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racism persisted. A more radical activism emerged, and militants like Malcolm X spread the idea that the black issue should only be handled by black people, in order to impose their own perspective on the matter. Malcolm X encouraged the improvement of black communities instead of working for integration, as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka discusses in his play Dutchman (analyzed in the present Unit). The discourse of some Black Power advocates supported violence as a racial right, and discouraged integration. Both types of activism sought, nevertheless, to uplift the black race and to strive for a unity that history or specific circunstances usually repressed. Both Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka typify the standpoint adopted by a good number of writers of the decade, for whom the personal is political and in whose work we can detect activism through literature.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: ADRIENNE RICH’S EMPOWERED VOICE 2.1. APPROACHING Rich’s «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» Adrienne Rich (1929-) was born in Baltimore (Maryland) to a non-practicing Jewish father and a gentile mother. Despite her very complete education (she graduated from Radcliffe in 1951), she resented the ambivalence of a cultural environment where she was intellectually encouraged while taught southern manners and female passivity. She therefore felt a sense of contradiction and division, «split at the root» as she would define it years later. Harriet Davidson accounts for such rupture of Rich’s identity: «both Jewish and casually anti-Semitic, educated to conform to stereotypes of feminine behavior and to question, critique, and aggressively challenge the world as it is» (in Showalter 1993: 297). She published her first volume of poems (A Change of World, 1951) after being selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series. Years after she acknowledged that she had been writing under the influence of male forms and themes, especially those by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats and Auden himself. His preface to the volume misread but praised Rich’s artistry as well as her modesty and her respect for the elders, a patronizing support that she would challenge and transcend in her future compositions. She would release the half-hidden passions of her early 270

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poems, and would defy the patriarchal constructions of history and language. As the quotation that follows shows, hers is a political poetry, an art that demands from readers the same commitment that she puts into practice as a writer: You must read, and write, as if your life depended on it. [...] To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your readings your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and, simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce the routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. To read as if your life depended on it—but what writing can be believed? Isn’t all language just manipulation? Maybe the poet has a hidden program—to recruit you to a cause, send you into the streets, to destabilize, through the sensual powers of language, your tested and tried priorities? (1993: 32-33)

Her early poems already suggested women’s oppression through imagery of opposing forces, particularly those related to creativity and domesticity. However, the formalism she had inherited and imitated, so praised by her male contemporary critics, constricted her awakening self-consciousness as a woman in the early stages of her art. As a result, these youth poems are characterized by «feeling’s absence. The universality for which Rich strove is not a state of being, but of nonbeing» (Bennett: 182). She would acknowledge such personal and formal confinement in her landmark essay «When We Dead Awaken»: [B]eneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men. [...] In those years formalism was part of the strategy —like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded. (1979: 40-41)

Increasingly alert of her complex, sometimes contradictory, identity as a poet and a wife, she spent the eight years between her second and her third books reflecting on the roles that society had constructed for women. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law was published in 1963, after the birth of three children that had drastically shattered the ideal image of motherhood so widely publicized during the nineteen fifties in the United States. Frustration and a sense of disloyalty provoked a deep feeling of guilt in

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Rich, who at moments perceived herself as an anti-woman woman, i.e. as a monster. In the nineteen sixties, however, she found in feminism the means to comprehend and handle gender issues and their relation to creative and personal power. The feminist theoretical framework helped her to understand the difference between motherhood and marriage as experiences and as patriarchal institutions. Anger and imagery of the monstrous, then, shaped the initial feminist consciousness of her poetry. From then on, Rich would insistently portray rebellious women who resented their commitment to patriarchal patterns they were contributing to reproduce. The title poem of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law —to be discussed below— provides a written instance of the climatic moment Rich was at that time living as a woman and a poet. The volume exposed Rich’s experience as a woman for the first time, and such experience became the structural and thematic axis of the poems. It presented new directions in form —which left behind its former closedness— and ideas —with the exploration of political and emotional concerns. Like Emily Dickinson, whose poems she had been rereading, Rich discarded the finished, polished style of previous compositions and adopted the fragmentariness of Dickinson’s verse, as Betsy Erkkila argues, not only a[s] poetic strategy but an emblem of a female way of being and seeing in a world split by the polarities of masculine and feminine, mind and body, subject and object, transcendence and immanence. (548)

If we were to find Postmodern traits in Rich’s work, we should first set eyes in her hearty engagement with history and identity, which separates her from the universalist conception of poetry. Indeed, she aims at reviewing the western consciousness she has inherited, from which she declares herself excluded as a woman and a Jewish. Her growing awareness of women’s historical oppression and subsequent powerlessness has shaped her poetry since the late fifties, an awareness that would later include racebased exclusions as well. Throughout her career, Rich has been concerned with another distinctively Postmodern issue: that of language as a social construct in the hands of men, like history. The struggle to find a real female language has condemned women writers to either adaptation to male discourse or complete silence. «Autumn Equinox,» an earlier poem, offered a similar approach to the only and ineffectual discourse available to women with something to express: 272

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Night, and I wept aloud; half in my sleep, Half feeling Lyman’s wonder as he leaned Above to shake me. «Are you ill, unhappy? Tell me what I can do.» «I’m sick, I guess – I thought that life was different than it is.» «Tell me what’s wrong. Why can’t you ever say? I’m here, you know.» Half shamed, I turned to see The lines of the grievous love upon his face, The love that gropes and cannot understand. «I must be crazy, Lyman –or a dream Has made me babble things I never thought. Go back to sleep –I won’t be so again.»

Rich places this fundamental linguistic breach at the base of marital and societal inequality and breakdown. Her poem «Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw» expands the idea of the «love that gropes and cannot understand» and proposes a mythical figure to make women’s mind and message visible. With a view to get a proper insight into the poem bear in mind…

The fragmentary form of the poem. The contestation of accepted models of womanhood. The poem’s use of quotation and allusion. The imagery related to violence. The reversion of myths as a form of empowerment. The utopian female figure at the end of the poem. 2.2. REVISITING «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» As explained above, «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» is the poem that names Rich’s third volume of poems. Its structure, language, and theme aim at liberation from male-dominated patterns and traditions. Rich wrote it divesting herself from formal and ideological male influences, and placing women at the center of her compositions.

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 Although

the poem’s overall prosodic pattern is that of the free verse, sometimes the freedom is broken. Pay attention for the instances of metrical regularity and end rhyme in the poem.

This poem is particularly interesting for its overt proclamation of women’s position in society, as each «snapshot» reveals a female state of mind. Rich’s 1971 essay «When We Dead Awaken» presents Rich’s own account of the experience of writing this poem: In the late fifties I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman. The poem was jotted in fragments during children’s naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3 a.m. after rising with a wakeful child. [...] Yet I began to feel that my fragments and scraps had a common consciousness and a common theme, one which I would have been very unwilling to put on paper at an earlier time because I had been taught that poetry should be «universal,» which meant, of course, non-female. Until then I had tried very much not to identify myself as a female poet. Over two years I wrote a ten-part poem called «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» (1958-1960), in a longer looser mode than I’d ever trusted myself with before. It was an extraordinary relief to write that poem. (44)

 The title of the poem is significant enough in its announcement of the fragmentary construction that follows, caused by an intermittent writing process. What else does the word «snapshots» suggest? Why is it a powerful visual, and also acoustic, image?

In the title of the poem Harriet Davidson reads an abandonment of «her [Rich’s] idea of poetry as careful craft set against the storms of life» (in Showalter: 299). In other words, the loose form proclaimed by the word «snapshots» would suggest a dismissal of formal correctness as shelter as well as confinement against social forces. However, the bravery entailed by such looseness should not overlook the cognitive implications of the term. Each of the poems composing the volume is to be viewed as a 274

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photograph, a still moment captured from life. Rich started to date her poems in this volume as if to freeze them in time, thus acknowledging and proclaiming the importance of historical moment and context. Paula Bennett interprets the title as the author’s acknowledgement of her mosaiclike awareness, «a compendium of Rich’s new insights, a brief anthology of her gripes» (195). The title of the poem proposes another interesting issue in its central figure, named after the social role she plays. Such label defines the woman in relation to a system based on heterosexual love and marriage, a conventional discourse that Rich would progressively decry both as a lesbian and as a feminist. In other words, the poem’s title suggests that only by marrying a man does the daughter in law exist. Moreover, the figure has been relegated to a secondary position as a double daughter —by blood and by «law.» In a sort of circular disposition of ideas, the ending lines outline Rich’s new woman against patriarchal values («as beautiful as any boy or helicopter»). The poem initially strikes us as a highly literary composition, very academic in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Indeed, the poem offers a profusion of scholarly allusions and quotations from men and women writers alike. Especially meaningful are the references to Simone de Beauvoir and Emily Dickinson, social and literary models respectively through which to reach female awareness and a sense of collective heritage. Rich had read and imitated Dickinson’s poetry in her teens, a reading she resumed in the late nineteen fifties. Dickinson’s concern with confinement and her attention to the power of imagination were paid due homage in Rich’s poem: Reading while waiting for the iron to heat, writing, My Life had stood —a Loaded Gun— in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum, or, more often, iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird, dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life. (NAAL: 2652)

Rich made use of the «loaded gun» as a twofold image: on the one hand, it alludes to the (creative, not destructive) power contained in the gun of the

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imagination; on the other, it invokes a violence that is shared by the overall tone of the poem.

 «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» contains images of physical violence. List these references (paying particular attention to the first and second snapshots) and ask yourself what lies behind them: anger, passion, fear, longing…?

In these intertextual references to women writers Betsy Erkkila has perceived recognition of a female poetic influence that differs from male poets’ influence in that it does not entail competition or conquest. To quote her, «By defining themselves in relation rather than in reaction against each other, these women poets reverse the pattern of male relationships» (544), thus detaching themselves from another line of masculine domination. The poem’s allusive density functions as a complex environment along which the reader, and the female voice in the poem, must find a way towards selfawareness. As in a rite of initiation and passage, transformation is sought and misconceptions are abandoned. In tune with this quest and the initiation patterns mentioned, the poem also appropriates traditionally male elements, like the quester and the outdoors scenario. It starts with a passive southern belle and ends with an active challenger, advancing through the traditionally female confined spaces of the domestic sphere towards the open-air mobility of the final section. Home as an ideal space for women is brutally decried in the poem. In the lines that follow, for instance, it is portrayed as limiting, infuriating, and deranging: Banging the coffee-pot into the sink she hears the angels chiding, and looks out past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky. Only a week since They said: Have no patience. The next time it was: Be insatiable. Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save. Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm, a match burn to her thumbnail. (NAAL: 2651)

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As the excerpt above suggests, and as Rich had also read in Simone de Beauvoir, acquiescence invites self-destruction. Home is therefore attacked as the center of a masculine system to which women are expected to keep loyalty. (In fact, the Women’s Liberation Movement was sometimes associated with Communism in the fifties, because they were both seen as a menace to the American way of life.) Rich empowers female discourse by deconstructing and transforming this national myth of the nineteen fifties, perpetuator of patriarchal structures. Compatible with this resistance is the final section of the poem, where the daughter-in-law is envisioned as a saboteur «or at least as disloyal interrogator [...] of the sacred institutions of family, marriage, heterosexual romance, that is, the foundations of patriarchal civilization (Runzo: 138). Each of the ten sections, or snapshots, of the poem challenge and dismiss preconceptions and stereotypes. In other words, they discard those roles and attitudes socially constructed and conventionally attributed to women. But they also provide lively examples of men’s power to subdue women. For instance, the girl in section five —assimilated to the figures in Horace’s odes—is represented as a sweet and cheerful creature performing a banal activity exclusively for admiration, and her legs are pictured as immobile and useless as «petrified mammoth-tusk.»

 Read the sixth snapshot closely. How is the lute player conveyed? Is she depicted as an agent of creation or as a passive figure? When the poet mentions «adjusted in reflections of an eye,» whose eye is that? Is it male or female?

As mere stereotypical constructions in men’s art or as its imitators, women have been silenced and refused their own language. Female creativity is further discussed in section nine, in which the poet denounces the unfair male judgement to which women’s art must be exposed: «And in his cups drinks to the fair/ bemused by gallantry [...]/every lapse forgiven, our crime/only to cast too bold a shadow/or to smash the mold straight off» (NAAL: 2654). Section seven serves as a climatic moment in this passage: it alludes to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Women (1787).

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Wollstonecraft was a well-known English thinker who struggled for women’s equality and suffrage, and whose influential «Vindication of the Rights of Women» still stands as a protofeminist milestone. This reference to Wollstonecraft’s accomplishments opens a new thread of discussion, since Rich mentions the social punishment that Wollstonecraft had to endure. It is little surprise that there are «[f]ew applicants for that honor» (NAAL: 2654) if merciless contempt is its reward. The final snapshot is truly pictorial in its graphic layout and its visual imagery. The vision conveyed by this snapshot relates a downward movement of the «she» who is to come, a falling motion whose sharpness is represented by the blade-like ending of the poem. Its final words are arranged so as to resemble a pointed instrument, which assimilates the violence of the preceding sections. Instead of creating a wax-winged Icarus who rises beyond limitations, Rich gives birth to a bladed woman who descends, sharp-pointed, and ready to leave her mark. her fine blades making the air wince but her cargo no promise then: delivered palpable ours. (NAAL: 2654)

The flying woman of the vision is a monstrous creature, «part woman, part bird or avenging angel, part boy, part machine» (Davidson in Showalter: 299), who cannot suit normal standards of imagining the world. «A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,» says the poetic voice, thus pointing at the self-destructive power of female imagination. In tune with the physical thread explored above, corporal aggression, deformity or dissolution are suggested as a result of repression, but also as a form of resistance. Virginia Woolf understood creative autonomy as a deadly encounter with the mythical Victorian figure of the «Angel in the House.» In this same line, Elaine Showalter debates that, for women authors, finding artistic independence requires a symbolic annihilation of patriarchal conceptions of women. Accordingly, she continues, imagery of destruction and death is frequent in the literature written by women (207-208). Imagery related to the body, then, focuses the readers’ attention on the specificity of women’s lives, as well as it prepares them for the utopian vision of a woman who has escaped the limits of her own body and mind. 278

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Despite her focus on women and their distinctive experiences, Rich avoided the «I» speaker in this poem. She used a «you» instead that constitutes a very effective rhetorical strategy that intensifies the dramatic form she employs.

 Who

does «you» refer to, besides the daughter-in-law? Who else does the speaker address? How is a collective femaleness created with this use of pronouns?

The «she» figure at the end of the poem acts as representative of empowered women. It also, however, establishes a distance from the personal. In «When We Dead Awaken» (44) Rich would admit her lack of courage at the moment to be so personal as to assume, and be responsible for, the resistance she was exhorting. Like the woman in the second snapshot whose divided self leads her to the brink of mental breakdown, Rich found in creativity and imagination the suitable arena for initiatory activism. The poem displays polivocality, or array of voices, by assuming the voices of other silenced women. As mentioned in the previous section, it is Rich’s belief that language is a male instrument —like history and time— that can only shut women down. Instead of articulating her thoughts in a language not her own, the rebellious «she» figure in «Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw» is silent, physically active but linguistically quiet. Thus, women’s opportunity for verbal expression remains in their appropriation and subsequent reshaping of meanings. Reversion is therefore a powerful and empowering instrument in the hands of women writers.

Adrienne Rich’s poetry and essays stand out as relevant participants in the feminist movement of the nineteen sixties. She became increasingly aware of the gender issues associated to her role as a social and a literary being, and how history defines self. Her poetry underwent a similar evolution, as it gradually lost its formal constriction and acquired metric and ideological freedom. In «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» Rich uses several strategies —allusion and quotation, mainly— in order to question stereotypes concerning womanhood and raise female consciousness.

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3. TEXT ANALYSIS: AMIRI BARAKA’S BLACK POWER 3.1. APPROACHING Baraka’s Dutchman Literature mirrored and nurtured the dissenting atmosphere of the American 1960s. Narrative as well as drama were the modes that best reflected this texture of conditions and social circumstances from which disagreeing voices were emerging. Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones, stands out as one of the most active voices in the political and literary turmoil of the nineteen sixties. If Adrienne Rich’s work is distinguished by its activism in gender issues, Jones’/Baraka’s typifies the racial struggle for social rights and artistic appraisal of the decade. He started his literary career as a poet, under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, and was involved in the Beat movement (he founded Totem Press, which published works by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac). The turbulent years after Kennedy’s death served as a kind of rite of passage for Jones, who developed a more extremist ideology, shifted from poetry to playwriting, and finally changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. The definitive turning point in Baraka’s life and career was the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, after which he decided to engage actively in Black Nationalism (the belief in blacks as a separate nation). He moved to Harlem and established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, where he committed himself to the social and artistic interests of the black community. The Black Arts Movement became known as such in the mid-sixties, when activists of the Black Nationalism started to strive for the definition of a Black Aesthetic. Art and politics were thus decisively linked in this attempt to repudiate white culture and taste. Artistic expressions, accordingly, were conceived as political instruments, that is to say, as manifestations of functional and committed creativity. The Black Aesthetic, in short, envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. (Gayle: 272)

Unsurprisingly, Black Aestheticians dismissed the work of previous African American writers, even that of the most «classic» authors who have 280

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gained recognition and support some decades ago. As a matter of fact, the black protest novels of the nineteen fifties (Richard Wrights’s Native Son, or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) opened the path to the militant works of the sixties that Baraka and the Black Aestheticians demanded. They specially debased the literature written under the «double consciousness,» that is, the tensions underlying the black folk’s life and art. Baraka initially participated in the refutation of those writers in his 1963 essay «Myth of a Negro Literature,» in which he alluded to their unconscious imitation of white models and values —what he came to label white black literature. He softened his arguments in «Philistinism and the Negro Writer,» an essay he published in 1966 in which he explained the political arguments behind his refusal of the black literary tradition. He claimed that the cultural and political implications of the «literature of double consciousness» had been usually overlooked. His own poetry and drama aimed at loading black literature with the necessary racial awareness and social demands. As he declared in «Black Revolutionary Theatre,» The Revolutionary Theatre should force change; it should be change [...]. It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fatbellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is there for them to slobber on [...]. [T]his is a theatre of assault. The play that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. (In Home: Social Essays: 210-215)

Accordingly, poetry should follow the same path of active engagement, away from abstractions and the pursuit of beauty. Baraka and other supporters of the Black Aesthetic understood black music as the sole valid model at the writers’ disposal for the expression of black experience. Readers of this volume may remember that Jazz had a major role in twentiethcentury American Literature: it suited the Modernist demands of primitive forms, and later on typified the social critique exercised by the Beats. Professor Thomas defends that for the seekers of a Black Aesthetic, the jazz musician is not merely the custodian of an authentic folk culture or even the conscious avant-garde artist; he is the leader of rebellion against postwar conformity and the spiritual agent of the politically powerless. (291)

For that reason, «pure» black art would not represent a mere celebration of black heritage, but a form of dissidence and an act of empowering. Baraka

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would try to preserve the energy and dissension entailed by jazz in his poetry and in other literary formulas. Black Art, as articulated by Baraka and some of his contemporaries, employed a rhetorical method that consisted in exaggeration and imagery of violence, much informed by pop culture — particularly grade B movies and comic strips—as can be observed in the excerpt below: We want «poems that kill.» Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff Poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrr... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuh tuhtuhtuhtuh (From A. Baraka’s «Black Art,» 1966)

Statements like the previous have made of Baraka one of the most controversial authors of contemporary American literature. Some scholars, however, have tried to prove that Baraka’s work is not as overtly propagandistic as his credo seems to announce. His overall literary production, indeed, is subtler and more complex than what it could be inferred from his reputation. The dramatic form provided Baraka with action, situations in which he could place interacting characters. As he declared in his The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984), he chose drama for his most combative works because he could transform characters into «living metaphors» and «the fuel of ideas.» After a long and successful period of Beat poetry writing, Dutchman was his first play. It was written in an era of open racial conflict, but it also revealed the unseen personal conflicts embedded in the Black Movement. For many, it was an actual public exorcism on Baraka’s part to free himself of his liberal character in favor of a more committed dedication to the black cause. 282

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When you read this play bear in mind…

 The myths and archetypes that inform the plot and its characters.  The symbolic power of the play, including its title.  The intertwining of gender, class, and ethnic issues.  The pressure of history and its effect on private and communal maturity.

 The violence in its language, tone and action. 3.2. REVISITING Dutchman Dutchman, first staged in 1964, is one of the works that best reflects the nonconformist sixties. It reveals its author’s revolutionary motivation behind the text, and his deep concerns for racial matters. The play criticized the black middle-class integrationists who had embraced the white ideology and its representations. The main protagonist is a persona of Baraka himself in the critical moments he lived around 1964, that is to say, shortly after an illuminating trip to Cuba and a divorce from his white wife. However, the plays seemed to suggest that a step forward should be taken to completely commune with the Black Movement. The play is usually defined, together with the similar The Slave, as a didactic fable, which entails that what they do not permit is a perverse reading. They are in the service of personal and social transformations which make the plays themselves merely means to a social end. They deny density, ambiguity, opacity. The aesthetic becomes suspect. (Bigsby: 285)

Debatable as the former statement is, Dutchman reveals a focused design. Its allegorical structure offers several reading levels and a set of recognizable symbols that orient interpretation and avoid, in C. W. E. Bigsby’s words, «perverse reading.» Andrzej Ceynowa debates that the play’s external form is that of a duel with sexual and racial implications «that only constitute the play’s external form; they are the things that meet the eye first» (16). From his viewpoint, therefore, the play is plotted on a purely abstract level and requires the audience to ascribe meanings to abstractions.

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The setting, a subway train, is perhaps the most distinguishable expressive strategy used by Baraka. It signifies the exploration of issues below the surface of reality; moreover, it points at a concealed («subterranean») subtext that demands attention and debate.

 What else does this setting suggest to you? Is the movement of the train meaningful? Does it contribute to the form of the play as an initiatory journey?

Baraka makes use of archetypal patterns like the descent into darkness to disclose hidden anxieties, repeatedly exploited by American and worldwide authors. Dutchman includes notions of violence, cruelty, decadence, and haunting pasts. The uncanny, related to those hidden desires which have been repressed to adjust to moral and social standards, participates in the story as forcefully as in any Gothic tale. In early nineteenth-century American literature, Gothic fiction narrated the nation’s sense of Otherness, which mostly involved constructions of non-whiteness. These narratives made a racial use of the binary opposition black/white, employing blackness as an expression of horror: for instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s «The Minister’s Black Veil» or Edgar Allan Poe’s «The Black Cat.» Baraka reverses this ontological categorization, revealed in the literary tradition of the Gothic, by transforming blackness into the passive receptor of horror and whiteness into the horrifying agent: White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because they themselves have been trained to hate. The revolutionary Theatre must hate them for hating [...]. They will all die because of this. (Home: 210-211)

 The

representation of women as passive victims and men as active persecutors is another Gothic convention. Can you detect its reversion in the play? Do not overlook Clay’s final symbolic emasculation at Lula’s hands.

Baraka’s play draws heavily from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Several elements in the text remind of the story of Adam and his mates (Eve or 284

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Lilith) as told in the Genesis: the apple, Clay’s book, temptation, ejection…, but the author reverses the myth as he has Gothic formulas. To begin with, Clay’s name alludes to the primary matter of which the first man was supposedly made, thus reinforcing the pattern of the forbidden fruit and the subsequent fall. The apple is a recurrent element in the play, providing a rhythmic pattern and allusive overtones. It supports the characterization of Lula as seductress, and confers mythical overtones to the play that intensify —but also transcend— the racial and political. Here, as in the Biblical pattern, the symbolic power of the fruit includes both Lula’s body and one’s self-knowledge. Lula is a white liberal who tries to seduce Clay. In other words, she attempts to entice him into a sexual encounter that mainly involves an apprehension of his position as a black man in the United States. Clay openly displays this forbidden knowledge after Lula’s verbal allure: he admits his approaches to whiteness, which he later rejects, and shows evidence of his violent racial angst. Clay’s book is another reference to the Genesis, and an approach to logocentrism. In the Genesis there is no evidence of the forbidden fruit being an apple, but it grew on the tree of knowledge whose fruit could grant the capacity to discern good from evil. Clay’s knowledge comes from his readings, and his curse originates in his inability to use such learning in the right way. As he states in his passionate monologue, he has chosen culture and reason over violence —a violence that will ironically destroy him.

 Lula’s name calls attention to Lilith, not Eve. Baraka focuses our attention on Adam’s allegedly first mate, expelled from Eden. Explore this idea briefly and try to see which of Lilith’s features Baraka considered more suitable for his play.

An important thematic concern in the play is that of the symbolic fall: Dutchman is a representation of the loss of grace and innocence regarding race. According to Christian typology, humiliation, expulsion from Eden and spiritual death were the immediate consequences of the fall from grace. George R. Adams, however, points out the «demonic» inversion of the Biblical motif played by Baraka. This scholar argues that Dutchman offers

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a modern and ironic interpretation of the fall of man. To begin with, America’s Eden is represented as a disorderly subway train —that is to say, it is shown as an undesirable place to dwell, so that Clay’s banishment lacks the tragic echoes of the Christian scheme (129). The second Adam —Christ, whose sacrifice may regain Paradise for man— is embodied in the black young man who enters the train after Clay’s eviction. While a pessimistic reading of this resolution is possible, Adams sees this re-born Clay as a Black Messiah who will redeem both tempter and tempted. As conducting story line, the play resorts to sexual courtship. Racial and sexual relations were closely interrelated in the United States in the 1960s, a time marked by openness and rejection of taboos. However, contemporary theatergoers were well aware that such interracial affair had once been chastised with death. Paradoxically enough, the myth that works out the racial and sexual conflict is that of the Genesis —a white, western narrative participating in the logocentric architecture of our culture. Baraka himself stated once in an interview that his play was about the difficulty of becoming a man in America. The work’s protagonist, then, is a young man put to a maturation test in which a woman has a dominant position. As said before, the sexual thread of the play runs parallel to the racial issue that Baraka wants to debate. The mental emasculation that Clay undergoes, therefore, reads also as a sexual powerlessness and a loss of control. The nakedness suggested by the sexual allure evokes the intellectual nakedness that Baraka proclaims as an essential phase, prior to the total commitment to racial issues. Once the white bourgeois symbols and concepts have been eliminated, he suggests, a true black revolutionary self will emerge and finally act. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), an unquestionable touchstone of black literature of the nineteen fifties, calls to mind when reading Dutchman. Ellison’s work described the picaresque-like adventures of a black young man who grows aware of his metaphoric invisibility, that is, the condition provoked by society’s refusal to acknowledge him. As the protagonist states, the invisibility of the African Americans is caused by an inner dysfunction of those who behold, not by some inherent incapacity in black people: «When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or fragments of their imagination —indeed, everything and anything except me» (NAAL: 2298). In Dutchman, Baraka presented Clay as a man attempting invisibility as a black citizen, and disguising himself as a white man with the 286

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help of garments and language. This attire protects him from prejudice and from his own inner, hidden drive to act in search of justice: Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That’s what makes you so attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate, taking hold of his jacket] What’ve you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat for? And why’re you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard. (NAAL: 2750) LULA:

According to Bigsby, the play expresses Baraka’s own dilemma about his position as an artist and a black man (286). In fact, it contains some autobiographical allusions that support this idea, such as one of the names Lula proposes when she tries to guess Clay’s (the author was first called Everett LeRoi Jones), or the New York artistic circle so well-known by the author. The reference to Charlie Parker, a reputed black musician, is a clear allusion to the complexity of pursuing an artistic career when active involvement in the racial cause seems more necessary. In his autobiography, Baraka admitted that the ambivalence of the play revealed his own confusion at the moment of writing it. Indeed, Clay’s character is ambivalent —that is, exposing two different attitudes to the same stimulus— but the author made an asset of this ambivalence, since the play points at a critical issue in the black movement: the definition of identity. Group recognition and affirmation greatly depended on its members’ awareness of their discernible features. Thus, a severe eradication of external influences and impressions was required. Clay must therefore undergo this process of purification or ultimately succumb. The climax of the play arrives after one of Lula’s speech, articulated as a mock emulation of jazz diction and rhythm: [...] And that’s how the blues was born. [Begins to make up a song that becomes quickly hysterical. As she sings she rises from her seat, still throwing things out of her bag into the aisle, beginning a rhythmical shudder and twistlike wiggle, which she continues up and down the aisle] [...]. And that’s how the blues was born. Yes. Yes. Son of a bitch, get out of the way. Yes. Quack. Yes. Yes. And that’s how the blues was born. Ten little niggers LULA:

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sitting on a limb, but none of them ever looked like him. [Points to CLAY, returns toward the seat, with her hands extended for him to rise and dance with her] And that’s how the blues was born. Yes. Come on, Clay. Let’s do the nasty. Rub bellies. Rub bellies. (NAAL: 2754)

The passage above reinforces the racial consciousness that she attempts to extract from Clay, a consciousness that Clay rejects. Lula’s verbal aggression finds reply in Clay’s physical charge, which is in turn answered with Lula’s murdering him. Violence and death impregnate Clay’s final speech, a manifesto that merges the aim of literature («And I am the great would-be poet. [...] Some kind of bastard literature... all it needs is a simple knife thrust») with a political intent: […] Don’t make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you’ll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can «accept» them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of these ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you. They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. (NAAL: 2757) CLAY:

This climactic proclamation is, like Rich’s vision of the flying woman, an anticipation of the future to come. It also encloses a threat, for it devalues the power of reason to perpetuate a feeble status quo. Indeed, Clay seems to insinuate, a «rational explanation» may sustain any kind of racial reaction, from the most peaceful to the most violent.

 What is the role of the knife in the play? Think of it as symbolic phallus, and also as instrument of dramatic and sexual climax.

The title of the play refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the doomed captain that perpetually wanders in search of a selfless love that may deliver him from his curse. In harmony with Baraka’s political views, the reading of 288

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the play makes clear that such encounter is fated to fail. Characterization of the two main characters already suggests that the two figures are too distant for conciliation. Each one represents what the other does not: Lula is female, white, middle-class; Clay is male, black, and «fake» middle-class. History is discussed in the play as an oppressing force. Lula and Clay cannot deprive themselves from their own heritages of oppression and slavery. Like the subway train they ride, history envelops them and generates the desire to destroy. The intellectual and/or sexual encounter is deemed unrealizable as the two parties represented are portrayed as irreconcilable: «[W]e’ll pretend that people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history» (NAAL: 2751). Another meaning of the term «dutchman» is that of the cloth used in theater settings to hide the cracks between flats. This last definition suggests the attempt to provide a façade of union and integration, while in fact joints are imperfect and fragile. Racial prejudice and ethnic stereotypes are so deeply embedded in the play that either perverted integrationism or banishment are the only options for blacks presented by Baraka. Their historical heritage does not allow for the individualistic attitude displayed by Clay, who decides on a calm release to his old ambivalent self after his explosion of rage. He is not honest to himself nor to his people’s history, and thus he is killed off. Professor Alan Flint focused on the racial inferiority denounced by Dutchman to the point of rejecting the usual interpretation of the play’s title and proposing a new reading. He consulted several dictionaries, where he found definitions of the term with clear contemptuous overtones. Thus, he argues, «Dutchman» refers to society’s judgment of black people, even if Clay’s character is presented as educated, well-dressed and, ultimately, superior to Lula. As with Rich’s poem, examined in the previous pages, historical and cultural allusions permeate Baraka’s Dutchman. From politicians to actors and writers, the span outlines the American landscape in race and class parameters. Allegories and fables usually employ stock characters to represent a variety of social types. In the case of Dutchman, however, the social texture is referred to.

 Think of the passengers in the subway train. How are they represented? Are they named? Differentiated in any way? Responsive? Acquiescent?

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Amiri Baraka (former LeRoi Jones) was one of the leading voices of the Black Arts Movement, a group of artists who claimed the truth and power of African American art. Dutchman typifies the bellicose literature written by Baraka, which called for racial awareness and purity of commitment. History and myth blend in this didactic fable, articulated as an intellectual and sexual seduction. Symbol and allusion are noteworthy devices in its political declaration.

4. EXERCISES 4.1. Test yourself On Adrienne Rich a) Why is free verse especially noticeable at this point of Rich’s career? b) What imagery does the poet use to convey notions of both women’s encapsulation and potentialities? c) What does the word «snapshots» suggest, in formal and ideological terms? d) Why is the quotation from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems particularly interesting? e) Why does the speaker avoid adopting an «I» voice? How does polivocality contribute to the idea expressed by the poet? f) What did Rich draw attention to when she chose the daughter-in-law role for the title of her poem? g) How is the monstrous expressed in «Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw? h) Why does violence impregnate the imagery and tone of the poem? i) What instances of reversion of male patterns are evident in the poem? 290

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On Amiri Baraka a) Why is Dutchman often defined as a didactic fable? b) What are the connotations of the male protagonist’s name? c) What are the main symbols of the play? d) In what sense does the author subvert, reverse or interpret the Edenic myth? e) What icons of whiteness does Lula identify in Clay? f) To what extent is the title of the play meaningful? g) In what way is the play a representation of Baraka’s own personal dilemma? h) How do historical and cultural references work in Dutchman? i) In what ways is jazz music present in the play? Summary questions a) What social and political issues lay behind the two authors covered in this Unit? b) How do Rich and Baraka challenge and reverse myths and traditions in their works? What class, gender, and ethnic aspects have constructed those myths? c) Both Adrienne Rich and Amiri Baraka resent and mirror the ambivalence of the culture they were brought up in. Discuss such ambivalence as impelling motifs of their works. d) Why did the Black Aestheticians and the feminists in the sixties contest their literary heritage? 4.2. Explore a) Despite the detailed domestic actuality of «Snapshots of a Daughterin-Law,» the poem avoids the presence of men unless in the form of

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cultural allusion. In your opinion, what is the function of this strategy? Does it figuratively cast off men to a plane of non-physical existence? Does it, quite on the contrary, reinforce their intellectual predominance over women? b) «Until then I had tried very much not to identify myself as a female poet,» Rich declared years after writing «Snapshots of a Daughter-inLaw.» Why do you think she had made such an effort to avoid the label, or maybe the work, of «female writer»? c) The final lines of «Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law» are sometimes interpreted as Rich’s persistent attachment to a patriarchal ideology she could not shake off completely at the time she wrote them. Provide your own interpretation of the concluding section of the poem. d) Both Rich and Baraka resort to the archetypal pattern of the initiatory quest to configure their works. Compare them, bearing in mind the formal specificities of each work (a poem can hardly be as expository as a tale or a play), and focusing on the mechanisms the authors employ to adapt the archetype to their own purposes and interests. e) Debate the differences in the theme of violence or violent imagery as seen in Rich’s poem and in Baraka’s play. f) From the play that you have read, does Amiri Baraka’s work abide to his political credo? Can you detect any inconsistencies? How would you explain that Lula, a white character, judges a black character’s stand? g) Critics have frequently indicated Baraka’s satiric mood. Although the term satire is commonly associated to humor, a satiric work is not necessarily a comic one. Broadly speaking, a satiric attitude implies an effort to expose the evils, absurdities and foils of a social order, and the intention to defy and deplore social mores. In this line, can you detect any satiric elements in Dutchman? h) Scholars disagree as to the ending moments of Dutchman. Which do you think is the function of the young man who enters the subway train at the end of the play? Would you say the resolution is ironic? i) How did the tone and mood of the Harlem Renaissance differ from those presented by the Black Aesthetic? 292

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4.3. Key terms — Ambivalence — Black Aesthetic — Fable

— Reversion — Satire

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5.1. Recommended readings — Adrienne Rich’s «When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision»: http://www. nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/5/rich/writing.htm — LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s «The Revolutionary Theater,» National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/ protest/text12/barakatheatre.pdf

5.2. Critical works cited PAULA BENNETT. My Life A Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. C.W.E. BIGSBY. Modern American Drama: 1945-2000. Cambridge U.P., 2000. ANDREIJ CEYNOWA. «The Dramatic Structure of Dutchman.» Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 17, No. 1, Black Theatre Issue (Spring, 1983), 15-18. HARRIET DAVIDSON. «Adrienne Rich.» In Elaine Showalter et al. (eds.), Modern American Women Writers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993. BETSY ERKKILA. «Dickinson and Rich: Toward a Theory of Female Poetic Influence.» American Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), 541-559. BETTY FRIEDAN. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. London and New York: Norton, 1997. ADDISON GAYLE. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971. LEROI JONES. Home: Social Essays. New York: Apollo, 1966. ELAINE TYLER MAY. «The End of ‘Containment’: The Collapse of Cold War Culture and the Prelude to the Vietnam Era at Home.» In Pilar Marín (ed.), Visiones

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Contemporáneas de la Cultura y la Literatura Norteamericana en los Sesenta. U. de Sevilla: 2002. LARRY NEAL. «The Black Arts Movement.» In Hazel Arnett Ervin (ed.). African American Literary Criticism. New York: Twayne, 1999, 122-128. ADRIENNE RICH: «When We Dead Awaken.» In On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. — «As If Your Life Depended on It.» In What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: Norton, 1993. SANDRA RUNZO. «Adrienne Rich’s Voice of Treason.» Women’s Studies, Vol. 18, 1990, 135-151. ELAINE SHOWALTER. «Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers.» Antioch Review, Vol. 50, Issue 1/2 (Winter/Spring 92), 207-220. LORENZO THOMAS. «‘Communicating by Horns’: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement.» African American Review, Summer 92, Vol. 26, Issue 2, 291-298.

5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1934-): Dutchman and The Slave are usually published together. In the latter, Walker Vessels is a former field slave who becomes the leader of a revolutionary black group in a racial war. However, he cannot thoroughly dismiss past commitments such as his white wife or dialogue. Like Dutchman, it is heavily autobiographical. Ralph Ellison (1914-1994): His novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, tells the story of a black man who lives in a subterranean hole. He undergoes disenchanting and humiliating episodes related to racial prejudices. It entails a severe critique of the American institutions of the time, unable to provide or support ideals and regulations in favor of an understanding between races. Richard Wright (1908-1960): Native Son (1940) was his major publication, a novel of naturalistic traits in which environment exerts uncontrollable forces on the individual. It reveals the poverty and injustice presiding the lives of African Americans. Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, discovers the immense breach that exists between races, a breach that only permits contact by violence.

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Program 1. PRESENTATION: Postmodern narratives 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: Ursula K. Le Guin’s challenge to Logocentrism 2.1. APPROACHING Le Guin’s «She Unnames Them» 2.1. REVISITING «She Unnames Them» 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Raymond Carver’s subversive Realism 3.1. APPROACHING Carver’s «Cathedral» 3.2. REVISITING «Cathedral» 4. EXERCISES Learning objectives — To get acquainted with the intricate relationship between reality and the literary text in Postmodern literature. — To discern the variety of fictive formulas in later twentieth-century fictions. — To understand the narrative contribution of parody and dirty realism.

1. PRESENTATION: POSTMODERN NARRATIVES The controversial nature of «reality» has been always present in any discussion on literature, fiction in particular. Narratives of the past four decades have reflected, debated, resented, and even celebrated the difficult relationship of the fiction writer with his or her raw material for writing. Mainly, American recent fictions have discarded the reflection, explanation or denunciation of reality in order to reinvent their relationship with it. Although Brian McHale’ words were originally intended to account for selfreflective fictions, they can be applied to a wider scope of contemporary fictive texts: [T]hey continually raise the problem of the relation between the gamelike artifices of fiction and the problematic imitation of reality which actively

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resists and subverts the reader’s efforts to make sense of them in the familiar novelistic ways. (62)

Although at first sight the label «new fictions» could suggest rejection of «old fictions» —mainly those under the shadow of Realism or accurate reproduction of reality— fiction is never totally disconnected from shared experience. In fact, scholar Malcolm Bradbury states that both Modernism and Postmodernism are forms of Realism, that is, modified understandings of reality and its expression, rather than opposite reactions to the realist movement. In other words, reality may be contested even if it is acknowledged. What are here called «new fictions» embrace the different fictive responses to a series of literary and historical circumstances. Entering the cultural panorama in the nineteen sixties and flourishing in the seventies and eighties, a number of explorations coexisted with the classical story of manners —i.e. the reconstruction of a shared reality through a number of mechanisms of mimesis. These at times radical forms inquired into the notion of reality, fiction itself, and the relationship between them. A sense of exhaustion of old fictive forms, and a new sense of history after the energetic sixties and seventies and, especially, after the Curtain came down, contributed to the reinterpretations to be examined in this Unit. The Postmodern stand is best detected in the fictive realm of literature. Throughout the centuries, fiction has sheltered all exploratory possibilities in its flexible form, and has welcomed those aesthetic quests demanded by the period. The novel form has seemed to be in a permanent danger of disappearance, so writers have searched for new ways of expanding or altering its boundaries, appropriating or rejecting former literary practices, and forcing the readers’ participation in the construction of the text’s meaning. The following sections offer a concise survey of three major approaches to the relationship between reality and fiction. The richness of the contemporary fictive panorama makes it impossible to provide a clearly outlined and compartmentalized overview, but the three modes discussed will hopefully draw an indicative map for future readings. Non-mimetical fiction writing occupies much of the Postmodern space in contemporary American literature. The terms «Fabulation» and «Fabulist fiction» originated in Robert Scholes’ critical study The Fabulators, published in 1967. He described the genre as a parodic treatment of past literary conventions, and emphasized its use of inexplicable occurrences. However, 296

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«Magic Realism» is frequently used as well to refer to narratives that further explore the conflicting spheres of reality and fantasy by stating that these share the same space. Porous as all critical terms tend to be, «Fabulation» describes those narratives that depart from the faithful recreation of actuality and rather construct their own worlds, governed by their own rules, and therefore free from the restrictions imposed by traditional narrative frameworks. In other words, «Implausibility is no longer the sad result of incompetence but the outcome of an intention to transcend or eschew the conventional modes of competence» (Tallis: 99). The decades that followed the end of the Second World War witnessed a new interest in genres that had been traditionally considered frivolous, i.e. of less transcendental import than the so-called serious or high-brow literature. Detective fiction, science fiction stories, westerns or thrillers have entered the canon thanks to the attempts of contemporary authors to find new ways of expression. When those ways seem nonexistent, writers make use of traditional narrative patterns to convey new meanings. Much of the significance of the text comes, therefore, through its fulfillment or failure to fulfill expectations regarding genre. Self-reflexive or metafictive fictions could enter the class of fabulist narratives, since their aim is not the accurate representation of a shared reality and its rules. They rather point inwards, that is to say, their significance does not depend on its distinctive relation or similarity to a shared reality, on its very nature as an artifice. Metafiction, or fiction about the writing of fiction, was well illustrated in Unit Seven with an excerpt from one of John Barth’s stories, in which the narrator/author directly addressed the reader. The following lines from Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov, will hopefully supply another instance: As greater authors than I have put it: «Let readers imagine» etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever, but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. (65)

But the fabulators are not necessarily innovative in form, yet their content challenges the readers’ assumptions about literary conventions or literary history. For instance, John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) adapts the Anglo-Saxon legend Beowulf —a well-known text among English speakers—

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in order to present the monster’s point of view. Gardner’s monster is characterized after twentieth-century psychology and existentialist thought: «Why can’t these creatures discover a little dignity?» I ask the sky. The sky says nothing, predictable. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores him, forever unimpressed. Him too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding trees, these brattling birds. Not, of course, that I fool myself with thoughts that I’m more noble. Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of dead men, murdered children, martyred cows. (I am neither proud nor ashamed, understand. One more dull victim, leering at seasons that never were meant to be observed.) (6)

The readers’ expectations about monsters and protagonists in epic tales are thus challenged, and they are forced to construct meanings through alternative ways. In short, the fabulators seek new ways of conveying new notions of the real. The non-fiction novelists provide another approach to the representation of experience. In the turbulent nineteen sixties, the novel form resented the complexity of a reality that resisted apprehension, explanation or accurate reproduction. From President Kennedy’s assassination to the Vietnam War, or from the racial tumults of the time to space trips, the overwhelming amount of remarkable social and political events defied the imaginative outcome of fiction writers: The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. (Phillip Roth in Klein: 144)

In addition to this creative impotence declared by this and other novelists, the journalists encountered a similar obstacle in the task of translating life to text. The freshness and immediacy required by such actuality escaped the usual framework employed by the reporter, mainly the appearance of objectivity, the formulaic treatment of material, and conciseness. Provided this panorama, both the fiction writer and the journalist were forced to 298

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reconsider their methods, and they arrived to a space where actual events were shaped into fictional structures: It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space [...] to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally. (Wolfe and Johnson: 28)

Hence, fiction and journalism attempt a reconciliation of categories that had always seemed to stay apart. Novelist Truman Capote, for instance, wrote one of the most popular novels of the nineteen sixties by imposing literary strategies onto the actual events of a murder that took place in Kansas in 1959. In In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (1965), Capote recreated the murder of the Clutter family and the details of the events that followed, from the police investigation to the death penalty claimed for the two murderers. The extensive documentation that Capote gathered for this non-fictive text took the form of a novel through a scene-by-scene organization of events, characterization techniques imposed on the people involved, the creation of atmosphere, and careful handling of dialogue. Observe the presentation of one of the murderers in Capote’s text: But neither Dick’s physique nor the inky gallery adorning it made as remarkable an impression as his face, which seemed composed of mismatching parts. It was as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center. Something of the kind had happened; the imperfectly aligned features were the outcome of a car collision in 1950 —an accident that left his long-jawed and narrow face tilted, the left side rather lower than the right, with the results that the lips were slightly aslant, the nose askew, and his eyes not only situated at uneven levels but of uneven size, the left eye being truly serpentine, with a venomous, sickly-blue squint that although it was involuntarily acquired, seemed nevertheless to warn of bitter sediment at the bottom of his nature. (Capote: 29)

Reporters like Tom Wolfe took a similar path in order to deal with the material they encountered in their careers. This sort of creative journalism has been labeled with a variety of titles, among them «New Journalism» —may the most widespread tag—, the oxymoron «non-fiction novel,»

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«journalit» and «faction.» In any case, this is a prose that embraces an aesthetic purpose, and that demands a reading attitude proper of the novel or the short story. In other words, it is not fiction, but it reads like fiction. The following excerpt is taken from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) where in a most personal style that defied all journalistic conventions he reported the trip of novelist Ken Kesey and a group of friends: Skidding down the embankment choking up dust like in a Western the blur of the Drain flats out beyond Kesey vaults over an erosion fence at the bottom of the embankment Ri-i-i-i-i-ip a picket catches his pants in the crotch rips out the in-seams of both pants legs most neatly flapping on his legs like Low Rent cowboy chaps running and flapping through the Visitacion flats poor petered-out suckmuck marginal housing development last blasted edge of land you can build houses on before they just sink into the ooze and the compost poor Visitacion Drain kids playing ball in the last street before the ooze runs flapping through their ballgame stare at him AND AT THE GHOST ON MY HEELS ? (331)

New Journalism and fabulist fiction are both creative responses to the crisis of Realism, and therefore do not try to create the «illusion of reality.» As John Hellmann states, the realistic novelist tries to create a parallel world and says to the reader «All this did not really happen, but it could have.» The fabulator needs only convince on the basis of the internal cohesion of his purely imaginary worlds, and claims «All this could never happen, so do not blame me if it does not seem real.» The New Journalist or non-fiction writer, on the other hand, needs only convince on the basis of verifiable sources and his personal integrity: «All this actually did happen, so do not blame me if it does not seem real» (11). In 1989, journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe published a controversial essay in which he decried the experimentalism of avant-garde fiction, and claimed a reconsideration of the social novel. Those who held the «avantgarde positions beyond realism» exhibited, to Wolfe’s eyes, serious deficiencies: 300

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The action, if any, took place at no specific location [...]. The characters had no background. They came from nowhere. They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed indicated any class or ethnic origin. (49)

He had already decried those fabulators who had given up Realism in search of «higher realities» in myth and who —still according to Wolfe— were like the engineer who avoided electricity because «it had been done» (Wolfe and Johnson: 57). In his essay, Wolfe declared the excesses of Postmodern experimentalism, which were to be progressively replaced by a return to representations of a recognizable world. The eighties —the «Me Decade» in the United States— certainly witnessed the American authors’ growing preference for the realist style, particularly in the form of shortstory writing. The common events of ordinary experience, then, were placed at the center of writers such as, to name a few, Raymond Carver, John Irving, Anne Tyler, Donald Barthelme, or Bobbie Ann Mason. After several Units dedicated to diverse forms of dismissal of Realism, it returns to the limelight for our consideration. Although the New Realists conform to basic conventions of the realist style and reproduction of reality, they contribute to its renewal with the following aspects indicated by Mark Shechner: «a new awareness of voice and of language as the echo chamber of history and tradition, a consciousness of region and place, a revived ethnic and regional sensitivity, a new awareness of traditional folk narrative, a distinct political animus» (in Verluys: 31). Schechner points at several reasons for the development of the realist renewal in the late eighties. To start with, the social pressure effected by groups that had remained silenced by the canon and tradition before found in this style a form of identification and recognition. Additionally, market factors exercised a pressure on literary forms, and demanded that fiction be a commodity. Also, a good number of writers convened that prose has a specific identity that differs from other cultural forms, however revolutionary they may appear, so that it has been reoriented to its essential function: telling stories. The over-indulgence of many metafictive or other forms of experimental fiction entailed a hermetic and elitist inclination that readers were ready to exchange for more non-intellectual alternatives, provided by the New Realism in all its variety.

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2. TEXT ANALYSIS: URSULA K. LE GUIN’S CHALLENGE TO LOGOCENTRISM 2.1. APPROACHING Le Guin’s «She Unnames Them» Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-) is a well-known author of science fiction and fantastic stories. Her parents provided an academic background for her upbringing, for her father was a professor in Berkeley and her mother was a writer of stories for children. Le Guin herself attended college and received a master’s degree in Romance languages from the University of California. As a feminist author, she has found in fantasy a suitable space for the reconsideration and reimagination of woman’s position in contemporary American society. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), for instance, offered the utopian view of a planet in which only one sex exists, so that its inhabitants do not understand each other in terms of sexual or gender differences. Her story «She Unnames Them,» often anthologized in both Postmodern and science-fiction volumes, was first published in The New Yorker, in January 1985. It later became part of the collection Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987). Although the volume is a highly heterogeneous combination of fiction, essay and poetry, it contains the repeated idea that oneness with nature has been lost, and that such communion will remain impossible as far as the fallacy of human superiority over nonhuman life persists. According to Malcolm Bradbury, [t]he phenomenon of postmodernism has been for some predominantly a style or a mannerism, but for others [...] the apocalyptic product of a time when the sign has floated free of the signified, authoritative utterance becomes impossible, and only re-naming, re-writing, re-creating can be attempted. (163-164)

Bradbury’s statement coincides with other critics’ pronunciation on the Postmodern interest in rewriting. They claim that signs, words, patterns, stories, genres... have been worn out and devalued after so much use. Le Guin’s story illustrates this Postmodern concern with parody. However, where other authors may attempt rewriting for the vacuity and conventionality 302

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present in the word, Le Guin seems to suggest that the word suffers from an overcrowding of cultural significance and association. The source of the challenge is the same: language is a code of signs whose meaning is a construction, and the frame it sets shapes our world in such a way that its interrogation modifies our experience deeply. In Le Guin’s hands, rewriting is an intertextual exercise of approach to the cultural sources of power relations. The following features are particularly interesting in this story. Bear in mind…

 Its retelling of the myth of the Genesis.  Its contestation of authority, logocentrism and tradition.  The combination of fantasy and closeness.  Its integration of discourses of difference and power.  Its intertextual play. 2.2. REVISITING «She Unnames Them» «She Unnames Them» acknowledges as well as subverts the mythical construction that justifies discourses of difference and power. Its aim is to decenter meaning, depriving the text of the closed, centralized significance provided by dominant discourses, practices and beliefs. The sources of the story could be located in the tradition of Magical Realism or Fabulation, rather than in the science-fiction that Le Guin has so successfully practiced. Magical Realism blends the occurrences of everyday life with surrealism, and in this story animals are granted the capacity to speak, analyze and debate while in an utterly domestic, or normalized, scenario. The opening lines of the story create this matter-of-fact climate that pervades it: Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that «yak» sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. (NAAL: 2671)

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In line with the idea explored at the beginning of this Unit, the author subverts accepted notions of reality and offers alternative visions of it. Her interest in anthropology and mythical patterns shows throughout her work. In particular, in her introduction to «She Unnames Them» she stated: «Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living [...], but in order to be useful they must be retold» (75). The story also borrows from the Bildungsroman form, a narrative pattern that explores a character’s process of learning or maturity. As mentioned in previous Units, growing up and dismissing established values are traditional themes in American literature, often adapted by authors to question a variety of social, moral, or sexual issues. But this story is a form of rewriting of one of the best-known myths in the western world: the Genesis, and God’s granting Adam the power to name animals and woman. As with other Postmodern works, «She Unnames Them» uses the original story as its starting point, in the awareness that readers will construct meaning from their knowledge of the previous version. Intertextuality enters the reading of this story because readers instantly think of the Genesis. In other words, the story cannot be read in isolation, but always in relation to the preceding text. (Intertextual theory, in fact, maintains that all texts belong to an immense matrix, where they are connected by common reading and writing practices.) Intertextual modes include allusion and quotation (examples of which abound in this volume), and parody or palimpsest. It should be remembered here that the medieval practice of palimpsest writing consisted of the effacing of a text in order to reuse the parchment or vellum on which it had been originally written. Le Guin’s text is therefore an ideological palimpsest that also reevaluates the function of the author as sole source of meaning of the text. As Linda Hutchion puts it, «the ‘world’ in which these texts situate themselves is the ‘world’ of discourse, the ‘world’ of texts and intertexts» (125). A variety of reasons may motivate the rewriting of familiar stories, ranging from mock to homage. A good number of palimpsests attempt to offer a traditionally silenced or ignored point of view. «She Unnames Them» reveals, in its very title, those who have been overlooked by the myth. Indeed, «She» (woman) and «Them» (animals) were, according to the Biblical telling, the ones who received names from Adam without a previous consultation. Hollow and imprecise as they may appear, these pronouns 304

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demand attention for themselves, despite their lack of precise referents. That is to say, the title has already deprived entities of their names, in favor of an indefinite but non-imposed linguistic personality. The title, therefore, makes an explicit reference to the act of unnaming that the protagonist of the story will perform in it. Moreover, the title calls attention to the usual binary oppositions that underlie linguistic and conceptual organization of experience: «she» depending on «he,» «them» depending on «us.» Hence, postcolonial and feminist stands have denounced the discourse that defines ideas and people in relation and in opposition to seemingly immobile categories («he,» «us,»). Le Guin’s story unveils and deconstructs such discourse, and suggests that language shapes reality as much as cultural frames do, and that power relations are encoded in linguistic utterances. The narrator does not provide accurate spatial or temporal details to situate the story. Instead, several allusions to reputed men function as cultural referents with an ideological, more than a narratological, purpose. Jonathan Swift, Carolus Linnaeus or T. S. Eliot could serve as temporal hints, were it not for the narrative present that includes an Adam in a garden. Thus, the story’s setting remains indistinct enough to recreate the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian condition. A second effect of the allusions included in the story is the inadequacy of language in its present condition to organize experience, for the words of writers or scientists alike are dismissed.

 Why are Swift, Eliot and Linnaeus mentioned? What do they represent? How are they important in a story about (un)naming?

Characters are equally blurry and unsituated in order to participate in the fabulist rewriting of the Genesis. In a sense, the readers’ own knowledge of the story provides the necessary information to proceed with the reading, and to make meaning of it. Therefore, «She Unnames Them» is a recreation in its fullest sense: first, it is a rewriting of the myth; second, it retells the creative authority encompassed by the Genesis, and endorses it on the figure who has traditionally been ignored in the equation. The power relations established by the myth have remained intact throughout the centuries in

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western thought: God as creator of life, and Adam as namer of life. Both roles involve power, possession and dominance. By telling the woman’s part of the story, Le Guin’s tale reveals women’s exclusion from the creative and linguistic power, and questions patriarchal authority inside and outside the myth. It is consequently embedded in the Postmodern contestation of «official» narratives that challenge singleness of authority and voice. Besides the spatial and temporal indefinition, the narrator’s name is omitted too. However, cultural background fills in the gap, and the readers associate Adam’s name to Eve. Thus, they are expected to realize the power of language in the double paradigm offered by the story: as culturally constructed and transmitted —hence we automatically assign the narrator the name of Eve—, and as the instrument of construction of reality that the story reflects. Observe in what terms the narrator dismisses her name and its associations: I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, «You and your father lent me this —gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.» (NAAL: 2672)

Therefore, Le Guin is building her story on the readers’ previous knowledge of the myth. The narrator’s name doesn’t «seem to fit very well lately» because she has questioned the authority who granted names, and has rejected the role and cultural connections that her name cast upon her. From the readers’ perspective she is no longer Eve, under God’s and Man’s authority, but a strange creature who has created herself —for her lack of name and of relation to a form of power and tradition transforms her into a symbolical newborn.

 Why is Adam’s mate never identified by a name in the story? How are we contributing to the story’s intertextual game by identifying her as «Eve»? What associations are we projecting on this unnamed character when we name her «Eve»?

After much rewriting of the figure of Adam in the American literary tradition, the myth of Eve required revision. If the myth of Adam —as well 306

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as its American version— stemmed from masculinist readings of the Genesis, the universal notion of Eve has its roots in patriarchal interpretations of the scriptures, which subsequently support generalized assumptions about women. Thus, the archetypal woman in western thought derives from such legitimization of patriarchal patterns, which Le Guin identifies and exposes in her story. Her rewriting of Eve deposes the canonical understanding of this female myth as passive and secondary to Adam —for Adam was created first.

 In what ways is this «Eve» subversive? How is her difference from Adam stated? How does she subvert the dispositions of the authority?

Le Guin’s mock retelling deprives the story of its religious overtones and bestows a domestic air on the story: God is absent from the scene, Adam is «fiddling around,» the garden key is missing, and dinner is expected: I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, «Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up.» (NAAL: 2672)

The result of this narrative strategy is a utopian —i.e. unconnected to a definite place— vision of power relations. These are perceived as everyday matters, a common state of affairs, to be resolved in an ideal scenario where major authorities and their metanarratives —for instance God or the state— are absent. The mixture of surrealist elements and domestic affairs accentuates the in-betweenness, that «neutral territory» demanded by Hawthorne and other romance authors to explore those issues that did not participate of societal conditions. Le Guin has appropriated the «neutral territory» of her male literary ancestors, and has invested them with the usual feminist claims observed in her fiction. The association of woman and animals in the story is significant enough. They are grouped in the same category of creatures, those with a name imposed by the male human. According to Le Guin’s interpretation of the myth, language is essentially an obstacle for the coexistence of all the

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creatures —Adam included— instead of a help: «For Le Guin’s Adam, language has become a barrier, relegating Eve, the animals, and the garden itself to generic functions in service to his needs; he cannot see them as individual selves» (Cornell: 100). Furthermore, western thought has traditionally coupled women and nature, thus establishing an archetype that includes the idea that man equals reason and civilization. In the story, such association is conveyed not only through the events narrated, but also through the closeness that the narrator feels towards animals: None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. (NAAL: 2672)

Le Guin’s story seems to imply the similarities between the rights of women and animals. All kinds of oppression, in other words, emanate from the same sources. Ecofeminism is the critical approach that examines the relationship between feminism and ecology, so «She Unnames Them» permits such ecofeminist reading. The Genesis, whose retelling is being discussed here, establishes the correspondence between Man’s dominion over animals (1:26) and naming (2:19). By unnaming animals and herself, the narrator demolishes the barrier of dominance that the previous act of naming had erected. «She Unnames Them» implies that radical separation between humans and nonhumans —and the subsequent abuse— departed from this condition, for after the unnaming act the connection is regained: They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, —that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food. (NAAL: 2672)

In this postlapsarian moment —for the Genesis situates Adam’s naming of Eve after the Fall— Le Guin envisions an ideal, almost prelapsarian in a sense, predicament by which «hunter» and «hunted» or «eater» and «food» cannot be distinguished. Therefore, the usual connotations of superiority, violence, and disconnection vanish as the names have vanished. In this state 308

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of grace, the narrator says to Adam: «I hope the garden key turns up» (NAAL: 2672). The reference has been already mentioned here as an instance of domestic affairs. However, its intertextual function is evident.

 Explore the different roles of the key in the story. How does it contribute to the intertextual situation of the text? What other «garden» has been lost for lack of a key? What kind of key does the narrator discover?

Meanwhile, Adam continues «fitting parts together,» unaware of the possibility of a harmonious experience of creation. Unlike the previous mother-goddess figures of Middle Eastern religions like Ishtar or Astarte, whose worship the Genesis was aimed to extinguish, the God of JudeoChristian creation myths stands in separation from his own creation. By leaving such order of things, Eve «begins her own, distinctively female, creation story» (Gilbert and Gubar: 271).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s career is distinguished by her inclination to fantasy and utopian visions. Her appropriation of science-fiction and fantastic genres has produced very suitable forms of expression for her discussion of gender issues and power relations in general. «She Unnames Them» is an example of a fabulist rewriting of the literary tradition, which permits a reconsideration of the roles of reality, myth and intertextuality in the construction of meaning. She is also concerned with the ultimate instrument of writing, language, which proves as culturally constructed as gender roles.

3. TEXT ANALYSIS: RAYMOND CARVER’S SUBVERSIVE REALISM 3.1. APPROACHING Carver’s «Cathedral» Raymond Carver’s prose has been labeled with different tags from his early stories on: regionalist, minimalist, new realist, dirty realist… He is said to

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have been the catalyst of the realist revival in American literature. His work blends the traditional form of European authors like Flaubert, the linguistic sparseness of Hemingway, and the distinctive disorientation and hopelessness of contemporary characters. Carver’s fiction, therefore, typifies the hybrid mode into which traditional Realism has been transformed in response to contemporary cultural developments. Carver obtained great critical acclaim with Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, a collection of stories he published in 1976. What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983) followed, situating him among the most reputed and influential authors of the moment. «Cathedral,» the story discussed in the present Unit, belongs in the collection of the same title. The Pacific Northwest of his childhood (he was born in Oregon) provided him with settings and situations for his stories of beaten characters. However, as Shechner argues, they exist without traditions of any kind, and it might be said of virtually all of them that they have no parents, no families, no profound link to the past. There are exceptions but surely the main things missing from Carver’s stories are generational continuity, group identity, and nurturing spirits, except insofar as the AA meeting or the detox center are institutional sources of nurturance. Carver’s characters are amazingly alone, which is precisely what is so American about them. (41)

His has been termed a «Dirty Realism» for its in-depth look at the most disagreeable aspects of American life, and for its exploration of the most disturbing side of the American promise. His stories are credited with «giving voice to a submerged population, who before his time had not been adequately recognized in the cultural space of American literature» (Lainsbury: 78). In a sense, his work analyzes another form of belonging to a minority, for his «ex-centrics» constitute a class-related neglected group. «Minimalist» is another frequent label employed to define Carver’s fiction. Minimalism became a fashionable and very marketable literary option in the nineteen eighties, a period in which readers sought less academic writing. As a literary mode it implied the distinguishable but simplified imitation of reality, that is to say, the world’s representation as reduced to a few recognizable segments. A number of features distinguished the minimalist style in literature and energized the renewal of the short-story form in the United States: 310

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— Economy of words and detail. — Slight plot and compression of incident. — Extrospective approach. — Terse characterization. — Monotonic prose. — Openness of form and misleading conclusions. Minimalism is, therefore, a sort of general understatement of the essential components expected in fiction. Though popular with the reading public, the more innovative and nonrealist authors decried minimalist fiction for its meagerness, since it appeared aesthetically poor against the exuberance of metafictive or fabulist works, and for its fatalistic conception of life. Professor Frederick Karl summarizes such detraction: Sequential narrative line and routine characterization, as well as plotting, are either diminished or undermined altogether. The author brings us close to boredom, withdrawal, rejection of the work itself. Further, minimalist fiction is nearly always based on a pessimistic view of life, where all the normal goals and controls no longer obtain. (384)

Carver repeatedly dismissed the label «minimalist» when attempting to define his fiction: That word brings up associations with narrow vision and limited ability. It’s true that I try to eliminate every unnecessary detail in my stories and try to cut my words to the bone. But that doesn’t make me a minimalist. If I were, I’d really cut them to the bone. But I don’t do that; I leave a few slivers of meat on them. (Gentry and Stull: 72)

He then preferred the term «precisionist» to account for his particularly lean style. Precisionism was in origin an artistic movement of the nineteen twenties, whose coldness through a precise drawing of situation is replicated in Carver’s works, according to him. His stylistic economy developed from his fiction-writing classes with author John Gardner (to whose memory Cathedral was dedicated), and from his editor Gordon Lish. They both influenced Carver’s career in its initial stages, as he acknowledged in his essay «Fires» (Stull: 235). Such economy of words and emotions diminished

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as his career advanced and by the time Cathedral was published it had decreased significantly. However, the story under analysis here still reflects Carver’s strives for omission. Not surprisingly, Carver has been more than often compared to Ernest Hemingway, whose linguistic performance was as lean as Carver’s. (If his fiction can easily be compared to that of Ernest Hemingway, the poetry of the early stages of his career can be compared to the verses of William Carlos Williams, for the three authors share the same pared-down style.) Both show a disposition towards the essential and avoid the superfluous in their organization of plots and sentences. Unlike Hemingway, whose stories responded to the bleakness of the Modernist period by allowing his characters a moment of insight, most scholars claim that Carver communicates a triviality of life. His stories relate a world in which events are anecdotal occurrences that lack significance or consequence. In Winnifred Fluck’s words, It is one of the main problems of these characters that experience remains embedded in, and defined by, a stream of contiguous circumstances in which the banal and the unusual are indiscriminately juxtaposed. Thus, the unusual must be expressed through linguistic banalities, just as, on the one hand, in recurring moments that actually constitute the highpoints of Carver’s work, the banal always threatens to become the unusual. (In Versluys: 72)

In this light Carver would manage to deprive actual and ordinary experience of the redeeming attribute that some Modernists sought in it, although «significance» and «redemption» are terms that require further exploration, to be pursued below. This demythologization of existence, nevertheless, defies conventional Realism in the sense that more traditional practices used to rely on an authoritative presentation of a common referent, the main asset of which was its ready identification. Carver’s worlds are portrayed as void or, as Fluck accurately describes them, as «semantically empty» (in Versluys: 78). You may find Carver’s story disconcerting at first, so you should bear in mind… The leanness of its style, plot and characterization.  The particular narrative voice and its tone.  312

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Its suffocating atmosphere.  Its challenge to accepted notions of realist fiction.  The presentation of the darker side of the capitalist system.  The importance of televisual culture. 

3.2. REVISITING «Cathedral» Carver’s Realism is considered «dirty» because it engages in those themes that traditional Realism would not tackle. The analysis of «Cathedral» requires a review of the realist conventions, with a view to understand how Carver undermines this form of representation of experience. One of the fundamental standpoints of nineteenth-century realist texts was the credibility of their narrative voices. This kind of narrative voice delivered the created world in such a way as to maintain its coherent, cohesive image intact. It contributed to the pretension of verisimilitude, and also to the moral significance the audience expected. «Cathedral» presents its readers with a first-person, homodiegetic narrator who tells the story in a manner that powerfully resembles oral storytelling. Several strategies —such as fractured syntax, colloquial diction and expressions, interjections— remind the reader of spoken speech, and the telling occasionally acquires a casual tone: Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to-be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. (NAAL: 2829)

Such an uncommitted attitude detaches the narrator from the story in which he participates as a character, and allows him the necessary distance to show sarcasm, prejudice, and suspicion. He also uses reported speech, either indirect or free indirect, to be ironic about his wife’s relationship with the blind man, and to emphasize the fact that he doesn’t know that part of the story first-hand —hence his sense of exclusion, insecurity and reluctance.

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 Make sure you distinguish the different types of speech employed in the story: direct, indirect, free indirect. Direct speech evidences the least intrusion in the telling on the part of the narrator, and free indirect the most. Examine which type is used for each part of the story.

Carver’s minimalist-precisionist style concerned the description of his characters as well as of places and situations. In «Cathedral,» for instance, the narrator does not provide a description of his wife, and the blind man is mainly described through his size and his beard. Since the story is narrated in the first person, the scarcity of detail casts an air of inarticulateness on the narrator, as if experience could not awaken his sensitivity or consciousness. Carver’s Dirty Realism is observed in the self-portrayal of the speaker. The reader progressively places him among the American pariahs, i.e. those who have been left out of the American Dream of success and self-fulfillment: Not necessarily part of an officially sanctioned group of «victims,» Carver’s characters belong to a large invisible class virtually ignored by the press, the movies, by television drama, by the new academic trends, by many writers, too: those employed in low paying service jobs, or not employed at all, alcoholics or recovering alcoholics […], people who live amid broken human relationships in low-rent housing. (Taub: 104)

As mentioned above, the narrator characterizes himself as he exposes his prejudices and his unresponsiveness. The crucial moment in the story, when he is asked to describe for the blind man what a cathedral is like, forces the following confession: «‘The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are’» (NAAL: 2837). The speaker characterizes himself through the narrative style he employs. Homodiegetic narration usually derives in the reader’s empathy towards the speaker, but this narrator’s tone and attitude are hard to empathize with. Irony and distance are useful instruments for the narrator to handle emotions, both his wife’s and his own. Even the passage dedicated to the death of the blind man’s wife, which verges on empathy at a certain point, incorporates a form of return to his usual derisive standpoint: «And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears […] her last 314

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thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave» (NAAL: 2830). In addition, the narrator uses othering devices in order to present the visitor as different, alien to the narrator’s worldview and circumstances.

 How

would you define the narrator of this story, in the light of the information he provides about himself? Make sure you find textual references for each adjective. Also, think of some features of the blind man’s personality that the narrator does not possess.

Minimalism conferred an incomplete, erratic or elliptical air to Carver’s dialogues. Much of the intensity that readers would expect in such an economical form as the short story is lacking in Carver’s dialogues, which seem to glide over the characters’ conflicts without fully exploring them: «That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.» «It was the strawberry pie,» the blind man said. «That’s what did it,» he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head. «There’s more strawberry pie,» I said. «Do you want some more, Robert?» my wife said. «Maybe in a little while,» he said. (NAAL: 2834)

Some critics have attributed the linguistic inarticulateness of Carver’s characters to the plethora of mass-media stimulants that flood these characters’ lives. Image culture, specialists in the field point out, provokes bluntness and oversimplification of discourse. In fact, this verbal impotence is sensed in several of Carver’s titles: «Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,» «What’s in Alaska?,» «One More Thing,» or «How About This?,» to offer only a few examples. The author introduced in the present story the interesting issue of televisual culture. As in other contemporary authors, television in Carver’s works stands as a sign of consumer and media culture, a culture where sensitivity and sensibility are dissolved by audiovisual strategies: It is at once the marker of the random and arbitrary meanings of freefloating commercial signs in consumer culture and an index of the

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material, spiritual, and intellectual limitations of lower and working-class life within that larger culture. Those meanings converge in the aimless indirection, the social and economic randomness of the lives of Carver’s working-class characters. (Mullen: 100)

Media culture has shaped contemporary literature as film techniques did on the literature of the early decades of the twentieth century. The presence of televisual culture is twofold in Carver’s story: the hum of the television set provides the same hypnotic effects as alcohol, drugs, or slow digestions; additionally, Carver’s fragmentary and skeletal prose is much indebted to the characteristic quality of televisual production and reception. Mullen takes the idea further and argues that, in the manner of television’s serial format, Carver’s stories are «as transient and fleeting as commercials; they seem to click on and off with the abruptness of a channel change» (103).

 Carver

usually placed his characters in indoors settings in which a menacing atmosphere could be perceived. How is the atmosphere in «Cathedral»? Ponder on the architectural design of medieval cathedrals and their symbolic power. How do they contrast with the narrator’s reduced house?

«Cathedral» subverts as well the notion of individual choice proposed by more traditional forms of Realism. Far from the confident understanding of the human being offered by nineteenth-century American fictions, where options were a certainty, this story denies that possibility to the protagonist: «How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?)» (NAAL: 2833). For the first time in Carver’s career, the volume Cathedral offers a moment of revelation for some of his characters. Most critics agree on the fact that Carver’s stories lack such climactic instants of insight. However, their standard for dealing with these stories is usually the epiphanic notion inherited from early twentieth-century fictions, whose definition and circumstances of application were somewhat different. Therefore, some scholars have attempted to approach Carver’s stories by reconsidering the 316

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term «epiphany,» and redefining it as a moment of learning and growth, «albeit in a muted, implicit way» (Meyer: 24). Under this new light, Carver’s epiphanic moments are to be understood as revelations of transcendental significance that, nevertheless, «remains at the level of a non-semantic sense of the ‘whatness of things’» (Leypoldt: 533). In other words, the characters’ realization of some discovery does not find verbal expression because they fail to grasp its social and emotional implications. The altered epiphanies of Carver’s characters involve: deep and creative connection between humans that reveals to Carver’s alienated and diminished creatures that there can be contact in a world they supposed was empty of sense or love. (Facknitz: 296)

In «Cathedral,» the speaker progressively deprives the telling of his ironical and biased attitude —a seemingly integral constituent of his personality— until the odd climax leaves him spiritually and almost linguistically unresponsive. According to Facknitz, Carver redeems this character from his figurative blindness, although he is incapable of articulating the significance of what he has just learned: My eyes were still closed. I was in my house and I knew that. But I didn’t feel inside anything. «It’s really something,» I said. (NAAL: 2838)

The narrator has experienced a spiritual awareness through a physical perception of space: «I didn’t feel inside anything.» The isolation and confinement of previous pages have evolved into an openness that he senses as physical, not spiritual.

 The story abounds with the words «anything,» «nothing» and «something.» Underline these occurrences and think about how they reflect the narrator’s poor diction, but also his necessity to express rather complex experiences in very simple utterances. His «It’s really something» may hide a depth he cannot articulate.

Fiction as a vehicle of morality, to be found in much of nineteenthcentury Realism, finds a serious obstacle in this story. Even if the narrator

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had undergone an enlightening experience in the drawing of the cathedral, he was incapable of unfolding and communicating its significance.

 Explore all the story’s references to permanent or transitory blindness: from the visitor’s sight problem to the closing of eyes. How are they related to sight —in its broadest sense? How and how much do the characters «see»?

Some scholars have approached «Cathedral» as an allegory of the writer’s labor, an interpretation rejected by Carver. In the story, hints such as the blind man’s effort to make something of a person’s face, or the difficult composition of a poem, or an equally arduous drawing of a cathedral seem to announce the relationship between creator and creation. As the protagonist becomes the eyes of Robert, and cathedrals became the holy texts that the illiterate could not read, so literature becomes the vehicle of unknown worlds for those who have only one. However, critics have pointed at Carver’s paratactic style: sparse subordination of ideas results in inability to conceptualize and render experience. In David Kauffman’s words, The cool surfaces mark a deliberate denial of sentimentality and effect. Parataxis […] separates will from action and desire from will. It magnifies the importance of the interpretation which it does not, or cannot provide. It renders enigmatic the world it appears to describe. (101-102)

Carver’s fictional worlds presented the usual lack of a national framework of minimalist stories. His was not a social Realism in the usual sense, since the poverty in his work was not depicted as a result of the capitalist system or, more concretely, of the Reagan administration. Rather, some scholars have observed that Carver’s sparseness mirrors the bleakness of any workingclass life. The absence of a national social pattern bestows a universalist character on his work, which transforms poverty into a spiritual condition rather than the malady of a specific time and place. Moreover, Carver’s lack of interest in political agendas or social critique intensifies the numbness of his characters’ lives, further deadened by such unawareness or indifference to actual conditions around them. 318

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Raymond Carver’s fiction can de defined as belonging to the new realist,  dirty realist, minimalist, or precisionist styles. Indeed, his prose is sparse in detail, meager in character or plot development, and contained in tone. His contribution to a new understanding of the relationship fiction-reality consists of his refusal to provide an elaborate picture of societal conditions to sustain his narratives, or articulate characters whose behavior may guide the reader along the telling. «Cathedral» exposes such concerns, as well as an example of the peripheral characters that have brought the label «dirty» to his Realism.

4. EXERCISES 4.1. Test yourself On Ursula K. Le Guin a) How does «She Unnames Them» borrow from the Bildungsroman? b) Why could this story be labeled a fabulist fiction? c) What is the importance of intertextuality in the story? What forms does it adopt? d) What is the effect of the narrator’s omission of definite spatial and temporal information? e) Why are the pronouns in the title relevant to the theme of the story? f) How does the feminist discourse interrelate with ecological demands? g) What is the function of the domestic or everyday atmosphere conveyed by the story? h) How does the story achieve its mock tone? i) What is the significance of the «key»? On Raymond Carver a) What minimalist features can be located in Raymond Carver’s «cathedral»?

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b) Why does Carver prefer the term «precisionist»? c) Why is Carver’s fictional style sometimes tagged Dirty Realism? Which of its features can you detect in «Cathedral»? d) What is the symbolical function of space in «Cathedral»? e) How is characterization achieved in the story? f) What allegorical reading can be made of «Cathedral»? g) What is the relevance of oral features in Carver’s story? h) How does the author articulate the different speech modes (direct, indirect and free indirect speech)? i) To what extent can we say that the protagonist of «Cathedral» experiences an epiphany?

Summary questions a) Why is «reality» such a troublesome term for fiction writers? b) What different approaches to reality can be detected in the second half of the twentieth century, regarding fiction writing? c) How do those new forms of writing fiction negotiate the relationship between author and reader? How do they challenge the reader’s expectations regarding the representation of reality through a fictive text? d) What formal or ideological weaknesses did avant-garde writers find in minimalist fiction? e) How do the two stories surveyed in this Unit approach creativity and acts of creation?

4.2. Explore a) Compare Adrienne Rich’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s revisionist approach to literature. How do they contest conventional intellectual 320

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and cultural patterns? How do they, as women, benefit from the revision? b) Examine Le Guin’s story, focusing on the character of Adam. How is he portrayed? To what extent is his characterization relevant in the rewriting of Eve? How does his character guide, or challenge, the readers’ expectations? c) Le Guin makes as much use of myth —or well-known patterns— as such Modernist authors as Eliot or Hemingway. How does her appropriation of myth differ from her Modernist counterparts? d) Carver’s «Dirty Realism» resembles the grotesqueness that Sherwood Anderson had discovered —or uncovered— in the life of a small midwestern town. Compare the tone of both stories, and pay special attention to the relationship between the narrator and the characters represented. e) Make a comparative analysis between Le Guin’s and Carver’s narrators. How do they establish relationships with the readers? What is, in your opinion, the function of these relationships, and to what extent are they relevant to the topics discussed in the stories? f) Both Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman and Carver’s narrator are the antithesis of the self-made, successful American type. Explore the difference in perspective that these two authors employ at presenting and debating their characters. In particular, observe the ways in which Miller and Carver lead the readers’ responses to these characters. g) Other narrative genres, such as movies and sitcoms, have revised the traditional conventions on which the representation of reality was based. Think of instances among the popular forms that reinforce the notions of frame-breaking that you have learned. Suggestive enough are Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) or Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), in which fact and artifice meet, but the mixture of fiction and documentation as seen in Steven Spielberg’s The Schindler’s List (1993) and in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994) deserve attention too.

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4.3. Key terms — — — — —

Dirty Realism Ecofeminism Fabulation Metafiction Minimalism

— — — —

New Realism Non-fiction novel Parody/Palimpsest Precisionism

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 5.1. Recommended readings — Outline of American prose since 1945: http://usinfo.org/oal/lit8.htm — «Prose as Architecture: Two interviews with Raymond Carver»: http://titan.iwu. edu/~jplath/carver.html — Linda Hutchion’s article «Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History»: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/ 10252/1/TSpace0167.pdf

5.2. Critical works cited MALCOLM BRADBURY. The Modern American Novel. Oxford U.P., 1985. MARK. A. R. FACKNITZ. «‘The Calm,’ ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ and ‘Cathedral’: Raymond Carver and the Rediscovery of Human Worth.» Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Fall, 1986), 287-297. MARSHALL BRUCE GENTRY and WILLIAM L. STULL (eds.). Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson and London: U. Press of Mississippi, 1990. SANDRA GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. One: The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. JOHN HELLMANN. Fables of Fact. U. of Illinois Press, 1981. FREDERICK R. KARL. American Fiction 1840-1980. New York: Harper, 1983.

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LINDA HUTCHION. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. DAVID KAUFMANN. «Yuppie Postmodernism.» Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1991), 93-116. G.P. LAINSBURY. «A Critical Context for the Carver Chronotope.» Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1997), 77-92. GÜNTER LEYPOLDT. «Raymond Carver’s ‘Epiphanic Moments.’» Style, Fall 2001, Vol. 35, No. 3, 531-547. BRIAN MCHALE. Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ADAM MEYER. Raymond Carver. New York: Twayne, 1995. BILL MULLEN. «A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver.» Critique, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), 99-114. PHILLIP ROTH. «Writing American Fiction». En Marcus Klein (ed.), The American Novel Since World War II. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1969. RAYMOND TALLIS. In Defense of Realism. London: Hodder Stoughton, 1988. GADI TAUB. «On Small, Good Things: Raymond Carver’s Modest Existentialism.» Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Fall 2002, Vol. 22, No. 2, 102-119. KRISTIAAN VERSLUYS. Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992. TOM WOLFE. «Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.» Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 1989, 45-56. — and E. W. JOHNSON (eds.). 1973. The New Journalism. London: Picador, 1975.

5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Truman Capote (1924-1984): His non-fiction novel In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (1965) is one of the most popular examples of the blending of actual material and fictional strategies. It retells the murder of the Clutter family, the subsequent investigation, and the trial of the two murderers through an elaborate redistribution of events and a fiction-like presentation of documental material.

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John Gardner (1933-1982): Grendel (1971) offers one fine example of Postmodern rewriting of a classical text to deconstruct authoritative voice. It retells the story of Beowulf from the perspective of the monster, and dislocates the readers’ knowledge of the legend even further when Gardner defines Grendel’s personality through modern psychology and existentialism. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-): The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) tells about a space traveler who lands on a planet whose inhabitants have only one sex, and each being can both father and bear children. Therefore, Le Guin proposes, sexual and gender differences do not enter these beings’ understanding and organization of life. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977): Although Nabokov was a Russian-born author, critics usually consider his novel Lolita (1955) as a landmark of American literature. It tells the narrator’s love for a sensuous child as well as the process of building a credible narration. Lolita is therefore an instance of self-reflexive or metafictive fiction. Tom Wolfe (1931-): Although he started his writing career as a journalist, his contact with creative non-fiction has transformed Wolfe into a reputed novelist. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) reported the frantic escape trip of novelist Ken Kesey and a group of hippie friends aboard a remodeled school bus. Its psychedelic style, aesthetic focus, and literary techniques defy journalistic conventions and places it among the best examples of New Journalism.

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UNIT TEN THE VOICES OF MULTICULTURALISM

Program 1. PRESENTATION: Metaphors for the «e pluribus unum» 2. TEXT ANALYSIS: N. Scott Momaday’s construction of identity 2.1. APPROACHING Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain 2.2. REVISITING The Way to Rainy Mountain 3. TEXT ANALYSIS: Sandra Cisneros’ gendered borderland 3.1. APPROACHING Cisneros’ «Woman Hollering Creek» 3.2. REVISITING «Woman Hollering Creek» 4. EXERCISES Learning objectives — To get acquainted with the multicultural panorama of the United States and its literatures. — To analyze the ways in which different categories that construct identity —sex, class, religion, nationhood, etc.— interact in the stories under scrutiny here. — To examine particular literary strategies that explore and debate notions of identity and history.

1. PRESENTATION: METAPHORS FOR THE «E PLURIBUS UNUM» The concepts of plural identity and national literature are constants in American literature courses. The increase in immigration from the late nineteenth century on inquired into both ideas and opened the way to modes of expression and voices other than the «Anglo-Saxon total,» as Henry James labeled it. However, that Eurocentric total emerged from the waves of European colonists, pilgrims, explorers, and immigrants that progressively populated Northern America, and that ultimately entailed an internal colonization of the different Native American peoples.

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On the back of the United States one-dollar bill, a paradoxical motto encloses the recognizable American eagle: «e pluribus unum,» or «the one from the many.» Open to debate as it is, the aphorism comprises the multicultural nature of American society and attempts to amalgamate distinctions of race, gender, class, religion, language and so forth. The texture of American history is made of slavery, migration, genocide, crossbreeds, assimilation and racism, which suggests an irregular effort to come to terms with its own ideal of plurality. Edward M. Griffin proposes three competing theories about the American organization of social groups. His article «The Melting Pot, Vegetable Soup, and the Martini Cocktail: Competing Explanations of U.S. Cultural Pluralism» accounts for three chief figures of speech that ultimately respond to three underlying ideologies concerning the unity and the plurality of American citizens. The starting metaphor was the «melting pot» of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which entailed the assimilation to the new territory and the eradication of anything old that the newcomer might bring along. The outcome of the melting was a «new man,» an American self. But the violence of the sixties disagreed with the apparent consensus announced by the melting carried out in the pot. The «new American man» discarded any other form of Americanness, like non-whites, non-males, or non-Anglo Saxons. In the decade of the 1960s, as surveyed in Unit Eight, the country saw a claim towards the unmeltable identities that could retain their specific qualities and nonetheless remain American. Therefore, the racial and sexual revolts demanded new frames of mind and subsequent new tropes: «The mosaic,» «the Kaleidoscope,» «the Vegetable Soup» and «the Salad Bowl» are only a few of them. The liberal ideal of cultural pluralism encountered a harsh context during the Reagan and Bush administrations, when the emphasis was put on the unity of the nation rather than on its diversity. Recent cultural theories define cultures in terms of hegemony, that is, they understand social groups as separated in two major categories: the dominators and the dominated, at the center and the margins of discourse respectively. Hegemoneous practices such as language, ethics, the media, and so on always keep an oppressed, heterogeneous class in opposition to a dominant class. The historical trait of unity versus plurality disappears to give preferentiality to dualism. Griffin labels this relationship «the Martini Cocktail» due to the permanent presence 326

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of two basic ingredients, one of which will remain as the dominant majority. This metaphor implies that the particularities of each cultural group integrating the dominated minority are integrated into one single category. Postmodernity is intensely concerned with identity politics and power relations. The political correctness prevailing in political, academic, and theoretical spheres claims for a discourse that may recover the specificity of every citizen. The adjective or noun «American» is one of those controversial terms over which much debate is held. The sameness and amalgamation suggested by the term have been challenged by hyphenated constructions such as «African-Americans,» «Asian-Americans,» or «Mexican-Americans,» rooted in the years of strong affluence of immigrants into the States, especially in the late nineteenth century. Contemporary usage of American English avoids hyphenating these constructions, but the expression «hyphenated American» is sometimes used to stress racial or cultural difference. The problem of nomenclature spreads to the academic field when scholars try to make justice to the variety of American letters. «Ethnic studies,» for instance, presents a conflict in that white issues are as ethnic as black or Native American ones: After all, any literature can be read as ethnic literature. But it is usually only the dominant literature [...] that escapes this designation as well as the limitations and the marginalization it often signifies for readers and critics not conversant with or interested in the cultures and histories of specific, nondominant, literatures. (Rustomji-Kerns: 2)

The literature(s) of the United States forced a severe revision of the canon during the twentieth century, as social and political progress led to some recognition and parity of approach. The diverse minority groups coincided in the attention paid in their writings to their dual or plural identity. They would develop formal and thematic strategies to tackle the issue of selfhood in attitudes that range from expository to confrontational. A variety of causes lay at the heart of the multicultural nature of contemporary American literature. At the outset, immigration has nurtured the United States with colonists, pioneers, exiles, and workers over the centuries. Enslaved men and women enriched the national texture for centuries as well. When the United States had at last acquired a texture rich enough for the birth of a «national literature,» disappointment and disbelief led to the Modernist period, during which minority groups adhered to the general

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questioning of the notion of Americanness and supplied new views of national identity in terms of gender, race, ethnics and religion. Therefore, though the early years of the twentieth century witnessed a Modernist project that was fundamentally Eurocentric and male, it expressed a curiosity about other rhythms, languages, patterns and beliefs. The ongoing movements for civil rights strive for the visibility and equality of those who had been previously systematically silenced, on social as well as artistic levels. Finally, the Postmodern spirit supplies a most suitable zeitgeist for the interrogation of such terms as identity and nationhood. Nationhood is a construction expressed in terms of history and shared historical values, based on an atavist sense of territoriality and artificially energized with ideological aspects. In the case of the United States, national identity has been constituted by successive waves of migration to such an extent that the plurality of its social structure shows through in every aspect of life. Transnationalism, or the interconnectivity of peoples and cultures beyond frontiers and national memberships, shows in the works under study here. Over the centuries, the Other has been the basic element in the construction of identity. Dominant voices create frames of mind as to sameness and difference because they dominate discourse. However, identity is more complex and flexible than a set of categories defining the self. Assimilation and acculturation are relevant aspects to take into account when dealing with American minorities, especially with ethnic and racial groups. The history of the United States has been a dialectic process of adaptation to a dominant culture and preservation of one’s group’s differentiating aspects. The attachment to original roots and the preservation of a non-American identity are manifested in several ways. For instance, the presence of ghettoes, reservations, or barrios is geographical evidence of the resistance to completely lose one’s origins. Language is of the utmost importance in the process of adapting to another culture, and linguistic preservation is therefore another mode of resistance against the complete dissolution of origins. For that reason some authors have decided to write in the language of their ancestors. For instance, some Chicano writers write in Spanish, and there is an important body of Yiddish theater in the history of American drama. The revision of the canon has encouraged the recuperation of the works written by racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Therefore, «American literature» has now broadened its scope to include 328

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those social segments that had remained «invisible» for traditional systematizations and evaluations of American texts. After the agitations of the sixties and seventies, a favorable climate arrived for new literary anthologies and critical positions regarding the literatures of cultural plurality. As a consequence, new terminology and approaches developed, which will be surveyed in the present Unit. The writers of American multiculturalism show their debt to the Postmodern spirit in their strategies to explore and define their identity. Thus, they have blended contemporary aesthetic concerns with their particular idiosyncrasy. They discuss ethnic, racial, gendered or sexual selfhoods as well as civil rights and notions of history and memory. Such is the variety of these writers —Native American, Chicano, French American, Jewish, Basque American, Asian American...— that a survey volume on contemporary American literature can hardly provide its readers with an adequate overview of all their concerns and formal devices. African American literature and culture has been paid due attention in previous Units, as it was the earliest to contribute to American mainstream culture and therefore had a solid tradition by the beginning of the twentieth century. A sense of cultural duality pervades the literatures of cultural plurality. It may be expressed in binary oppositions like past/present, gringo/Chicano, or East/West, as in the following extract from Cathy Song’s poem «Heaven.» In it, readers can observe how the duality of Asian American identity is reflected almost in a pictorial sense. The transcontinental separation, however, enhances a romantic idealization of a China the speaker has never visited: He thinks when we die we’ll go to China. Think of it –a Chinese heaven where, except for his blond hair, the part that belongs to his father, everyone will look like him. China, that blue flower on the map, bluer than the sea his hand must span like a bridge to reach it. An octave away. I’ve never seen it. It’s as if I can’t sing that far.

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But look— on the map, this black dot. Here is where we live, on the pancake plains just east of the Rockies, on the other side of the clouds. (NAAL: 3196)

Asian —mostly Chinese— people arrived in the United States in large groups in the nineteenth century, particularly as gold diggers during the California gold rush or as workers for the transcontinental railroad. Geographical, linguistic, and ethnic differences have frequently placed Asians in binary opposition to the Eurocentric culture, a cultural categorization persisting still today in a variety of popular cultural manifestations: The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (Said: 1)

Though the Asian American community may perceive and express a sense of duality, it is also possible to observe a process of assimilation to, and influence on, the dominant culture. The first published instance of Asian American literature was Seen and Unseen or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail (1897), by Japanese-born poet Yone Noguchi. Ezra Pound, an admirer and translator of Oriental poetry, praised the vitality of Noguchi’s English. Moreover, the pictorial precision of ideograms stimulated the Modernist innovations in poetical form. On occasions, the duality expressed in Cathy Song’s poem is made even more manifest when it takes place in the middle ground between opposites, as it happens with the concept of the borderland. Far from the mythical implications of the nineteenth-century Euramerican frontier, the borderland makes reference to the delicate territory in which bi- or multicultural citizens dwell. Gloria Anzaldúa’s works on mestizaje and the borderland make clear that an in-between awareness is a privileged perspective from which to contemplate one’s position in society: 330

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I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. (19)

Borders have become almost indispensable terms in the evaluation of the literatures of multiculturalism, especially of Chicana literature. After Anzaldúa’s phrasing, the borderlands have become a place of negotiation of cultures, where mainstream systems of classification collapse, where the dominating culture is not prevalent, and where the traditional separating line of the frontier cannot apply. Borders are not to be understood as lines of separation, as the culture and history of the United States traditionally understood it, that is, «as attempts by those in power to separate and divide, the border produced as boundary in the name of the status quo» (Concannon: 433). Anzaldúa understands the border rather as a space to inhabit and to resist a division designed for inequality. The term mestizaje evokes fusion of differences; it has transcended the purely racial and it is currently used as a critical instrument to designate the fluidity of identity, perceived and expressed in transition. In line with Postmodern thought, mestizaje illuminates the notion of a decentered identity in which its fluid components (race, gender, nation) are in shifting relationship. The Latina and specifically Mexican-American literary traditions share a great degree of mestizaje and code-switching, thus evidencing the bi- or multiculturalism that articulates them. One of the particularities of the literature of Hispanic origin is that, in some cases, it is written in Spanish, the reason for which it is sometimes rejected from the canon of American literature and finds editorial limitations to publish in the States. The texts surveyed in the pages that follow show how marginal discourses become empowered by decentering dominant ideologies. In order to do so, these resistant narratives make use of a range of strategies: — Mixing codes, so that not only the voice of the dominant group is heard. — Subverting literary traditions that have added up to contemporary relations.

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— Challenging binary oppositions that ultimately downgrade the dominated group. — Breaking ontological structures.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: N. SCOTT MOMADAY’S CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY 2.1. APPROACHING Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain Native American writers suffered the consequences of the colonization of those who for centuries deprived them of their land and silenced their histories. American literature largely offered the unique perspective of the colonizers and conquerors, thus overlooking the side of the dispossessed and annihilated, and has frequently presented an altered view of American identity, either by romanticizing or decrying its customs and beliefs. American Indian literature can be said to be based on —in some cases it is a retelling of— the traditional tales of the manifold tribes that populated North America. Their rituals and myths, sacred narratives, creation stories and trickster tales have developed into a modern Native American literature that combines tradition and modernity. The richness and variety of this literature comprises a group of recurring themes that define it: survival of American Indian culture as opposed to the Euramerican one, the relation of oral language and tradition to selfhood, the recuperation of a harmonious relationship with nature, and the healing power of storytelling. In words of Navarre Scott Momaday «We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves» (Momaday 1970: 55). Momaday was the initiator of the literary «Native American Renaissance.» The label was coined by Kenneth Lincoln’s study of the same name, published in 1983. It tries to emulate other similar cultural revivals that have surfaced in the American letters from about the 1850s. As with other previous renascences the term implies recovery, but this particular revival also calls for political restitution. Its beginnings are dated in the mid-sixties, when American Indian activism energized the publication of a variety of articles, poems, stories, and nonfiction books that retold the history of Native Americans. 332

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Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma (1934) from an EnglishCherokee mother and a Kiowa father. He was raised in Indian reservations, where he was in contact with Pueblo, Navajo and Apache traditions, while his father told him the folk-tales of his people that have been passed down for generations. Momaday has struggled to collect, preserve and perpetuate them with his own writing and with his work as university professor. He stated in «The Man Made of Words» that, after her grandmother’s death, he had to imagine himself as an American Indian and initiate a process of self-construction: «An Indian is an idea a given man has of himself» (Momaday 1970: 49). His concept of identity is, then, a posteriori —i.e. not a pre-established and static model. In response to the United States’ government policy that attempts to systematize American Indian personal and collective identities, Momaday proposed the trope «blood memory» —an aesthetic and political term— to define identity in imaginative terms. In other words, against the «blood quantum» standard of Native identification, this and other authors employ and celebrate blood memory as recuperator of the racial, collective memory passed down through oral tradition. Blood memory, then, is the «process and the product of situating oneself within a particular American Indian family’s or nation’s ‘racial memory’» (Allen: 98). Aware of identity as construction, Momaday’s blood memory participates in the construction of selfhood through memory and imagination. Momaday wrote The Way to Rainy Mountain as a journey of the spirit that paralleled his own physical journey to the landscape of his ancestors. But this journey, he acknowledges, is as physical as it is historical, mnemonic and verbal, designed for the reader to join: as Kimberley Blaeser asserts, the author «wants the reader to use his imagination to look through the windows of history, legend, cultural and personal experience just as Momaday has in his creation of the text» (In Vizenor: 40): Blood memory thus tropes the conflating of storytelling, imagination, memory, and genealogy into the representation of a single, multifaceted moment in a particular landscape. Blood memory also names the process through which Momaday «beads» the «memories of fathers and sons» into a single, integrated text. The contemporary Indian writer renders himself coincident with indigenous ancestors and with indigenous history —and makes available to readers both that indigenous past and his contemporary

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identity as indigenous— through strategies of narrative remembering and transgenerational address. (Allen: 101)

Momaday thus blends the traditional elements of oral discourse with modern tactics —for instance, the utility that printing and editing can provide. Momaday’s grandmother lived near Rainy Mountain, on the Kiowa Reservation in Oklahoma. On her death in 1963 he started to seek the oral tales of his childhood, which he gathered in the hope of making sense of the continuity that he perceived between himself and his ancestors. This way, Momaday sought to construct for himself an Indian identity that he could not detect in his assimilation to the Anglo-American culture. The result of the fieldwork he carried out in that period gave birth to The Journey of Taime, a hand-printed collection of legends, tales, and family stories that was published in 1967. Much of the material in this collection became the core story in The Way to Rainy Mountain. For a good warming up before you read Momaday’s text you should bear in mind…

 Its tripartite format, encompassing three different approaches to the same idea.

 Orality as a fundamental component in storytelling and in the construction of identity.

 Blood memory as a fundamental constituent of the self.  The connection between the one and the many.  The approach to nature as different from previous presentations in Eurocentric texts.

2.2. REVISITING The Way to Rainy Mountain The Way to Rainy Mountain is Momaday’s narration of an actual pilgrimage across Kiowa’s landscapes and its parallel mnemonic and historicalanthropological journeys. This work is then a gathering up of all these processes with a view to reconstruct Native American identity in an imaginative dimension. The task of inscribing this work in a definitive genre 334

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is certainly problematic due to its deliberate amalgamation of legend, personal narrative, and documentary. Scholars have labeled it «autobiography,» which would separate it from the traditional autobiographical mode: it is not confined to Momaday’s personal experiences or understanding of the world, it does not span his life-time, and it is far from being linear. Specialist Arnold Krupat adds that other autobiographies by American Indians encompass bicultural elements that, in a way, defy the recuperation of Native culture (1981: 24). All in all, critics have concentrated on Momaday’s exploration of identity, and have classified this innovative text under the phrase «autobiographical writing.» Most certainly, this work first strikes the reader for its surprising look. It shows an innovative disposition by which disparate texts seem to have been cut and pasted together with collage techniques. This layout challenges traditional conventions of storytelling and reading, since authors and readers alike are used to one linear, sequential narrative where events are reported. Postmodern frame-breaking, or the transgression of boundaries, is therefore employed here to subvert conventional textual practices, and to contest monofocal approaches to reality. In other words: we are forced to read these accounts differently («read» in its dual sense of looking at the words and interpreting them). In the case of The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday bracketed the text with an opening and a closing poem, whose verse form contrasts with the prose to be found in the prologue and the epilogue that introduce and conclude the story respectively. The story itself was told in twenty-four sections, but they were disposed according to a tripartite arrangement, by which myth, history, and personal account are displayed simultaneously on the page with different typographies. Some interspersed ink drawings by his father complete the work. The implications of this complex disposition are several. On the one hand, readers are encouraged —if not forced— to make an effort in order to face the text. They must abandon long-established reading habits to accompany Momaday in his journey. On the other, the logical necessity to fill spatial and informational gaps between sections makes the reader reconsider «reading.» Much in tune with the Postmodern understanding of readers as co-creators of meaning, Momaday’s narrative expects its readers to overcome customary boundaries regarding both textual practices and categorization of the world. Again in the words of Blaeser,

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Momaday undoubtedly chose his form partly for its ability to engage the reader, to involve the reader in questions about the significance of divisions. These ponderings will ultimately lead to more creative questions about the relationships between parts and the violation of divisions and to some concept of the dynamic interaction within the text. (42)

 Consider the transgression of boundaries addressed in this Unit, and try to see Momaday’s textual design as another form of transgression. Not only is he challenging the established model of writing and reading: he is making us read fluently, crossing the white gaps («frontiers») between the different sections of the narrative.

What the author himself labeled «commentaries» —the historical and personal fragments adjacent to the main, mythical text— «are meant to provide a context in which the elements of oral tradition might transcend the categorical limits of prehistory, anonymity, and archaeology in the narrow sense» (Momaday 1970: 59). Thus, the author challenges the accepted supremacy of the written word and the derived metanarratives. The graphical, verbal and ideological juxtaposition of the work also defies conventional sequential reading. The tripartite arrangement of each section seems to invite us to read each fragment before proceeding to the next section. It can be observed, however, that some connection exists between the main text in each section and the following, so that the commentaries could be skipped in order to read the principal parts sequentially. As for the three differentiated parts in each section, Blaeser argues that they interact by means of links that permit the author to deal with the same topic from different points of view. Therefore, she accurately points that such interaction may lead readers to ask themselves disturbing questions: «Can myth, then, also be history? Can fiction be fact? [...] Can the personal be historical? Does personal experience include history?» (46). The multiple possibilities of reading seem to suggest a plurality of coexisting realities. As the exercise in blood memory it is, the text manifests that Native American identity has to be imagined, and strategies for imaginative construction are therefore used. The energy of the spoken word —the chief 336

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vehicle of transmission— permeates The Way to Rainy Mountain, as it recurrently does in Native American works and postcolonial literature in general, where scripture —the foundation of ideological white dominance— blends with orature.

 As you read, pay attention to the signs that point to oral telling: poetic pieces, ancestors’ discourse, Native American songs and stories…

Concerning the themes that Momaday debates in his hybrid work, Vernon E. Lattin highlights the «mythic vision» of harmony between humans and nature, a vision of the sanctity of all life, a vision of the beauty and everlasting quality of the land, and a sense of the unity of life and time that transcends the lineal, judgmental, and historical view accepted by Western Christians. (625-626)

Lattin emphasizes the importance of distinguishing this vision from that of Christianity, and from the pastoral ideal observed in much mainstream American literature. These, Lattin argues, entail dominion, violation and exploitation of the land. Quest is, therefore, the attire that Momaday casts on this mythical journey, a pilgrimage towards the recovery and restitution of lost harmony. As usual in Momaday’s work, the text deals with «modern America’s need to come to accept the land» and to develop, Lattin continues with Momaday’s own words, an American Land Ethic [...] not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years. And we must come to moral terms. (635)

 Other

quests of the Postmodern period are nightmarish or void of significance. What is the tone of Momaday’s quest? Does it imply meaninglessness? Optimism? Where does it lead to?

As Allen brings up, there is an ongoing debate on the likelihood of «indigenous memories surviving contemporary times in the face of high

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degrees of cultural and linguistic assimilation, physical relocation, and genetic hybridity» (93). One of the immediate questions emerging from this debate would be to what extent Native American identity is validated by the texts written upon these unlikely recollections. Momaday has tried to overcome the debate over authentic or valuable memory by blurring the distinction between narrative and racial identity, reconciling both in one unique medium. He discloses here the almost magic power of the word — one of the characteristics in Native American writing— by which ancestors and history can be conjured. He asserted in «The Man Made of Words» that in the racial memory, Ko-sahn had seen the falling stars. For her there was no distinction between the individual and the racial experience, even as there was none between the mythical and the historical. Both were realized for her in the one memory, and that was of the land. (54)

 Momaday deconstructs the accepted frames of time and history as linear, and makes the boundaries of time (past, present) and person (I, others) collapse in the literary text. Can you find any cognitive «inconsistencies» in the narrative? Anything shocking that challenges our understanding of events?

The journey motif is ubiquitous in American —and worldwide— literature, as it has been mentioned in previous Units. However, mainstream literature has frequently monopolized such motif to the point that the myth of the open road has been constructed as white, male, escape-seeking or space-conquering. Indeed, Native American tribes used to move around in North America in search of food, or as a sort of collective ritual. Traveling, as a result, was an important part of their storytelling. However, Ronald Primeau accurately observes, Movement for European Americans was born of separation; the native American, on the other hand, was caretaker of the earth, not so restless, and not so intent on conquering space, speed, and progress. Without romanticizing, it is fair to expect few if any Native American writers to be attracted to the road narrative genre unless it is to undermine or parody many of its conventions. (121)

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Though not in an undermining or parodying spirit, Momaday’s journeys do seem to conform to the Native American relationship with the earth. As Primeau states, domination of the land for one’s economic or spiritual growth does not enter the literary journeys of Native Americans in the same way as it did not participate in their geographical mobility. As a matter of fact, the journeys in their works celebrate homecoming and reunion (The Way to Rainy Mountain itself or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony), while white traveling emphasized the idea of flight and disengagement. In the same line of thought, Momadays’ work reveals the environmental mindedness of Native American people. Although nature writing is an enduring genre in the literature of the United States, Native Americans «‘write nature’ regardless of genre» (Schweninger: 49). In other words: they have not developed their nature writing from a recognizable tradition, nor consider it a specific form in which to accommodate their appreciation of existence. American Indian ecoliterature can be traced back to pre-contact days, when their songs and rituals already celebrated the land and their interrelatedness with it. Free of the patterns of intellectual or exploitative domination perceived in Euramerican writing, they respect and venerate the earth and the feminine principle they associate with it. In tune with this reverence, femaleness occupies a central position: «Indian mothers, like the earth, endure; women’s rituals and symbols —earth, moon, fire, and water— emphasize continuance rather than destruction, survival rather than extinction» (Antell: 52). Interpretations of the position of American Indian women in their communities include those of servile wives or inferior members to men’s superiority. Notwithstanding these roles, the women in these communities —especially those of advanced age— have contributed to the survival of the tribal value system as preservers of a cultural and blood line.

 Revise The Way to Rainy Mountain and find out for which figures direct speech is reserved in the narrative, instead of indirect speech.

The narrator’s own understanding of his relationship with the earth is perceived in passages such as the following:

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Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. (NAAL: 2772-2773)

With the use of such words as «remembered earth,» «wonder,» or «imagine,» Momaday seems to be announcing the loss of a precious connection that human beings should strive to regain through the imaginative act. Once more, the ritualistic power of words, expressed in the parallel structures of the previous sentences, condenses the idea that identity is a reconstruction and not an absolute, finished-off, merely transferred narrative.

Navarre Scott Momaday is said to have initiated the Native American Renaissance in 1968. He uses blood memory as thematic constant in his poetry and prose, by which he proposes a construction of identity based on the creative imagination. In his work The Way to Rainy Mountain he shows a hybrid and innovative form, where he displays some recurrent motifs in Native American Literature: the mythic power of orality, the search for roots and identity, and the harmonious relationship with nature.

3. TEXT ANALYSIS: SANDRA CISNEROS’ GENDERED BORDERLAND 3.1. APPROACHING Cisneros’ «Woman Hollering Creek» Latino/a American literature, like Native American literature, bloomed in the nineteen sixties. However, it dates back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In fact, some anthologies include the writings of Cabeza de Vaca or Bartolomé de las Casas as early American literature written in Spanish. The recent history of Hispanic people is associated with those Mexicans 340

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who remained on United States soil after the 1858 Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty, by which the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, California and part of Colorado ceased to belong to Mexico and became part of the United States. The term that would later name these Mexican-Americans is Chicanos, although the present-day Hispanic community includes Latinos/as from other parts of the world (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean...). The term Latino/a would therefore encompass all Spanish speakers or, more restrictively, only those of Caribbean origin if the adjective Chicano/s is to be used for Mexican-Americans. In the territories which were to become part of the United States in the nineteenth century, the Anglo culture dominated the Spanish culture that had in turn dominated the Native culture. Sandra Cisneros (1954-) was born in Chicago to a Mexican father and a Chicana (Mexican American) mother. She spent her early years moving from the States to Mexico and back with her family, and when she later settled in Texas she apprehended the cultural and linguistic tensions of border life that she would subsequently incorporate into her work. In her literature she pays attention to the Latina community which she finds absent from other, canonical records. Her best-known works are the autobiographical The House on Mango Street (1984), the volume of stories Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and the novel Caramelo (2002). Unlike the critiques of Adrienne Rich —and other feminist writers of the 60s and 70s— Cisneros’ advocacy of women’s position in society is engaged in other discourses of difference. In her stories, female characters are seen as inscribed in underprivileged categories such as woman, ethnically marked, poor, nonspeaker of English, and not belonging to the prevailing religion. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s work —be it fiction or nonfiction— the mestiza consciousness is constructed as privileged for it allows an understanding of the fragility of borders and the value of crossing. Geographic, linguistic, religious and gender crossings have had an immense influence on the production of Latin American Literature. As with Anzaldúa’s consciousness, Sandra Cisneros is defined by her in-betweenness, since we can locate her inside both the United States and the Chicana cultures, that is between two traditions, two languages, and two nations. The reading of her work manifests her «transnational» approach to questions of identity, neither assimilationist to the dominant culture of the United States, neither oppositional.

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Read this story while you carefully bear in mind…

 The instances of biculturalism it presents.  Its emphasis on oral culture and tradition.  The subversive representation of gender types.  The porous quality of boundaries of any sort.  The ways identity can be constructed and imposed on the subject. 3.2. REVISITING «Woman Hollering Creek» If Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain deals with the public history of a community, Sandra Cisneros’ «Woman Hollering Creek» discusses a family’s private history. Both accounts are nevertheless readable and subject to interpretation. Cleófilas, the protagonist of the story, is a character who lives on the ideological borderland, i.e. in the hybrid space between static frontier lines. According to Cristina Garrigós, The unconventional narrative flow of the story, the multiple voices and narrators, the characters who are superposed […] are designed to confound the readers and point out the mobility of the frontier and the impossibility of attaining a single meaning. (148)

As suggested above, dwelling between cultures, languages and traditions account for such fluid, loose storytelling. Narrative voices alternate and blend, from the rather distant narrator of the story’s first paragraph to the involved narration of the kind that follows: Because you didn’t watch last night’s episode when Lucía confessed she loved him more than anyone in her life. In her life! And she sings the song «You or No One» in the beginning and end of the show. Tú o Nadie. Somehow one ought to live one’s life like that, don’t you think? You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end. (NAAL: 3165)

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 Observe the different styles used in the story to transmit speech: direct, indirect and free indirect. Does the author use the conventional linguistic markers to indicate each (such as inverted commas, or introductory verbs)?

Although English is the language of Cisneros’ upbringing and academic formation, she —like other Latino and Latina writers— contests this sign of cultural dominance by interspersing Spanish into her prose. This use of Spanish —the language of the Other for Anglos— is imposed on the hegemonic English language. According to Francis R. Aparicio, What on the surface appears to be a praxis that signals cultural assimilation may be defined also as a subversive act: that of writing the Self using the tools of the Master and, in the process, transforming those signifiers with the cultural meanings, values, and ideologies of the subordinate sector. (797)

The inclusion of Spanish diction such as arroyo or señora is meaningful enough, for it dismisses the English corresponding words while preserving the Spanish sounds /rr/ and /ñ/ (difficult to pronounce for an English native speaker). But resistant discourse is brought to the forefront beyond lexis: the syntax and rhythms of Spanish are also visible in «Woman Hollering Creek,» transforming English to the point of creating a new, hybrid language of the borderland. Aparicio proposes a subversive function of this hybrid representation of identity and highlights the displacing of the center of discourse to the margins: By metaphorically displacing the ideal monolingual American reader and by producing texts whose poetic and cultural signifying require crosscultural competency, contemporary U.S. Latino and Latina writers are marginalizing and even potentially excluding the monolingual reader who has been glaringly positioned throughout history as the prototypical embodiment of cultural literacy. (800)

 Think of the way this linguistic interference of Spanish provides a multiple view of subjectivity. What other cultural elements in the story contribute to this plural notion of identity?

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Cisneros focuses on the position of women in this fluid cultural site. The story addresses the diverse power structures around powerless, confined women. Romantic love, as idealized in romantic fiction or Latin American soap operas, is one of the controlling devices of women’s identity in the text, since their narrative perpetually enhance the idea of pain in the name of love: María de Nadie, the poor Argentine country girl who had the ill fortune of falling in love with the beautiful son of the Arrocha family, the very family she worked for, whose roof the slept under and whose floors she vacuumed, while in that same house, with the dust brooms and floor cleaners as witnesses, the square-jawed Juan Carlos Arrocha had uttered words of love, I love you, María, listen to me, mi querida, but it was she who had to say No, no, we are not of the same class, and remind him it was not his place nor hers to fall in love, while all the while her heart was breaking, can you imagine. (NAAL: 3169)

But the other women in the story also comply with the dominant ideology and add up to Cleófilas’ silence in the face of domestic violence. The story reveals a consented silence that suppresses the real facts about man-woman relationships and that finds a cruel companion in the fact that Cleófilas does not speak English. Cultural and linguistic speechlessness intermingle. Space is another element in Cisneros’ story which deserves particular attention. Far from being presented as a static, empty set of coordinates for the development of the plot, space is perceived as subject to power relations, i.e. «in relation to identity and agency» (Brady: 122). The binary opposition public/private space is interwoven with that of safe/unsafe, both of which are highly gendered. Home as a site of decency and safety for women is quickly decried in «Woman Hollering Creek,» whose title announces the desolation of domestic life.

 Consider

the story’s cyclic treatment of patriarchal domination. What does Cisneros imply by removing the protagonist from a husband’s house and returning her to a father’s? Think of confinement as differentiating element in Cleófilas’ and Felice’s characterizations.

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Seguin’s geographical design stresses Cleófilas isolation and patriarchal structures: TV repair shop, drugstore, hardware, dry cleaner’s, chiropractor’s, liquor store, bail bonds, empty storefront, and nothing, nothing, nothing of interest. Nothing one could walk to, at any rate. Because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car. (NAAL: 3168)

 The quotation above calls attention to class and gender issues in relation to freedom and agency. How do vehicles, everpresent symbols of independence in American culture, contribute to this in the story?

The story’s suffocating spaces contrast with the openness of the road, as Kaup proposes: Agents of change and mobility, roads are disturbers of the peace, of the status quo. Whereas houses and boundaries offer shelter and protection against intruders, roads serve opposed needs —for freedom, an encounter with the unknown, and new relationships. (370)

The title of the story evidences how a static, consolidated piece of language such as the name of a creek can be appropriated and its meaning reestablished. «La Llorona,» one of the main female myths in Mexican culture, is the representation of Coatlicue, who «embodies the full experience of motherhood, from pleasure to pain» (Marrero: 187). This figure, who according to legend wails for the loss of her children, resists external forces «that diminish a sense of self [and] embodies the act of struggle inherent within the principle of contradiction –the dynamic tension between conflicting forces, such as creation and destruction, lightness and darkness, masculinity an femininity» (Carbonell: 53). Like other Chicana authors, Cisneros «subverts traditional representations of La Llorona by portraying her as a heroic figure […] as a figure who frees herself from stereotypes of dependency on men, especially those who are abusive» (Marrero: 179). The creek bears the name of a suffering woman whose only act of speech takes the form of hollering. In the surroundings, Felice points out, nothing

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«is named after a woman» (NAAL: 3171), as if the very act of giving a woman’s name to towns or topographical elements could symbolically make the Other pervade patriarchal discourse. Women themselves participate in the construction of gender by ascribing a negative connotation to a woman’s unrepressed discourse: What kind of talking was that coming from a woman? Cleófilas thought. But then again, Felice was like no woman she’d ever met. Can you imagine, when we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy, she would say later to her father and brothers. Just like that. Who would’ve thought? (NAAL: 3171)

By the end of Cisneros’ story, however, Cleofilas’ silence undergoes a change as a «long ribbon of laughter» releases her suppressed identity after crossing the creek, assuming the holler but subverting its traditional meaning.

 «Woman Hollering Creek» comprises several instances of the binomial silence/talking. Underline all the acoustic demonstrations —not exclusively speech acts— permitted to the men in the story.

As with Momaday’s text, orality filters through the narrative with a double effect: firstly, storytelling challenges the scripture of the dominant discourse; secondly, an intimate dialogue is established between narrator and reader.

 List the ways in which Cisneros adds this oral quality to the story, as if it were being told for listening, not for reading.

Sandra Cisneros belongs to a generation of Chicana writers dealing with notions of identity politics, transnationalism, and gender issues in multicultural communities. Her stories depict how identity hinges upon fluid categories, constantly negotiated and reevaluated. Her women characters are more than often portrayed as dependant citizens who suffer the pressure of history, tradition, and other sociopolitical forces.

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4. EXERCISES 4.1. Test yourself On Scott Momaday a) What does the complex form of The Way to Rainy Mountain suggest? b) How does blood memory inform the work’s form and theme? c) In what way is Momaday’s journey motif different from Eurocentric literary journeys? d) How are different frames or boundaries challenged and surpassed in the text? e) How would you define the narrator’s relationship with nature? How is it different from the one felt in Euramerican literature? f) Why are the habits and outfit of the Kiowas carefully given? g) In what ways does the narrator recuperate the oral strategies of Native Americans? h) How does this text construct notions of cultural plurality? i) In what way are women important figures in The Way to Rainy Mountain?

On Sandra Cisneros a) How does Cisneros’ story typify the literature of the borderland? b) Which elements of Mexican origin does she intersperse with Anglo culture in order to create a transnational identity? c) What is the importance of orality in these two texts? In what sense does it connect to memory and identity? d) How is media culture seen as contributing to gender asymmetries? e) What is the purpose of the story’s fractured narrative?

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f) How is identity represented in flux in the text? g) In what way is the binomial sound/silence important in the story? h) How are vehicles symbolic? i) Why is space relevant to the story’s discussion of powerlessness?

Summary questions a) What are the reasons behind the Renaissance of the literatures of multiculturalism? b) How are oral traditions incorporated into the literatures analyzed in this Unit? c) What is the role of myth in them? d) How are women portrayed in these narratives? e) Why is the critical discourse of postcolonialism frequently used to approach these works?

4.2. Explore a) What kind of audience would you say these authors address to? How do they reach those readers outside their own communities? b) Ethnic, religious, and gender issues blend in the works covered in this Unit. Examine to what extent gender aspects may be explored from the postcolonial perspective —i.e., as a form of colonialism. c) Discuss how homecoming is portrayed in the two works analyzed in this Unit, and its implications for their protagonists. d) Both Cisneros and Momaday have university degrees and hold jobs as teachers of literature. In your opinion, how does this biographical fact shape their work? Are they scholarly, or consciously-crafted texts? Do their stories reveal the knowledge of a canon that has excluded them until recently? 348

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e) Regardless of its old-fashioned approach and style, West Side Story (1961) problematizes the dichotomy resistance/assimilation to Gringo culture in the United States. Explore such duality in this film, paying attention to the ethnic and cultural stereotypes that intervene in the dichotomy. f) Some modern films attempt to compensate for the biased representation of ethnic groups submitted by older pictures. Discuss to what extent this is accomplished in contemporary films (for instance, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990)). 4.3.  Key terms —  Blood memory —  Borderland —  Ecoliterature

—  Mestizaje —  Postcolonial —  Transnational

5.  Bibliography 5.1.  Recommended readings — Gloria Anzaldúa’s «La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness.» NAAL: 2936-2946. — Sandra Cisneros’ webpage. http://www.sandracisneros.com/index.php — Paul Lauter’s «The Literatures of America: A Comparative Discipline.» From Redefining American Literary History, by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (eds.), New York: MLA, 1990. http://venus.arts.u-szeged.hu/pub/angolamerikai/amerikanisztika/rozsnyai/talc/lauter.html — James Ramson’s «Perpetuating Remembrance: N. Scott Momaday and Kiowa Storytelling.» Point of View, No. 18. http://imv.au.dk/publikationer/pov/Issue_18/ section_1/artc9A.html#akr05 — Ana María Carbonell’s «From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.» MELUS, Vol. 24, No. 2, Religion, Myth and Ritual (Summer, 1999), 53-74. http://mmagsig11.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/fromllorona-to-gritona.pdf

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5.2. Critical works cited CHADWICK ALLEN. «Blood (and) Memory.» American Literature, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March, 1999), 93-116. JUDITH A. ANTELL. «Momaday, Welch, and Silko: Expressing the Feminine Principle Through Male Alienation.» American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1979), 7-12. GLORIA ANZALDÚA. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco, Aunt Lute: 1999. FRANCES R. APARICIO. «On Sub-Versive Signifiers: U. S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English Author(s).» American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), 795-801. BILL ASHCROFT et al. The Empire Writers Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. HOMI K. BHABHA. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. KIMBERLY BLAESER. «The Way to Rainy Mountain: Momaday’s Work in Motion.» In Gerald VIZENOR (ed.), Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman and London: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1993, 39-54. MARY PAT BRADY. «Contrapuntal Geographies in Woman Hollering Creek.» American Literature, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 1999), 117-150. JENNIFER BRICE. «Earth as Mother, Earth as Other in Novels by Silko and Hogan.» Critique, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), 127-138. KEVIN CONCANNON. «The Contemporary Space of the Border: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and William Gibson’s Neuromancer.» Textual Practice, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Winter, 1998), 429-442. CRISTINA GARRIGÓS. «Postmodernist Women Writing in the Eighties: Broken Images of Motherhood in the Works of Acker, Castillo and Viramontes.» In Mª Felisa López Liquete et al (ed.), American Mirrors: (Self) Reflections and (Self) Distorsions. Vitoria: UPV, 2002, 141-150. EDWARD M. GRIFFIN. «The Melting Pot, Vegetable Soup, and Martini Cocktail: Competing Explanations of U.S. Cultural Pluralism.» Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1998), 133-152. LEE E. HELLER. «Conceiving the ‘New’ American Literature.» Early American Literature (29:1), 1994, 83-90.

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MONIKA KAUP. «The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature.» American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 2 (June, 1997), 361-397. ARNOLD KRUPAT. «The Indian Autobiography: Origins, Type, and Function.» American Literature, Vol.53, No. 1 (March 1981), 22-42. — The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. U. of California Press, 1989. VERNON E. LATTIN. «The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction.» American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 4 (January, 1979), 625640. MIGUEL MARRERO and SARA CARDONA. «Chicana Identit(ies): Reconstructing La Malinche, La Llorona and La Virgen.» 2004 Monograph Serires (Part I). Houston: NAAAS and Affiliates, 2004. N. SCOTT MOMADAY. «The Man Made of Words.» Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970. RONALD PRIMEAU. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green: Bowling Green U.P., 1996. ROSHNI RUSTOMJI-KERNS (ed.). Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by South AsianAmerican Writers. Boulder: Westwood Press, 1995. EDWARD SAID. Orientalism. New York: Vantage Books, 1979. LEE SCHWENINGER. «Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers.» MELLIS, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), 47-60.

5.3. Literary works mentioned in this Unit Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-): Her work Ceremony (1977) is, like Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a blend of memory, prose and poetry. It tells of Tayo’s returning home after the Second World War, and his attempts to recover the harmony his ancestors once had.

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Read the following excerpts and write a commentary on them, using the questions that follow as a guide. Remember to: — Focus on the questions themselves. — Use critical terms accurately. — Organize and develop your ideas. — Provide suitable examples from the texts to support your arguments. — Write in legible, coherent, proficient English. Also, you should try to avoid: — Pouring out all you remember of a certain topic, unrelatedly. — Describing authors’ lives and works. — Exposing ideas without textual references. — Incoherent, fragmented pieces of information. — Sloppy, illegible language.

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1) A melody is heard, playing upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises. Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides. Only the blue light of the sky falls upon the house and forestage; the surrounding area shows an angry flow of orange. As more light appears, we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality. The kitchen at center seems actual enough, for there is a kitchen table with three chairs, and a refrigerator. But no other fixtures are seen. At the back of the kitchen there is a draped entrance, which leads to the living-room. To the right of the kitchen, on a level raised two feet, is a bedroom furnished only with a brass bedstead and a straight chair. On a shelf over the bed a silver athletic trophy stands. A window opens onto the apartment house at the side. […] The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially transparent. The roof-line of the house is one-dimensional; under and over it we see the apartment buildings. Before the house lies an apron, curving beyond the forestage into the orchestra.

1.1. Why is the setting described as «partially transparent» (line 16)? 1.2. What is the role of the flute in the excerpt and in the complete text? 1.3. How does the excerpt contribute to the characterization of the work’s protagonist? 1.4. How does the complete text defy American myths of home and family? 1.5. Analyze the quote «Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.»

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2) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their public beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night […].

2.1. Analyze the rhythmic devices in the excerpt above. 2.2. Explain the paronomasias in the excerpt. 2.3. What does the phrase «the best minds of my generation» refer to, and why are they praised? 2.4. How are the physical and the emotional blended in the complete poem? 2.5. Discuss the complete text as manifesto for a generation of writers.

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3) Around him loomed vague hothouse shapes; the pitifully small heart fluttered against his own. Counterpointed against his words the girl heard the chatter of birds and fitful car honkings scattered along the wet morning in and Earl Bostic’s alto rising in occasional wild peaks through the floor. The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threatened by such hints of anarchy: gaps and excrescences and skew lines, and a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals. Callisto had described the process once as a kind of «feedback»: she crawled into dreams each night with a sense of exhaustion, and a desperate resolve never to relax that vigilance. Even in the brief periods when Callisto made love to her, soaring above the bowing of taut nerves in haphazard double-stops would be the one singing string of her determination.

3.1. How does the excerpt relate to the title of the story? 3.2. Identify the characters in the excerpt above and describe their roles in the story. 3.3. What is the role of musical imagery in the excerpt and in the complete text? 3.4. In what way does the complete text defy conventional literary and thinking frames? 3.5. Debate the portrayal of American culture as seen in the complete text.

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4) When to her lute Corinna sings neither words nor music are her own; only the long hair dipping over her cheek, only the song of silk against her knees and these adjusted in reflections of an eye. Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before an unlocked door, that cage of cages, tell us, you bird, you tragical machine— is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down by love, for you the only natural action, are you edged more keen to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown her household books to you, daughter-in-law, that her sons never saw?

4.1. What is the main idea contained in the first stanza of the excerpt? 2.2. What does the image «unlocked door, that cage of cages» (line 9) stand for? 4.3. Discuss the figure of the «daughter-in-law» in the complete text. 4.4. How does the complete poem reveal women’s empowerment? 4.5. Debate the quote «A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.»

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5) None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, —that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food. This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, «You and your father lent me this — gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.»

5.1. Identify the narrator of this excerpt. 5.2. How does intertextuality operate in the excerpt? 5.3. How does the complete text fit into the feminist interrogation of language? 5.4. How does ecofeminism work in the story? 5.5. Analyze the quote «Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living [...], but in order to be useful they must be retold.»

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