assorted essays

The Great De-Centering

2007-03-15T04:09:00.001-07:00

THE FOUR GREAT DE-CENTERING OF HUMANITY

Copernicus-- Earth is not the center of the Universe, not even our own galaxy or solar system. We orbit around the Sun, not it around us. Hence we are not the center of universal creation.

Darwin / Big Bang / science / Enlightenment-- Darwin showed that we, humanity, were not the first creation, not the crowning achievement, but rather an organism that evolves, changes, and is subject to the same natural laws as all other creatures. Hence we are not the center of Earthly creation either.

Freud-- Freud showed the human to be infinitely complicated. He showed that we, in fact, are not even fully in control of ourselves, but instead susceptible to psychological conditions in our subconscious. These various conditions, caused perhaps in our infancy, perhaps by societal mores, can well up in pathology. So we, our ego, our conscious being, is not fully in charge. Hence we are not even the center of ourselves—we are shared; we are in part unconscious beings as well as rational, logical conscious ones.

Einstein-- With his Theory of Relativity, Einstein de-centered everything. Nothing holds. All facts, knowledge, is relative to where you are standing. All laws break down. This returns us, in a sense, to primeval chaos: there is no center to speak of.

And perhaps…

Job-- This is an uncanny book in the Bible, somewhat discordant from the rest of the Old Testament. It shows man as ultimately incapable of understanding the morality of God. God’s reason is not the reason of man and it is incommunicable. Hence man is irreconcilably severed from his God. This is analogous to the eviction from Eden. We are taken from the center of God’s love and intimacy and thrown out into the harsh world where God no longer makes logical sense to our meager understanding. There is evil (so we think) and we can’t grasp it. Didn’t Elohim call his creation good? How can this be? Job says we cannot know.

Whitman’s Elegies:

2007-03-15T03:42:00.000-07:00

Whitman’s Elegies:

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

and

When Lilacs last in Dooryard Bloom’d

In Walt Whitman’s great elegy, “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman creates powerful, moving emotion that has raised this poem to among the finest elegies in the English canon. It captures the mourning of an entire nation for the loss of their friend and leader, President Lincoln. However, the idea and format are not altogether original to this poem; Whitman builds this masterpiece in the mold and mirror of another of his great earlier works, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Both poems are elegies sharing concurrent themes and meaning. “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” expounds upon and makes explicit that which is already latent in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “Out of the Cradle” is a metaphor for how Whitman finds his poetic voice and calling. Simultaneously, he discovers “the key,” a word that is found in much of Whitman’s poetry: death (200). The themes of death and Whitman’s poetic voice, first discovered in “Out of the Cradle,” are further developed and emphasized in “When Lilacs Last.”

Whitman celebrates the beauty of death and the mourning of lost love. In both poems, the voice of the mourning and loss comes from the “trembling throat” of a bird (203). The “old crone rocking the cradle” (a metaphor for the sea) whispers to him the “delicious word death” (205). Many people do not readily consider death as “delicious,” but it is consistent with “When Lilacs Last” and Leaves of Grass. In “Out of the Cradle,” death is first only mentioned in regard to the loss of the singing birds mate. It is referred to as “the word stronger and more delicious than any” (200). Whitman doesn’t allude to the word until nearly the end of the poem. It is buried beneath the representation of sorrow, grief, and intense mourning; its presence is vaguely implicit. At the end, he unmasks his disguised theme as “death, death, death, death, death”(205).

This thematic epiphany comes quickly on the heels his artistic epiphany to his calling to write. These are the two themes of the poem, and they are unveiled nearly simultaneously. The bird songs of loss inspire and awe Whitman. It is in these songs of mourning and distress that Whitman reaches poetic heights that he arguably never tops:

Shake out carols!

Solitary here, the night’s carols!

Carols of lonesome love! Death’s carols!

Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!

O under that moon where she droops almost down

Into the sea!

O reckless despairing carols. (203)

Death is understood in relation to the loss suffered by those who survive and not in relation to those who experience the inevitable mortal change. The reader doesn’t know what befell the female bird in “Out of the Cradle,” he only can hear the desperate song of the he-bird that remains behind, as Whitman and all of America are left behind when Lincoln dies. It is from hearing the song of the bird that Walt Whitman finds his poetic inspiration to write about Lincoln. He says, “Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake” (204). He finds “a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, / A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die” (204). Whitman gives his oath never to stop “perpetuating” the songs of the warbling bird (songs of death).

The representation of these themes in “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” is much more developed and evident than they were in “Out of the Cradle.” The thought of death is not disguised or secondary, but is the primary representation of this poem. The first four sections are different sensual representations of mourning (smell, sight, and sound), but the fifth part is a description of Lincoln’s funeral procession. Whitman portrays “the silent sea of faces” of the mourning Americans as they line the streets. In their midst is the coffin of the dead moving passed. Death is visible and present in a way that it isn’t in “0ut of the Cradle.” The poem is proclaimed as “a song to you, O sane and sacred death” (266). This death is the same word that was whispered by that “old crone” in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The difference being that in “Out of the Cradle,” death was whispered at the end of the poem, and in “When Lilacs Last” death is proclaimed and sung early and often. In “Out of the Cradle,” death is guised in a melody of woe. In “When Lilacs Last,” the coffin is in full view of those who suffer the loss.

Walt asks himself, “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song” in wondering how to artistically pay proper homage to the one he loved so much (266-7)? Whitman is seeking to practice the art that is taught to him by the mourning songs of the he-bird in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Whitman did not possess the calling until the end of this poem, so he could clearly not articulate such a desire in the middle of it. In ‘When Lilacs Last,” however, he is his older self (not the child of “Out of the Cradle”) and ponders his writing while he is in the very process of it. Thus the two poems show a progression in the artist. They represent the maturation of Whitman as a poet. He begins as a child, experiences his call to write, grows to become a writer, and then is faced with writing about the death of the man he most admired. All the while, death is there in his first lesson and has remained.

In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” as the name suggests, these themes are born and begun. Walt gives himself and his readers his oath to pursue eagerly his artistic gift, and also vouches for the infinite importance and pervasiveness of the word and action of death. Beyond these oaths there is nothing else. In “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman draws evidence for his claims. Surely, the act of writing “Out of the Cradle,” itself, could be viewed as evidence for his poetic gift, but it is not discussed internally within the poem as it is in “When Lilacs Last.” “Out of the Cradle” is about Whitman’s genesis as a writer where “When Lilacs Last” is about undertaking the process of writing. In this poem he ponders these themes with specific detail. The death of a man, President Lincoln, is portrayed and reflected onto his nation. The effort and thought of writing this piece is represented with questions of “how shall I deck my song” (267). He decks it well.

Work Cited

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Whitman

2007-03-15T03:41:00.000-07:00

Kill the Buddha:

Two Ecocritical Readings of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, in his one book Leaves of Grass, was prolific, covering sexuality and the body, travel and growth, the poetic call, death and fear, the land, patriotism, and his nation. Much of what he wrote is nearly inseparable from his environment; it was deeply tied to his own ideology, a reflection of himself. Whitman saw himself as a sort of prophet, a bard whose great task was to awaken the spirit of his nation. As a poet, he was answering a call first posed by Emerson in his essay “The Poet”:

We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admired in Homer, [ . . . ] Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination and it will not wait long for metres. (221-222)

To sing America in all its vicissitudes and grandeur would be Whitman’s literary quest, and this makes him especially open to an ecocritical reading. He painted the picture of America, both the land and the nation, to be read by its people and thus be inspired themselves. This essay will look at Whitman from ecocritical perspectives, showing two variations of interpretation, two levels of understanding, which are both ecocritical, but stylistically variant. The first is more traditional, looking at Whitman’s form and content, text and context. The second, however, will delve deeper into his ideology and beliefs, how these understanding are visible and essential to the poetry Whitman creates.

Two poems that encourage the first style of ecocritical interpretation are “Song of the Redwood-tree” and “Song of Exposition.” If we understand ecocritical exegesis as “the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” then these poems address this relationship in both form and content, and in both text and context (Glotfelty xviii). First, Whitman uses a characteristic long line, often spilling over onto the next. Little end rhyme or meter. In “Song of Exposition,” he writes,

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,

Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,

That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings,

Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,

Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount Moriah,

The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections,

For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you. (159)

The rhyme is mostly internal, alliteration, assonance, half-rhyme, and word repetition. Whitman’s verse has a flow, an internal rhythm, a rising and falling sound like gentle sea-waves. Leaves of Grass became the prototype of what is now called free verse—a style that doesn’t observe traditional poetics, poetics that were then the dominant forms of his day. This “free” verse style is congruous with the content as well as the message Whitman wished to convey. As D. H. Lawrence states, “the function of art is moral”—but not for Walt (171). For Lawrence, “[Whitman] was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something ‘superior’ and ‘above’ the flesh” (171). Whitman was freeing Americans to what he believed was a bigger world, the new America.

Like the form, the content is free and natural as well. Whitman uses “Songs” of “the open road,” birds, trees, and himself create his poems. The settings are invariably rural or woodsy, though often memories or projections of the author’s mind. Even in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” as he celebrates Manhattan, he does it by natural means:

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me that mast-hemn’d Manhattan?

River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?

The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter? (132)

Instead of looking at the city, he turns to the water, the undivided and unordered river and sea. These are worth celebrating, and these make up the bulk of Whitman’s content and text.

But many would argue that the context of Whitman’s writing was not nearly so simple or innocent. In his dissertation on “The Politics of Epistemology in American and Native American Literature,” David Moore cites numerous critics of Whitman who might agree that he has “a dialectical epistemology inadequate to deal with plurality, whether hopeless or fruitful” (Moore 102). Whitman lived in the time of slavery, racism, the subjugation of Native Americans, the proliferation of industry—and none of this, or the consequences thereof, seemed “to prove a fit subject for Whitman’s powerful poetics” (Moore 101).

It must be true that Whitman didn’t deal with plurality directly. Perhaps Walt could have written a great poem on the plight of the Native American. Why was the Native American not worthy of the “Sympathy” that D. H. Lawrence derisively deems as Whitman’s essential motif? The answer, I believe, rests more clearly in my second interpretation: Whitman’s ideology. Whitman would say that his goal was more ambitious, more grandiose than helping any one group in particular. D. H. Lawrence writes of Whitman’s doctrine:

A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. [. . .] America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the great and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. [. . .] He is the first white aboriginal. (172-173)

Lawrence claims that it wasn’t Whitman’s intent to deal directly with the plurality of his time. As we will see later, his work addresses the underpinnings of these issues more circuitously. Where he apparently doesn’t deal with such issues as slavery directly, he does subvert them indirectly through his ideology.

Having noted this characteristic in Whitman, there are examples to the contrary. The growth and expansion of the U.S. or “America” was a point of pride and honor to Walt. In “Song of Exposition” and “Song of the Redwood-tree,” the reader can sense a love for the land at the same instant Whitman speaks of destroying it. In “Redwood-tree,” Whitman speaks to the usurped land: “Farewell my brethren / Farewell O earth and sky,” alluding to the new era that was dawning on the West Coast in the form of this new country “America,” which is the context of the poems, or more specifically, manifest destiny (167). This passion for his country and its growth are juxtaposed with his love for nature. The relationship borders on paradox. In “Redwood-tree,” the reader can sense Whitman’s love for the natural world through his connection to it; Whitman can hear “the death-chant chanting” of the dying redwoods (167). This ability to hear the redwoods implies a sort of bond to them. He gives them consciousness. In their own voice:

I too have consciousness,

identity,

And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth, Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,

Our time, our term has come. (168)

From the voice of the trees America inherits the land. The western coast isn’t so much usurped as it is granted to America in song, and Whitman is the ambassador to receive it and write it. Americans are the “superber race,” the natural descendants, and manifest destiny is a sort of natural ordination (Whitman 168).

In “Song of Exposition,” he calls the muse to America, “the empire new,” so that she may help him sing about “a palace, loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet, / Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping” (168, 161). He is the true patriot of America and accepts the environmental damage as, oddly, a natural progression. He writes with the passion of a man who believes he is living in the greatest land, in the greatest country in history: “history’s seven outstripping” (Whitman 161). The muse is called away from “immensely overpaid accounts,” meaning Greece, Rome, and the western tradition as a whole. America to him is truly the new world, the new paradigm of humanity, but it is growing on the stumps of the fallen redwood trees. This natural cost is not too high for Whitman, but, again, naturally ordained.

The land is bountiful, with “limitless crops,” “incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold / and silver, / The inexhaustible iron in thy mines” (165). His tendency to list is another characteristic of his form. Clearly, Whitman was not immune to the narrow vision of his time: exploitation, not conservation. He believed in his people, his nation, and in his land’s ability to yield resources and surplus. Perhaps his idealism was not balanced by his pragmatism. The idea was manifest destiny. America bordered on the divine, and its harvest was limitless.

Today, the reader may read this philosophy in different ways. Environmentalists will be skeptical because the harm of such a worldview is now clearly evident. In attempting to grasp the plurality of his time, it appears he may have missed the mark. Whitman underestimated the greed and amorality of his fellow Americans; his ideology never manifested in reality. Not everyone loved the land the way he did, nor did the growth of our nation ever balance itself with the waning health of our natural environment.

This analysis of Whitman is congruent to my understanding of an ecocritical literary analysis. I have tentatively sketched the relationship between America and the land it was founded upon—the relationship as Whitman saw it. This relationship has been portrayed as primarily socioeconomic, i.e. his patriotism and belief in manifest destiny. But if this were the only reading of Whitman, it would be shallow and miss the force of Whitman which lies beneath his representations.

I have already hinted, and lightly discussed that there is another way to understand Whitman ecocritically: through his ideology, and it is this reading which presents what Walt would have considered the true content of his poetry. For Walt Whitman, his lines weren’t wholly about trees, manifest destiny, “America;” he didn’t disregard the Native American or the slave because they didn’t appear as images or words in the songs, but the song was sung for them, to them, and by them—it is their song as it is my song.

The relationship between the author and his reader is synonymous with the relationship between him and the land: it is a primary relationship, solidarity, a brotherhood, a relationship not common to many authors. He writes:

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, [. . .]

I am at peace about God and about death.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. [. . .]

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,

I find the letters of God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name, (70-71)

Walt sees himself as a god and everyone else a god with him. The world itself is divine and death is divine. For Whitman, this means that his celebration of the world and himself is a celebration for all, an uplifting of the American spirit.

This analysis could be called a “deep” ecocritical reading. It is analogous to the relationship of a Tibetan Buddhist to the universe, not in the sense of nothingness, but in the concept of the universe as a mirror of oneself. Whitman’s spirituality and ideology can be understood through a deep ecocritical lens.

A “deep” ecocritical reading of “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” shows Whitman’s essential connectedness to the natural world. His awareness of his literary vocation is awakened in him through nature:

Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? Or is it really to me?

For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,

Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,

And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful that yours,

A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die. (204)

The song of the “mocking-bird” who lost his mate was so sorrowful, so powerful and moving that all Whitman’s “own songs awoke from that hour” (205). Nature was the vehicle for his coming into himself as a professional man. But the connection is still much deeper than this. Both “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” share the common theme of “Death, death, death, death, death” (205). This word, “superior to all,” is the essence of Whitman’s strength (204). Knowledge of this word lifts him “out of the cradle” and into the Platonic light (200). The knowledge and understanding of death empower Whitman’s life and letters.

Death, the most obvious and fearful of all natural processes, was so central to Whitman’s writing that it is impossible to conceive his poetry without it. This centrality is correlated to the centrality that it held in his own philosophy. “The smallest sprout shows that there is really no death” (27). Life was a cycle with no knowable beginning or end: “And now [the grass] seems to me the lovely uncut hair of graves” (26). Life comes out of death and death out of life. This was a great confidence to Whitman--he lived as though he wasn’t afraid to die. He wrote, “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it” (27). He believed in the immortality of the soul and this was a subtle current beneath all of his work (38). If you can free yourself from the fear of death, then likewise you become free to live.

This knowledge gleaned from nature empowered his selfhood. He took to the “Open Road” and “learned the secret of the making of the best persons, / It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth” (119, 121). Where Whitman is no conservationist – he is a pantheist. He saw himself as “taking the exact dimensions of Jehovah,” but he “would fetch you whoever you are flush with [him]self” (61, 63). All things were holy.

This immensity of spirit, his capacity to praise and to exalt, is really the fundamental energy behind Whitman’s writing. He wouldn’t write lines like, “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher” if he wasn’t a pundit and wasn’t sincere in his efforts to exalt his readers as well as himself (69). “Kill the Buddha” is a Zen Buddhist proverb with the same aim and the same understanding. Whitman attempted to empower his desired readers, the laborers, his fellow country-men, by awakening them to themselves, freeing them from fear. By himself overcoming the natural fear of death, he achieved a certain freedom that he equated with spiritual power. This power was his message and his theme - not the environment, not the issues that were present in his time; the environment was his source and vehicle; his writing, to him was eternal—not bound by the issues of his day, but open to all to hear.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” Class Handout.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm. eds. Ecocriticism

Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking Press, 1923.

Moore, David. “Native Knowing: The Politics of

Epistemology in American and Native American

Literature.” Diss. U. of Washington, 1994.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Self analysis:

Time and stress. I have been unable to give this paper time and thought. I have been stressed, ill, busy, and tired. I could have done much more research. Thought alone would have helped me gain a clearer perception of what I wished to achieve with this piece. I only vaguely address the essential “So what?” question. For this reason I feel I have failed to be compelling, the string that is meant to lace the essay together is barely evident, the movement is at times obscure.

I could use much more outside evidence to place this work in the framework of other pieces written similarly, building on what they have done and failed to do.

I am most disappointed in the amount of thought that has gone into the work. It is not my best but the best I could do. I am not upset about it. I feel it stands up, has enough clarity and persuasion to be at least somewhat provocative. I do love Whitman.

And while I have the chance, thank you for a great class. Lots of good reading and discussion. Have a Merry Christmas. –Jonah.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard

2007-03-15T03:40:00.000-07:00

Annie Dillard:

“Doors of Perception”

Throughout time, humanity has created mythologies and religions to divide chaos, to order the universe. Webster’s Dictionary defines chaos as “the disorder of timeless matter and infinite space, supposed to have existed before the ordered universe.” This “disorder” is unintelligible to us; the epitome of which is our inability to grasp death: How can we understand death? Often the natural universe is the point of departure for our questioning and the possessor of the potential answers. There are, after all only three directions: God, the universe, and the self. How did the world begin? Why must I die? Who am I? Why is there suffering in the world? There is little agreement on the answers people have found; different cultures lens the environment and their experience there differently. At times there is shining solidarity across the world in the form of archetypes, symbols, rituals, and other fundamental ideas that have been shared by people of different times and lands. This paper will be a tentative look at the questioning of Annie Dillard, her progressions, experiences, and how she, through her understanding of her environment, has come to a similar philosophy shared by ancients and mystics throughout history.

The many vibrant images of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek serve as symbols marking the path described above, namely the quest of one to acquire their own spiritual base and ideology. Dillard uses nature itself as an emblem of mystery, the veil of chaos. The story itself is framed within a description of “an old fighting tom” cat who bloodies the author’s nightgown with red paw prints (1). But it wasn’t just blood, “I looked as though I had been painted with roses” (1). This was the mystery. What was this blood? “Was it the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain?” (2). There is no way to know, she simply woke up with it—and that is life: “Seem like we’re just set down here, . . . and don’t nobody know why” (2). This mystery of life is a major theme in the book and Dillard’s philosophy as a whole. This is the foundation, the truth of our existence: The universe is unknowable. She says that even science has been proved subjective, that now physicists are “wild-eyed, raving mystics” (202). The Principle of Indeterminacy says that “you can not know both a particles velocity and position,” implying that particles are not bound to a law that determines there movement; “they seem to be as free as dragonflies,” Dillard says (202).

What do we do with a world that is clearly beyond our reason to understand? Like a good Zen Buddhist, Dillard says we participate in it; we walk around it and experience it as beauty and wonder, for having innate value in and of itself. And she does, she walks around the land, observing new miracles daily, whether muskrat or chrysalises, sunsets or the ashen branches of sycamores. I’ve heard her criticized as being an observer of the world, but I believe that observing, seeing the world with our eyes is itself a form of experience. Sight is one of the great inlets of perceptions and understanding. The world is literally shaped by our capacity to see it. She talks about “the tree with the lights in it,” another theme of the book, as the first thing a girl saw on regaining her eyesight (28). For Dillard, this cedar, a tree she herself has seen, is symbolic of beauty, and, what is more, as a “great door. . . open[ing] on eternity” (80). Eternity is primary in Dillard’s ideology as well; it lies beneath much of her symbolism as the foundation for which our lives are built around; eternity is the infrastructure of the universe, where nature or the environment is the superstructure.

The blood of the tom cat serves as a cipher to this underlying nature. She questions whether it was “the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth,” thus identifying the dualistic nature of nature (1). The difference, as it was for Whitman, between life and death is thin and veiled, part of the mystery of life. Everywhere she looks she sees something being born out of death—the two always hand in hand: Nature as Dillard sees it is very much a “now you see it, now you don’t affair” (16). There is no certainty, no determinacy, but it is a cycle that dips perpetually into the eternal, the unity beneath.

The universe is so large, so unknowable that anything at all can be shown as relative, or subjective. As the rosy paw prints serve as a doorway and emblem of the “mysterium tremendum,” and themselves a thing so small. Size is therefore deconstructed. Dillard sees the small as being just as essential as the immense. She creates a sort of parable about a penny, one of the most meaningful and memorable passages in the novel, and to me, a keystone of my youth. She writes:

It is a dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. (15)

When my mother and I used to take walks together in the woods, she used get so excited, red in the face, with the finding of some simple plane hidden beneath the pine straw. I could hardly see the thing, a rattlesnake orchid for instance, or understand her excitement over it. As an explanation for her glee, she would say, “I have a low threshold for pleasure,” and this is exactly what Dillard is saying with her pennies and the novel as a whole: The world is a mystery, but it is all beautiful, big and small, and we can find peace by opening our senses and experiencing it on all levels. For if we need the great to bring us joy, then there may be a long wait in-between our discoveries. But as Dillard says, ”since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days” (15).

With this beauty there is also death in the world, and suffering. Van Gogh said the world “is a study that didn’t come off” (69). We can’t understand why, or even if this is true; it is a mystery. How does Dillard reconcile this blunt fact with her pennies? To the contrary of Van Gogh, Dillard quotes Einstein saying, “God is subtle, but not malicious, . . . nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning” (7). It is beyond us to understand, but we are still alive, still conscious beings with a life to live—or so we perceive ourselves. We react to death and suffering with our fear and our religious morality. These things, as good mystics know, can be distilled, alchemized. Remember Whitman, “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” (Whitman 27). Dillard buts it this way:

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. (181)

This is a farcical Gnostic portrait of Genesis. She plays it lightly because, although this is the world we live in, it illusion, smoke and mirrors, the crust of the conscious mind covering the abyssal depths of the subconscious. It is precisely the self-consciousness that separates us from eternity, the “I and Thou” of Martin Buber. Dillard writes, “It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures” (79). This division can be reconciled by the “I” becoming the “Thou.” I am thou; not far different from the Old Testament God saying “I am that I am.” There is no truth, no morality, no god, no law, only “Cogito ergo sum”—the existential “I.” So, for the self then, what remains? Beauty. For this, she uses the metaphor of a canary perched upon a globe singing. The whole earth is alive and itself full of music and wonder. Dillard sings “frogs,” “praying mantis cocoons,” “parasites,” “locusts,” “caribou migrations,” and above all, “pennies.”

This is meaning enough. What else does she need? Chaos is just fine by her, death and sin as well. All structures of understanding can be burned away; there is no determinism, there is no death, no individuality—we are all here together on this globe, so what are you going make of it? For Dillard, self-consciousness is a barrier to full experience of the world; it is part of the division, the Christian “fall.” Blake, a good mystic by my reckoning, said, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see things as they truly are: infinite” (Blake 188). This sort of “seeing” is all important to Dillard. Most people will see a cedar, where Blake and Dillard see “the tree with the lights” (Dillard 271).

Works Cited

Blake, William. William Blake: The Complete Poems. Alisa Ostriker. ed. London: Penguin, 1977.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York:

HarperCollins, 1974.

NOTES:

That paper is no different than any paper I have written this semester: It lacks polish, time, effort, clarity, and direction. Professor, I am sad that I have failed to represent my writing, writing that I can be proud of to you. I truly enjoy writing essays. This essay bares witness to the passion for Annie Dillard and her beliefs and writing. But the form of the essay itself is immature and unfinished. I wrote it easily and joyfully over a week ago, and now, Thursday night late, it still sits unrevised and unworked upon.

I hope it will suffice. Seeing that I won’t have the pleasure of another class of yours before I graduate, I hope you can find some pleasure in reading it. I do love Pilgrim at Tinker Creek very much.

I wish you a pleasant winter break. The class was a pleasure and a door to new ideas and perspectives. So much was incorporated and discussed. We covered a lot of ground. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in the hallways in the future—perhaps we’ll find the time to chat.

-jonah

Joyce and Existentialism

2007-03-15T03:24:00.000-07:00

Charybdis Theory:

The Dialectical and Existential Pattern

Of the Modern Hero

By Jonah Manning

This paper aims towards the highest of possible ends—to solve the riddle of the universe. My ambition is nothing less than to demonstrate an underlying pattern for the way in which man encounters himself and the world. This, of course, has been a fundamental project for humanity since the very beginning, when chaos was divided and ordered. But today we all find ourselves enwrapped in a modernity without any cohesion, without solidarity. Christianity was the last dominant paradigm for the West, but it has slowly receded since the Age of Reason. Does humanity, the new global community, share any similar tale of our existence or universe, any system that adequately encompasses the whole? To all appearances this doesn’t seem to be the case. However, I should say, to most appearances, because, from the beginning, there have always been a minority who looked for and found singularity and unity among the beliefs of the multitude. Today, with the proliferation of knowledge, these once obscure connections, rarely observed, are now slowly differentiating themselves and becoming clearer in the now broadening collage of mythologies, religions, arts, and sciences. Over millennia and centuries, much like the phoenix, each successive mythology has prospered and burned, leading always to the next, only marginally different from the last. [CAMPBELL QUOTE – “the same old round”] They rise and fall, turn and change and come around again transformed. This is the pattern! This is the universal cipher and code. Can you see it? It is a spiral. [See front piece.]

Physicists are noticing; they are seeing mystical patterns behind quarks and numbers, patterns that are beyond reason to explain. Annie Dillard said that “physicists are becoming wild-eyed raving mystics.”[1] This theory doesn’t stand alone. The new sciences have circled back and are converging with ancient mysticisms. For the sake of this work—essentially a critique of Joyce’s Ulysses, by a manner I will soon explicate—I will mostly constrain myself to literary and philosophic evidences for my theory. The theory is only a pattern of movement, like the phoenix pattern above. It is simple, subtle, but utterly graceful for what it is. It is its simplicity and movement that enables its multiplicity and universality. It can be found in mathematics to art. The movement can be graphed in several ways and has been for nearly 5000 years.[2] I call it the Charybdis Theory to use Joycean and Homeric symbolism.

The Charybdis was once a woman, so avaricious, she would steal cattle from her neighbors and roast them over a fire. This upset Zeus and he condemned her to the eternal life of a hungry demon and hurled her into the sea forever.[3] The vortex of the Charybdis spiral should be imagined as a black hole, a vacuum insatiably sucking everything into its abyss. Certain string theorists believe the big bang was the result of a black hole that had reached its peak mass density and exploded.[4] Isn’t this what Ulysses is itself, an explosion of a genius-creator’s mind—a work that spans millennia, from the time when the “word was made flesh,” through the gestation of language, through Elijah, Christ, and Christendom, up to modernity? “[James Joyce] saw everything that he had made and indeed, it was very good.”[5] All which Joyce opened his eyes upon seems to have found its way into this book. The line, The devil can use the Bible for his own purposes, could just as easily be, use Ulysses for his own purposes, just by the sheer multitude of allusions and presentations. The truth is that the devil could use reality for his purposes, which is what I believe Joyce portrays so convincingly. Ulysses is my paradigm for reality. I will use it as a mirror to bounce my theory off of. Let me say that this paper is far to brief to serve as a proof in any way—at most I hope it to be suggestive. To achieve this, I am going to offer two perspectives of the pattern that is ubiquitous and eternal. The two perspectives are (1), existential, and (2), dialectical. The existential will demonstrate how such an understanding, still undoubtedly a mystery, can serve the self, self-knowledge, and the self in the world. I am going to elucidate the work Joyce himself has done, which is to modernize and remythologize the classic heroic archetype. This new version is the one he employs in Ulysses and has the most relevance for us today. The dialectical perspective will serve as a movement of thought and experience, a method for uncovering relative truths through circumspection, a means of gripping the past and utilizing it, a way of moving forward productively into the future. The existential pattern provides the framework for the dialectical thought and experience. The existential is the path towards a dream or ambition that the dialectic slowly weaves toward. Both patterns look identical. Graphed, the pattern looks like this:

The left graph is the view from the top, like looking down a drain, where the second is the lateral view of the same graph. The spiral can be understood as a three-part motion. This is the foundation of the Charybdis Theory:

1. a movement away,

2. a change, a turn of direction which leads back, and

3. a return, but still changed, different, elevated above the position of departure.

We live on a spinning globe in a spinning galaxy. We grow from DNA that is wound in coils. The same image repeats in the form of mollusk shells, flushing toilets, flower and leaf arrangements, animal horns, tornadoes, and on and on and on. The mathematics that derive the spiral are possibly more fascinating than its abundant natural occurrences. More prolific than the spiral is the number 1.618 . . ., or phi (Φ), also called the golden ratio. Ironically, it is an “irrational” number. Also, and more directly, the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, . . .). The connection here is that if you take the ratio of the Fibonacci numbers (e.g. 1/1=1; 2/1=2; 3/2=1.5; 5/3=1.666. . .; 8/5=1.6), it approaches but never reaches Φ. The Fibonacci sequence provides the angles by which stems swirl around the tree trunk and sunflowers seed. If you notice to the left, the sunflower has two opposite spirals—this is possible with exact Fibonacci angles and tight groupings.

The Fibonacci sequence and Φ have used since ancient Sumeria.[6] This is nothing new, but I only wish to give a mathematical and biological background for the weight I place on a mere symbol.

Intellectually, the greatest use of the spiral has come in Eastern mysticism and

philosophy. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism amongst many, many more have elicited the Yin/Yang symbol (right) as their visualization of reality. Archeologists have discovered similar symbols on great tablets in Mesoamerica used for human sacrifice.[7] The symbol can be understood as perfectly dialectical, as will be brought out in the next section. The Swastika and the Buddhist Gankril are similar representations of a circle in motion, spiraling around itself, but divided. The Yin/Yang is dualistic[8], where the Gankril (not pictured) is triadic, and the Swastika (left) is quadratic. They all represent the same motion. The Navaho used this open-circle graph instead (next page, right).

It is cyclic and the important point is the gap between the trail and the head (this symbol is often depicted with the head and tail nearly touching).This distinguishes the symbol from being a circle, a closed system. The ambiguity between what came before life and what will come after dead is represented but without the linear portrayal of much of western mythology. All of these symbols are two-dimensional, representations of a spiral. The depth inherent in all is best depicted in the Yin/Yang.

The spiral is a symbol of motion, change, and cyclic return. Now I will demonstrate how both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom can be understood in these terms, of the three-part movement, and the existential and dialectical structures it generates.

____________________1.

Dialectical Turning:

The Movement of Thought and Experience.

“If only people could understand that something can be true and untrue at the same time.”

- Schopenhauer

“Dialectics” itself is a term wrought with many definitions. I like the smorgasbord—a synthesis of all. I will give a brief definition here, but see the third appendix for much greater detail. Plato used dialectics as a conversational tool to uncover truth or new learning. Hegel took this and morphed it into its most famous understanding: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This can be the essence of any definition. Dialectics is an oscillation between diametrically opposed poles and synthesizes them on a higher plane. In this way all truths (dialectics is only concerned with relative truths, not ultimate truths) naturally consist also of their “otherness.” We have already seen “otherness” in the seed of the Yin/Yang symbol. The dialectic synthesis always takes something of each thesis. In this way there is always continuity with the prior system of beliefs. Even if the former belief is practically wrong, it still is marginally valid if for no other reason than the cause of your believing it—it grew out of your personal experience and your experience was valid. So dialectics results in unity.

All of these various spirals and circles work to graph dialectics. They demonstrate the constant movement from idea to idea, but always reversing itself. The dialectic reversal is the nature of dialectic thought not to simply charge ahead, but to double back and reconsider former decisions with new data. For instance: the Fibonacci sequence is generated by this same sort of reversal: 0+1=1; 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13—two steps forward, one step back. In thought, it is this sort of motion that keeps our perspectives sharp but also our identity: we are constantly reevaluating—nothing is permanent or sacred. Everything is questioned.

Dialectics is inseparable from perspectivism: truths are relative, not universal. Plato, of course, would not agree, but the term itself has outgrown its archaic meanings and been born again. It spirals onward and to no end. Each truth is relative to what antithesis it is brought against. It is a theory of experience and is therefore incumbent on the individual and the socio-historical context: what has come before it? This is all too evident in the case of Stephen Dedalus. The duality of Stephen’s name is in itself in opposition. It represents the tension of his mind, the battle between the two tendencies with in him: it is a paradox between a Christian martyr and a “great pagan artificer.”[9] In Portrait of an Artist, he almost became a priest, put forsook the position to become an artist. In Ulysses, he is still seeking out that path but not well, at least to the reader. What does he lack?

Raised a devout Jesuit, Stephen has lost his faith in an omnipotent transcendent god. We quickly see in him Nietzsche’s great nihilistic fall: “I believe lord, help my unbelief.”[10] He has broken out of his cradle—the first stage: separation. He is compared to both Hamlet and Sisyphus—both existential figures: what is the meaning of perpetual suffering? This will all become clear in the next section. Stephen unfortunately can’t seem to get to the bottom of his destruction; he can’t find any sort of ideology that can withstand his intellect: God is a sound in the street.[11] Armed with a staggering mind he tackles the great philosophic problems: Aristotle or Plato, consubstantiality or transubstantiality, free will or determinism, and on and on. “Proteus” and “Scylla and Charybdis” are the finest expositions of his mind. What he shows is an inability to accept paradox. Like the vortex he spirals around and around, wallowing in these paradoxes, digging and digging, and in the end deciding nothing and being consumed. The answer isn’t Plato or Aristotle—but dialectically both. In the play of the book this is exactly what Joyce implies. Nothing is ever decided, no side wins; it is always a little of both, which Stephen is unwilling to accept. Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare plays out the same way: “All sides should be represented.”[12] Stephen concedes that “truth is midway,” that Shakespeare was likely both Hamlet and his father.[13] In the end, Stephen continues with his nihilistic deconstruction by denying his own theory—again unable to accept “a little of both.” Nothing is left standing. He looks for something that will endure; he looks for a father figure—a man to show him the way to himself: Nietzsche’s “become who you are.” We see this idea touched on with the philosophic idea of the entelechy: it is the entelechy of a walnut to become a tree. Stephen believes his entelechy to be that of a great artist. What he wants is a Virgil-esque guide through the circles of the underworld until he can go no further down and then help him find the path toward his salvation: artistic creation. Sisyphus must find his rock to be his thing.

MORE STEPHEN, S & CHARYBDIS, PROTEUS

I want more…..

[[[[On the highest level, the book itself attains conscious itself through dialectical cycling. Images recur over and over and over again, in similar and disparate circumstances. In chapters like “Wandering Rocks” the narration the narration is omnipresent and omniscient, it gets into the minds of various characters and sees connections that none in the work could know (e.g. the positions of random people in the street, whose arm passed by the window, and especial the scrap of paper floating down the Liffey). I would go so far to say that the variation of style exhibits a sense of consciousness, that the book alters itself to altering circumstances, taking the form that best emulates its content. This authorial consciousness becomes the consciousness of the text itself. The reader comes to expect this sort of complexity and multiplicity from the text. This coincides with a Gadamerian understanding of dialectics (def. 2, appendix _____)

In the “Circe” chapter, there is a question of the delusional consciousness in which Bloom wanders around in. I propose that he drank some absinthe himself—and this explains the transmogrifications of himself and others. But the proof is scant. The other possible explanation is that there is no explanation for it, but is another example of the “text consciousness” creating situation for its own ends. Joyce is the god of the text: Can he distort reality so grossly for a simple analogue to Circe’s palace in the Odyssey? Normally, of course not, but this book is a world in itself. I prefer to see it as a depiction of reality, not a world ruled by Joyce Demiurgos.]]]]]]

___________2.

The Classic Hero to the Modern: Campbell and Nietzsche.

“Follow your bliss”

-Joseph Campbell

Thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation.

-Nietzsche

Joseph Campbell was a famous mythologian of the Twentieth-Century who was intimately interested in making connections (He was criticized for purportedly using a Procrustean Bed—or forcing things fit together by either stretching them out or chopping things off). He worked with C. G. Jung’s conception of archetypal forms—natural patterns that recur throughout time independent to culture—by discovering myths that coexist around the world. The myth he was most fascinated with was the hero archetype. The hero archetype is the unconscious projection of each culture’s ideal of human spiritual potentiality into mythological form. Campbell found a simple pattern repeated in all hero mythology around the world. In Western mythology, we have a slightly more complicated pattern (non-archetypal) for the hero (born of a god, banished, returns and regains kingdom ect.), but it is easily simplified to mesh with Campbell’s. Campbell’s monomythic[14] pattern goes like this:

1. Separation. The hero experiences a call, some mission of importance for which he feels compelled to follow. He leaves his community.

2. Crisis. He faces many difficulties and trials. He metaphorically (or literally) enters the underworld, the belly of the whale until he overcomes whatever has challenged him.

3. Return. He returns home with new learning gained from his separation and his trials.

Notice first the innate reflection between this movement and the movement of the dialectic. They are identical except that this one exists in a personal plane: this is your path. This is what Stephen struggles with. This is ironic; he has experienced the call to the artistic life. This is his entelechy. The entelechy is the seed of the path, the life that you wish for yourself. This he has, but the thought that should take him along this path is blocked by paradox and irrationality. He has separated himself, he has destroyed or is destroying his idols, and is now alone in the belly of the whale, but he has not yet found his way upward and out. His epiphany will not take place in this novel, though, if we imagine Stephen as part Joyce, we imagine it does take place by the existence of such a masterful novel as Ulysses.

The hero is the projection of human spiritual potentiality. In other words, this is the ideal of humanity—what it means to be human—buried beneath the trope of myth. Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi, Job—the way we are socio-historically constructed to understand greatness is embedded in this archetype—this is our story. It is also your story and your path to yourself. Just as dialectics utilizes the same pattern for efficiency, the archetypal hero gives us father figures in literature to emulate and the key to their paths to follow and mold in our own way. And also, very importantly, a means of understanding ontologically the crises we experience and way-that there is something to be gained from the deeps.

Within literature this pattern has been used over and over again in variant ways—it is visible from the obvious examples—Homer, Dante, Milton—to more modern examples such as Ulysses , Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and many of Hermann Hesse’ works and children’s books. But before I look into Joyce further, I need to delineate an important and telling change that the classical hero has experienced—in large part due to Joyce’s own genius.

In ancient Greece and up through the Enlightenment, the hero has always had gods to provide him with inspiration or a nemesis, or they offered him the various powers necessary to succeed—where would Odysseus have been without his moli or Athena’s guises? The hero’s powers and toils have always been intrinsically tied to the gods. Within Christianity, this pattern is played out in a particularly peculiar way. The rewards of life aren’t here, but in an afterlife. Nietzsche will call this a form of nihilism, displacing the meaning of life toward an indefinite future (this will be handled with more detail later. So the pattern is essentially split after the second stage. Think about the Unity—Duality—Unity pattern, or the Innocence—Experience—Innocence pattern. Aside from Jesus, both martyrs and church fathers are Christian types of the archetypal hero. For the martyr, they are (1) called to Christianity, essentially separating themselves from social mores, they (2) struggle against the world, teaching the word of God, and are killed; then (3) they return to God and are rewarded and succeed through eternal life in heaven. It is the same pattern in a different context. But the Christian pattern, with its obvious unconformity (only fulfilled after death), hasn’t lasted.

With the onset of Enlightenment thinking, with the new confidence in man’s reason and the growth of the sciences, the gods, primarily the Christian god, lost his monopoly on truth. The moral foundations of Christian culture started to crack as “facts” became more convincing than faith. Kant was one of the first to speak of the fading of god.

And alas it has happened—or still is happening. Science has explained away so many natural phenomena and previous “miracles” that it has slowly usurped the power of divinely ordained mythology and left them hollow and collapsing. What is more, science has stripped humanity of our privileged place in rank of creation. Darwinism has demoted us to an organism like all others; we are subject to the same new rules of evolution as all the rest. With the dying of God, also dies the morality that it spawned.

The first to proclaim the death of god loudly was Fredrick Nietzsche.[15] What he meant was that the concept of god was no longer believable, no longer adequately functioning to offer meaning to the world. This is no metaphysical claim to whether there is or isn’t a “True” god. What is at stake is god’s role for humanity and his inability to compromise with or adapt to science and modernity. Its dogma had long become antiquated and stale. Nietzsche saw this degeneration as possibly the most frightening occurrence in western culture: what could now found morality—biology, a “survival of the fittest” morality? For the few (the elite thinker to whom he writes), it opened the horizon to endless opportunities, but for the masses (the Christian herd) it would be disastrous. Nietzsche rightly foresaw the prevalent nihilism of the Twentieth-Century and the mass genocide and fascist states it engendered. For Nietzsche the death of god became a foundation for his concept of the ubermensch, or the superman, the ultimate being—or basically, the Nietzschean hero. The ubermensch is the remythologization of the classic hero, now the modern hero. It follows the same three-stage progression but with the subtraction of the mediation of the transcendent god or gods. The powers and responsibilities once endowed by the gods are now thrust into the self—I am the protagonist, the world, the antagonist all in one.[16] The Campbellean model can now read psychologically.

For Nietzsche, the superman is the artist, the life-affirmer; he takes the weight of existence squarely upon his shoulders. Life is taken at face value and nothing more. He is the phenomenological ontologist[17] Afterlife?—it is beyond our vision. Souls? Platonic forms?—irrelevant. The here and now are what are of value. Truth?—no, only perspective. The superman finds as many perspectives as he can to obtain the fullest understanding of himself and the world—he thinks dialectically. It is not “Truth” or “Reason” but creationism that he uses to become himself. Nietzsche writes,

“One thing is needful—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”[18]

Is this not precisely what Stephen lacks—style? He wants to become himself. He knows he wants to become “the artist”, but he doesn’t know how. He has no style. He must “give style” to himself. He will begin to do this when he reaches the bottom of his nihilism, the first stage of the existential movement.

VERY ROUGH#########----------------------------

When Nietzsche had destroyed everything impermanent, all that remained were “the desire for power” and “the emotion of fear.”[19] But he realized that fear was only the lack of power and now he had the will to power as the single motivating force in the self. The will to power is essentially life force, drive for health, achievement, aptitude—love. Loving yourself is, for Nietzsche, the hardest of all tasks. It is growth, rejection of stasis and rest. Gandhi, a real-life hero, altered the phrasing of his philosophy “passive resistance” to the Sanskrit, “Satyagraha” which means, “the force to truth.” This has a strikingly similar ring to Nietzsche’s will to power. Here, at the bottom of nihilism, is the dialectic turn: the task is the rebuilding, the return, of the system that was destroyed by the death of god and the consequent devaluation of morals—but now morality is founded on a personal notion of selfhood: the solipsistic I—nothing else can be known. Joseph Campbell’s phrasing was “Follow your bliss.” This is his analogue to “give style to yourself.” For Campbell, bliss meant finding that thing in yourself, (“become who you are”), that dream, that desire, that essence that is possibly greater than you are, and follow it. Campbell, although working with the older archetype, believed that gods were also reflections of the self as were the heroes; Xenophanes’ idea that if horses were to create gods they would look like horses. What is great within the Self?—follow it. It is the rock that cannot be destroyed. It is this path that Stephen lacks.

[MOVE] Like the classical hero, the existential hero journeys through the same three stages:

1. He experiences a profound loss or disillusionment which separates him from himself and his world.

2. He works through nihilism to attempt to cut away any more false illusions. He reaches the bottom of his nihilism where little remains but the self and gains a new equilibrium and foundation [will to power].

3. He begins the upward, restorative movement, rebuilding himself on a new foundation of understanding and experience [give style to one’s self, eternal recurrence].

The two patterns of the hero are identical if it were not for the notion of godhood. The classical hero always relied on the assistance of external transcendent gods. Today those gods are no longer available—they have become immanent. All the attributes of former “deities” now “reside in the human breast”—it is difficult to ignore the similarity between Blake’s Creative Genius and Nietzsche’s superman.[20]

This is the modern maturation of the archetypal hero. It seems fitting to use this pattern for my exegesis on Joyce. Some scholars consider Ulysses to be a mock-epic by the clear degeneration of its hero, Bloom, from his prototype, Odysseus. Does Bloom have what Stephen lacks? Is Bloom a hero in the way we understand “hero” through Campbell and Nietzsche? I am not sure if the answer is clear, as very little is clear in Ulysses.

Does Bloom have style? Yes and no. Bloom is no Ubermensch, but is anyone? I have spent many pages here describing what a hero is, but perhaps I have omitted a pertinent point: I believe that the title “superman” is to be understood like the term “perfection”—it is to be strived for but no attained. By striving for perfection we achieve excellence, which is admirable. By striving for the superman, we gain our paths, our lives, and ourselves, and this is the best we can achieve. There are rare individuals, Gandhi, Jesus, for Nietzsche it was Goethe, Michael Jordon—whose lives are so successful and public that they may achieve the status of “hero” in their lifetime. Let us strive for it, but it isn’t the true goal which is the attainment of ourselves. Dialectics is not goal oriented pattern: it is many smaller truths, one after another, but none is the ultimate truth, just relative ones. Nietzsche and Campbell likely didn’t mean this, but I think for the practicality of application to our lives and for this theory, the heroic pattern is better understood as processual.

We can see both Bloom and Stephen on the path, but Bloom is in a very different place from Stephen. It is not chance that I call Stephen by his first name and discuss him in greater detail in the first section. He is stuck in his Christian past, struggling to free himself through thought and process. I choose to call Leopold Bloom by his last name and discuss him here. “Bloom” is a name that suggests the feminine and a sort of unity: the female bloom opens itself to the male pollen. “Leopold” however is concerned with kingliness, glory and eternal life[21]--things which he has not attained. Bloom has a much clearer conception of self than Stephen has. Stephen’s ideology is built upon the concepts of others—what grounds them? It’s all air or history. Now, “History is to blame,” has a new context in the novel, namely that of Stephen’s inability to think outside of it.[22] Bloom on the other hand is grounded in the soil. All his metaphysics are grounded in biology. He calls himself a Jew, but this is only true socially, not ideologically. He is not kosher;[23] he doesn’t practice or worship.[24] However Bloom is a wanderer; he is an outsider and feels somewhat persecuted. He is compared to the longshot thoroughbred Throwaway and the Wandering Jew, but these attributions are social in nature.

One of Bloom’s most striking traits is his femininity. He is not feminine in a homosexual manner, more that he has a propensity to communicate with women more affectively than men. There is only one successful “deep” conversation between Bloom and a man in this novel, and of course I mean with Stephen in “Eumanaeus.” However, the women he meets throughout the day, Mrs Breen, Mrs Purefoy, ~ Gerty MacDowell, he talks with comfortably and is responded to positively. Around the men, he simply takes up space:

The doorknob hit Mr. Bloom in the small of the back as the door was pushed in.

--Excuse me, J. J. O’Molloy said, entering.

Bloom moved nimbly aside.

--I beg yours, he said. (7.282-284)

He is like a vacuum, and what he says is never in line with the direction of the conversation or the dominant paradigms of Irish thought at the time. He goes largely ignored.

His femininity is largely expressed through his sensitivity and compassion. While the men joke around, his thoughts are often with Mrs. Purefoy while she is in labor.[25] He puts his money where his mouth is concerning the wellbeing of Paddy Dignum’s children by giving five shillings[26] Coleridge is the first I know of to speak of the artistic genius as androgynous. Shakespeare is often thought to have been bisexual. I think of Walt Whitman. In this novel it is Bloom who shows the sensibilities of both the masculine and the feminine. He is a male by nature and biology, but female by personality.

This is a point where Stephen flounders. He can’t talk to women; he can hardly talk to anyone. His has a fearful history in regard to the other sex. Scripturally, women were the first to fall and are naturally befouled by their own sexuality. What is interesting is his recurrent memories of Cranly, and Cranly’s arm in particular. This is suggestive of self-undifferentiated homosexuality; Stephen, like so much else in himself, simply hasn’t identified it yet.

The movement toward the feminine has a powerful precedent in Blake’s reading of “The Book of Job.” In his illustrations the poem begins with Job and his family sitting at prayer, reading from a great book, under a tree. Musical instruments hang in the tree unused. The last illustration of the poem is very similar: Job and his new family gathered around the same tree, but this time there is no book, they are all standing and playing music. Stephen Mitchell, author of a new translation of the text, correlates this artistic change with the movement at the end of the poem towards the feminine:

[Job] also had seven sons and three daughters: the eldest he named Dove, the second Cinnamon, and the third Eye-shadow. And in all the world there were no women as beautiful as Job’s daughters. He gave them a share of his possessions along with their brothers.[27]

The story of Job, to me, is one of the finest examples of the heroic journey. (1) He started out pious and a devout believer in god. He was a man’s man—successful in every way. But (2) he was challenged by god and brought down, everything was taken from him and he learned both, that he is “dust,” and the ineffable and mystical nature of god. (3) So he turned back to the world anew and instead of worshipping began living, “comforted that [he is] dust.”[28]

It is Bloom who is also moving toward the feminine and the artistic—both represented in his return to Molly—woman and artist. Nietzsche (and Blake) ascribed the creative faculty to that of the highest human potential. In self-becoming and “giving style” to ourselves, we become artists or creators. Self-creation is the central and vital aspect of Nietzsche’s existentialism and Campbell’s hero: “follow your bliss.” In “Scylla and Charybdis” the issue of the nature and derivation of creation is hotly debated. Is Shakespeare Hamlet, King Hamlet, or the play itself? Though Stephen’s theory is disregarded in the end, the reader is left feeling that it was indeed the whole of the play, that the creation was a reflection of the creator, not just in parts, but in totality.

Bloom is himself an artist, at least in his spare time.[29] We all know the standard use of the word, but what does Joyce mean by using the word artist? . . . . . .

LOVE_________________WILL TO POWER

-FAUST AS CHRISTIAN ANTIGONIST OF THEORY – LINEAR AND REVERSED,

TRANSVALUATION OF MORALS, BETAS

-ADD ARISTOTLES’ THOUGHT OF THOUGHT THOUGHT TO DIACLECTIS SECTION WITH JAMESON AND GOD THEORIES 21

REMEMBER CLIPBOARD.

______Cyclic and Linear Time: Natural Duality

_______Appendix

1. The three-part movements:

The motion of the graph is three parts. From a point on the spiral:

1. from a point, a movement outward or away.

2. reach a point diametrically opposite to initial position, then begin turning back toward initial position.

3. a return to initial position, though changed somehow, raised or lowered.

The classic hero:

1. Separation. The hero experiences a call, some mission of importance for which he feels compelled to follow. He leaves his community.

2. 2Crisis. He faces many difficulties and trials. He metaphorically (or literally) enters the underworld, the belly of the whale until he overcomes whatever has challenged him.

3. Return. He returns home with new learning gained from his separation and his trials.

The modern existential hero:

1. He experiences a profound loss or disillusionment which separates him from himself and his world.

3. He begins the upward, restorative movement, rebuilding himself on a new foundation of understanding and experience [give style to one’s self, eternal recurrence].

Job’s progression: -----WORK------

1. He started out pious and a devout believer in god. He was a man’s man—successful in every way. But the Accuser separated him and god’s good will. Everything was taken from him.

2. The Accuser brought him suffering but he never cursed god. He learned both, that he was “dust”, and the ineffable and mystical nature of god.

3. So he turned back to the world anew and instead of worshipping began living, “comforted that [he is] dust.

2. Dialectics:[30]

1. [Plato, Gadamer]

Dialectics as a theory and practice of a movement of thinking that aims to embody contradiction, multiplicity, and process. At this level, dialectics is a mode of thinking that "moves through" 9r "plays off against one another" multiple definitions or perspectives in a "conversational journey" wherein "truth" consists not of any 'one definition or perspective so much as of the entire :'conversational journey" itself. Truth, inseparable from the process of its emergence, is discovered through a continual encounter with and sublation of a range of limited or partial perspectives whose significance/is only fully elucidated once they are situated within a wider perspective--to sublate or supersede a given position, in this jargon, means at once to negate, to preserve, and to transcend or surpass it. Dialectics is the art of tracing spirals, so to speak, and, as writers have on occasion pointed out, it has affinities with the Odyssey of transformative "development or, put another way, with the Odyssey of "growing up": Hegel's dazzling Phenomenology of Spirit has indeed been described as, among other things, a kind of "novel of education" of World Spirit gradually Attaining Knowledge of Itself in and through History.

2. [Gadamer]

Dialectics as a theory and practice of f! movement from immediate or naive consciousness to wholly mediated self-consciousness. At this level, dialectics is the movement of thinkin2' whereby self-consciousness is developed out of a process in which the subject first "abandons" itself to the wider cultural field it inhabits, elucidates the multidimensional context of its own limitations and possi1ilities, and then "returns" to itself with a heightened consciousness of both itself and its world. You must lose: yourself---but with thorough alertness--in order to find yourself. This "dialectical spiral" is ended only with death. This is another way of stating what has been said about the matter in point one above.

3. {Hegel, Marx}

Dialectics as a theory of the movement of historical becoming. At this level, dialectics is a theory of the essentially relational and processual character of history. "Being is Becoming." Historical being is a dynamic process formed of a multiplicity of interpenetrating levels, a process in which human actors are at one and the same time the producers and the products, the continually changing creators and the continually changing outcomes. Insofar as all things, persons, and concepts are perpetually altered by their movement in time as well as by their relationships with one another, they are "conditioned" and, as it were, "inhabited" by both temporal and relational "difference," or as the dialectical tradition likes to put it, by "negativity." "Otherness" inhabits the very "interior" of any thing, person, or concept, an "otherness" that is "constitutive" of beings in a world in which nothing exists as a stable, independent, self-enclosed identity. Beings are always traversed and "marked" by what is "outside" them, always ceasing to be what they "are," always beginning to be what they "are not," always unfolding "otherwise" in the radiant shadows of time. Reality, essentially non-coincident with itself, is the destructive and creative pulse of Unrest. We dwell in the Hand of Secretly Patterned and Patterning Errancy.

4. [Hegel, Marx]

Dialectics as a theory and practice of a movement of thinking that aims to comprehend the dynamic relationship between the relational, processual movement of history and the relational, processual development of its own concepts and procedures within that movement of history. At this level, dialectics is a movement of thinking that, according to its own guiding insights, should continually spin back upon itself, out of itself, in order to grasp the context of both its own formation and the formation of all those social realities and cultural objects which its aims to comprehend from the broadest possible perspective. Dialectics, in other words, involves the recognition that thinking is socially conditioned--or, as the dialecticians like to say, socially mediated--from top to bottom: and just as social reality is always already "other:" to itself inasmuch as it bears within it traces of the past and projects ahead of it future possibilities, so thinking is always already "other" to itself inasmuch as it bears within it traces of the social situations that have "motivated" it and casts before it contours of further theoretical orientations that will "supersede" it.

5. [Fredric Jameson]

Dialectics as thinking on thought itself, thought², a transcendent observation of the self &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&________and the movement

4. Nietzsche’s Existential progression towards the ubermensch:

“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.”

I will walk through a patchwork of Nietzschean concepts that together can be understood as the bridge from the man to the Ubermensch. Notice the parallels to the turning of a certain type of dialectic and also the three Campbellean stages of the hero archetype:

1. 1. God is dead.

The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: ‘I am looking for God!’. . . ‘ Where has God gone?’ he cried. ‘ I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How ere we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? . . . Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?—gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives—who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed—and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.’

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early,’ he said then; ‘my time in not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. . . This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.’ (Gay Science 125)

At the turn of the twentieth century, God was no longer believable—the concept of God. The “Reason” of the Enlightenment began its slow divine death. Many have still not come to realize it. But for those who have, it is a great “sundering” and de-centering, because what then is true? However, it also opens the new possibility of new understanding formerly veiled. Here begins the great destruction:

From J. R. Hollingdale’s Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The controlling tendency of [Nietzsche’s] thought during all these five years is nonetheless unmistakable: it is to break down all the concepts and qualities in which mankind takes pride and pleasure into a few simple qualities in which no one takes pride or pleasure and to see in the latter the origin of the former; likewise to undermine morality by exposing its non-moral basis and rationality by exposing its irrational basis; likewise to abolish the ‘higher’ world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world; in brief, the controlling tendency of his thought is nihilist. The cheerful tone, the stylistic beauty, the coolness of the performance cannot conceal that what is taking place is destruction. The fact was, in any event, obvious to Nietzsche himself; and of all his problems this became the greatest, the most pressing, the one with which his ‘passion’ was most engaged. He had come close to a total devaluation of humanity and because he could as yet see no way of halting this movement he took the only course open to him: he pushed it on to its limit. (13)

It is hard to imagine a more radical nihilism then the one produced by Nietzsche during these years. He destroyed everything but what he found to be the two controlling tendencies in human experience: what he calls the will to power and the emotion of fear. “And when Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivation principle for all human actions: the will to power.” (26)

The Will to Power:

Of Self-Overcoming . . . Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power . . And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again. . . Where there is perishing and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for the sake of power! . . . And you too, enlightened man, are only a path and footstep of my will: truly, my will to power walks with the feet of your will to truth! . . . The living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation itself speaks—the will to power!’. . . Spare me for one great victory. (pg. 23-24)

With this will to power we have the turning—reconstruction begins. We have already shed and destroyed all that was possible. Now we rebuild ourselves around the rock of our will, a will to succeed, to strive, to grow. This isn’t a hedonism, a utilitarianism, nor a dominance of others (as it was misconstrued by the Nazis).

“You shall become the person you are” (Gay Science 270)

How?

Now we start to get a sense of the value artistic creation holds for Nietzsche. In this way, the Superman, who we are now following the progression of, is a figurative god: a creator of selfhood and reality. We are unhindered by communal morality; we have created our own to suit our natures. But the Superman is first

the man who is master of himself,” but this is “the hardest of all tasks, that which requires the greatest amount of power: he who can do it has experienced the greatest increase in power, and if (as Nietzsche later says explicitly but here implies) happiness (in Zarathustra’s joy) is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome, then the Superman will be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence. Through continual increase of power to transmute the chaos of life into a continual self-overcoming of life and thus to experience in an ever greater degree he joy which is synonymous with this self-overcoming: that would now be the meaning of life—for joy is to Nietzsche, as it is to commonsense, the one thing that requires no justification, that is its own justification. He who had attained that joy would affirm life and love it however much pain it contained, because he would know that ‘all things are chained and entwined together’ and that everything is therefore part of a whole which he must accept as a whole. To express this feeling of life-affirmation Nietzsche formulated a theorem of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same events’ to which he gave rhapsodic expression in Zarathustra.

The eternal recurrence:

“The Greatest Weight—What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘this life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!’—Would you not throw yourself down and gnash you teeth and curse the demon who spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: “You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine! If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (Gay Science 341)

Hollingdale continues,

To be sure, only the Superman could be so well disposed towards his life as to want it again and again forever: but that precisely is the reason for willing his creation. The joy of the Superman in being as he is, now and ever, is the ultimate sublimation of the will to power and the final overcoming of an otherwise inexorable and inevitable nihilism.

Now Nietzsche becomes the great affirmer:

thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation.”

This is the superman: a self-creating, life-affirming being who ever seeks growth and experience. “Live dangerously,’ he says. The arc of growth is one of severe nihilism to the point of solipsism, and from there a reaffirmation of the self in terms derived from the deepest desires and fear. Life is seen for what it is and appreciated. What about Truth? What about afterlife?—it is beyond our senses to know so it is not part of the project. Perspectivism, relative truth, truth to me. Live for the day!

[1] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 202.

[2] In the appendix several graphs are available—though are also forthcoming in the pattern in their proper place.

[3] Bernard Evslin, Gods, Demigods, and demons: an Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology (New York: Scholastic Inc, 1975), 38.

[4] Gabriele Veneziano, “The Myth of the Beginning of the Time,” Scientific American Magazine, May 2004, p. 55-65.

There are two theories with the big bang as not the beginning of the universe.

[5] Genesis 1.31 New Revised Standard Version

[6] Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), p.____

[7] Theodore Andrea Cook, The Curves of Life (New York: Dover, 1979), 451.

[8] I prefer to understand the Yin/Yang as triadic, representing duality, but incased within a unity. The two representations are inseparable from each other, as well as the dualities are inseparable from each other. Also, in comparison to the Fibonacci sequence verging toward Φ and never reaching it, the Yin/Yang is actually an oversimplification. The “seeds” of otherness would not in themselves be purely Yin or Yang, but each seed would also contain a seed of otherness as well. So the Yin/Yang also verges on infinity, is irrational, and bottomless.

[9] Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: the Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley: U. of California, 1989) pg. 14.

[10] James Joyce, Ulysses, Gabler Ed. (New York: Random House, 1986) pg. 176.

[11] Joyce, p. PROTEUS.

[12] Joyce, p.162.

[13] Joyce, p.174.

[14] “Monomyth was a word that Campbell borrowed from Joyce to describe a universal myth.

[15]See Nietzsche’s Gay Science, sections 108 – 125 and 343. The Madman (125) is the famous and boldest proclamation.

[16] I have jumped ahead of myself, but dialectically understood, there can be no distinct separation between the universe and the self, because each always contains the otherness of the other. Imagine two mirrors positioned facing each other, eternally reflecting both, never allowing a clear distinction of which is which.

[17] Heidegger’s description of himself.

[18]Nietzsche, Gay Science, pg. 290.

[19] R.J. Hollingdale, “Introduction” to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Middlesex: Penquin, 1961), 26.

[20] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” The Complete Poems (London: Penquin, 1977), 186. Like Nietzsche’s superman, Blake’s hero is also the artist, the creator, and he who reconciles good and evil, light and dark—all dualisms—within himself. He is the Campbellean maverick.

[21] Gifford pg. 70.

[22] Joyce, p. 25.

[23] Joyce, p. 357, ln. 256.

[24] Joyce, p. 66, lns. 340-348. I am assuming his appreciation of the sacrament is not because it is Christian, but because it is church ceremony, Jewish or Catholic, which he is unfamiliar with because he does not attend.

[25] Joyce, Ch. 14.186.

[26] Joyce, Ch. 10.980.

[27] Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job, (New York: Harper, 1987.), pg. 91.

[28] Mitchell, pg. 88.

I share this interpretation with Mitchell as put forth in his introduction. Note the similarity of Job being dust and the nihilism of the existential movement.

[29] Joyce, ch. 16: 1448-1449.

[30] The first four definitions were given to me by Dr. Bob Baker, University of Montana.

Joyce's Ullysses

2007-03-15T03:21:00.002-07:00

The Dublin Questers:

A Modernist Adventure through Existential Crisis

By Jonah Manning

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stands this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

-Joseph Campbell

On June 16^th, 1904 two men casually wander in and about Dublin. Their names are Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus; they don’t know one and other but seem destined to meet. Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, is the story of how their two paths cross, then intermingle for a while, before separating indefinitely. Nothing apparently changes—there is no great drama or noteworthy occurrence throughout the long day and night. Molly is making breakfast for a change: Perhaps Leopold’s great heroic victory? The story is weighted heavily by its name: Ulysses. “What’s in a name?” Stephen retorts Bloom in the wee hours of the morning (p. 509).[1] For Joyce, and the readers of his novel—there is quite a bit. The name “Ulysses” demands the reader to consider an older literary tradition with mythological implications that today are rarely employed. With a name like Ulysses, our minds are drawn to Odysseus and Telemachus, to heroes and great journeys there and back again. Joseph Campbell has said about Ulysses that “there is a direct calling-in of myth, using intentionally and with direct reference the mythology of the hero’s voyage into the world of darkness, the abyss, and the return.”[2] This is indeed a great part of Joyce’s project, but Campbell meant not only allusions to the Odyssey, but also the wealth and breadth of the world’s religious and mythological figures. Allusions and symbols appear in every line and few representations will remain in static 1:1 relationships with their signifiers; they are compounded and shared. Campbell continues: “While Joyce and Mann were descending into the mythological realm, in exactly those same years, Frazer was undertaking the same exploration in anthropology, and Freud and Jung in psychology, and all of them were interpreting mythology in psychological terms.”[3] Myth was awakening, opening itself as a great vehicle of knowledge and potential self-understanding: the myths of gods and heroes are not about gods and heroes—they are about us. They discovered that myths are the “masks of god,”[4]—but we are the gods. The masks differ in time and place, to the specific needs and temperament of the culture that produces them. Gods are merely externalized projections of our own human qualities. Zenophanes said:

Man made his gods, and furnished them

With his own body, voice and garments.

If a horse or lion or a slow ox

Had agile hands for paint and sculpture,

The horse would make his god a horse,

The ox would sculpt an ox.[5]

What sort of god would Joyce create?

Freud and Carl Jung noticed an innate similarity between the structures of myth and dream, which both represent the unconscious. Jung, by studying the dreams of his patients, discovered universal mythic symbols that appeared independently from that person’s contact with that symbol in their own personal experience. He called these patterns archetypal forms and they resemble Platonic ideals except that they exist in what Jung called the collective unconscious, a sort of ground of being, as opposed to a Platonic transcendent realm. [6] The Madonna is an archetypal image of the mother. Reynard the fox is the archetype for the trickster. Campbell was particularly interested in the archetype of the hero. He saw the hero as the representation of human greatness. Where heroes, in the case of Heracles, can teach lessons such as excess, fundamentally they are stories of growth, accomplishment, and the attainment of self-knowledge. These myths are stories of our human spiritual potentialities.[7]

Ulysses brings the classic mythology back into modernity. Joyce creates a conglomerate of myth and tradition, a syncretic anomaly which aims at raising the dead cultural subconscious of our modernity into the conscious sphere and awakening it in a new way. Since the Enlightenment, the West has done what Saul Bellows called, “a housecleaning of belief.” Myths, particularly Christian mythology became antiquated, concretized, objective, and isolated from individual experience: we can’t experience the cross, but we should. Jesus becomes something separate from our experience. He is no longer a man, but a transcendent god. This paper is an exploration into Joyce’s usage of mythic patterns, particularly the heroic pattern, and how he remythologizes them for modernity. Is modernity capable of heroism? Are adventures possible in Dublin? Old archetypes become renewed and redefined for modern readers. The Homeric monsters Scylla and Charybdis are transformed into the swirling of Stephen’s thought, and the library where they meet becomes Joyce’s mind.[8]

Mythic and Existential Crisis

“God is dead”[9]

The first and arguably the primary mythic model for this novel is Homer’s Odyssey. As readers this prepares us for an epic, a heroic tale (though the Odyssey is technically a romance), and there is a basic mythological pattern which heroes follow and we therefore expect Stephen and Bloom to follow. In studying myths from around the world, Joseph Campbell articulated three basic stages of the heroic journey:

The hero is separated from his familiar surroundings and goes on a journey alone.
He undergoes a mysterious initiation, during which he grapples with supernatural powers and gains a new understanding of himself in relation to his community and to the gods.
He returns to share the new vision with his fellows.[10]

Ulysses hardly follows this pattern at all, perhaps obliquely, and there are two possible reasons why. First, this is a modern novel; everything has been cut and fragmented, including the natural movement of a hero through a story. The immediate story takes place in one day making dramatic transformation difficult, although significant historical context is injected throughout. The second reason is more interesting: what if Stephen and Bloom are not heroes? What if Joyce is in fact writing a “mock-epic”, a distorted farce of a heroic journey? He makes a mockery of most everything else, why not his own model? I won’t argue this point either way, but instead will show how Stephen and Bloom both fit and stretch the heroic pattern.

For Bloom, the Odysseus of the story, the three-part movement of the hero is followed in physical terms. That is, he (1) wakes with his wife, (2) leaves and wanders around Dublin, struggling to reconcile their marital problems, but (3) finally makes his way back home to his wife and bed. It is doubtful whether Stephen makes it home at all. Bloom’s major symbolic figure is clearly Odysseus, but he also has many others; however, they are mostly situational. In “Aeolus” for example, he is Moses (as he is also Odysseus) and won’t quite enter into the promised land or get his ad in the paper. Odysseus almost made Ithaca only to have his crew open the bag of winds. In “Cyclops,” Bloom is Elijah leaving in a whirlwind of glory after his triumph over the citizen. Like Odysseus, Bloom thinks mostly of his wife, Molly. He is not only physically separated from her for the day, but has been emotionally and “psychologically” separated from her since the loss of their son Rudy nearly eleven years ago. He is bothered by the possibility of his wife Molly having an affair this afternoon with a man named Boylan. Parallels can be drawn to Odysseus here, the suitors and his virtually unknown son, but it feels like Bloom is just a simple man with a lot on his mind and not all that suitable for heroic comparison.

What is more important than the obvious physical movement of the heroic pattern is the psychological reality of the story which the pattern validly represents. Both men have already experienced separation before the novel begins: Bloom became separated from Molly after the death of Rudy, and Stephen became separated from God in Portrait. In this way, Ulysses begins as the Odyssey did, in medias res. Both characters start the novel in the doldrums, in a psychological hell, separated and searching for a way back, and both without a key—physically and allegorically. This is the beginning of second stage of the hero’s quest from which the heroes never apparently excavate themselves.

Because of the stagnation of the heroes in their own exasperation, Campbell labeled Ulysses an Inferno. For the hero, there is always an obligatory trip to the underworld, Hades, Hell, the belly of the whale, the subconscious—it is a place of death and subsequent renewal (assuming the hero lives to return from it). This is where our “heroes”—if we deem to call them that—are, but there is still an important distinction that is yet to be made between our heroes and the classic models which they emulate. In classical mythology and in the pattern of the heroic adventure above, gods always had a vital role: where would Odysseus have been without Athena?—one of Circe’ swine! But today we have no more gods to aid would-be heroes; we have no more monsters to triumph over. The closest thing modernity has to a Cyclops is a narrow-minded conservative fundamentalist “citizen.” Science and reason have brought light to the dark portions of the rational world and tamed it to principles and laws. Nietzsche was the first to loudly proclaim that god was dead:

Is this not the state of modernity: what to make of a diminished thing? Early in Portrait Simon Dedalus proclaims, “away with God, I say”[12] In Ulysses, “he’s dead. The man upstairs is dead” (p. 195). What then will take his place? For Nietzsche, and indeed for Stephen, this is the greatest, most pressing question.

“God is dead” was not meant as a metaphysical claim to the existence or non-existence of god, but a statement of its practical efficacy in ascribing meaning to a new and changing world. God no longer functioned for modernity. This realization opened the possibilities for individual freedom and expression to imperceptible horizons like no time before in history, but this was also terrible freedom. Nietzsche’s model for the ideal modern man, a man to harness such freedom, was the ubermensch, or the superman.

The superman is the godless hero, the Odysseus without Athena. Nietzsche was concerned with the path and the mind that leads to a satisfying life in the world. His path, as opposed to the classic model, is explicitly psychological, but it still mirrors the traditional movement of the archetype minus god. I understand it this way.

1. He experiences a profound loss or disillusionment which separates him from himself and his world.

2. He works through nihilism to attempt to cut away any other false illusions. He reaches the bottom of his nihilism where little remains of the self until he gains a new equilibrium and foundation [will to power].

3. He begins the upward, restorative movement, rebuilding himself on a new foundation of understanding and experience [give style to one’s self, eternal recurrence] and returns to selfhood and the world.

The three-part movement is the same: (1) a separation (nihilism), (2) a plunge into the depths until something is overcome, then (3) a recovery. This is Stephen’s pattern—Dedalus the pagan.

Stephen Dedalus’ name represents the paradox of his crisis: the name is in conflict with itself. Stephen is the first Christian martyr and Daedalus is the “Great pagan artificer.”[13] This paradox represents his movement from his youth toward his goal, from god toward art—which is his desire, but he is stuck in inaction. The first character Stephen is compared to is Hamlet, and he remains my favorite representation of Stephen: there is something rotten in the city of Dublin. Hamlet is the existential philosopher who cannot make sense of himself or the “absurdity” of the world around him. There are no priests in Hamlet—no metaphysicians. They are both young men who cloth themselves in mourning-black cloths; they are unhappy with themselves. Hamlet is an outsider in his own court as Stephen is in the artistic circle of Dublin. They feel their lives have been usurped unjustly and want to rebel but don’t. Why do they procrastinate?—who knows? They are both called to a project which neither acts upon.

With the youth of Stephen, the age of Bloom, and the juxtaposition of this story with the Odyssey, it is easy to see the current of a father-son myth occurring concurrently with the other multitudinous themes. Father-son myths are about careers, which is to say that Stephen is subconsciously looking for a role model, someone whom he can relate to that can help him move forward. This is another point at which we must consider the possibility that Joyce has written a mock-epic. Bloom and Stephen are “poles apart,” and when they do get to converse, it is none to smooth (p. 524). Bloom is not a great artist—he is a piddler, “a cultured allround man” (p. 193). What could Bloom offer to Stephen who ostensibly isn’t looking for any help to begin with? Bloom is a representation of the feminine. He has his best conversations with women. Molly is presumably his best friend. Stephen fears women. Bloom is kind, soft-spoken and compassionate. Stephen is a mocker. Bloom is prudent and employed; Stephens is soon to be broke and unemployed. Stephen and Bloom are either diametric opposites or far points on a continuum. They represent opposite poles of consciousness, namely the metaphysical vs. the phenomenonal, the divine vs. the earthly.

Bloom has his son constantly on his mind. He is the one who notices Stephen and singles him out. In “Circe,” at the end, Bloom sees Rudy in the mien of Stephen and Rudy doesn’t see him, as Stephen doesn’t pay Bloom any attention throughout the novel. However, there is a connection—they share similar thoughts and visions throughout the day, random things both happen to notice. What do they share with one another?

This state of oppression and crisis is where we begin to draw a similarity between Stephen and Bloom. Both spend the day distracted and depressed. Stephen is “a servant of two masters, . . . , an English and an Italian (p. 17). He is referring to English rule and the Catholic Church. He speaks as an Irishman whose people have been oppressed. Bloom has much more personal matters that cloud his day. His wife and his son, Rudy, are much closer to home. Rudy’s death has put Bloom off of full sexual intercourse ever since. This, presumably, is the inciting factor of Molly’s infidelity—though this remains ambiguous.[14] What both men have in common is that they are each oppressed by themselves. In the end it is Bloom who blames himself for Molly’s adultery, not Boylan or Molly; it is Bloom who takes the blame for the death of Rudy. And he cannot move on. Stephen is more mired than Bloom in his frustrations because his mind is that much deeper and he can continue to spiral deeper and deeper until he loses himself. “Proteus” is a quintessential existential rhapsody in the vain of Hamlet, despairing and questioning the reality of this “mortal coil.” Stephan, in Joyce’s Portrait, has already lost his faith in the Christian transcendent god. Stephen is himself lost, “drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.”[15] Haines says, “It seems history is to blame” and the idea is repeated throughout the novel (p. 17). Stephen steps back from blaming himself and blames the world which has come before him: “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (p. 28).

Odyssey of Self-Becoming

“Who am I”[16]

God has always served humanity as a grounds for existence: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” [17] God is also the ground for morality. The very foundations of culture are built on Christian ideals, so without god, what do we believe? Nietzsche and Stephen both undertake a great nihilism to investigate the existential problem. Stephen says, ‘I believe Lord, help my unbelief,” meaning he has still been unable to shed all of his Christian heritage that was taught to him in his Jesuit upbringing (p. 174). He is frightened by the thought of nothingness. He remembers Mulligan’s comment about his mother, that she was “beastly dead” (p. 7). This is not a Christian death, but a gross biological one. Stephen is no longer protected by heaven—not that he had any security in his admission there anyhow. So death becomes a nightmare. “Damn death, long live life,” he proclaims to a British soldier, meaning that it aught to be his country’s duty to protect him from death as opposed to him dying to save his country (p. 482). Campbell explains that “the secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.”[18] Nietzsche came to the same conclusion by means of a parable: the eternal recurrence:

Only Nietzsche’s superman could conceivably affirm such an idea—it is not meant as reality, only as a kind of litmus test. The result is that the only time that matters is now. This time will continue and continue—there is no more value in the future than the present. This idea is in stark contrast to the ideology Stephen was brought up with: “think only of last things:” Stephen was told in school, “one thing alone is needful, the salvation of own soul. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul!”[20] Remember Mr. Deasy here: “All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” (p.28). This is the Dantean/orthodox Catholic ideology that Stephen rebels against. Ulysses places itself diametrically opposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy with regard to its goal-driven divine metaphysical aim. Dante’s love for Beatrice is only fruitful in that it points toward heaven; she is his personal Madonna, a finger pointing toward the moon. His worldly love for her is nothing. Dante’s life is nothing but a vehicle to heaven, a means of promoting the Lord through his artistic call.

Nietzsche called this nihilism as it devalued life. Joyce wrote in a letter: “my mind rejects the whole social order of Christianity,” in response to his mother’s death; “I curse the system which made her a victim.”[21] These are strong and emotional words, but we see how he works out some of his disgust with the church by positing a variant, mystically oriented cosmology and eschatology: we are in the middle, beginning and end.

Amor fati—love your fate was Nietzsche’s great affirmation of life. We have to be present now and love the things we have: this is all we can be sure of. When Nietzsche himself came to this realization he wrote:

--thus I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation.[22]

Nietzsche affirms the present life which is something that Stephen struggles with. Bloom on the other hand, has had a cleaner break from his Jewish heritage. Judaism, however, doesn’t place the same weight on the afterlife as does Christianity. Bloom doesn’t speak about it. What matters to him are the stars or the sea or any number of worldly curiosities.

Life exists now—in this present moment—not in the possible futures of heaven or hell.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.[23]

Heaven and hell are experiences of life, they are psychological states of being that exist here and now, just as we see Stephen and Bloom muddling through the fires of Dublin.

When Nietzsche reached the bottom of his nihilism, he found he could destroy everything but fear and “a desire for power,” but he found that fear was only an absence of power, so he had a single unified principle: the will to power.[24] This realization is the hero’s “initiation” or coming out of the underworld back into reality: I want to live life, hence Amor fati. The horizon is again open. But the upward movement is back to the self, self-discovery, and it is “the hardest of all tasks.”[25] But having seen death and suffering, you have been strengthened and changed by it—you have experienced the initiation, and you understand life in these new terms. There is a heaven, but it is only won through the work of self-empowerment. To strengthen the will to power is to, as Joseph Campbell called it, “follow your bliss.” Nietzsche said it two ways: (Like Pindar) You must become the person who you are by “giv[ing] style to one’s character—a great and rare art!” And here is the trick—“ a great and rare art.” The epigraph of Portrait is from Ovid: “et ignotas animum dimittit in artes,” or “he applies his mind to obscure arts.”[26] Nietzsche, with Blake and others, believed that artistic creation was the path to the true self, the superman, like Blake’s Creative Genius. Gods are the masks of ourselves and the primary function, the first great task of the gods is creation: “Los Demiugos,” Nobodaddy, Yahweh, Marduk, Vishnu, Jupiter. The superman is the classic hero sans gods and demons. Twice, once at the end of the first two chapters, Joyce refers to Stephen as “ubermensch” (ps.19 &42).

Both of our “heroes” dream about being artists but neither is acting on those impulses. Neither can free themselves from the infernos of their minds, can’t move forward in life, can’t get access to the pathways out of chaos to be able to reflect on it, write on it perhaps. Hell is worth writing about.

Inferno.

For Ulysses is an inferno. As Homer sent his Ulysses wandering through the inferno of Greek mythology and Virgil his Aeneas through one of Roman mythology so Dante himself voyaged through the inferno of the mediaeval Christian imagination and so Mr. Joyce sent his hero through the inferno of modern subjectivity.[27]

In the tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante, Joyce’s heroes must make a trip to the underworld. I have already described why this is, that it is a physical manifestation of psychic confusion, change and overcoming; it is the heroic turning and climax. To settle this analogy, Joyce has a chapter posthumously titled “Hades,” where Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignum. Of course Bloom can’t help but think of both little Rudy and his dead father who killed himself after the death of his wife (this is implied by a letter by his father in Bloom’s drawer) (p. 595). This chapter is hardly as terrifying as Odysseus’ visit with Tiresias and Achilles, or Dante’s journey toward Dis. Death is the only semblance between them. Death isn’t such a terrifying thing for Bloom as it is for Stephen; it is as natural as anything else. After Mr. Kernan makes a remark about, touching “a man’s inmost heart,” Bloom postulates on the heart, “a pump after all,” “old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.” (p. 87). The concept of “metempsychosis” Bloom uses to make sense of the world—but not necessarily meaning the transmigration of souls. “Love among the tombstones. In the midst of death we are in life” (p. 89). For Bloom, there is a natural cycling of form: “blood sinking in the earth gives new life”—it is that simple to Bloom (p. 89). He doesn’t speak much of “essence” which is generally inferred by the term. Stephen doesn’t share Bloom’s ambivalence toward death or his simple understanding of metaphysical terminology.

“Hades” is not the psychological hell of the novel however. The real experience of hell comes in “Circe,” ch. 15, the very bottom of the novel, the nadir and the turn. Blamires points out that the bestializing of the characters in the Odyssey, is representative of the withdrawal of the rational element.[28] Indeed, in Joyce’s version, nothing makes rational sense. All of the people Bloom sees throughout his day return in transmogrified form, often taunting him, drawing at his insecurities. After the loss of his “potato” (moli) he is then vulnerable to being vulgarized himself and is turned grotesquely into a pig and a woman and then abused. He cries, “O, it’s hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches like mad” (p. 435). Dante nor Odysseus ever participated in anything quite as terrifying as the treatment that Bello gave to Bloom.

If Joyce had stopped with only the “Hades” chapter it would have appeared as a mockery, I think, of the epic pattern. The parody is funny, but “Circe” provides the energy, fear and perspective that is as necessary to this book as it is to each of the other epics.

True to Joyce, “Circe” has its transcendent moments as well, when Bloom gives his “stump speech,’ imagining himself in positions of power (p. 390). The reader here encounters both the positive and negative aspects of Bloom’s subconscious: both his dreams and his nightmares; we see the oppression of his father and wife, as well as his highest social aspirations. The chapter ends with an act of compassion. Stephen gets beat-up and Bloom looks after him. The heroes survive and leave the underworld, coming back into the light. It is important to note that Joyce uses mirrors to reflect Bloom’s consciousness. The connection between mirrors and consciousness will become more important as we go.

What is their initiation? Have they changed? Or is this a joke?—Stephen takes one punch and Bloom becomes a pig. The moment that stands out to me is the moment of compassion Bloom has for Stephen. It is the first time anyone all day has shown Stephen any kindness. Does this affect him, maybe in the morning when he sobers up? The novel doesn’t go that far, so the reader can never know. Joyce gives so few clues to follow. If nothing changes today, why should it tomorrow? But heroes are supposed to change and this is supposed to be a story about modern heroes—and as a reader, we know that Joyce (Stephen, perhaps) does grow up to write a supreme artistic work. So there must be a change, but we don’t know if it takes place on June 16^th. There is a story that one time Joyce was beat up in a park for talking to an “accompanied” woman. The friend he was walking with stepped back and it was a strange man that came and helped him up and took him home. If this incident was the impetus for the character of Bloom and this novel, then it seems safe to say that the man’s compassion had a great effect on Joyce and therefore on Stephen as well.

But for today hell is inescapable. Indeed Joyce gets us and Bloom thinking about death in “Hades”, experiencing hell in “Circe,” but Campbell took it a step farther. He understood Ulysses as a whole to be an Inferno. In Dante’s Inferno, many of the figures Dante and Virgil visit with as they walk through the rings are Florentines. Dante has symbolically depicted Florence as hell, but, Campbell argues, in Ulysses, Dante’s model has been reversed, it is hell that is portrayed as Dublin: “Dante pitches us out of this world and into the mythological dimension. Joyce brings the mythological dimension into this world and shows it to us through the world.”[29] Dante goes on a journey to hell, but Bloom and Stephen live there; it is not only the psychological realm, but also their physical location and society.

Dostoevsky wrote: “Father and teacher, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”[30] (Will Bloom’s compassion teach Stephen something of the importance of love?) Theologically, hell can be understood as the complete absence of god. All of these various aspects of hell work in limited ways. God is certainly absent in the traditional transcendent Christian way. Though later we will see that god does occupy a more inconspicuous role. I have already shown how both Stephen and Bloom live in their separate spheres, both struggling to identify with the other. My understanding of hell is division. From the Gospel of Thomas, “if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness.”[31] Hell is a stage of experience and life where we separate ourselves and attempt to gain perspective. It is the same as the heroic archetype: union – separation – reunion, Blake’s innocence – experience – innocence. It is the separation from god that shows how glorious he/she is; it is the loss of love that demonstrates how cold the world can be without it. Both characters walk through Dublin burdened by their existential crises—this is psychological hell. Beyond Joyce’s language and form, nothing is beautiful.

Think of Dublin as emblematic of Ireland as a whole. Joyce has called Dublin “a general state of paralysis some call a city.” But couldn’t this also be said of Ireland? Through songs and particularly the old milk woman, we are shown Ireland as withered, once vital and fertile, but now dried up and fallow, as dying (p.12). In Portrait, “Ireland is the old sow who eats her farrow.”[32] Where is opportunity? What could be heroic here? We see men who are not family men, regardless of whether they actually have families or not, gambling, drinking, hardly working, caring for little other than their own “homosocial” activities. Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, fights to keep from giving too much money to his daughter Dilly so that he might have a bit more for drinks (p. 196). It all seems like such a sad state of affairs. In “Sirens” Ben Dollard literally sings to the sad history of Ireland:

“We hold his house for our Lord and King,

And Amen! Say I, may all traitors swing!”

At Geneva Barrack that young man died,

And at Passage they have his body laid.

Good people who live in peace and joy,

Breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy Boy.[33]

Joyce has written a political and a religious critique all in one novel. Stephen is “a servant of two masters,” both Rome and England (p. 17). In this section we have seen how England has made a hell of his home and Rome has made a hell of his mind.

The Black Mass.

Tat twam asi[34]

June the 16^th was a Thursday in 1904 and Thursday happens to be named after Jupiter or “Thor,” the God of Thunder. In Portrait, the transcendent god has already failed due to its ineffectability at describing modernity. God is conspicuous by his absence in this novel. The transcendent god is gone, hence we have a black mass, a mass with a missing divinity, a new mass, but what does it celebrate? Where is god in Ulysses? You may hear him when you slam your book shut.

Joyce may answer the question with one word:

“contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality” (p. 32).

Indeed, what a word! And the spiritual potentiality of the whole work is there imbedded, occasionally hinted at and alluded to throughout—one word to represent the whole of his project. The word is an amalgamation of several terms, and the various splintered parts are minor themes of the novel and together give what I understand to be a cohesion to Joyce’s post-Christian, modern ideology—the answer to Nietzsche’s god-killing, the upward turn from the post-Christian nihilism. The words are:

Consubstantiality

Transubstantiation

Magnificand

Jew

And BANG!

The idea of Trinitarian consubstantiality—the Father is equal to the Son in substance—is a question particularly prevalent in Stephen’s chapters, “Proteus” in particular, but the term’s meaning runs much deeper than the Christian hypostasis. Generally, the term means, “to have the same substance.”[35] Is the Christ equal to but different from God? From this theological speculation, the question spins down to fathers and sons or creators and creations. Is Shakespeare Hamlet or the entirety of his creative work? Are they equal? Must Stephen look up to his father although he feels superior to him?[36] In “Proteus” Stephen thinks about it metaphysically.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too made not begotten. . . . From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eternal stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. (p. 32)

Is there any greater being than ourselves, a transcendent god? Nietzsche of course says no: the superman is the pinnacle. Stephen wants to agree with him, but he wants proof. Bloom, always the opposite pole sees it more simply--equanimity: we all live; we all die; we are all the same--consubstantiality.

Transubstantiality is the opposite, what Arius argued for, of consubstantiality, meaning that the son is not equal to the father. However, transubstantiation refers theologically to the Eucharist and the movement of essence between separate and different matter—the body and blood of Christ into the bread and the wine. More broadly, it is also metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, reincarnation, etcetera. Bloom gave little thought to anything as being consubstantial, but transubstantiation he notices at least obliquely through his organic understanding of death and subsequent life. When Whitman writes, “the smallest sprout shows there really is no death,” does this imply a movement of essence as well? Grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”[37] This would be Leopold’s idea. Does Bloom think about the soul? He says little if anything about “souls,” only in “Calypso” when defining metempsychosis for Molly and once in “Oxen of the Sun”: “what is the age of the souls of man?” but this is the narrator, not Bloom (p. 337). It is the placement of the idea in Bloom’s first chapter that adds to its weight and importance. The important characteristic of transubstantiation is flux, movement, change. Where consubstantiality emphasizes equanimity, transubstantiality promotes circular movement between life and death, just various stages and changes of the eternal sameness.

The section “Magnificand” ostensibly is a derivation of the Magnificat, which is “a Catholic prayer celebrating the words that the Virgin Mother Mary addressed to her cousin Elizabeth: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’ (Luke 1:46).”[38] God is inside her. Campbell reads it “as not solely [referring] to the condition of the Mother of God, two thousand years ago in Judea, but to every one of us, here and now.”[39] Immanent divinity.

Bloom is a jew—is that why this word appears in the “word of words” of this novel? Is Bloom then the ubermensch and his “jewishness” an important element of that? Yes and no. In the context of this book, to be Jewish was to be different and set outside: Jews as persecuted, Jews as underclass, Jews as special in some peculiar and strangely unidentifiable way. To be Jewish is to loathed and secretly admired or at least queried about. Jews are a mystery, a group always distinct anywhere in the world. I believe it is this mysterious element, this inherent division from social normalcy that is at the heart of its inclusion here. We see all of this in Bloom. He is so different, but somehow at ease in the midst of his ambiguous social status. To be a Jew is to be an individual, to be yourself.

BANG! “A shout in the street” BANG! The “hammerhurler.” Thor’s lightning rods cracking over head. As Stephen and Bloom doddle in the maternity ward and Molly lies in bed trying to sleep, a great thunder strike cracks over Dublin. Stephen is deathly afraid of thunder and is a bit shaken. Bloom notices and

spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon. (p. 323)

But Stephen doesn’t share Bloom natural perspectivism. Stephen, as well as Molly, can’t help but think of “old Nobodaddy,” Blake’s Old Testament god, who speaks his decrees through thunder. Molly said,

that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end and then they come and tell you theres no God (p. 611).

Stephen might have said those same words, with a bit more pedantry perhaps. The difference between Stephen and Bloom is never more apparent than with this example. Molly and Stephen see god as communicating through natural phenomena where Bloom see only the phenomena itself. BANG! Bloom can understand the mechanics of the sound. But for Stephen the sound is god—the mechanics are irrelevant.

--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr. Deasy said. All human history moves toward one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

--That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

--What? Mr. Deasy asked.

--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. (p. 28)

Mr. Deasy is the antithesis to the Nietzschean, existential understanding of Joyce. He is orthodoxy—he is a “citizen.” History “moving toward” god is precisely the nihilism that Nietzsche protests, and Stephen “refutes him thus”: God is “A shout in the street.” God is present now and here, around and in, penetrating and participating—utterly immanent and impersonal: “Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”[40] The truth Stephen wishes to believe in flows more easily from him when he has a fool for an antagonist who spouts the same jargon Stephen himself was brought up with.

BANG! is present all around us; it is our hearts beating within our chests. It is in us, equal to us, and beyond us. We must wander away from it to see it for what it is and then move back from wince we came. It moves through us and about us. It is our essence. It is our will. It is our bliss. It is nature and supernatural. Contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality!

We have a new god, but the god is essentially the world or permeates the world, the energy, the Tao, that flows through all things. When we look into a mirror, it is god that stares back at us. Mulligan, as he wakes to shave, is not bashful to make a mass of himself. What I see as the important element is not the cross, but the mirror. God=Dog. And dog has been for Stephen the symbol of biology, the natural world, the “beastly” world that he cannot come to accept. Mulligan has no trouble: “It’s a beastly thing and nothing else” (p. 7). But neither are exactly right—not nothing, not god, but us. The mirror. The universe is a reflection of what we are. Contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality is not only the “new” god—it is once again, as always, us. “Tat tvam asi”—you art that (thou). When we read myth, we are reading about ourselves. These are our archetypes. The “black mass” is a celebration of selfhood, ritualizing my life, making my life memorable, significant. Amor fati.

the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge![41]

Ulysses is a “dangerous” novel; no one had ever attempted anything like it before. It was created through boldness. This is the freedom of godlessness and the power of mythical understanding. Joyce built his masterpiece by incorporating himself and the world by knowing himself and the world:

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, . . . then will you enter the kingdom.[42]

“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”

-Goethe

[1] Joyce, Ulysses, Gabler Ed. (New York: Random House, 1986). All citations from this text will be made internally by page number only.

[2] Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Worlds (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 12-13.

[3] Campbell, Mythic Worlds Modern Worlds, p.16.

[4] “Masks of god” is a phrase used by Campbell in many places, particularly as the title for his four-part mythological encyclopedic work.

[5] Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner, Eds., Third Edition, Classical Mythology: Images and Insights, (Sacramento: Mayfield Pub., 2001.), p. 35.

[6] It is interesting to note that modern DNA studies show how we still carry all of man’s history and prehistory. The entirety of our past is still encoded n our DNA, though not “consciously” used. Would Jung perhaps propose a “biological” ground for his collective unconscious?

[7] Campbell p174, 39, xxiii.

[8] Campbell, Mythic Worlds Modern Worlds, 104.

[9] J. R. Hollingdale, “Introduction” to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Middleessex, Eng: Penguin, 1969), p. 14.

[10] Harris and Platzner,p, 267.

[11] Fredric Nietzsche, The Gay Science sec, 125.

[12] James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 39.

[13] Joyce, Portrait, p. 278.

[14] In Molly’s soliloquy she blames her infidelity on Bloom: “its all his own fault if I am an adulteress” (p.641).

[15] Joyce, Portrait, p. 102.

[16] Joyce, Ulysses, p. 163.

[17] Gen. 1.1-3. New Revised Standard Version.

[18] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), xiii.

[19] Nietzsche, Gay Science p. 341.

[20] Joyce, Portrait, ps. 118-9.

[21] James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1993). p. ix.

[22] Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 18.

[23] John Milton, “Paradise Lost”

[24] Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 26.

[25] J. R. Hollingdale, p _________

[26] Joyce, Portrait, p. 1.

[27] Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide through Ulysses (New York: Routledge, 2002), xvi. Quoting McGreevy.

[28] Blamires, p. 159.

[29] Campbell, Mystical Worlds Modern Worlds, p. 19.

[30] Andrew Harvey, Journey to Ladakh, ______________________________

[31] James Robinson, Ed. “The Gospel of Thomas,” The Nag Hammadi Library (New York: HarperCollins, 1990 ), p. 133.

[32] Joyce, Portrait, p. 220.

[33] Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 293. “The Croppy Boy” was a ballad about the Irish rebellion of 1798 by William B. McBurney.

[34] Sanskrit: “You art thou”

[35] Webster’s New World Dictionary.

[36] Joyce, Portrait, p. 102.

[37] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1892 Edition (New York: Bantam, 1983), p.26 and 27.

[38] Campbell, Mystic Worlds Modern Worlds, p. 80.

[39] Campbell, Mystic Worlds Modern Worlds, p. 80.

[40] The Gospel of Thomas, p. 135.

[41] Nietzsche, Zarathustra, p. 18

[42] Gospel of Thomas, p. 129.

Blake and Emerson

2007-03-15T03:21:00.001-07:00

Early Romanticism and Transcendentalism:

A Philosophical Comparison

of William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the late eighteenth-century and the early part of the next, Blake was not read. Far from being popular, he was scorned and written off as an eccentric or a lunatic. He was not a part of the literary conversation. On the other side of the Atlantic, only a few decades later, Emerson found much greater popularity. He wrote essays and lectured to the delight of a new country. As divergent as these two careers might appear their result and ultimate contribution to the modern sensibility is strikingly similar. Through variant forms, both create a philosophy and show human spiritual potentiality that today can be seen as parallel and convergent.

Both Blake and Emerson wrote independent of the influence of the other. Emerson was strongly influenced by other Romantic poets of the era (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly) but Blake was not. Swedenburg was an influence on both writers. He was accepted with reservation by Blake, but was later disregarded after Blake’s reading of Divine Love (Ergman 897). Emerson approved of Swedenburg’s doctrines.

Their backgrounds are also dissimilar. Emerson attended Harvard and seminary while Blake was mostly self-educated. Yet, somehow their philosophies on human spiritual potentiality became the same.

In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Blake satirically throws the world upside down. Hell becomes desired and angels become derisive. Blake displays in metaphor a dynamic view of the structural failings of western culture. Reality is presented as being dualistic in nature. In plate 3, Blake states that, “without contraries there is no progression” (Blake 181). He believes that “attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to “human existence” (Blake 181). Evil is not presented as dark and fiery, but as liberating and creative. This non-traditional hell is a place where one can pursue his true passions and desires. Blake equates this place with creative energy and vitality.

The good, or his conceptualized heaven, is a place of rules, reason, stagnation, repression, and fear. One must be submissive to the system and fit in. Individual traits are subjugated for the greater good. Heaven is the predominant archetype of modern culture, and hell, the artistic side, is subjugated by propaganda about evil and sin from the moralizers and priests.

By presenting the world in such a bizarre and perverse manner, the reader starts to sense the incongruity between truth and perception. Blake presents such excellence as Milton and even Jesus as being “of the devil’s party” (Blake 182). Blake also describes “the enjoyments of genius” as appearing to be “torment and insanity” (Blake 181). This is especially clear in the didactic proverbs of Proverbs from Hell. Here, action, passion, individualism, and strength are valued while patience, passivity, morality, and dependence are abhorred. The dualistic nature of reality is emphasized with stark believability.

What Blake means to do is to have a society or a man that is able to enlist both sides and thereby encompasses the whole. This man he calls the poetic genius. This is a man who, in a sense, denies nothing. He is in touch with his inner self and expresses it, making him an artist. He pursues his passions but is able to balance such pleasures with a sense of reason and rationality. He takes the liberty to find proof within himself to any moral laws and only living by such laws as he can experience, making him a nihilist.

It is in comparison with the poetic genius that Emerson comes closest to Blake. In The Poet, Emerson creates the contemporary American transcendental hero. The Poet is a call to the American spirit and a guide to spiritual maturity for a people yet without a hero. Emerson conjures a meaningful archetype through a seemingly erroneous progression. Understanding who his poet is can be challenging. At times, he is describing the poet as a writer and other times as an artist. He is also introduced as “the genius” and “the complete man” (Emerson 205). Emerson’s faults are due to his own biases as a poet, and thus he taints the clarity of his archetype.

Emerson’s true poet is the archetypal hero; he is the man who is to be the epitome of American humanity. This true poet is one that is able to “report the conversation [he] has had with nature” (Emerson 205). This connection to nature and the advanced imagination are emphasized early on and are elemental in what Emerson’s archetype will be.

To build his true poet, Emerson constructs a trinity. The characteristics of the true poet are drawn out and contrasted against those of like supreme figures. Emerson calls the members “the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer” (Emerson 205). The true poet is first the Sayer, or the one who “takes[s] all from the muse” (Emerson 223). He is “the namer” and shows the “beauty” of the world through his creations and expressions (Emerson 205). Emerson believes that “man is only half himself, and the other half is his expression” (Emerson 204). This structure becomes very problematic for the reader because it limits the true poet and constricts the very interpretation Emerson wishes to encourage.

Traditionally, The Doer is the archetype of the hero. Remember, the true poet is Emerson’s hero archetype. This is a seeming contradiction, and it is here, in the distinctions and disparagements amongst the trinity, that Emerson finds himself muddled within his own design. His true poet, the Sayer is now opposed to the traditional hero, the Doer. So anxious to describe the importance of the creative faculties of the literal poet (or artist), that which Emerson believes himself to be, he too often blends his language, confusing the meanings of the word poet to mean different things. Often, whether he is describing the poet as a poet, or as an artist, or as his hero/true poet, the reader can hardly discern.

Amid such confusion and contradictions, Emerson finds resolution. He says, “These three are equal . . . and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him, and his own, patent” (Emerson 207). Understanding this, the true poet is truly all three; the trinity is secondary, solely a character delineation. Emerson declares that, “Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words” (Emerson 206). Here the Sayer and the Doer are the same. This reconciliation rejuvenates his archetype construct and there also deconstructing the trinity.

The trinity is apt at describing the important elements of the true poet or hero: wisdom, action, and creation. While Emerson states that these are all of equal importance, the reader cannot fail to notice the writer’s tendency towards creation or expression. Little is ever described about his Doer and Knower. It is as if he expects his readers to easily accept the qualities of wisdom and bold action, but the power and value of creation and expression are under-appreciated and his explanation is necessary. To view an artist as one who reflects what he sees (expression) is a more common view than that of one who creates boldly with imaginative powers, creating language and images that have never existed and are beautiful without regard to their source matter. It is this latter opinion of the artist that Emerson views as a sovereign power.

The powers enlisted within the trinity are nothing more than words on paper if Emerson does not describe how the reader is to come to them. He writes, “every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration” (Emerson 210). He has just described the poet as one who sees wonder in nature. The reader is the poet insofar as he has the potential of such. It is this wonder and curiosity for nature that will lead and guide the spiritual path.

In theory, Emerson’s criteria are simple: one need only go into nature and open his imagination. Open your senses to perceptions that you can not find by using reason. “Nature has a higher end”, he writes, ”namely ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (Emerson 214). The true poet knows “the world is a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity” (Emerson 211). Learning these symbols in nature, the poet harnesses the world to his own growth. Emerson teaches, “the low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol" (Emerson 211). This is so because what is hidden in the meaning of the symbols is always eternity. This understanding of unity is highly enlightened theory and was gleaned by observing nature.

Here Emerson converges with Blake. The infinite is also a theme that permeates both works. Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake 188).

Superficially, the two essays may not appear so similar. One describes a political and social condition while the other describes a man. Easily though, could that description be turned up-side down. Blake and Emerson’s essays parallel each other in many ways. These essays both begin with a poem. Each author uses their poem to a different function. Emerson’s verse is of the childlike nature and qualities of his true poet and the world that is perceived through his eyes. The child/poet is “wildly wise” and sees “musical order and pairing rhymes” (Emerson 203). Blake uses his verse to portray the disorder of the modern condition. He brings forth dualism with “the just man” and “the villain” and the non-ceasing struggle between them.

Both sections of verse serve to reflect its coming essay and also show the differences between the essays. Blake focuses less on the poetic genius and more on the dualisms of religious and social structure. Emerson builds his true poet. The dualisms are the hurdle the true poet must overcome and are thereby secondary. Blake would agree. In a sense, Blake is demonstrating the problem where Emerson gives the solution.

The two essays are greatly intertwined and connected. Emerson’s true poet is Blake’s poet-genius. They both call their archetype a prophet. Blake says, “The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy” ( Complete Blake 1). Such a prophet is Isaiah. Isaiah says,

“I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite, organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.” (Blake 186)

The voice of Blake’s God is the sound of Emerson’s imagination. Emerson writes, “The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.” (Emerson 220). Emerson would view Isaiah as a highly imaginative man and nothing more.

Where Emerson’s poet is himself by his “very high sort of seeing,” or “the flower of [his] mind”, imagination; Blake’s poetic genius is himself by his obedience to his desires and energies. Those things deemed evil and sin by cultural norms, the poetic genius embraces. He is free. Emerson calls his poet “those who are free throughout the world” (Emerson 218).

Another way to see the connection is to examine a few of Blake’s Proverbs From Hell.

Works Cited

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Class handout.

------------------. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Emerson, Ralph. The Poet. Class Handout (ENLT 121).

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

2007-03-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

Reflections of Confusion:

Robert Browning’s

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

Robert Browning makes no attempt to make his poetry accessible for his readers. Accessible poetry to Browning is poetry that shows the reader something that he already knows and is therefore easily extractable and identifiable in the poetry. For Browning, the aim of poetry is to “put the infinite within the finite” (Erickson 134). This is clearly an intricate task, but in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Browning elevates and perfects this dictum. Childe Roland is a difficult poem because of its potential depth and obscurity, and it can be interpreted in numerous ways. I see Childe Roland as a poem illuminating the utmost spiritual confusion. This in part explains the obscurity of the poetry: the verse mimics the theme.

On a first reading it is not likely that the reader should have any decent formulation of what happens in the poem. The narrator is Roland, a man who is on a quest through a foul and hideous land to a place called the Dark Tower. He will face a difficult trial there which none have passed. On reaching the Dark Tower and his trial, the poem abruptly ends. What happens to Roland? Does his quest fail? What occurred for him at the Tower? It is all confusion and mystery.

The reader knows that Roland loathes his quest and his life. With Roland’s desire to pass his trial at the Tower, he has spoiled and squandered his present life and reality to such an abyssal degree that the victory he once sought is now beyond the capacity of his reason. All he wants now is to fail and be done with a life wretched and grotesque. Roland has dedicated his whole life to a trial which he no longer wants to win. Browning turns the whole world upside down. The poem is given in past tense, yet the reader is led to believe that the poem may end with Roland’s death (this is left unresolved by Browning). Roland claims that he “had so long suffered in this quest,” and yet he is addressed as a childe (37). A childe, as Bloom points out, is “a noble youth not yet a knight” that must accomplish an act of bravery (Bloom 81). This all seems quite queer to the reader and that is Browning’s intent. Who is the narrator? The true landscape, the identity and age of the narrator, and the meaning of the Dark Tower, are all confusing and left a mystery by the author.

Roland’s foul personality creates the atmosphere of confusion. Roland himself is unreliable. The poem begins with Roland speaking of the “hoary cripple” that “lied in every word” (2,1). Yet by the third stanza Roland speaks of that same lie as “that ominous track which, all agree, / Hides the Dark Tower” (14-15). The “hoary cripple” is clearly not lying as his directions are correct and prove to be so later in the poem. This creates the primary confusion of reality that Browning never resolves: what is real and what is not.

Roland borders on madness. He is paranoid and delusional. The cause of his psychosis is his fear of failure and the uncertainty of whether he is “fit” enough to overcome the trial that lies before him. The torment and anguish of such an obstacle casts a melancholic shadow of gloom upon his world. It is not that he has fears, all men do, but that he dwells on them unceasingly. His life physically transmogrifies into this inner despair. In depression, he no longer sees why success is worth his agonizing effort. With the tainting of his present life by fears of failure, the goal he seeks becomes devalued.

The imagery of Childe Roland suggests that the trial Roland faces at the Dark Tower is his death. The quest to The Tower is metaphorical to Roland’s life, reaching the Dark Tower is his death; the success or failure of his quest is whether, through death, he will earn an afterlife. Roland’s quest for The Dark Tower is consistent and analogous with a human understanding of life. Roland talks about “The Band” that has come to the Tower and failed, but on his own path, there is “No foot-print leading to that horrid mews, / None out of it” (135-136). No one has lived his life or walked his path. His quest is his own, and this assists the reader in understanding the grotesque landscape of the poem. The scenery of the poem is painted by the confusion of the quester only. There are no other people on his path (The cripple put him on the path but was not on it himself.). Through his journey and fear of his goal, Roland neglects and thereby spoils the life he has. He grows wicked and distrustful through the implausibility of his own mission. He dwells on it. The portrayal of the landscape of the poem is warped by this inner-squalor of Roland’s mind and spirit and are not his true physical surroundings - though, it is logical to think that his perceptions are mal-distortions of those true physical features. The confusion, then, is a spiritual confusion of how to live and how to die. Roland is too preoccupied by the future.

The future that has captivated him is the reaching of the Dark Tower. It is the goal and focal point toward which the poem and its madness move. For Roland, the Dark Tower is the realization of all of his hopes and dreams. It is the end and goal of his quest and the location of his trial. All who have come to The Tower before him have failed. He calls his predecessors “The Band” and views them with both honor and contempt (39). On reaching The Tower, Roland sees “The Band” anthropomorphized in the mountains surrounding him, “ranging along the hill-sides, met, / To view the last of [him]” (199-200). Browning leaves the ending ambiguous; whether or not Roland succeeds or fails like all the others is maybe the most tempting mystery of the poem.

The Dark Tower is the incarnation of his fear; it is the mystery that plagues his dreams and poisons his reality. The Tower is a “round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, / Built of brown stone, without a counterpart / In the whole world” (182-184). What is important is that the Tower is always in the future. The poem ends with his reaching it. It is the goal, but the poem represents the quest, and the quest is obscene. It is logical then, to see Roland’s quest and the Tower as reflective of each other. Because his fear and knowledge of the Tower predate his quest, the Tower, then, has tainted his quest and not visa versa.

If the reader believes that the Dark Tower is a metaphor for Roland’s death, then it is understandable why he sees death everywhere around him. In each example, in everything Roland encounters, there is an image of death. It starts with “the skull-like laugh” of “the hoary cripple,” to the metaphor of the dying man, to the failures of “the Band,” to the horse who “might be dead,” and on and on (10,2,39,79). The horse is a telling example because, through the suffering of the horse, Roland actually sees the metaphor for his own life where he doesn’t see it elsewhere (meaning he doesn’t realize that it is he that is projecting his reality). He says, “I never saw a brute I hated so,” as he surely hates his life (79). In the suffering of the horse he sees his own suffering and misery. The example is also curious in his statement that he thinks the horse “must be wicked to suffer so” (80). There is no other direct evidence of Roland hating himself, but he clearly hates his life, and here the reader sees that he holds himself to blame and not some higher force or being.

Roland meets also “Apollyon’s” bird, another image of death, which he deems as a guide for the remainder of his quest (160). The devil-bird brings a new image to all of Roland’s projections. Now Hell can be considered as a label that the reader may choose to categorize this world of Roland’s. It is fitting. Due to the shear desolation and near unrivaled grotesqueness of Browning’s landscape, it is conceivable that Roland is in Hell. However, I don’t insinuate that Roland is dead. The past tense would support such a claim, but he has not yet faced the Dark Tower and his judgment. Childe Roland is in a living Hell, self-created and born of his own fear and confusion. It is that he cannot see that he is in hell, and that his path there is self-appointed, that is the author’s interest. If Roland creates his own reality by projecting his inner-consciousness upon his landscape, then where he built a hell with bricks of fear, he could have grown a heaven by planting seeds of acceptance and reaping beauty and peace. The fear Roland festers is by worrying and living in the confusion of an uncertain future. It can be inferred, then, that by living and concentrating on the present, Roland could have forgone his confusion of the future and found value in the present.

It is with this thought [inner-reflection] where the deepest interpretation of Childe Roland can be found. Browning himself promotes the analogue to life and death, but that itself serves as a metaphor for a more subtle meaning. Life and death are analogous for path and destination. This is similar to quest and the Dark Tower, but now in a universal sense and understanding. I refer to all goals and the means by which we come to them. This is the “infinite within the finite” that Browning writes with his poetry. He shows the reader a quester is a miserable search for a Tower. The reader is lead to sense that it represents his life and death; it does, but it is also his every action, his every pursuit and goal.

Through Roland, Browning shows what happens when a person is fixated on the future goal and not appreciative of the path and means by which he acquires it. Love and beauty are not inconspicuously absent, rather they are blatantly and intentionally so. These are the missing elements of Roland’s life. Roland once mentions “not shaming such tender love,” but the love to which he refers is itself twisted. He speaks of the love of those who would plan his death and burial while in his presence. He hopes to die in order to not shame this “tender love” by making their plans untimely. This also is only a thought in his mind. Roland never mentions any family or friends, anyone whom he loves or is loved by. He is alone and cannot see love or beauty anywhere. In fact, he never looks for it. This is the root of his confusion. The hell he suffers is his perception. There are always two points of view and Roland only sees the darker half. Wasn’t that horse’s perseverance commendable? What of the solitude, or the sunset he saw? The possibilities of the present were not important to Roland.

At the end, I believe Roland realizes that the present moment should have been important to him. There is a change in the mood of the poem in the last stanzas, a stay in the confusion. There is a new vitality in the language, an optimism in the phrasing that is new to Roland. It begins in, “Dunce, / Dotard, a-dozing at the very nunce” (178-179). This language is almost playful. Roland seems to rise up and challenge his own death. He doesn’t flinch, saying, “Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!” (192). The change is that the moment that Roland has been awaiting for so long has finally arrived. He is on the threshold of what he has long desired. The uplifting language represents the uplifting spirit of Roland. He feels a joy and in this he finds a small sort of revelation. Roland calls the Tower “blind as the fool’s heart” (182). He is the fool and only now, on reaching his goal, can he see or sense beauty (the beauty of accomplishing a goal). Only on reaching his goal can he realize how blind he has been along his quest.

Roland is a Tom O’bedlam character whose dread for his own future dominates and therefore taints his own reality. Only at arriving at his destination does he see that his confused reality could have been otherwise, that, had he chosen, “The dying sunset kindled within the cleft,” could have kindled for other glories in the world (189). Through Roland, Browning teaches his readers to appreciate the moment, to live in the present, or else you may make for yourself a hell. Look for beauty and love in the world, in the present, and the path shall be as worthwhile as the destination. Is it too late for Roland? Browning doesn’t share, but Roland blows his horn triumphantly and sings his own song: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York:

Scribner, 2000.

Browning, Robert. The Poems of Robert Browning.

Ed. Donald Smalley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Comp., 1956.

Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His

Audiences. Ithica: Cornell University Press,

1984.

Hamlet's Melancholy

2007-03-15T03:16:00.000-07:00

Lord Hamlet’s Melancholy

In a lecture given to The British Academy, C. S. Lewis defends Hamlet against the various schools of criticism that have attacked the play. Lewis breaks up such criticism into “three main schools or tendencies:” those who believe that Shakespeare has not been given proper explanation for Hamlet’s delay (and Hamlet is therefore a theatrical failure}, those who do not think Hamlet delays at all but goes right to work as situation allows him, and lastly, those who see Hamlet’s procrastination as due to some quirk of psychology (Lewis 1-2). Like Lewis, I hold with the later understanding of the play, as Lewis defends himself by relating Hamlet’s enigmatic nature to the ……………………………, I intend to justify my point while disproving the first, that Hamlet has no adequate explication for his inaction and delay. He most certainly does and it can be justly represented by a deeper look into the troubled psychology of a man suffering extreme melancholy.

Dr. Johnson is one of the first critics to acknowledge that for “the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause” (Lewis 1). Eliot is a more modern critic, who for the above reason, views the play as “most certainly an artistic failure” (Eliot 123). He believes that “Mr. Robinson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother (Eliot 124). How anything about this play can be seen as “certain” or “undoubtedly true,” I am not sure, but I do believe there to more than “adequate cause” to be present in this play, and it is not Hamlet’s emotion toward Gertude solely but his melancholy that encompasses this and many other causes.

The more orthodox interpretation would align with Coleridge, Goethe, and Lewis, that Hamlet procrastinates because of something in his psychological makeup. It is in this cause where many critics differ by great variation. Shakespeare gives too little certainty to supply any interpretation with enough evidence to convince such skeptics as Eliot. No one has ever created an enigma such as Lord Hamlet. But today, there is a better understanding of the condition which he “undoubtedly” (dare I use the term) suffers from. Hamlet complains about “how ill’s all here around my heart” (V.ii.186). Hamlet rarely speaks, as he does here to Horatio, sincerely about his melancholy. It is implicit everywhere in his irony and his soliloquies. What he calls melancholy is nothing less than what in modern terms is called depression. Depression is not only a legitimate cause for inaction, but next to being dead, may be the best. Depression is a chemical imbalance of the brain that induces inactivity. If ever there was a man who had cause to depression it is Prince Hamlet.

Hamlet’s melancholy is most clearly put forth in his first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstrern, but pervades the entirety of the play:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of excises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that his goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory . . .The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (II.ii.280-291)

Generally, Hamlet is not to be believed when speaking in company. He feigns madness through a rich and intelligent irony that often does betray his motives, though secret to his observers. However, in the company of Horatio and in the solitude of his soliloquies he should be perceived as honest and straight.

When alone, Hamlet pours out his heart with the weight of great sadness. “What a rogue and peasant slave am I!” seems always to be his self-analysis (II.ii.502). He questions, “Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain,” but it is only him (II.ii.523-524). This is Hamlet’s own feeling toward himself. The word coward is repeated by Hamlet numerous times in his soliloquies. If Hamlet is not attacking himself, he is contemplating ending his life. Before he even knows of his father’s murder, he wishes for “self-slaughter,” except that it is against God’s “canon” (I.ii.132). Before his “feigned madness,” his melancholy is already present, already torturing his mind, even in the first scenes of the play.

His melancholy is sincere and will prove to be extreme. As Eliot believed, it is anger toward his mother for her ostensible betrayal of the dead King Hamlet. I believe this to be only one of a number of causes, all contributing the vast sullenness of Hamlet. As already noted, Hamlet is melancholic at the start of the play. Gertude, in seeking the cause of Hamlet’s madness, names the cause of his melancholy best, saying, “I doubt it is no other but the main: / His father’s death, and our o’erhasty marriage” (II.ii.56-57).

If this alone were not enough, Hamlet would soon learn that his father did not only die but was murdered. This knowledge given by his father’s ghost sends Hamlet into a frenzy of rage and despair. He is given the daunting task of revenge which means killing a king. He ghost beckons Hamlet, “remember me,” and Hamlet responds (to himself), “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / . . . / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (I.v.91, 99-103). This remembrance is two fold. First, it is his filial obligation to avenge his father. Secondly, and most interestingly, it is a remembrance of the materialization of death that is branded into Hamlet’s mind. The thought of his father “confined to fast in fires” is a burden all but unimaginable (I.v.11). Is Hamlet’s melancholy not “certainly” substantial and severe? As depression, couldn’t it “undoubtedly” be the cause of Hamlet’s delay?

Life still gets worse for Hamlet. Shortly after Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, the King and Queen notice some change in him. It is here in Act 2 that they summon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet and attempt to divulge his secret sorrow. It would be amiss to think that anything in Shakespeare happens by accident, and this just so happens to be precisely the time that Ophelia begins repelling Hamlet’s letters and favors. At Ophelia’s burial Hamlet shows that he truly did love her. This rejection then must have been difficult at a time when his life is already crumbling down on top of him. Ophelia not only rejects him, but betrays him as well. It is impossible to know whether Hamlet senses Polonius is spying on Hamlet and Ophelia’s conversation, but it is possibly implied and is also one of a few explanations of Hamlet’s later cruelty toward Ophelia.

Maybe less painful then the betrayal of Ophelia is the betrayal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He finds their cause out quickly and easily, and they are fuel on an already blazing flame of Hamlet’s depression.

Hamlet never mentions that his throne has been usurped by his uncle. This is telling of his deep sorrow for the loss of his father that to stand up for something of value is so far beyond him. Isn’t it conceivable that the best way to exact his revenge on Claudius would be to first steal his throne. By gaining the throne, Hamlet would no longer have to kill a king. Claudius would be much more vulnerable and much less attended. Yet the only action Hamlet can summon is inaction. Feigning madness is only an externalization and an active response to his depression. To that, he is embracing his sorrow instead of combating it. Today it is well accepted that severe depression can rarely be repaired without the use of drug related therapy. As noble as Hamlet may be, his mind has betrayed him with sorrowful thoughts and lead him down a path that has no clear return. His flaw is not visible or understandable but in these terms.

A further verification of this is Hamlets desire to kill himself. Death itself is everywhere in the play. The play opens with a ghost, death incarnate, and ends with a scene of great carnage that “becomes the field, but here, [in the palace hall,] shows much amiss” (V.ii.381). The play is Hamlet’s pursuit of his uncle’s death, his desire for his own death, and in the end, the death of all but Horatio. In Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Roland taints and warps his whole reality because of his never ceasing thoughts of death and what would come after. The same could be said of Hamlet. His vigorous morning for his father and his disgust at his mother manifest themselves as melancholy or “the loss of all [his] mirth” (II.ii.280). “The earth,” to Hamlet, “seems like a sterile promontory” (II.ii.282-283). This is an understatement of his world and Roland’s. They are grotesque. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”(---------). In part it is Hamlet’s attitude.

Living with such rancor, Hamlet has devalued his own existence. He ponders, “To be or not to be, that is the question” to question whether his life was worth the effort it takes to live, and further, whether it is worth fighting for what he believes (III.i.51). He wishes only

To die, to sleep –

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That the flesh is heir to - (III.i.60-63)

He has often, however ironically, commented that his life is not worth “a pin’s fee” and (I.iv.65). In regard to Polonius’ company, Hamlet says that there is nothing he would “more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life” (II.ii.209-210).

Hamlet himself does not understand his disease. He doesn’t know why he is so “unpregnant of [his] cause” (II.ii.520). He craves his vengeance but is unable to initiate it. He compares himself against the player who can summon such emotion for Hecuba: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her? What would he do, / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?” (II.ii.511-514). The soldiers on their way to fight in Poland are more determined than him. He sees “The imminent death of twenty thousand men, / That for a fantasy and trick of fame / Go to their graves like beds” (IV.iv.60-62). What they fight for “straw” (IV.iv.26). Seeing this only further plunges Hamlet into his melancholy. He feels like a “peasant slave,”a “coward,” his self-insults go on and on. Is it any wonder he didn’t chose to fight for his throne?

Laertes is a fine example of how Hamlet would act without the weight of such melancholy upon him. All in the play agree that Laertes is “a very noble youth” (V.i.191). Laertes sweeps to the revenge of his father in a way Hamlet wishes he could. Laertes even gains the opportunity to seize the throne as Hamlet should. Laertes is untroubled by doubts or fears of failure although he is arguably less endowed than is Hamlet. It is Hamlet’s superior brain that is also his undoing. Laertes acts while Hamlet is muddled in the darkness of his own indecision and grief.

Hamlet’s melancholy “undoubtedly” pervades the breadth of the play and can be linked clearly to all that Hamlet does and fails to do. His disease is the invisible factor that handicaps this most “noble youth.” The fear and doubt that Hamlet expresses in his soliloquies make him an Everyman. He stands as the great figure of English literature. All people have lost and suffered so. What is especially interesting to note is that shortly before writing this play he lost his son, Hamnet. Dostoyevsky, after losing his son, Alyosha, wrote The Brothers Karamozov in which Alyosha (Alexie) is the luminary. In Hamlet, Shakespeare does similarly. Hamlet is not Hamnet, but Shakespeare himself. In the play, it is the father that is lost and not the son so the name cannot be the same. The emotional power, the melancholy and remorse, the anger and self-pity are what the author himself experienced and wrote about so vividly. It has been said that only Hamlet could have written Hamlet.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot

2007-03-15T03:12:00.000-07:00

Greater Expectations:

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

To wait is an inherent part of the human existence. For this reason, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is written for us all and for all time. The play’s appeal has not waned over time: its universal theme is as relevant today as it was in France in the early fifties when it was first performed. Hugh Kenner notes “that [the play] resembles France occupied by the Germans, in which the author spent the war years. How much waiting must have gone on in that bleak world” (30). This interpretation certainly fits soundly into the play, but there seems to be much more than a simple metaphor for Beckett’s war experience happening, as Kenner himself would agree. The play is loaded with religious and metaphysical allusions and references. I see Beckett portraying a world of vast absence of meaning, a world of nothingness that he believed to be the spiritual misunderstanding of Christian society, waiting on a transcendent god. In Waiting for Godot, the characters squander their lives by relying and waiting on a force outside of themselves for their salvation. This force, literally Godot, never arrives, and the characters struggle in a world “dominated by absence” (Yuan 4).

Beckett, by presenting the absence of things, demonstrates their importance. Also, he emphasizes the importance of that which causes the absence in the beginning. Waiting is the theme that is clearly at the center of the plot of the play. The conviction of Estragon and Vladimir to spend seemingly their whole lives in expectation of some external gratification is parodied, suggesting the deeper implications of the play. They are placing meaning in something outside of themselves and outside of their control. A simple understanding of existentialism would hold that meaning must come from inside and that its value “is greater because it cannot be taken away by external forces” (“Summery of . . . ). Godot, or the concept of Godot, is this sort of external force; he robs them of potential to understand their world.

The play is imbued with a substantial number of allusions to Christianity. When Pozzo asks Estragon for his name, Estragon responds, “Adam” (25). The analogy here would be that Adam was thrown out of Eden into the wild, to make a life without the beneficence of the lord. Like Estragon, Adam was forced to live in a world without meaning and in a state of “dreadful privation” (8). In Act II, Estragon tries to guess the names of Pozzo and Lucky. He guesses “Cain and “Abel” (53). At another point, Estragon says, “all my life I’ve compared myself to [Christ]” (34). Vladinir contemplates repenting and discusses the Gospels (8, 9). Estragon says, “I’m going [to hell]” and compares their request to Godot as “a sort of prayer” (13). These allusions to Christianity serve to align Estragon and Vladimir with the Christian tradition. The temporal and spatial absences suggest that the play could take place wherever and whenever, but it could also be always and everywhere. This broad frame is necessary to represent Christian culture as a whole over time.

The Christian God is a transcendent god who gives his rewards in an afterlife. In essence, Christians must “wait” for heaven in the same way Estragon and Vladimir are “waiting for Godot” (7). If God is dead, as Nietzsche teaches, then there would be no external meaning, no meaning outside of the self. Dostoyevsky says, “If God didn’t exist, anything would be possible”(-----). Nothing, however, is possible for Estragon and Vladimir: they are tied, “tied to Godot! What an idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment” (14). Of course, there is no such thing as a “moment” in this play.

What Vladimir and Estragon want “is the impression that [they] exist” (44). Whether that is understood as having meaning in their lives or being happy, it is very much the same thing. If Godot was to come, he could offer Estragon and Vladimir work and security. Work would give them that rock, that center of purpose, pride, meaning, and happiness. They wait because “It’s safer,” not because it is the only way (12). They choose to gamble on Godot instead of actively pursuing their own opportunities. Opportunities are made proactively; meanwhile, they sit bored with their lives out of their hands.

What is the absence that Beckett uses to create, what has been called a “negative fable” (___)? Beckett’s main characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for a man named Godot, who either doesn’t come or doesn’t exist. This is the primary absence of the play. Yuan says that Godot “becomes both transcendent and enigmatic” (5). He is the hope of Estragon and Vladimir for a better life than the wretched life they both now lead. Their existence is deplorable. Nothing appears real or believable: “Indeed Beckett’s play is dominated by a prevalent sense of emptiness” (Yuan 4). All things are lacking – except void.

The reader first gets the sense that there is an absence of time. “Time has stopped” (Beckett 24). Estragon and Vladimir argue,

Estragon: We came here yesterday.

Vladimir: Ah no, there you’re mistaken.

Estragon: What did we do yesterday?

Vladimir: What did we do yesterday?

Estragon: Yes.

Vladimir: Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when

you’re about. (10)

In Act II, which is supposedly the next day, this scene is nearly repeated; Estragon asks, “And all this was yesterday, you say?” (39). It is as if there is no past at all; each days resembles the last and the next. The desired future, the arrival of Godot, never occurs. There is no sense of time anywhere in the play. Another character, Pozzo, has a watch but loses it (30). This is very representative of time’s absence in the play. The time that does exist, being one day turning into next, is incongruous or even absurd. The text claims that it is the following day, but Vladimir’s recollection alone would lead the reader to believe this to be true. Pozzo and Lucky, who come the previous day, come again down the road and stop to pass the time with Estragon and Vladimir. The absurdity is that Pozzo is blind the second day and was not the first. He claims that he has been blind for some time (24). Lucky, who went into a mental tirade on the first day, is now dumb (24). How can this be? It is possible that a great deal of time has passed – more than just a day. This all is quite strange and struck Vladimir that way as well. Estragon, who has been called “the embodiment of estranged agony,” is aware that he has no memory and is not surprised at all by these irregularities (Yuan 5). The reader feels that it could be any day. The timelessness so permeates the play that the reader feels this has and will go on forever.

As Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, there is “nothing to be done” (7). This is the first spoken line of the play. This is a play about nothingness, and specifically, the only action is the act of waiting, a non-action. Beckett demonstrates the doing of nothing by presenting things that either go undone or are done with great delay. Vladimir says, “I’m going” four times and never does so (19-21). At the end of Act I, Pozzo tries to leave but delays:

Pozzo: I don’t seem able . . . (long hesitation)

. . . to depart.

Estragon: Such is life. (31)

On the second day, Pozzo falls down and needs help. Vladimir says, “lets do something, while we have the chance,” and then gives a long speech on the subject instead of helping Pozzo off the ground (51). It is very comic, but at the same time, it shows Vladimir and Estragon’s inability to act. As Estragon enters the stage in the beginning of Act II, he says that he has been beaten up by a bunch of men. When asked by Vladimir what he had done to deserve the beating, Estragon says, “I wasn’t doing anything” (38). This serves as an outstanding analogy for the play as a whole. Vladimir and Estragon suffer for not “doing anything” (38).

The location of the play is also important to note. The entire play takes place in one spot: “A country road, A tree. Evening” (6). The play gets no more specific, except we discover that there is also a mound (7). The generic nature of the location makes it possible that this could take place feasibly anywhere in the world (outside of the desert, arctic, ect.). The scene could also take place at any time throughout history. Understanding that the play is not grounded temporally or spatially opens the possibilities broader critique of Christian society.

With the absence of temporal and spatial connectedness, there is also a complete breakdown of communication. The “void” that each character experiences is clearly individual. Estragon doesn’t recognize anything in the second act from the first (40). Vladimir believes he knows, but is swayed: “nothing is certain when you’re about” (10). When in conversation, they are never able to communicate. In a sense, they are simply talking to themselves (21). Vladimir pleads, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?,” trying to get Estragon (Gogo) to follow and respond to his train of thought (9). Vladimir is not much more capable than Estragon. He once restates the same line, “You want to get rid of him?” six times until he gives up recieving an answer from Pozzo (21). On a rare occasion, they do get on the same train of thought and create a witty dialogue (13), but often their talks end with the loss of Estragon’s memory (generally, it is absent, not lost, as you cannot lose something that you do not have to begin with). He begins repetitively stating the same lines.

Estragon: Our movements.

Vladimir: Our elevations.

Estragon: Our relaxations.

Vladimir: Our elongations.

Estragon: Our relaxations. (49)

This inability to communicate causes a desire for separation (40). They never do separate, as they never do anything that might be in their best interest, such as leave the tree in pursuit of other opportunities. It is comic chaos, the center of which, Godot, is absent.

Over all, the reality of the play is absurd. Not only is there no sense of time or place, but the people and things are all mistaken. When Pozzo enters in both acts, he is mistaken for Mr. Godot. Beckett makes a witty allusion, here, to the broader meaning of the play when Pozzo remarks that he is “Made in God’s image!” (15). No wonder Estragon mistook him for Godot. Godot sends a boy as a messenger at the end of each act. Vladimir believes that it is the same boy, but the boy doesn’t recognize him (33). Everything gets lost in the play as well: Pozzo’s pipe, watch, vaporizer, and most of all, his train of thought (23, 25, 30). Estragon says, “There is no lack of void” and everything seems to fall into it (42). Nothing could be said more truly about this play. Their reality is represented by what is inside Vladimir’s hat and Estragon’s boot as they gaze inside them – nothingness (8). This nothingness manifests itself a misery. Estragon claims spending his whole “lousy life crawling about in the mud!” (39). “Everything oozes” and “that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth” (39). This reality is so absurd that they would prefer Lucky’s existence to their own. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche claims that “man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose” (299). Lucky, as low as he is, has a purpose: he is forced to act. This is preferable to Estragon and Vladimir, who have only the void and boredom. They have no purpose at all. This wretched state sparks Estragon’s thought, “We are all born mad, some remain so,” He implies that he is one of those whom remain crazy because none of the world around him makes any sense to him (51).

Beckett, by emphasizing what is absent and its gross effects, creates an analogy for our culture. This play should not be misunderstood as an analysis of the human condition however. We, as a culture, are not imprisoned in the “void” as Vladimir and Estragon are not forced to wait. Waiting is their choice; believing in Godot is their choice. If they were to walk away, it is anyone’s guess as to what they might encounter (since they don’t exist outside of the play, a good guess is nothing). Regardless, they are certainly not confined to the “void.” Beckett is presenting an option: the passive or the active. “If God didn’t exist, then anything would be possible”: this is an active participation in life. Since there is no time in the play, Beckett also suggests that there is only the present moment. Waiting is then akin to death or sleep; it is a non-living; it is the passive choice. This is the heart of Beckett’s critique. It is senseless to wait for something that may never come and waste what we do have. The beauty of opportunity is only shown as not being like the reality of the play. It seems the only rational choice for Vladimir and Estragon is to quit waiting. The irony that maybe one day Godot does come is impossible; the absence of time is the absence of the future. With the stagnation of time, the present moment is perpetuated. Beckett emphasizes the importance of making the most of this instant, and finding an experience of being alive, here and now. This experience is what Estragon and Vladimir claimed to be seeking, an “impression that [they] exist” (44).

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Inc.,

1956.

Kenner, Hugh. “A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett” Syracuse:

Syracuse Press, 1996 [1973].

Yuan, Yuan. “Representation and Absense: Paradoxical Structure

in Postmodern Texts.” Heldref Publications. 1997.

“Summary of Some Main Points From Sarte’s Existentialism and

Human Emotion.”