First of all I would like to say that your presentation was very good, and I agreed with what you both said.
However, when you mentioned there being an "arc" in the books we're reading, my first thought was that it had to do with character. Yes, philosophies on life and death is an arc as well, and perhaps character is part of that arc, but I had actually been paying a lot of attention to portrayal of characters as representations of human beings.
Nicholson Baker encouraged us to focus on every little moment. He only paid close attention to one character, and during the course of an escalator ride, he was able to flesh out his character so much that we knew Howie very, very well. Woolf's style was similar to Baker's in that she did flesh out characters a lot over a short period of time. However, Woolf took it to the next level by fleshing out (nearly) every single character in her novel. She made it impossible to really hate anybody. After spending so much time reading Woolf, her writing has really impacted the way I've read other books in this course. While reading Hemingway, I was constantly searing for what was underneath the surface, because I was so used to that being very important in Woolf's writing. This was obviously also important in Hemingway's, and I was very glad we had read Woolf first because it made it much more obvious that I had to look beneath the surface while reading Hemingway. Gregor's transformation in The Metamorphosis was like one huge metaphor not only for the awful family dynamic, but also for Gregor's insect-like personality. While reading The Stranger, our sympathetic view of characters was challenged by a character who seemed incredibly inhuman to us. We looked as hard as we could for human traits in Meursault, but it was difficult to find any at first. We even called him a psychopath. Once his trial began, however, and he started to change as a character, we began to like him because he was showing emotion for the first time we had seen. Now that we're reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I'm not sure what it will do for our perception of human nature and character, but I expect it to tell us something important as well.
I agreed with the points you two made during your presentation, but I wanted to offer an alternate "arc" that these books are forming, at least for me.
1 comment:
Marina, you should run a discussion of your own! Maybe I need to make that a formal part of the course--"find the arc." Because, inevitably, there may be many such arcs, and one doesn't rule out another (and, of course, issues like how one conceives of death and the prospect of life going on without them certainly has a strong connection to how we view their character).
It is early to tell, but a good place to start thinking about where Rhys fits into your "arc" would be the idea that, in Antoinette, we see "alienation" as an inheritance or birthright. It's not *her* reaction to the majority culture, or "convention," or whatever. She exists from the earliest days of childhood in a kind of in-between zone--she has no "larger culture" to rebel against, as she isn't included in either the "Jamaican ladies'" scene or (for understandable reasons, given her father's reputation as a brutal slaveholder) the local black culture which she seems to identify with more. How does a "self" get formed under such conditions?
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