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English 45C: The Yggdrasil of "Being" in the Modern World -…

- - - - Their Eyes were Watching God
      - Langston Hughes
        
        Harlem
        
        Let America be America Again
      - A Few Dont's
      - Sailing to Byzantium
    - - In a Station of the Metro
        "The apparation of these faces"
      - Spring and All
        But now the stark dignity of
        entrance--Still, the profound change
        has come upon them: rooted, they
        grip down and begin to awaken"
  - - - Tradition and the Individual Talent
        "The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is the continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continue extinction of personality."
    - - The Dead
      - Waiting for Godot
- - - - The Turn of the Screw
      - Waiting for Godot
      - Things Fall Apart
      - Some texts argue that in this new modern world, the only sight that exists is that of power. In Things Fall Apart, power structures come to define whose voices are heard and recognized; Okonkwo begins as a patriarch and domineering force, being heard by all in his actions and his status. That the sounds of him beating his family literally ring out across the village shows that demonstrations of power are what determine "sight" and recognition. When the British begin to take over, it is Okonkwo who now is unheard just as his adopted son's pleas were unheard too, banished from the village and literally unseen because of the distance. In the end, no one joins in his fight, his cause "unseen" and "unheard" because he no longer hold power, diminished from a man to a chapter to eventually a short paragraph in the District Commisioner's final book, a manifestation of the power of death and life wielded by the British. In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo's command over Lucky controls all aspects of his being, a subtle parallel to how the unseen Godot seems to somehow be controlling all of Didi and Gogo's daily affairs in their waiting for him. In this absolute control, the master-bondsman Hegelian dialectic comes to mind, where these characters of absolute control seem to define themselves through their control and delineation from the bondsmen. Though Pozzo becomes blind in the end and Godot is never "seen," these renderings of blindness actually serve as irony for the fact that they are "seen" everywhere. Godot is constantly talked about and "seen" in Pozzo, and Pozzo's blindness doesn't stop himself from being recognized, only stopping Pozzo from "seeing" Didi and Gogo. The blindness of power sees not the powerful forgotten and unseen, but the powerless unaccounted for. This same invisible force of power seems to obscure sight and happenings in the Turn of the Screw too, as in the fact that the ghost of Miss Jesebel refuses to be recognized by Mrs. Grose or by the children is also an acknowledgement of their power and her lack thereof. The children seem to literally control reality and therefore what and who is "seen," the Governess too becoming "unseen" through her attachment to things the children deny. Their power though comes not just from social status like in the other texts, but in part through their purity. The "power" they hold is that of being pure in an impure world, of being better than others. What is true is what is pure in the world of The Turn of the Screw, and the Governess' accusations cannot make the children impure, only stain herself.
    - - Sea Rose
        "you are flung on the sand,
        you are lifted
        in the crisp sand
        that drives in the wind."
      - Eurydice
        "I am broken at last,
        I who had lived unconscious,
        who was almost forgot,"
  - - - Mrs. Dalloway
      - Their Eyes were Watching God
    - - Nude Young Dancer
        "What jungle tree have you slept under,
        Night-dark girl of the swaying hips?
        What star-white moon has been your mother?
        To what clean boy have you offered your hips?"
      - The Weary Blues
        "He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
        [...]
        'Ain't got nobody in all this world,
        Ain't got nobody but ma self."
- - - - Bartelby the Scrivener
      - The Sound and the Fury
      - Things Fall Apart
      - Sometimes the simplest answer to dealing with the overwhelming collapse of the world is to simply just say "no." Bartelby gives us the model for this: there is a "correct" way of dealing with the chaos that is prescribed upon us, and we may say the opposite. To say no here is not necessarily inaction; it's a statement of preference that in the modern chaos, the new structures replacing the old are not necessarily gospel and that we may choose for ourselves our own destinies. But while Bartelby's fate may appear at least gentle if not even beautiful despite his eventual death, The Sound and the Fury tells us that a refusal may be as much a tragedy as it is a beautiful rebellion. The whole Compson family rebels in a way against the shifting societal order, refusing to adapt to the times and move on from the legacy of slavery or reckon with it. Their "curse" is self-inflicted, and is in a way their own preference. They "prefer" the curse to actually changing, to giving up their old ways and acknowledging their wrongdoings or the shifting social order around them. The curse then is a truly Shakespearean/dramatic tragedy in that the cause and resulting fate are known to begin with, but they are accepted nonetheless because of the shortcomings of the Compsons. Things Fall Apart in Okonkwo's suicide is of course a statement of his preference not to as well. Suicide in Things Fall Apart, as in The Sound and the Fury, represents a third option: instead of attempting to return to the past structures of being or entering into the new world order, Okonkwo and Quentin prefer to simply not be. Whether these suicides are to be seen as preferable or "the message" is not necessarily decided for either text; what is certain though is that it reflects one of the primary answers to questions of the how to cope in the wake of the destruction of the old world: to simply not.
    - - Oread
        "hurl your green over us--
        cover us with your pools of fir."
  - - - Easter
        "Yet I number him in the song;
        He, too, has resigned his part
        In the casual comedy;
        He, too, has been changed in his turn,
        Transformed utterly:
        A terrible beauty is born."
    - - Waiting for Godot
      - The Second Coming
      - In between the refusal to be of Bartelby and the forging of a new day found in Let America be America Again is an odd liminality, inhabited particularly by Yeats and especially Waiting for Godot. In the 20th century, this liminal space is of feigned belief. Didi and Gogo wait endlessly for Godot who will never come, forgetting each day their previous toils and their endless wait with the hope that someone will come to rescue them from the catastrophe of their times. Yet underneath it all, Didi reminds us that even he is sleeping and someone is watching him, that someone allows him to wait endlessly. Didi knows that this wait will not end, that there will be nothing on the other side, yet he does it all the same. Beckett is telling us that this is what life is: waiting. Following the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, our life is filled at once with waiting and movement; we are like Didi and Gogo, passing time to fill our days and to insert reason where there is none. How much they truly believe there is a Godot on the other side doesn't matter; what matters is that the day has passed, that this day of waiting is over. Yeats says as much in The Second Coming when he writes of the belief in a second coming, that there is something to save them from their current predicament. The ugliness with which he characterizes what is born from this second coming tells us that we falsely assume that a resurrection or second coming is "good;" all it is is a return. Yeats sees us waiting not for the second coming, but for goodness to return, for "revelation," when instead all that will come again is the horrors of the world. We are in wait for goodness that will never come, supplicating our hope to begin again and to do better with destruction and renewal that brings only turmoil once again.
  - - - The Lake of Innisfree
        "And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
        [...]
        I will arise and go now, for always night and day
        I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."
    - - Mrs. Dalloway
      - Their Eyes were Watching God
      - Let America be America Again
      - Some texts see this chaos as an opportunity, seeing the many possibilities and worlds before them as within their hands to dictate for the first time ever. Langston Hughes reminds us with parentheticals that America has never been "for" African Americans, but it can be now. The promise of America is now entering its second century, and Hughes tells us that in this moment, we can reignite it to be truly for all people for the first time ever. Their Eyes were Watching God sees Janie move through 3 men throughout her bildungsroman, and in the end the fact that she ends up with none of them is crucial to understanding that like the bildungsroman more generally, the journey of Janie is one that does not end at the end of the narrative; rather, it is one that is just beginning with all the lessons of her life in tow. Janie asks her soul to come in, which is to say she accepts herself for really the first time in the entire novel. That acceptance underlies the hope in the novel that in the wake of upended social norms, shifting racial hierarchies, and changing gender roles, the marginalized now have the voice and opportunity to make something of themselves that is truly their own. This sentiment is certainly echoed in Mrs. Dalloway too, who finds Clarissa renewed at the end of the novel by Septimus' death and it solidarity. The death of Septimus and its representation of the Great War illustrate the turnover of the world in its wake; that living is an immense privilege and that we have come out the other side with the opportunity to appreciate and beautifully be. No longer must we obscure the past or use life as an opportunity to forget our sorrows; now, we may embrace what we were and step into the new present.