A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard

Although several individuals in class today described Binx as a character to whom they could not relate, I feel that his character exists and lives the way it does for a particular reason. Although Binx fought in the war, he is not the typical, hard-working ex-soldier many Americans saw pre-Gulf Wars. Although he is a bond trader, he does not seem to be focused solely on material possessions (although he enjoys flings with his secretaries, he is engaged in seeking answers to existential questions). Although he is from New Orleans and surrounded by Creole culture, he abstains from Mardi Gras revelry. He is not even in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

The list of paradoxes in Binx’s life could continue–I feel that the one above could be generated from a quick skim of the book, indicating that Binx is indeed designed to stand out from the crowd and to be held at arm’s length from the reader. In a way, that the reader is forced to observe Binx without being able to truly empathize with him parallels the relationship Binx has with the people he encounters in his everyday New Orleans life. Binx spends much of his free time (it seems) observing people and hypothesizing about their motives and their awareness of themselves and of existential ideas. Percy, in creating Binx as an incredibly unrelatable character, forces the reader to do the same.

With this in mind, it seems that although Percy fails to argue for or against either an existentialist, intellectual life or a hard-working, relatively shallow one, he seems to believe that Binx’s approach has at least some merit, and that human beings should be at the very least engaged in pondering the meaning behind their own lives and existences, if not also those of others.

Having read another chunk of the play since my last post, my thoughts on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead honestly have not changed much. Although I have returned to civilization from my mountainous, cellphone-less West Virginia physics trip retreat and have thus encountered varied opinions on the work, I remain loyal to my reading of the play as a witty, fast-paced ride. I continue to be fascinated by the idea that the plot of R and G Are Dead occurs within (well, more like beside) that of Hamlet. The two works are remarkably different in diction, syntax, imagery, and, particularly, humor, but their common cast of characters and the overlapping plays-within plays pull them inextricably together.

So, not only do I find this more recent play to be entertaining with its mathy, bantery humor, but I also find its juxtaposition with Shakespeare’s work to be interesting. I feel as though it is a more modern phenomenon for a writer to analyze events from the perspective of a side character (from another work) much like how art-conscious art has recently developed and how creativity is now defined in an endless series of works about the creative process.

Ok. I’m going to attempt to be more succinct in this post than in previous ones in which I have rambled seemingly without aim. The final 25 pages or so of The Hours was the best part of the book to me. Before that point, I honestly had mixed about the book: I admired the audacity of Cunningham for taking on the challenge of kind of “modernizing” (and I put the word in quotes because I feel it really does not do his attempt justice or describe it holistically), and  I very much enjoyed the commentary on how the three women feel about their places in their families, social circles, and lives in the three different eras. I’d actually love to read a book describing and comparing the experiences, thoughts, of several women (or several men or children-really anyone) over differences in time, social standing, or place, but Cunningham went beyond that by incorporating Virginia Woolf and her novel into his and by adopting a stream-of-consciousness approach. But, despite these positives, I shared the reservations of many of my classmates. I felt as though I had almost read this book before and as if it lacked creativity and originality.

Frankly, those misgivings were banished upon discovering that Laura Brown’s Richie is Richard. The interaction of the characters whose individual stories had been described simultaneously, but across a time gap, was, to me, the most engaging part of the novel. In that realization (and I was kicking myself quite hard for not picking up on the name-based connection), Cunningham delivers again the message of Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway: the shock of discovering Laura and Clarissa’s connection begs the reader not simply to consider the point of life, but rather to understand its value at the very least in helping someone else create meaningful relationships.

Having just completed Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying this past weekend, I feel slightly overwhelmed by stream-of-consciousness novels. But, now seventy-five pages into Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I also feel well-prepped to compare the different ways the two authors go about writing their respective thought- and observation-based stories. While Faulkner chose to divide up the thoughts of his various characters in clearly-marked chapters, Woolf goes an entirely different direction with only a few white lines separating the distinct ideas and emotions of her two characters, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

As of this point in Mrs. Dalloway, I am torn between the two styles concerning which I enjoy more. I found Faulkner’s development of his characters through only thoughts (including those of others) immensely impressive, but I find Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness with some interjections to describe the scene and the characters’ observations easier to follow, and I feel this allows me to delve into what is said about their emotions and wants, among other things, more thoroughly.

What I guess I will say about the differences in style (at least how I perceive them) is that I found Faulkner’s more genuine and real as he only recorded the thoughts of his characters (obviously, as a dead Addie Bundren weighed in, it was not wholly realistic). I think this realness was a direct result of his commitment to only record the thoughts of his characters (omitting simple observation of that person walking down the road, the trees, the color of grass, and other things). With this approach, the readers of As I Lay Dying have more to fill in, but, with that freedom, I simply felt more invested in the novel. On the other hand, Woolf describes every minute detail each character observes in Mrs. Dalloway. I find this extremely impressive but also nearly impossible, as she is attempting to describe every aspect of a human experience throughout a day, a powerfully ambitious effort, but one that so cordons off her characters from the readers’ own creativity.

I’m going to begin with a description of AP Physics to which I will refer back through the rest of the blog. I want to explain this part of my daily Monday-through-Friday workweek so that all readers of the blog will understand the background with which I approached Dickinson’s poetry. A couple key thoughts:

1. Physics is one of the double-period science classes on offer at Providence Day. This means that the Physics student has an automatic one and one-half hours of class daily.

2. There are four basic types of Physics class periods determined by activity:

• Labs
• Testing
• Whiteboarding and practice problems
• Lectures and note-taking

Obviously, there is more to AP Physics than just these two items, but these two are the particular aspects of the class that I see as crucial to understanding its control of time. Because of the first point, Physics is long–a seemingly endless stretch of time in a large, white-walled classroom. The second point is important because the activities determine the extent to which Physics bends time. Testing makes the period fly by most quickly; notes most slowly.

I would think most students have a class or area of study that seems to them as Physics seems to me: a long slog. Further, everyone must be able to recognize some chore that makes time seem to pass numbingly slowly and another event that accelerates time.

To Emily Dickinson, death is both–not the dull or fun event, particularly, but rather the one that distorts time. In her poems “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–” and “Because I could not stop for Death–”, Dickinson discusses death’s effect on time using dash-based syntax and death- and grave-related metaphors.

Dash-based syntax is a commonality through essentially all of Dickinson’s work (at least as much of it as I have seen). This syntax, which renders traditional commas, periods, and semicolons obsolete in “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–” and nearly succeeds in the same feat in “Because I could not stop for Death–”, allows Dickinson to control the pace of her poems by controlling the speed at which the reader is asked to jump from one idea to a second and back. I find this control of pace (an aspect of tone) most commanding in “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”; the stronger, jumpier use of dashes reflects their complete replacement of all other forms of punctuation. Here, Dickinson matches the pace of the readers’ thoughts with her interpretation of death:

The first stanza:

I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air–

Between the Heaves of Storm

(1-4)

And the last stanza:

With Blue–uncertain stumbling Buzz–

Between the light–and me–

And then the Windows failed–and then

I could not see to see–

(13-16)

Early in the poem, when Dickinson is referencing the calming effect of death, her ideas are contained in relatively long strings of words separated infrequently by dashes. But as Dickinson writes toward the culmination of her poem–adiscussion of the quick pace of life of a dead person–her dashes become more dominant and long statements and ideas fall away. A similar pattern exists in her poem “Because I could not stop for Death–”. As the poem goes on, there are more dashes, and the reader jumps about more quickly. This corresponds to the subject of the end of the poem relative to that of the beginning; at the end, Dickinson is blunt, stating, “Since then–’tis centuries–and yet/Feels shorter than the Day.” In both, the increase in the number of dashes (an increase of the pace of the poem) comes when Dickinson indicates her belief that, to the dead, time flies.

Dickinson describes the period just before death as I would describe lectures notes in Physics class. Using metaphors, particularly and frequently a set relating death to a home, Dickinson explains the stagnation of time just before death and the opposite acceleration of time just after it. The most obvious instance of Dickinson’s use of house-related metaphor is in “Because I could not stop for Death–”. The fourth stanza follows:

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground–

The Roof was scarcely visible–

The Cornice–in the Ground–

(17-20)

By the amount of the poem devoted to the description of the house (an entire stanza), it is clear to any reader that Dickinson intended for it to be a focus of her poem. But, similarly obvious, it is clear to any reader that the house is not Sears-Roebuck. Rather, it is metaphor for a grave. Such an understanding of the metaphor, which is clearly indicated by lines eighteen and twenty, makes the rest of the poem an approach to that grave (aside from the last stanza, which I will discuss momentarily). Therefore, the approach of Death and the narrator to the House is a description of the moments before death, which, as a carriage ride through the country, seems quiet, gentle, and, most significantly, slow. In contrast, the last stanza of “Because I could not stop for Death–” (of which the first two lines are included above) directly indicates the “pace of life” of death.

In “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”, Dickinson again uses a house-related metaphor to describe the arrival at death. In the first poem discussed, the House was the grave–the arrival at death. In this poem, the moment of death is defined when “the Windows failed.” In this poem, like the last, the separation between the slowness of creeping toward death and the quickening effect death has on time is that house metaphor.

Dickinson’s choice of a house as a metaphor for death is intriguing to me. Aside from allowing her great freedom in approaching her references to death, Dickinson employs this particular metaphor because, to her, death is not terribly uncomfortable. According to Dickinson, when a person dies, time slows before the death and accelerates afterward, but she says, like a window shutting, the experience is not awful, nor should one fear it.

I hope, though, that the moments just before death will be like lectures in Physics in that they will be slow, allowing much time for reflection, but also unlike Physics.