It’s not imaginary: I now own Lacan.
This is all Gaurav’s fault.
22 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
A horrifying scene.
22 February 2009 at 1.43 am (General musings)
Tags: Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf
Things I’m currently reading (and the briefest considerations of them).
21 February 2009 at 2.30 pm (General musings)
Tags: apocalypse, Ben, Christopher Marlowe, Deleuze and Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Will Shakespeare
or, several more reasons why I’m doomed to fail at reading long novels.
Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Miriam. English Renaissance Drama. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Norton, 2002. 615-672.
Continuous rhyming aside, Cary’s play seems to get more interesting with each re-reading — which probably reveals more about my own willingness to read than it does about the work itself. I still don’t have much desire to see the play performed (this summarises my feelings towards most neoclassical drama).
Derrida, Jacques. “Edmund Jabes and the Question of the Book.” Writing and Difference. Transl. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 64-78.
I’m foolishly writing a paper on history, prophecy, and language in Daniel and Revelation for my apocalypse class. Using Derrida. It’s a painful process.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. London: Routledge, 1990.
Grosz makes Lacan intelligible. One day I may even read him again.
Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.
The first book in the American masculinity course that I’ve both enjoyed and read without my satirical mental narrator. It’s also a sad and disturbing work.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. The Complete Plays. Ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin, 2003. 241-339.
Abigail (and particularly her conversion in 3.3) annoys me in this play, in a way that she did not when I read it two years ago. She’s also an intriguing figure around which to conduct a Lacanian-Deleuze&Guattarian-Kierkegaardian reading, should I need to do so in the near future.
Peele, George. Clymon and Clamydes. [1599]
Peele’s romantic comedy is something like English drama in its adolescent form: still heavily under the parental influence of medieval romance, but occasionally ridiculing mum and dad when they leave the room. There are also elements of the kind of satire Jonson will use in his earliest plays, and foreshadowings of festive comedy. Also, lots and lots of rhyming.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Candace Ward. New York: Dover, 1994.
I have a nice Broadview edition of this text, with all the attending contextual material, &c., but first, I’m not sure where it is, second, the Dover was assigned for class (reasons of cost effectiveness), and third, I’ve never been interested enough in gothic literature to about it in an extra-curricular way (or even to shelve it properly, apparently). Shelley annoys me less than most at least, but only because Dr Frankenstein is so very dim it amuses me.
21 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Unfinished novels.
19 February 2009 at 1.27 am (General musings)
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with Dan Simmons. Six months ago I read about 100 pages of The Terror, his “historical thriller” about Franklin’s lost expedition. It’s a fascinating book — but not fascinating enough; I paused the reading about five and a half months ago, and haven’t yet resumed.
Earlier this week, Gaurav bought me a copy of Drood, Simmons’s newest book (unsurprisingly, about Dickens’s final years). It’s narrated by Wilkie Collins, and I’m still enjoying it. At 771 pages, though, and the end of reading week approaching, my best intentions to finish the novel are highly suspect. I have this strange love for Dickens’s Edwin Drood (and the transvestite, meta-theatrical musical of the same name); this will hopefully sustain my interest: though I think I bought The Terror on the premise that it was channeling my beloved Moby Dick.
I’m doomed.
19 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
…and what happened to Antonio?
6 February 2009 at 12.19 am (General musings)
Tags: Will Shakespeare
I’ve always assumed that, since Orsino governs Illyria, the decision to kill Antonio or not belongs to him (indeed, in 5.1 Antonio identifies himself to be “Orsino’s enemy” particularly). I assumed, too, that, between marriage, festivities, and the recovery of (Sebastian and) Antonio’s purse, Orsino might have decided to give Antonio a legal reprieve: a hefty fine perhaps.
I should know by now that no one ever truly wins in early modern comedy.
Assuming the capital punishment to which Antonio alludes in 3.3 (25-28 ) holds, I now wonder how awkward that final scene must be for Antonio. Certainly he receives an effusive three-line greeting by his beloved Sebastian, who professes that “the hours have racked and tortured [...] since [he] lost [Antonio]” (5.1.210-212), but thereafter, the relationship takes a decidedly odd tone:
Antonio. Sebastian are you?
Sebastian. Fearest thou that Antonio? (212-213)
These are the last words spoken to Antonio in the play. There are no stage directions, or orders from Orsino, indicating that Antonio is removed from the stage at this point: he’s ostensibly and merely ignored during the subsequent reunion of Sebastian and Viola, and the marriage arrangements of Viola and Orsino, and Sebastian and Olivia.
Does Orsino, after leaving the stage, casually turn to Antonio, “by the way, you’re not invited,” before signalling to the officer to take him directly to the gallows?
Actually, I can believe Orsino would be that petty. How does one explain Sebastian’s behaviour though? What in Antonio’s question “Sebastian are you?” incites Sebastian to transform his initial relief and pleasure at seeing Antonio into complete disregard as he redirects his pleasure towards others (particularly women) onstage? And what does Sebastian say to Antonio after their exit, and following this cruel performance? (“Thanks for hanging”?)
There are words for people like Sebastian. I’m not going to type them here though.
Works Cited:
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. The Norton Shakespeare Comedies. Ed. Greenblatt et. al. New York: Norton, 1997. 653-713.
5 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Four letter words.
5 February 2009 at 10.42 pm (Gender Theory)
I just acquired an audiobook of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (Read by Emilia Fox, and released by CSA Word). I’m intrigued by the summary on the back of the recording, which reveals nothing of the plot or characters, but recounts, instead, details of the censorship trial “when Penguin were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act [...] largely on account of its explicit scenes of a sexual nature and use of four-letter words.”
Gaurav and I had fun walking in the bookstore, trying to guess what words those might be: 0ne of them, we think, might have been discussed at length in an article we read on Twelfth Night for today.[i]
Yet I wonder about the publisher’s choice of marketing for this book: are hordes of people still buying Lawrence (and spending extra money for the dubious privilege of having him on disc) for the possibility of “four letter words” and “scenes of a sexual nature”?
Apparently yes, but readers are also not willing to admit to the fact. After outlining the book’s provocative qualities for a few paragraphs, the summary hastily defends the book as a “literary masterpiece [that] is about much more than sex.” Beyond a few general themes (“love,” “class,” and “politics”) in the last fifteen words of the summary, however, the criteria for the book’s “masterpiece” status remains elusive.
Review to follow.
End Notes:
[i] Twelfth Night today. Callaghan’s “Body Politics and Twelfth Night.” (1996): “At that literal, textual level, we never do know why there is a ‘CU[N]T’ in Twelfth Night.”
5 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
1.1…
5 February 2009 at 1.01 am (Ben)
Tags: apocalypse, Ben, early modern philosophy
of Jonson’s The Alchemist is one of my favourite dramatic openings:
FACE. Believe ‘t, I will.
SUB. Thy worst. I fart at thee.
DOL. Have you your wits? why, gentlemen! for love –
FACE. Sirrah, I’ll strip you –
SUB. What to do? lick figs
Out at my –
FACE. Rogue, rogue! — out of all your sleights.
DOL. Nay, look ye, sovereign, general, are you madmen?
SUB. O, let the wild sheep loose. I’ll gum your silks
With good strong water, an you come.
DOL. Will you have
The neighbours hear you? will you betray all?
Hark! I hear somebody [...]
Mostly I enjoy the contrast between the liveliness and ribaldry here and the moralising prologue which, in typical Ben fashion, “aim[s] to [...]better men.” (The “Reader” of the play gets an additional lesson on distinguishing proper readers from ignorant ones.) I also love Ben for conclusively demonstrating, here, that not everyone in 16th century England “just talked like that” (in rhyming iambic pentameter).
This is a fun play to reread. It’s also useful in terms of my looming apocalypse paper: I forgot (or never realised) the extent to which the play emphasises apocalyptic themes. I recalled a lot of mockery of Ananias and the Anabaptists (exiled from much of Europe, in part for their beliefs in an immenent apocalypse), but forgot about Tribulation’s desire to harness alchemy for the raising of the Saints (after which follows the seven year “Tribulation” — battle between Christ and the Antichrist — for which he is named). I also forgot how long Doll’s “interpretation” of Daniel’s prophecy in 4.5 is.
Add in Dame Pliant’s mistrust of the “Spanish Don” in connection with the year of the Armada’s defeat (“ever since eighty-eight could I abide them, / And that was some three year afore I was born, in truth” 4.4; 1588 is the year that an “innocuous” xenophobia towards Spain developed into the belief that Spain might represent the Antichrist of Revelation), and the gulls’ various fears of venereal and bubonic diseases begin to take on a decidedly apocalyptic tone. These fears are coupled with the hope and promise of eternal life (in the form of the Philosopher’s Stone): hopes which, like fear, are also typical of apocalyptic beliefs.
In 5.5 Lovewit reveals the fulfillment of these hopes is an illusion: the fantastical offerings of a con game. Meanwhile plague remains a real disease that theatregoers (exposed at the play’s end) confront even in attending the play. At least Ben provides a humourous show before the inevitable.
4 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Dekker gets the boot.
2 February 2009 at 10.13 pm (General musings)
Tags: Thos. Dekker, Thos. Kyd
After reading The Shoemaker’s Holiday, one of my students told me she “couldn’t wait to go back to reading tragedies.” It seems the adventures of middle class cobblers can’t compete with the murderous nobles of The Spanish Tragedy.
Poor Dekker.
2 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Making sense of Kermode.
2 February 2009 at 9.15 pm (General musings)
Tags: apocalypse, Will Shakespeare
In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode offers to “make sense of the ways we make sense of the world” (31). He does so by positing a narrative of apocalyptic narratives, one with that increases in complexity as history moves further away from the medieval period:
In [the Reformation] the End grew harder and harder to think of as an imminent historical event, and so incidentally did the beginning; so that the duration and structure of time less and less supported the figures of apocalypse which blossomed in the glass and the illuminations of the Middle Ages. This was the moment when the terrors of apocalypse were absorbed by tragedy. The Renaissance equivalent of the long Beatus tradition — in sculpture, manuscript, sermon, and church painting — is King Lear. And the process of sophisticating the paradigm continues. Tragedy, we are told, must yield to absurdity; existential tragedy is an impossibility, and King Lear is a terrible farce. (27)
Narratives like King Lear contain, according to Kermode, the “terror” of earlier medieval apocalyptics, but the narrative paradigms are submerged beneath other narrative paradigms and secular themes and anxieties.
Renaissance (and post Renaissance) literature may manifest apocalyptic themes in a complex way, but Kermode’s assessment of both history and narrative is reductive. Kermode tacitly assumes that complex secular texts replace historical sacred narratives after the Reformation, as though the latter cease to show interest in apocalyptic hypotheses entirely. Reformation Europe and England, however, did not universally give up the fear (and hope), that the end was incredibly nigh (the year 1600 was earmarked as a likely date). Clerical scholars including William Tyndale and John Bale similarly persisted in literal historical interpretations of the Bible; these historical narratives existed alongside both secular histories and other narrative forms with their “submerged [apocalyptic] paradigms” (28).
Kermode’s own history of increasing complex narratives is an oversimplification and is so because it possesses the same immanent (inherent and constantly deferring) qualities which post-Reformation secular histories possess.
I’m not sure what to make of that King Lear remark.
2 February 2009 ~ St. Catharines
