Letteratura Inglese 3

8/13/2019 Letteratura Inglese 3

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In Tribute to the Angels (1945) the poems personaasks midway through the alchemical process thattransmutes her into a poet:

What is this mother/fatherto tear at our entrails

What is this unsatisfied dualitywhich you can not satisfy?

(her mother was a musician and an artist who hadsacrificed her talents for her husband; her fatherwas a scientist who hoped that his daughter would

become another Madame Curie.)

H. D. also invokes the figure of a twin -self sisteran external objectified self, a thin vibrant andintensely sincere young sort of unsexed warrior(from the novel Her(mione) , 1927 in which there

are encoded the story of her troubled relationshipwith Pound and her subsequent affair withFrances Gregg). This search represents for her theconstruction of an ideal more stable self, one whichcould free her from the whirling and swirling ofhysteria.


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H. D. became also involved in cinema, an art sheconsidered quintessentially modernist, writing filmreviews for Close Up . The avant-garde film journalto which Gertrude Stein also contributed, wasfounded and funded by Bryher and edited byKenneth Macpherson who was also the director ofBorderline , a 1930 movie dealing with interracialsexual relations and violence, featuring also Bryher

and H. D.

Trilogy gathers together three long sequenceswhich were published separately in the mid 1940s:The Walls Do Not F all , Tr ibute to the Angels andThe F lowering of the Rod .

These works reflect H.D.s palimpsestic conceptionof poetry as layers and layers of languagedismembered and re-membered. The poetexorcises destruction, at a time when Nazism andthe war were threatening to reduce Westernculture to utter ruin, by showing how meaning

must be created out of it. She became alsointerested in Alchemy, esotericism and occultismwhich become poetical metaphors.

Now polish the crucibleand in the bowl disti l

a word most bitter , marah,


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a word bitterer sti ll , mar,

sea brine, breaker, seducer,giver of life, giver of tears;

now polish the crucibleand set the jet of flame

under, til l marah-marare melted, fuse and join

and change and alter ,mer, mere, mre, mater , M aia, M ary,

Star of the Sea,Mother.(Tribute to the Angels , section VIII)

In the sequence there also emerge asyncr etistic image of female divinity asonly centre capable of holding andtranscending the ruins: Love, the Creatoris invoked as a goddess in The Walls andthe last image of the sequence is that of anuncanny childless Virgin venerated by theMagi


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H elen in Egypt is H.D.s greatest

achievement, an American epic of modernconsciousness in which the Trojan Warand the dramatic clash of humans and godsparallel the social and political scene inEurope during the first half of the century,

the two devastating wars and the personalencounters of the poet. The poem retellsHelens story and the creative/destructiveeffect of her extraordinary beauty fromand beyond its many different recorded

versions Homer, Stesichorus, Euripidesand many other poets close r to H. D.s owntime versions in which Helen is vilified asthe cause of war or absolved as innocentcharacter in the drama. The beautiful,

much-loved, much-hated Helen istransformed into the most adequatesymbol of poetry (she herself is thewriting ) and the most perfect image of thewoman poet (she the moment and

infinity together).


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Helen

All Greece hatesthe sti l l eyes in the white face,the lustre as of oliveswhere she stands,and the white hands.

All Greece revilesthe wan face when she smiles,hating it deeper sti llwhen it grows wan and whiteremembering past enchantmentsand past i l ls.

Greece sees, unmoved,Gods daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feetand slenderest knees,could love indeed the maid,only if she were laid,white ash amid funeral cypresses.


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In its epistemological quest for Helen, thepoem incorporates all the complexities of

the myth in order to translate Helen intoHellas, H. D.s metaphor for origin,culture, art, and poetry.

H elen ( from H elen in Egypt)

Thus, thus, thus,as day, night,as wrong, r ight

as dark, light,as water , fire,as earth, air ,

as storm, calm,as frui t, flower,as life, death,

as death, life;the rose deflowered,


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the rose reborn;

H elen in Egypt,H elen at home,H elen is H ellas forever.

The fast pace of the poem, with its shortlines of parallel concepts boundtogether by sense and sound, creates theflash-like concentration of meaning andemotion in the image of Helen: H. D. s

conception of poetry as reconciliation ofopposites, though not without strife andviolence.She showed a way to penetratemystery, which means, not to flood

darkness with light so that darkness isdestroyed , but to enter into darkness,mystery, so that it is experienced(Denise Levertov)


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At Ithaca

Over and back,the long waves crawland track the sand with foam;night darkens, and the seatakes on that desperate tone

of dark that wives put onwhen all their love is done.

Over and back,the tangled thread falls slack,

over and up and on;over and all is sewn;now while I bind the end,I wish some fiery friendwould sweep impetuously

these fingers from the loom.

My weary thoughtsplay traitor to my soul,

just as the toil is over;

swift while the woof is whole,


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turn now, my spirit, swift,and tear the pattern there,

the flowers so deftly wrought,the borders of sea blue,the sea-blue coast of home.

The web was over-fair,

that web of pictures there,enchantments that I thoughthe had, that I had lost;weaving his happinesswithin the stitching frame,

weaving his fire and frame,I thought my work was done,I prayed that only oneof those that I had spurnedmight stoop and conquer this

long waiting with a kiss.

But each time that I seemy work so beautifullyinwoven and would keep

the picture and the whole,


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Athene steels my soul.Slanting across my brain,

I see as shafts of rainhis chariot and his shafts,I see the arrows fall,I see the lord who moveslike Hector lord of love,

I see him matched with fairbright rivals, and I seethose lesser rivals flee.

Adonis

1.

Each of us like youhas died once,

has passed through drift of wood-leavescracked and bentand tortured and unbentin the winter-frost,then burnt into gold points,lighted afresh, crisp amber, scales of gold-leaves,

gold turned and re-weldedin the sun;


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each of us likeyou had died once,each of us has crossed an old wood-pathand found the winter-leavesso golden in the sun-firethat even the live wood-flowerswere dark.

2.

Not the gold on the temple-frontwhere you standis as gold as this,

not the gold that fastens your sandals,nor the gold weftthrough your chiselled locks,is as gold as this last years leaf,not all the gold hammered and wroughtand beaten

on your lovers facebrow and bare breast is as golden as this:

each of us like youhas died once,each of us like you

stands apart, like youfit to be worshipped.


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THE SUBJECT

she pursed her lips when she looked in theglass. It was to give face point. That was herself pointed; dart-like; definite. That washer self when some effort, some call on her tobe her self, drew the parts together, she aloneknew how different, how incompatible andcomposed so for the world only into onecentre, one diamond, one woman who sat inher drawing-room and made a meeting-point ( Woolf , M rs Dalloway )

Psychological: the self is no longer unitaryand stable but fluid, fragmented, ofteninconsistent

Literature and psychology are equally

interested in mental and emotional life

consciousness is nothing jointed; it flows. Ariver or a stream are the metaphors bywhich it is most naturally described. Let us

call it the stream of thought, of consciousness


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(William James , Principles of Psychology ,1890)

A new psychological realism devoted to thedescription of the inner motivations of thesubject, reality consisting now in humanconsciousness ( H. James )

Woolfs tunnelling : to burrow into thecharacters pasts to unearth their history. Split beings living in the past and present.Their thought tell us who they are, theirmemories explain them and reveal howthey came to be what they are.

Lawrence in a letter to Garnett: You mustntlook in my novel for the old stable ego There is another ego, according to whoseactions the individual is unrecognisable, and

passes through, as it were, allotropic states He is interested in Individuals but not inindividualism (the self-assertion of the ego)which he condemns. He only cares aboutfeminine and masculine principles under theveer of civilization. about what the woman


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is what she I S inhumanly, physiologically,materially

Existential to fulfil ones potential: to becomewhat one is( Nietzsche ); be thyself notthrough kno wledge but through life andpersonal relationship which are transcendentand liberating ( Lawrence )With the advent of psychoanalysis thetheological search for God had been replacedby the epistemological quest for self-knowledge; enlightenment was not to be foundin Christianity or in society but in the self, in

individual subjective consciousness. (Childs)

Impersonal and post-human, beyondsubjectivity, disembodied and dispersed, inabstract art the body is no longer the

privileged object of representation, dissolutionof the syntax of the self in Futurism : Wesystematically destroy the literary I in order toscatter it into the universal vibration andreach the point of expressing the infinitelysmall and the vibration of molecules Thus


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the poetry of cosmic forces supplants thepoetry of the merely human. ( Marinetti )

External, pictorial, expressionistic, caricatural(Expressionism: Ensor belgique, Munch sveden; Otto Dix , G. Grosz , Max Beckman :Nuova oggettivit)W. Lewis : I am for the Great Wi thout, forthe method of external approach for thewisdom of the eye Vs self -indulgentromanticism of Freuds chaotic unconsciousHis eyes blazed above a black -bearded grin,with clownesque incandescence. He was black

and white, dazzling skin and black patches ofhair alternating. His thin knees were unsteady,his hands were hanging in limp expostulation,his grin of protest wandered in an aimlesscircle ( W. Lewis , Beau Sojour , 1909)

Butchers large red nose stood under a checkcap phenomenally peak ed A quizzing,heavy smile broke his face open in anindifferent business-like way. It was a soursmile, as though half his face were frozen withcocaine ( W. Lewis , Tarr , 1928)


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Gendered: a different subjectivityFor the Men of 1914, and especially for

Pound and Lewis, what really counted was theorganisation of forms, the power of design asthe composition and symmetry and balance ofstructure which might function to order theflux and chaos of modern phenomenallife.(Nicholls) feminine modernist writing : irregular, fluid,elliptical, erasing the separation betweensubject and object, experimental, subjective,more personal, still I-funded, anti-realistic,elastic, free from syntactical constrictions,

moulded on psychological states of mind.Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), DorothyRichardson (1873- 1957), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Rebecca West (1892-1983), MaySinclair (1863-1946), Charlotte Mew (1870-

1928), Mina Loy (1882-1966), H. D . (1886-1961), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Jean Rhys (1890- 1979), Rose Macaulay (1881- 1958),Edith Sitwell (1887-1964). Only recentlyincluded in the Canon, they wrote poems,novels, essays, journalism from a femaleperspective, mixing the genres, moulding their


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writing on a female sensitivity and way ofbeing, vindicating the female difference Vs

logocentric male homogenizing, apparentlyneutral, rationalism.

PROSE

Modern novel: complex, various, open and self-conscious form

The Modern Novel in The Common Reader by V. Woolf

Admitting the vagueness which afflicts allcriticism of novels, let us hazard the opinionthat for us at this moment the form of fictionmost in vogue more often misses than securesthe thing we seek. Whether we call it life orspirit, truth or reality, this, the essentialthing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to becontained any longer in such ill-fittingvestments as we provide The writer seemsconstrained to provide a plot, to provide

comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air ofprobability But sometimes, more and


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more as time goes by, we suspect amomentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as

the pages fill themselves in the customaryway. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?Look within and life, it seems, is very far

from being like this. Examine for a momentan ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The

mind receives a myriad impressions trivial,fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with thesharpness of steel. From all sides they come, anincessant shower of innumerable atoms; andas they fall, as they shape themselves into thelife of Monday or Tuesday, the accent fallsdifferently from of old; the moment ofimportance came not here but there; so that, ifa writer were a free man and not a slave, if hecould write what he chose, not what he must, ifhe could base his work upon his own feeling

and not upon convention, there would be noplot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest orcatastrophe in the accepted sense Life is nota series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged;life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparentenvelope surrounding us from the beginning ofconsciousness to the end. Is it not the task of


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the novelist to convey this varying, thisunknown and un- circumscribed spirit?

David Herbert Lawrence(novelist, poet, dramatist, essay writer,painter)

1885 born in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire,4th son of a coal-miner and a school teacherwith wider cultural and social aspirations.(msalliance, he came from the working class;and inevitably he was class conscious. inhis novels working men and aristocrats may be

praised, but never the bourgeoisie W. Allen)

1906 became school teacher

1909 poems published by F. M. Ford in The

English Review (sent by Jessie Chambers,Miriam in Sons and Lovers )

1911 The White Peacock (Annable: precursorof Mellors, A man with on e idea: that allcivilization was the painted fungus ofrottenness)


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1912 Resigned for health problems, eloped

with Frieda, the German wife of his CollegetutorThe Trespasser (influenced by German cultureand Nietzsches concept of will to power)

1913 Sons and Lovers autobiographical earlymasterpiece (Freudian self-analysis,emancipation from mother, revaluation offarther heritage) 1914 married Frieda

1915 The Rainbow , banned, marginalized lifealso for German wife in war period: they werethought to be spies

1920 Women in Love , Italian period

originally with The Rainbow unitary project ofThe Sisters one prototype of which was K.Mansfield (3 generations of Brangwen family,from idyllic organic past to modernindividuality and the tragedy of war. Mainthemes were: woman becoming individual,taking her own initiative and the


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establishment of a new relationship betweenman and woman.)

1922 Aarons Rod , travels to Ceylon, Australia,U.S.A.

1923-4 The Plumed SerpentNew Mexico where he funded the communityof Rananim

1925 St. M awrFor health reasons came back to Europe (Italy,Germany)

1928 The Woman Who Rode Away, LadyChatterleys Lover , banned, privately publishedin Italy, original title Tenderness (2 previousversions: The first L.C.L . , John Thomas and

Lady Jane )1930 Dies of tuberculosis in France

1932 expurgated version of L. C. L. publishedin Britain1960 Penguin publishes L. C. L. Trial


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Various academic critics, including E.M.Forster, Richard Hoggart and Raymond

Williams, were called as witnesses. Theprosecution was ridiculed for being out oftouch with changing social norms when thechief prosecutor asked if it were the kind ofbook you would wish your wife or servants toread.

For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the obscenePublications Act, 1959, at the old Bailey inLondon from October, 20 th to November, 2 nd

1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to thetwelve jurors, three women and nine men, whoreturned a verdict of Not Guilty, and thusmade D. H. Lawrences last novel available forthe first time to the public in the United

Kingdom.Both in England and in the United States thefree publication of the book was a significantevent in the cultural and sexual revolution ofthe Sixties


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British poet Philip Larkin begins his poemAnnus Mirabilis with a reference to the trial

Sexual intercourse beganI n nineteen sixty-three(which was rather late for me)-

Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles first LP

Two film version in 1955 and 1981A television version in 1993 directed by KenRussell for BBCIn 2006 French director Pascale Ferran filmed a

French language version, based on JohnThomas and Lady Jane edition, which won theCesar award for best film in 2007 (broadcast inArt channel)In 2006 the novel was adapted for BBC radio as

well

The vision of his age

He was against his age; he loathed it (W.Allen)


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Lawrence Vs IndustrialismCompetition

War

Vs MechanizationStandardizationLoss of individual creativity

Vs TechnologyNature violation

Loss of Mistery

Vs Materialism

Enslavement to moneyLoss of dignity and freedom

Vs IdeologiesSocial tensions

Loss of intimacy between the sexes

Vs Intellectualism Aridity

Loss of vital exuberance


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The Novel and its prophetic function

Nothing is important but life. For thisreason I am a novelist. The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They areonly tremulations on the ether. But the novelas a tremulation can make the whole mantremble. Which is more than poetry,philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.

(Why the Novel M atters )

I am a man alive, and I intend to go onbeing a man alive. For this reason I am anovelist. And being a novelist, I considermyself superior to the saint, the scientist, the

philosopher and the poet, who are all mastersof different bits of man alive, but never get thewhole log.

L.C.L. 104-5

The quality of his art


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Constance, 6, 21, 72,Mrs. Bolton, 100, 103

Michaelis, 22-3, 24-5Mellors, 47-8, 147, 228-9

Themes

Industrialism, 13-4 , 148-9, 166

Classism, 15 , 251 Modernist intellectualism, 16-7 , 76, 203, 299- 300

Materialism/Mental life , 38-9, 100, 159 Vitalism, 245 , 314-15

SexualityGerman experiences, 7, 9Clifford, 13 Michaelis, 24-25 , 30

Phases with Mellors, 92-3 ,119-20, 122-3, 140-1

Letteratura Inglese 3

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