literature

Continental Shift

~ Bon Steele ~ 5 Comments

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
  -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Big changes percolating, m’friends. There are whole continents shifting in my head about writing and learning and parenting and my body and my child and and and…

As I said, big changes.

Some of it is things that have been on the boil, albeit on a back burner, for years. Others are a more gradual shifting. Still others are a radical change in my thinking caused by the last few months of school. Most especially the last couple of weeks.

I suppose Emerson and Thoreau do that to people.

I further suppose that is one of the reasons they continue to be taught, year after year.

We all fall down, and while down in the dirt, despair. We find it more comfortable, and far easier to wallow than to get back up. Especially if this is your third, or thirteenth, or even thirtieth tumble.

Or higher.
*coughcough*  AHEM.

 

Still, I find myself looking back over my writings and seeing a progression. Seeing an upward and outward trend. It’s only when I stop writing that there is a stutter in that progression. And how easy a truth is that?

And how sad is it to think that I keep forgetting such an easy lesson?

How sad are the un-kept promises made to myself and my readers that I never get around to? How lucky I am that you keep coming back. Thank you. It means a lot to me.

If Stephen King’s magnum opus was right – and all the universe is but a continuous microcosm of author(s)’ brains, how many of my characters now flounder in Limbo? Who tremble under a pendulum that ever threatens? Or wait in the Red Desert with madness snapping at their heels?

Time, I think, to rescue them. To do the work I mean to. To no longer simply visit the piles of my previous words and wail. But to unravel the frayed and forgotten ends, to weave a more complete tapestry.

I am no Emerson. I am no Thoreau. Heck, I am not even a King.
(still not King.)

I am who I am, doing what I am supposed to be doing. Pretending or feeling otherwise is a slap in the face to the talent that I do have.

Continent shifting, indeed.

Orlando vs. Orlando: Divorcing the Literature from the Film

~ Bon Steele ~ 6 Comments
Wait. Wrong Orlando. But…let’s not be hasty. We can linger, yes? No? Ah, well. Moving on.

One of the final assignments for my Critical Theory Literature class was a compare and contrast of Orlando the Virginia Woolf story and Orlando the movie based on it. Six hundred to one thousand words about how they stack up to one another. Easy peasy, eh?

Hmm.

Let me just say, right up front, that I loved both. Each had its very good points. Each also had its weak points. The story’s weaker points were mostly concerned with Woolf’s style of writing. Even in a “light, playful” story, her phrasing can be a tad chewy. The movie’s weaker points were mostly in some of the artistic choices that the director made. Again, I am not saying that either was bad. Just, as with any human endeavor, they weren’t flawless.

At any rate, I did the assignment. Unfortunately, for my professor, I am NOT a scholar. I like writing. I aspire to be a published writer. But, I am a fiction writer. So I did the best I could and turned it in. And really, this isn’t a rehash of the assignment, although I did steal my title from it for this piece. Because it is a COOL title, dammit. It should see the light of day and not languish in my professor’s slush pile.

No, what I wanted to talk about was this tendency we have to rehash stories into movies. Many other people have already bewailed that. To be honest, humans have always told the same stories over and over. Even Billy S. was guilty of this.1  This is because we really do have a pretty shallow arc of things that are important to us on the continuum of themes that we could talk about. They are significant things, and we should talk about them. Some of the ones we see the most are life, love, death, betrayal, forgiveness.

Très importante, right?

And I grok that movies are a fabulous medium. I love movies. I watch a lot of movies. No, really. A lot. And, quotes from them pepper my conversation and writings. However, I think that the one thing that truly movies sucks at is translating literature. Especially for students.

I’ll wait while y’all finish gnashing your teeth and shaking your fists at the monitor. Done?

Good.

Here’s why I think that students are better served by literature as words: Movies are limiting.

It is ONE viewpoint. One. That you are fed by the director/screenwriter/producers. You do not get the benefit of figuring out for yourself what it all means. You’re told. And before people get their panties in a wad and send me hate-mail with details about their favorite movie that “Oh. My. GAWD. Movie XYZ totally has fourteen different viewpoints that can be blah blah blah.”2

Seriously? Of course there are exceptions. Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which may be translated as “the exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted.” Or more succinctly, the rule exists because the exception implies that it does.

My point, before I wandered SERIOUSLY off track was that in the vast majority of movies, you are force fed the viewpoint of the director. While some of these adaptations are very good, they are still just.one.viewpoint.

The beauty of words is that they are malleable. They are fluid. Their meaning shifts from one moment to the next, one person to the next. It is words’ changeability that separates a writer from an author, in my ever-so-humble opinion. A writer captures meaning, plot, and dialogue. The reader is able to read the story and be entertained. An author captures meaning, dialogue, and plot. Then, just for kicks, inserts multiple meanings within their text. Reading an author’s work is like peeling back layers of an onion, always finding something new.3

Tangented again. Sorry.

At any rate, I guess what I am (eventually) trying to say is that I will always prefer the book to the movie. I will always find multiple layers within good literature. And I think that we should continue to push the words in school – and not just at the collegiate level[s]. Let’s have our children find out new things for themselves, get lost and find the path again without too much intervention on our parts. Force feeding a classic complete with a pre-fab meaning sort of misses the point.

Don’t you think?

1 – Now, I want you to notice something that I just saw [and take as proof as my not being a scholar. If I was a scholar, I’d have noticed this while writing the Orlando essay.]  Which person accuses Shakespeare of being a plagiarist?  Why, Robert Greene, the author of Orlando Furioso. [Emphasis mine.]  And does Mr. Greene show up in cameo in the book Orlando? Sure he does. As the 17th/19th century poet and critic, Nick Greene.  Hmmm….. /ArsenioHall

2 – There are others. You’ll notice that both of the movies I reference are considered “science fiction” and not High Literature. Please reference Mister Hall, above.

3 – Inevitable comparison.  Literature is to onions as Movies are to parfait.

Fall of the House of Poe

~ Bon Steele ~ 5 Comments

As promised, here is the slide show presentation I did for class.1

Below it are the notes I wrote for each slide.  Exciting, no?
During the actual presentation, I wound up sort of extemporizing from instead of reading directly off the notes.

 

 

<COVER SLIDE>
For my paper and presentation, I chose Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher to thematically, psychologically, and biographically analyze.  As you might imagine, these themes are twined around one another like vines; where one leaves off, another picks up.

<SLIDE TWO>
However, while talking to a couple of my more literary frou-frou1friends, I mentioned that I had chosen Poe and his House of Usher as my research subject. Reactions were less than thrilled, overall.

I have liked and admired Poe’s writing since my high school days.

He was a talented and very prolific author. Over the course of his 22-year career he wrote: one novel, over 50 poems, one poem in a play format, over 60 short stories and numerous essays, news articles, and literary critiques.

He wrote in a variety of styles, not just the Gothic horror that most people know. He wrote one of the first modern science fiction stories and he is credited as the Father of modern detective novels. In fact, Sherlock Holmes is based off a character in a Poe story: C. Auguste Dupin.

This is not counting his letter writing – of which there is a tremendous amount. The U.S. Postal service was the Facebook of that time. As one of the very first writers who struggled to earn his living by writing, he often wrote to friends and family to ask for money, love, or both.

But other than scholars and me, who even enjoys his work?

<SLIDE THREE>
Just those crazy Goth kids …oops, wrong Goths….

<SLIDE FOUR>
Just those crazy Goth kids are into that depressing stuff, right?
Actually, that isn’t true. Human’s fascination with the dark– something that Poe did very well – is pretty universal.

What is GOTHIC?

<SLIDE FIVE>

As it turns out, Gothic covers a pretty wide landscape. The actual definition is listed on your handout. But, the short version is a written landscape wherein the fantastically dread can occur.

Americans love their Gothic literature. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is considered Gothic. So is Hitchcock’s Psycho and Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

<SLIDE SIX>
One of Poe’s mainstays in his Gothic writing was the use of the grotesque; that is, to purposefully arouse shock and disgust in his readers. He lured them into a story by capturing their mind’s eye with images of death, of decay and rot; mingling them within them a sense of ethereal beauty.

GROTESQUE:  An artistic style that is intended to cause fascination by using images that cause dismay & revulsion.
It’s the car wreck phenomenon. You aren’t supposed to look; you don’t really *WANT* to look. But you do it anyway.

Humans love a dichotomy. Death and life. Love and hate. Rot and growth. It’s all a way to make something frightening and mysterious, less so.

I could go into several other examples: Jung’s Great Mother archetype with her destructive/nurturing tendencies. The Kali Ma, Beautiful Destroyer. The Republican party. There are examples everywhere. Even in places you wouldn’t normally think to look.    CLICK “Mostly” link.

But, I only have 25 minutes and I have yet to get to the meat of the paper.

<SLIDE SEVEN>
So, that’s why I chose Poe. But, given that he has been analyzed, over-analyzed, even-Freud would say “enough with zee analyzation!” – what could I do that hadn’t already been done?

<SLIDE EIGHT>

THESIS TIME!!

<SLIDE NINE>
First, the story itself is a katabasis; the ‘narrator’ journeys through the dark underbelly of the House of Usher, both literally and figuratively, during his stay there. He is a witness to the madness and downfall of his host, Roderick Usher as well as the implosion of the house, itself.

I’m not going to play the video this in its entirety – I’ve linked it in the handout if you want to see it later. But, I thought it was a nifty take on the ultimate journey through the Underworld to knowing. He starts off, and things just get weirder and more dangerous as he goes. Eventually, he reaches the end and is rewarded.
Usually, the reward of katabasis is knowledge. However, in order for this to occur, an anabasis must happen as well. Anabasis is the return journey with the prize.

<SLIDE TEN>

One of the ways that I believe Poe used the story of Usher as an allegory for his own life is through the use of use of metafiction.

What IS metafiction, you ask? Glad you asked.

According to Patricia Waugh, it is “…a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact [sic] in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”

Although it has been around since Homer’s Odyssey, it didn’t really get a full head of steam as a literary trope until the 1960’s. The term wasn’t even in use until 1970.

So, if it wasn’t in vogue or much use at the time, how could it be present in Usher?

In actuality, it was in a number of his works: The Imp of the Perverse, and  Ligeia are both thought to be metafictional in nature.

Although it may have been subconscious in nature – and without really being able to quiz Poe on it, we might never know for sure – I do have my doubts. He was an extremely precise writer. As I mentioned, he authored more than one essay on the mechanics of writing. The parallels one finds in Usher might certainly be intentional. But to what purpose?

<SLIDE ELEVEN>

(Heh. It goes to ‘eleven’.)

NARRATOR: is the voice and speaker of a story. In theory, this character is supposed to be separate from the author, himself.

However, in the case of much of his work, the narrator is often a thinly disguised Poe.

Poe, due to a variety of psychological reasons, mirrored himself in the story the narrator, Roderick Usher, as well as the House itself.

This slide shows both a quote from “Usher”, describing Roderick; and a watercolor done of Poe when he was around 35 years old. This was during one of Poe’s more prosperous moments and shows him in far better adult health than he had enjoyed since his college days.

One of his contemporaries said, “I distinctly recall his face, with its ample forehead, brilliant eyes, and narrowness of nose and chin; an essentially ideal face, not noble, yet anything but coarse, with the look of oversensitiveness [sic] which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing that coarseness. It was a face to rivet one’s attention in any crowd; yet a face that no one would feel safe in loving. . . .”

You can see the similarities between the description(s) and the image.

In later years, he would adopt the mustache that most people today picture when they think of him.

<SLIDE TWELVE>

Poe can also be seen in the physical House, too. He even describes the House as one would a creature; imbuing it with a sinister aspect.

Although at first it appears sound, if somewhat menacing, the House is slowly disintegrating. Either the madness of the people within it – Poe’s voices, maybe? – or the disinterest of care of same, cause the House to be a slowly self-destructing object.

Poe was often his own worst enemy. In spite of a ferocious talent, he was prone to binge drinking, an air of superiority, callousness in dealing with others, jealousy when working with other writers, and an instability within his personal life. Although he was always neatly dressed and presented, he was more often than not, slowly falling apart.
<SLIDE THIRTEEN>

Poe’s life was a series of ill luck, missed opportunities, and self-sabotage. Usher is a Romanticized portrait of a suffering artist being driven slowly mad by a too-loud, too obnoxious, and not nearly refined enough world.

One of the main parallels that I will go over in my research paper is the death by consumption (tuberculosis) of almost every important woman in Poe’s life. His birth mother, his adoptive mother, and his wife – all die young, of consumption  after lingering illnesses. All of these women were pale, large eyed, dark haired women.

In spite of his attempts to control his environment, both Roderick and Poe lose the women they love (Poe often called his wife “Sissie”) to a wasting disease. This loss, in turn, eventually kills them.

 

 

 

1 – See: Hipsters, Literary Snobs. 

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