History of the American Revolution (NIVEL AVANZADO)

In three documentaries. Preliminaries:

 

The Beginning of the Revolutionary War:

The Birth of the Republic:

Emily DICKINSON – La Recluse incandescente (DOCUMENTAIRE, 1988)

Young, Veronica, dir. Emily Dickinson. Documentary. 1988. With French subtitles. ("Emily DICKINSON – La Recluse incandescente"). YouTube (Éclair Brut) 24 April 2020.* (With Richard Sewall, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich et Joyce Carol Oates).

https://youtu.be/gRaDjEH1sMo

         2020

 

TODAY'S FIGHT FOR US INDEPENDENCE

It's always a revolutionary war for independence and liberty in America—and everywhere else as well:

pic.twitter.com/zPh2ddB38K

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2020

pic.twitter.com/L3tOUDiT0G

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2020

—oOo—

United States of America's National Anthem

"The Star Spangled Banner," the United States of America's National Anthem. Written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key (—yes, including the reference to the rockets in 1814).

Doris Lessing (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From The Salon.com Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

Lessing, Doris (1919-[2013])

b. Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) [Premio Príncipe de Asturias 2001, Nobel Prize for Literature 2007]

FICTION: The Grass is Singing (1950), This Was the Old Chief's Country (stories, 1952), Martha Quest (Children of Violence series, 1952), A Proper Marriage (Children of Violence series, 1954), Five: Short Novels (1955), Retreat to Innocence (1956), The Habit of Loving (stories, 1958), *The Golden Notebook (1962), A Man and Two Women (stories, 1963),  African Stories (1964), Landlocked (Children of Violence Series, 1966), The Four-Gated City (Children of Violence sereis, 1969), Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971), The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories ([republished as Volume 1 of Collected Stories, 1978] 1972), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), To Room Nineteen (Volume 2 of Collected Stories, 1978), The Diaries of Jane Somers (including The Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983)and If the Old Could (1984), originally published under the pseudonym Jane Somers], 1984), The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992), Canopus in Argos: Arvhives ([contains Colonized Planet V, Shikasta (1979), The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments: The Report of Ambien II, of the Five (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)], 1992), Playing the Game: Graphic Novel (1993), Winter in July  (Stories, 1993), Love, Again (1996), Mara and Dann (1999), [The Sweetest Dream, 2001, The Cleft, 2007]

NONFICTION: Going Home (1957), In Pursuit of the English (1961), Particularly Cats (1967), A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1975), Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987), African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992), Under My Skin (Volume 1 of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, 1994), Walking in the Shade (Volume 3 of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, 1997), [Time Bites (2004), Alfred and Emily (2008), On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (2007)]

For over half a decade, Doris Lessing has turned her prolific pen to just about every prose form—fiction, autobiography, essays, drama. Yet all of her writing stems from the impulse to lay bare the grid of class, race, and gender relations that governs her middle class characters' lives. Lessing brings the microscopic intensity of George Eliot and the combative sexual consciousness of D. H. Lawrence to bear on English culture, whether the context is the provincially hierarchical "settler" society of Southern Rhodesia in A Proper Marriage or the beleaguered bohemia of "free women" in The Golden Notebook. Lessing's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the post-World War II period rests firmly on her contribution to the grand tradition of English social realism. Yet Lessing herself once dismissed George Eliot, to whom she is so often compared, as "good as far as she goes"; she prefers to claim the more cosmopolitan influence of Tolstoy and Balzac.

Indeed, this apparently most British of writers was thirty years old before she set foot in England or published her first novel. Her upbringing on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) acquainted her more thoroughly with the isolation and racial exploitation of white colonial culture than with an imperial literary heritage. Her formal schooling ended at age fourteen, and in Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography, Lessing notes with pride the real accomplishments of her youth: the ability to "set a hen, look after chickens and rabbits, worm dogs and cats, pan for gold, take samples from reefs, cook, sew, use the milk separator and churn butter, go down a mine shaft in a bucket, make cream cheese and ginger beer . . . drive the car, shoot pigeons and guineafowl for the pot, [and] preserve eggs." By the time she left for London in 1949, she had augmented these accomplishments with two divorces, three children, the obloquy of Communist party membership and anti-apartheid agitation, and the unpublished draft of her first novel.  

Colonia race relations, political activism, and the burdens of women have remained her central concerns. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, about a farmer's wife drawn into a doomed affair with an African worker, approaches its material from a distance. Lessing infuses a simple plot with the intensity of a Greek tragedy. She portrays the wife's murder by the African, Moses, as the inevitable outcome of male violence and female passivity fostered by white settler culture. Lessing depicts the white experience of colonial Africa more urgently and directly in her five-novel Children of Violence sequence (1953-1969), in which she embeds the sexual, political, and intellectual development of her protagonist, Martha Quest, in a detailed evocation of the communist and progressive political and intellectual life of Rhodesia and London in the 1950s and 1960s.

Anna Wulf, the novelist heroine of Lessing's most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, continued Martha's quest: political activism, sexual experimentation, maternity, female friendship, and authorship all feed into her struggle for authentic, integrated selfhood. The declarative simplicity of the novel's opening line—"The two women were alone in the London flat"—belies the explosive effect on several generations of women intellectuals struggling to reconcile the life of the mind, the imperatives of the body, and hte gender roles they inherited from the 1950s. But as Lessing herself insists, The Golden Notebook achieved innovations bneyond its contribution to what she dismissively terms "the sex war." The novel combines omniscient observation, Anna's own musings in four different journals, and sections from Anna's novel manuscript. These interwoven narratives capture both an individual consciousness and a particular cultural moment with something of the multilayered depth of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Public events shape private histories in Lessing's novels, often violently. In The Good Terrorist, for example, middle-class Alice Mellings keeps house for a pseudo-communist cadre until a too-successful bombing destroys her illusion of control. In the chilling The Fifth Child, terror emerges from the bosom of the family, when Harriet Lovatt gives birth to the sociopathic Ben, the embodiment of a disaffected savagery that, Lessing suggests, will inherit the urban future. Lessing anatomizes a less dramatic, but perhaps more pervasive, anguish in The Diary of a Good Neighbor, If the Old Could . . . , and Love, Again, in which women whose familial nad productive relationships have passed away confront the isolation of aging.

Lessing's scary genius lies in her ability to bring her readers face-to-face with an unadorned reflection of some of our more depressing, but all too human, features. At the same time, her realism has always coexisted with a tendency towards mysticism. Her novels of the 1970s compellingly combine a surface of social and geographic detail with journeys into an inner space that Lessing has described, in The Real Thing, as "so much more intelligent than the slow, lumbering, daylike self." In the haunting Memoirs of a Survivor, for example, worlds separated by time and space interpe etrate through the vision of the unnamed female narrator, enabling her to save herself and her companions from extinction. But when Lessing leaves humanity entirely behind, as she does in the science fiction sequence Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983), her depictions of warring galactic empires lack the individuality and emotional insight she brings to earthly society. In Lessing's most recent novel, Mara and Dann, she returns once again to the theme of earthly apocalypse, with human, if visionary, protagonists.

In Under My Skin, Lessing describes her long-ago attempts to explain to her young children her departure from their lives: "[I told them] I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful world where there would be no race hatred, injustice, and so forth . . .  One day they would thank me for [leaving] . . . I was absolutely sincere. There isn't much to be said for sincerity, in itself."

It is typical of Lessing to emphasize the limits of good intentions, even her own. Yet in doing so, she paradoxically underlines her dedication to a more rigorous sincerity, a vision as stripped of illusion as her art can make it.

 

See Also: Writers who share Lessing's unsentimental vision of contemporary mores include Margaret Atwood, Diane Johnson, and Alison Lurie.  

 

—Laura Morgan Green

Edgar Allan Poe, poeta irremediable

—Edgar Allan Poe, según la Historia Universal de la Literatura de Léon Thoorens:

El poeta irremediable

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), el "poeta irremediable", busca una luz fatídica y misteriosa para iluminar sus portentosas experiencias y para profundizar en los abismos del alma humana.

En 1842 publicaba uno de sus poemas, en que figuraba este fragmento:

En el cielo habita un espíritu
las fibras de cuyo corazón forman un laúd.
Nadie canta tan asombrosamente bien
como el ángel Israfel
y las indecisas estrellas —según dicen—
cesan en sus himnos, presas por el encanto
de su voz, enmudecidas....
...Si yo pudiera residir
donde Israfel
reside y se personifica en mí,
quizá no cantase tan singularmente bien
una melodía humana,
y una nota más intensa que ésta
 volara de mi lira hasta el cielo.

En este poema se reconoce en el acto un tono y una vibración espirituales ausentes en toda la versificación americana anterior.

Poe escribió, además, otros poemas, una novela, Las aventuras de Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), y numerosos cuentos y relatos, reunidos ahora bajo el título de Historias Extraordinarias, que Baudelaire comenzó a traducir a partir de 1848, aunque los críticos americanos seguían y siguen permaneciendo indiferentes a ellas. "Es un mal escritor, que debe su popularidad a un accidente pasajero", dice Yvor Winters, comentario que sólo concierne a Poe como poeta. Sus historias no son más que relatos populares. En cuanto al hombre en sí...  Dos días después de su muerte, el New York Tribune publicaba un artículo bilioso que decía: "pocos le echarán de menos, pues aunque tenía algunos lectores, contaba con pocos o con ningún amigo". En su opinión, la sociedad sólo estaba compuesta de canallas. No soportaba la contradicción. Ignoraba la delicadeza moral. En resumen, era un vulgar ambicioso, un hombre "diferente" y, por lo tanto, peligroso, en doloroso desacuerdo con su país, al que osaba juzgar y condenar.

Baudelaire presentía en Poe a un poeta de vida espiritual intensa en exceso, de una lucidez demasiado grande, para que pudiera acomodarse a "esta inmensa barbarie alumbrada con gas" que era América. En julio de 1856, los hermanos Goncourt descubrían su obra artística y declaraban: "Una literatura nueva, la literatura del siglo XX... Por fin la novela del futuro dedicada a contar más la historia de cuanto ocurre en el cerebro de la humanidad que lo que siente su corazón". Y más tarde, el francés-norteamericano Julien Green escribía unas frases que plantean de modo definitivo el caso trágico de un hombre que se sabía "poeta irremediable" en un país que negaba al poeta el derecho a profetizar.

"Me pregunto por qué su país se ha mostrado tan injusto con él. Los lectores norteamericanos le consideran morboso y a América no le gusta estar representada por tan malsano poeta. Y es rechazado con más ira todavía porque América lleva en su seno ese desequilibrio que el genio de Poe significa como una flor tenebrosa, un grandioso lirio nocturno entre los dedos de la muerte." 

 

Su vida es una novela trágica y desconcertante. Hijo de actores, huérfano a los tres años y adoptado por una familia burguesa de Richmond, recibe una educación distinguida en colegios ingleses y norteamericanos, y rompe al fin sus relaciones con su familia adoptiva. A los dieciocho años de edad se alista en el ejército, es sargento mayor apenas cumplidos veinte años e ingresa en la Academia de West Point, pero al fin es expulsado de allí. Comienza entonces una dolorosa existencia de vagabundo elegante, periodista, poeta y narrador de cuentos, perpetuamente borracho y quizá también entregado a los estupefacientes. Se casa a los veintisiete años de edad con una muchacha que sólo contaba catorce y, cuando ella muere diez años después, debe defenderse de vagas acusaciones de crueldad. Colabora en diversas publicaciones, alcanza el éxito e incluso la fama, pero se arruina, bebe incesantemente y cae en una manía persecutoria, intenta suicidarse, pierde cada vez más su equilibrio mental, si no el juicio, y muere de "delirium tremens" en el hospital de Baltimore el 9 de octubre de 1849.

 

Edgar A. Poe, un escritor maldito

Aun con toda su aridez, los citados datos biográficos señalan un destino: un hombre afectado por circunstancias particulares, pero que no logró hallar en la sociedad en que vivía las respuestas, los valores, el contorno que le hubieran permitido reconstruirse tal como él desearea: feliz y equilibrado, dueño de su vida y de su pensamiento. Se percataba de ello y en toda su obra intenta explicarlo: no deleitándose en la descripción de su infierno, sino poniendo de relieve sus esfuerzos para salir de él.

Poe navega contra la corriente literaria de su época. Hace justicia a Cooper y a Irving, aunque no crea en su genio, pero debate contra sus epígonos Cooke, Coob, Southworth, Holmes e Ingraham, simples románticos aficionados, que mezclan lo real, lo novelesco y los convencionalismos. A las "novelas-río" de moda, Poe opone "la literatura de revista", o semanario, cuyo éxito popular, según él, no significa, "como suponen algunos críticos, una decadencia del gusto", sino que es "un genio de nuestro tiempo, de una época en que los hombres sienten necesidad de cosas breves, escuetas y bien digeridas". En este caso no se trata simplemente de una estética de la concisión opuesta a una estética de la incontinencia verbal, sino del papel que debe desempeñar el escritor ante las necesidades del público.

El mundo norteamericano en erupción, creador y destructor, triturador de cuerpos y almas, hace sentir como nunca lo que la vida acarrea consigo de misterio, de desorden y de abismos aparentemente insondables. Describir y amplificar no sirve para nada e incluso perjudica y mixtifica. En lugar de dejarse arrastrar por las olas, es preciso dominarlas, explicar su poder y su pretendida fantasía. No es tarea fácil y el público se resiste a ello. A partir de aquí, lo fantástico, casi el mundo del ocultismo, los prolegómenos de la ciencia-ficción, permiten al autor expresar libremente —aunque esta libertad procura revestirse prudente y púdica de complejos simbolismos— cosas que de otra manera desencadenarían sobre él la reprobación pública y quizá la cárcel. El lector, por su parte, puede no comprender nada o fingir que no lo entiende, al propio tiempo que se divierte con la fantasía y la habilidad asombrosas del prestidigitador.

Siendo tan compleja la realidad y los medios de tener contacto con ella tan difíciles de dominar, el poeta compone "una crónica de sensaciones más que de hechos", como dice el propio Poe en Berenice, renunciando a analizar despiadadamente las sensaciones. En La esfinge, el héroe divisa un monstruo que desciende por la colina: es un insecto deslizándose sobre un cristal. Rasgo que bien pudiera ser una de las claves principales de la obra de Poe. Se le considera, además, acertadamente, como uno de los patriarcas de la novela policíaca clásica: aquella en que el autor expone un enigma aparentemente insoluble que resolverá más tarde, únicamente mediante la inteligencia y la lógica, y demostrando que, de hecho, el lector disponía, desde la exposición de los datos, de todos los elementos necesarios para para solucionarlo por sí mismo.

Su novela Doble asesinato en la calle Morgue encaja perfectamente en esta idea, si bien sus demás relatos lo confirman: Ligeia, El escarabajo de oro, La caída de la casa Usher, El corazón revelador, El gato negro, William Wilson, El descenso al Maëlstrom, La carta robada, citando a propósito los que el propio Poe señaló como mejores. Nada hay en ellos sobrenatural ni fuerzas ocultas o misteriosas al margen del espíritu y la voluntad del ser humano. El hombre es libre y su destino aparece siempre determinado por la calidad de su raciocinio. El El escarabajo de oro, el protagonista razona adecuadamente y es recompensado por el triunfo y la fortuna; en El gato negro no lo hace así y es castigado con la muerte. Poe intenta demostrar y demostrarse a la vez que el destino es un mecanismo; ahora bien, un mecanismo estropeado puede ser reparado. Con una audacia que no excluye el terror, sino que lo incluye, por sentise débil, vulnerable y desarmado. Poe se enfrenta con lo desconocido, se deja fascinar por ello y lo expresa, en consecuencia.

 

 

Se podrá argüir que se trata sólo de símbolos, pero éstos son a veces tan densos y abrumadores que el espíritu del poeta irremediablemente escapa al dominio del "racionalista irremediable" y la lógica matemática ya no basta. Entonces todo aparece blanco como en Gordon Pym. El blanco es el color del vértigo, y Poe explica en vano que es una ilusión óptica y el resultado aparente de la fusión de los demás colores cuando se mueven con mucha rapidez. También procura evadirse: en la poesía que con él deja de ser discurso coherente, versificación y juego lírico, para convertirse en ejecutoria de la locura; evasión en el alcohol y finalmente en aquella muerte tan evocada. Poe muere vencido, o quizá debiera decirse, más exactamente, reducido a la impotencia, aunque sin haber cedido: como lo había escrito simbólicamente en Gordon Pym, convertido en libro de lectura para jóvenes a consecuencia—como en el Gulliver de Swift—de un malentendido:

La cima de la catarata se perdía por entero en la oscuridad y en el espacio. Sin embargo, era evidente que nos aproximábamos a ella con espantosa velocidad. Podían verse, a intervalos, sobre aquella sabana, enormes grietas abiertas, aunque sólo momentáneas, y a través de estas grietas, tras de las cuales se agitaba un caos de imágenes flotantes e indistintas, se precipitaban poderosas y silenciosas corrientes de aire que surcaban en su vuelo el océano inflamado.

Podría considerarse a Poe como un "caso" literario y patológico, si fuera el único en navegar en esta misteriosa embarcación arrastrada por una misteriosa corriente hacia la inmensa figura blanca que no sabemos si representa a Dios o a algún abominable cero matemático. Pero Poe tenía otros compañeros: prácticamente, todos los grandes escritores de su época.

El Big Bang de Poe

 

Other American authors 1900-1960 (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

 

Eugene O'Neill     (1888-1953)

 

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, US dramatist, Irish stock, b. New York, son of a playwright; sailor and gold prospector; realist-symbolist dramatist; psychological analyst of character, pessimist;  Nobel Prize 1936; d. Cape Cod.

 

 

Works

 

O'Neill, Eugene. The Emperor Jones. Tragedy. 1920, 1921.

_____. Anna Christie. Drama. 1921, 1922. (On prostitution).

_____. The Hairy Ape. Drama. 1922.

_____. The Great God Brown. Drama. 1925.

_____. Mourning Becomes Electra. Dramatic trilogy. 1931. (Oresteia adapted to US Civil War)

_____. The Iceman Cometh. Drama. 1946.

_____. Long Day's Journey into Night. Drama. Written 1940-41, pub. 1956. (Pulitzer Prize 1957).

 

 

 

John Steinbeck        (1902-1968) 

US novelist, worker and student at Stanford; Pulitzer prize for fiction, Nobel prize for literature 1962 

 

_____. To a God Unknown. Novel. 1933.

_____. Tortilla Flat. Fiction. 1935.

_____. The Grapes of Wrath. Novel. 1939. (Pulitzer prize for fiction 1940).

_____. East of Eden. Novel. 1952.

Langston Hughes           (1902-1967)

US modernist poet, Black American; b. Missouri, from a middle class family with anti-slavery tradition; mother divorced and remarried, l. Cleveland; BA Lincoln U, PA; radical politics, stayed in Russia, correspondent during Spanish Civil War, travelled, menial jobs, poverty, l. Harlem, prominent figure of the "Harlem Renaissance"; taught at universities, investigated as suspected Communist, champion of Black Arts movement

Hughes, Langston. "As I Grew Older." Poem. All Poetry.*

         https://allpoetry.com/As-I-Grew-Older

         2019

_____. "I, too." Poem. Poetry Foundation.*

         https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47558/i-too

         2019

 

 

 

Tennessee Williams          (1911-1983)

 

(US dramatist, b. Thomas Lanier Williams, Mississippi, son of a traveling salesman, St. Louis 1918-, U of Missouri, worker, nervous breakdown, then Washington U and U of of Iowa, writer under name Tennessee, lived around USA and Mexico, success with Glass Menagerie. Homosexual relationships with Donald Windham and others; wild gay lifestyle, literary prestige decayed in later career, increasing interest in sadism and violence, self-destructive and addictive old age)

 

_____.  The Glass Menagerie. Drama. 1st performed 1944.

_____. A Streetcar Named Desire. Drama. 1947.

_____. The Rose Tattoo. Drama. 1950.

_____. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Drama. 1955.  (Pulitzer Prize).

 

A modern performance of  A Streetcar Named Desire (not the Elia Kazan film):

 

 

 

Arthur Miller  (1915-2005)

 

 

(Arthur Asher Miller, US dramatist; b. New York City, son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants, father well-to-to illiterate manufacturer, ruined in the Depression; manual worker and student, grad. U of Michigan 1938, friend of drama theorist Kenneth Rowe; l. Brooklyn, married Mary Slattery 1940, exempted from military service; Communist contacts, ps. "Matt Wayne"; 2 children, affair with Marilyn Monroe 1951; divorced wife and m. Marilyn Monroe 1956, quarrelled with Elia Kazan; testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee 1956 as suspected Communist, blacklisted; divorced Monroe 1961 and m. Ingebord Morat 1962 (Morat d. 2002), 2 children, 1 with Down syndrome, never visited by him; campaigned for dissident writers in USSR; inducted to the American Theatre Hall of Fame 1979; lived with painter Agnes Barley from 2002; Pulitzer Prize, National Medal of the Arts 1993; PEN Award 1998; Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize 1999; Jefferson Lecture 2001; Príncipe de Asturias Prize 2002; Jerusalem Prize 2002; President of PEN international 1965)

 

 

Works

 

Miller, Arthur. All My Sons. Drama. 1947. (Tony Award for best Author).

_____. Death of a Salesman. Drama. First performed Broadway, Morosko Theatre, dir. Elia Kazan, 1949. (Tony Award for Best Author; New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, Pulitzer Prize for Drama).

_____. The Crucible. Drama. 1953. (Spanish trans.: Las brujas de Salem).

_____. A View from the Bridge. Drama. 1955. (1st version in verse; rev. as longer play in prose).

_____. After the Fall. Drama. 1964. (On his life with Monroe).

_____. Incident at Vichy. Drama. 1964. (Antisemitism, denial).

_____. Broken Glass. Drama. 1994. (Kristallnacht).

Una representación en español de The Crucible (Las Brujas de Salem, 1973):

The Human Stain (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Three Yale lectures on Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain. In your readings you have the first chapter of the novel, "Everyone Knows".

 

THE HUMAN STAIN (Film)

The Human Stain. Dir. Robert Benton. Based on the novel by Philip Roth. With Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. 2003.*

         https://youtu.be/frw5UxxtZtQ

          2020

 

Morrison, Toni

 

By Adam Begley.  From the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).

 

MORRISON, Toni (1931-[2019])

 

FICTION: The Bluest Eye (1970), *Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) [Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015)]

NONFICTION: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) 

Sula—I'm talking about the character here, not the novel—would have winced at the sentimental streak running through Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known book. Sula is bad news, a skeptical fatalist, an idle, amoral artist, an accident so sure to happen it doesn't bother waiting. But she's my favorite; and she lights up Morrison's second novel like a torch. She's a good part of the reason why I insist that Sula, the skinny, 174-page novel, is Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved—I'm talking about the novel here, not the character, who's really just a ringer from The Exorcist—is something of an icon, a bit like Morrison herself, the unassailable Nobel laureate, supremely confident in herself as a woman, a black woman, and a black woman writer. Beloved is a "contemporary classic," a big book with a colossal subject: slavery. Who wants to knock it? Not m, because in fact it's beautiful, rich, fierce, harrowing. A damn fine book. But also sentimental. Why should uplift and overripe prose poems clog a novel about a runaway slave willing to slaughter her own children, including her newborn baby, rather than be dragged back to captivity, children in tow?

In Beloved, Morrison strains to remind us of goodness and love, as though she feels she has to counter the world's gross tonnage of evil. So we have a white girl busy saving Sethe's life (Sethe the runaway slave, half-dead, hugely pregnant); the white girl chatters all the while about how "Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling." And we have two of Morrison's specialties, food and sex, served up luscious enough to make us forget all that looming horror. Here, for example, the erotic version of corn-on-the-cob: "How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free . . . [N]o accounting for how that simple joy could shake you."

I can already hear a grad-school clever argument about how Morrison binds food and sex and the monstrosity of slavery in one tangled life-like whole, but that doesn't change a thing. The music swells, Sula winces.

Morrison began with a bone-dry book, The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl raped by her father and driven mad by her yearning for blue eyes, epitome of the white world's ideal of beauty. A sad and bitter story, choked by too many voices, it contains passages as lovely as anything Morrison has written—but it's a minor work in a minor key.

Then comes Sula, the story of two little girls, best friends, who grow up very different in "the Bottom," the black neighbourhood of a small Ohio city. Sula and Nell are bouncing with life, vividly real but also emblematic. Sula becomes the radical individualist, Nell the pillar of the community, steady, maternal, dutiful. Morrison weaves her tale with just three strands, a place and two families, but she seems magnificently omniscient, as though she had access to the pooled insight of every sociologist, every psychologist, every anthropologist; as though she had solved the riddle of what holds society together, what holds the solitary self together—and what blows it all apart. Though packed with comic scenes and and brilliantly inventive, Sula ends on a note of rich, full-throated sadness. There's plenty of laughter in the Bottom, but only visiting white folk manage to "hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under [the] head rags and soft felt hats . . . . [T]he laughter was part of the pain."

Song of Solomon—another marvel, a rambling tale, almost picaresque, freer and more daring than Sula, though less precise, less perfect—follow a callo young man's slow steps to redemption. If Sula is about self and community, Song of Solomon is about self and family. Hints of the fantastic in the first two novels—folklore, and the maybe-magic of myth—blossom here. The ordinary takes wing: Our hero flies.

The weakest of Morrison's novels is Tar Baby, a dubious jumble set in the Caribbean, featuring a white candy magnate, his black servants, their beautiful niece, and an ugly cruelty inflicted years ago. Morrison's first extended excursion into the heads of white folk. Only for the loyal fan.

Beloved wiped the slate clean and beckoned, with the same gesture, the august attentions of the Swedish Academy. After which, of course, a disappointment: Jazz, a curiously dispassionate, plotless love story set in Harlem in the 1920s. A teenage girl, an older man, and his jealous wife generate some bizarre domestic violence. In the background, the threat of race riots.

Another kind of violence powers Paradise: the defensive violence of black people intent on protecting their community. Ruby, Oklahoma, is an all-black settlement founded in 1950, a patriarchy, fortress of rightenousness, a prosperous, peaceable community. Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have shut out the white world. A few miles from Ruby is the Convent, nun-less since 1970, a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, some black, some white. There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. In 1976, the misguided men of Ruby, who think of the Convent as a witches' coven, stage a deadly raid.

The narrative is choppy and needlessly confused, but Morrison's messabge comes through loud and clear. No haven can be heavenly, no home can smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or thrives by triage—some in, some out, some damned, some saved. Morrison is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

As a storyteller Morrison combines a poet's grace, a radical's fervor, and a great preacher's moral majesty. She writes for and about the African-American community ("If I tried to write a universal novel," she once claimed, "it would be water"). And yet she reaches us all.

 

See Also: Nobody who "writes like" Morrison is anywhere as good as she is. If you're after other African-American writers, try James Baldwin or John Edgar Wideman (avoid Alice Walker). If you're after nuanced treatment of racial isues, try Nadine Gordimer. If you just want a novel as good as Sula, try The Great Gatsby or Billy Budd.

 

—Adam Begley

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (NIVEL AVANZADO)

John Barth

 BY PETER KURTH

From The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000)

 

BARTH, JOHN

1930-

b. Dorchester County, Maryland 

FICTION: The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles, Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (Stories, 1968); *Chimera (1972), LETTERS (1979), Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), On with the Story (stories, 1996)

NONFICTION: The Literature of Exhaustion, and the Literature of Replenishment (1982), The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (1984), Don't Count on It: A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights (1984), Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (1995)

 

As the doyen of "postmodern" novelists in America, John Barth has typically enjoyed two discrete followings. The first are academics, who have found in Barth's playful, wildly-convoluted fictions a permanent gold mine for analysis and criticism. The second are college students, who identify romantically with Barth's existential heroes and his vision of the world as a random, madcap, menacing place, where nothing is what it seems to be and truth is just a construct, a fiction in itself. There are no answers to anything in the Barthian universe, and no solace beyond stories, legends, and narrative invention.

"Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of all my main characters," Barth has said. "We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equeals life: to cease to narrate . . . is to die." As a writer, barth's model and muse is Scheherazade, of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who spun stories for the sultan every evening to escape execution. Generally, Barth's novels are huge, labyrinthine affairs, shot through with comedy, fantasy, ribaldry, wordplay, allegory, literary allusion, and structural culs-de-sac. Just when you think you've grasped Barth's point, rest assured—you haven't. There is always something else behind the door. Barth undercuts himself at every turn, tells you straight out that he can't be trusted, and begs you only to enjoy the ride—the "funhouse," as he constructs it fresh from book to book. 

Barth grew up in the Tidewater region of Maryland, and most if not all of his novels are set there. He was one of a set of fraternal twins, and became a write in adulthood, he thinks, "in part because I no longer had my twin to be wordless with"—hence his fascination with the mechanics of language. His first three novels, all of them comedies "dealing with the problem of nihilism," were conceived as a piece and written in quick succession. Todd Andrews, the hero of The Floating Opera, recognizes that nothing has meaning and decides to commit suicide, only to realize before the deed is done that his vision of reality is neither more nor less significant than anyone else's, and that suicide is just as meaningless as staying alive. The theme is repeated in The End of the Road, with the exception that the hero's object lesson is far more terrible and utterly closed to humor. And in The Sot-Weed Factor, written in the style of an eighteenth-century hero quest, innocence is lost completely when Ebenezer Cooke, first Poet Laureate of Maryland, is subjected to every indignity the nascent colony and its inhabitants can heap upon him.

Giles, Goat Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, for which Barth wrote the National Book Award in 1973, are all difficult, willfully self-conscious fictions that seek to extend the traditional boundaries of the novel, a goal Barth sets for himself in his famous 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," More recently, Barth has doubled back, spewing out "prefaces," "postscripts," mock treatises, and windy explanations for all his books to date. The unreadable LETTERS finds characters from Barth's earlier novels corresponding with him in the hope of justifying themselves. Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor are all set in boats on Chesapeake Bay, where fables of life, love, death, sex, fiction, meaning, and the lack of it are traded back and forth among characters old and new. The Tidewater Tales is the best in this series, or at least the best contained; readers can be forgiven for tiring of the game by the time they've finished all three. A collection of autobiographical pieces, as illusory and open-ended as any of Barth's fiction, appeared in 1994 as Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, bringing Barth's work full circle and further blurring whatever "truth" the reader can perceive. As always, Barth is obsessed with narration, myths, and the ultimate futility of words. 

For many years, Barth has taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is currently professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars. He remains the academic's dream novelist, his work arbitrarily challenging in structure and form but redeemed by inventiveness, huge erudition, humor, and an unquenchable sense of adventure.

See Also: Barth accepts the postmodernist label while remaining sui generis, linked at least in flights of fancy with Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, and Thomas Pynchon. 

 

 

Watching Nothing: Postmodernity in Prose

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Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89). In 1863 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote much poetry, including 'Heaven-Haven' and 'The Habit of Perfection'. He came under the influence of the Oxford Movement and Newman, and in 1866 was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1868 he resolved to become a Jesuit and symbolically burned his poems, though he sent some copies to his friend Bridges for safekeeping. He was professor of rhetoric at Roehampton 1873-4, then studied theology at St Beuno's in North Wales (1874-77), where he also learned Welsh.

A new phase of creativity began in 1876. Inspired by the loss of the Deutschland in December 1875, which had among its passengers five Franciscan nuns exiled for their faith, Hopkins wrote his most ambitious poem, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. In 1877 he composed some of his best-known poems, including 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty'. After ordination he was sent to Chesterfield, then London, then Oxford, where he wrote 'Henry Purcell'. Work in various industrial parishes followed, including an exhausting spell in Liverpool (1880-1) where he was oppressed by a sense of his own failure as a preacher.

 

In 1884 he was appointed to the chair of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. There he became ill and deeply depressed, and wrote (mainly in 1885) a number of 'Dark Sonnets', powerfully expressing his sense of exile and frustration; these include 'Carrion Comfort' and 'No worst, there is none'. He also managed to produce in these last years less desperate poems, including 'Harry Ploughman' and 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'. He died of typhoid.

Apart from work in anthologies (including Poets . . . of the Century, 1893, and Bridges's own The Spirit of Man, 1916), nothing was published until 1918, when Bridges produced his Poems; Bridges had judged the public not ready to receive Hopkins's 'oddity', but initial bewilderment was followed by steadily rising admiration. His poems, letters, and journals reflect his sense of vocation (sometimes conflicting) as priest and poet, his technical interest in prosody, and his search for a unifying sacramental view of creation. His concepts of 'inscape', 'instress' and 'sprung rhythm' have given rise to a large body of aesthetic theory. By 'inscape' he seems to have meant 'the individual or essential quality of the thing'; 'instress' refers to the energy which sustains an inscape, and flows into the mind of the observer. Both words were coined by Hopkins. 'Sprung rhythm' he considered less an innovation than a return to the rhythms of speech and of earlier forms of verse. But the great (though delayed) impact of Hopkins's work may be seen less in terms of technical innovation than as a renewal of poetic energy, seriousness, and originality, after a period marked by much undistinguished and derivative verse.


 ______________

 

Sprung rhythm  (or 'abrupt rhythm'), a term invented by G. M. Hopkins to describe his own idiosyncratic poetic metre, as opposed to normal 'running' rhythm, the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Hopkins maintained that sprung rhythm existed, unrecognized, in Old English poetry and in Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton (notably in Samson Agonistes). It is distinguished by a metrical foot consisting of a varying number of syllables. The extra, 'slack' syllables added to the established patterns are called 'outriders' or 'hangers'. Hopkins demonstrated the natural occurrence of this rhythm in English by pointing out that many nursery rhymes employed it, e.g.


Díng, Dóng, Béll,

Pússy's in the wéll

He felt strongly that poetry should be read aloud, but seems to have felt that the words themselves were not enough to suggest the intended rhythms, and frequently added various diacritical markings. Some critics have suggested that sprung rhythm is not a poetic metre at all, properly speaking, merely Hopkins's attempt to force his own personal rhythm into an existing pattern, or recognizable variation of one, and that his sprung rhythm is in fact closer to some kinds of free verse or polyphonic prose.

__________________

From Andrew Sanders,
Short Oxford History of English Literature
("High Victorian Literature"):

To Dickens and other Victorian progressives, the assertiveness of the Oxford Movement and the magnetism of the revived Roman Church seemed to be dangerous examples of 'Ecclesiastical Dandyism', an undoing of national history and a self-indulgent withdrawal from more urgent concerns. The career of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) might certainly have suggested the impropriety of such a withdrawal had the nature of his twin vocations to the Jesuit priesthood and to poetry been more widely known to his contemporaries. His conversion to Roman Catholicism at Oxford, and his decision to enter the Society of Jesus in 1868, efectively cut him off from the mainstream of contemporary English life. The failure of his Jesuit superiors to recognize and encourage his idiosyncratic poetic talent also severed him from the body of prospective readers to which he most earnestly sought to appeal. He burned much of his early work on his ordination and took up poetry again only in 1875 with the startingly radical 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', a poem which the editor of the Jesuit periodical, The Month, decided that he 'dared not print'. No representative edition of Hopkins's poetry appeared until 1918.

Hopkins was fortunate in the poet-friends with whom he corresponded, Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the latter his literary executor and editor. These non-Jesuit correspondents were the recipients of the theories that he attempted to articulate and of the often extraordinary poems that were developed in relation to these experimental ideas. After 1918 his work found the wide receptive audience which it had earlier been denied, but Hopkins's experiments, like the culture from which they emerge, remain essentially of the nineteenth century. As his Journals reveal, he observed nature in painstaking detail, patiently examining flowers and leaves, intently noting the effects of light and shade, and delighting in gradations of texture and colour. Given the stringency of his Jesuit surroundings, his immediate culture may have been of aesthetic deprivation, but his habits of observation and recording had been long acquired. His attention to the exactness of things is indeed akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (if not to Pre-Raphaelite poetry) and his methods of analysis indicate a scrupulous Ruskinian apprenticeship. Hopkins's intellectual disciplines certainly benefited from his study of theology, and in particular from his somewhat eccentric (given the prejudices of his teachers) pleasure in the thought of the thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus ('who of all men most sways my spirits to peace'). His poetry may have been far too idiosyncratic to appeal to the somewhat saccharine tastes of his contemporary co-religionists, but his structures derive from highly disciplined and often traditional ways of thinking, seeing, translating, and writing.

Most of Hopkins's surviving poems are distinctly God-centred. His is a God who resolves contradictions as the fount of all that is and as the Creator who draws all the Strands of Creation back to himself. Created nature is in itself immensely precious, for the glory and wonder of God is implicit in it. In 'Pied Beauty' Hopkins celebrates harmonized oppositions, dapples and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange' because they express the energy and vitality of the visible world, a world held together by a divine force that constantly regenerates it. Undoing, desolation, and the 'problem of pain' are however never eliminated from his most searching poems. At times it is humankind which mars the integrity of beauty by unfeelingly trampling 'the growing green', by felling the 'especial' sweetness of a line of poplars, or by caging skylarks, but Hopkins is never simply or naïvely 'green'. His poems also explore the presence of violence in the realm of the parahuman. Despite the wonder of it, the windhover's ecstatic swoop is none the less predatorial, breaking lines and straining words as it falls.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-beak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The windhover's beauty is 'brute', yet its 'brutality' is of the essence of its animal perfection. Hopkins's poem gasps at the wonder of a creature whose free movement and concentrated strength stir an awesome sense of the presence of the Creator-Redeemer (its subtitle directs it 'To Christ our Lord'). Elsewhere in his work, most notably in the complex theological framework of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and the parallel poem 'The Loss of the Eurydice', Hopkins ponders the mystery of human suffering by forging parallels with a paradoxical Christ, the Man of Sorrows, and the Suffering Servant who is, at the same time, the Divine Judge and the Merciful Redeemer. He pulls dissolution into resolution by seeing patterns, not simply in the seasons or in the forms of nature, but also in religious imagery, in the observances of the Christian calendar, and in the ultimate meaning of the universe. The very intricacy of his verse is an attempt to express and recvord something of the multifariousness of the visible and aural world. The very 'difficulty' and the contortion of his poetry, its intellectual leaps and its violent 'metaphysical' yoking together of images, offer a momentary statis and a fusion of divergent insights and impressions. Hopkins found order where other Victorians saw anarchy; he recognized purpose where many of his contemporaries begain to despair over what they presumed was an increasingly meaningless fragmentation. Even in his dark, straining, disappointing, despairing last sonnets ('No worst, there is none', 'To seem the stranger lies my lot', I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day', 'Patience, hard thing!', 'My own heart let me have more pity on') there still remains the conviction that somehow a barely comprehended God comprehends all things.

The Fates of Men

 

—oOo—