amimetobios

A brief peroration on Invisible Man, then on to the beginning of Whitman's  "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"  via syllables in Dickinson ("syllable from sound") and Stevens ("clickering syllables") and the Whitman entry in Pinsky's My Favorite Poem project.

A quick tour through several Dickinson poems, including "I started early," to which we'll return briefly.  Some noting (and a lot of not-noting) of echoes and congruences with Emerson's vocabulary: "Austere," e.g. and attitudes towards snow.  Next class we'll return to "The Brain is wider than the sky" as a way into Whitman and by way of contrast to Stevens' Comedian.

A quick catchup on major issues we couldn't or didn't really consider in The Aspern Papers, Mrs. Dalloway, and "The Dead."  Death and parties.  Then onwards to Dickinson, in particular to "The brain is wider than the sky" (dashes suppressed) as a way into Emerson and the Divinity School Address, TK.

A class that was supposed to be about "The Dead" but wasn't really: more about truth in fiction, the difference, gulf, and interface between the fictional world and our world.  First person narratives and the little they guarantee.  The difference and interface between narrating narrator and narrated narrator, and its parallel in the third person narrator of FID and the point of view narrated.  The first sentence of "The Dead."

Some context in Byron and Shelley.  Claire Claremont (Miss Juliana) as a survival from another world.  Things we don't know: narrator's name; content of the papers.  A little bit about things that don't exist at all: his assumed name, or (it would be better to say, though I didn't) the difference between his false and real name.  I didn't get nearly as far as I would have wanted to here.

Jane Eyre and the way narrative works.  Truth in fiction. Breaking the fourth wall in so many different ways in this paragraph, the first of chapter XI:

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe.  All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of an October day: I left Lowton at four o’clock a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight.

 Why fictional narrators always tell the truth.  What sympathy or agreement truthful (if frequently unreliable) narrators expect of their audiences.  How this feeds into the psychological acuity of Brontë's depiction of Jane.  Jane like Cordelia again: the false sense, central to first person narrative that "tout comprendre est tout pardonner."  Why Jane Eyre ends with the fate of St. John Rivers, far away and disappearing.  (I think this is the best class so far.)

The first of two classes on Jane Eyre.  Relation of Rochester (and of Heathcliff) to Milton's Satan.  Relation of Jane to Cordelia: how she's not like Cordelia.  Transparency and first person narration (to be picked up in next class).  Jane Eyre as feminist novel.

We look at "Rousseau" (= Wordsworth) in The Triumph of Life describing the disappearance of the shape all light, fading like Venus into the light of common day.  Then on to Mont Blanc as a poem about the struggle between the mind and the world as to which is to be master, and the jiu jitsu by which the mind wins by letting the world (= Mont Blanc) utterly overwhelm it.  Relation to the sublime.

And its relation to the Invocation to Book 3 of Paradise Lost.  Loss of intensity converted to the intensity of loss.

A bit more on "A Slumber did my spirit seal."  An urgent conjuration that they should like the Intimations Ode.  Followed by a bit of literary theory - the theory of axiology or value.  Dworkin's view of literary interpretation: interpret so as to make a literary work the best work it can possibly be.  Derived from his view of the Constitution.  Some strictly amateur talk about the Constitution and the right to privacy as found in Griswold vs. Connecticut.  The ordering of two works attributed to Solomon: Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes.  Which ordering do we prefer?  The end of Lear; do we prefer he die happy or in despair, and why?  (Most people who wrote about the issue wanted to claim he died happy.)  Do we prefer "trees" to be the hopeful alternative to "rocks and stones" or the grim failure even of something living to be more than rocks and stones are in earth's diurnal course.  Intimations Ode itself Monday?

A first class on Wordsworth, which is really a class on ballads, from "The Twa Corbies" and "Lord Randall" to Beddoes's "Ghost's Moonshine" (as it is called) from Death's Jest Book.  The idea of the anonymous eerie third person otherness of the ballad, a spooky point of view on how we all become part of the spooky point go view.  Scott's "Proud Masie."  That balladic spookiness combined with the first person expressiveness of the lyric in the anonymous (in 1798) Lyrical Ballads. Payoff = a reading of "A Slumber did my spirit seal."

General comment about paper writing, because we were handing back papers. What I regard as very basic techniques for writing sentences that will almost automatically lead to clearer writing.  Then on to one more Blake poem: the "Chimney Sweeper" Song of Innocence, with some notice of technique similar to what I had urged at the opening of the class.  Next up: Wordsworth!

A bit more about Pope, and the amazing cleverness of Rape of the Lock.  Then on to Blake, the meaning of calling something a "Song of Innocence," some pairings between the songs of innocence and of experience, and a line by line reading of one Song of Innocence: "The Little Black Boy."  The way the poem criticizes the normativity of whiteness that the little boy has almost been induced to buy into.

Since apparently most people didn't get a chance to read the poem, this became more about the way heroic couplets work, as opposed to Miltonic and Shakespearean blank verse. Basic idea: the severe constraints of the couplet require extreme push back from the poet in terms of balance, variation, surprise.  We talk about rhyming and look in some detail at one four line sequence from the start: 

Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou'd compel
A well-bred Lord t'assault a gentle Belle?
Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor'd,
Cou'd make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?

Abandoning Paradise Lost today, with some more consideration of our love for the unreal -- fictional characters in comedy and tragedy, and how the very fact that they're fictional contributes to their effect.  We don't need to worry about what happens after "happily ever after" ("that is called Fiction" --Oscar Wilde), we can feel sadder about their losses, which are more total.  Adam's commitment to marriage.  The fall in PL is not the fall into sex, because they already have sex, but the fall into marriage, into the limits of love and sex.  That's what's tragic.  Partly that it doesn't end with the fall (into sex, into death), but keeps going on, into the real unreality of our lives.  Eve's greatness after the fall.  Adam's running to meet her.  Their expulsion.

The return to earth, the right place for love (as Frost will say). One fall or two: that's another way of asking the question of how to think of God.  Calliope can't defend Orpheus because she is an empty dream.  Orpheus's turn to Eurydice as a turn to the fact of mortality: all mortals are empty dreams. Fall of Eve, and of Adam: "And me with thee hath ruined" = first silent thought. 

Following sections and a snow day, we try to catch up, which means (it turns out) looking at more similarities between God and Satan: their derision for their enemies, their invocation of "necessity / The Tyrant's plea."  How the Son manages the Father's douche-bag-splaining ("death for death" --> "life for life").  This is a further idea of justification: making God just.  Satan's reaction to the innocent Adam and Eve ("whom my thoughts pursue with wonder / And could love."  His pity for them though he is unpitied) contrasted with God's ("ingrate!").  Satan's dream temptation of Eve and how much Raphael echoes it in his Great Chain of Being speech.

The rebel angels vs. God on free will (does God have it?).  Parallels between them.  The word "dispose" as a word about narrative ordering in Milton, and therefore of the narrator's own story and experience; suzet and fabula; Satan's hatred of light and his voice, vs. Milton's vs. the Muse's, vs. God's ("woe to the inhabitants of earth").  How the mind is its own place, bot for Satan and for the narrator/Milton.  There's new stuff here, not in previous Milton classes....

On to Book 3 of Paradise Lost: Shelley on God's viciousness; God's jokes about Satan; similarities between the Son and Satan (via their courage) and God and Satan (via their gaming for humanity).  Question of justifying the ways of God to men: do we judge whether he's just?  How? Euthyphro dilemma.  Luther on God's apparently unjust ways (can't be justified independently to us).  Poetry in hell; philosophy in hell.

Back to Satan in Books 1 and 2, via Burke's chapter on "How words influence the Passions," where he quotes "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, / A universe of death" from Book 2.  The sublime in Burke and Kant (and Nietzsche, and a little Longinus) as the inner response to outer disorder, in contrast to the beautiful.  Delight vs. pleasure.  Magnificence of Satan.  "Yet faithful how they stood, / Their glory withered."

Really a class about the sublime, and Satan as the sublime in Blake and Shelley, that is Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost, via Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and his allusion to the same line from the Gospel of John that Wittgenstein loved so much ("It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you"), and Shelley's preface to Prometheus Unbound.  To be continued.

A last class on King Lear focusing on the question "Why does tragedy give pleasure?" Why do we like Johnson's shock at the death of Cordelia so much?  Why do we want depth? (...is the question though I didn't put it quite that way.)  Answer: friendship among mortals (which I almost put that way).  The only friend to a mortal is a mortal (again, almosting it).  Lear is about mortals:  Freud on "making friends with the necessity of dying" echoes Gloucester: "My son came then into my mind, and yet my mind was then scarce friends with him."  Mortality in King Lear is endless, but it's shared.  That's one reason the Fool has to be mortal: a fairy tale spirit who turns out to be the spirit of mortality (as I wish I had quite said).

More on fairy tale testing in Scene 1. Fairy tales as the world outside our world, which is the world of mortality Lear gets us into.   If you've heard the Shakespeare podcasts on Lear, the fairy tale testing approach is new, i.e. a more recent insight.  After that, the rest of the class is a quick version of the longer exposition in the Shakespeare classes: parallels and stereoscopic near parallels (i.e. parallax) between and among characters: "nothing will come of nothing," repeated with the Fool beginning the recuperation of Lear after his terrible first appearance; the rivalry between Kent and the Fool; Lear as the Fool's only friend.

First real day on King Lear.  Window characters who are there at the end as well as the beginning.  How Prufrock thinks of himself.  But how Shakespeare braids them together, so that windows become mains.  Conflict within scenes and between the groups who constitute the members of separate scenes.  Fairy Tale beginning of King Lear.  Lear sets a test for Cordelia, and she fails in his eyes, but wins in France's, which makes France (and Cordelia) win in ours.

More on the bucket of poems from the first class, mainly about the personification of love.  Love and shipwreck,  In Plato, in Herbert, Love is personified as the god who personifies.  The burning child as personification of love: Southwell, Freud, Bishop.  The shipwreck is the proof of love, too.