"the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

Finishing The Moviegoer has prompted me to think more about the novel than when I was actually reading it: amidst the fragmented explanations of Binx’s search, repetitions, certifications, and genie-souls, it is a little difficult to orient oneself as a reader. In retrospect, however, I feel like I am able to more clearly see Binx and Kate as characters as well as the genius of Percy’s writing. I would have to say that the most intriguing feature of The Moviegoer is Percy’s character descriptions through the eyes of Binx. Although Binx abandons his search for the meaning in life–the hidden authenticity behind endless facades–with the simple line, “It is impossible to say,” I think he has come away with more knowledge than he reveals. It’s easy to see the facets of human nature in each of Percy’s secondary characters: the longing for spontaneity in the romantic, humility in Harold the hero, awful envy in Lonnie, and the longing to find one’s true place in society in Mercer (is he a loyal butler to the Cutrers, or does he really belong in Harlem?). The Epilogue mentions nothing of Binx’s finished/abandoned search; it only describes his life moving forward in his thirty-first year. He has married Kate, and has resolved the tension with Aunt Emily: she now finds him “comical and laughs a good deal at [his] expense.” If anything, this resolution with Aunt Emily is more than enough evidence that Binx has consiously accepted Aunt Emily’s tendency to shy away from authenticity, and he has made a decision to put that aside and have a relationship with her anyway. This is proven further when Binx comforts his younger half-siblings on Lonnie’s last day. Lastly, he respects Kate’s wishes and tells her exactly what to do and how to do it when she has to go to town and do an errand for him. The fact that the Epilogue only discusses Binx’s relationship with Kate and his family conveys the second part of Percy’s message: It is impossible to say why we are here on earth or what is the meaning of life, but at the end of the day, the other people here are all we are left with, and we have to connect and coexist with them.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a specific concept that seems to be resurfacing in different areas of my life: the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. While I’m fascinated by literature and french, science leaves me counting the tiles on the ceiling–I even chose to eliminate science completely from my senior year course load. But my research on various liberal arts colleges during my college search over the past year has made me realize that, unfortunately, science will be almost completely impossible to escape. I recently attended a presentation at Villanova University’s College of Arts and Sciences which dealt with the importance of both the humanities and the sciences, and the importance of using them together.  I sat in the audience trying to come up with any counter argument that would save me from suffering through future science classes, but I walked away grudgingly admitting that science is an important inverse to the humanities.

A couple of nights ago, this idea presented itself again in my life in such a surreptitious way that I almost didn’t catch the connection. I came across a videotaped presentation of a “TED Talk” on Youtube entitled “How it Feels to Have a Stroke” and was immediately interested, since I had learned how to identify the symptoms and warning signs of a stroke the summer before in Lifeguard training class. Surprisingly, I found this video fascinating, even after I realized that the presentation was mainly about the scientific stages of a brain deteriorating during a stroke. What was unique about Jill Taylor’s presentation, however, is that she described exactly how she was feeling and what she was thinking during her stroke. The emotion in her voice as she recounted her human feelings and thoughts was profound and really conveyed the situation in terms of what a stroke means to a human mentally and emotionally.

Though it’s sometimes difficult to find a clear link between sciences and humanities, I’ve often thought that the end points, the goals, of studying subjects in the two fields are quite similar, if not the exact same. We study, question, and create ideas in both categories for the purpose of understanding the world, improving the world, and creating our own personal meaning in life. It’s at this point that I think of Binx: though he doesn’t know what exactly he’s searching for, he knows that he is searching. He has separated his search into two categories–vertical and horizontal–and it is in his vertical search that he takes advantage of both science and humanities as he “stood outside the universe and sought to understand it.” During his vertical search Binx read War and Peace, A Study of History, What is Life?, The Universe as I See It, and The Chemistry of Life. Clearly, Binx has done extensive research and absorbed boatloads of information, but that doesn’t satisfy him; it’s seems he has trouble processing the information and applying it to his search in a personal and emotional way. For example, Binx’s summer of research with Dr. Minor was a failure because the problem at hand (manipulating the pH of pigs’ blood in order to yield oxate stones) wasn’t consistent with Binx’s horizontal search, the search for his own personal meaning and place in the universe. He had a lab partner and all the necessary equipment, but when the time came to begin research, he “became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory,” and “sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight” (52).

It seems to me that the idea of Reality seems to continue to surface as our class continues to spend time with Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I was first struck by the fact that it’s difficult to place Ros and Guil in a particular setting at the beginning of the play. As an audience, we expected the play to exist in the reality of the original Hamlet–Denmark, or the castle of Elsinore. However, this is not the case. Ros and Guil appear in the action of Hamlet for their few scheduled performances, but the rest of the time they are in unspecified places, wondering who they are, how they got there, and what to do next. During these scenes, when Ros and Guil are not playing their roles in Hamlet, they leave the reality of Denmark. That is to say, these scenes aren’t consistent with what we would have expected the characters to be doing offstage: eating, socializing with other people at the castle, etc. In a sense, Ros and Guil have entered a reality between that of Denmark and our own (our own reality being a place where Ros and Guil would be actors waiting in the wings offstage). I think Stoppard’s own film adaptation of his play strengthens this idea because of the way he chose to direct the transitions. At the end of the scene in which Ros and Guil first encounter the Tradegians, they are left standing on the Tradegians’ cart and wondering where the players have disappeared to. The next thing they know, they’re standing in the castle underneath curtains. I think the manner in which Ros and Guil were swept along from the woods to the castle is described perfectly in Guil’s line, “Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…” (122). How does this relate to our lives? I don’t know. Perhaps Stoppard is warning us to be cautious and choose wisely when deciding which boats to board.

I’ll admit it, I’m confused. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead begins with Ros and Guil “passing the time in a place without any visible character,” which is actually quite a shock to the audience, given that they have all arrived to see a play thinking that they are pretty familiar with most of the characters, setting, and plot, since the play is related to Hamlet. Not only is it unclear where the two Elizabethan men are, it’s unclear what they’re doing. Why are they just sitting there flipping coins? Why does Guil continue to flip coin after coin when each time it lands “heads,” consequently resulting in him losing a bet with Ros? Why can’t they remember what happened to them this morning? Where are they going? The unfamiliarity of the whole thing is strange because it is the opposite of what the audience was expecting, but this is exactly enables Stoppard to begin the story of Ros and Guil in a separate world from the story of Hamlet’s descent into madness. By plopping the audience down in a place where the only connections between what they’re seeing and Hamlet are the characters’ names and clothing, Stoppard sort of creates a blank slate with the audience, therefore allowing him to explore ideas that seem unrelated to the themes of Hamlet, like the notion of probability and consistency and the importance of a name. It seems to me that there must be more of a connection between R&G are Dead and Hamlet than just the characters, setting, and plot. I think that later on in the play the themes that Stoppard introduced will somehow comment on an event or theme of Hamlet in a new way, and I’m excited to see what that is.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time in my last blog post or outside reading assignment to really discuss two of Tennessee Williams’ essays that I greatly enjoyed, but I wanted to post them so that they would be available to anyone that wants to take a look. These two essays are really not related to either The Glass Menagerie or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in terms of discussing and analyzing the content of the plays, but they were both included in my paperback copies (the first in Glass and the second in Cat) because, in them, Williams explores some of his personal experiences and thoughts related to being a playwright. I loved reading these essays, and they definitely contributed to my analysis and experience with the two plays, not to mention that Williams now has a spot on my list of favorite writers!

The Catastrophe of Success (included in The Glass Menagerie)

Person–to–Person (included in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

I chose Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie for my outside reading assignment because I knew it dealt with a somewhat dysfunctional family, and as I discussed in my last blog post, I enjoy literature that presents me with unusual and interesting characters and relationships. However, I didn’t begin reading at the first line of Act I, Scene I, because Williams’ Production Notes precedes the actual play in my copy. These couple of pages introduce The Glass Menagerie as a “memory play,” meaning that like a memory, the play is somewhat unrealistic: certain details are exaggerated while others are neglected, and the lighting is “focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center.” Most interesting, however, is Williams’ description of the single recurring tune that should “give emotional emphasis to suitable passages.” He writes,

“This tune is like circus music, not when you are on the grounds or in the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when you are at some distance and very likely thinking of something else. It seems under those circumstances to continue almost interminably and it weaves in and out of your preoccupied consciousness, then it is the lightest, most delicate music in the world and perhaps the saddest. It expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune, which dips in and out of the play as if it were carried on a wind that changes.”

This piece is different than any other play I’ve read before in the sense that, as the creative force behind the drama, Williams is very much present through his vision for a strong influence of music, lighting, and stage directions. It doesn’t feel right to put forth any thesis or analysis on the meaning and complexities of this play, because it seems as though this paper copy of The Glass Menagerie‘s script does not contain the full piece of art that Williams’ sought to create. Often when reading a play, a reader knows that the story might be totally different onstage than on paper, yet that doesn’t stop him. In this particular case, however, it’s different. Never before have I read a book or play and found myself thinking so much of the author, the playwright, the creator. I usually am fully preoccupied with the characters, their relationships, the theme of the novel. But in this case, that is difficult to do. Williams has put himself right on the page and incorporated himself into this piece of work, and that is impossible to ignore. And so when I finished the last page, I wasn’t thinking of Laura’s dim future or Tom’s abandonment of his family; I was preoccupied with the infinitely more interesting and valuable access I had to the mind behind the work.

I look forward to seeing The Glass Menagerie performed sometime in the future, but I’m afraid that no physical performance of this play could capture the beauty and profundity of Williams’ unrestrained thoughts on the circus music. Upon reading them, an understanding breaks through and the emotions that one feels so strongly are clarified and brought out from behind the veil of fog; emotion and understanding fall into place beside each other. I was so affected in this way by his ability to so elegantly and accurately articulate the emotions evoked by a tune that “weaves in and out of your preoccupied consciousness,” that I began to fear that this beauty and truth could never be recreated in a theater. Of course the music can, but I doubt that such a profound thought could penetrate the minds of the audience–I think they would feel the emotions, but their understanding of the emotions they were feeling would be foggy. The question is, is understanding and articulation necessary? Or will the feeling be enough to carry them towards the overall meaning of the performance? I hope that sometime in the future I can experience a version of the play that fulfills Williams’ artistic vision, but in the mean time, I will not be writing my outside reading assignment on The Glass Menagerie, but rather a longer play of Williams’: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

I must admit that Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. In reading a novel, I usually enjoy focusing on the nature of the characters, the reasons and emotions behind their actions, and their relationships with one another. I often shy away from intricate, symbolic prose exploring an abstract idea, such as Death, Nature, or Time. Since Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that can be described in exactly this way, I first threw aside all of Woolf’s poetic and significant pages filled with phrases like, “the voices of birds and the sounds of wheels chime and chatter in a queer harmony, grow louder and louder and the sleeper feels himself drawing to the shores of life,” (67) and focused on the lost identity of the married women in the novel. As I developed this theme more and more, I felt confident in its soundness, its importance. But for me to only shine light on this one element of the novel would probably exasperate Woolf– in her diary, she wrote, “I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea that all caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment.” (xlviii). Even though I’m comfortable discussing only a small part of the vast hollows behind the women in the novel, it’s necessary for me to face my weakness and spread into the sunlight those abstract, complex, and poetic thoughts that are surely the connection between the characters’ caves.

So, here goes:

The concept of Time is prominent in Mrs. Dalloway, a book that is often described as “a novel of moments” and was almost entitled “The Hours.” Undoubtedly, Woolf establishes the fluidity and endless nature of Time through metaphors relating Time to water; each of Big Ben’s chimes send “leaden circles dissolving into the air.” The question is, what is the significance of this? What effect does Time have on the characters– their feelings, their actions, the meaning of their lives? It seems to me that there is a connection between Time and Thought: these moments are ultimately a vehicle through which characters find meaning in their life. Unsurprisingly, this meaning is different for each character– Clarissa spends her moments enjoying her somewhat frivolous life while pondering and analyzing her past love triangle, Sir William Bradshaw fills his moments by taking measures to ensure that his “goddess” proportion lives on, and Septimus spends his every waking minute troubled by his loss of feeling and his search for Nature’s divine meaning. The key to this connection between Time and Thought, however, is that though each moment is unique, none is more important or meaningful than another; they are separate yet at the same time connected, like a stretch of a river which after a turn or a patch of rapids flows into another stretch of calm water. The meaning of Rezia’s life is not compressed into the moment when she finally understands her husband’s abhorrence of Dr. Holmes, nor is it contained in the joyful time she spent with him creating Mrs. Peters’ hat. As Septimus understands, “sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds” (22). A sound, a significant moment where a light of understanding broke or a laugh was shared between spouses, is just as important as the spaces between them, as every other moment in Rezia’s life.

Lastly, there is a transcendental aspect to the assertions Woolf has made about the relationship between Time and Thought and the significance of moments. Woolf writes:

“Clarissa had a theory in those days — they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter — even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death . . . perhaps — perhaps” (149).

The dissatisfaction Clarissa and Peter felt as young adults is certainly due to the fact that moments of thought and feeling are private, unless one chooses to communicate one’s feelings, which I think is a weakness in Clarissa and Peter’s relationship. But the connection Clarissa feels with “people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter” is certainly a result of the fact that Life is, ultimately, a collection of moments. Though the substance of these moments is the “unseen part of us,” Clarissa feels that it somehow creates a transcendental connection between herself and people who have possibly experienced moments similar to hers, just as Woolf feels that the caves she has dug behind these characters are all connected.

Although I’m fairly certain that Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying isn’t our class’s first experience with multiple narrators, we all agreed that his writing style is more confusing than what we’re used to. The disorienting aspect of the book is mainly due to the fact that Faulkner refuses to give the reader any background information about the “who”s, “what”s, “where”s, and “why”s– we as readers are just plopped in the middle of a family with a dying mother. Usually, multiple narrators give stories more depth by showing the readers different perspectives of events, but Faulkner employs an extreme version of this. The only way for the readers to figure out what is going on and who the characters are is to recognize and make use of Faulkner’s use of repetition by matching certain lines and events to different narrators’ accounts.

Over the Christmas break I read Steig Larsson’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy, which is a huge contrast to As I Lay Dying in terms of the author’s choice to give background information. Before a character becomes involved in the plot, Stieg Larsson devotes at least two pages to bombarding the reader with information about the character’s physical appearance, biography, career, etc. Although Larsson’s approach makes for a much easier read than Faulkner’s, it’s difficult to stay interested in a novel when the first half is almost purely background and set-up for the plot.

Also, a side note: I recently saw the movie “The Descendants” in which a family deals with the death of their mother and the realization that she was having an affair before she died. I thought it was interesting that despite the fact the mother played a big role in the plot of the movie, she wasn’t really an active character. I’ll be interested to see what role Addie Bundren will play in the novel– will she just continue to lay on the bed with her hands like “roots dug up… and won’t get clean,” or will she actually narrate a chapter and play an active role in the novel’s conflict and tension?

After finishing Native Son, a novel whose primary source of tension is conflict between the white and African-American races, I was caught off-guard with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Morrison’s story is also about the life of a black boy, born on the edge of Lake Superior named Milkman (Macon) Dead, but curiously, the racial tension that was so prominent in Wright’s Native Son seems distant in Milkman’s life. Perhaps he’s too preoccupied with his quirky family’s internal conflicts, but I have another suspicion–money. Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, owns a real-estate company through which he rents rooms to a good portion of the town’s African-Americans. In comparison to Native Son, Milkman’s father ironically holds the same business position as Mr. Dalton, and the two families are both well-off, while Bigger Thomas and Guitar Bains are both poor young men who feel a strong hatred towards the white society. I think this difference in wealth between Milkman and Guitar causes the latter to feel the limitations of being black much more strongly than the former. I’m not denying that Milkman doesn’t recognize the racial conflict, but I do think that his family’s money allows him to focus on other things. Additionally, his reaction to hearing of Guitar’s participation in “The Days” society is very negative– he doesn’t think that their solution is rational, and he says, ” The one sane and constant person he knew had flipped, had ripped open and was spilling blood and foolishness instead of conversation,” (165). Of course Guitar’s solution and reasoning for participating in “The Days” is not the least bit rational, but it’s clear that the society was born out of resentment and fear, the same emotions that caused Bigger to accidentally murder. They resent the fact that white people can kill African-Americans without consequence, and they fear the “unnaturalness” of the white race. But Milkman isn’t convinced that this reasoning is sufficient–he’s heard about Emmett Till and other various lynchings, but they can’t reach him behind the wall of his family’s money:

Guitar looked at him, first in rage, and then he began to laugh. “You’re right, Milkman. You have never in your life said a truer word. This is definitely not Montgomery, Alabama. Tell me. What would you do if it was? If it turned out to be another Montgomery?”

“Buy a plane ticket.” (104)

If there was ever a book that earned its spot on the Banned Books list, it’s Native Son by Richard Wright. If you think Orwell’s 1984 or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are risqué, stay away from Native Son, because its portrayal of reality in 1930′s Chicago is more shocking than anything I’ve ever read. At its core the Banned Books list was created out of fear, and ironically, fear is where Wright’s story begins.

Bigger Thomas is a 20 year old black boy in the South Side of Chicago surrounded by a white society from which he is excluded. Wright cleverly crafts his story to present Bigger in a way that anyone can empathize with his thoughts and feelings. This does not mean that readers can sympathize with Bigger’s life as a black boy in a hostile white world, but rather they can understand his vicious cycle of emotions, starting with fear, then moving to longing and hunger to merge with the white world, then hate, and finally violence. After having established this cycle, Wright takes it to life by taking the reader through Bigger’s unfortunate mistake and his actions in dealing with it, which specifically mirror his cycle of emotions. First, after accidentally smothering young and white Mary Dalton, he burns her body out of fear of being found out. Next, longing to leave behind his fateful mistake, start a new life, and integrate himself into the society made exclusive by racism, Bigger delivers a ransom note to Mary’s family asking for 10,000 dollars. And finally, when Mary’s bones are found in the furnace, Bigger flees out of fear and hatred, eventually resorting to killing his girlfriend Bessie in an attempt to keep himself safe.

And lastly, a quick observation. Wright keeps the reader inside Bigger’s dark and swirling head for so much of the story, it’s a rare occasion to see out into the world. Bigger often looks outside at the city covered in abundant, pure white snow. These descriptions serve to juxtapose the turmoil that makes up most of the book. As I read, I’m reminded of the idea of a calm in the eye of a storm, except Bigger is a small spot of chaos in a huge, calm, and most importantly, white world.