Fins, come and mark us....come on.....come on....get out of your bed!!!!
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
Oi've been up fookin' ages and reading George Gissing.
Okay! And another way you might have approached your piece, ISN, is this:
"Peter saunters back to Ventura Rodriguez, exhausted with his day'ssearch for a Pensione, and climbs the steps to his Pensione. His room is tiny, with just a small sink and a makeshift cupboard. He takes out a bottle of red, and some Jamón and bread, and eating, looks out the window at the rooftops and clothes flapping in a light summer breeze. Picking up Don Quixote, he's not convinced he'll ever finish it. He thinks about his luck in finding the Pensione to move to. It's half-way between Plaza España and Bilbao where his college is.
Looking for a Pensione in Madrid is difficult at the best of times, but this summer, all the rooms seemed to be taken in every boarding house in the whole of the city. There were certain areas that Peter didn't want to live in, all nicely detailed in the Lonely Planet guide. So en route, on his quest for a room today, he didn't walk through Sol, or Lavapies (the latter had an air of bohemia that Peter found incompatible with a good night's sleep: you know the kind of thing; people out drinking 'til all hours of the night; gangs of ruffians marauding at will).
All day, Peter had been walking from Plaza España, up through Noviciados, and he'd already passed a bakery and an interesting café. He'd stopped in the café and ordered a caña and some tapas. Standing at the counter, he'd found himself to be a magnet, and was soon engaged in discussion with the regulars, one of whom happened to be a Briton. This man was once a model so it seemed, but his jaunty remarks about living in Spain were betrayed by his bleary-eyed look and general decrepitude. (Moving on, Peter noted the incredibly orange internet café for future reference). He decided not to enquire at any Pensiones near Gran Via, but headed up-hill on a parrallel with the major road, crossing the small side-streets, like a surgeon deftly splicing veins.
We would have found him at one point today in Bilbao, enquiring about a room in a street overlooking the station, with balconies towering over the junction: an imposing building with decorative architecture on her light grey walls. The room (from the classified paper, Segundomano), was taken. Peter was somewhat relieved, as the landlady seemed to be a little too personal, and the other man living there, who might have divided her interests, was leaving for Milan that evening.
He had noted that day on his walk that the youth hostels were all full, which he knew from his first few weeks in Madrid. We can see him at one point at the edges of the city, walking haphazardly through streets with little shops and cafés. He was peering into a shop with blanched leather gourds hanging out to air. One day they would be filled with wine and painted in gaudy colours for the tourists. We see him backtracking, and coming upon a square, that Sunday afternoon, filled with young people drinking beer, singing, talking together, and playing drums. All encircling the front of a huge church, splayed around the courtyard like a necklace of conviviality. Lingering, he felt part of the happy crowd, which included toddlers, and Madrileños that would not look out of place in a Benneton ad.
The street was long and straight, with different vendors on it. The balcony of his new room caught the afternoon sun, and let it flood into the double sized space, highlighting the beautiful polished floorboards. One of the shops was a tobacconist. There were plenty of cafés and a flower stall was set up. It was near the old centre of Madrid, and he'd passed a film crew, but only stayed to gawk for a few minutes.
This area was sure to become as fond to him as his favourite, Ventura Rodriguez, where he would watch the sunset from the top of the hill in Park Ouest, and dream of walking to the distant mountains - 'the mountains of Madrid', and skirt the ancient Temple Debod, with its reflective water apron, to laze in the folds of greenery, and dream his lazy dreams. The guide to the Madrid Metro was similar to the London Underground, in its wild twistings and bright colours: reds, yellows etc, but, unlike London, each stop on the Madrid Metro afforded discoveries of a nature ensured to bring delight to the newest Madrileño unfamiliar with the infinite possibilities that a walk through Madrid could open."
And Ruby, your piece is exceptional. It manages to adhere to the specifications of "Mrs Neave's Discovery" while also observing focalization techniques in the "Penny's Dilemma" exercise, achieving the device of "external-analepsis" through the protagonist's memories as suggested in the "Peter's Walk" task.
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
I've done life drawing classes in the past where we've been encouraged to produce our work on newspaper so as not to be too precious about our exercises. Remember that these are just workshop tasks for fun, and what you personally get out of them is what's paramount. The more you do the exercises, the more nimble and flexible you get. And you're truly very talented. I'm not disingenuous here. I mean it.
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots Here's an exercise I've set. Anyone like to try it?
I'd like you to attempt a short piece of prose narrative featuring a character called Penny who is in a dilemma. The nature of her difficulty, you can choose entirely for yourself. What I'm really interested in here is to ask you to explore the possibilities of representing Penny's consciousness. However, your main constraint is that Penny must always be referred to in the third person. She is not the narrator even though it is her thought being represented.
I'd like you to take note of the following:
When a third-person, "omniscient" narrator plunges into the consciousness of a character and represents their thoughts but still in the third-person, this technique is called focalization.
And there are different levels of focalization. Used to great effect, the narrator can display a particular level of empathy with a character, for a different effect. Let me demonstrate how this works.
A character's quoted monologue, "Have I wasted my time in this job all these years?" would, in focalization, be converted to the third person and the past tense, using for example the following three techniques:
1 She wondered if she had wasted her time in her job, all those years. This sentence is an example of what is called psycho-narration. The narrator is reporting indirectly the character's thought, changing the pronoun and tense, and substituting the demonstrative adjective "those" for "these".
2 Had she squandered her time by remaining in that occupation for all those years?: This sentence is an example of narrated monologue. Note that there's no phrase such as "She wondered" in this example to identify the prominence of an obtrusive authorial narrator here, which means we have greater emphasis on the character's thoughts, without any additional narratorial reportage. However, the language used is more writerly than in the character's own quoted monologue, so we say that here is an example of narrated monologue of the dissonant kind.
3 Had she wasted her time in his job, all those years? This is narrated monologue of the consonant kind, because though it phrases the character's thought in the third person and switches tense, it is the closest kind of focalization we have seen to the original example of quoted monologue quoted above.
Example 3, and, to an extent, example 2, are known in linguistics as free indirect discourse. Such discourse is 'free' because it's not preceded by phrases such as "She said" to make it reported speech that emphasises the narrator's standpoint; it's indirect because it's not a first person utterance.
So, I'd like you to produce a piece of work which shows all three kinds of focalization mentioned above, in operation.
And please do make sure to have good fun at attempting this exercise. I hope it will benefit you!
Hey there Fins: Here is my stab at what I understand this to be?...
1. Pondering where all of her glory years as a dancer had faded to.
2. Should she had been more meticulous with her craft throughout the wasted years?
3. Would the practice have paid off in her later years?
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
ISN, your work is wonderful.
Please don't feel sad.
I've been reading all your stuff here.
You know so much that I sometimes feel like a dumbass cos I know so little in comparison!
ISN is very good. The exercise clearly states there are two ways one might reorder narrative time. I was demonstrating that the piece ISN wrote was strong enough to be adapted to both forms.
I believe workshop exercises are good for showing writers that literature is a process and that we must continue to negotiate and revise its form. I'm never satisfied with my own efforts. I'm always changing them.
ISN, pm me if you like, on this point. Let's get back to the exercises! You too, ISN!
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
thanks rubytubey....I love you very muchly....altho I don't tell you......hehehehehehe....I'm quite happy.....now I feel better......I love you rubytubey.....:)
ruby tubey
the only ruby
around
....they're asking me to prove why I should be allowed to stay with my baby in Australia, because I'm mentally ill......and they think I should leave......
I love you too ISN (have been trying to think of something that rhymes with ISN) And very muchly so too.
There once was a girl called ISN
she was fiesty, irish and very good with a pen
Fair knowledge abundant she did possess
and her words in themselves were fineness!
(p.s Mr Finsbury actually paid your work a high compliment I thought. Cos if he didn't know you well enough and think your work worthy enough he never would have or could have used it as an example. I think it's only cos he knows and assumes you too therefore know that you are great that he could do that. I'll shut up now.)
One might find temporal displacement, say, in a story that works like this.
(A) Peter miserably peering from inside police cell bars;
(B)Peter conversing with an aggressive officer; Peter reflecting on the events that had led up to his arrest.
(C)The day's events, beginning innocuously enough with an account of him waking, dressing and breakfasting, then his eventful walk around his city, through to his arrest.
(D)Then you're back in the cell again and you trace perhaps how he is released with a warning.
So, the order goes: (A)=2, (B)=3, (C)=1, (D)=4.
Or one might even work like this:
(A)Peter walks home from the police cells after being released with a warning.
(B) He remembers a few moments ago peering miserably from his cell bars and conversing with an aggressive officer.
(C) He remembers his own reflection there and then of the day's events from waking onwards.
(D)The day's events, his day's eventful walk in the city and the arrest.
(E)Following (A), Peter stops in his walk home and pauses in reflection, noticing the scene around him.
(F)He remembers his release and ponders on the implications of his day.
So, the order here goes (A)= 5; (B)=3; (C)=1; (D)=2; (E)=6; (F)=4.
Originally posted by ISN I'm upset atm....there's no talking to me......I have issues with expectations and disappointments.....you can't cheer me up....I worked on that piece very hard.....and it brought me back to Madrid for an hour or so.....I feel like someone came and shat on it
hmmmmmm
I could sware I´ve heard about a similar situation some time ago...
aw sorry, go on Prof. Fins
Write. Wind each new thought upon the stream;
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
I could swear I´ve heard about a similar situation some time ago...
aw sorry, go on Prof. Fins
Thanks exhale. But let's all be kind now. If anybody's got a gripe with another, to PMs with it. BBS Guidelines. This is the luuuuurrrve thread. Plus only Finsbury should have the honour of getting his own thread locked.
He shovels through the day reciting scores
of lottery results from months gone by;
He dreams he opens up his van's back doors
and wads of banknotes fall out endlessly;
He pokes your arm and shouts into your ear,
"You see that bloke there? Him? Right - now - don't stare -
He's plenty money. Loaded, dontcha fear!
I'm tellin' ya! The bloke's a millionaire!"
He'll ask you what you're studying right now.
"That's good, that's good, but after you've done that,
after all that learnin' stuff, then, how
Much d'ya think you'll earn, then? I mean, what
sort of job d'ya think that you can get?
No one just studies for the sake of it....."
Classic. I was going to comment to the tune that Ophelia should have a story about the board problem and you have already got there and left. Swift and intelligent.
“Kurtz, of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is a modern-day Achilleus, highlighting conflicting notions of heroism. Once a paragon of materialist enterprise, honour and glory, he comes to despise the internal competitiveness and values of his society. He operates as a renegade, outside the mores and imperatives of his peers. He perceives himself a heroic demigod of the mythic sort: he indulges single-mindedly his wrathful vision of self-definition, in the dark heart of overseas conflict. In the midst of bloodshed by his own hand, paradoxically he broods on the horror and tragic futility of conflict and plunder. His anger has horrific consequences but constitutes tragic heroism. ”
The above statement, which I have devised myself, implies a discrepancy between the mythic conceit of heroism represented in Homer (see below) and the imperialistic ideals of “Western” colonial-expansionist heroism prevalent both when the Iliad (c.725 BCE) was received by c.5th BCE Athenians and when Heart of Darkness was read in the imperial context of 1899. The radical representations of Achilleus and Kurtz as single-minded, heroic figures who firstly dismiss the materialistic Western values they are thought to represent and secondly embrace propensities of otherness - non-human (in being godlike) and ‘barbaric’ – will be studied comparatively in this essay, with references to the texts’ receptions.
Citing Emerson’s statement “The hero is he who is immovably centred”, C. Kerényi (1959) describes the heroes of Greek myth as “marked by their substantiality, by a remarkable solidity, which they share with the divine figures”(2): A hero in this sense transcends mortal values and conventions, even when the result of an unshakable vision or emotion is tragic and horrific. I shall argue below how Achilleus and Kurtz accord to this radical heroic model. Achilleus is the son of Thetis, a goddess. He is the (almost) invulnerable agathos of the Trojan Wars’ first nine years; his obdurate refusal to defer to Agamemnon’s aristocratic claim of superior timé, and his withdrawal from a trade war in the Troad on the grounds that “A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much” (Il.9.320) suggests his self-realization as a heroic demigod superior to the internal competitiveness and materialist mores of an aristocratic Achaian society. His anger causes legions of soldiers to become carrion-fodder; his excessive pride is tragic hubris; yet his single-mindedness is superhuman and heroic. Achilleus foreshadows Kurtz, a “universal genius” (244) who tires both of the internal competitiveness of his trading company and his spurious distinction as their prime source of ivory: He single-mindedly pursues a vision to institute himself as a mythic hero among the Congolese tribespeople he savagely suppresses: he is largely responsible for the horror he abhors. Mythic heroism encompasses a notion of Otherness that interrogates Western constructions of heroic identity: to be heroic in the tragic, mythic sense is to be barbaric: to be a materialist plunderer turned-‘god’ is to represent fears concerning degeneration from within the Western psyche in the dark heart of conflict.
Interestingly, when Classical Athens was involved in a colonial war with Persia, contemporary historians were keen to rid history of its mythical associations (cf. Overing 1997: 2). Mythic heroes, who disdained the codes of materialistic honour that were demonstrated in Homer’s account of Achaian society (and carried forward into colonial-expansionist fifth-century Athens), were ignored in Classical commentaries whilst a martial prototype such as Agamemnon – even without documentary proof of his existence – was, because of his suitability to Classical values, reappraised as ‘historical’. Thucydides (Supplementary Texts, 13ii: 38-40) lauds the Mycenaean basileus Agamemnon as probably “the most powerful of the rulers of his day” who represented values of kratos (power) and timé (honour acquired via recognized wealth) shared by later Greeks. Yet there is no reference in his text of Achilleus, whose fateful anger is proclaimed in the opening line of the Iliad as the poem’s central narrative theme. The silence in Thucydides’s discourse perhaps ‘speaks’ of a latent anxiety in Athenian society: the possibility that Homer’s Achilleus represents a regressive, degenerative tendency in all civilizers when out abroad suppressing ‘savagery’, to indulge their pre-Western propensities and embrace a barbaric will to quasi-divine power, fashioning themselves as gods above the prerogatives of war and material enterprise.
Edward Said (1978) suggests, “A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian” (54). Herodotus (in Supplementary Texts 7i, 1992: 8) sought to naturalize a cultural distinction between his society and the ‘barbarian’ Persian Empire of Xerxes. Although the Trojan Wars were concerned with trade rather than establishing Western colonies (as in the case of the later, Persian Wars), Herodotus argued that the ‘right’ of Greece to suppress Eastern barbarism originated in the perceived difference in values between Achaians and Trojans during the Trojan War as described by Homer: he writes that although the Achaian forefathers of his people heroically fought to defend their material honour against the Trojan captors of Helen and all her possessions, the non-Europeans in contrast did not share such all-important commodity values and “took the seizure of women lightly enough”. Herodotus’s Greek colonialists of the Persian Wars are pragmatic whereas non-Greeks are “religious to excess” (cf. Herodotus, trans. Rawlinson [1858] 1996: 132), in that they are prone to forming hero-cults abundantly and enacting strange, bloody rites and imprecations against their Western foes (133). Yet in Herodotus’s refusal to observe Homer’s descriptions of similarities between Achaian and Trojan lifestyles, dwellings and religious/burial customs (cf. Il. 6. 237ff; 24. 692ff), a contemporary Athenian anxiety emerges, that prefigures imperial fears of degeneration in Conrad’s era: that the Western civilizer and his Oriental counterpart are historically similar rather than different in their mores and “rites”, sacred or profane.
In Iliad 1.275, Nestor addresses Achilleus as a “great man” (agathos), one whose prowess in accumulating the spoils and therefore time of his army, during the invasive, raiding campaign in Troy, wins him distinction as a warrior of remarkable prominence. However, when Agamemnon argues his right to compensate for the loss of his ‘prize’ Chryseis via claiming, on the grounds of his superior timé, Achilleus’s concubine Briseis, Achilleus responds, directly confronting the value systems of his society by refuting the dominant notion that the means of wealth should be maintained by the richest rather than those whose heroic, godlike endeavours in the face of danger have secured it in the first place (“And now my prize you threaten in person to strip away from me, / for whom I laboured much”, 1. 161-2). He shows heroic resolve, however hubristic or vainglorious, by announcing his withdrawal from a war that profits him not (“I am minded no longer/ To stay here dishonoured and pile up your wealth and your luxury”, 1.170-1). The consequence of his stubbornness is the hurling down to Hades of legions of Achaian souls (1.3-4), including his beloved Patroklos (Bk.16). By comparison with the Achaian army, the colonial-expansionist trading ‘Company’ of Heart of Darkness is described as an exploitative profit-making venture, effectively raiding material booty from the Congo but disguising its intentions behind the Orientalist ideology of being an ‘emissary of light … “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways”’ (149). Kurtz has established himself as a “remarkable person” insofar as, from his trading post “in the true ivory-country” (159), he has been heroic among his rival agents in boosting the spoils and self-esteem of the Company. He has sent his superiors “as much ivory as all the others put together.” However, Kurtz, a “universal genius” (244) who is expected to “go far, very far … in the Administration before long” (160), in time sends back not ivory but invoices. He, like Achilleus, has grown impatient with the “little peddling notions” of a society that values the status of the affluent ‘owners’ of the means of production and wealth over those who labour to attain it (227). He is solely intent to safeguard his prime interests, “‘my ivory, my station, my river, my_____’” (206) rather than the honour of his disputed leaders. Kurtz rejects late-imperial notions of civilizing heroism by adopting a non-Western approach to heroic self-fashioning: he gets the peoples of the forest “to follow him” as a deity (218).
Kurtz, the author of a report into “Suppression of Savage Customs” becomes, on contact with the “grove of death” the embodiment of “alienist” fears of degeneration. He partakes in “unspeakable rites” with the Congolese tribespeople who worship him as a hero-figure or god. He single-mindedly and hubristically explores, to tragic effect for him and his tribespeople, “some lightless region of subtle horrors”; he decapitates “the natives” and decorates his Station with their impaled heads on stakes (220-1). Such a realization would have compromised supporters of Gobineau’s racist-imperial rhetoric of difference between Western “man” and non-Western “brute creation” ([1856] 1999: 266). Similarly, Achilleus’s resistance to social convention, by grieving beyond the customary period for Patroklos’s murder and by defiling the body of the killer Hektor (cf. 24.15, 17-8), surely would have made those who sought to naturalize binaries between the rational light of the Euro-Greek and the crazed darkness of the “Asiatic” uncomfortable, especially when such attitudes and actions came from the son of a god, the subject of a traditional hero-cult at the source of Greek civilization.
In spite of their propensity to “unspeakable” acts, both Achilleus (Il.9. 308ff.) and Kurtz expound on the poetics of the pity and horror of conflict and plunder. Kurtz’s death-cry “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad: 239), echoes Achilleus’s sympathy with Priam on the “evil” of conflict and conquest (Il. 24. 518): both figures tamely accept their deaths but refuse to integrate themselves into their societies by praising the codes of conflict and conquest. It is fascinating that one reviewer of Heart of Darkness in 1899 silenced this suggestion of the horror and futility of conflict for profit, with the assertion “It cannot be supposed that Mr Conrad makes attack upon colonization, expansion, even upon Imperialism” (in ed. Walder, 2001: 299).
In conclusion, Kurtz, like Achilleus represents a godlike agathos radically proclaiming superiority to a internally competitive society basing social order on acquisition of spoil in trading wars. Achilleus would have been received as problematic for fifth century Athenian readers who constructed Western identity around the example that his adversary Agamemnon represented: he seems to endorse a sort of heroism that is pre-Western, thus compromising the idea of a historical distinction between Western and Eastern identity (hero/villain) going back to the Trojan Wars. Achilleus’s dark-hearted wrath, violation of his dead enemies and refusal to value materialist prerogatives resembled characteristics that were attributed to the Orient but in Greek tradition famed as heroically single-minded. It was easiest not to mention Achilleus in commentaries suggesting historical precedents for a civilizing mission against “Asiatics”. Yet Achilleus’s radical spectre returns like a repressed memory of a pre-Westernized heroic identity, to haunt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the form of Kurtz. Kurtz constitutes what Edward Said (1978:8) calls “a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” destabilizing the colonial-expansionist constructions of Western late-imperial heroic identity, from within. He and Achilleus represent taboo figures of heroic worship in periods of colonial-expansionist reception; in the wilderness of conflict each chooses his own nightmares and tragic, heroic fate in spite of prevailing ideas of civilization precariously enforced in the heart of conflict’s darkness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990.
Homer (trans. Lattimore, Richmond), The Iliad, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951.
_____________________________ The Odyssey, New York: Harper and Row 1967.
Jones, Peter, Homer’s Odyssey: A Commentary Based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press 1988.
Open University, A295 Homer: Poetry and Society – Supplementary Texts, Milton Keynes: Open University 1992.
Willcock, Malcolm, A Companion to the Iliad Based on the Translation By Richmond Lattimore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976.
Secondary sources
Aeschylus (trans. Vellacott, Philip) The Oresteian Trilogy, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1956.
Brannigan, John, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998.
ed. Childs, Peter, Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature – A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999.
Cox, G.B., Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination, London: Dent 1974.
Cuddon, J.A., The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory – Third Edition, Harmondworth: Penguin 1991.
ed. Emlyn-Jones, Chris et al., Homer – Readings and Images, London: Duckworth/ Open University 1993.
Gobineau, Count J.A. [1856], “Influence of Christianity upon Intellectual and Moral Diversity of Races”, in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, edited and introduced by Harlow, Barbara and Carter, Mia 1999: 263-7.
Herodotus (trans. [1858] Rawlinson, George), Histories, Ware: Wordsworth 1996.
Jackson, Guida M., Traditional Epics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994.
Kerényi, C., The Heroes of the Greeks, Thames and Hudson 1959.
ed. Miles, Geoffrey, Classical Mythology in English Literature – A Critical Anthology, London/ New York: Routledge 1999.
Open University, A295: Homer Poetry and Society Learning Guides 1-3; audiocassettes 4-5; videocassette 2, Truth, Imagination and Value 02.56.50-3.56.27, 1992.
_______________ AA316 The Nineteenth Century Novel – Identities, audiocassette 2, 2001.
Overing, Joanna (1997), “The Role of Myth: An Anthropological Perspective”, in Myths &Nationhood, eds. Hosking, Geoffrey and Schöpflin, George, London: Hurst and Company 1997, pp. 1-18.
ed. Regan, Stephen, AA316 The Nineteenth-Century Novel – A Critical Reader, London/ New York: Routledge/ Open University 2001.
Said, Edward W., Orientalism – With a new Afterword, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990.
______________ Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage 1994.
ed. Tallack, Douglas, Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts, London: Batsford 1987.
ed. Walder, Dennis, The Nineteenth-Century Novel – Identities, London/ New York: Routledge/ Open University 2001.
Comments
Okay! And another way you might have approached your piece, ISN, is this:
"Peter saunters back to Ventura Rodriguez, exhausted with his day'ssearch for a Pensione, and climbs the steps to his Pensione. His room is tiny, with just a small sink and a makeshift cupboard. He takes out a bottle of red, and some Jamón and bread, and eating, looks out the window at the rooftops and clothes flapping in a light summer breeze. Picking up Don Quixote, he's not convinced he'll ever finish it. He thinks about his luck in finding the Pensione to move to. It's half-way between Plaza España and Bilbao where his college is.
Looking for a Pensione in Madrid is difficult at the best of times, but this summer, all the rooms seemed to be taken in every boarding house in the whole of the city. There were certain areas that Peter didn't want to live in, all nicely detailed in the Lonely Planet guide. So en route, on his quest for a room today, he didn't walk through Sol, or Lavapies (the latter had an air of bohemia that Peter found incompatible with a good night's sleep: you know the kind of thing; people out drinking 'til all hours of the night; gangs of ruffians marauding at will).
All day, Peter had been walking from Plaza España, up through Noviciados, and he'd already passed a bakery and an interesting café. He'd stopped in the café and ordered a caña and some tapas. Standing at the counter, he'd found himself to be a magnet, and was soon engaged in discussion with the regulars, one of whom happened to be a Briton. This man was once a model so it seemed, but his jaunty remarks about living in Spain were betrayed by his bleary-eyed look and general decrepitude. (Moving on, Peter noted the incredibly orange internet café for future reference). He decided not to enquire at any Pensiones near Gran Via, but headed up-hill on a parrallel with the major road, crossing the small side-streets, like a surgeon deftly splicing veins.
We would have found him at one point today in Bilbao, enquiring about a room in a street overlooking the station, with balconies towering over the junction: an imposing building with decorative architecture on her light grey walls. The room (from the classified paper, Segundomano), was taken. Peter was somewhat relieved, as the landlady seemed to be a little too personal, and the other man living there, who might have divided her interests, was leaving for Milan that evening.
He had noted that day on his walk that the youth hostels were all full, which he knew from his first few weeks in Madrid. We can see him at one point at the edges of the city, walking haphazardly through streets with little shops and cafés. He was peering into a shop with blanched leather gourds hanging out to air. One day they would be filled with wine and painted in gaudy colours for the tourists. We see him backtracking, and coming upon a square, that Sunday afternoon, filled with young people drinking beer, singing, talking together, and playing drums. All encircling the front of a huge church, splayed around the courtyard like a necklace of conviviality. Lingering, he felt part of the happy crowd, which included toddlers, and Madrileños that would not look out of place in a Benneton ad.
The street was long and straight, with different vendors on it. The balcony of his new room caught the afternoon sun, and let it flood into the double sized space, highlighting the beautiful polished floorboards. One of the shops was a tobacconist. There were plenty of cafés and a flower stall was set up. It was near the old centre of Madrid, and he'd passed a film crew, but only stayed to gawk for a few minutes.
This area was sure to become as fond to him as his favourite, Ventura Rodriguez, where he would watch the sunset from the top of the hill in Park Ouest, and dream of walking to the distant mountains - 'the mountains of Madrid', and skirt the ancient Temple Debod, with its reflective water apron, to laze in the folds of greenery, and dream his lazy dreams. The guide to the Madrid Metro was similar to the London Underground, in its wild twistings and bright colours: reds, yellows etc, but, unlike London, each stop on the Madrid Metro afforded discoveries of a nature ensured to bring delight to the newest Madrileño unfamiliar with the infinite possibilities that a walk through Madrid could open."
I really liked this one!
I've done life drawing classes in the past where we've been encouraged to produce our work on newspaper so as not to be too precious about our exercises. Remember that these are just workshop tasks for fun, and what you personally get out of them is what's paramount. The more you do the exercises, the more nimble and flexible you get. And you're truly very talented. I'm not disingenuous here. I mean it.
Hey there Fins: Here is my stab at what I understand this to be?...
1. Pondering where all of her glory years as a dancer had faded to.
2. Should she had been more meticulous with her craft throughout the wasted years?
3. Would the practice have paid off in her later years?
Thanks, even flow?
Please don't feel sad.
I've been reading all your stuff here.
You know so much that I sometimes feel like a dumbass cos I know so little in comparison!
I believe workshop exercises are good for showing writers that literature is a process and that we must continue to negotiate and revise its form. I'm never satisfied with my own efforts. I'm always changing them.
ISN, pm me if you like, on this point. Let's get back to the exercises! You too, ISN!
Love
Finsbury
I hope you have sweet sleep, ISN
xo
ruby tubey
the only ruby
around
There once was a girl called ISN
she was fiesty, irish and very good with a pen
Fair knowledge abundant she did possess
and her words in themselves were fineness!
Sweet dreams
Only joking.
Now. Onward.
Surely one brick wouldn't be enough? This thing is huge!
One might find temporal displacement, say, in a story that works like this.
(A) Peter miserably peering from inside police cell bars;
(B)Peter conversing with an aggressive officer; Peter reflecting on the events that had led up to his arrest.
(C)The day's events, beginning innocuously enough with an account of him waking, dressing and breakfasting, then his eventful walk around his city, through to his arrest.
(D)Then you're back in the cell again and you trace perhaps how he is released with a warning.
So, the order goes: (A)=2, (B)=3, (C)=1, (D)=4.
Or one might even work like this:
(A)Peter walks home from the police cells after being released with a warning.
(B) He remembers a few moments ago peering miserably from his cell bars and conversing with an aggressive officer.
(C) He remembers his own reflection there and then of the day's events from waking onwards.
(D)The day's events, his day's eventful walk in the city and the arrest.
(E)Following (A), Peter stops in his walk home and pauses in reflection, noticing the scene around him.
(F)He remembers his release and ponders on the implications of his day.
So, the order here goes (A)= 5; (B)=3; (C)=1; (D)=2; (E)=6; (F)=4.
hmmmmmm
I could sware I´ve heard about a similar situation some time ago...
aw sorry, go on Prof. Fins
and in its contradiction of response,
Or seeming stagnance, see that rippled gleam
That might suggest true movement. If you sense
a hidden wave in what seems blanket still,
Write more, wind each desire, and you'll see
The willows nod and rustle, and you will
hear the rushing babble of the free
gush of water, brimming, charged with light
That is your reader's understanding heart.
Thanks exhale. But let's all be kind now. If anybody's got a gripe with another, to PMs with it. BBS Guidelines. This is the luuuuurrrve thread.
of lottery results from months gone by;
He dreams he opens up his van's back doors
and wads of banknotes fall out endlessly;
He pokes your arm and shouts into your ear,
"You see that bloke there? Him? Right - now - don't stare -
He's plenty money. Loaded, dontcha fear!
I'm tellin' ya! The bloke's a millionaire!"
He'll ask you what you're studying right now.
"That's good, that's good, but after you've done that,
after all that learnin' stuff, then, how
Much d'ya think you'll earn, then? I mean, what
sort of job d'ya think that you can get?
No one just studies for the sake of it....."
"Ticketfokker sucks, dah fokkin' fokks!"
"The closest to dah stage I've ever been!"
"They're sellin' stuff on e-bay! Eddie's locks!"
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Crash bang wallop
Now it's Jan the first, year 'seven-TAY:
Jimi played "Machine Gun" live today!
The above statement, which I have devised myself, implies a discrepancy between the mythic conceit of heroism represented in Homer (see below) and the imperialistic ideals of “Western” colonial-expansionist heroism prevalent both when the Iliad (c.725 BCE) was received by c.5th BCE Athenians and when Heart of Darkness was read in the imperial context of 1899. The radical representations of Achilleus and Kurtz as single-minded, heroic figures who firstly dismiss the materialistic Western values they are thought to represent and secondly embrace propensities of otherness - non-human (in being godlike) and ‘barbaric’ – will be studied comparatively in this essay, with references to the texts’ receptions.
Citing Emerson’s statement “The hero is he who is immovably centred”, C. Kerényi (1959) describes the heroes of Greek myth as “marked by their substantiality, by a remarkable solidity, which they share with the divine figures”(2): A hero in this sense transcends mortal values and conventions, even when the result of an unshakable vision or emotion is tragic and horrific. I shall argue below how Achilleus and Kurtz accord to this radical heroic model. Achilleus is the son of Thetis, a goddess. He is the (almost) invulnerable agathos of the Trojan Wars’ first nine years; his obdurate refusal to defer to Agamemnon’s aristocratic claim of superior timé, and his withdrawal from a trade war in the Troad on the grounds that “A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much” (Il.9.320) suggests his self-realization as a heroic demigod superior to the internal competitiveness and materialist mores of an aristocratic Achaian society. His anger causes legions of soldiers to become carrion-fodder; his excessive pride is tragic hubris; yet his single-mindedness is superhuman and heroic. Achilleus foreshadows Kurtz, a “universal genius” (244) who tires both of the internal competitiveness of his trading company and his spurious distinction as their prime source of ivory: He single-mindedly pursues a vision to institute himself as a mythic hero among the Congolese tribespeople he savagely suppresses: he is largely responsible for the horror he abhors. Mythic heroism encompasses a notion of Otherness that interrogates Western constructions of heroic identity: to be heroic in the tragic, mythic sense is to be barbaric: to be a materialist plunderer turned-‘god’ is to represent fears concerning degeneration from within the Western psyche in the dark heart of conflict.
Interestingly, when Classical Athens was involved in a colonial war with Persia, contemporary historians were keen to rid history of its mythical associations (cf. Overing 1997: 2). Mythic heroes, who disdained the codes of materialistic honour that were demonstrated in Homer’s account of Achaian society (and carried forward into colonial-expansionist fifth-century Athens), were ignored in Classical commentaries whilst a martial prototype such as Agamemnon – even without documentary proof of his existence – was, because of his suitability to Classical values, reappraised as ‘historical’. Thucydides (Supplementary Texts, 13ii: 38-40) lauds the Mycenaean basileus Agamemnon as probably “the most powerful of the rulers of his day” who represented values of kratos (power) and timé (honour acquired via recognized wealth) shared by later Greeks. Yet there is no reference in his text of Achilleus, whose fateful anger is proclaimed in the opening line of the Iliad as the poem’s central narrative theme. The silence in Thucydides’s discourse perhaps ‘speaks’ of a latent anxiety in Athenian society: the possibility that Homer’s Achilleus represents a regressive, degenerative tendency in all civilizers when out abroad suppressing ‘savagery’, to indulge their pre-Western propensities and embrace a barbaric will to quasi-divine power, fashioning themselves as gods above the prerogatives of war and material enterprise.
Edward Said (1978) suggests, “A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian” (54). Herodotus (in Supplementary Texts 7i, 1992: 8) sought to naturalize a cultural distinction between his society and the ‘barbarian’ Persian Empire of Xerxes. Although the Trojan Wars were concerned with trade rather than establishing Western colonies (as in the case of the later, Persian Wars), Herodotus argued that the ‘right’ of Greece to suppress Eastern barbarism originated in the perceived difference in values between Achaians and Trojans during the Trojan War as described by Homer: he writes that although the Achaian forefathers of his people heroically fought to defend their material honour against the Trojan captors of Helen and all her possessions, the non-Europeans in contrast did not share such all-important commodity values and “took the seizure of women lightly enough”. Herodotus’s Greek colonialists of the Persian Wars are pragmatic whereas non-Greeks are “religious to excess” (cf. Herodotus, trans. Rawlinson [1858] 1996: 132), in that they are prone to forming hero-cults abundantly and enacting strange, bloody rites and imprecations against their Western foes (133). Yet in Herodotus’s refusal to observe Homer’s descriptions of similarities between Achaian and Trojan lifestyles, dwellings and religious/burial customs (cf. Il. 6. 237ff; 24. 692ff), a contemporary Athenian anxiety emerges, that prefigures imperial fears of degeneration in Conrad’s era: that the Western civilizer and his Oriental counterpart are historically similar rather than different in their mores and “rites”, sacred or profane.
Kurtz, the author of a report into “Suppression of Savage Customs” becomes, on contact with the “grove of death” the embodiment of “alienist” fears of degeneration. He partakes in “unspeakable rites” with the Congolese tribespeople who worship him as a hero-figure or god. He single-mindedly and hubristically explores, to tragic effect for him and his tribespeople, “some lightless region of subtle horrors”; he decapitates “the natives” and decorates his Station with their impaled heads on stakes (220-1). Such a realization would have compromised supporters of Gobineau’s racist-imperial rhetoric of difference between Western “man” and non-Western “brute creation” ([1856] 1999: 266). Similarly, Achilleus’s resistance to social convention, by grieving beyond the customary period for Patroklos’s murder and by defiling the body of the killer Hektor (cf. 24.15, 17-8), surely would have made those who sought to naturalize binaries between the rational light of the Euro-Greek and the crazed darkness of the “Asiatic” uncomfortable, especially when such attitudes and actions came from the son of a god, the subject of a traditional hero-cult at the source of Greek civilization.
In spite of their propensity to “unspeakable” acts, both Achilleus (Il.9. 308ff.) and Kurtz expound on the poetics of the pity and horror of conflict and plunder. Kurtz’s death-cry “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad: 239), echoes Achilleus’s sympathy with Priam on the “evil” of conflict and conquest (Il. 24. 518): both figures tamely accept their deaths but refuse to integrate themselves into their societies by praising the codes of conflict and conquest. It is fascinating that one reviewer of Heart of Darkness in 1899 silenced this suggestion of the horror and futility of conflict for profit, with the assertion “It cannot be supposed that Mr Conrad makes attack upon colonization, expansion, even upon Imperialism” (in ed. Walder, 2001: 299).
In conclusion, Kurtz, like Achilleus represents a godlike agathos radically proclaiming superiority to a internally competitive society basing social order on acquisition of spoil in trading wars. Achilleus would have been received as problematic for fifth century Athenian readers who constructed Western identity around the example that his adversary Agamemnon represented: he seems to endorse a sort of heroism that is pre-Western, thus compromising the idea of a historical distinction between Western and Eastern identity (hero/villain) going back to the Trojan Wars. Achilleus’s dark-hearted wrath, violation of his dead enemies and refusal to value materialist prerogatives resembled characteristics that were attributed to the Orient but in Greek tradition famed as heroically single-minded. It was easiest not to mention Achilleus in commentaries suggesting historical precedents for a civilizing mission against “Asiatics”. Yet Achilleus’s radical spectre returns like a repressed memory of a pre-Westernized heroic identity, to haunt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the form of Kurtz. Kurtz constitutes what Edward Said (1978:8) calls “a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” destabilizing the colonial-expansionist constructions of Western late-imperial heroic identity, from within. He and Achilleus represent taboo figures of heroic worship in periods of colonial-expansionist reception; in the wilderness of conflict each chooses his own nightmares and tragic, heroic fate in spite of prevailing ideas of civilization precariously enforced in the heart of conflict’s darkness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990.
Homer (trans. Lattimore, Richmond), The Iliad, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951.
_____________________________ The Odyssey, New York: Harper and Row 1967.
Jones, Peter, Homer’s Odyssey: A Commentary Based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press 1988.
Open University, A295 Homer: Poetry and Society – Supplementary Texts, Milton Keynes: Open University 1992.
Willcock, Malcolm, A Companion to the Iliad Based on the Translation By Richmond Lattimore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976.
Secondary sources
Aeschylus (trans. Vellacott, Philip) The Oresteian Trilogy, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1956.
Brannigan, John, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998.
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Cox, G.B., Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination, London: Dent 1974.
Cuddon, J.A., The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory – Third Edition, Harmondworth: Penguin 1991.
ed. Emlyn-Jones, Chris et al., Homer – Readings and Images, London: Duckworth/ Open University 1993.
Gobineau, Count J.A. [1856], “Influence of Christianity upon Intellectual and Moral Diversity of Races”, in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, edited and introduced by Harlow, Barbara and Carter, Mia 1999: 263-7.
Herodotus (trans. [1858] Rawlinson, George), Histories, Ware: Wordsworth 1996.
Jackson, Guida M., Traditional Epics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994.
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_______________ AA316 The Nineteenth Century Novel – Identities, audiocassette 2, 2001.
Overing, Joanna (1997), “The Role of Myth: An Anthropological Perspective”, in Myths &Nationhood, eds. Hosking, Geoffrey and Schöpflin, George, London: Hurst and Company 1997, pp. 1-18.
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______________ Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage 1994.
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