Another "Waste Land" Post

Just re-reading bits of Lawrence Rainey’s 2005 The^Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (published in New Haven by Yale U.P.—let’s get all the information in there like a good English major!) a couple of statements jump out at me. According to Rainey in his introduction, “While Eliot’s status as an international celebrity has plainly waned since his death in 1965—what other poet could give a lecture in a basketball arena holding fourteen thousand spectators, as Eliot did in1956?—his most important poem still retains its lacerating power to startle and disturb” (2).

I love that word lacerating. It might make an interesting contrast with the basic premise of Mary Karr’s “How to Read The Waste Land So It Alters Your Soul”—although maybe getting lacerated is an altering experience, too? Is there something sado-masochistic about using this text with sophomores?
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Rainey also refers to a book by David Chinitz, T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, to support the statement about “Eliot’s life-long appreciation of popular song and his responsiveness to the seedy side of urban life that he owed to . . . [his background in a neighborhood that was becoming racially mixed]. . .” (3). I’m gratified to know this book exists, and am even happier to see that our college library has a copy. I’m looking for a way to segue from Eliot and the modernists, and our experiment in reader response, to African American and postcolonial theory, and I suspect that Chinitz can offer a key. (Interesting, though, that one of the glowing reviews on the back cover of Rainey’s book is by Chinitz!) I have always suspected that, as Rainey points out a few paragraphs later, “Eliot’s interest in ‘American slang’ and ‘the comic strip,’ his openness to vernacular culture, may go a long way toward explaining why . . . [his] poems . . . possess a colloquial vigor that sets them apart” (4). As Rainey asserts in another place in his introduction that I can’t find right now, Eliot has a reputation as an elitist, but he can be read as just the opposite.

A couple of Eliot’s statements in letters published in Rainey also strike me as interesting in terms of reader response theory. In a text Rainey labels “London Letter, September 1921” Eliot has just attended a Stravinsky concert and is making an intertextual connection (though he wouldn’t have used those words) between Sacre du Printemps and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a text Eliot himself claimed was an important influence on his writing of The Waste Land. In Eliot’s words, “In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation” (Rainey 189). This knocked me out, because, even more than some of the quotations we often hear from “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” this statement captures for me what The Waste Land does.

In a more well-known essay--"The Metaphysical Poets"--Eliot argues, "Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning" (199). Obviously, the elitism is there in the phrase "refined sensibility": some individuals are more capable of becoming the "catalysts" (to use Eliot's word in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" for the multitude of traditions that are out there. Nevertheless, Eliot seems to value ALL of the variety and complexity of the modern world. Rather than being pessimistic, perhaps his poem finds hope in this variety?

A Better "Waste Land" Web Site

"Exploring the Waste Land" is the most in-depth hypertext out there for looking at Eliot's poem and its multiple intertextual connections. It's at: http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html

“The Waste Land” Continued

In my second blog responding as a reader with my Spring 2009 "Approaches to the Study of Literature" class, I'm still on assignment #1, which asks readers to simply work on understanding the poem in the context of this particular community of readers—seventeen people, ranging in age from late teens to sixties (if you include me)—English, creative writing, drama, elementary education majors—did I miss anyone? I'm trying to write every day for this two-week period, keeping focused—obsessed, really. I'm also learning how to use the blog—this time how to save a document as a web page and post it on my blog. I'm still unsure of how to do this, so my last posting is filled with typos that I couldn't figure out how to fix—and this one may be, as well—but at least I can now take more time with composing an analysis. I am writing along with my students because I think teaching is all about staying fresh and learning with them, a philosophy sometimes mistaken for disorganization—which, in fact, turns into disorganization at times, especially when my personal life takes over the time I've mapped out for my intellectual life. But this ever-present threat of falling off the tightrope is real for students, too. My rationale for this project—at least one of them—is that at any given time, everything we're reading, the courses we're taking or teaching, personal relationships, chance encounters, all the whirling experiences of our personal history and our cultural influences, etc. all play into our "reader response" to a given text in a vast web of intertextuality.

This particular week in February, I'm reading Intertextuality by Graham Allen (a book in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series published in London in 2000), a text that locates the roots of intertextuality in Saussure, Bakhtin, and Kristeva. Like "reader response" the concept of "intertextuality" is much more complex than most people—even academics—assume. In my Intro to Lit course, we've just discussed Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" (mostly talking about specific narrative action, narrative pace, suspense, and other elements of style—essentially doing the reader response thing—close reading directed toward the effect on the reader of syntax, word choice, etc.). I've assigned other war stories--Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" and Haruki Murakami's "Another Way to Die"—Murakami connects to my World Lit course where we just read Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country—a great read on the coldest day of the year in our little town on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. We're moving into literature of India in the World Lit course, and it was neat to run across a reference to Kawabata in a web article about Tagore. Spooky thing last week during conferences in the library—a creative writing student was talking about getting ideas for his short stories from his dreams, and as we turned to the text he was struggling to write a response to ( the Chinese classic "Monkey: Journey to the West") I had written in the margin of that page in my book a note about dreams. The same day, as I was reading Basho, a former student walked through the library coffee shop with a book on haiku under his arm. And, of course, T.S. Eliot—YES, I'M WRITING ABOUT THE WASTE LAND—was studying Sanskrit at the time he was composing parts of the poem, and Eliot includes references to the Buddha's fire sermon and the Upanishads, wonderfully intertextual with the short stories by Premchand and Tagore that we're discussing this week in World Lit.

I didn't plan this merging consciously, but it's all coming together in an interesting texture, a tapestry, in my mind. The connections I have mentioned only work for me, of course, since the other sixteen people who are doing the Waste Land project are not in that class. They're in other classes, though, and I encourage them to think about the way the various texts they are reading are weaving together in their brains. According to Allen, Roland Barthes puts it this way: "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (13). (I might argue with the God part, choosing to separate the cosmic kairos of God from the socially constructed kronos of human culture, but I think Barthes means the human Author of a literary work here, anyway.) Of course, Barthes is the theorist who coined the phrase "Death of the Author" while Julia Kristeva first labeled intertextuality. At one point, Allen or one of the writers he quotes uses the word "tissue" to refer to an interwoven web of texts. That's an interesting word, hinting at a strength and delicacy at the same time. I think of both an organic tissue—our bodies—the brain that is our organ of thought as we think about intertextuality and weave our webs of tissues—comprise tissues within tissues—AND a fine, soft piece of paper used for blowing our noses or even more intimate purposes. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the epitome of such a tissue of intertextuality, in ways that Eliot deliberately put there, long before the idea of intertextuality existed, but also—more importantly to me and my students at this point—in ways Eliot could never imagine, since we—as readers—are making meaning in a vastly different universe. If I read line 413 of The Waste Land correctly, Eliot implies that each of us is isolated within the prison of our own individuality. But the thinkers quoted in Allen's book Intertextuality argue just the opposite. Even inside the deepest recesses of our brains, we are never alone.

Waste Land #1

We read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in class today. What fun! This is a memorable group. Students are supposed to write about the reading experience, so I'm doing the same. (A link is at http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/ . I found it this time through Voice of the Shuttle: http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp --a great website for finding literary texts and articles about them. This isn't the same URL as the one in my original bibliography for this project, but it seems to be the same text.) We haven't read the commentary yet, and I resisted the temptation to clarify or to even correct misreading, since that's all part of making meaning, and I wanted to frustrate the process at first, to slow it down so we could see it happening—a few readers read translations from footnotes, but at some points we didn't even do that, and some readers wanted very much to read those footnotes! The Eliot virgins (a phrase filled with ironic [Freudian?] possibilities) have been asked to write without consulting anything but the poem. The rest of us are to focus as much as possible on today's reading. I started with Alex Marden on a hunch that he might be able to read the Latin—which he could. (Last year, a student I would not have expected to read either was able to read both the Latin and the Greek. He came in early as I h ad the text projected on the screen and rattled it right off. So much for stereotypes.) In good company with Shakespeare, Alex admitted to having no Greek, but, of course, most of us have no Latin either.

Looking at the first page of the poem, I love the image of the Sibyl deliquescing in the jar. Wonderful word, deliquesce. Rotting, but in a delicate way, reduced to juices. Not delicious, but the sound suggests it. Delicious, delicate deliquescence—the way of all flesh. Googling the word, I first realized that I had misspelled it, leaving out the c—Did you mean deliquesce? Google asked—and it didn't help my frame of mind that I can't recall my university ID number, one that I have typed hundreds of times, a chilling experience at my age, so I couldn't use the OED Online. But then I found a fascinating website (fascinating how many fascinating words have an s and a c back to back) at http://www.drbilllong.com/MoreWords/Deliquesce.html --actually by someone who takes pride in constantly losing senior citizen spelling beesand who has a degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, a school I had just mentioned this afternoon in a conversation with David Johnson, who is in the class that is reading The Waste Land. In a round-about way, I am providing free labor to Gordon Conwell, serving as a reader for Bill Haddock's doctoral dissertation. Bill Haddock is my pastor.Dr, Bill Long's website doesn't mention Eliot, but on one page, I saw something about The Great Gatsby, another text we've read in English 205. So the world gets curiouser and curiouser. BUT OF COURSE THE WORD DELIQUESCE ISN'T EVEN IN ELIOT'S POEM; IT'S IN THE FOOTNOTE, WHICH I MADE STUDENTS AVOID!

So with all of this, I haven't even passed the first page.

The readings were the best I've heard in several years of using The Waste Land as an elaborate experiment in reader response theory. I don't think we'll be able to top Matthew Khalil's Rhine maidens anytime soon, and Justin Garrity thundered well. Not that the other readings weren't just fine. It's always interesting to note where misreading happens, though—e.g. the word person accidently substituted for prison in one line and not another in "What the Thunder Said" and a few places where readers read through the white spaces between "stanzas"—not just errors where the reader doesn't know the vocabulary—that's not very interesting—but where an ironic layer of meaning comes out of some warp in the texture of the transaction between reader and text—that is interesting.

In the Reader Response approach we ask: Why does a particular misreading occur and with what implications? For example, Eliot's lines read, "I have heard the key / Turn in the door once and turn once only / We think of the key, each in his prison [the reader said person] / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison [the reader pronounced prison correctly this time]. . ." (411-14). The error makes sense, since a person would be thinking within his or her person—to equate that person with a prison is an idea that takes more thinking. Does Eliot's text imply that we are imprisoned within our bodies? Does this indicate a dualism, with body and person two separate entities? When I typed the lines at first, I left out the repetition of turn once in line 412 and had to go back and put it in. Is it ironic to say turn two times with a conjunction (and) in between, but emphasize that it happens only once? I look at the pronouns in these lines and wonder, who are the referents of the pronoun We? There's a hall of reflecting mirrors implied here, I think—I'm thinking of you thinking of me thinking of us thinking of the key.

Japanese Literature

To look at visual art from the Edo period, contemporary with Saikaku and Akinara, click on the links at this website: http://www.art-and-archaeology.com/timelines/japan/edo.html

Chinese Literature

It's interesting that both "Journey to the West" (AKA "Monkey") and "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (AKA "The Story of the Stone") begin on mountaintops with stone imagery and religious connotations before going respectively to their action adventures or soap opera romances. What is the effect of that on readers? I think that the members of our World Lit class, as Westerners who are also far removed in time from these sixteenth and seventeenth century texts, find the transition a bit confusing. Both stories in the end (which we didn't read) come back somewhat to their beginnings, with the pilgrims in "Monkey" finding enlightenment and the main male character of "Stone" passing his exams and becoming a more "masculine" Confucian gentleman before finally returning to his own enlightened state as an inscribed stone on the mountaintop. This frame structure and the episodic nature of these long, rambling novels make them difficult to keep up with. Another difficulty for me is the unfamiliarity of the names. I kept forgetting them in class discussion and feeling foolish. But in Chinese, they have meaning, and often provide puns that add depth and irony. For example, the family name is JIA, a pun on "fiction" in the Chinese language of the original, making "Jia Bao Yu" mean "Fictional Precious Jade"--a pun that is enhanced by the couplet about fiction and truth in the opening chapter. It makes me wonder if the author thought of the name first, then let his mind go to imagine an origin for someone with that name!

Chinese Literature

Here's a link to a video that shows some of the characters in the Chinese classic our anthology calls "The Story of the Stone"--also known as "The Dream of the Red Chamber" and (in Chinese) "Hong Lou Meng": www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-CGF24Y6eA

My favorite poem by Philip Levine

The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough. Philip Levine

Philip Levine

Several people in several classes have read Philip Levine's "What Work Is"--see Matthew Khalil's blog, for example. Here are links to that poem and others, some read by the poet.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine.php

World Lit--Still Reading "Monkey"

A student doing math research has posted information about the Lo Shu legend of the magic square on this web page: http://mathforum.org/alejandre/magic.square/loshu.html . Wu Ch'eng-en probably assumes his readers will get this allusion when Sandy makes his boat with his skull collection and Kuan-yin's red gourd. Interestingly, a classic Japanese story is called "The Floating World"--the idea being that we should approach life that way, just letting it float us gently down the stream. I wonder what magic squares have to do with going with the flow? Could it be that when we are all lined up inside, so that the numbers come out the same no matter what, that we feel that lift of being truly free?

I think one of my core values feels something like that as I fumble around for it in my mind right now. We often wonder what would have happened if we'd made a different decision, some minute move to the left or right, taken the road not taken, kicked off the butterfly effect, how our lives would have been different. But I wonder. Could it be that eventually all roads would have led to the same place, the place we were supposed to be? How fatalistic--how Calvinist--does that sound! But it doesnt feel that way--feels downright Arminian! Gets to the paradox of how human free will and God's omniscience and timelessness can coexist--and explains how I can get from the fascination with an Asian concept that I don't quite get to the familiar comfort of Christianity by way of a circuitous mathematical pathway that seemed wandering and circular but was as sure as the straight line of a magic square.

WE DID NOT FEAR THE FATHER

English 110 and English 205 readers of Charles Fort's "We Did Not Fear the Father" will relate to the image linked below. It shows the poet as a father, maybe twenty years ago, in Wilmington.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwwayneup/3046905939/

World Lit: Journey to the West

The more I read "The Journey to the West" the more I enjoy it. The instructor's guide to the Norton Anthology of World Lit makes an important point: "In Chinese the phrase 'monkey of the mind' refers to the mind's ungovernability--its constant speculations, strategems, and shifts" (2). Tripitaka, on the other hand, finds strength in weakness and from the Buddhist point of view is the one who gets it right. But--Dear Monkey!--how we love his energy and his tricks!

ENGLISH 205 DISCUSSION

English 205 is a course titled "Approaches to the Study of Literature" that I teach pretty much every semester. I am really excited about this class because we're in a room with some great equipment for accessing the Internet and doing all sorts of fancy stuff. I want students to remind me Monday 1/12 to take them to the OED Online at our college library, since that's a scholarly source that came up in class today that I want to introduce them to. Today we read Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" together and looked at a critical essay about it--and a reference to the OED gave an opening to mention it. I'd like to follow up on that, since I threw it out there, and maybe we'll go ahead and talk a bit about using the databases, as well.

Our discussion of Hemingway kicks us off nicely and relates well to the next reading, which will be F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. My favorite story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald is the one Hemingway tells in A Moveable Feast (probably pure fiction in what purports to be nonfiction) where the two are in a men's room and they compare sizes. Of course, since he is telling the story, Hemingway is bigger. Goes along with the submerged sexuality (part of that iceberg he talked about) in the story.

Another dragon picture?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Abu-ghraib-leash.jpg

Ucello Painting

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/education/teachers_notes/uccello.htm

Ucello and Fanthorpe

http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/paintings&poems/uccello.html

Father From Asia

Father, you turn your hands toward me.
Large, hollow bowls, they are empty
stigmata of poverty. Light pours
through them, and I back away,
for you are dangerous, father
of poverty, father of ten children,
father of nothing, from whose life
I have learned nothing for myself.
You are the father of childhood,
father from Asia, father of sacrifice.
I renounce you, keep you in my sleep,
keep you two oceans away, ghost
who eats his own children,
Asia who loved his children,
who didn't know abandonment,
father who lived at the center of the world, whose life I dare not remember,
for memory is a wheel that crushes,
and Asia is dust, is dust.

--Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Link to Mary Oliver poem "Singapore"

http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Singapore.html

Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons"

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Monkey Journey to the West

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/arts/music/26monk.html

Here's a web site with an article and some visuals of Monkey.

World Lit--Monkey: Journey to the West

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D4yFuHxkdI&NR=1

Our first assigned reading in World Lit--after everyone succeeds in finding the cheapest set of the 2nd edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature Volumes D, E, and F--will be the Chinese tale about the monk Tripitaka's trip from China to India to get the sacred Buddhist writings. Along the way, he is helped by Monkey, who pretty much steals the show, and Pigsy, Sandy, bodhisattvas, and other characters. To get a breathtaking visual image of one stage interpretation of this classic, go to this You Tube site. While there, explore other postings related to Monkey. While stories from India about the Monkey King in the Ramayana are earlier than our time span for this course (after 1600 or thereabouts) you might look for references to these, as well, since they certainly provide an intertextual connection.