Montaigne's essay is incredibly fascinating for being so long. I just keep chugging along with it, despite the fact that it never seems to be getting any closer to a conclusion that is not arrived at already within the first five pages. The unfolding of Montaigne's argument is ultimately the subject of the essay, and the experience of it is illuminating. Montaigne's fluid musings on fundamental human issues of life and death, aging, and sexuality are not only profound but humorous. The simple thesis of Montaigne's essay is something like: Sexual pleasure should be enjoyed by older men who can properly appreciate it. But there are many sub-arguments within the essay:
1) The mind can rescue itself from old age, but struggles against the needs of the body in order to do so.
2) It is a mistake to marry for love. Marriage should be entered into as an economic and familial arrangement for "posterity and family" (7).
3) Love should be sought outside of marriage.
4) Women and men have the same sexual desires and urges, and women should be allowed to pursue theirs outside of marriage. Men are hypocritical to deny women this freedom.
5) There are worse vices than promiscuity. Unsanctioned sexual activity, particularly as practiced by women, has only been condemned because human beings are jealous by nature.
Montaigne frequently contradicts himself, but this becomes a strength of the essay, as he is able to anticipate counterarguments, and debunk prevailing thinking through sarcasm. Contradiction, juxtaposition, and oxymoron are ubiquitous in the essay. To characterize his age, exaggerating his decrepit seniority, Montaigne juxtaposes, "From the excess of sprightliness I am fallen into that of severity" (1). He then humorously juxtaposes wisdom and folly, "Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by alternate services in this calamity of age" (2). Then, the mind and the body, "Seeing it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I advise mine to it with all the power I have; let it meanwhile continue gree, and flourish if it can, like mistletoe upon a dead tree" Montaigne invokes plaintively, with a fantastically morbid simile (3). The juxtaposition continues throughout, as I have outlined. Montaigne's argument relies on dualities to represent the complexity of human experience.
Montaigne's frequent use of oxymorons exposes how ridiculous and ineffective the prevailing oppression of female sexuality is. "We, on the contrary, would have them at once sound, vigorous, plump, high-fed, and chaste; that is to say, both hot and cold, for the marriage, which we tell them is to keep them from burning, is but small refreshment to them as we order the matter" (11). Later, Montaigne provides an even clearer image of the problems of suppressing female sexuality, in oxymoron, "There is no doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active; I hold it more easy to carry a suit of armor all the days of one's life than a maidenhood; and the vow of virginity of all others is the most noble, as being the hardest to keep" (15). Montaigne seems to comment on his own use of oxymoron when he says, "there is neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desires" (19).
One of the strongest rhetorical facets of Montaigne's argument is his complete omission of the subjects he is discussing, and occasional euphemism. As soon as Montaigne actually starts talking about sex, he completely refrains from using the word. Montaigne writes at length about the penis, but never uses the word penis. The euphemism he uses most often is "member"; he also uses "shameful parts," "implements," and "natural furniture."
"In the greatest part of the world, that member of our body was deified; in the same province, some flayed off the skin to offer and consecrate a piece; others offered and consecrated their seed." (13)
"To what end do we make a show of our implements in figure under our gaskins, and often, which is worse, above their natural size, by falsehood and imposture?" (13)
The fact that Montaigne effectively omits the subject of these sentences, and yet we know exactly what he is talking about, forces us to agree with him.
In this fantastic passage, Montaigne again writes with humor about activities performed on his "member," this time in the context of aging:
"Nature should satisfy herself in having rendered this age miserable, without rendering it ridiculous too. I hate to see it, for one poor inch of pitiful vigor which comes upon it but thrice a week, to strut and set out itself with as much eagerness as if it could do mighty feats; a true flame of flax; and laugh to see it so boil and bubble and then in a moment so congealed and extinguished. This appetite ought to appertain only to the flower of beautiful youth: trust not to its seconding that indefatigable, full, constant, magnanimous ardor you think in you, for it will certainly leave you in the lurch at your greatest need; but rather transfer it to some tender, bashful, and ignorant boy, who yet trembles at the rod and blushes" (32). Montaigne's overwrought account of masturbation among old men is so hilarious and pitiable, he wins us over, as at the beginning when he characterizes himself as a pitiable old man. The passage is another oxymoron: Montaigne argues that pleasure should be reserved for older men who can appreciate it properly, but then reveals that his body is not quite up to the task. Alas, youth and experience do not go hand in hand, again the problem of mind/body disconnect.
"Every member I have, as much one as another, is equally my own, and no other more properly makes me a man than this," Montaigne writes, in case we had any doubt as to which member he had been referring to throughout the essay. Montaigne emphasizes the fact that the word member is not specific, that it could really mean any appendage of the body, but we knew exactly what he meant all along, which means we have already experienced his point and must therefore agree with him.
Later, Montaigne compares the sexual organs and apetites of males and females:
"The gods, says Plato, have given us one disobedient and unruly member that, like a furious animal, attempts, by the violence of its appetite, to subject all things to it; and so they have given to women one like a greedy and ravenous animal, which, if it be refused food in season, grows wild, impatient of delay, and infusing its rage into their bodies, stops the passages, and hinders respiration, causing a thousand ills, till, having imbibed the fruit of the common thirst, it has plentifully bedewed the bottom of their matrix" (14). Montaigne's account of Plato is so wildly imaginative it allows his radical argument to pass as comical, although sincere.
Montaigne very rarely refers to women directly in the essay, only using a sex indicator when it is absolutely necessary to clarify the attributes of one sex versus the other. When he can, Montaigne simply uses 'us and them'. While the assumption that the writer was male at the time would have been pretty much universal, the fact that Montaigne can describe the conditions under which women lived without referring to women directly, again forces us to agree with him. Montaigne's delightful assay proceeds with a will of its own through humour, juxtaposition, oxymoron, and above all, euphemism.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Comments from a reactionary
I had read the Communist Manifesto in a vague sort of way for other classes before, but I had always considered it a sort of artifact of history and not a text with the power of persuasion for subsequent generations of would-be revolutionaries. It is difficult for me to account for the lasting power of the Communist Manifesto because I don't find it persuasive. It's lofty language and exaggerated claims seem hardly serious to me. I find it more funny than persuasive. From the opening sentence, "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of communism," the manifesto strikes a tone that is at once powerful and comical. This is a fantastic and extremely memorable opening sentence for a work of literature, but in this context, when I read this line all that comes to mind are a bunch of zombie revolutionaries stalking the darkened streets of Paris. Marx and Engels' attempts to frighten their readers into agreement with lofty similes end up sounding ridiculous, "Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." This childish, fairytale analogy makes the arguable claims advanced about the bourgeoisie trite. The strong image that the analogy conjures obscures the modern conditions that the sorcerer is being compared to.
The manifesto makes bold, unwavering claims, as a manifesto should: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The phrasing of this sentence so that the word history is repeated emphasizes the radical recasting of the dominant historical narrative by Marx and Engels. As potent and quotable these simple declarative sentences that are spliced throughout the text are, I think their simplicity undermines the argument. History is not so simple as to be reduced to an overarching declaration. The tone of certainty, articulated in vitriolic rhetoric, has a great deal to do with the historical power of the manifesto, as it has lasted through its quotability and memorability. However, I find the certainty unsettling.
One of most powerful rhetorical strategies used by Marx and Engels is inversion. As the argument proceeds from their account of perpetual class struggle, they declare, "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part." Recasting the group they had just labelled as oppressors as having been, historically, revolutionary, Marx and Engels make way for the second part of their argument: the inevitability of the impending proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie revolution has outlasted its time, they argue. The time for a workers revolution has come.
Throughout the manifesto, the opposing of groups (bourgeois/proletariat), communists/everyone else as anti-communist, forces the reader to take a side. From the opening, the reader is labelled either as a communist, or as one among the reactionaries who are already behind the momentous revolution. "Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?" Communism is declared to be a power, in fact declared by the opposition to be a power, and those that are sceptical of it can only be those currently in power or those that are against change. This may be an effective rhetorical strategy for readers that are prone to take sides; perhaps at the time the Communist Manifesto was written there were more such readers. However, I find it alienating, and imagine that others might react similarly. As many critics have said before, the high language can hardly expect to be appreciated by the proletariat it incites to revolution, so the question remains, who is the intended audience? While Marx and Engels make many statements that would seem to alienate the "petty bourgeoisie," whose interests are so opposed to such a communist revolution, it is to this audience that the manifesto seems to most clearly apply. Certainly, in its current circulation, the Communist Manifesto seems to be most often espoused by those who are minimally oppressed and privileged enough to claim to speak for the lower classes.
The manifesto makes bold, unwavering claims, as a manifesto should: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." The phrasing of this sentence so that the word history is repeated emphasizes the radical recasting of the dominant historical narrative by Marx and Engels. As potent and quotable these simple declarative sentences that are spliced throughout the text are, I think their simplicity undermines the argument. History is not so simple as to be reduced to an overarching declaration. The tone of certainty, articulated in vitriolic rhetoric, has a great deal to do with the historical power of the manifesto, as it has lasted through its quotability and memorability. However, I find the certainty unsettling.
One of most powerful rhetorical strategies used by Marx and Engels is inversion. As the argument proceeds from their account of perpetual class struggle, they declare, "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part." Recasting the group they had just labelled as oppressors as having been, historically, revolutionary, Marx and Engels make way for the second part of their argument: the inevitability of the impending proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie revolution has outlasted its time, they argue. The time for a workers revolution has come.
Throughout the manifesto, the opposing of groups (bourgeois/proletariat), communists/everyone else as anti-communist, forces the reader to take a side. From the opening, the reader is labelled either as a communist, or as one among the reactionaries who are already behind the momentous revolution. "Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?" Communism is declared to be a power, in fact declared by the opposition to be a power, and those that are sceptical of it can only be those currently in power or those that are against change. This may be an effective rhetorical strategy for readers that are prone to take sides; perhaps at the time the Communist Manifesto was written there were more such readers. However, I find it alienating, and imagine that others might react similarly. As many critics have said before, the high language can hardly expect to be appreciated by the proletariat it incites to revolution, so the question remains, who is the intended audience? While Marx and Engels make many statements that would seem to alienate the "petty bourgeoisie," whose interests are so opposed to such a communist revolution, it is to this audience that the manifesto seems to most clearly apply. Certainly, in its current circulation, the Communist Manifesto seems to be most often espoused by those who are minimally oppressed and privileged enough to claim to speak for the lower classes.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
It's Interactive!
Ben's short fiction selections for tomorrow are very interesting. What is immediately apparent about them is that each of them say a lot with few words. This is a characteristic of writing that I really admire. It makes the interpretation of the reader a part of the text, creating an interaction between the reader and the characters of the story. Each of the fictions generally seem to be about social ritual, and involve communication between two subjects. The two women in the Lydia Davis piece take turns using the word extraordinary, the first placing the emphasis on the word and the second placing the emphasis on the verb and thus on her own opinion, which seems to both agree with and trump that of the first woman. The change in emphasis across the two lines of dialogue puts the lines in conversation with each other, along with the two women. While the two lines appear to be almost identical, they each have a different tone and reveal different information. In fact, it is not absolutely clear that the second person speaking is a woman; she is simply referred to as 'the other' and so we assume that she is another woman. The title, "They take turns using a word they like," becomes necessarily a part of the story that is required in order to interpret the two line conversation. According to the title, the conversation is really not about anything. This frees the reader from interpreting the actual content of the conversation, and instead allows her to consider the inherent meaning behind the interaction. The conversation really seems to be about the competition between two women, couched in a dramatic but meaningless word, extraordinary, and exaggerated politeness.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Hills Like White Elephants
Hills Like White Elephants is interesting in that it is told almost entirely through dialogue, within which the topic of conversation is never actually named. Since our discussion last week, I have been much more consciously aware of the presence of authors in their writing, particularly fiction writing. In this story, I sense Hemingway's presence very strongly in the way that he manipulates the our perceptions of the events. The title in particular is a beautiful and striking line, a simile that I expected to be revealed in Hemingway's narration of the setting. In fact, it is said by the woman, and turns out to be of little importance, on the surface.
"The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
"The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.
‘No, you wouldn’t have.’"
Coming after Hemingway's characteristically minimal description of the hills, the girl's observation seems like a comment on Hemingway's narration. In fact, "hills like white elephants" is obviously Hemingway's own simile that he situated in the mouth of this girl, almost it seems so that he did not have to accept responsibility for the self-conscious writerliness of the line. The girl is entirely self-conscious when she says this, as is revealed later in her indignation at the man's response, "‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’
‘That was bright.’"
In the situation of this line, we sense Hemingway's presence, as well as in his very minimal descriptions that are just enough to set the scene. Hemingway's simple, low style, feels very mannered and unnatural, but allows the subtlety of the subject matter to come through.
By telling the story mainly through dialogue, Hemingway sets up a dynamic in which the reader is voyeur to the conversation between the couple. Giving us just enough evocative detail to set the scene, Hemingway places us in the middle of this overheard conversation and refuses to interpret it for us. This story is entirely about what is not said, both between the couple in the world of the story, and stylistically in the writing of it.
Rewriting of Hemingway in high style:
The girl narrowed her eyes against the haze of heat toward the hills, starkly white like starched sheets spread over tall humps of dry brown country.
"They look like white elephants," she said.
"I've never seen one," the man said swallowing his words with the cold and salty beer.
"No, you wouldn't have," she mused, to the battered edge of counter where her elbow trailed. She had never seen a white elephant either, but imagined they would be as anomalous in this landscape as a sensitive word from her manfriend. The licorice sweetness choked its way through her languid limbs, falling to the pit of her stomach, where it sucked at her until the air was gone.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Highs & Lows with Sister Mary Ignatius' Explanation
In Chapter 8, Lanham is trying to make a distinction that he admits is difficult to describe. While the distinction between high, middle and low styles seems quite subjective, it is more the type of thing that a good critique recognizes when she reads it. As we have discussed profusely in the course of the class so far, good stylists often ignore or purposefully break 'the rules,' and Lanham's description of high style is particularly difficult to nail down because as he explains that the qualities that are often present in the high style do not necessarily combine to form the high style. What I find particularly interesting is how Lanham analyzes the importance of the social situation or context in which the piece fits. This is especially apparent in his description of Churcill's wartime radio addresses, which brought a public speech into private livingrooms, "The front-stage/back-stage antithesis was potentially healed, the whole range spanned, before Churchill began to speak...As we now know, over and over again he made the most of it, brought all Britain into a sublime unity where public and private worlds fused" (Lanham, 169). Lanham also disscusses the problem Hennesy has in reworking the carefully neutral historical tone of Marx in the Communist Manifesto into an angry feminist revolutionary cry, also a problem of situation.
Of the writers we have read so far, Baldwin would certainly be an example of high style. As we discussed, Baldwin's self-consciously scholarly and objective tone, with passive constructions and 'to be' verbs, is what makes his essay persuasive and his gross generalizations credible. While on the surface, Baldwin appears to be simply reporting the facts in a neutral, historical tone, Baldwin's subject matter is actually quite sublime, going to the heart of the experience of rage, fear and identity. As I analyzed in my post on Baldwin, his use of chiasmus throughout the essay is quite self-conscious and develops as a persuasive structure, as well as his metaphors, figurative language, and religious diction, that allow the essay to operate on multiple levels and depict a highly complicated and embedded situation. Baldwin also dissolves the antithetical framework of private/public by extending a personal experience into a universal experience for a group of people and reactionary experiences for other groups of people in different cultures.
For me, this is the most useful distinction that Lanham makes between high and low style:
"the style that has been discussed, analyzed, marveled at, has been the high style...Ornamented, emotional, spotlighted, it was the style you could see. And talk about. The transparent, neutral, unemotional style could be applauded but there wasn't much to say about it. Ideally it wasn't there at all. You looked right through it to the facts beyond" (Lanham, 165).
With Nabokov, the more you look, the more you find. You could read Nabokov for the rest of your life, and continue to discover new complexities, new twists of meaning. This is high style. As Lanham points out, low style can be quite self-conscious, quite literary, and quite entertaining, but it really only operates at one level, although it can incorporate multiple cultural reference points, as his example of car journalism does. It is the middle style that seems to be the most disappointing. Neither entertaining nor sublime, it can only be read as failing to attain the higher level to which it aspires. If it seems to aspire to nothing, it is drier than an elbow in winter.
Of the writers we have read so far, Baldwin would certainly be an example of high style. As we discussed, Baldwin's self-consciously scholarly and objective tone, with passive constructions and 'to be' verbs, is what makes his essay persuasive and his gross generalizations credible. While on the surface, Baldwin appears to be simply reporting the facts in a neutral, historical tone, Baldwin's subject matter is actually quite sublime, going to the heart of the experience of rage, fear and identity. As I analyzed in my post on Baldwin, his use of chiasmus throughout the essay is quite self-conscious and develops as a persuasive structure, as well as his metaphors, figurative language, and religious diction, that allow the essay to operate on multiple levels and depict a highly complicated and embedded situation. Baldwin also dissolves the antithetical framework of private/public by extending a personal experience into a universal experience for a group of people and reactionary experiences for other groups of people in different cultures.
For me, this is the most useful distinction that Lanham makes between high and low style:
"the style that has been discussed, analyzed, marveled at, has been the high style...Ornamented, emotional, spotlighted, it was the style you could see. And talk about. The transparent, neutral, unemotional style could be applauded but there wasn't much to say about it. Ideally it wasn't there at all. You looked right through it to the facts beyond" (Lanham, 165).
With Nabokov, the more you look, the more you find. You could read Nabokov for the rest of your life, and continue to discover new complexities, new twists of meaning. This is high style. As Lanham points out, low style can be quite self-conscious, quite literary, and quite entertaining, but it really only operates at one level, although it can incorporate multiple cultural reference points, as his example of car journalism does. It is the middle style that seems to be the most disappointing. Neither entertaining nor sublime, it can only be read as failing to attain the higher level to which it aspires. If it seems to aspire to nothing, it is drier than an elbow in winter.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Faulkner--Dry September
The horrifying subject matter of this short story is conveyed in Southern gothic high drama through a suspensive structure. The third sentence is fantastic for revealing the structure which is to inform the action: "Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened." The only two people in the story who should rightly feel "attacked, insulted, frightened" are Will Mayes and Minnie Cooper, if in fact she was attacked. However, the sentence begins by putting the emphasis on the men in the barber shop, who feel threatened by what they perceive as a racial threat against their women. We are never really told how Minnie Cooper feels. We can only infer through her bizarre behavior, trembling in public and laughing hysterically. This sentence is an unusual example of sentence pattern 3, compound sentence with explanatory statement, but because a series of mostly prepositional phrases interrupts the subject and verb, which should explain the three inflamatory feelings layed out at the beginning, the sentence explains more in the following clause than appears at the surface. By punctuating the sentence with a colon, Faulkner draws attention to the subsequent clause that seems to explain little, except to conjure the room in which the men heatedly ponder their action. In fact, the details about the stale and stationary air and the odors of the men serve to emphasize the gossip that is swirling, until the sentence comes to the disturbing conclusion that none of the men actually know the details of the supposed crime that they all are prepared to carry out justice in the name of. Throughout the story, air, speech and breath are referred to as "hissing" informing the gothic tone of the story and establishing the sinister nature of the gossip.
Leaving the reader perilously holding on to find out what is going to happen to Will Mayes, and without any power to stop the men, Faulkner jumps to describe Minnie Cooper in section II. Faulkner does an excellent job of characterizing Minnie Cooper, as he does in this breathless cumulative sentence, "When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious." Throughout the story, Faulkner makes up illuminating composite adjective such as unclassconscious, the mouthful of the word having a sort of illustrative onomatopoeic quality.
The beginning of the "white folks" violent confrontation with Will Mayes has the gothic suspense of a horror movie, simultaneously captivitating the reader and making her loathe to read on. "Below the cast the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars." This is the moment in the horror movie when everything goes completely silent and you know something bad is about to happen; in fact, suddenly suspicious noises are heard creeping up the road! How predictable, and yet utterly new. Faulkner plays with the reader's sympathies. We want to be afraid for Will Mayes, but the narrative point of view tells us we should be afraid for the men who have ostensibly come to kill him. Faulkner takes the reader on a journey closer and closer to the awful conclusion, and then refuses to show it to us. The action does not play out as we expect; Will Mayes escapes, but we do not know for how long.
At the moment when the barber and Will Mayes both jump out of the car, Faulker unites the two of them in plural pronouns:
"The barber began to tug furiously at the door. "Look out, there!" the soldier said, but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car went on without checking speed."
So, evidently, "the Negro" jumped out of the car after the barber. Straightforward enough.
"The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch. Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking and retching until the second car passed and died away. Then he rose and limped on until he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands. The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town began to glare beneath the dust. He went on, limping. Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed. McLendon's car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the running board."
In this paragraph that follows, we take the unnamed "him" to be Will Mayes, since he jumped out of the car in the previous sentence. We wonder what happened to the barber. Then, Faulkner switches to "them." While the them is obviously standing for the two cars, it can also figuratively stand for both Will Mayes and the barber, since we have been lead to believe that they both jumped out of the car and don't know what happened to them.
"They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town."
Finally, we find out that it is only the barber who continues on his way. All this elaborate suspensiveness leads us to the question, WHAT HAPPENED TO WILL MAYES? which is never directly answered.
Faulkner interrupts the naration again, leaving the reader to ponder what happened to Will Mayes and to the barber who pathetically stood up for him in section III, and moves on to narrate Miss Cooper's apparently traumatic trip to the movies in section IV. During Miss Cooper's trip in to town, we learn the only further bits of information to help answer the question through the nonchalant gossip of the men, "What did they do with the nigger? Did they--?" "Sure. He's all right." "All right, is he?" "Sure. He went on a little trip." While this statement could mean that Will Mayes fled, we are lead to infer that the man is referring to the sort of untimely trip that racist Southerners of this period would refer to in that way. We never know for sure. Faulkner's gothic descriptions contribute to the construction of the story as a sort of extended suspensive sentence.
Leaving the reader perilously holding on to find out what is going to happen to Will Mayes, and without any power to stop the men, Faulkner jumps to describe Minnie Cooper in section II. Faulkner does an excellent job of characterizing Minnie Cooper, as he does in this breathless cumulative sentence, "When she was young she had had a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life as exemplified by the high school party and church social period of her contemporaries while still children enough to be unclassconscious." Throughout the story, Faulkner makes up illuminating composite adjective such as unclassconscious, the mouthful of the word having a sort of illustrative onomatopoeic quality.
The beginning of the "white folks" violent confrontation with Will Mayes has the gothic suspense of a horror movie, simultaneously captivitating the reader and making her loathe to read on. "Below the cast the wan hemorrhage of the moon increased. It heaved above the ridge, silvering the air, the dust, so that they seemed to breathe, live, in a bowl of molten lead. There was no sound of nightbird nor insect, no sound save their breathing and a faint ticking of contracting metal about the cars." This is the moment in the horror movie when everything goes completely silent and you know something bad is about to happen; in fact, suddenly suspicious noises are heard creeping up the road! How predictable, and yet utterly new. Faulkner plays with the reader's sympathies. We want to be afraid for Will Mayes, but the narrative point of view tells us we should be afraid for the men who have ostensibly come to kill him. Faulkner takes the reader on a journey closer and closer to the awful conclusion, and then refuses to show it to us. The action does not play out as we expect; Will Mayes escapes, but we do not know for how long.
At the moment when the barber and Will Mayes both jump out of the car, Faulker unites the two of them in plural pronouns:
"The barber began to tug furiously at the door. "Look out, there!" the soldier said, but the barber had already kicked the door open and swung onto the running board. The soldier leaned across the Negro and grasped at him, but he had already jumped. The car went on without checking speed."
So, evidently, "the Negro" jumped out of the car after the barber. Straightforward enough.
"The impetus hurled him crashing through dust-sheathed weeds, into the ditch. Dust puffed about him, and in a thin, vicious crackling of sapless stems he lay choking and retching until the second car passed and died away. Then he rose and limped on until he reached the highroad and turned toward town, brushing at his clothes with his hands. The moon was higher, riding high and clear of the dust at last, and after a while the town began to glare beneath the dust. He went on, limping. Presently he heard cars and the glow of them grew in the dust behind him and he left the road and crouched again in the weeds until they passed. McLendon's car came last now. There were four people in it and Butch was not on the running board."
In this paragraph that follows, we take the unnamed "him" to be Will Mayes, since he jumped out of the car in the previous sentence. We wonder what happened to the barber. Then, Faulkner switches to "them." While the them is obviously standing for the two cars, it can also figuratively stand for both Will Mayes and the barber, since we have been lead to believe that they both jumped out of the car and don't know what happened to them.
"They went on; the dust swallowed them; the glare and the sound died away. The dust of them hung for a while, but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again. The barber climbed back onto the road and limped on toward town."
Finally, we find out that it is only the barber who continues on his way. All this elaborate suspensiveness leads us to the question, WHAT HAPPENED TO WILL MAYES? which is never directly answered.
Faulkner interrupts the naration again, leaving the reader to ponder what happened to Will Mayes and to the barber who pathetically stood up for him in section III, and moves on to narrate Miss Cooper's apparently traumatic trip to the movies in section IV. During Miss Cooper's trip in to town, we learn the only further bits of information to help answer the question through the nonchalant gossip of the men, "What did they do with the nigger? Did they--?" "Sure. He's all right." "All right, is he?" "Sure. He went on a little trip." While this statement could mean that Will Mayes fled, we are lead to infer that the man is referring to the sort of untimely trip that racist Southerners of this period would refer to in that way. We never know for sure. Faulkner's gothic descriptions contribute to the construction of the story as a sort of extended suspensive sentence.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Chiasmic Baldwin
In discussing such a painful topic as race in America, particularly at the time he was writing, Baldwin carefully manages "Stranger in the Village" to draw attention to its logic and objectivity, even as he relates personal and difficult experiences. In one of the highest points of tension during the essay, Baldwin states, "There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare--rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men" (162). Yet the essay functions as more than simply a 'way of coping with the resulting complex of tensions' for Baldwin; Baldwin's ability to control his rage makes it all the more potent, and yet accessible and informative to a large audience. It is clear throughout the essay that Baldwin is not speaking only to black American men; he is also speaking to white men--"by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is"--as well as to Europeans (163). Baldwin's purpose is to tell his readers what a black man understands about white people through his experience that white people are too busy pretending to be innocent to know about themselves, as well as what an American knows about Europeans through the experience of their cultural inheritance. That the essay is rife with chiasmus is logical then, since Baldwin is illuminating the way structures have been transmuted from one group and imposed on another.
Some particularly potent examples of chiasmus from the essay:
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them" (161).
"The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me" (163).
"Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men" (166).
"At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself" (166-67).
"In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity" (167).
"The cathedral of Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them" (167).
"But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth" (167).
These are instances of isolated chiasmus.
The essay also employs several brilliant paragraphs of extended chiasmus:
I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. (161)
In this selection, Baldwin compares the different baggage associated with a black stranger in a white village, vs. a white stranger in a black village, as a way of describing, eventually, his point about race relations in America, which is that black Americans can no longer be strangers in America. White men can never regain the "European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist" (167-8). Baldwin's very presence in the village is a reversal of the structure in which white men enter a village of brown men to colonize it, a figurative chiasmus which serves to heighten the altered power dynamic borne by the historical implications of this alternative encounter. While the scene he is relating is, figuratively speaking, a chiasmus, Baldwin also uses chiasmus to link his sentences together to give his essay an objective and logical flow. I have highlighted the chiasmus operating across sentences, and within sentences with many levels, in bold. In the cumulative sentence in particular, the alliteration of hard c-words is reflected across the levels of the sentences, their slight alteration serving to magnify the differences between the two experiences and make the conclusion of the sentence all the more affective when it breaks the pattern established by the previous clauses.
Some particularly potent examples of chiasmus from the essay:
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them" (161).
"The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me" (163).
"Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men" (166).
"At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself" (166-67).
"In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity" (167).
"The cathedral of Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them" (167).
"But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth" (167).
These are instances of isolated chiasmus.
The essay also employs several brilliant paragraphs of extended chiasmus:
I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. (161)
In this selection, Baldwin compares the different baggage associated with a black stranger in a white village, vs. a white stranger in a black village, as a way of describing, eventually, his point about race relations in America, which is that black Americans can no longer be strangers in America. White men can never regain the "European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist" (167-8). Baldwin's very presence in the village is a reversal of the structure in which white men enter a village of brown men to colonize it, a figurative chiasmus which serves to heighten the altered power dynamic borne by the historical implications of this alternative encounter. While the scene he is relating is, figuratively speaking, a chiasmus, Baldwin also uses chiasmus to link his sentences together to give his essay an objective and logical flow. I have highlighted the chiasmus operating across sentences, and within sentences with many levels, in bold. In the cumulative sentence in particular, the alliteration of hard c-words is reflected across the levels of the sentences, their slight alteration serving to magnify the differences between the two experiences and make the conclusion of the sentence all the more affective when it breaks the pattern established by the previous clauses.
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