There are two ways to view the future with regards to one’s life. One of these ways is fate, the belief that the events that comprise one’s life are predetermined and can occur in only one way. The other way is chance, the belief that one can control the events in their life through choice as they encounter them. This concept of fate versus chance was one that fascinated the ancient Greeks. They believed strongly in fate over chance, and the three Moirae (fates), Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, controlled the lives of all humans on Earth through metaphorical threads. Staying true to his Greek beliefs, Sophocles depicts the triumph of fate over chance in his play Oedipus the King.
Oedipus recounts that at the shrine at Delphi the priestess “prophesied that [he] should kill Polybos, / Kill [his] own father,” and marry and sleep with his mother. Try as he might to evade this prophecy, Oedipus cannot. It was he who killed his father and Oedipus did in fact marry his own mother. In the play, all who believe in chance and reject fate are ruined. Oedipus carries out his horrid fate unbeknownst to him and blinds himself in the end. Iocastê, Oedipus’s wife and mother who regards all prophets as phonies, is married to her own son and takes her own life. According to Greek beliefs, as demonstrated in Sophocles’s play, any attempt to escape one’s fate is futile.
Perhaps the real reason why the concept of fate versus chance is so controversial is because neither one can be ruled out as being entirely incorrect by simple logic, and they can both be considered correct given different viewpoints. For example, say I walk into a 7-Eleven and decide to buy a soda. I can buy a Coke, a Sprite, or a Fanta. Chance: I choose to buy a Coke. Fate: However, in the end, I did choose a Coke, and not a Sprite or a Fanta; the event could only take place in one specific way. And thus we are left with the same dilemma faced by the ancient Greeks. If neither fate nor chance appear to be entirely incorrect, which one in fact exists? The ancient Greeks answered this question in the same manner we humans answer most questions we cannot answer: they created a higher being, the Moirae.
The way I perceive it, fate and chance are just two different vantage points from which to look at the events in our lives. From the chance vantage point, we have the ability to make decisions entirely out of our own free will, and thus we have the ability to control our own lives. However, from the fate vantage point, in the end the events in our lives can and will turn out in only one specific way. (472)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Shock and Wasted Life in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych deals with the slow realization of a dying man that he has essentially wasted his life, and want and he may, he will never get another chance to live it. The story’s second chapter begins, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” While for some this first sentence may have created some literary tension, or even oxymoron, it did not faze me at all, and I in fact passed over it without notice until it was brought up in class discussion. This sentence did not faze me because it made complete sense to me. Whether or not you believe in an afterlife, you only get one chance at life itself, and aside from living a corrupt and evil life, nothing could be more terrible than a simple and ordinary one.
I went to sleep immediately after reading the first two chapters of Tolstoy’s story the other night and I had a dream. I had a dream that I was dying; I was dying at seventeen years old. All I could think about was that I was too young to die. Statistically speaking, I’ve probably already lived somewhere between one-fourth and one-fifth of my life, but what bothered me in my dream was knowing that I would die without doing so many of the things I’ve wanted to do with my life.
Perhaps Ilych felt the same way as he lay on his deathbed. He had lived his entire life after childhood by his own golden rule of doing whatever others (society) thought to be appropriate, and repressing his desires to do what he wanted to do. Although Ilych may not have become consciously aware that he had “not spent his life as he should have done” until mere days before his death, this knowledge of his wasted life may have been in his subconscious for quite some time. Ilych groaned, and in the end screamed, in agony as he slowly died, and it is mentioned many times in the story that Ilych’s agony was more of a mental nature than a physical one. It would seem the most logical explanation for this mental agony is that Ilych could sense something disturbingly wrong, more than just the fear of death, even if he did not know what this wrong was at the time.
This wrong is the fear of a wasted life, which lay in Ilych’s subconscious until he became aware of it in his final days, as evidenced simply by his rejection of his impulses to do what he wanted if these impulses went against society’s standards. Perhaps during your life you have experience the shock of driving down a road in the wrong direction for a couple of hours, or losing a term paper when your computer crashed, because you knew (all at once) that you had “wasted” that short bit of your life. Essentially, this shock is the same one that Ilych is dealing with on a grand scale, realizing all at once that he has wasted his entire life, and that he would have no chance to live again. And it is this shock that sent him into screaming “so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors without horror.” (562)
I went to sleep immediately after reading the first two chapters of Tolstoy’s story the other night and I had a dream. I had a dream that I was dying; I was dying at seventeen years old. All I could think about was that I was too young to die. Statistically speaking, I’ve probably already lived somewhere between one-fourth and one-fifth of my life, but what bothered me in my dream was knowing that I would die without doing so many of the things I’ve wanted to do with my life.
Perhaps Ilych felt the same way as he lay on his deathbed. He had lived his entire life after childhood by his own golden rule of doing whatever others (society) thought to be appropriate, and repressing his desires to do what he wanted to do. Although Ilych may not have become consciously aware that he had “not spent his life as he should have done” until mere days before his death, this knowledge of his wasted life may have been in his subconscious for quite some time. Ilych groaned, and in the end screamed, in agony as he slowly died, and it is mentioned many times in the story that Ilych’s agony was more of a mental nature than a physical one. It would seem the most logical explanation for this mental agony is that Ilych could sense something disturbingly wrong, more than just the fear of death, even if he did not know what this wrong was at the time.
This wrong is the fear of a wasted life, which lay in Ilych’s subconscious until he became aware of it in his final days, as evidenced simply by his rejection of his impulses to do what he wanted if these impulses went against society’s standards. Perhaps during your life you have experience the shock of driving down a road in the wrong direction for a couple of hours, or losing a term paper when your computer crashed, because you knew (all at once) that you had “wasted” that short bit of your life. Essentially, this shock is the same one that Ilych is dealing with on a grand scale, realizing all at once that he has wasted his entire life, and that he would have no chance to live again. And it is this shock that sent him into screaming “so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors without horror.” (562)
Sunday, December 7, 2008
81 Years Apart: the Importance of Literary Eras in Conrad’s and Coetzee’s Writings
Written English literature dates back to the times of the epic tale Beowulf well over a thousand years ago. However, times change rapidly and so must the literature that depicts them. Fiction, while by definition being imaginary or made up, still depicts the attitudes of the time period it is written in, whether or not this time period is the same as that in which the story itself takes place. And it is amazing how much difference 81 years can make.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in three parts 1899) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (published 81 years later in 1980) are at some basic level quite similar works of literature. They both involve a protagonist narrator their readers trust and like; they both involve an antagonist whom serves as a foil to the protagonist and whom their readers come to distrust and dislike; and they both involve the clash between a “civilized” society and a “barbaric” one. However, Conrad’s story is mostly concerned with the horrible effect the uncivilized Africa has on Kurtz, while as Coetzee’s is mostly concerned with the unfair practices the Empire exercises on the “barbarians.” Therefore, these two apparently similar writings have very different plots and storylines. Douglas Kerr explains this concept excellently in his essay “Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee” when he says, “arguably the greatest change, in the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial discourse, is the most obvious: the shift in perspective from the lawman to the outlaw.” It is the difference of attitude, even of point of view, due to the eras in which the two works were written, that creates the main difference between Conrad’s and Coetzee’s stories.
The stories could even easily have been flipped. Had Coetzee been writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, he could have easily written a novel about a small town on the frontier between the civilized Empire and the uncivilized barbarians, that would have been mostly concerned with the struggles of the Magistrate and Colonel Joll in this foreign environment and how this horrible experience changed them. Similarly, had Conrad been writing in the early 1980s, he would have likely written a story about the unjust ways in which the actually calm and civilized Africans were treated by Kurtz as seen through the eyes of Marlow. (Of course these story inversions neglect such “negligible” facts as the nonexistence of European colonial rule of the vast majority of Africa in 1980).
However, Joseph Conrad died a full 16 years before J. M. Coetzee was born and they did not write the two inverted stories I have just created. They wrote Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, respectively, and they wrote what they wrote because of the eras in which they lived. Their writings reflect these eras, and whether or not the established beliefs of our current era resonate with their attitudes, they are excellent representations of the beliefs of the past. (512)
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in three parts 1899) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (published 81 years later in 1980) are at some basic level quite similar works of literature. They both involve a protagonist narrator their readers trust and like; they both involve an antagonist whom serves as a foil to the protagonist and whom their readers come to distrust and dislike; and they both involve the clash between a “civilized” society and a “barbaric” one. However, Conrad’s story is mostly concerned with the horrible effect the uncivilized Africa has on Kurtz, while as Coetzee’s is mostly concerned with the unfair practices the Empire exercises on the “barbarians.” Therefore, these two apparently similar writings have very different plots and storylines. Douglas Kerr explains this concept excellently in his essay “Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee” when he says, “arguably the greatest change, in the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial discourse, is the most obvious: the shift in perspective from the lawman to the outlaw.” It is the difference of attitude, even of point of view, due to the eras in which the two works were written, that creates the main difference between Conrad’s and Coetzee’s stories.
The stories could even easily have been flipped. Had Coetzee been writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, he could have easily written a novel about a small town on the frontier between the civilized Empire and the uncivilized barbarians, that would have been mostly concerned with the struggles of the Magistrate and Colonel Joll in this foreign environment and how this horrible experience changed them. Similarly, had Conrad been writing in the early 1980s, he would have likely written a story about the unjust ways in which the actually calm and civilized Africans were treated by Kurtz as seen through the eyes of Marlow. (Of course these story inversions neglect such “negligible” facts as the nonexistence of European colonial rule of the vast majority of Africa in 1980).
However, Joseph Conrad died a full 16 years before J. M. Coetzee was born and they did not write the two inverted stories I have just created. They wrote Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, respectively, and they wrote what they wrote because of the eras in which they lived. Their writings reflect these eras, and whether or not the established beliefs of our current era resonate with their attitudes, they are excellent representations of the beliefs of the past. (512)
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Waiting for the Barbarians: A Setting for the Discussion of Concepts, Issues, and Morals
In the opening pages of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians we gather that this novel will be hypothetical, that it will be more concerned with the concepts and morals of the events-to-occur than with the actual events themselves or the people who make them happen. In these opening pages we are first introduced to two of the novel’s main characters. The narrator we learn to be a thinking and somewhat moral, yet still somewhat corrupted magistrate of his village. Sharply contrasting him is Colonel Joll, the torturing and brainless representative of the Empire in the narrator’s village. In the novel’s opening we also gain a sense of Coetzee’s style of writing. We become familiar to his simple wording and use of subsections within each section of the novel, through which he tells little parts of the story. Finally, we learn that the novel will discuss many concepts and issues: moral issues, political issues, concepts of authority and hierarchy, etc. But there is one issue that, at least in my mind, stands out from the rest.
This issue is that of torture. When I say it stands out from the rest, I do not mean that it is more important or deserves more attention, I just mean that it catches my eye much quicker than the other issues and concepts of Coetzee’s novel. I believe that the issue of torture grabs my attention so quickly because it is such a shocking and controversial issue. It is next to impossible to ignore imagery such as, “The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole,” or, “There is a certain tone… A certain tone enters the voice of a man who is telling the truth. Training and experience teach us to recognize that tone.” With such imagery it is obvious that the morals of torture will be questioned in the novel. When I came across this first torture scene in my reading I remembered a radio talk show I had heard a while back in which I learned that the United States defined torture as “pain equivalent to death or organ failure,” so that certain agencies could justify their means of obtaining information “without torture.” Therefore, the morals of torture have two levels. Is torture moral? And if not, what is and what is not considered torture? (421)
This issue is that of torture. When I say it stands out from the rest, I do not mean that it is more important or deserves more attention, I just mean that it catches my eye much quicker than the other issues and concepts of Coetzee’s novel. I believe that the issue of torture grabs my attention so quickly because it is such a shocking and controversial issue. It is next to impossible to ignore imagery such as, “The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole,” or, “There is a certain tone… A certain tone enters the voice of a man who is telling the truth. Training and experience teach us to recognize that tone.” With such imagery it is obvious that the morals of torture will be questioned in the novel. When I came across this first torture scene in my reading I remembered a radio talk show I had heard a while back in which I learned that the United States defined torture as “pain equivalent to death or organ failure,” so that certain agencies could justify their means of obtaining information “without torture.” Therefore, the morals of torture have two levels. Is torture moral? And if not, what is and what is not considered torture? (421)
Monday, November 17, 2008
Chinua Achebe – “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
-There exists a desire—even a need—in Western psychology to set up Africa as a foil to Europe. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness displays this desire or need.
-Conrad’s (and Western) fascination: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours…. Ugly.”
-Conrad is a racist – Heart of Darkness is concerned with the evil effect Africa has on Marlow and Kurtz, rather than the evil effect the Europeans have on the Africans. Therefore, Achebe cannot see the story as a great work of art.
-This racism (of Africa being inferior to the West) is so common and accepted that it is often not noticed. It will be a difficult task to change this perception of Africa, but it must be done, and it must be done soon.
-Conrad’s (and Western) fascination: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours…. Ugly.”
-Conrad is a racist – Heart of Darkness is concerned with the evil effect Africa has on Marlow and Kurtz, rather than the evil effect the Europeans have on the Africans. Therefore, Achebe cannot see the story as a great work of art.
-This racism (of Africa being inferior to the West) is so common and accepted that it is often not noticed. It will be a difficult task to change this perception of Africa, but it must be done, and it must be done soon.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Dilsey: From “De Beginnin” to “De Endin”
When Dilsey speaks the ten simple words, “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin” at the Easter Sunday church service she does much to bring about closure to The Sound and the Fury. The first three sections of the novel are narrated by Benjy, Quentin, and Jason respectively. Yet with regards to the story of the entire Compson family, Dilsey is the only reliable source of information (not to be confused with “reliable narrator” since she does not narrate any part of the story). She is there in the beginning in 1898 when the Compson children are toddlers, and she is there in the end in 1928 when they are grown and in their thirties, so she is with the family for the entire duration of the story. Most importantly, though, she is sane. Benjy’s disability, Quentin’s early death, and Jason’s corruption make their contributions to the story either unreliable or incomplete. Therefore, these pieces of the story are somewhat scattered and confusing to the reader. Faulkner needed an ending to his novel that would unite these pieces into a single coherent story of the failure of the Compson family. So it is the purpose of this fourth section to bring about this unity, and Dilsey is a key aspect of this purpose. (223)
Monday, October 27, 2008
Faulkner’s Theory of Relativity: A Different Concept of Time in The Sound and the Fury
Bass, Eben. “Meaningful Images in The Sound and the Fury.” Modern Language Notes. Vol. 76, No. 8 (Dec. 1961): 728-731. Johns Hopkins UP. JSTOR. 22 Oct. 2008 .
In the above-cited article, Eben Bass explores the significance of some of the more important images in The Sound and the Fury with respect to time. Bass begins the article by discussing the concept of time in the novel and how Faulkner’s fragmented time is used to create four different viewpoints in the four different parts of the novel. The first part of the story is told through the broken concept of time due to Benjy’s disability. Time in Quentin’s narrative is more orderly but halted when he commits suicide. In the third part of the novel, Jason changes time when he goes back in time to get “revenge on his sister Caddy through her daughter Quentin.” It is not until the fourth part of the novel that time moves forward in a more normal fashion. However it is all four of these parts that work together to piece each other’s broken segments of narration together into one coherent story. Bass then proceeds to explain how the images of Caddy’s wedding slippers, the pear tree, Benjy’s weed in a bottle, the mirror Benjy sees in the library, and the flames Benjy sees in the kitchen stove serve as memory-triggers for the characters to begin their narrations and ultimately help to piece the story together.
I found Bass’s concept of time in the story being relative to the character narrating it very interesting because this relativity (in fact the theory of relativity) is a present and inescapable truth in our everyday lives. If we can set the way we view time when our lives are following their most normal order as a standard, we have a basis off which to relate our perception of time when our lives do not follow such a normal order. For example, when we are under a great deal of stress and exertion, our minds speed up and we perceive time to be moving slower than it is actually moving (based on our pre-established norm). Consequently, when we are resting with nothing to do or think about, our minds slow down and we perceive time to be moving faster than it is in fact moving. Last year, Andrew Charlson summed up this theory of relativity very well in his senior speech (and this is a rough estimate of his exact words), “For most of you out there, my speech has been going on for a minute and a half. However, for me it has felt like half an hour on this stage. And it’s only been about thirty five seconds for Guy Gamble sleeping in the front row.” I have no idea how I remembered this quote.
Yet for the troubled characters of Faulkner’s novel, the warping of time in the mind does not end at the theory of relativity, it is also warped by their disabilities (whether diagnosed or not) to not only slow down or speed up, but also to change order and mix itself up. It can be triggered by something as simple as a familiar sight or sound, as in the case of Benjy’s scrambled narration, or abruptly ended by an event such as Quentin’s suicide. Ultimately, perhaps it is Faulkner’s use of a mixed time sequence that makes his novel so interesting. It is something the novel’s readers can relate to, yet it pushes the limit of our understanding of time and makes us think. (608)
In the above-cited article, Eben Bass explores the significance of some of the more important images in The Sound and the Fury with respect to time. Bass begins the article by discussing the concept of time in the novel and how Faulkner’s fragmented time is used to create four different viewpoints in the four different parts of the novel. The first part of the story is told through the broken concept of time due to Benjy’s disability. Time in Quentin’s narrative is more orderly but halted when he commits suicide. In the third part of the novel, Jason changes time when he goes back in time to get “revenge on his sister Caddy through her daughter Quentin.” It is not until the fourth part of the novel that time moves forward in a more normal fashion. However it is all four of these parts that work together to piece each other’s broken segments of narration together into one coherent story. Bass then proceeds to explain how the images of Caddy’s wedding slippers, the pear tree, Benjy’s weed in a bottle, the mirror Benjy sees in the library, and the flames Benjy sees in the kitchen stove serve as memory-triggers for the characters to begin their narrations and ultimately help to piece the story together.
I found Bass’s concept of time in the story being relative to the character narrating it very interesting because this relativity (in fact the theory of relativity) is a present and inescapable truth in our everyday lives. If we can set the way we view time when our lives are following their most normal order as a standard, we have a basis off which to relate our perception of time when our lives do not follow such a normal order. For example, when we are under a great deal of stress and exertion, our minds speed up and we perceive time to be moving slower than it is actually moving (based on our pre-established norm). Consequently, when we are resting with nothing to do or think about, our minds slow down and we perceive time to be moving faster than it is in fact moving. Last year, Andrew Charlson summed up this theory of relativity very well in his senior speech (and this is a rough estimate of his exact words), “For most of you out there, my speech has been going on for a minute and a half. However, for me it has felt like half an hour on this stage. And it’s only been about thirty five seconds for Guy Gamble sleeping in the front row.” I have no idea how I remembered this quote.
Yet for the troubled characters of Faulkner’s novel, the warping of time in the mind does not end at the theory of relativity, it is also warped by their disabilities (whether diagnosed or not) to not only slow down or speed up, but also to change order and mix itself up. It can be triggered by something as simple as a familiar sight or sound, as in the case of Benjy’s scrambled narration, or abruptly ended by an event such as Quentin’s suicide. Ultimately, perhaps it is Faulkner’s use of a mixed time sequence that makes his novel so interesting. It is something the novel’s readers can relate to, yet it pushes the limit of our understanding of time and makes us think. (608)
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