Last Post

End of the year and here we go, the last impressive post of the semester. The Crying of Lot 49!!! This is probably my favorite book of the year because it was both humorous and it went against the literary establishment, my two favorite things. Most of the time I feel like some of the interpretations given in English are pretty much B.S. and Pynchon speaks out in his book about searching for something where there is nothing to be found. Now I'm not saying that there never is more meaning and even most of the time there is, but reading too much into something is pointless and bad. Oedipa was a bored housewife who's paranoia fed by the fear of the could war looked for meaning in the meaningless throughout her life. While looking at a radio or the factories in the city she thought they were trying to tell her something more. Her paranoia was even more effected by the sighting of a secret society symbol throughout her adventures that lead her further and further down the road of craziness. One of the points I believe Pynchon was trying to make was that paranoia can leave you alone in this world and always leave you looking for something else. For Oedipa she lost everyone and never found what she was looking for.

The Brooch

The Brooch by Faulkner is a story of the relationship between a mother, son and his wife. The relationship dynamic between the three is what stuck out to me most in this story. First of all, the mother/son relationship is very strong and they are very close. When he went to college she went with him, the story says, making it so they never have to be apart. In class it was suggested that it might be an "unnatural" relationship, possibly even sexual. I don't really get that from the story. She definitely has a control over his life as is made evident by the fact that he never really went out with anyone, and he hung his head when walking by the pretty girls. She doesn't ever expressly forbid him though and he eventually does fall in love with Amy and he marries her. He can't leave the house because she is his mother and he feels he owes it to her and she is too sick to take care of herself. The mother doesn't like it because of Amy's reputation though. Amy and the mother's relationship is a strained one that only exists because of her son's wishes. She is kind enough to give Amy a Brooch that is worth alot and is a family heirloom. The mother holds no love for her however and as soon as Amy cheats she is ready to give up on her and force her out. Boyd and Amy were in love when they got married and had a descent relationship other than him being angry at her for dancing and drinking with other men. After their baby died they grew apart and he couldn't help her in her grieving so he allowed her to go dancing alone, something he knew one day would lead to her cheating. He felt useless and so he always just hoped it wouldn't happen, but when she did cheat he could no longer go with her and reject his mother or let his mother rule his life anymore. It was just too much to bear and he had to end his own life.

The Queen

There was a Queen by William Faulkner is a story about a woman who marries into this proud family, all the men die, so that it is only her, her aunt in law, her son, and the help left. She had received letters that would embarrass the family earlier in life and they were found by a Jewish man who she then slept with in order to retrieve them. The old woman then dies and the story ends. Basically this story seems to have to themes, that of pride and race. First of all, Narcissa is too prideful to tell the uncle to go after the man who wrote the letters and too prideful to burn them, so later she has to have sex with another man to get them back. This hurts the pride of the Aunt to the point that she becomes so upset she dies. Pride is also related to race in that the maid Elnora feels that she is better than Narcissa because she has more high class blood in her and the fact that she is part black doesn't diminish that fact. Obviously to the white people however it does diminish it. This story also shows a anti-semitic sentiment when the old woman tells the Jewish investigator to leave just because he is a Jew.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos William's biography says it all when it calls him a "no nonsense voice of the social man". His poetry also contains vivid imagery and subtleties that could be missed if one didn't read carefully. His poem The Young Housewife at its surface is about a man who drives by a house and sees a woman and later he sees her with various delivery men and he just drives by. One has to wonder how the man knows that the wife would be in a negligee at that time of day when she is inside. It actually seems like he has had a sexual relationship with this woman and as he drives by one day he thinks of her fondly and sexually. He then compares her to a fallen leaf and then says he drives over dried leaves crushing them. So perhaps the car is him sexually and he is a man that has had sex many times with wives and enjoys thinking about it. The Portrait of a Lady I did not really get at all. Finally there was The Descent. Carl Rapp wrote "Williams reaches a point at which the external world no longer seems to provide an adequate correlative for his desires and expectations. Williams finds a similar way of looking at defeat and loss that enables him to see those negative experiences as positive ones with implications not yet "realized."" I think these are great comments about Williams' s poem. In this poem he seems to be speaking about death but how it isn't really the end. He seems to believe that even after we die our memories still live on and that memory is the greatest thing we have from life. For instance "no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness" is saying that nothing is as good as our memory makes it. He is also saying that in death we realize the love is not moral and it will remain after life forever "endless and indestructible". Throughout this poem he is trying to say this that "no defeat is made up entirely of defeat" and even in death good can come.

Chestnut

Chestnut's short stories The Passing of Grandison and The Wife of His Youth both deal with the African American condition in both the pre and post civil war era. In The Passing of Grandison it was interesting how Grandison was set up throughout the novel as a simple servant who no matter what was loyal to his master above all else. However, his true motivation was that of keeping his family together. He was in love with Betty the maid and he just could not leave her behind as well as the rest of his family. The reader is lead to believe throughout this story that Grandison is a simpleton who doesn't understand the value of freedom, but he is smart enough to set up his families escape to freedom without getting caught proving he was very intelligent. Also in this story it was interesting how Dick set about freeing Grandison and just couldn't figure out why he refused to go free. This misunderstanding of African Americans by whites is indicative of how whites viewed blacks as selfish stupid creatures, where in reality they are intelligent and selfless. It was also interesting how Dick set out to free one slave but because of his attempt to free just Grandison he paved the way for eight to escape together. This theme of importance of family is also evident in the second story, The Wife of His Youth. This story once again shows the selflessness of an African American as she waited for 25 years to find the husband she had when she was still a slave. She wandered America to find this man and he too chose his old bride to the one he was about to make advances toward. This is the type of love that is rare and beautiful and is great that Chestnut set it up between two older African Americans instead of the usual young people that most stories revolve around. It should also be pointed out that just because Mr. Ryder had planned on furthering his courtship of Mrs. Dixon. He too had waited a very long time before even considering another woman and like most people after 25 years he must have assumed she was dead.

Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a wonderfully rich novel by Mark Twain. I greatly enjoyed the usage of different dialects throughout the novel. Each one designated a different social class with the wealthier class of people having a more fluent way of speaking, what would be called proper English. The next class is the lower or working man's class which is often spelled wrong but when sounding it out it still comes across as fairly close to proper English without the use of big words or rhetoric. Finally the African American class is completely misspelled and words run together so that it seems they are almost speaking a different language to be interpreted at times. These three modes of speaking add color and add to the appeal of the novel. It brings the reader into the story to the point that one feels like they are a part of the story, plus it gives even more personality development to the characters.
Also important throughout this novel is the interplay between religion, superstition and Huck Finn. Huck Finn begins thinking that both superstition and religion are nothing real and unimportant. Huck needs proof of everything and he finds both to be lacking in the proof area. Of the two he believes in superstition more because he has seen evidence of the bad luck that follows touching a snake skin for instance. However he doesn't believe in all superstitions and still is more of a rationalist. Religion he finds complete fault in because he has no proof of it at all. In fact he feels like he has evidence against it in that during the feuding section of the book they go to church and the sermon is about brotherly love and everyone says how good the sermon was but very soon afterwards they are almost all dead because of the feud. So Huck's reliance on reason is also how he decides what is morally right. As long as it doesn't hurt anybody and it helps him it is ok to do it.

Three Poems

The Three Poems for today were "After A Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes"; "I LIKE a look of agony"; and "It Sifts From Leaden Sieves". There is an interesting progression in these three poems that I liked when reading. In the "Agony" poem the focus is on liking pain because it is the only true emotion, the second "Pain" poem is about the pain of dying in the snow, and the third is about the beauty of the snow. However with the background theme of pain and snow being together may mean there is something more to the third poem then it seems. In "It Sifts From Leaden Sieves" the surface reading of the poem is that the snow falls from gray clouds and it covers all the trees, fills in the cracks of the road, makes everything flat and even in every direction, it covers fences and stumps and fields all alike, and fills all the area summer had been making it like it had never existed, so there is no record of life and even people don't move. If one looks at this from a different vantage snow could very easily represent death in this poem. Death comes and covers everything. All things will die eventually and it is the great equalizer just like it says about it flattening everything, mountains and valleys alike. It also covers and eliminates any evidence that the living had ever been, especially with time. And it also stops people from moving about because once one dies time is spent in morning.