lizardwatcher

Self-Control

2006-05-12T12:46:22Z

Don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell, I don't care how relevant the phrase "Speak to Silence" is, don't title the TCI essay after a LARP spell!

Poetry

2006-04-27T17:45:08Z

Found a lovely bit of poetry today. Thought I'd share it. Comments very much appreciated. See if you can guess the author - or origin, or date. Points for any useful fact.

--

Bayonet
may FPC the simonson.
Some semaphore
or electroencephalogram
or koala it's nudge,
Amy,
chamber.
See grist! Exploratory -
on turnpike, on majesty
it's chronograph! Use
some musket and nuclei
in tenfold or prank -
but toxicology may colloq,
roof, marksman.
It's californium, on, seek,
see - adobe some alpha
it leaven be delft.
See Chiang, Jehovah
on cerberus be fleshy!
A diversion, permission
see narrate or Diana
and priory or flush.
The primeval - some epicyclic -
may dragonhead;
Fascist.

Comments

2006-04-24T02:24:17Z

Received comments back from Joyce!Postgrad on Joyce essay; they essentially boil down to "very funny, and you're right about the Bloomsday thing, but a. you don't have a consistent argument as such, b. you don't know what you're talking about, and c. you're a scary madwoman, please stop talking about wolves".

Fair on all counts, I think.

Essay Plan

2006-04-20T07:51:19Z

And so I was all like Out out demon modernism I will eat your shoes! and it was all like dude those are my shoes and I was all like I care not for your shoes! and it was all like dude and I was all like No! and it was all like Leonard Cohen

“Modern Literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind . . . those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface” (JAMES JOYCE)

Discuss, with reference to Joyce and Woolf.

Balestre: Pondering the question; In which Joyce throws me the gage, but breaks the code duello in restricting my choice of weapon and piste. I accept.
Contretemps: Why do we need to understand the Other?: In which the landscape from a moving train features largely. The purpose and meaning of predictions and oracles, the collective unconscious in Jung, and the fluid nature of time, are discussed. (8, 13, 15, 20)
Contra-caveating parade: How might Joyce and Woolf attempt to understand the Other, and why does it all boil down to Thought?: In which I discuss the quest for comprehension of the other; the tarot, divination, Bloomsday (with footnote on the Cult of Celebrity), sybils, Joyce’s obvious contempt for and respect for mediums, and a final note on bibliomancy. (4, 18, 27)
St George’s Guard: Why can’t Joyce and Woolf attempt to understand the Other through conscious thought?: In which modes of thinking are discussed; the difference between individuals in active critical thought (Colonialism, psychology) makes obsolete the study of the active mind as a tool for world-comprehension, and thus exchanged for the id; in which the active self and the narrator are mentioned, and the value of the latter queried, with reference to the parody in Cyclops; in which Jung and the shared humanity of the collective unconscious makes a brief reappearance, to rapturous applause. (2, 3, 19)
Neuvieme: In which the value of art and futility are briefly, and somewhat tangentially, touched upon. But why is the rum gone? Why do the writers write? What’s the point? Why create in order to discover? Is it really creation? Convolution! Futility! Lots of convolution! Dancing on the edge of oblivion is also mentioned. (1, aconite, 6, 8, 10, 22, 9, 11)
Attack au Fer: What’s this Twilight business all about, then? In which I discuss twilight in its essential value as a liminal thing; as a descent into the darkness of the human id (LIKE PROMETHEUS!!1eleventyone); as a signifier of the Other, when the wolves come out (or possibly in) to eat you; I begin to chip away at Joyce’s guard, by continuing my “wolf” metaphor in a terribly clever way I haven’t quite worked out yet, and discussing the primitive man, adrenaline, the fight-or-fight reflex; V.W.’s wings help the analogy along, appearing from her subconscious (or possibly from Heaven) to knock those nasty wolves flat on their furry backsides; and I avoid making an atrocious pun. (24, 28, 21)
Corps-a-corps: If Woolf is concerned with Real Things, which she is, and I’m arguing that it’s All About The Subconscious Baby, how’s that work? Of course, by referring back to my argument; because the subconscious is constantly at work, like a hungry thing masticating stuff, and it needs something to masticate. Also, Real Things are better understood by the subconscious than by the ego or superego, which are foolish and pale and sit in rooms alone with hands pressed to forehead, drinking absinthe; whereas the subconscious is bluff and hearty (and red in tooth and claw), and hides up trees waiting to drop on gazelles and/or spends its time drinking with its mates down the pub. (29, 9, 12, 16, 23)
Jews!: How does The Other appear in the novels of Joyce and Woolf? Jews, religion, and suicide all feature in this exciting and action-packed paragraph, which builds on the previous paragraph’s fear of the other within by examining the other without. Regular listeners may recognize such highlights as Dorian Grey, Beowulf and the Vitriarchs. (7, 24, 26)
Coup lancé: Where does all this envelope-pushing business come from? In which I discuss taboos, Hindus, beauty, aesthetics and somehow manage to relate them all back to my argument. (What’s my argument again? Oh yeah, active passive subconscious mind Jews divination wank.) These things are secretions, like butterflies. Or possibly Oysters. (5, 17)
A Palpable Hit: In which I sell out mightily by noting that it’s not all as black and white as all that, and really what the modern novel is concerned about is the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious and how it’s not really a line it’s more a fuzzy sort of permeable membrane, and honestly at the end of the day everyone’s a little bit unconscious all the time and I’m terribly sorry I insulted your wife Mr. Joyce and I’ll make a full apology to her so can I please have my sword back and could you possibly move that main-gauche just a little further away from my throat because you’re sort of drawing blood a little bit? (13)

Joyce essay

2006-04-19T18:14:09Z

"Modern Literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind... those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface" (JAMES JOYCE)
Discuss, with reference to Joyce and Woolf.

So far, I have:

1. Trains!
2. Jews!
3. Suicide!
4. Taboos and envelope-pushing
5. Aesthetics and beauty

Can anyone else suggest anything I should add? I'm reading a bunch of articles off lion.chadwyck at the moment, which are useful. Some of them have words like "masochism" and "lesbians" in the title.

Hey, it's a living...

Lies, Damned Lies and Mystics

2006-04-18T00:05:42Z

Dear Helen:

Three days ago, when you annotated your copy of The Dry Salvages, you clearly thought that you could prove the entire poem was a form of litteromancy on Eliot's part, and hence that the passage damning forms of divination as "usual/Pastimes and drugs" was hypocrisy.

You did not seek to illuminate how, exactly, you intended to prove this, assuming that your future self would take the note "Litteramancy. Hypocrisy. Aha!" as a mnemonic aid to rediscover the blinding revelation you had experienced.

My dear, you were entirely, tragically wrong.

I shall now attempt to construct a proof of this theory - not because I think you were right, you understand, or because I have the faintest hope of achieving whatever relevatory heights you were experiencing when you scribbled down your visionary knowledge - but because I've got fuckall else of substance for this essay; a thesis, a great many examples, a great many quotes, but no linking material as such... no question, no structure that doesn't simply involve going through the notes to The Waste Land and exposing the enormity of Eliot's lies.

If anyone reading this has any ideas, incidentally, feel free to help.

Yrs,

H.

Lies, Damned Lies and Mystics: Mysticism and Authorial Dishonesty in The Dry Salvages and The Waste Land

“I do not know much about gods.” (‘The Dry Salvages’)

Dishonesty and Mysticism in The Dry Salvages and The Waste Land

The Dry Salvages and The Waste Land are both full of lies and mysticism. Why does Eliot lie to his readers? Are all the examples of dishonesty really dishonesty, or are some “honest” mistakes? Why the obsession with mysticism; does Eliot seek to educate his readers, or can the concepts he expresses only be expressed in terms of superstition and religion? Why the formal borrowing from religion? Does he really believe that nothing is secular, or that nothing should be secular, as he states in “Religion and Literature”?

In this question it is important to avoid the “intentional fallacy”.

Examples of Dishonesty

The dramatic monologue as lie – speaker reveals more about themselves than they intend, especially in reflexive statements. Cf. “My Last Duchess”, “Bishop Orders his Tomb at Padua”. The Waste Land as a study in dramatic monologues.

Waste Land II: “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies” – coming at the end of a passage written in the vernacular, the sudden Shakespearian (taken directly from Hamlet 4.5 – Ophelia’s farewell lines) is a rude insertion of the poet. Its purposes are many (to recall the earlier frivolity of false emotion, Shakespearian rag, and contrast directly to the real life of the apparently “less cultured” lower classes; or to zoom out, provide context, a farewell from the second section of the poem as well as an IC farewell from its characters, or other things), but the fact is it’s dishonest, it’s an Out Of Context moment. The entire thing is a refutation of the assumption that English speech naturally falls into iambic pentameter, and all of this on one line – Shakespearian originally, but no more! – does the same…

Is the linguistic conceit of the poetry dishonest? Poetry is supposed to be understood; is the obfuscation dishonest? Does the poet really expect the reader to understand the multilingual statements? Does it matter?

Begins with Dante, obviously attempts to reference Dante, but remember that Dante “defended his use of the vernacular by St. Thomas’s dictum that art ought to give us the beauty connatural to man and he felt that he could achieve this beauty more adequately in his native tongue” (Crowned Knot)

“Mr Eliot never withdrew into the private despair he described in The Waste Land” (Crowned Knot)

“a dancer who could not be separated from the Dionysiac frenzy of his dance” (Crowned Knot)

“When Mr. Eliot remarked that “the poetry does not matter”, he was telling us that poetry is not an adequate substitute for religion.” (Crowned Knot)”

“the poet, like the mystic, must learn to accept his own suffering as a reminder of the sacred wound of love” (Crowned Knot)

“…yet we have no hint of the nature of the history implied. A feeling is claimed by the poet, the motivation, or meaning of which is with-held, and of which in all likelihood he has no clearer notion than his reader can have.” (Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (New York 1947), talking about Gerontian, quoted in Crowned Knot.)

“We do not need to know their past histories or anything else about their personalities [in order to get the religious meaning]” (Crowned Knot)

“Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.” And this could lead to “cultural disintegration”; it’s dangerous. (Notes Towards the Definition of Culture)

“No culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion”, “the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people” (Notes Towards)

“Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into aesthetical sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art.” (Notes Towards – but everyone’s a critic, right? Or should be…)

AHA! “the actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything else” (Notes Towards)

Although modern mysticism is presented as dishonest and mercenary (Sosostris), we are supposed to read something deep in the Thunder Sermon and the Upanishads. Or are we? There is a dichotomy here. Either we should believe both or neither, or there should be evidence presented for modern mysticism being less cool than ancient…

Lies in the Tarot: false Tarot, false cards, he associates “quite arbitrarily” with the Fisher King (does he? What’s the significance of the Three of Staves? Balance. Caduceus. The fisher king as self-healer.)

“Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long” – bollocks, it’s very long! The author as self-presenter; more examples of lies. Why does he do this? WHY DOES ELIOT LIE? Why? Why? THUMBS! Show me your THUMBS!

Can I do something with the fact that so many of the first lines end with present participles? It’s about endings, breeding, beginnings, but all seems to terminate with doing. Is this the Upanishad principle, the Thunder Sermon, to be not to do? Is the flaw being pointed out that Marie does – all her freedoms, when she was (frightened), have been curtailed, and now she can only do (read). There is a lie here. The lie is that Eliot does (writes)…

Gods. I do not know much about gods. But the river is a strong brown god, the sea is many gods, and part of the sense of the poem is an exploration of divinity; annunciation (and the bell), Mary, Death as god, Krishna, Mars,

Formal structures in the Dry Salvages are borrowed from religious and philosophical sources; of course he knows plenty about gods, he knows about religion. “Unpropitiated/By worshippers of the machine” – here the machine is presented as a god.

“Clangs
The bell.”  Human intervention, but also cooperation; the sea clangs the bell which humans have made. Is it a marker of human intention?  Death. Mysticism.

Various divinations are reduced to “usual/Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press”; and indeed are heretical in his belief. But is this poem itself not an attempt to communicate with the supernatural, automatic writing of sorts, litteramancy? “Riddle the inevitable/With playing cards”, oh, he mocks it, but isn’t he doing it himself?

“No source of movement/Driven by daemonic, chthonic/Powers” – make up your mind! Which is it?

The refuge of the poet: that futility does not diminish beauty. That the yew-tree will be nourished and beautiful, though our aim is “Never here to be realised”.

Last stanza of section II of the Dry Salvages isn’t poetry until “time the destroyer”. So he lies about poetry.

Krishna EXPLICITLY DID NOT MEAN THIS! So you can’t wonder if that’s what Krishna meant; this is another lie, a test for the reader. Krishna said to Arjuna on the battlefield (among many other things) “The contacts of the senses with the sense objects give rise to the feelings of heat and cold, and pain and pleasure. They are transitory and impermanent. Therefore, (learn to) endure them, O Arjuna.” (Bhagavad Gita 2.14) – “the agony abides”, “the moments of agony… are likewise permanent”, no they’re fucking not.

“vegetation ceremonies” in the notes, “Again the spirit of vegetation is sometimes represented by a king and queen, a lord and lady, or a bridegroom and bride” (Golden Bough) – the quest for rain as a vegetation ceremony, Tiresias as both male and female, watching the sexual act which though it brings no pleasure brings rain. Fertility. He says that the reader will recognise certain references to vegetation ceremonies, but he’s being clever; the reader will create certain references to vegetation ceremonies, and since both the Waste Land and the Golden Bough are occupied with the very stuff of life and art and culture and religion itself, there will always be parallels. By adding that note, Eliot has ensured that regardless of what he intended, the poem is now full of vegetation ceremonies. Lithuanian sacrifices: a black cock to Perkunas the thunder-god (Frazer). (48.3, the corn-spirit as cock, can largely be ignored because the entirety of chapter 48 deals with the corn-spirit in animal guises. The black cock of the thunder-god is more significant.)

Attis and castration. Tiresias, an attempt to reconcile the best-known version of the Attis myth (Catullus), in which gender pronouns are interchanged with great abandon, with mythical androgyny… while Frazer may say that Attis is to Cybele “as Adonis to Venus” (1.3), Eliot places his Tiresias apart, watching the sexual act but not engaging in it as either party… “I too awaited the expected guest”. The notes say that “What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” All Tiresias sees is a very unsatisfactory fuck. Does Eliot really want us to believe that the entire substance of The Waste Land, of his magnum opus, is a rather unsatisfactory fuck? If he does, why the classical allusion? Why does Tiresias need to be watching to express a rather unsatisfactory fuck?

River-deities and the Thames-daughters. If he doesn’t know much of gods, then why has he started inventing(?) his own? He knows plenty of how gods are formed and worshipped, enough to enact a very convincing anthropomorphic trio of naiads. And he wants us to know it, too, or he wouldn’t have annotated it.

Tiresias also lies. Women enjoy it more? Bollocks!

TIRESIAS CORRESPONDS WITH THE CADUCEUS THROUGH SNAKES AND STAFF. THE FISHER-KING CORRESPONDS THROUGH ELIOT WITH THE THREE OF STAVES WHICH IS THE CADUCEUS. THE SECRET OF THE STORY IS THAT TIRESIAS IS THE FISHER-KING UNABLE TO HEAL HIMSELF BUT ONLY ABLE TO GIVE PROPHECY. THE WANDERING CRIPPLE.

The entire “Tiresias” passage is almost all in perfect iambic pentameter.

Fucksake he wrote a book called “After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy”

“Art presumes that life is worth living, and must not, except dramatically or in a moment of exasperation or irony, say that it isn’t. But Mr Eliot writes only to say that it isn’t;” –Arthur Clutton-Brock, A New Byronism, Times Literary Supplement

“his artistry has reached that point at which it knows the wisdom of sometimes concealing itself” …. The notes are “of more interest to the pedantic than the poetic critic”, but “ ‘The Waste Land’ exists in the greater part in the state of notes” (Edgell Rickword, A Fragmentary Poem, TLS)

“In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot advocated a poetry that was “impersonal” and profoundly historical, written out of a self-conscious awareness of “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”. (Modern Poetry, James Longenbach, Cambridge Companion to Modernism)

“Eliot wants to assert the kind of powers Shelley claimed for poetry without sounding like Shelley.” (Longenbach)

Eliot “feared the democratizing force of totality almost as much as he feared chaos” (Longenbach)

The Waste Land: “a sequence of attempts to unify the world through the unifications of individuals” (Longenbach)

“…however successfully the poem constructs a provisional sense of wholeness, its thematic content remains at odds with its structural goal: that is, no matter how convinced we become that Tiresias does come to embody the unification of the world, Tiresias sees only the failure of individuals to achieve any sense of unity” (Longenbach)

“the sexes never truly meet” (Longenbach)

“Decades before it became fashionable to do so, Elizabeth Bishop would argue that Eliot’s poem is “’about impotence.’ Not symbolic impotence – it’s about the thing.” (Longenbach)

“We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.” (Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, 1919)

“When a poet deliberately restricts his public by his choice of style of writing or of subject-matter, this is a special situation demanding explanation and extenuation, but I doubt whether this ever happens.” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism)

“that which is to be communicated is the poem itself, and only incidentally the experience and the thought which have gone into it” (ibid)

“the poet does many things upon instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody else” (ibid)

Eliot is very complementary about T. E. Hulme, who says: “…a classical revival to [people in general] would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it” – so perhaps the Waste Land is a classical revival, not a death at all… (ibid)

“modern poetry is supposed to be difficult” (ibid)

“The more seasoned reader, he who has reached, in these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first” (ibid)

“an interaction between prose and verse… is a condition of vitality in literature” (ibid)

“the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous as possible… I myself should like an audience who could neither read nor write” (ibid)

Eliot essay

2006-04-06T13:03:27Z

3-4k words by Friday of 0th week.

Starter quote: "I do not know much about gods."

"Polytheism and the Thelemic Tradition in The Dry Salvages and The Waste Land"? Nah, too general. Plus, I've only known what thelemic means since Solstice, shamed as I am to admit it. Academic dishonesty is all very well, but...

Okay, maybe I should actually read "The Dry Salvages" before trying to base an essay on it, hmm?

Fuckin' degree...

Snarl, growl

2006-03-09T17:03:07Z

Predicted 2.1 from both Martin (Old English) and Gill (VicLit/first half of Modernism).

Pick up the fucking pace, Helen. This is not good enough.

A Feeling

2006-03-09T05:06:24Z

I do not think that, until the day I die, I will be able to read the Happy Ending of Waugh's Vile Bodies without feeling that great cold-burning knot of pain and pity and beautiful sorrow rise in my heart and bleed its strands into every fibre of my being.

Every time. It gets me every time.

Marginal

2006-03-09T02:44:34Z

Note found in margin on p. 49 of Exiles and Émigrés, Terry Eagleton, Chatto & Windus, London 1970:

"Mr Eagleton, your style & reputation are more convincing than your argument."

Too fucking right. This entire book of crit. is OO.

Not to mention sexist.

The chapter on Waugh doesn't mention Waugh for the first seven pages, and doesn't actually start talking about him in any detail until the ninth. Woolf and Huxley, you understand, are far more relevant to a chapter on Waugh than any of his actual works.

Gah!

Damn!

2006-02-27T21:26:25Z

Every chapter of Waugh I read, I fall in love a little more. And now I get to study him. JOY.

I've just got to the bit in Vile Bodies where Agatha Runcible finds out who Miss Brown is and whose house she's just stayed the night at. My gods! The horrific, terrible hilarity...! The paradigm flip! The cringing laughter...!

Come on Helen

2006-02-24T05:39:19Z

It's the home stretch now, you can do it. You're getting there, you're tight, you're focused, you're enjoying it, don't let yourself get frivolous now. That was what the Joyce essay was for. No, you may NOT use the epithet "the unwashed nun" for Æthelthryth. I don't care how accurate or appropriate it is. Keep it up now. Come on. Keep focused. You can do it.

Thank you, Mister Joyce

2006-02-24T04:02:50Z

I have now had to delete six extraneous Stephens from this essay and I'm only halfway through. There are not supposed to be any Stephens in this essay. There may have been a great deal of Stephen in the last essay I wrote, but that's no excuse; this moniker-bleed is simply unacceptable.

For reference, three of them were trying to be Saint Sebastian, one was posing as Edmund himself (which is acceptable, I suppose - protagonist-name-confusion), one was lurking in the corner with a tinfoil crown calling itself King Oswald and the last was attempting to be the virgin nun, Saint Æthelthryth.

I will put up with these crossdressing modernist Irishmen in my Old English essays NO LONGER! Away with you, Stephen! Avaunt! Back to Clongowes and Dublin with the rest of the heathens! G'wan!

The Illuminatus Essay

2006-02-23T15:31:40Z

Have you ever seen a more pretentious piece of wank on your screen? HAVE YOU? Answer me! mejoff enjoyed it and he's never read Portrait, so you don't necessarily need to know the context to comment.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “What are the ‘nets’ and why must Stephen fly by them?”

“Restez Zen” – Autoroute sign near Grenobles

“ ‘Sociolinguistics’ sounds like a lesbian orgy.” –K., private correspondence

“There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.” – Joubert, Pensées (1842)

Each of the “nets” which Stephen must escape is essentially a conceptual net woven of context; a net which seeks to pin him down and define his identity through outside factors. Their operations and natures may work on different levels and in different ways, but each “net” shares this key defining factor. In escaping the nets, Stephen simultaneously becomes an individual – and leaves the scope of the audience’s understanding; attains independent existence – and loses his existence in the novel; is born – and dies. By flying past the nets which seek to entrap him, Stephen is fulfilling the wordless animal drive for life.

Towards the finale of this novel, Stephen declares: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets”¹. He has spoken of the difference between the birth of the soul and the birth of the body, and attempts to continue in his philosophical musings, but is stuck down by the simple voice of the Irish people, embodied in Davin: “Too deep for me, Stevie”. It is difficult to say whether this response more readily expresses the frustration of the free-thinking intellectual with the constraints placed upon his thought – that is, whether it is itself a “net”, adding the ignorance of peers to the list of contrary forces which seek to trap and overwhelm him – or whether Joyce is indulging in brief self-mockery (or at least mockery of Dedalus), revealing perhaps his knowledge that these “deep” and revelatory pronouncements and sentiments are not always appropriate for his audience; that they may, indeed, be meaningless (or at least have their meaning radically altered) when observed by anyone except their originator.

In Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash², the fourth-wall breaching, post-modern Hiro Protagonist is characterised by lack of character; his dialogue and actions reveal nothing – Zen, he acts only in the moment. Even his race is almost universally foreign; by making the character a Japanese-African-American, Stephenson ensures that only a tiny percentage of his target audience will be able to associate with the character through any link other than the shared discovery of the unfolding narrative. This complete lack of characterisation in his point-of-view character allows Stephenson to provide his reader with a near-perfect “blank filter” through which to view his theories of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, religion and computer science. Through a much earlier version of a similar technique, by closing so tightly with his protagonist from the first instance – beginning in disjointed, subjective language, ending in the first person, focusing slightly further out for the intermediate chapters but never straying from the filter of Stephen Dedalus’ internal monologue – Joyce provides his readers with little opportunity to judge Dedalus the character, or even the validity of his views. Rather, we are led to analyse and contemplate the factors which have created this individual, his theories on life, love and philosophy, and the “nets” of nationality, language and religion which hold him back. In one sense, Dedalus and Joyce have already flown past one net – the net of critical appraisal of their shared (semi-autobiographical) character. While a more distant novel, a less omniscient narrator or focus further outside Dedalus’ personal paradigm might encourage us to entrap both Joyce and his protagonist in the nets of our critical observation, Joyce has achieved freedom from this: he has enmeshed the reader in the net of Stephen Dedalus’ mind, writing so closely into the character that the reader cannot hope to observe the novel without observing, to a certain extent, through Dedalus. Clark’s view³ of Dedalus’ slow comprehension of himself as a parallel to the Einsteinian theory of relativity follows roughly the same line of reasoning, though emerges somewhere quite different.

The complex and recurring theme of nationality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is inextricably tied up with the issues of culture and family that are addressed by the text. On the one side is the Irish patriotism, sense of cohesive nationality and revolutionary struggle which Dedalus and Joyce are heir to; on the other side is the conviction that despite this apparent national identity, the nature of Irish is now defined by that which it is not: that is, England and the English. Dedalus’ frustration at the discovery that the dialect word tundish is “good old blunt English” is particularly telling, as he discovers that even the Dean of Studies can learn “his language” from the Irish, so entrapped are they in the nets of English colonialism. The very fact that the language of the book is English, not Irish – indeed, that the Irish language only appears as an intrusion, a strange otherworldly thing spoken by the “old man”, used to convey the “broken lights of Irish myth” to Davin, or as a scholarly conceit by Dedalus’ fellows at the university – shows Joyce’s and Dedalus’ ambiguity to their national heritage, culturally and linguistically. The crucial question asked of Dedalus – “Are you Irish at all?” – is a question that Joyce seems to pose to Ireland itself; is it truly Irish at all, or has even its struggle for independence become Anglicised? It is in seeking to escape and to understand these nets of nationalism and nationality that Stephen finds himself finally an exile; in order to place them in context, to understand what Ireland means, that he flees both Ireland and England. Without the external viewpoint, Stephen’s “soul” is in peril; he refuses to pay “in [his] own life and person” the “debts” that his ancestors made when they allowed “a handful of foreigners to subject them”, but while remaining in Ireland, he has no choice but to pick sides – either to pay these debts by working to throw off English rule, or to become the national enemy, the collaborator. To do either would be to fall into the net of nationalism and nationality; Dedalus refuses this imposition of context, refuses to choose whether or not to wear the green, and escapes both physically and symbolically.

“Language” is an obsession of Stephen’s, implying a similar obsession on Joyce’s part – an implication which is more than borne out by the text. The novel begins with wordplay and paronomasia, Stephen’s early approaches to language and comprehension beset with an ambiguity which will later evolve into a terse and frustrated diary style, involving elision of pronouns and prepositions in a kind of rhetorical shorthand; Stephen seems intent on getting at the meaning of his sentiments, and brushes aside the unnecessary and cumbersome parts of the English speech in order to do so as efficiently as possible. The very fact that Joyce’s native language is by no means native to his country, discussed above, made some later critics – particularly Irish critics with their own political agendas, “de-Yeatsification” among them – feel that he was in some sense creating a ‘new Ireland’, that by tacitly accepting English as the language of the intellectual Irish and flying free of the nets of reconstructionist Celtic nationalism, he had “debunked the Celtic Twilight and nationalism itself”⁴. The limitations of language, its inability to fully communicate the mind-state and sentiments of the artist, perhaps comprise the one net that Stephen never truly escapes from; even by his own exile, his journey to his “kinsmen” across the ocean, Joyce can never prevent his hero from being essentially a construct of the written language. Although he manipulates narrative in original and effective ways, refusing to maintain consistency in clear third-person descriptive prose, he nevertheless cannot escape from the necessity of communication via language. Unless we are to view the end of the book as the end of Stephen’s writing career – the final diary entry as a symbol of his escape from the constraints of written language, a final “flying free” that severs the link, and thus the net, between reader and subject, reader and author – we must view Stephen Dedalus as forever enmeshed in the net of language, a fictional character unable to escape because his prison is made of his own substance; he cannot break the bars of his cage without destroying himself.

Religion, on the other hand, is the one net of the three overtly mentioned which Stephen falls hardest into, but also the one he finally manages to circumnavigate most comprehensively. In a parallel to the conundrum of linguistic colonialism, Stephen is shown as tacitly and even unwillingly accepting the Catholic paradigm just as fully when he falls into “mortal sin” as at his later conversion during the highly effectively hellfire sermons. While Stephen apparently “cared little that he was in mortal sin”, the entire paragraph in which Stephen’s religious reactions to the “fierce longings of his heart” are discussed is full of contradictions which, with an awareness of Joyce’s keen understanding of the religious psyche, must be deliberate; Stephen realises, even as the narrator makes the declaration that “nothing is sacred”, that his desires are “savage” and “shameful”. The “keen and humiliating sense of transgression” which is with him even as he exults in the “dark orgiastic riot” of his sexual habits resurfaces again and again, showing that however “cynical” Stephen may think himself, the fact that he has never truly rejected the Catholic moral paradigm will continue to haunt him with “unrest” until he finally comes to some sort of resolution. By indulging in the joy of that which is forbidden, Stephen maintains the control that Catholicism holds over his perceptual and ethical matrix; it is only through venturing to the other extreme, to absolute faith, that Stephen can eventually realise that neither defiance nor acceptance of the Catholic doctrines will suit him, but rather only rejection. Finally, the “profane joy” that Stephen takes in the wading girl, symbolic as she is of Pagan imagery, the unknown, the shapeshifter of Irish myth, “magic” and “worship”, fulfils him with “the holy silence”. The Christian God is no longer his, but rather the world-as-God; “a world, a glimmer or a flower”, the mystery of self-chosen religion has been opened to him in the tradition of the early 20^th-century occult philosophers, Thelemic magicians and mystics. To self-define, Stephen must first define God – and do it without help from doctrine and dogma.

One might also identify “hidden” nets and pitfalls for Stephen, traps which act on him in the same way as nationality, language, and religion do – and which he flies free of, or becomes entangled in, in the same way. One of these is the only other reference to the word nets in the novel: those of Galilee – not Christ the saviour, here, not the Catholic mystery of sin, guilt, grace and transcendence, but rather Christ the carpenter and friend of fishermen, the honest labourer. It is the net of honesty – of work, or rather the lack of it; of everything that Davin has experienced in his farm life, his quintessentially Irish peasant upbringing – that Stephen fears when he speaks of the “struggle” with the “red-rimmed horny eyes” of the old Irishman that Mulrennan tells the account of. Stephen’s life has not involved the honest labour symbolised by those nets, and it is this guilt – this subconscious conviction that his scholarly background makes him in some way less than his less fortunate peers, while rendering him academically superior – that Stephen attempts to fly past during his time at the university. He is, as Davin points out, neither one thing nor the other: “One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers,” and this ambiguity could well be attributed to his combination of a hard home life, poverty and an alcoholic father, with scholarly excellence. This net of inferiority, this conviction of dishonesty, traps Stephen too, and requires a fresh start away from the cultural and intellectual convictions of his homeland – it is not mentioned in his list of three because, at the time he speaks the list, he does not realise he is struggling in it.

I have so far presented Stephen’s necessity to fly past these “nets” as integral to the progression of his character throughout the novel and his own self-knowledge and development, but it is not purely in intellectual integrity that Stephen desires freedom. There is sentiment inherent in this as well; from the first wrench away from the comfortable warmth of the infantile “baby tuckoo” to the “pale and chilly” air of Clongowes, there is a sense of something missing in Dedalus’ life, a home which he can never return to. Even when he is reunited with his family, it is in atmospheres of pain and helplessness – from arguments to drunkenness to his own dissatisfaction and ennui, a conviction that the house of Stephen’s family is no longer his home. It is this, I believe, that causes the problematic conviction that by leaving everything he knows, Stephen is going to join his kinsmen; the peculiar Celtic sentiment of cianalas or hiraedd, a nostalgia, a yearning for home accompanied by the knowledge that the “home” of one’s longing can never be returned to, a desire for the familiarity of unknown hills, a wanderlust and homesickness in one. The appearance of the omen of the birds in the third section of chapter 5 provides an external analogue for this internal sentiment of Dedalus’; he must at last take flight, having circumnavigated some nets and accepted the constraints of others, both from his country and from the novel itself.

Stephen’s nets are a subject more suitable for a thesis than an essay; the number of variant approaches and interpretations which I simply do not have the space to cover might be a lifetime’s work. Perhaps they are Stephen’s sense of the inevitable challenges for the hero of the Künstlerroman, an understanding that in order to grow and mature he must fly outside the context of a simple genre narrative and evade the novel entirely. Perhaps they are Joyce’s representation of Stephen’s awareness of his author; a fourth wall breach, deliberately emplaced by Joyce to give the reader a clue that Stephen’s frustrations and angst stem from an awareness that he is essentially a fictionalisation of Joyce’s self. Perhaps, even, they are the clinging vestiges of the corpse of Stephen Hero, the legacy of Stephen Dedalus’ aborted twin brother; Dedalus, perhaps, seeks to fly free of these remnants of his younger (earlier) self – and perhaps that is why Dedalus and not Icharus; Joyce’s protagonist must continue his lonely flight after his younger companion has fallen in flames, saddened by the lesson but unable to simply give up and follow his brother/son/predecessor into a watery grave.

The only possible critical approach to this novel must include a certain frivolity; anything else would be disrespectful to the complex, cold, brooding, human nature of its semi-autobiographical protagonist. In making unlikely and facetious connections, in cheap punning and shock tactics, we approach the stream-of-consciousness style that Joyce adopts in order to create Stephen Dedalus, that Stephen Dedalus adopts in his “private” diaries; and it is then that we can hope to begin to understand the novel. The “nets” are woven from threads of self-consciousness, of assumption, of socially-imposed paradigms which seek to force the human brain to interpret the world in known and approved ways. Stephen flies outside those nets, finding himself a new life away from Irish nationalism and English colonialism, away from the Irish, Latin and English tongues, away from Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in all its guises. So must we fly, if we are to do the novel any justice at all; we must follow our own views and our own peccadilloes, however strange and ridiculous, our laughing childlike desire for puns and rhymes and motorway philosophy. The “nets” which Stephen Dedalus speaks of are everywhere about us; every time we are told how to think, every time we are discouraged from forming our own opinions, every time we are given a black-or-white binary view of a great, burning spectrum of colour, we risk being enmeshed in them. To think is to fly.

I am using the searchable Project Gutenberg e-text of this novel, which is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4217. I am also using the invaluable concordance at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/paym/.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, RoC (1994)
The Dedalus Factor, Revd. Timothy D. Clark, found at http://joycean.org/index.php?p=35.

Insiders and Outsiders, Hazard Adams, found at http://joycean.org/index.php?p=3.

What the fuck?

2006-02-23T08:50:47Z

No, seriously, what the fuck did you just write, Helen? What the fuck?

In Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash², the fourth-wall breaching, post-modern Hiro Protagonist is characterised by lack of character; his dialogue and actions reveal nothing – he acts, Zen-like, only in the moment. Even his race is almost universally foreign; by making the character a Japanese-African-American, Stephenson ensures that only a tiny percentage of his target audience will be able to associate with the character through any link other than the shared discovery of the unfolding narrative. This complete lack of characterisation in his point-of-view character allows Stephenson to provide his reader with a near-perfect “blank filter” through which to view his theories of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, religion and computer science. Through a much earlier version of a similar technique, by closing so tightly with his protagonist from the first instance – beginning in disjointed, subjective language, focusing slightly further out for the intermediate chapters but never straying from the filter of Stephen Dedalus’ internal monologue – Joyce provides his readers with little opportunity to judge Dedalus the character, or even his views: rather, we are led to analyse and contemplate the factors which have created this individual, his theories on life, love and philosophy, and the “nets” of nationality, language and religion. In one sense, Dedalus and Joyce have already flown past one net – the net of critical appraisal of their shared (semi-autobiographical) character. While a more distant novel, a less omniscient narrator or focus further outside Dedalus’ personal paradigm might encourage us to entrap both Joyce and his protagonist in the nets of our critical observation, Joyce has achieved freedom from this: he has enmeshed the reader in the net of Stephen Dedalus’ mind, writing so closely into the character that the reader cannot hope to observe the novel without observing, to a certain extent, through Dedalus.

HOW THE FUCK DID HIRO PROTAGONIST GET INTO THIS ESSAY???

Bah.

2006-02-23T07:15:38Z

Well I could use this highly informative and well-researched piece on how the villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a microcosm of the entire book, except that until starting to read it I'd forgotten there was a villanelle in the novel at all.

Athena help me, but I'm not cut out for this shit. I'm a front-line kinda girl, battlefield colder, telesales hack, short-order copywriter, fencer, volunteer, deadline junkie, pitching in with a strong right arm or a keyboard at short notice or no notice. I like knowing what my problems are and coming up with swift and innovative ways to shoot them down; at worst, I make a half-decent lieutenant, ordering the ranks, seeing the big picture, but willing to pitch in and get my boots dirty when the going gets tough. But I've been dropped way off the map, and I'm not even sure whether I'm behind enemy lines or far into my own territory, let alone who the enemy is; the lack of team is not a problem, the lack of objective is. I just wonder if I'm really cut out to be an academic...

This great tradition, Bodley's Library and the EFL and all the rest, paralyses me with its monstrous bulk. Some days it feels like no thought I've had can possibly be original; and worse, no comment I could ever make can be well-informed, because I can never hope to read through the reams of theory and counter-theory that will have inevitably been argued across the ages on each tiny, specific fragment I might pick up. They're doing a series of lectures on Philip Pullman, for fuck's sake; how can I possibly hope to make any comment on Milton without sounding like an ignorant ass? Do I really want to spend the rest of my life reading fucking criticism?

Pulling the wings off butterflies...

Right, this isn't doing me any good. Less self-pitying whingeing, more Teh Ghey and Catholicism in Joyce. Let's go.

Notes Towards...

2006-02-22T03:11:48Z

A while back, over at the main journal oxfordgirl, I mentioned that I was working up to an essay on The Adventurer. I suppose now, just before I sleep for a while, is as good a time as any to make a list of things I eventually intend to include... feel free to add your own thoughts in comments.

1. RPGs, particularly fantasy RPGs, particularly LARP. Reference romauld's rant on Leadership.
2. H. Rider Haggard, particularly the song in KSM ("Tired of life and the tameness of things") and the first section of Alan Quartermain.
3. Solitude and heroism, especially as presented in Dorian Gray, &AELig;lfric's Saints' Lives, The Seafarer, the Odin Trip and antiheroic Victorian literature (particularly Dickens).
4. The Last Stand, with reference to The Battle of Maldon and Killiecrankie.
5. Freud's Thanatos, martyrdom, suicide, aggression and masochism.
6. The Tyburn Song, with reference to all the ones I know. Jack Hall, MacPherson's Rant and Roddy McCorley in particular.
7. The Comitatus. (I think this will be the synthetical point of the essay, providing context for (3), (5) and (6) and adding supporting evidence for the others.)

Nicely done

2006-02-22T02:55:26Z

Context:
Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric's "Passion of St Edmund"
James W. Earl
Philological Quarterly, Issue 78 (Winter 1999)

(I'm reading an online copy at LION)

Comment:
Very nicely done, sir. A good subtitle might be "How to have a pop at Christian historical suppression of the base impulses[1] while making it look like you're being friendly and objective".

The text isn't anywhere near as useful to the essay as it might be (as I suspected; tutor has once again recommended utterly tangential text while sniping at me for "tangentially" answering classmates' vital questions relating to construction of weaponry in Maldon-era Europe, largely because she doesn't know the latter but can gank the former off convenient Googling), but I've certainly enjoyed reading it. Well worth a look if you've the chance, if nothing else because it's got a pretty good "The Blood-Eagle Debate In Thirty Seconds" summary near the start, which can be useful to introduce those who know nothing about the topic.[2]

1. Earl uses Freudian terminology, which I don't necessarily agree with, but one is largely talking about the same thing whether one says "base impulses", "LaVey's Satan", "sin", "Thanatos/Eros" or whatever. Insert your favoured phrase here, basically.

2. And everyone should be involved in the Blood-Eagle debate. Where else in any academic field can you claim to refute someone's argument on grounds of historical and literary accuracy, anthropology, religious ritual, physiology and ornithology simultaneously?

LARP bits

2006-02-19T23:52:18Z

Well, since the fashion on the FLRP list at the moment seems to be for relating characters' ongoing responses to the chaos in the White City in narrative form, might as well add my own contribution.

First: Lieutenant Ambriel Chermes of the Port of Glass Embassy. Mostly just filling in bits of background and plot colour, a couple of drug references.

Disconnected

In the Grand Embassy of the government of His Most Magnificent and Pious Grace the Lemuel D’Artois, Duke of the Port of Glass and its territories to the White City, things are getting a little... disconnected...

Lieutenant Ambriel Chermes knows that the Embassy compound is officially Port soil, and that White City laws don't apply there, but she's still keeping an eye on the gate guards. Some of them have been indulging their Vainglory habits to help pass the hours on duty recently, and this is not the time to be antagonising the foreigners. That De Courci woman might have been awkward, but she at least could be relied upon to respect diplomatic immunity.

Outside, some strident young city girl has begun loudly shouting on a street-corner about the Light Indivisible. Ambriel glances up at the Embassy's clock-tower, giving her five minutes. Within three, there is the sound of armoured boots hurrying down the street, and a meaty crunch. The shouting cuts off. The gate guards look to her for direction, and she signals them to stillness. Outside the Embassy compound is officially White City territory, and thus falls under the heading of Not Our Problem.

Ambriel paces the corridors of the Embassy, trying to keep a hold on things. This strange Northern architecture unnerves her, all straight lines and iron. Over the years, the brave progression of expatriates have done their best to give the place a more homely feel - brightly-stained mosaics in chipped glass, Southern plants in the solarium - but the White City's weather still creeps in everywhere, that pervasive temperate chill that no number of braziers or blankets can seem to drive out.

She is met on the stairs to the diplomatic staff's offices by an officious-looking man in priestly robes. She salutes him respectfully, trying to remember his name. One of the de Verlays, she thinks. His eyes skip over her, just seeing the uniform, and he's about to pass on when he pauses.

"Ah, Captain."

"Lieutenant, sir."

"Whichever. When will the mirror room be free?"

"I'm... sorry, my lord?"

"The mirror room, in the tower. Constantine has been in there for almost a week now. When do you expect it to be free? He's not the only priest around here, you know, and I need to offer my reports to Lord Arturo somehow."

Ambriel looks at him with blank confusion and decides to play it dumb. Fifteen years of soldiering for the Port have taught her not to volunteer any more information than absolutely necessary and, if in doubt, blame someone else. "I have no idea, sir. Might you ask the diplomatic staff?"

"The diplomatic staff, lieutenant, are in the pub, and have been since the revolution. You are aware that I outrank him?"

She toys with the idea of asking which pub and joining them, but decides to play it safe. "I'm afraid I'm only responsible for security, my lord. I could have someone knock on the door...?"

They both reflect on that, and a mutual glance indicates that it's probably a bad idea. Nobody has quite forgotten the last time someone interrupted a D'Artois at his meditations in the Mirror Room; it was Lord Bartholomew that time, and the results were... lasting.

"...or I could have a messenger posted to tell you when it's free?"

"That would be more suitable, I think. Tell me, what are your opinions on this Constantine fellow?"

"Ah..." Well, I was talking to a Blood-Sorceror the other day who says that it's entirely his fault this Marius creature came to the White City in the first place, but I don't put quite as much credence to that as to the popular story doing the rounds at the Griffin and the other adventurers' taverns at the moment, which is that when the going gets tough, Constantine D'Artois gets under a table. He's very pious, which I'm sure is a virtue, but I'm not entirely sure he's quite... reliable. "Couldn't say, sir."

"And Bartholomew?"

"Um..." What, that terrifying bastard with the eyeball-fixation? I'm immensely glad he's in the Embassy, in the same way that one is glad when one can see the snake in the room rather than just knowing it's about somewhere. Reputation with the adventurering lot, though. Not necessarily a good one, mind, but a reputation. "Haven't had much contact with Lord Bartholomew, sir."

"What about the Duchess Caroline?"

"Defend her with my life, sir," she answers promptly. That one's easy, not to mention true.

"Very good. Long life to Duke Lemuel."

"Long life, sir."

With that, the little ritual of salutation, they part ways, and Ambriel continues up the stairs. She spots one of the guards, off-duty, kissing one of the serving-wenches in an alcove, and feels a pang of loneliness. Whistling The Girl I Left Behind Me, she tries to cheer herself up as she checks the armoury; all weapons present and accounted for.

Her job might be a little easier, she supposes, if she had any official duties as such. Her brief before being sent out to the Embassy was verbal, short, and ambiguous: "Find things that need doing," Lord Silvestre had told her, looking unusually harried, "and do them. Particularly if they're dangerous. Unless they offend the White City. Don't do anything that offends the White City. Well, except the bits we don't like. Oh, just go." And now, she finds herself an odd-jobs fixer; one week sourcing dealers in shady taverns to match her superiors' habits, another bodyguarding visiting dignitaries around the city, or knocking someone matching a particular description over the head in an alley, all without ever asking why.

"Why" is a very dangerous question within the Embassy. Ambriel Chermes checks over the duty roster one last time, and pulls on a plain cloak over her Broken Guard officer's tabard as she prepares to leave the Embassy. There's a pub down by the slums called the Long Road, where expatriates of all nations gather and where the landlord is rather more tolerant than most about the legality of his Northern and Southern customers' habits. There's a man waiting in that pub named Orpheus, and on Orpheus' belt is a pouch, and in the pouch is waiting a packet of Vainglory, which Ambriel intends to introduce herself to.

As she walks through the streets of the city, the sound of mobs rises and the smell of smoke drifts on the air. Everything feels a little... disconnected.

Second: Everyone's favourite "Helen's attempt to play a nice simple angst-free character", Professor Kit Fisable of the College of the Thousand Arts (Faculties of Cartography and the Arcane). Contains slightly grisly and squicky bits. Have not yet consulted with the_teflon_monk, so non-canonical for the moment.

Ghost-Gum

Kit rounds the corner to the alchemical laboratories. Edward Holtz has his own private lab here, a poky room full of strange noises and odd smells. She raps on the door and goes in.

Holtz is standing next to a smoking alembic. "I just can't seem to get it to come right, Professor," he says with a note of sadness in his voice as Kit enters. He turns to her, and the flesh of his face is melting. "No matter what I try, it won't come right." He starts towards her as his lips begin to bubble and drip away, revealing white teeth and bone. She sees a glitter of light as the bone begins to vitrify. She bolts.

The Statecraft lecture theatre has been converted into sleeping quarters for the High Guard that Belor has told her will soon begin to pack the College. As she slows her headlong run by the door, she feels a compulsion to enter. Inside, makeshift blankets and rags have been hung up between rows of simple pallets to provide some sort of privacy for their occupants. The central dais is an armoury now, stacked with gleaming racks of breastplates. It does not seem strange that her mother is one of the servants working hard at shifting chairs aside and clearing space for the soldiers who should start arriving tonight.

"Christina. Have you seen Jarek? The baby's been crying for him." In her arms, her mother is holding her little brother. Not Tom, the sailor, but the unnamed one she miscarried when Kit was twelve. The half-formed thing looks at her with blank, mirrored eyes, and laughs. She falls.

She's standing on an endless, glittering plain, under a violet sun that gives no light. Echoes and screams reverberate around her skull, and she can feel something bigger than the world dragging itself upright in the far distance. It's noticed her. She turns to run again, and feels something soft under her feet. She won't look down - she can't look down - but her eyes are dragged to the ground. Under her boots, a bloodstained wolfskin cloak covers a figure with a dark ponytail and a black headband. By one outstretched hand, the hunting horn has shattered into pieces. By the other, where Jac's shield should be, there is only an oval mirror. Her eyes meet her reflection's awful gaze...

....and Professor Fisable wakes just in time to cut off the scream building in her throat, curled into a ball in the corner of a bed, fully clothed and sweat-soaked. For a second the panic that overtakes her whenever she awakens under an strange roof rises, and then the room comes into focus; the wave of fear passes as she remembers that she fell asleep some hours ago in her official quarters on the ground floor, exhausted and not willing to face the climb up the Cartography Tower to her old rooms. Is that why the dreams are back? No, these were too intense. Something's wrong. There is an all-too-familiar pain at her temples, and a whispering noise she knows she's not hearing with her ears.

She checks the walls, first. Of course she'd had the mirrors taken down when she first moved in, but it was always possible that some servant had made a mistake. Nothing. Next the bed and her clothes; with a shiver she remembers the horrible moment of realisation in the Isles when they discovered that Fal-Kar's armour had been stitched with glass. Nothing, again. There's no Silverleaf taste in her mouth, and no memory of any attack before she slept. She hears a faint noise from her office.

She crosses the bedroom to pull open the connecting door. Under the desk, there is a pile of blankets which occasionally twitches or mutters. She strides over, kicks the pile until a head and neck emerges, then grabs it by the collar and drags it to the outside door. Roland the Subtle - who bears, Kit notices for the first time, an uncanny facial resemblance to those white-furred things which kept creeping up to their campfire on the Breathing Isle - barely awake, makes a confused whimpering noise as he is forcibly ejected into the quad adjoining the deer park.

"And don't fucking come back!"

---

For those unsure of WTF just happened: Roland the Subtle, played by the_teflon_monk, has "Shattered Blood", which causes nightmares of the Vitriarchs for all those sleeping near him. He has been rooming in the College during the revolution.

If you have absolutely no idea what any of that was about, go here and look at the shiny pictures. Then go here and read the shiny setting. Then come play LARP.

Barthes: The Death of the Author

2006-02-14T19:41:45Z

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile."

Barthes, you never spoke a truer word. You are fucking indecipherable.

Sontag: Against Interpretation

2006-02-14T18:32:53Z

Reading this for Paper 1 - Text, Context, Intertext (wank). Next is Bartes' Death of the Author.

The interested can find an online copy of the piece here.

In order to keep faith as much as possible with the author's intentions, I shall not interpret the content of this essay even a little bit.

Instead, I shall adopt a grading system based on my intense and immediate sensuous reaction to the piece, as follows:

-1: Dissing the Invisibles by quoting Wilde
-1: Not acknowledging the Oracles while going off on one about "interpretation" in late Classical religion
+1: Being sensible about the Song of Songs
-1: "The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one." clearly contradicting previous comment on Song of Songs
+1: Having the balls to use the word "impious" in that context
-1: "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling" - 'impertinent' does not fit this sequence
+1: Use of "befoul" in 4.1
+10: Sheer balls in penning as pretentious a phrase as "a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability"
-2: Failure to take beautiful opportunity to use scarequotes around "content" in 5.1
+1: 5.3 - "a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters"
-2: Calling Ingmar Bergman "pretentious"
+1: 8.3 - "mucking about"

FINAL SCORE: 7. But is this what it is or is this merely what it means? Discuss.

Maldon

2006-02-14T08:00:52Z

1. I wish to compose a folksong concerning the Battle of Maldon, in the style of Killiecrankie but less depressing; somewhere between that, The Mary Ellen Carter and General Taylor, I think.

2. I am studying English at Oxford University and today, for the first time in my life, I have learned the definition of the word trope. This is further evidence that I am a miserable excuse for a human being who does not deserve to be allowed to read, let alone study English at Oxford, and should be hanged.

Work In Progress

2006-02-09T03:42:19Z

Men and Monsters: The Presentation of Humanity in King Solomon’s Mines and The Picture of Dorian Gray

“…and some stories are better left untold.”

Both these novels blur the line between the human and the other; whether that other be subhuman, monstrous, animal or something else entirely. Both are full of dynamic characters of shifting nature, slipping from stereotype to self-realisation with a complex realism uncharacteristic of the period. Even Quartermain, the apparently simple and solid man of the veldt, is seen with resilience and strength stripped away from him by physical trials. LINK: UP-DOWN

Some are presented at the start of the narrative as bald monochrome sketches, to climb to the heights of the tragically human. Sibyl Vane discovers love, her humanity opening like a rare flower to the eye of the reader, only to lose the only quality which is deemed valuable by her society. …brother… Others descend the opposite slope of the same mountain, beginning as complex humans but ending as simple, brutal monsters. LINK: ASCENT-DECLINE BROAD BRUSH STROKES

Just as we can observe these general broad themes of humanity in ascent and decline throughout the novel, the authors present the characters as uttering similar wide views and observations. General statements about humanity; in KSM they are uttered by the wise narrator, who – although his occasional mistakes and general ignorance of intellectual pursuits are fondly mocked by the author – is held, in general, to be wise in the world and to know himself. LINK: ON THE OTHER HAND

In DG, otoh, these general statements are often uttered by the tempter, Lord Henry, whose lies are mixed with truth so liberally it is difficult to tell which the author wishes us to respect for their eloquence, which to condemn for their misanthropy. LINK: INACCURACY OF GENERAL STATEMENTS, BIGOTRY

Race and class are typified by their exceptions in both novels. It is a mistake to judge the presentation of the characters’ attitudes to races and classes other than their own by twentieth-century values. LINK: TWENTIETH-CENTURY VALUES OF RACE

Quartermain’s attitude to the native is, if one explores it without falling prey to the automatic (and laudable!) anti-racist reaction which the modern civilised mind requires, colourblind; does he not hold the Portugee in a contempt less fond than the Zulu? LINK: VULNERABILITY SHARED BETWEEN MEN-AS-MEN REGARDLESS

Both works are studies of humanity in extremis. LINK: IN EXTREMIS MEANS UP AS WELL AS DOWN

It is in striving to be the best, to be greater than oneself and to reach the pinnacle of achievement – whether that achievement is in internal self-perfection or in external testing oneself against the worst Nature and Earth can throw – that the characters in these novels come closest to animalism. LINK: BECOMING LESS/MORE THAN ONESELF, HEROISM

What is a hero? Can a hero ever be truly human? Does the superhuman not automatically approach the monstrous? Solitude is the blessing and the curse. LINK: HEROISM AND SOLITUDE

The hero leaves the world. He casts himself loose and sets out into the void, into a new, shining, terrible place. This is the only way he can truly discover whether or not he is a man. LINK: COMPANIONSHIP

Every adversary is oneself. Every companion is also oneself. Mirrors and reflections. Twala is an unrepentant and inexcusable monster. A reflection of Quartermain? The dark half. Mirrors! LINK: FALSITY AND TREACHERY

Gagool. Treachery. Lies. Lord Henry. LINK: MOTIVATIONS FOR EVIL

Desire has something to do with it. Desire for fame, for love, for affection, for money, for perfection, the driving force that leads the hero to perform notorious and beautiful and unspeakable and heroic deeds. LINK: MOTIVATION AND IDENTITY

Both novels dive more deeply into their points of view than comparable fiction of the period. While Dorian Gray is told from the third person, the current subject of the point of view colours the narrator’s perspective to a much greater degree than one might expect from Collins or Dickens. King Solomon’s Mines is, of course, first-person subjective. CONCLUSION: NO MAN IS A HERO TO HIS VALET OR HIS CREATOR; THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PERFECT SELF; THE OBSESSION WITH FLAW

content-free

2006-02-06T14:28:40Z

zomgbbq Wanderer/Goldwinne OTP

Dormant

2006-02-03T02:29:00Z

Why, O My Brain, did you tell me that LaVey preceded Wilde? Why? Why?

The essay on human monsters (it's not an essay on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It's not. Really. Fuck off.) is bubbling away in my brain very well, but I really need to clear the decks before I can get to work on it; unfortunately, as is usually the case, the decks are filling up faster than I can easily clear them. I think I'll compromise by sorting out everything on my to-do list that was due to be done yesterday and today, answer half the email in my inbox, then get to work...

or possibly just fall asleep...