I finished my paper on Kierkegaard and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Now I only have to write one more major research essay (plus a three-page abstract for my Greek drama class) before May. So it's time to start thinking of some potential paper topics.
The class is on mediation and dictation, and all of the literature is from the modern period with a heavy emphasis on Irish literature. I think I want to write my final paper on The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien. This novel was originally written in Gaelic and parodies the Irish obsession with reclaiming a Celtic identity. The Poor Mouth was first published in 1941, and this especially intrigues me; I wrote my undergraduate thesis on post-WWII British literature, and love Irish literature. Ireland's neutrality in WWII is also interesting to me, and I think I understand it better now after reading The Poor Mouth, even though the novel never mentions WWII directly. The obsession with a mythicized Celtic tradition, of Irish lords locking themselves in a stone tower to wait out the Viking invasion, untouched by the foreign aggressors, played a big role in Irish neutrality, and that spiritualized national identity is mercilessly lampooned in this novel. Another aspect of Ireland's neutrality was its self image as a small, poor nation; the Irish prime minister at the time stated that small states like Ireland should stay out of the affairs of the grand powers. Ireland was a very poor nation, especially in the south; I don't dispute that, but what The Poor Mouth elucidates is the peculiar approach to poverty in Ireland (by the upper classes, of course), the pride in abject poverty, the identification of poverty and parochialism with true Gaelic-ness.
I loved the acerbic wit of this book and I'd like to read it again (it's short, only about 180 pages) and think more about the fetishization of the Gaelic language, referred to in the book almost exclusively as "sweet Gaelic," contrasted with bitter English.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Grad Life
I had an unexpected day off today; the one student I usually advise on Thursdays is travelling with his sports team, and my professor cancelled class. And as I was clicking through fashion blogs while eating my oatmeal this morning, I realized that I seriously don't get dressed when I don't have work or school. And it would be hilarious if I started a fashion blog myself. You'd see that I many, sundry patterns of pajamas and put the sweaters Jarrod doesn't like to good use.
Evidence:
This is from St. Patrick's Day, during spring break, and an accurate representation of what I wear around the house. Yes, I'm wearing leggings. I put those on when I figured that 3 PM was a little too late to still be in pajamas. Hey, at least I don't leave the house like this.
Oh, grad school. Eating a banana with peanut butter because you're out of bread. Substituting coffee for adequate hours of sleep. Leggings count as pants. Lowering standards all around.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
My Spring Break: Dutchmen and Danes
It's spring break wooooooo! In my grand tradition of taking tropical vacations and getting drunk off my face for spring break, I am writing an essay on Soren Kierkegaard and Washington Irving. (For the record, the bit about drunken spring breaks... in the past few years, I have spent spring break: taking the MTEL, preparing to defend my senior thesis, and visiting prospective grad schools. Yeah.)
Anyway, I wanted to write down a few of my main ideas for this paper, kind of sort things out here and then get cracking on secondary research.
While Irving predates Kierkegaard by a few decades, and there is no evidence of Kierkegaard regarding Irving as an influence on his writing or thought, what first got me thinking about reading these two in conjunction with each other is their use of pseudonyms and fictional sources. This is interesting to me in terms of authorial distance and textual authority. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous "editor" of Either/Or, Victor Eremita, is very careful to emphasize that he did not write these papers and functions in the text as little more than a reader, interfering as little as possible with the papers he "found" in a second-hand writing desk. Similarly, Washington Irving's narrator Geoffrey Crayon frequently references the posthumous papers of Dietrich Knickerbocker as the source of much of the New York Dutch folklore in the Sketch Book. Like Victor Eremita, Crayon regards himself primarily as a reader and an observer, not as the authoritive voice in the text, but a facilitator of a conversation between many texts. Rather than an all-seeing, detached, authoritative author capable of giving final meaning to the text as a whole, in both Irving and Kierkegaard, we get a multiplicity of voice, numerous and contradictory points of view that are impossible to reconcile. For Kierkegaard, this is very much the point, to have irreconcilable differences between texts so that the reader is forced to make an ethical choice between two mutually-exclusive absolutes. I think Irving employs numerous authorial voices and points of view to evade choice, so as to preserve the cultural multiplicity that he saw was dwindling in nineteenth century America. Irving counters the idea that there needs to be a single narrative for the nation; instead of the great American novel, he gives us a series of sketches that stretch across the Atlantic and across hundreds of years. Irving fights against homogenization of American culture by weaving together fragments of other cultures; he is especially fond of Dutch New York, perhaps because the Dutch were the first European settlers in America and he disdained the anglicization that began after the Revolution.
Geoffrey Crayon and A, the author of the first section of Either/Or, both refer to folklore frequently. Folklore and fairy tales are not authoritative texts; they come from the voices of the common people, coming to us from the indistinct, remote past. No one can identify a precise origin, a single author, in folk tales; rather, they are the result of multiple authors, each changing the myth slightly every time it is told, yet preserving something as well.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes the poet as the spirit of remembrance, and this is a very apt description for Irving's Geoffrey Crayon. Part of what makes Rip Van Winkle so comical is that he only slept for twenty years, yet in merely a generation, everything has changed so drastically that it is no longer recognizable; his community is alienated from the past, and as such, the individuals in it are alienated from each other. Rip Van Winkle, however, serves as a gathering point as the spirit of remembrance; he preserves the past that everyone has already forgotten. Rather than leaving a legacy of wealth for his own children, Rip Van Winkle leaves his stories to the community's children; he is not a father in the particular, insular family, but a patriarch of the entire community, initiating the liminal (children and travellers) into the society through his stories.
Authorship requires some distance, then; in order to be a storyteller, Rip Van Winkle abandons his domestic and work duties. He is not a man of business. Victor Eremita's name implies his distance from society as well; eremita is Latin for recluse, hermit. A also writes that he does not spend much time in society. Instead, he swoops down and retrieves pieces of it from time to time, bringing these scraps back to his nest to weave a tapestry of them.
There's a lot more that I'm going to write about this, but I need to do some more research first. I'm really enjoying this paper so far, though!
Anyway, I wanted to write down a few of my main ideas for this paper, kind of sort things out here and then get cracking on secondary research.
While Irving predates Kierkegaard by a few decades, and there is no evidence of Kierkegaard regarding Irving as an influence on his writing or thought, what first got me thinking about reading these two in conjunction with each other is their use of pseudonyms and fictional sources. This is interesting to me in terms of authorial distance and textual authority. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous "editor" of Either/Or, Victor Eremita, is very careful to emphasize that he did not write these papers and functions in the text as little more than a reader, interfering as little as possible with the papers he "found" in a second-hand writing desk. Similarly, Washington Irving's narrator Geoffrey Crayon frequently references the posthumous papers of Dietrich Knickerbocker as the source of much of the New York Dutch folklore in the Sketch Book. Like Victor Eremita, Crayon regards himself primarily as a reader and an observer, not as the authoritive voice in the text, but a facilitator of a conversation between many texts. Rather than an all-seeing, detached, authoritative author capable of giving final meaning to the text as a whole, in both Irving and Kierkegaard, we get a multiplicity of voice, numerous and contradictory points of view that are impossible to reconcile. For Kierkegaard, this is very much the point, to have irreconcilable differences between texts so that the reader is forced to make an ethical choice between two mutually-exclusive absolutes. I think Irving employs numerous authorial voices and points of view to evade choice, so as to preserve the cultural multiplicity that he saw was dwindling in nineteenth century America. Irving counters the idea that there needs to be a single narrative for the nation; instead of the great American novel, he gives us a series of sketches that stretch across the Atlantic and across hundreds of years. Irving fights against homogenization of American culture by weaving together fragments of other cultures; he is especially fond of Dutch New York, perhaps because the Dutch were the first European settlers in America and he disdained the anglicization that began after the Revolution.
Geoffrey Crayon and A, the author of the first section of Either/Or, both refer to folklore frequently. Folklore and fairy tales are not authoritative texts; they come from the voices of the common people, coming to us from the indistinct, remote past. No one can identify a precise origin, a single author, in folk tales; rather, they are the result of multiple authors, each changing the myth slightly every time it is told, yet preserving something as well.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes the poet as the spirit of remembrance, and this is a very apt description for Irving's Geoffrey Crayon. Part of what makes Rip Van Winkle so comical is that he only slept for twenty years, yet in merely a generation, everything has changed so drastically that it is no longer recognizable; his community is alienated from the past, and as such, the individuals in it are alienated from each other. Rip Van Winkle, however, serves as a gathering point as the spirit of remembrance; he preserves the past that everyone has already forgotten. Rather than leaving a legacy of wealth for his own children, Rip Van Winkle leaves his stories to the community's children; he is not a father in the particular, insular family, but a patriarch of the entire community, initiating the liminal (children and travellers) into the society through his stories.
Authorship requires some distance, then; in order to be a storyteller, Rip Van Winkle abandons his domestic and work duties. He is not a man of business. Victor Eremita's name implies his distance from society as well; eremita is Latin for recluse, hermit. A also writes that he does not spend much time in society. Instead, he swoops down and retrieves pieces of it from time to time, bringing these scraps back to his nest to weave a tapestry of them.
There's a lot more that I'm going to write about this, but I need to do some more research first. I'm really enjoying this paper so far, though!
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Cough Cough Wink Wink
I'm sick and I'm failing to concentrate on reading at the moment. So I thought I'd post.
I'm working my way through Either/Or and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm using it for my research paper (due in two weeks, good grief!!!) in my class on American literature, read in conjunction with Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. I know, it's a weird combination-- an early American short story writer and a Danish philosopher. But it makes sense (I swear); I'm writing about authorship, the writer's contentious relationship with larger society, aesthetic distance and pseudonyms. It's going to be a good time.
If only I could stop coughing.
:-(
I'm working my way through Either/Or and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm using it for my research paper (due in two weeks, good grief!!!) in my class on American literature, read in conjunction with Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. I know, it's a weird combination-- an early American short story writer and a Danish philosopher. But it makes sense (I swear); I'm writing about authorship, the writer's contentious relationship with larger society, aesthetic distance and pseudonyms. It's going to be a good time.
If only I could stop coughing.
:-(
Saturday, February 26, 2011
What I'm doing in Grad School
So I haven't written about a single thing I've read in grad school. I've read a lot of books (about one per week per class) since this semester started, but I want to throw back to last semester to what I think is one of my best pieces of writing to date. This is a shorter version of the 30-page final paper I wrote about Artaud and Beckett last semester.
In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett describes habit as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability.” [1] Habit is a defense against the suffering of being, the experience of life as precarious, painful, fecund, and mysterious, and a guarantee of the mechanical repetition of existence. The life of habit is inscribed within conventional narratives, which impose an illusion of order over the chaos of living. Winnie, the “well-preserved” protagonist of Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, uses romantic narratives to anaesthetize herself to her bizarre condition of sinking into the earth, her increasing hysteria, her farce of a marriage and sexual frustration. Her act of self-preservation commits violence against the singularity of events. This hegemony of conventional narrative comprises the crucial problem of contemporary theater, according to avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud. In The Theater and its Double, Artaud claims that the domination of dialogue, realism, and psychology in contemporary theater has reinforced the tendency toward self-preservation and alienated theater from its purpose: to remind us that “[w]e are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.”[2] Artuad promotes a theater of cruelty; this Artaudian cruelty is not necessarily physical violence, but overwhelming, superfluous intensity. Happy Days uses saturated, minimalist phenomena, fragmentation of narratives, and dehumanization to construct a dark mythos of dangerous but fragile cruelty and chaotic freedom.
In the past fifteen years, Beckett scholarship has shifted from strictly philosophical readings toward a focus on the mythical, mystical, and anti-rational. Several recent studies view Beckett’s work as an inversion of the quest formula, undermining the heroic ego and dramatizing a psychological journey into darkness, quiescence, and the unconscious. Much of the critical body has traditionally emphasized the failures of language. But language is not merely a failure in Happy Days. Phyllis Carey observes that Winnie’s mechanical use of language normalizes and reduces to cliché “[w]hat once struck humans with awe, elicited primitive worship of the supernatural, and seemingly endowed words with magical, transforming power.”[3] Winnie destroys fear and wonder through her adherence to and elaboration of the static narrative formulas of romance and religion. Christianity fosters an illusion of a merciful God and an orderly universe, and the courtly love narrative forces sexuality into an orderly, controlled, and thus distorted form.
Marriage is a point of juncture for Winnie’s two narratives of romance and religion. The Catholic catechism justifies the sexual bond between husband and wife as an image of God’s love for humanity. This metaphor is fragmented and distorted in Happy Days. Sexuality has become perverse, not in the transgressive excess of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I argue is the prevailing biblical allusion in the play, but in the narrative of courtly love, which spiritualizes sexuality, negating the body through language rather than risking the body’s integrity through an excessive, theatrical act.
Much like Beckett’s increasing austerity in Happy Days, Artaud discards the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue in favor of creating a new mythology based on cruelty. Artaud writes that “all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation”[4]. Creation risks destruction, a danger that appears throughout Beckett’s work and provokes the characters’ anxiety, especially their fear of procreation, resulting in sterile, non-productive, and alienated sexuality. Winnie responds to this fear by sublimating sexuality into narrative.
Winnie’s sterile marriage to Willie is comprised of rituals in which love and sex are represented linguistically: she recites clichéd expressions of affection throughout, and in the final scene, her sentimental song replaces sexual union. The force she represses is dangerous and linked closely to her dark fantasies of apocalyptic destruction and the consuming, transgressive sexuality Artaud describes in The Theater and its Double. Artaud commends John Ford’s 1629 drama ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore for its spectacle of Eros, which transgresses every principle of normative sexuality. The central love affair is extramarital, violent, and incestuous, between brother and sister. The main character displays his intense passion and refusal to abandon his beloved by tearing out her heart “as if to feast upon it in the middle of a banquet.”[5] Superfluous, transgressive sexuality is experienced as an essential force in the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and Lot’s daughters commit a theatrical act driven by metaphysical fear, a response to chaos with greater chaos like the shrieking victims of the plague. In contrast, Winnie and Willie’s marriage is a mechanical, habitual devotion that fails to consume them and bring them to the edge of complete decimation.
Traces of uninhibited passion persist, despite Winnie’s aestheticized narration. In the play’s final scene, Willie attempts to climb the mound in which Winnie is buried. Winnie reads this gesture as a recapitulation of his marriage proposal—he’s come begging for a kiss again—but she cannot dispel the “something else” he may be after, the gun. David Alpaugh suggests that Willie puts forth an “attempt at communication, sympathy, and love.”[6] Alpaugh reads the violent potential as Willie’s desire to end Winnie’s suffering, but I suggest that his intent to kill may be the unleashing of sexual energy as an uncontrollable force. Winnie and Willie do not need preservation, salvation, or the word of God. Only an Artaudian act of cruelty would allow them to feel again, live again, and be again—even if only for the spectacular moment of their deaths, in total rebellion against their plight. The possibility for such release is fleeting and quickly denied. Willie fails to reach her; his act is incomplete. Winnie responds with clichéd expressions in a “mondaine” tone and “her” song, “I Love You So,” a duet from The Merry Widow. Here, Winnie is at her most unoriginal and mechanical—her song is a music box tune—as opposed to Willie’s spectacular, desperate endeavor of superfluity and passion. Winnie ultimately preserves her cherished words from disintegration by destroying Willie’s theatrical gesture and inscribing it within her narrative. Order is restored. Another happy day will undoubtedly follow.
Outside of Winnie’s torrent of words, the divine operates as a capricious, inhuman force, and sexuality is something dark, threatening and intractable. Happy Days is cruel in its theatrical excess of saturated images and affects. In my full-length paper I discuss the dramatic techniques that engender cruelty, especially its dehumanizing irony and anti-sentimentalism, thus foregrounding turbulent, uncontrollable forces instead of characters’ psychology.
Winnie fantasizes about darkness and destruction, for the “happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours,” [7] but then qualifies her wish for the purgation of a fiery death: “I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder.”[8] She inscribes death into her stabilizing narrative, removing its finality and arbitrariness. Winnie muses, “There always remains something. (Pause.) Of everything.”[9] Her burned parasol will return the next day, her medicine bottle will become whole again, and Winnie herself will never melt, only fade into oblivion little by little, like those “unforgettable lines” she cannot remember. Rather than committing a theatrical act of total rebellion, which is ephemeral, unrepeatable, and singular, Winnie guards against the plague of the theater, theater as an overwhelming, disruptive force and harbinger of chaos, and the suffering of being. In the end, Winnie and Willie fall into silence; the effects of her linguistic violence are irreparable and the play ends with a cruel sense of the impossibility “to break through language in order to touch life”.[10]
Works Cited
Alpaugh, David J. “Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.” Twentieth Century Literature 11.4 (1966): 202-210.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Carey, Phyllis. “The Ritual of Human Technē in Happy Days.” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Katherine H. Burkman. London: Associated University Presses, 1987. 144-150.
Gontarski, S.E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977.
[1] S.E. Gontarski. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, 17
[2] Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double, 79
[3] Phyllis Carey. “The Ritual of Human Techne in Happy Days,” 147
[4] Artaud 31
[5] Artaud 29
[6] Alpaugh 210
[7] Samuel Beckett. Happy Days, 18
[8] Beckett 38
[9] Beckett 52
[10]Artaud 13
Bad Romance: Love and Violence in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days
In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett describes habit as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability.” [1] Habit is a defense against the suffering of being, the experience of life as precarious, painful, fecund, and mysterious, and a guarantee of the mechanical repetition of existence. The life of habit is inscribed within conventional narratives, which impose an illusion of order over the chaos of living. Winnie, the “well-preserved” protagonist of Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, uses romantic narratives to anaesthetize herself to her bizarre condition of sinking into the earth, her increasing hysteria, her farce of a marriage and sexual frustration. Her act of self-preservation commits violence against the singularity of events. This hegemony of conventional narrative comprises the crucial problem of contemporary theater, according to avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud. In The Theater and its Double, Artaud claims that the domination of dialogue, realism, and psychology in contemporary theater has reinforced the tendency toward self-preservation and alienated theater from its purpose: to remind us that “[w]e are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.”[2] Artuad promotes a theater of cruelty; this Artaudian cruelty is not necessarily physical violence, but overwhelming, superfluous intensity. Happy Days uses saturated, minimalist phenomena, fragmentation of narratives, and dehumanization to construct a dark mythos of dangerous but fragile cruelty and chaotic freedom.
In the past fifteen years, Beckett scholarship has shifted from strictly philosophical readings toward a focus on the mythical, mystical, and anti-rational. Several recent studies view Beckett’s work as an inversion of the quest formula, undermining the heroic ego and dramatizing a psychological journey into darkness, quiescence, and the unconscious. Much of the critical body has traditionally emphasized the failures of language. But language is not merely a failure in Happy Days. Phyllis Carey observes that Winnie’s mechanical use of language normalizes and reduces to cliché “[w]hat once struck humans with awe, elicited primitive worship of the supernatural, and seemingly endowed words with magical, transforming power.”[3] Winnie destroys fear and wonder through her adherence to and elaboration of the static narrative formulas of romance and religion. Christianity fosters an illusion of a merciful God and an orderly universe, and the courtly love narrative forces sexuality into an orderly, controlled, and thus distorted form.
Marriage is a point of juncture for Winnie’s two narratives of romance and religion. The Catholic catechism justifies the sexual bond between husband and wife as an image of God’s love for humanity. This metaphor is fragmented and distorted in Happy Days. Sexuality has become perverse, not in the transgressive excess of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I argue is the prevailing biblical allusion in the play, but in the narrative of courtly love, which spiritualizes sexuality, negating the body through language rather than risking the body’s integrity through an excessive, theatrical act.
Much like Beckett’s increasing austerity in Happy Days, Artaud discards the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue in favor of creating a new mythology based on cruelty. Artaud writes that “all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation”[4]. Creation risks destruction, a danger that appears throughout Beckett’s work and provokes the characters’ anxiety, especially their fear of procreation, resulting in sterile, non-productive, and alienated sexuality. Winnie responds to this fear by sublimating sexuality into narrative.
Winnie’s sterile marriage to Willie is comprised of rituals in which love and sex are represented linguistically: she recites clichéd expressions of affection throughout, and in the final scene, her sentimental song replaces sexual union. The force she represses is dangerous and linked closely to her dark fantasies of apocalyptic destruction and the consuming, transgressive sexuality Artaud describes in The Theater and its Double. Artaud commends John Ford’s 1629 drama ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore for its spectacle of Eros, which transgresses every principle of normative sexuality. The central love affair is extramarital, violent, and incestuous, between brother and sister. The main character displays his intense passion and refusal to abandon his beloved by tearing out her heart “as if to feast upon it in the middle of a banquet.”[5] Superfluous, transgressive sexuality is experienced as an essential force in the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and Lot’s daughters commit a theatrical act driven by metaphysical fear, a response to chaos with greater chaos like the shrieking victims of the plague. In contrast, Winnie and Willie’s marriage is a mechanical, habitual devotion that fails to consume them and bring them to the edge of complete decimation.
Traces of uninhibited passion persist, despite Winnie’s aestheticized narration. In the play’s final scene, Willie attempts to climb the mound in which Winnie is buried. Winnie reads this gesture as a recapitulation of his marriage proposal—he’s come begging for a kiss again—but she cannot dispel the “something else” he may be after, the gun. David Alpaugh suggests that Willie puts forth an “attempt at communication, sympathy, and love.”[6] Alpaugh reads the violent potential as Willie’s desire to end Winnie’s suffering, but I suggest that his intent to kill may be the unleashing of sexual energy as an uncontrollable force. Winnie and Willie do not need preservation, salvation, or the word of God. Only an Artaudian act of cruelty would allow them to feel again, live again, and be again—even if only for the spectacular moment of their deaths, in total rebellion against their plight. The possibility for such release is fleeting and quickly denied. Willie fails to reach her; his act is incomplete. Winnie responds with clichéd expressions in a “mondaine” tone and “her” song, “I Love You So,” a duet from The Merry Widow. Here, Winnie is at her most unoriginal and mechanical—her song is a music box tune—as opposed to Willie’s spectacular, desperate endeavor of superfluity and passion. Winnie ultimately preserves her cherished words from disintegration by destroying Willie’s theatrical gesture and inscribing it within her narrative. Order is restored. Another happy day will undoubtedly follow.
Outside of Winnie’s torrent of words, the divine operates as a capricious, inhuman force, and sexuality is something dark, threatening and intractable. Happy Days is cruel in its theatrical excess of saturated images and affects. In my full-length paper I discuss the dramatic techniques that engender cruelty, especially its dehumanizing irony and anti-sentimentalism, thus foregrounding turbulent, uncontrollable forces instead of characters’ psychology.
Winnie fantasizes about darkness and destruction, for the “happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours,” [7] but then qualifies her wish for the purgation of a fiery death: “I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder.”[8] She inscribes death into her stabilizing narrative, removing its finality and arbitrariness. Winnie muses, “There always remains something. (Pause.) Of everything.”[9] Her burned parasol will return the next day, her medicine bottle will become whole again, and Winnie herself will never melt, only fade into oblivion little by little, like those “unforgettable lines” she cannot remember. Rather than committing a theatrical act of total rebellion, which is ephemeral, unrepeatable, and singular, Winnie guards against the plague of the theater, theater as an overwhelming, disruptive force and harbinger of chaos, and the suffering of being. In the end, Winnie and Willie fall into silence; the effects of her linguistic violence are irreparable and the play ends with a cruel sense of the impossibility “to break through language in order to touch life”.[10]
Works Cited
Alpaugh, David J. “Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.” Twentieth Century Literature 11.4 (1966): 202-210.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Carey, Phyllis. “The Ritual of Human Technē in Happy Days.” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Katherine H. Burkman. London: Associated University Presses, 1987. 144-150.
Gontarski, S.E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977.
[1] S.E. Gontarski. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, 17
[2] Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double, 79
[3] Phyllis Carey. “The Ritual of Human Techne in Happy Days,” 147
[4] Artaud 31
[5] Artaud 29
[6] Alpaugh 210
[7] Samuel Beckett. Happy Days, 18
[8] Beckett 38
[9] Beckett 52
[10]Artaud 13
Friday, February 25, 2011
Life is Beautiful
I think this is on my "Words of Wisdom" thing on the side of my blog, but it deserves repeating:
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I have been too much an accuser and negator lately. I've had a rough couple of weeks with a lot of presentations and more reading than I could handle, and while I got it done and performed well with my presentations, I wasn't satisfied. I think it's because of my approach to them, my orientation towards these challenges. One of the things that I love about Nietzsche is his approach to failure. It does not matter if you fail, it only matters that you strove for greatness. What paralyzed me and made me so frustrated, and ultimately feel empty and unaccomplished regarding my presentations and such, was that I fixated on the potential for failure. It's incredibly hard to do, but I should throw that concern aside and rise to meet my challenges. Failure is only possible if you strive for something greater than you are, and that reaching toward greatness should be my focus.
I think this mindset should help me power through these pages and pages of Bourdieu that I have to read now!
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I have been too much an accuser and negator lately. I've had a rough couple of weeks with a lot of presentations and more reading than I could handle, and while I got it done and performed well with my presentations, I wasn't satisfied. I think it's because of my approach to them, my orientation towards these challenges. One of the things that I love about Nietzsche is his approach to failure. It does not matter if you fail, it only matters that you strove for greatness. What paralyzed me and made me so frustrated, and ultimately feel empty and unaccomplished regarding my presentations and such, was that I fixated on the potential for failure. It's incredibly hard to do, but I should throw that concern aside and rise to meet my challenges. Failure is only possible if you strive for something greater than you are, and that reaching toward greatness should be my focus.
I think this mindset should help me power through these pages and pages of Bourdieu that I have to read now!
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Masks
I've been writing this blog from an impersonal perspective. The premise was to write about books I've read, and then these last few posts have been attempts to keep myself on-track in other areas of my life, but I've kept my writing vague and distant. Both of these subjects, reading and maintaining a balanced life, are intensely personal, and these bland updates are not helping me with the unspoken goal here of reflecting thoughtfully on my experiences.
So let me begin again. I'll introduce myself. I'm in my second semester of grad school, working towards a Masters degree in English with the intent of teaching high school in two years. This summer, I moved over 400 miles away from my hometown and I'm now living on my own for the first time in my life (a college dorm 30 minutes from my parents' house doesn't count as living on my own). I live with my boyfriend, and my decision to go to school here was largely based on wanting to be together; he got a PhD offer here, I got into the Masters program, and I can say unabashedly that love led me here. People go to grad school for the humanities for a host of irrational reasons, and I say that being with my boyfriend is a perfectly valid one. Three years ago, that notion never would have made sense to me, when I was bent on earning a PhD even if it took me 20 years and a monomaniacal level of focus. Scholarship and learning are still very important to me; I'm in grad school and want to be a teacher, after all. But they're not everything, and since Jarrod came into my life, I've realized that there is much, much more to me than being a good student, although he certainly encourages me to be a scholar too (he wants me to apply to the PhD program here, but I have a lot of reasons why I don't want to). Yes, I love him.
Moving far from home has been a complex experience with a lot of highs and lows. Some days, I love my new city. Sometimes I feel inexplicably nostalgic over something random and weird, like the roads I used to run on in my hometown or the way the morning sun fills the kitchen of my parents' house. I occasionally hate grad school and threaten to quit. Other times, I love it and get excited about what I'm reading and writing. It's an undulating tide of emotions that I'm trying to sort through, but I'm thankful to have this experience. For a long time, I avoided all risks and didn't challenge myself beyond what I knew I could achieve with reasonable effort. Now, for the first time in my life really, I know that I could put everything I have into some of my endeavors and still fail.
There's life after failure, and I'm a deeper person because I've failed. There is tragedy in life and I don't try to turn away from it. There is a great deal of comedy too. I'm trying to be brave enough and smart enough to recognize both.
So let me begin again. I'll introduce myself. I'm in my second semester of grad school, working towards a Masters degree in English with the intent of teaching high school in two years. This summer, I moved over 400 miles away from my hometown and I'm now living on my own for the first time in my life (a college dorm 30 minutes from my parents' house doesn't count as living on my own). I live with my boyfriend, and my decision to go to school here was largely based on wanting to be together; he got a PhD offer here, I got into the Masters program, and I can say unabashedly that love led me here. People go to grad school for the humanities for a host of irrational reasons, and I say that being with my boyfriend is a perfectly valid one. Three years ago, that notion never would have made sense to me, when I was bent on earning a PhD even if it took me 20 years and a monomaniacal level of focus. Scholarship and learning are still very important to me; I'm in grad school and want to be a teacher, after all. But they're not everything, and since Jarrod came into my life, I've realized that there is much, much more to me than being a good student, although he certainly encourages me to be a scholar too (he wants me to apply to the PhD program here, but I have a lot of reasons why I don't want to). Yes, I love him.
Moving far from home has been a complex experience with a lot of highs and lows. Some days, I love my new city. Sometimes I feel inexplicably nostalgic over something random and weird, like the roads I used to run on in my hometown or the way the morning sun fills the kitchen of my parents' house. I occasionally hate grad school and threaten to quit. Other times, I love it and get excited about what I'm reading and writing. It's an undulating tide of emotions that I'm trying to sort through, but I'm thankful to have this experience. For a long time, I avoided all risks and didn't challenge myself beyond what I knew I could achieve with reasonable effort. Now, for the first time in my life really, I know that I could put everything I have into some of my endeavors and still fail.
There's life after failure, and I'm a deeper person because I've failed. There is tragedy in life and I don't try to turn away from it. There is a great deal of comedy too. I'm trying to be brave enough and smart enough to recognize both.
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