The Blind Spot in Death and the King’s Horseman

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida argues that the writer doesn’t have full control over the meaning in the language he or she uses. He writes, “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely” (1825). This idea is similar to a fish swimming in a fishbowl. Because the fish is in the bowl, his world is defined by the bowl, and his understanding of that world cannot get outside the bowl, so he can only partially understand the concept of the water that fills the bowl. Because human beings operate within language and cannot get outside it, they will never fully understand it and therefore cannot fully control their use of it. This relationship between writer and language creates a “blind spot” wherein the writer “lets himself be determined by that very thing that he excludes” (1830). In other words, the blind spot in language permits texts to operate in contradictory ways uncontrolled by the author. Therefore, it’s partly due to the nature of language that basing interpretation on author intent is a fallacy, although Wimsatt and Beardsley don’t go that direction. This blind spot moves the burden of interpretation to the reader, who, because no “transcendental signified” or exact meaning exists (1825), is also only partially equipped to render an interpretation in language. The fact that language thus “deconstructs” itself can be illustrated through analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which both undermines and reinscribes authoritative power structures.

In the Author’s Note appended to Death and the King’s Horseman, Wole Soyinka decries the misuse of plays that involve colonial themes because “they acquire the facile tag of ‘clash of cultures’” (3). Instead, Soyinka prefers productions of his play to emphasize “the play’s threnodic essence” or, per the footnote, the play’s exploration of death (3). In other words, Soyinka would prefer interpretations focus on art rather than on politics. Unfortunately for Soyinka, in Derrida’s model the author’s interpretation becomes one among many.

“Ideology and Tragedy” by Biodun Jeyifo represents one example of an interpretation that critiques Death and the King’s Horseman on a political basis. Jeyifo argues that the “clash of cultures” theme that Soyinka rejects actually masks “the real, objective differences between conflicting groups and classes within the indigenous system” and thus supports “class rule” (171), so Soyinka has himself made a mistake in depicting the events because he should have been focusing on and urging more equity within the class distinctions existing in the native culture. Jeyifo’s interpretation could be supported, for example, by the depiction of the police officer Amusa, as we have discussed in class: is it an oversight that Soyinka depicts Amusa speaking pidgin throughout the play when the other African characters seem to code shift successfully from perfect English spoken to one another as a translation of the native language to perfect English spoken to the colonizers? Perhaps Soyika is blaming Amusa for his go-between position caused by the colonial presence in Nigeria, which suggests a callous kind of class judgment on Soyinka’s part. This kind of judgment would be consistent with the fact that the deaths of Elesin and his son Olunde at the end of the play potentially bring the traditional, authoritarian civilization back into order. This order is demonstrated by a version of the suicide ritual occurring in Elesin’s prison and Elesin’s successful suicide there. Iyaloja’s focus on “the unborn” in the last line of the play (63) suggests a forward view that indicates perhaps tradition was finally satisfied in this instance.

However, and again regardless of the author’s interpretation of his work, the play contains elements that could result in an equally defensible but contradictory political interpretation. This interpretation relies on elements of the dialogue where the native characters explain the events. For example, the Praise-Singer says, “this young shoot [Olunde] has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is not the way of life” (62). This image of sap moving from child to parent indicates that the ritual has not occurred properly, so the world lost its sense of order. Similarly, Iyaloja blames Elesin’s ultimate death on the colonial people: “No child [Pilkings], it is what you brought to be, you who play with strangers’ lives, who even usurp the vestments of our dead” (62). Iyaloja’s criticism of Pilkings indicates the events represent something for which to criticize him, which also indicates they have not brought order. In this case, rather than reinscribing traditional hierarchies the deaths of father and son have inaugurated a revolution from which a new culture will emerge, which requires a different interpretation of Iyaloja’s focus on “the unborn” at the end (63). In this case, the unborn may be responsible for an altogether different society, which could be more equitable although no details provide evidence either way.

These contradictory readings resulting in narratives of authority or lack of it may be read back in a self-reflexive way onto the author himself. Just as the play inspires contradictory versions of the traditional culture’s authority, so does the play illustrate the contradictory role of the author in his own creation. While the play emerged from the creative genius of Wole Soyinka who has a right to his own interpretation of his work, the playwright himself has a “blind spot” that cannot allow him full authority over his own creation. Thus, his own work “deconstructs” his power and makes room for the reader to exert his or her ideas.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “From Of Grammatology.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 1822-30. Print.

Jeifo, Biodun. “Ideology and Tragedy.” The Truthful Life: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama. London: New Beacon, 1985. Rpt. in Death and the King’s Horseman. By Wole Soyinka. Ed. Simon Gikandi. New York: Norton, 2003. 164-71. Print.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. Ed. Simon Gikandi. New York: Norton, 2003. Print.

Kill the Author!

I subscribe to the belief that readers can’t really discover the intent of authors. The words of a text aren’t enough to indicate what the author was trying to do. It’s entirely possible that an author was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something completely unexpected. It’s also possible that the author couldn’t even tell you what he was trying to do, or if he did, he might not remember correctly. Therefore, I share the formalist assumption expressed by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (1374-75). The words “available” and “desirable” are key. The intent is not available to readers, even if we ask the author.

Moreover, going off on a wild goose chase after the author’s intent as the key to understanding is not a desirable form of interpretation because it wastes time away from the text, and getting a juicy tidbit about the author’s intent may seem to close off all other possible interpretations. As Roland Barthes writes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1469). Interpretation is so much more complex and open-ended than the intent-only method allows. While knowing an author’s biography is useful, I don’t think it should end interpretation. Rather, it’s just one of the many tools the reader can bring to bear on interpretation.

I diverge from the formalists by valuing the reader’s role in interpretation. While the formalists eliminate the psychological/affective problems associated with the reader’s response by assuming a unitary “sufficiently informed” reader (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1399) who should arrive at the standard interpretation of great works, I don’t think texts have single meanings. Based on my experiences, I am likely to have a different reading experience not only with each text but with each time I read the same text as my “horizon of expectation” shifts (Jauss 1554). My understanding of the reader’s experience represents another reason why the author’s intent cannot determine interpretation: even an author who fully understands his own intent can’t predict how his text will affect me as a reader.

For all these reasons, I tend to avoid language in analysis that indicates I know the author’s intent. Instead, I talk about texts and what they do, and I talk about readers and how they might interpret texts. I’ve essentially killed off the author.

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing provides a metaphor for the death of the author in the disappearance of the narrator’s father in the Canadian bush. We could read the father as the author and the narrator’s search as the reader’s attempt to make meaning from a text. Textual interpretation literally occurs in the novel when the narrator takes a look at her father’s papers. She reads the author’s various sketches of hands with numbers and words, as well as some “stiff childish figure[s],” and because she “can’t make sense out of them,” she thinks, “he might have gone insane” (69). In this example, the author is absent, if not dead, and the daughter is searching for his intent in producing such odd drawings. Because she doesn’t understand them, she jumps to the conclusion that the author must be crazy.

Yes, this isn’t a typical moment of literary analysis because the narrator is trying to find the author, not just trying to interpret his texts, and typically, we don’t jump to the insanity conclusion in interpreting literary texts. We assume the text has some basic literary quality, or otherwise, we wouldn’t analyze it. However, I think the metaphor of the search comments on reading. One might connect my equation between author and father to Derrida’s phallogocentrism, which implies a stable truth associated with patriarchy. In Atwood’s novel, the absence of the father suggests there isn’t a stable truth, there isn’t an author whose existence will explain everything. Instead, we’ve got fragments of meaning that need to be pieced together. This is the task of the narrator in the rest of the book, and it’s also the task of the reader in reading about her experiences. In the end, it’s the interpretive work, reading, and not the missing father that’s ultimately important.

Author and Reader in The Shadow of the Wind

I just finished the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in English translation). I enjoyed it very much. It reminds me of The Thirteenth Tale, which is also a novel about a novel, an ekphrastic or self-reflexive novel, where the protagonist attempts to uncover the truth about an author. (There is a bit of a spoiler in the discussion below, so stop now if you want the mystery to remain intact until you read the novel.)

In The Shadow of the Wind, set in Barcelona in 1945-1966, ten-year-old Daniel visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and selects the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. He enjoys the novel so much that he searches for other novels by the writer and finds someone is buying and burning them, so there are very few left. His search becomes an obsession, and he interviews various people who knew Carax, slowly uncovering the secret of Carax’s parentage and childhood, his romance with Penelope, his years of writing in Paris, his return to Barcelona to discover what happened to his beloved Penelope, and the mystery of the book-burnings. Meanwhile, the details of Daniel’s life mirror Julian’s.

While the mystery itself is worth unraveling, the novel is also interesting in its commentary on authors, readers, and books. It represents an allegory of the reading experience where an engaged reader attempts to better understand a novel by understanding the author. This search models the traditional way literary interpretation has been taught in the US. My English teacher Mrs. Jackson would lecture on the author’s background and the historical moment, and then we were supposed to read her mind to determine the kind of interpretation she wanted. Yet, in the novel, the author-biography turns out to be dangerous, as Daniel’s search begins to be shadowed by a man with a burnt face who goes by the name of Lain Coubert, the name of the devil character in Carax’s novel, and also by a sadistic police officer who arrests and attacks anyone he doesn’t like. The danger suggests that the author’s background is important but risky; therefore, other keys to understanding literature exist, including the reader’s response.

The allegory pits the author and reader against each other regarding control over the aesthetic experience. I like this quote from Isaac, the caretaker of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, who comments, “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it” (Zafon 5). On the one hand, the text is “the soul of the person who wrote it,” which suggests the romantic view that artwork is the product of genius, of a man with “a more comprehensive soul” (Wordsworth 655), of a “specially gifted spirit” (Hegel 637), and the reader has no right to critique such a work, which “stands higher than any natural product” by virtue of its “journey through the spirit” (Hegel 638). In imagining they might challenge the right of the spiritual parent to his own offspring, readers are the “Fools [who] rush in where Angels [authors] fear to tread” (Pope 455). Readers are in this sense like young Daniel who inserts himself into the mystery of Carax’s life without understanding the threat to himself and others that his sleuthing represents.

On the other hand, Isaac suggests that the soul of books also belongs to readers, “those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.” There is something imaginative that happens in reading as well as in writing. While romantic theorists pay attention mostly to the writer’s self-expression, there is self-expression that occurs for readers in books as well. Kant describes this response as the “free play of the cognitive powers,” invoking both imagination and understanding (512). While Pope acknowledges the governing power of author intent in interpretation, “Since none can compass more than they Intend” (446), he also grants the humble, educated reader imaginative space in the interpretive process. Pope argues that “Wit and Judgment,” creativity and interpretation, are “meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (443), by which he means that good interpretation, with rules drawn inductively from great works, can guide authors in producing better texts. There’s an ongoing interaction between author and reader that’s valuable to improving the quality of literature overall. As it turns out in The Shadow of the Wind, Julian Carax is still alive, and to a certain extent, he helps Daniel uncover the mystery, seeing in Daniel the possibility of averting a repeat of his own tragic life. Thus, the self-reflexive allegory echoes the writer-reader collaboration Pope identifies. Without a reader, a literary son, the genius no matter how great his soul, dies alone, his texts lost in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

I am also interested in the backdrop of war in Zafon’s novel--the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War II (1930-45), and the peril of required military service--which emphasizes the threat of patriarchal violence also in the foreground as the legacy of fathers threatens sons, biological, adopted, and literary, as they learn to become men. Sons and readers need to negotiate the difficult terrain of their inheritance from their (literary) parents. Doppelgangers Julian and Daniel represent the tragedy or balance that may arise out of this contest, as well as the cyclical nature of the effort.

Works Cited

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. From Lectures on Fine Art. In Leitch 636-44.

Kant, Immanuel. From Critique of Judgment. In Leitch 504-35.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print.

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism. In Leitch 441-48.

Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In Leitch 648-68.

Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind. Trans. Lucia Graves. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Poetry Dangerous?

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that poets “establish[] a bad system of government in people’s minds by gratifying their irrational side” (78). The government metaphor is interesting because this argument is situated within a larger discussion of what makes the best society. In this case, Socrates ends up concluding that the poets do not belong in his imaginary utopian republic because they rely too much on the emotions rather than reason. In this sense, poets “colonize” normal, rational minds and cause people to make irrational decisions.

What’s kind of funny today is the idea that poetic texts might be threatening. I can see violent movies, video games, and rock and roll as potentially making people more accepting of violence in the real world or obsessions with celebrities or Facebook diverting people from taking care of themselves in the real world, but I find it humorous to imagine anyone would be influenced in destructive ways by poetry. It’s even kind of hard to think of a poem that might be dangerous. I’ll try the dagger sequence from Act II Scene 1 of Macbeth where Macbeth is contemplating murder:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.

Basically, Macbeth has decided to kill the king and is imagining he sees a dagger, perhaps because he feels guilty in advance. In response to this illusion he draws his own dagger and says that the illusion of a dagger has encouraged him in his resolution to commit murder. I can picture Macbeth doing this, I can even imagine why he might be interested in killing someone else for political power, but just hearing about it doesn’t make me want to pull a knife from the kitchen drawer and hunt down my boss to get him out of my way to power. So, if literature is going to have an evil effect on me, it’s got to be more connected to my life and emotionally and rationally motivating. It would have to restructure my way of thinking. I can’t remember any texts with negative influences, but I have been influenced by Dead Man Walking to oppose the death penalty, and by Real Food to eat less processed food, neither of which is fiction or poetry. I wonder what makes these different? They were both rational and emotional in their impact.

Works Cited

Plato. From Republic. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 49-80. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. Jeremy Hylton. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. N.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2011. < http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html>

Blog Party Post: Save Reading!

Introduction

Here is my conspiracy theory: the American political system is bankrupting public education in order to dumb down citizens so that they’ll experience knee-jerk responses to political messages, they’ll vote according to those responses, and they’ll keep in power people who make big money and help their friends make big money based on their political position. If I were going to take to the streets to protest any crackpot notion this would be it.

Every other problem I have with American politics is connected to it. The current American wars are just one example: we claim to be promoting democracy around the world and use violence to do it. This bait and switch ensures that there will always be terrorism so that America will always have an excuse to go to war, which puts big money into the pockets of people who make weapons and other war-related products and who make money off of that industry. War also allows politicians to whip Americans up into a frenzy of patriotism whenever they need votes in support of troops whose lives they are wasting to line their pockets.

This money-making machine falls apart when Americans have enough education and experience to think critically through the messages communicated to them, so it’s no wonder that politicians claim the public school system needs to be policed instead of properly funded. Increasing requirements and less money… hmm, I wonder what that will do? It will ensure that the American public loses faith in public-school teachers, that the politicians will take over and shut down “low-performing” schools (read: schools with a lot of poor kids), and that increasing sums of money will flow into the for-profit sector in support of high-cost “solutions” to the problem that poor families will not be able to afford. At the moment when America is poised to make real education accessible to all Americans (note the rhetoric of No Child Left Behind), we are actually chopping away at the public-school foundation that makes that access possible. Like everything else in American culture, we are talking one way and acting another. It’s called hypocrisy.

Inquiry question: What is the connection between reading and the “decline” of the American educational system?

Conclusion: Reading grounds academic success because it encourages imaginative, emotional, and intellectual connection with ideas. When educational and social structures encourage us away from reading, we lose the opportunity to advance ourselves and to support our culture. Currently, both educational and social structures are killing reading, which will increasingly undermine education in America and widen the gap between rich and poor. While this may not have been intended by those in power, these institutional structures benefit the privileged few who can survive the system and then capitalize on it.

Point #1: Reading and socio-economic class correlate. More affluent families have more money and leisure for reading, and they have generations before them who valued reading. So, we might reinterpret the following statistics: “fewer than 50 percent of high school graduates from families without college experience are regarded academically qualified for college [. . .], compared to more than 80 percent of graduates with college-educated parents” (Arum and Roska 42). These statistics assume that families’ lack of experience with college culture interferes with children’s ability to get to college. While this is likely true, another aspect of underpreparedness may have to do with low levels of reading in the home. If young people are not comfortable with reading and discussing reading, they may not choose reading-heavy courses or succeed in the rigorous coursework leading to college, and they may need lots of support to tackle the reading associated with college-level academics.

Moreover, reading is one way to unconsciously absorb all kinds of cultural knowledge. Many assessments of skills and knowledge rely partly on the skill or knowledge sought and partly on the greater cultural context surrounding the task. If a student’s critical thinking skills are being assessed by being asked “to generate a memo advising an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed” (Arum and Roska 21), the student needs to know more than merely how to argue based on evidence. The student needs to know what a memo is, understand the relationship between an employee and employer in a professional situation, and have some familiarity with airplanes. Students who have never come into contact with the cultural aspects of this prompt may struggle to determine how to answer it. Students who have not themselves come into contact with the same cultural aspects but who are also readers may be able to better address the question through their imaginative journeys into the lives of others who have encountered these things. The problem is that cultural exposure and reading are both class defined; the more well-off students who more likely to have a broad cultural exposure to the professional world assumed to be the norm by people writing tests (rather than, for example, assuming most students understand gang activity) are the same students likely to have broad reading exposure to additional aspects of culture.

Point #2: Schools are committing “readicide.” Kelly Gallagher defines “readicide” as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools” (2). Reading involves emotion and imagination. Reading occurs most effectively when students care about the subject matter and the mode of expression. Reading requires emotional and intellectual interaction with a text, not just processing of facts. Reading, even challenging reading, can be fun! For example, my eight-year-old daughter recently discovered the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. She’s not even done with the first book, and she loves the series. She imagines she is a cat, her stuffed animals become other cats, and even our real cat Ichabod gets dragged into the role-playing. Then, my daughter found the website for the series and discovered a related game. This game has a 54-page instruction manual. I told her that I didn’t have time to read it and help her, but because she is emotionally invested, this little kid is reading a 54-page instruction manual, understanding it, and not even thinking about it as work. My observations of her indicate that she moves easily from reading the manual to writing her own Warrior Cat stories, to acting out scenarios, to playing problem-solving Warrior Cat electronic games, and to discussions with other people about issues raised as part of this process. Her challenging reading is embedded in an entire intellectual, physical, imaginative, interpersonal, and emotional package that keeps her developing her thinking. Reading in school could be like this. In some schools, it is.

However, because of the culture of high-stakes assessments, many schools are forgetting how reading happens and focusing on reading as a simple transaction based in comprehension rather than engagement. In emphasizing reading in the service of test-taking, schools are making reading a chore completely disconnected from students as individuals and thereby ironically undermining their students’ ability to succeed on tests. Gallagher says, “In an effort to ‘help’ prepare [students] for reading tests, we starve readers” (32-33). Young readers hungry for interesting ideas and stories increasingly denied the opportunity to feast in sustained, authentic, pleasurable, intellectually stimulating reading moments will stop seeking them. Through readicide, schools are killing the potential for students to enjoy reading in more advanced school work and in later life. This situation particularly disenfranchises children of less affluent families who may not have opportunities and encouragement in the home to consider reading as fun.

Point #3: Popular culture substitutes quick superficiality for deep thought. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” smart characters like George have buzzers implanted in their heads to interrupt their thinking and make them more “equal” with less smart characters. During the story, George watches his son Harrison get killed on TV for defying the equality rules and showing off his strengths. Moments later, George can’t even remember this personal tragedy because “a handicap signal shook him up.” Instead, he says to his wife Hazel, “’Forget sad things’” (185). This is a tragic ending because parents are not even allowed to feel the loss of their child due to the politics keeping the powerful in power. One of the messages conveyed by “Harrison Bergeron” is that equality is not sameness but everyone having the support to use their talents. Another message is that structures of power protect themselves. In the story, these structures protect themselves through handicapping people into sameness and gunning down anyone who bucks the system. Thankfully, American structures of power don’t frequently turn guns against citizens, or at least not in white middle-class reality.

Yet, American culture includes structures that encourage distraction equally as devastating as George’s handicap buzzer. As an example, commercial news sources operate for pay based on advertising. This means they need to attract viewers who will stay and read the ads. This need to retain viewers’ attention means that news sources will highlight news stories most likely to do so. Often these stories, such as what’s going on with Lindsay Lohan’s rehab, are visually highlighted on the screen, while Middle East peace talks fall into a list of other world events. In our fast-paced world where we don’t have time to read every news story, we may find ourselves reading about Lindsay Lohan instead of Benjamin Netanyahu (who?). When it comes time to use our hard-won political right to vote, will we be ready based on our superficial understanding of current events? Maybe. Maybe we won’t vote because we don’t know enough. Maybe we’ll vote in alignment with our political affiliation because we haven’t had time to examine the facts. Maybe we’ll vote for the person who comes across most favorably in Yahoo! News photos rather than understanding anything about his or her politics.

While such media involve reading, the structures of such media do not encourage the habits of reading: first of all, commercial news sources don’t foreground important facts. They tend instead to cater to the lowest common denominator of public opinion, gossip. Secondly, such media don’t encourage spending time with information, pursuing ideas in-depth, living in characters’ experiences for days and years, and connecting those ideas to one’s ongoing thought processes. Instead, media like commercial news sources repeat the same kinds of stories over and over again, encouraging only momentary uproars and feeding our sense that nothing is happening worth worrying about. Real reading, reading that invokes our emotions and challenges our thinking, helps us to think outside the confines of our lived experience, to understand other people and cultures, to value individual and ordinary experiences, to imagine better futures and long for justice (Pontusco and Thornton 65), and to better understand ourselves (Felski 7).

Conclusion

OK, so maybe there’s not a conspiracy to dumb down American citizens, but there are structures in our culture that encourage us to invest our time and money in not thinking. In a democracy where successful government hypothetically relies on educated voters, the failure of our school system and culture to value reading and its connection to deep thinking subverts democracy and keeps a privileged few in power.

Questions for discussion:

1) I’m probably totally biased. I love reading. I don’t remember learning to read. Reading has always come easily for me. What are other structures in our culture that actively encourage deep thinking that could similarly assist in supporting democracy?

2) If reading is so all-fired important, what are strategies that could encourage kids and adults to read more?


Works Cited

Arum, Richard and Josipa Roska. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. U Chicago P, 2011. Print.
Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle Review 55.7 (19 Dec. 2008): 7.
Gallagher, Kelly. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2009. Print.
Pontuso, James F. and Saranna R. Thornton. “Is Outcomes Assessment Hurting Higher Education?” Thought & Action (Fall 2008): 61-69.
Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergeron.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6th compact ed. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Boston: Longman, 2010. 181-85. Print.

The Thirteenth Tale

Spoiler alert! This post refers to the ending of the novel!

In response to Anna's interest in Twitterature, here is my tweet regarding Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale:

Bookseller and biographer, who lost her own twin at birth, discovers the family secret of a famous twin author, allowing her to die in peace (137 characters).

Mine is not very interesting. It doesn't feel much different from the punchy sentences used to promote books. Let me try again:

How I ache for my twin lost at birth. I wonder how this famous author lives without her twin? (spoiler alert!) Aha, she’s not a twin! (133 characters)

That's a little more dramatic, coming from main character Margaret Lea's perspective.

I enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale and would recommend it to anyone who likes ghost stories, gentle gothic, and literary allusions. I have two criticisms: 1) It did seem a bit plodding. As Emperor Joseph II says to Mozart in the film Amadeus: "There are simply too many notes." Maybe there are too many pages? Maybe that says about as much about Setterfield as it did about Mozart. 2) I do like the unraveling of family secrets but thought there could be a few more clues regarding the outcome buried earlier in the storyline to make the outcome more satisfying. The outcome was kind of deus ex machina somehow.

Works Cited

Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale. New York: Washington Square P, 2006. Print.

Image from: http://www.amazon.com/

Persepolis

Like Susie in her discussion board post, I am often struck by the fact that Americans don't take to the streets more often. People all over the globe vocally, physically, and non-violently protest all kinds of abuses. We're seeing this in the "Arab Spring" this year. Americans used to protest. Take the Civil Rights Moment and the Vietnam War as two examples. What has happened to us?

I find myself silenced by not wanting to incur the animosity of my neighbors, not wanting to disrupt my classroom by having my political views interfere with student learning, and not feeling as if I know enough even to comment publicly on the larger issues that make me angry. Yet, I do believe political voice is the foundation of our democracy, so why the paralysis?

I like Satrapi's depictions of protests in Persepolis. On page three, she depicts a group of men and women dressed in black against a black background. Each person has a raised fist, and the fists and the faces are the only white parts of the image. The caption reads "In 1979 a revolution took place. It was later called 'The Islamic Revolution.'"

Another frame depicts women after the revolution protesting for and against the veil. One one side are women covered except for their faces in black shouting "the veil!" and on the other are women in white clothes with black hair shouting "freedom!" Again, both groups have fists raised. The background here is white, and the caption reads, "Everywhere in the streets there were demonstrations for and against the veil" (5).

What strikes me in both of these depictions is the groups of individuals doing the same thing, and the fact that protest involves raised fists, which suggests the capacity for violence. These aspects capture another aspect of my reluctance to protest: I'm not comfortable with group protests. Somehow, my participation in a group protest reduces the complexity of my understanding of a situation to the party line. I'm not comfortable being perceived as wholly agreeing with others in my group with whom I only partly agree. Maybe that's just an excuse.

The violence aspect, that even peaceful protests symbolized by raised fists involve the attempt to force others to share my view, is also not comfortable for me. I'm angry enough to believe in my view, but my recognition of the complexity of the situation makes me wary of imposing it on others who may better understand the details.

The Iranian revolution is a good example of the problem of complexity. In that revolution, the liberals and the fundamentalists collaborated to overthrow the Shah's excessive regime. The Shah needed to be overthrown, but the liberals did not predict that the fundamentalists would take that opportunity to impose Islamic law. If they had, they might not have joined the revolution. The situation was not as simple as it appeared, and the liberals like Satrapi's family have suffered for their simplistic reading of the situation. As we watch the various "Arab Spring" events, we would do well to be mindful of this history, as revolution involves tearing down existing structures, and it's never sure how they will be replaced.

And yet... all action is action. Even inaction and silence are action. When it comes down to it, we'd better just pick a stance and take to the streets even if our knowledge is not complete or risk never having our voices heard.

Blog 13: Quote-Response Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson! She reduces huge natural phenomena to managable size and wrestles with big philosophical questions like, will I be able to recognize my loved ones after death? In "The Lightening is a yellow Fork" (606) Dickinson does both. She uses understatement about lightening to imply the power and negligence of whoever lives in the sky.

In the poem, lightening becomes a fork dropped from a table, which makes the reader wonder about who lives up there. In imagining a person in the sky who has dropped a fork, Dickinson also implies negligence on the part of any diety: he has "inadvertent fingers" to carelessly drop something so powerful as a lightening bolt. This probes whether God is actually paying attention and caring about humans.

Because heaven, the "mansions," never appear clearly, we can't know anything about God, but the lightening reveals the awful truth: God's "Apparatus" is "Dark." He keeps us in ignorance, only revealing his power and lack of caring in the moment when lightening strikes.

Despite my interpretation of this poem, I don't think Dickinson was an atheist. I think she just practiced a very questioning faith through her poetry, avoiding the convenient assumptions about God that keep people comfortable.

Blog 12: Poem Paraphrase

Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" (576): I am familiar with despair from my own loneliness. No one cares about me. Even the sun by which understand time cannot provide moral direction and cannot tell me why I exist.

Blog 11: Quote-Response Brooks

I love Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool." It's in the rhythm section of our textbook because it employs only single-syllable words. Those words capture the force and naive fearlessness of young people:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We... (557)

In addition to the single syllables, the voice reminds me of the boys in "Greasy Lake" posing as tough kids. The avoidance of standard English suggests a rejection of authority in "We real cool." It's not "We're really cool." Skipping school or not graduating also bucks authority, as does staying up late, beyond bedtime or curfew. This rebelliousness here is connected to an accuracy of violence in "Strike straight." This might be a shot in pool or a punch delivered to an assailant. In either case, the young people are equipped by their rebellious lives to be effective. Of course, the end of the poem undermines their confidence.

I'm also interested in the use of "We," always at the beginnings of sentences and always at the ends of lines. This suggests a collective persona, as if the group members never do anything alone. This resembles the narration in "A Rose for Emily" where the town gossipped enough to share the same unhelpful opinions about Miss Emily. Here, it seems as if peer pressure creates this life of deadends for these young rebels. Because they work as a group, they can't think critically about their behavior, and they all, without regret on their part but sadly for the reader, careen toward death.

Blog 10: Song Response

Does anyone listen to Kenny Rogers anymore? I don't listen to much current music. Somehow, I lost the desire to keep up, preferring talk radio and audio books. But music was very much a part of my childhood and young adult life, and sometimes lyrics will come to mind. Kenny Roger's "The Gambler" has a great chorus that seems pretty important to my adult life:

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away, know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table,
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

The song is a narrative about a down and out young man encountering an experienced gambler who gives him advice. The chorus is the advice: you need to know when to keep playing and when to quit, and in quitting, you need to know when to get out fast. I do think it's hard for young people to know when it's time to give up. We're taught to "hang in there" and that courage involves seeing something through to the end. I think it's also important to know when no effort on my part will do any good. There have been important times in my life when I've folded and run, and I haven't been disappointed in that choice.

The other part of the advice is not to count your money while you're still playing. I read this as don't judge yourself. Whether you're winning or losing, judging doesn't do any good. Just keep going with the work until it's finished. I've found even after the work is done that judging doesn't matter because I'm on to the next job. It's really the game that's important, life, career, family, not figuring out whether you're winning or losing. Just be happy in the action of life.

I don't really think of Kenny Rogers as providing my life philosophy, but clearly my own experiences connect enough with the idea of this song to make it meaningful for me. :)

Blog 9: Haiku

From Rilke's "Panther":

The caged panther paces.
His fierce hunter’s heart seeks,
Finding only bars.

Blog 8: Poem Paraphrase

Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Panther": The caged panther paces, momentarily opening the eyes that once hunted only to find himself surrounded by bars.

Road through Wonderland

My friend Dawn Schiller wrote The Road through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes about her experiences as a “throwaway teen” victimized by the porn star John Holmes. The memoir follows Dawn on a road trip with her father, a Vietnam vet, from a tough neighborhood in Florida to Southern California where she met John. She was then 15, and he was twice her age. With the neglect of her father and John’s separating her from family and friends, Dawn came to see John as a protector, but their sexual relationship constituted rape, as she was not young enough to give consent, and he preyed upon her vulnerable situation.

Eventually, John became increasingly involved with drugs and abusive of Dawn. In one instance, John hit Dawn out of paranoid jealousy:

“Bam! John’s hand flies out across the glass and lands hard across my face.
I hit the ground with a thud that sends the air from my lungs. I immediately feel the searing pain of the blow rip through my jaw. It cracks with a loud snap and aches like it is broken. Stunned and in shock, I have no vision except for sparks of light against a black background” (259).

The use of present tense here and throughout the book makes the increasing violence gripping for a reader. While violence in a consensual relationship is never appropriate, it is even more terrifying that this is a big, male adult hitting a child, and the child has no adult to turn to and no frame of reference to use in understanding the violence as wrong.

John went so far as to traffic Dawn, prostituting her to raise money to spend on drugs. I can’t imagine that experience as the norm for a young woman. At the end of the book, following the Wonderland murders in which John was implicated, the couple fled to Florida where, finally, with the help of caring friends who notice the abuse, Dawn turned John in to the police.

Dawn’s book is written as a means to voice her side of the story in response to the film Wonderland, which focuses on John’s connection with the Wonderland murders. I had to watch the film version in small chunks, as I found the violence difficult. Kate Bosworth plays Dawn, representing her as a cute tagalong along for the ride. One planned scene of physical abuse was cut from the film, as the filmmakers were worried about making John look bad. One trafficking scene appears in the film, but it’s depicted so vaguely that it’s difficult to understand what is happening. John himself comes across more as pathetic than terrifying, which distorts his role in Dawn’s life.

As a means of turning the horror of her childhood into productive action, Dawn has founded the non-profit Empowering Successful Teens through Education, Awareness and Mentoring (ESTEAM): http://www.empowerteens.com/. Through this non-profit, Dawn plans to develop mentoring models that can guide adults in supporting teens experiencing neglect and in protecting teens from predators who prey on neglected youth. Nancy

Works Cited
Schiller, Dawn. The Road through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes. Medallion P, 2010. Print.

Image Source: http://www.medallionpress.com/authors/schiller.html

Blog Post 6: Gift of the Magi

I love O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi"! Della and Jim demonstrate their love for one another by each sacrificing his or her own prized possession to get a special gift for his or her partner. Of course, the irony is that neither can use the special gift because they sacrificed the possession to which it relates. The irony emphasizes their love by tinging it with regret, but it is only a regret for things, not for people, so it is dwarfed by the love their feel for one another.

What is often lost in this love story is the title and the last paragraph addressing the magi. As the last paragraph states, the magi were the three wise kings who brought gives to Jesus at his birth. Henry states that Della and Jim, and people like them who give gifts, "are wisest." "They are the magi" (162). In a sense, Henry is saying they are better than the magi. I think there is irony in operation here, too. Della and Jim are not kings; they do not have wealth and time; they have to work hard for the people they love. It is the very irony that they can't use the gifts that makes them wiser and better than the magi because they gave of their whole hearts, sacrificing themselves for their beloved, without a thought to getting anything in return. Their gifts, therefore, are more in line with the story of Jesus than those provided by the actual rich, leisured magi. Nancy

Blog Post 4: The Lottery

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is one of the scariest stories ever. It starts out all happy--a sunny summer day--and everyone's going to the lottery. Based on the general understanding of a lottery, it seems as if someone's going to win something. Then, it turns out that the "winner" is the big loser, getting stoned by her fellow townsfolk.

Stories of ritual human sacrifice are part of traditional agricultural societies that believed something(s) valuable needed to be sacrificed in order to guarantee a good harvest. This one has a small detail that indicates the connection: Old Man Warner, who has lived through 77 lotteries, mentions the old saying, "'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon'" (216), which makes the connection between the lottery and the crops.

Other similar stories occur in the film The Wicker Man, which is very creepy, and in Wole Soyinka's play The Strong Breed. In these two, the sacrifice is made ironic by the fact that the community opts to sacrifice an outsider; they aren't willing to sacrifice their own, which seems to undermine the whole purpose.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of these stories is that tradition continues without reason and is so strong that it overcomes all human feeling. While hopefully we don't make human sacrifices anymore, there are ways in which harmful traditions outlast their usefulness just because that's the way it's always been done. When we can't think beyond "We've always done it that way," we're in trouble. Nancy

Silver's Edge

I recently read Anne Kelleher's Silver's Edge, which is a fantasy novel that includes a couple romance plots. Normally, I'm not a big fan of fantasy novels where mortals travel to fairyland. I do appreciate the tradition. I taught a British fantasy course this past year that included several influential fairyland novels: George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lord Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter. These authors influenced other more well known fantasy writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In that class, we also read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which is a very recent version of the fairyland story that was also made into a movie. Both are delightful. (And, I have more to say on Neil Gaiman, whose novels are awesome.) I appreciate fairyland stories. I appreciate their impact on other works. But, generally, I find the depictions of fairyland rather simplistic, kind of like the wonderful children's book The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies or the film Darby O'Gill and the Little People. The stories tend toward cuteness rather than complexity because they don't take the fairies seriously.

However, Kelleher's depiction of fairyland seems more interesting. The characters are entangled in realistic relationship issues, some impacted by class, whether the need to make money or the need to marry for political advantage, and some impacted by political and racial tensions, such as those between nations or between mortals and the sidhe (fairies).

The borderlines are also drawn not just between the moral world and fairyland but also between the realm of goblins. The intersections among these three territories multiply the conflict and heighten the political intrigue, as characters make deals for their own advantage.

I also like the complexity in the depiction of the magical elements. There isn't just one kind of magic that some people have. There are differing kinds of magic and imlements that have magical effects, such as silver, and magic doesn't solve every problem. Instead, magic is one factor; bravery, honor, professional expertise, and hard work are others. It seems as if Kelleher takes fairyland seriously. It's not a realm of cute elfish caricatures as in Lloyd Alexander's work but more along the lines of Tolkien, drawn from a long history, with the sidhe simply being a race of non-humans for whom time moves differently.

Finally, I want to mention that I enjoyed the depictions of the female characters who are well-rounded and of the main character, Nessa, who has trained as a blacksmith in her father's smithy. She is capable and brave. She can make weapons and is willing to go weaponless in to the Otherworld to find her father. One sidhe character watches her swim back to the Shadowlands (mortal world): "He was forced to acknowledge her courage, and the intelligence, as well as the intuition that led her to not only chop off the goblin's head, but to bring it to the attention of the sidhe as well" (281). Although the sidhe are both attracted to and repelled by humans, this character, who seems trustworthy himself, views Nessa as a key player in the unfolding events, which allows the reader to take her seriously as well.

Nessa is likeable also because, like many fantasy heroes, she is looking for her future, whether that will be partnered with her father's apprentice Griffin or with the sidhe Artimour or working as a blacksmith or following the path of corn magic. She seems capable of many things, and the end of the novel leaves her future unresolved and her family mystery still hidden. So, now I have to buy the next book in the series...

Works Cited

Kelleher, Anne. Silver's Edge. New York: Luna, 2004.
"Silver's Edge" [cover image]. Amazon.com. 2011. Web. 9 July 2011.

Blog 2 Miss Emily

I love "A Rose for Emily"! It's kind of grotesque to realize that (spoiler alert!) she has been sleeping next to a dead guy for a long time. Ah, love! :)

I'm teaching a gothic course also this summer, so maybe I'll write about the gothic elements in Faulkner's story. Gothic fictions tend to have a creepy, ancient, aristocratic house and family, both of which are decaying. The domestic spaces, which should be safest, are risky. Usually, the characters are pretty clearly defined: virginal woman at risk threatened by dark villain and rescued by gallant, handsome, unmarried hero. So, "A Rose for Emily" has some of the gothic elements and plays on the others.

Clearly, the house and family are decaying. The house is disappearing among "garages and cotton gins" with its "stubborn and coquettish deay" (30). The house has regal elements of a prior age that are being obliterated by time, but it is still clinging to them ("stubborn") and teasing ("coquettish") the community with wisps of memory and desire for times past.

In her earliest days, Emily might have seemed the virginal heroine, "a slender figure in white," and her father seems the dark villain, "a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip" (32). "silhouette" means he is shadowy and dark, and the whip suggests violence. Her white clothing put her in the innocent role. Her father will not let her marry, so she cannot escape. She is the victim trapped in a mouldering house by her father's violence.

Faulkner definitely turns the tables on the traditional melodramatic gothic theme by making virginal Emily into the villain. Homer Baron decides to leave, clearly not the gothic hero coming to the rescue, despite the obvious signs of Emily's affection: the "man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece" (34). She can't stand the shame and loneliness, so she poisons him to keep him forever. I can just hear the "a ha ha ha" of the villain laughing. And she doesn't get caught until she dies. Victory! The once victim has her last hurrah. There's something about the twist of making the innocent into the murderer that heightens the creepiness.

ENGL 104 Blog Entry 1

1. My name is Nancy Knowles, and I prefer to be called Nancy. I am really busy and don't have hobbies. I like to cook, read, walk my dogs, and play with my child and husband. I'm originally from Southern California and have lived in La Grande, Oregon since 2000.

2. I don't remember learning to read, so I must have learned before Kindergarten. My parents had lots of books and liked to read--popular fiction, art books, magazines, my dad liked books about cars. I read a lot of the classics before they were assigned in school. In high school, I had Mrs. Jackson, a passionate Scot ("Scottish not Scotch"), as my English teacher for three of my four years. She loved Laurence Olivier, so we read every Shakespeare play for which there was an Olivier film. I am very grateful to her for that exposure.

Now, I prefer to read fantasy and science fiction or at least novel-length works. I like to disappear into the story, and short stories and poetry don't allow me to do that, although I enjoy analyzing them.

3. I did the interviews when I taught this course in 2009. I'll see if I can pin down anyone to be interviewed again...

The Women

I've been away from my reading blog due to a crazy busy schedule and also because something in EOU's move to gmail messed up my ability to connect to my blog. I think everything is fixed, and teaching ENGL 104 again this summer gives me an excuse to catch up.


I plan to write about a number of books I read this past year. The first is a book by T. C. Boyle called The Women. I have read a book by Boyle in the past, which was a humorous look at minor environmental terrorists. I remember someone living in a tree and characters attacking logging equipment. The Women is nothing like that book.


The Women retells the story of the lives of three women who loved famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna Milanoff, Maude Miriam Noel, and Mamah Cheney. The book addresses each woman's story in turn in that order. Olgivanna was Wright's last wife, Mirim his second, and Mamah a tragic love affair while he was married to his first wife Kitty, so the book tells the women's stories in reverse chronological order. I think this order allows the story to climax (spoiler alert!) with the murder of Mamah and her children at Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, which is very effective. The narrative deftly captures the different personality of each woman and her intersection with Wright's life. The focus on the women gives them the power of perspective over the reader's interpretation of Wright, which is a refreshing approach.

The book is narrated by a Japanese apprentice, Sato Tadashi, which is an interesting technique. It gives the narrator an insider perspective without using the first-person perspective for any of the main characters, which perhaps avoids biasing the reader in favor of any of them. The narrator doesn't interfere much in the story except for some rather humorous footnotes and the introductions to each of the three sections. In the introduction to the third section, Tadashi visits Taliesin with his wife, and Wright meets him at the station. Tadashi is weeping from "joy, recollection, nostalgia, pain" and is deeply honored by the fact that Wright respects apprentices well enough to take time to meet him (326). Tadashi's awe of Wright echoes the experience of the women in depicting Wright's charisma. Despite his ambition, arrogance, and insensitivity, Wright was a powerful, fascinating, and charming man, whom individuals might love or hate but couldn't help admire.

At the time I was reading this book, I also watched a PBS documentary by Ken Burns called Frank Lloyd Wright. The documentary told the story of Wright's plans for his famous house Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Always needing money, Wright took the contract for Fallingwater and then went back to work on other projects. When finally the future owner wished to see his plans, the owner called to say he had arrived at the station and would get to Taliesin in an hour or two. Wright spent those hours drafting freehand from the work he had been doing mentally all along and was ready to meet the owner as if he'd been working on the plans for months. That story seems representative of many qualities of Wright: again, his arrogance, partly also his insensitivity to the needs of others, and finally most definitely his impossible genius.

I also watched a documentary on the renovation of Heurtley House in Chicago called The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House, which was a really interesting way to explore Wright's design by tracking the ongoing attempt to revive the house's original qualities.

My interest in this book arises from the fact that my dad, architect George T. Knowles, was apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1950s, toward the end of Wright's life. My dad lived at Taliesin East in Wisconsin and also at Taliesin West near Scottsdale, AZ, so he knew Wright and his family. My dad is working on a book of photos about his experiences at Taliesin and has many funny stories about the celebrities who used to visit. Because Boyle lives in a home designed by Wright in Santa Barbara, my dad has attempted to contact him to see whether he might tour the home, but he has met with no success.

As a child, I visited a number of Wright buildings, including Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Pennsylvania.

Works Cited


Boyle, T. C. The Women. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Burns, Ken and Lynn Novick. Frank Lloyd Wright. Florentine Films, 1998.
Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House. Perf. H. Allen Brooks. 2002.
"The Women" [cover image]. Penguin. 2011. Web. 26 June 2011. us.penguingroup.com