Lots of smart comments so far--thank you! I find it interesting that so many of you talked about the American west and the frontier, locating the passage in an historical/cultural context as much as in the lives of the particular characters. You're right, I'm sure--but I'm surprised that so many of you seem to frame the whole experience in a kind of positive light, as if the passage is about new opportunities, a fresh start, a chance for self-improvement. This is no doubt true, but the paragraph seems pretty frightening and bleak to me! But with so many of you reading it as apparently less bleak, it must have its positive side, too! So I'd be curious to hear what others think about the tone here.
It's also interesting that (I think) only Marshall talks about God--and I think I'd got further than Marshall and say that the passage does imply that, on that night at least, Jim doubts God's existence. This goes along with my sense of the bleakness of the experience. Jim's parents are dead, he has left the world behind, and God is dead, too... What do you think?
Monday, February 28, 2011
Last paragraph of first chapter
Comment on a part of the last paragraph of chapter 1 (or comment on someone else's comment): How does this great paragraph set the emotional and intellectual stage for the rest of the novel?
Friday, February 25, 2011
Cather and Hemingway; things not named and icebergs
One of Cather's essays, "The Novel Demeuble´", is about how novels shouldn't have too much stuff in them. She writes about how the most important thing in a novel or a poem is "the inexplicable presence of the thing not named". This sounds fairly similar to Hemingway's theory that the writer can leave out of his story anything he wants to leave out, as long as he knows it, and the omission will actually strengthen the story. Hemingway says that a story should be like an iceberg, with only a tenth of it above the surface but with the vast bulk of it that isn't showing providing the heft and the meaning. And of course Cather and Hemingway were not alone in their thinking. What was it about the modern period that led so many writers and artists to such radical techniques of omission and disjunction? And how do these techniques seem to us now? Not so radical, surely--but do they still work? And do they have any of their old emotional force?
Here is Cather (from "The Novel Demeuble´" (1922)):
"One of the very earliest American novels might well serve as a suggestion to later writers. In The Scarlet Letter how truly in the spirit of art is the mise-en-scène presented. That drudge, the theme-writing high school student, could scarcely be sent there for information regarding the manners and dress and interiors of the Puritans. The material investiture of the story is presented as if unconsciously; by the reserved, fastidious hand of an artist, not by the gaudy fingers of a showman or the mechanical industry of a department store window-dresser. As I remember it, in the twilight melancholy of that book, in its consistent mood, one can scarcely ever see the actual surroundings of the people; one feels them, rather, in the dusk.
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.
"Literalness, when applied to the presenting of mental reactions and of physical sensations seems to be no more effective than when it is applied to material things. A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow by Mr. Lawrence, sharply reminds one how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions. Characters can be almost de-humanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli—can be reduced, indeed, to mere animal pulp. Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?
"How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude."
And here is Hemingway:
"I omitted the real end [of a 1923 short story] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything ... and the omitted part would strengthen the story." (From A Moveable Feast)
"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." (From Death in the Afternoon)
Here is Cather (from "The Novel Demeuble´" (1922)):
"One of the very earliest American novels might well serve as a suggestion to later writers. In The Scarlet Letter how truly in the spirit of art is the mise-en-scène presented. That drudge, the theme-writing high school student, could scarcely be sent there for information regarding the manners and dress and interiors of the Puritans. The material investiture of the story is presented as if unconsciously; by the reserved, fastidious hand of an artist, not by the gaudy fingers of a showman or the mechanical industry of a department store window-dresser. As I remember it, in the twilight melancholy of that book, in its consistent mood, one can scarcely ever see the actual surroundings of the people; one feels them, rather, in the dusk.
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.
"Literalness, when applied to the presenting of mental reactions and of physical sensations seems to be no more effective than when it is applied to material things. A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow by Mr. Lawrence, sharply reminds one how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions. Characters can be almost de-humanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli—can be reduced, indeed, to mere animal pulp. Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?
"How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude."
And here is Hemingway:
"I omitted the real end [of a 1923 short story] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything ... and the omitted part would strengthen the story." (From A Moveable Feast)
"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." (From Death in the Afternoon)
Beginning My Antonia
Looked at on its own, My Antonia is interesting in lots of ways: its narrative frame, the long arc of its story, the way that long story seems to eschew conflict, romance, climax, and indeed most of the traditional features of plot development, the calm, measured tone that strikes many readers as a kind of understatement, the extreme violence that periodically punctuates that calm tone, and so on. But these features are particularly interesting to me in the way they relate to a lot of other writing of the same period. Willa Cather was not exactly a modernist writer, and My Antonia is not exactly a modernist text, but her books could not have been written in an earlier period, and she shares many methods and concerns with writers we usually think of as modernists. So while we read the novel on our own, at home, we will also read together, in class, some key works by Hemingway, Eliot, Williams, Pound and Moore.
Here are some particular things, pulled off the top of my head, to look at as we begin the novel:
As we go forward, I will post some of my thoughts, and I will post some of your thoughts, as well. Feel free to comment on any post, but please be thoughtful and considerate when you do, and please don't comment anonymously.
Here are some particular things, pulled off the top of my head, to look at as we begin the novel:
- What is the effect of the narrative frame that Cather sets up at the outset?
- How does Cather set up her main character, the narrator?
- How does the novel set up, right at the beginning, the sense that this is a new novel, a story that is about a changed world, a story that is not being told in the traditional way?
- How does Cather handle description?
- How does the landscape function in the book?
- How does understatement work in the novel?
- How does the novel evoke emotion?
- How is the novel like, and unlike, the stories by Hemingway and the poems by Eliot, Williams and Pound that we will read--like them not only in technique, but in feeling, in theme?
- Do these techniques work for you? Do these feelings resonate with you?
As we go forward, I will post some of my thoughts, and I will post some of your thoughts, as well. Feel free to comment on any post, but please be thoughtful and considerate when you do, and please don't comment anonymously.
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