Chekhov I

Here's the 1887 story "Enemies": please read it, print it out, and bring it to class on Thursday.

Is He a Lord or a Duke or a Knight?

I have mentioned to you that we keep seeing in our readings the transition from feudal to mercantile or bourgeois society: that is, a situation in which power no longer comes from being a noble with an inherited title in a world where everyone's social position stays the same, but instead comes from anyone who has money. We saw this in Venice, when Candide, whose money came from exploration, had to help out the six kings; we saw it when the small businessman Michael Kohlhaas was able to make princes shudder and make counts lose their jobs.

I found one of the great folk songs about this change, a song in which a wealthy commoner is able to say fu to a nobleman: "John Barbour," here sung by Sean McCann of Great Big Sea. Unfortunately, the worthy who put it on youtube for some reason accompanied it with pictures of MacGyver or someone like that: you might want to just shut your eyes and listen.

Emma McEvoy on the Gothic

"In contrast to the realist novel, set in modern society, amongst ordinary folk in small towns or cities, the Gothic novel is most often set in a foreign country (usually Italy or Spain), in a barbarous medieval past . . . populated by virtuous heroes and heroines and unspeakably evil villains . . .
Its plots . . . characteristically involve evil ecclesiastics, beautiful heroines, handsome heroes, separation, imprisonment in dungeons and convents, mazes of passages, the evil older woman, wild scenery, castles, and ruins . . . stories within stories, multiple plots, and flights from imprisonment to reimprisonment . . .

One Gothic convention that seems to fly in the face of the habits of the reading of character that we expect in the realist novel is the technique of paralleling or doubling, where character is conveyed through the use of doubles and correspondences."

-Emma McEvoy, "Introduction." 1995. In Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. 1796. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Also of interest: The Literary Gothic, a web resource discussing all kinds of Gothic, neoGothic, and protoGothic authors and books and poems and stories.

Burke on the Sublime

It occurred to me to see if Wikipedia had a good summary of the sublime that I could tell you about. It did. Moreover, it led me to an online version of Burke's entire essay. Here are some passages that I liked:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling . . . When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience. (Part I, Section VII).

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There is a passage in the book of Job amazingly sublime, and this sublimity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described: In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice,—Shall mortal man be more just than God? We are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for the vision; we are first terrified, before we are let even into the obscure cause of our emotion; but when this grand cause of terror makes it appearance, what is it? Is it not wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting, could possibly represent it? (Part II, Section V)

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Look at a man, or any other animal of prodigious strength, and what is your idea before reflection? Is it that this strength will be subservient to you, to your ease, to your pleasure, to your interest in any sense? No; the emotion you feel is, lest this enormous strength should be employed to the purposes of rapine and destruction . . . The horse in the light of a useful beast, fit for the plough, the road, the draft; in every social, useful light, the horse has nothing sublime: but is it thus that we are affected with him, whose neck is clothed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth that it is the sound of the trumpet? In this description, the useful character of the horse entirely disappears, and the terrible and sublime blaze out together. (Part II, Section VI)

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Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.(Part II, Section IX)

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Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity. ( Part II, Section XIV)

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Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. (Part II, Section XVIII)

Finally, in this paragraph and the preceding section, Burke speculates as to how these sensations can be the cause of delight. He seems to have some affinity for the old idea of catharsis, the sense that you experience an emotional cleansing and are revitalized by seeing tragic stories acted out. Part of Burke's argument, as I understand it, is that to survive such sensations of awe and terror unharmed gives us the relief associated with the sense of self-preservation.

Another Kleist Dramatization

This is neat in that it sticks so closely to the text that you can follow along in the book if you don't know German.

Relatable to What?

The graduate student in NYC who blogs under the name "A White Bear" just posted this meditation, which reminded me of the "Be relatable to readers' lives" criterion in our list of what might make for Good Fiction. Notice that AWB has seen students try to reduce the intensity of poetry to personal struggles in authors' lives --rather than seeing how Countee Cullen was writing about U.S. society, her students say, "Hm, it must have been rough on him to be black." So far, no one has suggested that sort of thing in our discussions: there have been no "Boy, Voltaire must have been mistreated by priests" or "Wow, Kleist must have had a bad time in Saxony" comments. I've tried now and then to argue for the continued relevance of old fiction to the present day: you'll recall that I spoke of Candide and brought up the fact that we still see preachers who blame their fellow citizens for disasters, like the Church in Lisbon did; that torture, colonialism, slavery, and arbitrary execution still occur in this world; that people still trivialize war; in short, that many of the injustices Voltaire tore into are still around somewhere. More recently, I asked if the outpouring of community and mutual aid we see in "The Earthquake in Chile" rang true to you, and we had a good discussion.

AWB, as I interpret her post, likes seeing her students connect with the experiences of people very different from themselves but does not want them, in the name of "relatability," to erase the fact of that difference. So she's sarcastic about students who say their love affairs are Just Like the Gothic adventures of the lovers in Wuthering Heights, 'cause it's like saying "I had an experience with a contractor that was exactly like Michael Kohlhaas's conflict with the Junker!" If you have had a confrontation with an unjust bureaucracy that reminds you of "Michael Kohlhaas" or vice versa, it's not because Kleist is giving us a tale that's Just Like our mundane experiences but because we like to imagine ourselves as Romantic heroes who could shake an Empire, so the extremes of Kleist's story resonate with us.

So here are a few different things I think "relatable to readers' lives" could mean:

• I thought I recognized people in this story like those I know
• I empathize with the feelings of people in this story
• I sympathize with the goals of people in this story
• I enjoy identifying with people in this story
• I feel pity or compassion for the people in this story
• I have discovered similarities between my life and that of people in this story
• I wish my life worked like people's lives in this story
• I fear my life might end up like that of people in this story
• I am relieved that my life does not work like that of people in this story

The great risk, as AWB explains using the example of her bigoted Dad, is that a person will find a way to reinforce a prejudice or narrow world view in a story; the great opportunity is that a person will be changed and have some of his or her blind spots removed by an encounter with a great work of art. I think "relatable" is only a bad thing if it's used to mean "It did nothing but reinforce what I already know, or comfort me by saying what I already believe." Sure, you can make a case that a story confirming your beliefs is Good Fiction, but you'd probably want to make such a case on the grounds of its style or wit or suspense or some attribute other than "relatability."

We're Not in Saxony Any More

A movie from about ten years ago. Recognize the story?

A Romantic Looks at Candide

Madame de Staël wrote in 1814 that

It seems to have been written by a creature of a nature wholly different from our own, indifferent to our lot, rejoicing in our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at the miseries of this human race with which he has nothing in common.

Of course, Voltaire had plenty of feeling for "our sufferings" and was trying to remind us of them, while still being able to make them funny --there is such a thing as "dark humor." But something enabled Voltaire to write with an ironic distance that, fifty years later, another great French intellectual found impossible to understand: this change is a fine example of the change in sensibility that characterized the Romantic era.