This novel is finally finished after two years of extreme dedication and collaboration with Candace Zangoei. Please buy a copy and share the link for us!
https://www.createspace.com/5327804
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Dear Grandpa,
You just died about an hour ago. Do you remember the pain anymore? I hope, for your sake, you do not. You had a lifetime of it. Do you remember the hole in your heart left behind, the sorrow from which you could not recover, the disappointment, the weight of it—the unbearable weight of being alive without Grandma? Well, now you have flown away from it. You have shed your mortal skin like a coat thrown off and cast onto a chair. And here I am with the same ache, the same pressure behind my eyes, the same sadness and awe that you must have carried around with you all of your remaining days like the intimidating knobby wooden walking stick you brandished on our hunts for blackberries when I was young.
I’d like to put my feelings into words, but I’ve never been too much of a writer. Emotions don’t go well with words—words can only present themselves as embarrassing understudies to the real thing, raw emotion. But if you could see into my heart and watch my body react to the pain of having lost you, you would know what I mean. And I hope, in some paradoxical and magical way, it makes you proud that I hurt so much. You should be proud that you made yourself so heavy—so important—that I will carry your memory and the pain of having lost you, my second father, from now until it’s my turn to die. I hope that I am that heavy to someone someday. I just a read a novel called The Unbearable Lightness of Being that reminds me of what I’m trying to say. Being light and care-free doesn’t mean anything—it doesn’t leave its mark. But you meant something. You were heavy. You will always be heavy.
I told you before you died that we were cut from the same cloth. I thanked you for being my first writing coach, guitar instructor, acting mentor, audience member, fellow philosopher, friend, and the giver of unconditional love. So I won’t go too much into that—except to tell you that I wrote you into the first novel I published; that the first thought I always had when I went on a first date was whether or not you would like him and be proud of me; that when I hear old country music or see live music of any kind I am reminded of you tapping your foot as you played your red Gretch guitar, your smile peeping out from under your Wilfred Brimley moustache. When I think of Nashville or whiskey or the word “fuck-a-doodle-doo” – a word I learned helping you study your lines for the Community Theater—I think of you. When I think of old computers, the first commercial video cameras, home-made workout equipment, Blue Bell ice cream, Western movies, peanuts in soda, or unwashed armpits, I think of you. When I think of silly rhymes or Chihuahuas or flannel or guns or quiet reflection or flyswatters or long walks in the country, I think of you. When I consider my own disappointment or fall in love with Jay Gatsby each year I teach it to hundreds of students—the love of my life, the greatest of American dreamers who hoped unceasingly and never gave up on a dream—you are somehow enmeshed with him in my heart.
You were born a hundred years too late for your liking. You fancied yourself a cowboy because you were the best shot and you loved the open range and you liked the idea of the good guy winning and the bad guys going to jail. From the moment I saw Lonesome Dove on TV, you were nearly indistinguishable from Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call rolled up into one. But though all these things were what defined you from the top of your burred head to the soles of your boots or sailor shoes, I always saw in you—apart from the tough guy exterior—the sheriff, the outlaw, and really the full cast of characters from those movies you absorbed into your being—I saw most in you the little boy who always wanted to be loved. The boy who wanted attention for his new shoes, for his talent, for his body, for his wild ways, for his smarts—who wanted fame, who wanted notice and acclaim: in other words to become heavy. And though your body had dwindled down to literal skin and bones by the time you left today, I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that you did a good job. You were heavy to me. And you always will be. One of the last things you said to me on your deathbed when I told you most of the contents of this letter in more concrete terms was formed as a question:
Really? You think I did a good job?
I think you were a little surprised and mostly pleased to hear it, and I think you can rest well now, because so many people loved you. But I understood you. And I would tell you I will never forget you, except that would be so silly, as you well know, because I am so much like you it’s like you’re not even gone. And you won’t be, so long as I’m alive.
In the words of Augustus McRae:
“My God, Woodrow. It has been quite a party, ain’t it?”
Yes, Travis, my beloved, beautiful, stubborn, inappropriate, hilarious, kind-hearted one—
It has.
-Kim
RIP Travis Leroy Hobbs
March 26, 1930-
February 1, 2015
I am a resident of a small suburb of Denton. It’s lovely for oh-so-many reasons: it’s safe, quiet, right on the lake (in fact, my house is about five houses away from a private beach), very treed, and all the houses are representative of every socioeconomic level (literally from million dollar ranches to veritable shanties) and architectural style of various decades and aesthetic tastes. It’s got those perfectly arched canopied lanes that make you feel sacrilegious for admiring them from a car; you feel like you should be lounging in a horse-drawn carriage to truly appreciate them. And the animals around here– my god! Once a renegade longhorn steer walked right up to my car in the middle of the road about a block from my house and nearly made me pee my pants. There are goats and horses and cattle and dogs of every kind and cats that howl and birds and every kind of insect, too. My son loves to go for walks because we never know what we’ll see. There’s even a papier-mache (how the hell do you spell that?) 20-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex whose eyes light up and whose mouth goes up and down on a timer at night that someone lovingly put up in a field nearby. And I got a USDA loan on my house (hey— eyyyyy!!!) because it was out of the city limits, though I’m only four minutes from the interstate and from civilization.
There’s one major problem with my suburb, however: and this is its library. Now, I’ve only recently re-discovered libraries. I used to go as a child every weekend. In fact, that was the only way I’d ever behave at home. My parents would spank me, ground me, scream at me, wheedle, reward, and ignore. But when they took away my library card and told me I couldn’t read– no trips to the library,no books I owned, NOTHING–I straightened up right away.
An aside: My mother was a kindergarten teacher back then. I attended the same school at which she taught. I remember her horror when my third grade teacher marched down and asked her what was the meaning of her daughter being grounded from reading especially during READ week, the week where the whole school pushed reading for pleasure? When my teacher had asked us to open our textbook, I raised my hand and politely told her I wasn’t allowed to. I was a major rule follower and as much of a literalist as they come. I didn’t know what I was doing (not really, anyway).
Since college, though, I’ve purchased most of my books from Recycled Books (dolla paperbacks, y’all! Holla!) or somewhere similar to that. But after cleaning out my library, I still have four huge bookshelves full of books and stacks on the floor that still won’t fit. So I decided to do the library thing– after all, I keep a list of book recommendations on my I-phone and sometimes you’re just out of luck at a discount bookstore. Out of decency, I won’t go into the defects of this puny, underfunded, ridiculously ludicrous library I’m paying taxes to use. What I will say is that I finally bit the bullet and bought a non-resident library card that functions for all three Denton Public Libraries. I won’t wax about how long this took me to decide (it was a matter of principle– I’m a high school English teacher, a TWU adjunct professor, a graduate of both UNT and TWU AND a resident of Denton for the past 31 years) because I know that it still comes down to the fact that I don’t pay taxes in Denton. Okay.
But y’all– this is the best thing I’ve ever done. Seriously. If you don’t know about the Denton Public Library– their generous allowance of time for checking out books (and rechecking!); their three convenient and well-organized locations; their AMAZING hold system (up to 35 items at a time); their easy online system which is so convenient; and the OHMYGOD selection of the best books on the face of the earth– you should check it out. Groan.
So I paid my fifty bucks for the year. And in the first two weeks, it’s already paid off. I’ve read my son about 20 Easy Reading books. I’ve checked out ten novels I’ve been wanting to read for the longest time– and I totally feel like I own the world. I will never be bored again.
I finished 1Q84, by the way. It was… profound. So profound, in fact, that I have no idea what the hell Murakami meant by any of it. I suspect I am not alone in this review.
I also read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Now there’s an f’ing novel. I wish I had written it.
Currently reading : The ENTIRE UNIVERSE (one chunk at a time… tonight it’s Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (I’m finishing it up… it’s lovely, but not anywhere near his Disgrace level, in my opinion) and tomorrow I’ll begin The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov). I’ve got some great friends to talk about literature with. Candace, you are my literary soulmate (and in so many other ways too– but this is a literary blog). Peter and Hunter– you guys are wonderful additions to my life in general but especially to my mind, and I can’t wait to continue trying to solve the problems of the world and share recommendations with you both. 😉
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TwelDanc.shtml
The above is a link to the text of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” in case you don’t know the fairy tale in its entirety. What follows will include the entire text, but it will be broken up by my thoughts and comparisons to The Great Gatsby.
From Wikipedia: “[‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ (or ‘The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes’ or ‘The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces’) is a German fairy tale originally published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812…]”
I think this is a brand new thought, though I could be wrong, of course, given all of the prolific research out there on Gatsby. My apologies if an association has been published before.
What I will suggest is that “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” was the specific fairy tale that Fitzgerald used to show that the American Dream is, in fact, itself a modern day American fairy tale (as in– insubstantial, not real). It is common knowledge that the beautiful, poetic language Fitzgerald uses serves many purposes (it creates a musical rhythm; it elevates the novel to an epic poem of sorts, etc.). It has even been said countless times that the language Fitzgerald uses is consciously that of the fairy tale genre as a whole. But I’d like to suggest that he alluded specifically to “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” because it lent a sort of universal emotional credence to his themes and gave him a basis for the structure of the unfolding of the mystery who was Gatsby–the soldier in the fairy tale who was in love with the eldest princess, our Daisy Fay (meaning ‘fairy’) Buchanan. And in the American version of this ‘grim’ (pun intended) fairy tale, the soldier does not get the girl, but is sentenced to death by Tom Buchanan, the king (“It’s good to be the king”– especially when your subjects should do as you say and not as you do) who wants to know where his daughter (wife) is going off to all the time (actually, his mistress, too), just as all the others who attempt to pursue the (American) Dream have been before (if not literally, at least spiritually or metaphorically).
I’d also like to suggest that since Gatsby is the Cracked Fairy Tale version of the German original, Fitzgerald shows this through making Gatsby the Christ figure of the novel (sacrificed for the sins of those who “sneer(ed) most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor”(Ch. 8)—all of us, in other words), which works well, given that the biblically significant number of 12 (princesses/disciples) and 3 (the number of days before a suitor is killed if he doesn’t succeed/the number of days before Christ was resurrected) are present in the fairy tale. If Gatsby isn’t exactly resurrected in the novel, his memory sure is, as Nick is “borne back ceaselessly to the past”— to that summer of 1922. There’s a lot of academic material out there on Gatsby as Christ—the “son of God” (Ch.6) who “shouldered his mattress” rather like a cross (Ch.8) and went about his Father’s business” (Ch. 6), his Father being the God of Capitalism, wealth, greed, money, embodied in the blind and unfeeling advertisement of T.J. Eckleburg; so I’ll continue along with my original purpose.
I’ll go through the fairy tale and show you the parallels to Gatsby. This would be the worst rhetorical move ever for an academic paper, but since this is a blog, it works. Words in parentheses are my interjections—some assertions could be seen as suppositious, but others will be textually supported as at least plausible by the novel). Oh— and before we begin, remember all the rumors about Gatsby linking him to Germany (he’s a German spy, a cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm)? I wonder if it’s significant that this fairytale is of German origin? Could this fairy tale be “the elusive rhythm, (the) fragment of lost words, that (Nick) had heard somewhere a long time ago?” (Ch.6?)
Here goes:
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
There was a king (Tom—who lived in one of the “white palaces of fashionable East Egg” (Ch. 1)which “glittered upon the water”) who had twelve beautiful daughters. They slept in twelve beds all in one room and when they went to bed, the doors were shut and locked up [It should be recalled that Tom is appalled by Jordan’s family “let (ting) her run around the country this way (Ch.1) and that he keeps tabs on Daisy, too, which is evidenced in numerous ways, like asking Nick during the party they attended at Gatsby’s if he’s seen Daisy in Ch. 6 and stating in the same chapter that “women run around too much these days to suit (him)…”]. However, every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been danced in all night. Nobody could find out how it happened, or where the princesses had been.
So the king made it known to all the land that if any person could discover the secret and find out where it was that the princesses danced in the night, he would have the one he liked best to take as his wife, and would be king after his death [Tom says, “I’d like to know who he is and what he does…and I think I’ll make a point of finding out” (Ch. 6). And “I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow” (Ch. 7). And also Nick suggests that Tom and Daisy are part of a “rather distinguished secret society” (Ch. 1), somewhat like these princesses, who are bonded together through their nobility, their sense of entitlement, their leisure, and their obliviousness to the consequences of their actions upon others (to me, this fairy tale could foreshadow Myrtle’s, George Wilson’s, and Gatsby’s deaths. Remember, the girls are just dancing, but their secret gets a lot of people killed]. But whoever tried and did not succeed, after three days and nights, they would be put to death (Gatsby, anyone? He ‘tried and did not succeed,’ and was ‘put to death.’).
A king’s son soon came. He was well entertained, and in the evening was taken to the chamber next to the one where the princesses lay in their twelve beds. There he was to sit and watch where they went to dance; and, in order that nothing could happen without him hearing it, the door of his chamber was left open. But the king’s son soon fell asleep; and when he awoke in the morning he found that the princesses had all been dancing, for the soles of their shoes were full of holes (Dan Cody, Gatsby’s predecessor/mentor? He drank Ella Kaye’s Kool-aid, and then wasn’t heard from again) .
The same thing happened the second and third night and so the king ordered his head to be cut off (or breast, in Myrtle’s case).
After him came several others; but they all had the same luck, and all lost their lives in the same way (To me, this is the inherent warning of Gatsby—that there isn’t going to be anyone who “succeeds” really—that the fairy tale really is just that. Nick seems to be making this point pretty obviously in the end, even though there is “something gorgeous” about the romantic, quixotic desire to never give up on the Dream—even he romanticizes Gatsby’s character and Gatsby’s desire).
Now it happened that an old soldier [Gatsby fought in World War I—in fact, he recognized Nick from the “Third Division” (Ch.3)], who had been wounded in battle and could fight no longer, passed through the country where this king reigned, and as he was travelling through a wood, he met an old woman, who asked him where he was going.
‘I hardly know where I am going, or what I had better do,’ said the soldier (“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (Ch.5); ‘but I think I would like to find out where it is that the princesses dance, and then in time I might be a king.’ (I am reminded of Gatsby’s obsession with becoming wealthy as a child—the flashback in Chapter 6, as well as all we know about his yearning and desiring of Daisy and her lifestyle, which is present in all of the novel, really. )
‘Well,’ said the old woman, ‘that is not a very hard task: only take care not to drink any of the wine which one of the princesses will bring to you in the evening; and as soon as she leaves you pretend to be fast asleep.’ (Remember how Dan Cody is the one who taught Gatsby that drinking is a bad idea? Remember he’s the only one at his parties that doesn’t drink? Maybe Dan Cody represents this old, experienced person giving him the key to possible success.)
Then she gave him a cloak, and said, ‘As soon as you put that on you will become invisible, and you will then be able to follow the princesses wherever they go.’ When the soldier heard all this good advice, he was determined to try his luck, so he went to the king, and said he was willing to undertake the task (Remember the “invisible cloak of (Gatsby’s) uniform”—mentioned in Ch. 8?).
He was as well received as the others had been, and the king ordered fine royal robes to be given him; and when the evening came he was led to the outer chamber.
Just as he was going to lie down, the eldest of the princesses brought him a cup of wine (Jordan Baker doesn’t drink because of her “training” (Ch. 1); Daisy doesn’t drink, Jordan says in Ch.4 because “it’s a great advantage not to drink… you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.” This is significant to the fairy tale because the princesses would have been caught out the very first time, had they not given the sleeping draught to all the men before their moonlight trysts); but the soldier threw it all away secretly, taking care not to drink a drop. Then he laid himself down on his bed, and in a little while began to snore very loudly as if he was fast asleep.
When the twelve princesses heard this they laughed heartily; and the eldest said, ‘This fellow too might have done a wiser thing than lose his life in this way!’(Daisy is the eldest of her crowd, it is said, and Jordan Baker is the youngest(Ch.4).) Then they rose and opened their drawers and boxes, and took out all their fine clothes, and dressed themselves at the mirror, and skipped about as if they were eager to begin dancing.
But the youngest said, ‘I don’t know why it is, but while you are so happy I feel very uneasy; I am sure some mischance will befall us.’
‘You simpleton,’ said the eldest, ‘you are always afraid; have you forgotten how many kings’ sons have already watched in vain? And as for this soldier, even if I had not given him his sleeping draught, he would have slept soundly enough.’
When they were all ready, they went and looked at the soldier; but he snored on, and did not stir hand or foot: so they thought they were quite safe.
Then the eldest went up to her own bed and clapped her hands, and the bed sank into the floor and a trap-door flew open. The soldier saw them going down through the trap-door ( the Queensboro bridge? In Ch.4, Nick says that New York City “seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always … (seen)… in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world… anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge…anything at all.”) one after another, the eldest leading the way; and thinking he had no time to lose, he jumped up, put on the cloak which the old woman had given him, and followed them.
However, in the middle of the stairs he trod on the gown of the youngest princess, and she cried out to her sisters, ‘All is not right; someone took hold of my gown.’ (In Chapter 3, a girl named Lucille, a random guest at one of Gatsby’s wild parties, talks about how she “tore (her) gown on a chair” and Gatsby was careful to “stay invisible, so to speak, so he bought her a new dress).
‘You silly creature!’ said the eldest, ‘it is nothing but a nail in the wall.’
Down they all went, and at the bottom they found themselves in a most delightful grove of trees; and the leaves were all of silver, and glittered and sparkled beautifully (Isn’t this language reminiscent of Gatsby? Glittering? Sparkling? Silver? Much of the language that is used in the novel—and most especially—surrounding Gatsby and his parties—reminds one of language used in this fairytale—“enchanted” (Ch. 5),“bewitched to a dark gold,” (Ch. 3), the “silver pepper of the stars,” (Ch.1), “slippers shuffled the shining dust” (Ch. 8), “glistening,” (Ch. 3) “angry diamond (Ch.3)… well, you get the point) The soldier wished to take away some token of the place; so he broke off a little branch, and there came a loud noise from the tree. Then the youngest daughter said again, ‘I am sure all is not right — did not you hear that noise? That never happened before.’
But the eldest said, ‘It is only our princes, who are shouting for joy at our approach.’
They came to another grove of trees, where all the leaves were of gold; and afterwards to a third, where the leaves were all glittering diamonds. And the soldier broke a branch from each; and every time there was a loud noise, which made the youngest sister tremble with fear. But the eldest still said it was only the princes, who were crying for joy.
They went on till they came to a great lake; and at the side of the lake there lay twelve little boats with twelve handsome princes in them, who seemed to be waiting there for the princesses (Boats. This one is too easy).
One of the princesses went into each boat, and the soldier stepped into the same boat as the youngest. As they were rowing over the lake, the prince who was in the boat with the youngest princess and the soldier said, ‘I do not know why it is, but though I am rowing with all my might we do not get on so fast as usual, and I am quite tired: the boat seems very heavy today.’ (Boats against the current? … trying to move forward to the promised Heaven of the “glittering palaces,” the security of wealth, the leisure time redolent of eternity?)
‘It is only the heat of the weather,’ said the princess, ‘I am very warm, too.’ (“Hot! Hot! Hot! Too hot for you?… Chapter 7 is all about the heat… and not just the heat of the weather.)
On the other side of the lake stood a fine, illuminated castle [Gatsby was trying to attract Daisy by pretending to be one of these princes in this illuminated “castle,”(Ch.1) a fitting description matching exactly that of the novel, which was often …”lit from tower to cellar (Ch. 5)] from which came the merry music of horns and trumpets (“There was music from my neighbor’s house…a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones…” (Ch.3). There they all landed [“For a transitory, enchanted moment mam nust have held his breath in the presence of this continent… something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (Ch.9)], and went into the castle, and each prince danced with his princess (But alas, the soldier is not a real prince (Ch.6)); and the soldier, who was still invisible, danced with them too (He must stay invisible in order to dance with the “sparkling hundreds”). When any of the princesses had a cup of wine set by her, he drank it all up, so that when she put the cup to her mouth it was empty. At this, too, the youngest sister was terribly frightened, but the eldest always silenced her.
They danced on till three o’clock in the morning [The song that people danced to at Gatsby’s party was called “Three O’ Clock in the Morning” (Ch. 5)], and then all their shoes were worn out, so that they were obliged to leave. The princes rowed them back again over the lake (but this time the soldier placed himself in the boat with the eldest princess); and on the opposite shore they took leave of each other, the princesses promising to come again the next night.
When they came to the stairs, the soldier ran on before the princesses, and laid himself down. And as the twelve, tired sisters slowly came up, they heard him snoring in his bed and they said, ‘Now all is quite safe’. Then they undressed themselves, put away their fine clothes, pulled off their shoes, and went to bed (In Chapter 8, Daisy’s care-free and privileged youth seems quite like the young princesses’ of the fairy tale… “a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust…(and) through this twilight universe…(Daisy) drows(ed) asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed” ).
In the morning the soldier said nothing about what had happened, but determined to see more of this strange adventure, and went again on the second and third nights. Everything happened just as before: the princesses danced till their shoes were worn to pieces, and then returned home. On the third night the soldier carried away one of the golden cups (“He had committed himself to the following of a grail” (Ch.8) as a token of where he had been.
As soon as the time came when he was to declare the secret, he was taken before the king with the three branches and the golden cup (this reminds me of when Gatsby pulls out the photo of his Oxford days and the Medal of Honor from Montenegro in Chapter Four); and the twelve princesses stood listening behind the door to hear what he would say (just as Jordan Baker brazenly did in Ch.1 of the novel – “Sh!… Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens” she says to Nick so she can eavesdrop on Tom and Daisy’s fighting).
The king asked him. ‘Where do my twelve daughters dance at night?’
The soldier answered, ‘With twelve princes in a castle underground.’ (In the same way that Fitzgerald inverts the idea of manifest destiny in his novel from West to East instead of the historical, God-given morally imperative direction of East to West, Gatsby believes he has found the princess (singular) dancing in the sky (the “secret place above the trees” (Ch.6), which is why he is “regarding the silver pepper of the stars” when Nick first sees Gatsby in Ch. 1) He looks upward rather than downward; perhaps this is one of the causes for his demise. )And then he told the king all that had happened, and showed him the three branches and the golden cup which he had brought with him.
The king called for the princesses, and asked them whether what the soldier said was true and when they saw that they were discovered, and that it was of no use to deny what had happened, they confessed it all (But during the Hotel Scene in Chapter 7, Daisy doesn’t “confess” to the king. She tells Gatsby she loved him “too,” effectively shattering the possibility of a fairy tale ending for him, though he didn’t know it.)
So the king asked the soldier which of the princesses he would choose for his wife; and he answered, ‘I am not very young, so I will have the eldest.’(Daisy, the “pale magic of her face” (Ch. 8), “gleaming like silver” bewitching the soldier ) — and they were married that very day, and the soldier was chosen to be the king’s heir (But ‘rich girls don’t marry poor boys,’ as Mia Farrow’s Daisy cries in the 1974 version of the movie, echoing Ginevra King’s father’s words to a young and heartbroken Fitzgerald).
In conclusion, I really can’t think that all of this is coincidence; perhaps Fitzgerald borrowed the language and storyline of these dancing princesses with their worn-out shoes in order to show that the American Dream is every bit as dangerous, capricious, and “careless” as Daisy Fay, the eldest princess of the old fairy tale.
Currently reading: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
So. Everyone I know is blogging nowadays. I don’t plan to use this blog as a diary. I named this blog thelowbrowintellectual because I want to focus on academic, and specifically more literary, concerns without having to try to publish anything or worry myself about any kind of tedious process. I thought about naming this blog thelazyacademic, the eruditeidiot, and certain other descriptions to the same effect, but it all amounts to the same thing: I don’t want to do anything but share my thoughts about certain pieces of literature or about any literature-related stuff. Once these thoughts are created and typed on the page, then goodbye to them and I’m free to go watch Netflix or read another book. I’m actually much busier than that, but leisure time shouldn’t be taken up by concerns that I’m not being productive enough. A blog is a product, right?
Since I’m poor (mainly because of the fact that I’m a Public School Teacher and I have PILES of student loan debt) and have a two-year-old, I won’t be getting my doctorate (which I always expected would happen as a matter of course). By the time I could spare the time and money, a doctorate wouldn’t be financially prudent anymore. This blog is a way for me to expel all the stored-up ideas I had for possible dissertation topics or papers. It’s also a way for me to have a conversation with Myself if necessary (though I’m hoping with other like-minded people) about interesting reading material.
Of course I’d like to acknowledge any comments made on this blog, or involve myself in any discussion which may arise. I’ll always be open to (and even encouraging of) that.
The truth about myself (and I’d say I’m painfully self-aware, though so would so many others who aren’t in the least even a tittle aware of Anything, much less themselves) is that I’m an above-average, and quite possibly even brilliant, thinker (at least in some areas) and a terrible academic writer. So there it is. My highest expectations for this experiment are that a couple of random Internet People (who, it could be argued, are not really people at all) and a few dear friends (who will say they are delighted to do it but think me a high-maintenance friend for asking) will stumble upon this blog, not really understanding half of what I hope to get across (probably through no fault of their own), or even more likely, not caring at all or seeing any relevance whatsoever to What Really Matters in Life, but good-naturedly commenting just so I will be sure to know they have read what I have self-indulgently blurted out in a really kind of vaporous and casual way. But as pessimistic as I might seem to be, I wouldn’t be writing a blog if at the core I wasn’t hoping for some sort of audience (it doesn’t need to be Adoring so much as Not Hateful or Utterly Confused) who can make me more self-aware and who might actually be interested in Intellectual (at least on a pseudo level) thoughts conveyed through a (relatively) Lowbrow medium.
Why would you trust me? Well, there are some arguments both for and against whether you should.
I’m an English teacher with a Master’s Degree in English ( I graduated Summa Cum Laude and have been awarded a few teaching honors as well). I’m publishing a novel (it will be out soon). I’ve won international songwriting awards. I went to Hollywood with American Idol. I scored in the 96% percentile on the language portion of the GRE and won a major scholarship for my SAT score in undergrad. I taught myself Italian. I’ve traveled to a lot of cool places and read more voraciously than anyone I’ve ever personally met.
But, to be fair, I went to two middling universities, have never won Teacher of the Year, and some of what I’ve stated you’ll have to assume is true, especially if you don’t know me personally. Singing and music have little to do with Literary Things (some would argue, though I disagree), and most people in the 21st century have traveled to a lot of cool places (I mean, really, who does this person think she is? Ugh). And– I’ll go ahead and place this in the Why You Shouldn’t Read This Blog paragraph, though in my mind it belongs in the former paragraph– I’m as neurotic and self-conscious and kind of ridiculous as any Woody Allen character… or maybe even the Great Woody Allen himself (though I don’t claim to be nearly as brilliant or successful as He is). I’m pretty much Nobody Special.
My next post will be… (because I’ll need to ease into this whole blogging thing… slowly, slowly, like starting Dr. Zhivago, which I had to begin at least ten times before I finally gobbled it up in almost one full sitting)…. A list of my favorite novels (that I can remember and which will certainly piss me off the moment I post it because I’ve forgotten 100 more). Non-fiction has its place, and children’s books have theirs. This will be a list of novels only. Then you can see if you can trust me, if my literary palate is anywhere close to yours.
If you LOVE Ernest Hemingway or Stephanie Meyer (is her last name plural or singular? Meh, I’m too lazy to look it up because it Doesn’t Matter) or Joyce Carol Oates, you will probably not be as pleased. Not that I have anything against these authors, really (well, maybe I do just a little when it comes to Hemingway–the bastard); but you are welcome to continue reading if you please. I’m just not trying to trick any Internet People into thinking maybe they’ll like this blog if it is almost certainly assured that they won’t.
A disclaimer (or a few): Not everything I say will be precise. This is precisely the point of selecting a blog medium. So don’t bother correcting me on the details. If it is Important to me, it will be Correct. I’m pretentious at times, tedious at others (or quite possibly at the same time), and I will definitely say in 100 words what I could have said in ten. it’s my blog, and thus my prerogative, and I won’t have the time or inclination to edit, so if you will permit me, I’ll just throw it out there and call my copiousness Style. I also am VERY much interested in the philosophy, psychology, symbology, history, and ambiguity presented in novels. Just so you’re not surprised.
Testing, testing, 123. More to follow. I have some ideas… like some revolutionary ideas about The Great Gatsby (yes, revolutionary and even NEW, as far as I know).
Hokay. So this is my most current list of 50 of my favorite novels/authors. I must note that this list is ONLY comprised of my favorite novels, not my favorite authors of non-fiction or poetry or dramas. There’s an assorted list of those at the bottom of this list. If an author’s name is italicized, it means I’m recommending at least most of their other works (though some authors may have an occasional dud sullying what I would consider an otherwise gorgeous oeuvre). If an author is not italicized, it means either that I only deeply admire one of their works, or that I simply haven’t read enough of the rest of their output to know one way or the other if they are a Great Worshipful Author of the Highest Rank.
I came into contact with these novels (mostly) through my education, through recommendations of various Brilliant and Interesting People I Know, through Booker Prize short-listers and winners (now known as the Man Booker Prize), and through the New York Times Best Sellers list. Only rarely have I had a Serendipitous Encounter with one of these because its title was interesting or because the description sounded cool at the bookstore/library.
In no particular order (because I’m lowbrow, remember?) and without correct italicization of titles because, why bother, we all know that they should be italicized:
Zorba the Greek- Nikos Kazantzakis
The Remains of the Day- Kazuo Ishiguro
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Satanic Verses- Salman Rushdie
Blindness- Jose Saramago
Pere Goriot (or Old Goriot or Father Goriot)- Honore de Balzac
Candide- Voltaire
L’Assommoir- Emile Zola
Cancer Ward- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Prince of Tides- Pat Conroy
The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
The Sea- John Banville
The Sense of an Ending- Julian Barnes
A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens
Lolita- Vladimir Nobokov
Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
Slaughterhouse Five- Kurt Vonnegut
The Waves- Virginia Woolf
Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison
Native Son- Richard Wright
The French Lieutenant’s Woman- John Fowles
The Blind Assassin- Margaret Atwood
Of Human Bondage- W. Somerset Maugham
Steppenwolf- Hermann Hesse
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest- Ken Kesey
Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe
The Distant Hours- Kate Morton
Sad Cypress- Agatha Christie
Portrait of a Lady- Henry James
Letters from the Earth- Mark Twain
The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Age of Innocence- Edith Wharton
Jude the Obscure- Thomas Hardy
Possession- A.S. Byatt
A Fine Balance- Rohinton Mistry
Disgrace- J.M. Coetzee
Les Miserables- Victor Hugo
The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas
East of Eden- John Steinbeck
Lonesome Dove- Larry McMurtry
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Robinson Crusoe- Daniel DeFoe
Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Ishmael- Daniel Quinn
The Joy Luck Club- Amy Tan
Fight Club- Chuck Palahniuk
The Alchemist- Paolo Coelho
The Jungle- Upton Sinclair
Madame Bovary- Gustave Flaubert
McTeague- Frank Norris
Non-fiction authors /Thinkers/Poets I like most (if I haven’t listed them already in fiction—many of them would certainly overlap lists):
Joseph Campbell (misogyny aside)
Niccolo Machiavelli
Hayden White (author of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth Century Europe)
Kenneth Burke (the best rhetorician ever)
Stephen Hayes [the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)]
Richard Dawkins
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Stephen Hawking
Christopher Hitchens
C.S. Lewis (though I’m not a Christian)
Michael Pollan (The Food King—all of his non-fiction is worth a read)
Maureen Dowd (New York Times contributor)
Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald contributor)
Peter Mosley (a good friend and fellow blogger who blows my socks off with his mind)
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
W.E.B. Du Bois
Albert Einstein
Charles Darwin
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sigmund Freud
Edgar Allan Poe
Frederick Douglass
Jane Goodall (the chimp woman)
Walt Whitman
W.B. Yeats
T.S. Eliot
Eavan Boland (modern Irish poet laureate)
William Shakespeare
Lewis Carroll
L. Frank Baum
William James
Siddartha Gautama (Buddha, though I’m not Buddhist)
Benjamin Franklin
Willie Nelson (laugh it up, but the Tao of Willie changed my life)
George Orwell
Karl Marx
Arthur Schopenhauer
Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (co-authors of Metaphors We Live By)
And a thousand more that I haven’t thought about, and a thousand thousand beyond that, in whose debt many of these thinkers must be for their brilliance.
I’m sorry for all the papers I’ve posted that nobody cares about from grad school and my undergrad days. I wanted to keep them on my blog for posterity (and for reasons of my own as well). From now on, I’ll be writing fresh posts that aren’t stale and outdated or academic in nature (at least not purely).
I wrote SO much more– so many random snippets, papers, poems, and rants (and even a full-length novel in thirty days… what a piece of shit)both for classes and in my own ratty old spirals– but I’d like to look ahead now– not the already created, but to what I will create.
I have so many things in mind for this blog– but one step at a time. Tomorrow is another day– and I have so many posts piled up like old logs it’s like I’ve been blogging for a year rather than for one measly day.
And I think I’ll end my blogs with what I’m currently reading.
Tonight:
Jose Saramago- The Cave and Maureen Corrigan– So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Most of you probably know this poem, so I thought I would give this poem a go. I have always liked it in its Modernistic irony.
The poem recalls dystopic elements of 1984 and Brave New World, where a man has no privacy at all, and is judged by how well he “serves the Greater Community”. The poem is really a critique of the modern world, where concrete statistics reign supreme as measurements of absolute truth (due to our overdependence on science and technology) without taking any account of abstract humanistic qualities, or “the human element”. Technology as an unchallenged necessity is an important assessment of how “normal” the citizen is. He worked for “Fudge Motors, Inc”, “left the hospital cured”, and “had everything necessary to the modern mane, a phonograph, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire”. Many of these agencies use computers to generate their statistics, and even Eugenists and health care agencies use technology in more ways than one.Without technology, there is no way that the government could invade this man’s privacy in such a complete way.
Another assessment for how normal the citizen was is how well he adhered to the statistics put out by the various governmental agencies. He “was popular with his mates”, which is important because of the stress laid out to “serve the Greater Community”. His “reactions to advertisements were normal in every way”, which means he probably bought the proper amount of items (technological in some way probably) to help stimulate the economy, which could also be seen as “serving the Greater Community”. He “held the proper opinions for the time of year”, which means that he probably fell victim to the numerous propaganda techniques put out by the Government, since they fully expect a “normal” person to hold a set opinion at a certain time. The collective “we” used by the speakers reinforces the importance of community to this social model for success. When they assert rather overconfidently (a common side-effect of Modern society’s reliance on science and technology) that they “certainly would have heard if there had been anything wrong”, “wrong” means “incorrect” here, which applies mainly to the realms of mathematics or science. “Wrong” in this context is the opposite of “right” as stated a few lines earlier: that the man had “the right number for a parent of his generation”. This definition doesn’t take into account that “wrong” in the humanities can also mean “not okay” or “out of sorts”; but that would suggest that there are gray areas in life, which there aren’t really, to a computer. The “human element” must be present to understand that aspect of “wrong” in this sense.
This assertion that the speakers “certainly should have heard” is also disturbing because it implies a lack of privacy in this society, which makes sense because of all the governmental permeation into the lives of its citizens. Even the agencies that are reporting have “reports”: “Our report on his Union shows it was sound”. The “Greater Community” is capitalized like the name of God, because of the reverence a “modern” citizen should feel for it. All of these agencies that “report”, “declare”, “show” and “say” to the government what they have found about the “unknown” (also ironic, because while the citizen’s “true” identity is not important, nor are his feelings, his personal values or beliefs, the government knows everything about him as a “citizen” in this society, which realizes him and makes his life worth “researching”) citizen’s life give the impression that it is the collective Government that is speaking. The Government remains far after its citizens have died, and I think that is relevant too. Perhaps this is a fatalistic view of what our society will inevitably become due to the advances in science and technology, and in the creation of all of these departments and agencies within our government. Perhaps also, Auden is challenging our idea of “normal”. If this is all that “normalcy” means, submitting to the Government’s propagandistic agenda, and this is all that remains of a life that was considered “normal”, do we really want to strive for that ourselves?
This poem dramatizes a conflict between the speaker’s and the poet’s intent, particularly as the conflict relates to an endorsement of Britain’s daily tabloid paper, The Sun. Benjamin Zephaniah, the poet, deliberately creates a persona that is unreliable, unlikeable, and ignorant ; therefore, when the speaker praises The Sun, we instead question its value as a reliable source of information. This use of irony is effective because while the speaker is earnestly disclosing the socio-political beliefs he holds, he is unconscious of the reader’s increasing disgust, and he indirectly condemns the very newspaper he is endorsing by asserting repeatedly that The Sun is responsible for his ideology. The attack by Zephaniah on The Sun is a response to a notation in the paper “that in his youth Zephaniah had been sent to an approved (‘reform’) school and done time in prison on burglary charges. The poet’s opinion of The Sun is clear in the poem of that title…” (Zephaniah 895).
The speaker begins the poem by stating, “I believe the Blacks are bad/The Left is loony/God is Mad”, which immediately impresses upon the reader that he is a white conservative, and his blanket statement that “women should cook” later in the poem suggests that he is male. He says, “This government is the best we’ve had… I am friendly with the state,” which suggests he also holds power. Perhaps he is given these characteristics because Zephaniah believes the majority of people who hold these worldviews in England, and those at whom this poem’s verbal irony is aimed, are similarly white conservative males who enjoy a comfortable position in the social hierarchy.
These comments, along with “black people rob” and “Jungle bunnies play tom-toms” also indicate that the speaker is a racist bigot with misogynistic tendencies. He mentions black people three times in the poem: they’re “bad”, “jungle bunnies”, and they “rob”. These are all vague negative stereotypes of black people as a threat, but which are irrational and based on ancient fears of cultural differences, or possibly fear of retaliation for centuries of oppression by those in power. Because he is reading The Sun every day, which is evidenced by the refrain of the poem, it is also safe to assume that the speaker is a British citizen. When the speaker, as an Englishman, says that “Every Englishman loves tits/I love Page Three and other bits”, he is revealing his misogyny by unapologetically viewing women as sexual objects, not to be respected but ogled. The use of the vulgar “tits” instead of “breasts” reaffirms this. Also revealed is the content of each edition of the paper; if there are pictures of women with cleavage showing daily on “Page Three and other bits”, then that leaves room for less news reporting. Perhaps this also indicates what motivates him to read the rest of the paper.
As a bigot, the speaker is intolerant of differing ideologies, so when he says, “I believe Britain is great/And other countries imitate”, he is professing seeming patriotism, which in itself is innocuous, but with his other statements about being “not too keen on foreign ones” and not liking “Russian spies”, his “patriotism” melts into nationalism. The use of “I”, “we”, or “me” twenty-three times in this short poem also indicates the level of narcissism and egocentric thinking to which the speaker has risen. Not all Russians are spies, as he seemingly suggests, and Zephaniah ironically inserts into the mouth of the speaker, “But we (England) don’t have none (spies)/I love lies.” The speaker couldn’t consciously say that he loves lies, because it is evident that he does not know his irrational categorizations of people are lies, nor could he agree to being “blinded by The SUN,” as he asserts at the end of the poem. If he was aware of the “damaging” effects of his beloved newspaper, he wouldn’t be asserting so boldly that he reads it every day. This is how the reader becomes aware of the conflict between the speaker’s intent, and the poet’s intent. Zephaniah uses irony to emphasize the social or political stances of which he does not approve. In a sense, the reader can infer what he supports by what the speaker says he himself doesn’t. “Zephaniah does not employ such reversals of perspective and expectation simply to amuse or disorient his readers, but from awareness that such shifts in perspective are needed to emphasize how British, particularly English, society regards itself” (Cross).
When the speaker says he “really do(es) love Princess Di” and speculates on whether or not she reads the same newspaper he does, Zephaniah is pointing out how people who read gossip are addicted to fabrications and stories (remember the speaker “love(s) lies”) ,and feel a false connection to the celebrities whose stories take up more space than newsworthy news itself. The speaker declares, “Don’t give me truth, just give me gossip/And skeletons from people’s closets”, showing that this speaker is meant to come across as a busybody who isn’t reading the newspaper for the news, but rather for the pleasure of coming across a scandal or celebrity story. Further evidence of his disinterest in current events is his nonchalant “But aren’t newspapers all the same?” This illustrates how small his influx of information is, as he limits himself to only reading The Sun.
As the poem progresses, the speaker becomes bolder in his assertions. At the beginning of the poem, he says, “I believe” before making a sweeping generalization. Towards the middle of the poem, he drops any pretense of believing his statements are merely opinion, and audaciously and hyperbolically pronounces, “Every poet is a crook… Every hippie carries nits…Every Englishman loves tits”. This might be an indirect warning to readers of The Sun, or of any one source; perhaps they, too, might make the progression from one who allows difference of opinion to one who cannot delineate their own opinion from inarguable fact, if they continue to absorb information from only one source.
There is no specific meter to the poem, although it has a rhythm similar to a nursery rhyme, which might suggest a judgment passed on the speaker; the simplicity of the structure echoes how unconcerned the speaker is with truth and how childlike he is in his formulations of opinion. The rhyme scheme is also simplistic; every line in each stanza rhymes with one another, with no diverting from the pattern. This could be representative of the speaker’s unoriginality and inability to think creatively, with each line merely repeating the pattern of the one before it, and also to recall how uneasy the speaker is with all things foreign to himself.
The poem ends with the speaker saying, “I wanna be normal/And millions buy it/I am blinded by The SUN.” Perhaps these are its most effective lines. With such an ignorant and unlikeable speaker, it is horrible to imagine this speaker being one of millions who hold the same intolerant worldview for the same major reason: reading a propagandistic news source, or reading only celebrity gossip that promotes ignorance of more pressing issues. It is in these lines that we see that the speaker is meant to be representative of a large portion of the population who do not think critically (“I am told—so I don’t need to look”) and look to the media to cue them for what ideologies to uphold. If the speaker is “normal”, and “millions buy it” (both the newspaper and the propaganda it purportedly contains), then the reader is prompted to consider action. That action can be merely searching for a more credible source of information than The Sun (if Zephaniah is deemed to be a credible source of information himself), feeling the responsibility to prompt others to research from where their information is coming, or to rely upon more than one news source for relevant and factual news reporting.
Works Cited
Cross, Jasper. “Benjamin Zephaniah.” Twenty-First-Century “Black” British Writers. Ed. R.
Victoria Arana. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 347. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 9 June 2010.
Zephaniah, Benjamin. “The SUN”. Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Ed.
Keith Tuma. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 898-99. Print.
Henry V adopts many disguises throughout Shakespeare’s Henriad, some of which are evidenced by the different names he goes by: Hal, Prince Harry, Harry Le Roi, and finally King Henry V. M.C. Bradbrook writes that “disguise…may need a cloak and false beard, or it may be better translated for the modern age by such terms as ‘alternating personality.’” Henry V uses the element of disguise as defined by M.C. Bradbrook to conceal his Machiavellian political aims throughout the Henriad.
In the Introduction to Henry V, Katharine Eisaman Maus compares Henry to Machiavelli: “Shakespeare’s Henry is certainly no monster of iniquity, but his career poses some of the same questions that Machiavelli had… about the relationship of political success to personal goodness…” (1446). Henry understands that sometimes the “right” decision for a king is not always morally palatable, so he rationalizes the necessity for deception in many forms: through disguise, alter egos, double language, and concealment of knowledge. Henry asserts his Machiavellian philosophy: “for in everything the purpose must weigh with the folly” (2 Henry IV 2.3.153-4), or the end justifies the means. However, since “the Hal, Harry, or Henry on display is the one those around him want or need to see,…the would-be observer… is obliged to create whatever kind of protagonist seems most appropriate to the circumstances. The result is a cacophony of critical voices that surrounds the figure of Henry in all his guises” (Ayers). Henry is not a particularly likeable character to me, but his political genius makes him worthy of the critical attention he receives. I agree most with James Bulman, who, in his review of McAlindon’s Study of ‘Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’, criticizes McAlindon’s “insistence on reading the play through (a specific) lens… which denies (the reader)… ideological complexity” (117). McAlindon’s ultimate purpose, according to Bulman, is to “rescue Hal from those who regard him as a politically self-interested, morally compromising figure; to exonerate him of any imputations of insincerity, dishonesty, double-dealing, or cruelty; to justify his lies as Tudor policy rightly understood; and to fashion him a figure of Truth, an agent of God’s grace, the penitent son…” (116). Though some creditable critics do view Henry in this light, it is critical to allow the alternate viewpoint to be validated as well, especially because there are so many instances of other characters questioning whether Henry’s causes are justifiable or his motives pure. Yet even those critics who do not like him must concede that Henry is a brilliant political mind who should be regarded as a mighty force, a charismatic King who rules his England with absolute power, and whose warranted comparison to Machiavelli is, especially in modern scholarship, not necessarily a thorough condemnation. LaBranche suggests that Shakespeare’s theme in I Henry IV is that “the public man’s public worth is what matters, and that private virtues must have public worth to justify their maintenance.” This theme could stretch through all three plays, if Henry V’s actions and intentions are scrutinized.
Henry has, in part, instinctually learned his Machiavellian policy from “the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father” (Henry IV Part 2 4.2.105-6). In fact, he comes from a nation who has “the name of hardiness and policy” (Henry V 1.2.220). England has a reputation for political discernment, and as king, Henry is the head of this body politic. Falstaff erroneously believes Henry is different from his brother Prince John, who tricks the rebels into dispersing in 2 Henry IV through the use of double language. Henry’s “princely word” (4.1.292) is never more reassuring than Prince John’s, who says he will “maintain (his) word” (293) but relying on the rebels’ semantic misinterpretation of his promises, has them executed as traitors to England once they lay down their arms. Both brothers have inherited the “bypaths and indirect crook’d ways” (4.3.313) of their father, King Henry IV. “Many readers have found little to praise in the policy which Henry discovers to Hal in 3.2 (a counsel of duplicity which extends even to his ‘pilgrimage to Jerusalem’…)” (La Branche). When Henry puts on his father’s crown at his deathbed, he says,”And put the whole world’s strength into one giant arm, it shall not force this lineal honour from me” (4.3.174-5). If he has inherited the crown, he has also inherited his father’s usurpation of the throne, for the rightful King of England is still not coronated. King Henry IV reinforces this impression when, after likening his son to a bee (4.3.79-80), he likens himself to one as well (4.3.202). He expresses his remorse for how he assumed power, but in true Machiavellian fashion, he tells his son that the Kingdom will be much easier for Henry V to rule since he is not the original usurper. He is considering only the political aspect of Henry’s ascension, rather than the morality of it. Henry has not only inherited his father’s blood, he follows the Machiavellian example his father lays before him.
Henry V is loved and remembered as the common man’s king. Yet “his insistence upon ordinariness becomes a strategy of rule” (Maus 1450). Every instance of Henry-among-his-people is motivated by Machiavellian principles, from befriending all of Eastcheap, to providing a “copy now to men of grosser blood” (Henry V 3.2.24 )by cheerfully boosting morale among his tired troops in France, to insisting to Williams that “the King is but a man” (4.1.99). Ayers believes that Henry teaches his subjects a lesson by example: “…that the city can offer freedom from the inherited responsibilities and obligations of the old worlds of court and countryside, together with fixed identities and social roles that go with them. For them as for him, the anonymity and freedom from the traditional patterns of life it makes possible give to its inhabitants the power to recreate themselves as they wish and to make of themselves what they can, however they can.” His disguises might conceal specific political aims, but the fact that he is so successful in adopting them ironically reveals this truth to anyone who can recognize his cunning.
In 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry disguises himself as a prodigal. He plays his part so convincingly that both his “friends” at the Eastcheap tavern and the men at Court (including his father) believe he is truly happier drinking with Falstaff than assuming his princely responsibilities. When his father upbraids him for keeping company that does not befit a prince, Henry says to him, “I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, be more myself” (3.2.92-3), revealing that he has been adopting a disguise. Henry exposes one of his reasons for having done so when he says:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him (I Henry IV 1.3.175-181).
He reveals here that his intentions are to “mock the expectations of the world… and to raze out rotten opinion” (2 Henry IV 5.2.125-7) by becoming a great king. Since the kingdom will not expect greatness, his subjects will love him all the more for exceeding their expectations. He also makes use of his time with the commoners in order to learn about their lives: “When I am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap…I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (I Henry IV 2.5.12-17). These are excellent political rationales for Henry’s behavior. Yet Henry does not consider how dramatically he will emotionally affect the “base contagious clouds” and “foul and ugly mists” he uses for his political aims.
Henry’s disregard for the behavior of the Eastcheap commoners is apparent; what is not apparent to most is his complete disregard for their well-being. He adopts a disguise two times, once as a thief and once as a drawer, to expose Falstaff “in his true colours” (2 Henry IV 2.2.148), whom Henry says is a “globe of sinful continents” (2.4.258). He mocks Falstaff continuously, but in seeming good-nature. Like Prince John, Henry relies on a semantic misinterpretation of his words to convince Falstaff that they are friends. It is apparent that Henry has succeeded by Falstaff’s continual assertion that he is Henry’s best friend. When Falstaff calls out to the newly-crowned Henry V, “My king, my Jove… my heart!” (5.5.44), Henry’s callousness is evident by his response: “I know thee not, old man… How ill white hairs becomes a fool and a jester!” (45-6). In fact, in Henry V, Falstaff is said to have died because “the King has killed his heart” (2.1.79). Henry also betrays his friend Bardolph when he commands his guards to execute him when he is caught stealing in France, though he has always known Bardolph to be a thief and still called him “most noble” (2 Henry IV 2.2.60) and “honest” (2.4.300). He says of his decision, “For when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner” (Henry V 3.6.102-3). Like Machiavelli, he values the better political choice rather than his loyalty to his friend.
Almost as if to prove that public virtue is better than private virtue, Henry decides to kill Hotspur himself. Henry says, “I will redeem all this on Percy’s head…Percy is but my factor, good my lord, to engross up glorious deeds on my behalf” (I Henry IV 3.2.132-148). Just before he kills Hotspur, he says to him, “And all the budding honours on thy crest I’ll crop to make a garland for my head” (5.4.71-2). La Branche reveals Henry’s desire for public recognition:
If (Henry) were to assume to garland of Hotspur’s budding honors, he would, in effect, be continuing Hotspur’s articles of knighthood, and it is certain this was not his true purpose. His true purpose was to redeem his lost stature in the eyes of the king, and to rid the realm of its foremost public enemy. As his sword touches Hotspur, the ideal of private honor, of self-nourishing chivalry, has already receded into the past where it is fit company for worms.
It is also interesting to note that to King Henry IV, Henry calls him “the noble Percy” (5.5.19) but when no one is around, he tells Hotspur his “ignominy sleep with (him) in (his) grave” (5.4.99). He privately considers Hotspur a pawn for his own political advancement, but he tells everyone, even Percy’s dead corpse, that he was a “great heart” (86). Private virtue has no worth unless it is publicly declared, a Machiavellian principle.
Though Henry manages to conceal his true political aims from most through the use of disguise, not everyone is fooled. Though Falstaff wrongly judges Henry, he reveals that he knows Henry practices deception when it befits him. He says, “Look you, he must seem thus to the world…this that you heard was but a colour” (2 Henry IV 5.5.74-81) when the newly-crowned King Henry rebukes him. Also, though none are entirely convinced they are right, Warwick, Ely, and the Lord High Constable of France guess that Henry is far more shrewd and politically-minded than he seems. Warwick predicts to King Henry IV:
The Prince but studies his companions,
Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,
‘Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learnt, which once attained,
Your highness knows, comes to no further use
But to be known and hated… (2 Henry IV 4.3.68-73).
Likewise, when King Henry V “casts off his followers” so quickly, Ely observes to the Archbishop of Canterbury, “And so the Prince obscured his contemplation under the veil of wildness—which, no doubt, grew like the summer grass, fastest by night, unseen, yet crescive in his faculty” (Henry V 1.2.64-7). The Constable of France echoes this observation as a warning to the Dauphin, who gravely underestimates his opponent:
And you shall find his vanities forespent
Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus
Covering discretion with a coat of folly
As gardeners do with ordure hide those roots
That shall first spring and be most delicate (2.4.36-9).
These few men recognize what a truly brilliant and cunning mind Henry possesses. They can see through his disguise if only for a brief unsure moment. Their ability to do this validates Ayer’s assertion that Henry is inadvertently teaching his subjects that it is not only possible but admirable to recreate oneself as something else if it is possible and beneficial to do so.
If Henry adopts Machiavellian methods to become the best king he can be, then it easily follows that he uses these same methods to rule as shrewdly as he can. Henry disguises his political motivations for all of the decisions he makes as king: why he goes to war with France, why he goes out amongst his tired troops both as himself and disguised as Harry Le Roi, and why he decides to take Catherine of France as his queen.
Henry IV usurped Richard II’s throne, and it is by no means clear that Henry V is justified in assuming the title upon his father’s death. Even in the throes of battle with France, Henry V prays that God forget “the fault (his) father made in compassing the crown” (Henry V 4.2. 275-6) so he can be free to assume that victory against the French means God condones both his own usurpation of the English throne and his political motivations for waging war with France to begin with. When Henry comes disguised as a commoner to Williams and tries to justify his position, “his cause being just and his quarrel honourable” (4.1.120-1), Williams responds “That’s more than we know” (122), revealing that though his people are loyal to their king, they are not certain whether this war with France is justifiable or not.
Because Henry IV seized the throne from its rightful owner, all of England was torn between its loyalties. All of the “traitors” hanged in both 1 and 2 Henry IV had valid complaints against the new King. Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son is that he should go to war with another country to unite England against a common enemy, thereby ending the civil strife inside its own borders. “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out may waste the memory of the former days” (2 Henry IV 4.3.341-3). If citizens are distracted from their grievances against the king, they may have no choice but to accept him as the legitimate ruler in times of war. This is one true reason Henry decides to go to war with France. Henry also wants glory. He says, “France being ours, we’ll bend it to our awe, or break it all to pieces…Either our history shall with full mouth speak freely of our acts, or else our grave… shall have a tongueless mouth…No King of England if not King of France” (Henry V 1.2.225-232). Like his true reason for killing Hotspur, his desire for public recognition is behind his decision to invade France. Yet both of these political reasons are disguised behind the reason he gives: that he is the rightful ruler of France through his great-grandfather’s lineage by an outdated loophole in France’s laws.
Once at war with France, though, Henry is merciless. When he uncovers the plot by Scrope, Grey, and Cambridge to hand him over to their enemies, he cruelly tricks them the same way Prince John does in 2 Henry IV. Neither brother had any intention of granting a pardon. Maus describes Henry’s mercilessness with the traitors:
In 2.2, with a typical flourish, he pretends to hand (them) their military commissions, after feigning to inquire about mercy for traitors. Actually, he gives them letters showing that he knows of their plot. This is splendid theater, but it is also quite chilling: Henry plays with his guilty victims as a cat plays with a mouse. His joke signifies not true contest, but absolute control (1451).
Ironically, Henry says to Scrope before sending him to his execution, “And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot to mark the full-fraught man, and best endowed, with some suspicion” (2.2.135-7). The reader might apply these lines to Henry himself, a man seeming to be virtuous, honorable, and kind, but whose true intentions are at best Machiavellian and at worst self-serving and cruel. The speech Henry gives to the Governor of Harfleur indicates that he is a cruel king, though I believe his intention here is to intimidate the French town into surrender, which they do. He essentially threatens that he will completely destroy everything in the town and allow his soldiers to rape and pillage and kill at their own will (3.3.78-120). Whether he truly means what he says or not, a king who shows no mercy to his enemies and inspires fear is more Machiavellian than moral.
Machiavellian principles should be adopted by great kings because it helps them rule their kingdoms wisely, if not always morally. Not all of Henry’s actions are morally questionable, though they can be traced back to some selfish gain. The chorus in 4.0 praises Henry for the “cheerful semblance and sweet majesty” (4.0.40) with which he appears among his troops. “Every wretch, pining and pale before, beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all behold… a little touch of Harry in the night” (41-7). Though he comes to them as himself, he disguises the tiredness and fear he feels in order to boost the low morale of his troops. His charisma and motivational abilities are uncontested: without these characteristics, weary England may have lost the war. We only see the heavy thoughts of the true Henry when he is disguised as Harry Le Roi. Henry comes to Williams to find out what a common man thinks about the war. This is characteristic of him, as it recalls his questioning Poins about what commoners think of him, to whom he says, “Never a man’s thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine” (2 Henry IV 2.2.44-5). Since Williams is unaware that Harry Le Roi is the King of England, both can be candid with each other because the imbalance of power is not present. Rochelle Smith says:
Williams scoffs at the idea that a common soldier’s personal disappointment
in his king carries weight, thereby dismissing the notion that the king-commoner relation is based on mutual trust and respect. Williams’ response rejects the ideal of an intimate, personal king-commoner relationship. His sarcasm reveals the hollowness of Henry’s romantic vision of kingship while his anger exposes Henry’s disguise as an aristocratic pastoral fantasy. Kings can disguise as commoners to experience the simple life, but, as Williams points out, once the battle takes a turn for the worse, the game ends, the king is ransomed, and his word of honor is worthless to the men who lie dead on the field. (323)
His response angers Henry, who vents his frustration by way of a cruel joke on Williams later, but eventually, Williams is given a glove full of money for his pains. In a sense, Williams has outlined for Henry exactly why commoners do not see Henry’s Machiavellian style of rule as justifiable. He did “disguise as (a) commoner to experience the simple life” once before, and his “word of honor” has truly become worthless to the men who lie dead, namely Falstaff and Bardolph, and all the traitors for whom Henry’s word has not been honorable. Williams places the blame on Henry, saying “… take it for your own fault, and not mine, for had you been as I took you for, I made no offence. Therefore, I beseech your highness pardon me” (Henry V 4.8.49-51). If Falstaff were alive, he could not have said it better.
Finally, Henry disguises his political intention to unite England and France through marriage by pretending to woo Princess Catherine because he is in love with her. Maus points out, “He pretends that Catherine is free to reject him, even though the marriage is already arranged as part of the peace treaty” (1452). Though he disguises his reasons for the marriage to Catherine, his language gives him away to the reader. “…it is the self-consciously and transparently disingenuous nature of Henry’s words that receives the greatest emphasis. He is clearly not that which he claims to be, a man of ‘plain and uncoined constancy,’ but rather that which he denies being, a fellow ‘of infinite tongue’: this is how he has both defined himself and been defined by others from the very beginning of the Henriad” (Ayers). Furthermore, Henry has never seemed to be bashful or bumbling around women; In 1 Henry IV, he offhandedly remarks to Falstaff, “Why then, it is like, if there come a hot June and this civil buffeting hold, we shall buy maidenheads as they buy hobnails: by the hundreds” (2.5.330-2). Can this be the same person who asks Catherine, “Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms such as will enter at a lady’s ear and plead his love-suit to her gentle heart?” (Henry V 5.2.99-101). It is hard to tell which Henry is most like his true self, or even if either truly are.
Queen Isabel and King Charles are as aware that this marriage is political as Henry himself is. The language of all three in 5.2 is deceivingly romantic with undertones of political understanding. Isabel gushes about “this good day” and “this gracious meeting,” (13) but she immediately undermines the truthfulness of those words by passive-aggressively commenting upon Henry’s “eyes which hitherto have borne in them ,against the French that met them in their bent, the fatal balls of murdering basilisks” (15-17). She recognizes Henry is dangerous because of his great cunning and powerful position, and France must meet his demands or experience the mercilessness with which his other enemies have been vanquished. Foremost on his list is Catherine, his “capital demand “(96). King Charles uses phrases like, “Take her, fair son,” “this dear conjunction,” and “Christian-like accord in their sweet bosoms,” but in between are the political phrases that Henry understands: “the contending kingdoms of France and England,” “may cease their hatred,” and “never war advance his bleeding sword” (320-6). Henry’s wooing is beautiful, but his true political intent is evident in some of his language, like “take a soldier, take a king” (160), “I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it, I will have it all mine” (166-7), and “and you may thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way” (292-4). Though he may or may not be in love with Catherine, it is evident that his political aims are still very present, and he would have married her with accompanying tender emotion or without it. Perhaps Catherine is wiser than she knows when she says to Henry, “the tongues of men are full of deceits” (117-18).
Henry V may be a man whose tongue is full of “deceits”; he may be a man who is morally at fault for adopting so many varied disguises and carelessly hurting some of his loyal followers who love him; he may even be a self-preserving merciless killer. Whether he is all of these or not, one thing is certain: he is a great and mighty king whose Machiavellian style of ruling England brings much-needed harmony and peace to an ailing nation.
Works Cited for Shakespeare Paper
Ayers, P.K. “‘Fellows of infinite tongue’: Henry V and the king’s English.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 34.2 (1994): 253+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Nov. 2010.
Branche, Anthony La. “’If Thou Wert Sensible of Courtesy’: Private and Public Virtue in Henry IV, Part One.” Shakespeare Quarterly 17.4 (Autumn 1966):371-382. Rpt in ShakespeareanCriticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 119. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Sept. 2010.
Bradbrook, M. C. “Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama.” Aspects of Dramatic Form in the English and the Irish Renaissance: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook. Vol. 3. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983. 32-39. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 92. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Nov. 2010.
Bulman, James. C. “Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of ‘Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.’” Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol.58 (2007): 114-117 (Review). Web. 15 November 2010.
Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Introduction to Henry V. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York:W.W. Norton &Company, 1997. 1451. Print.
Shakespeare, William. I Henry IV. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1997.1157-1222. Print.
Shakespeare, William. 2 Henry IV. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1997.1304-76. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Henry V. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1997.1452-1521. Print.
Smith, Rochelle. “King-Commoner Encounters in the Popular Ballad, Elizabethan Drama, and Shakespeare.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Vol. 50 (2010): 301-36. Web. 15 Nov. 2010.
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois implements various paradoxes, dichotomies, and dualities to draw attention to the religious hypocrisy of white people, to convey what it is like to be black in a racially hostile environment, and to express a desire to see black and white cohabitating peacefully. He employs these “twoness”-es (Du Bois 1705) as an effective rhetorical device that communicates his deeper meanings. Using this device, he discusses the separateness between races, the strain that black people must bear because of their inability to rise to full self-consciousness due to “contradictory aims” and “unreconciled ideals,”(1706) and the need to find the correct balance between ridding the nation of hurtful paradoxes that inhibit progress, accepting necessary dichotomies that promote healthy understanding between certain individuals and groups, and trading certain dualities for one self-concept, one political aim, or one great nation.
Du Bois’s fundamental argument is concerned with “twoness”: a nation divided by race and sociopolitical and economic aims after the Civil War needs to acknowledge that 9 million of its citizens are divided internally between “unreconciled ideals”—what is expected of them by whites, and what they in turn want for themselves, and also divided amongst themselves about how to go about fixing the “problem of the Twentieth Century… the problem of the color line” (1703). His rhetoric is scattered with “twos”: “two centuries… twice-told tale… second sight… second slavery” (1705-1713) so that the reader might be able to grasp how divided the black man is in his quest for personal identity, and how broken the nation is when so many Americans are experiencing this plight.
He began recognizing “twoness” as a boy. He says that being black is like being “shut out from (the white) world by a vast veil,” (1705) one that he asserts that he can at will “step within…” implying that he is both within and without the veil at different times. For him, living as a white person is being in the “other world,” and compares it to “the streak of blue above,” or heaven. Meanwhile, “the shades of the prison house closed round about us all,” “us” meaning black people. “We” are black; “they” are white. He describes feeling ambivalently in his youth towards whites; at times, he has a happy separation from them, saying that he “had no desire to tear down that veil” but with time, the “fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds (he) longed for were theirs, not (his)” (1705). Both his separateness and his feelings about it represent a “twoness,” one that he ascribes to all black men in the nation and one that needs to be addressed. Harris says:
“A theme of duality emerges throughout the book that begins with a reinterpretation and application of the biblical usage of veil. Within the Bible this word takes on two meanings. In one instance it refers to ignorance, blindness, and hard-heartedness that prevented the Jews from understanding the scriptures, the spiritual meaning of the law, and from seeing that Christ was the law for righteousness. In the second context, the veil of the temple was that which separated the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest could cross the separation on the Day of Atonement. The veil was stripped away only at crucifixion to indicate that all individuals could freely go to God. Du Bois applies both meanings to the racial differences in inequality and oppression suffered by African Americans at the hands of European Americans.”
Even his metaphors are conducive to his “twoness” motif. Another religious element he uses to garner support from white elites is that of the African-American jeremiad. In order to expose the religious hypocrisy (another “twoness”) of whites continuing to oppress their black brothers and sisters, Du Bois, like many of his contemporaries, relies heavily on religious dogma to support his stance. “To the architects of this rhetoric, the jeremiad served a threefold purpose: (1) to expose paradoxical white Christian ideologies, (2) to emphasize the inhumanity of whites’ treatment of Blacks, and (3) to develop a sociopolitical awareness among Blacks. A more in depth investigation of African-American social protest of the early republic suggests that the prototypical form of their rhetoric is not so much religious as it is political” (Harrell). Du Bois says that “this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals” in the heart of every black man has “sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation” (1706). His purpose here is exactly as Harrell suggests: he wants to show how white people are at fault for the under-development of the black race, to make them feel repentance for it, and to give black people the hope that there will be a brighter future for them than their present situation might allow them to feel.
Yes, because of his oppression, a black man “ever feels his two-ness– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”(1705). He assigns this “double -consciousness” as the reason for black people being thought of as inferior, because the black man has only “half a heart for either cause” (1706) in his struggle to interact with the white world and still maintain his own sense of self-worth. He gives several examples of these “double aims” (1706). A black artisan might try to please white people by going into a profession that is considered more respectable, but he would be torn because of the definite need by his “poverty-stricken horde” (1706) to “plough and nail and dig” (1706). A black doctor might “be tempted toward quackery” (1706) or made to “feel ashamed of his lowly tasks” (1706) by white people. A scholar might be discouraged because he realizes how much his people need to learn, but be afraid to learn from white people, because “the knowledge that would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood” (1706). The black artist may feel uncertain about how beautiful or harmonious his work is because “the beauty revealed to him (is) the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despise” (1706). This is the reason, he insinuates, that black men are considered to be “half-men” (1709); they are only “half-free”(1707). When there are “twoness”-es like these, there is the “sound of conflict” (1709) and they need to be eliminated if there is ever going to be a resolution to the “half-named Negro problem” (1708).
Du Bois also calls attention to many paradoxes that black men must encounter. “Paradoxes are more than abstractions of thought which convey a seeming incongruity between two ideas or phenomena. Paradoxes provide new areas where one can collect new data or else emphasize the need for new ways to explain a novel phenomenon. Also, to label something as a paradox has an interrogatory effect: it can call into question views and relationships taken for granted. Du Bois employed the term both as a justification for further social analysis and as a rhetorical device to persuade the (white) readers” (Williams). The first paradox is prejudice, and here he catalogs a list of “twoness”-es: “the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the ‘higher’ against the ‘lower’ races”(1708). Yet were black men “not…asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all (their) time and thought to (their) own social problems,”(1708) they might be able to prove that they have been oppressed for centuries, and this is the cause of their seeming inferiority.
He criticizes Booker T. Washington freely, who suggests that “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top” (1623). He then outlines “the triple paradox of (Mr. Washington’s) career” (1715) discussing how Washington insists on the right ideals, but paradoxically inhibits their fruition through the methods he endorses. Part of fully accepting Du Bois’s ideas in their entirety is rejecting Washington’s “attitude of conciliation.” In fact, he says, there are two classes of colored Americans (yet another “twoness”) for whom this triple paradox of Washington’s is the object of criticism. One “represents the attitude of revolt and revenge,” (1716) which he dismisses as too primitive too be effective, and the other is the class of black men with whom Du Bois affiliates himself. All of these paradoxes or “twoness”-es, even “inspiration striving with doubt, and faith with vain questionings” must be grappled with by every black man, and should no longer exist if true equality is to be attained.
Yet not all “twoness”-es are hurtful. Some dichotomies are necessary in order for black men to rise to “full self-consciousness” (1708), and in order for the two races to stay “separate as the fingers of a hand,” a metaphor first used by Washington to describe his social aim for the black race. “Although DuBois opposed Booker T. Washington’s call for “separation” in “all things purely social,”… he doesn’t eliminate the color line so much as displace it, transporting it from a social context to a literary one, making sounds—and, by extension, the people whose sounds they are—seem “as separate as the fingers” of a hand” (Kerkering). Although Du Bois criticizes Washington freely, he also admits that he has “sincerity of purpose” (Du Bois 1712) and “tact and power” (1712). He says that Washington has performed “an invaluable service in counseling patience and courtesy” (1716) and is generally to be praised in many ways. However, he cannot overlook that “there is among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained” (1712). Any “educated, thoughtful colored man” should therefore reject some of Washington’s theories, but also honor his sincerity and honesty, along with his triumphs for his race. This reception of Washington’s proposals as “the social student’s inspiration and despair” (1712) reveals an acceptable dichotomy because it takes into account the complexity of the issue, and qualifies how ambivalence is necessary sometimes.
Black men should be able to be “both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows” (1706). Black men should not have to choose between “bleaching his Negro soul” and “Africanizing America” (1706). This “twoness” should be advocated as necessary for every black man’s identity. A black man must also “be himself and not another,” (1708) so whites should allow black people to co-exist peacefully. In order to illustrate this “twoness” Du Bois uses words like “co-worker” and “husband” to describe the “end of (the black man’s) striving” (1706). And the North should accept that it is the South’s “co-partner in guilt” (1719) for having created the atmosphere of oppression and bondage. All of these “twoness”-es are necessary and healthy both to the psyche of black men and the psyche of the nation.
There are some “oneness”-es that Du Bois says are just as hurtful as some “twoness”-es. In his criticism of Washington, he says that Washington has “”singleness of vision,” a “thorough oneness with his age,” and is “unnecessarily narrow” (1711). In one short paragraph, he emphasizes Washington’s oneness by using “single” or “one” seven times. He condemns this oneness because it is lacking; it is a “dangerous half truth” (1709). Washington is seen as a “compromiser” (1715) and this “oneness” is unacceptable to Du Bois. Another oneness that Du Bois condemns is the worship of freedom by the slaves in the days of bondage. They awaited “one divine event” with “one refrain- Liberty,” and thought that with their emancipation all of their prayers would be answered “in one wild carnival of blood and passion.” He dismisses these “oneness”-es as a result of the simple ignorance of a lowly people” (1707) and a gross oversimplification of what it would take to truly be free. After all, he says, “the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (1707).
Yet, along with the necessary dichotomies that Du Bois mentions, perhaps the most important aspect of his argument is that “each (bright ideal of the past) alone (is) over-simple and incomplete” (1709). He says that “to be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one” (1709). We must trade some of these dualities for a unity of vision and a single purpose. The veil must be lifted, the “us” must be conjoined with the “them,” and the worlds of the “streak of blue above” and the “prison house” must blend together. In the same way, each black man must rise to a full self-consciousness of himself as one man who belongs to numerous groups. Harris points out in the title:
“Du Bois uses the definite article before the word souls and thus makes “The Souls” convey a black essence, the intrinsic or indispensable properties that characterize or identify something, meaning the most important ingredient, the crucial element, or the oneness, that is characteristic of psychological study. However, he uses the plural, souls, to alert the reader to the “group” or collective of members. Moreover, his use of the word soul directs the reader to the inner, internal, and subjective as contrasted with the outer, external, and objective, regardless of whether he is referring to the individual or group. The intricacy of the reciprocal and bidirectional relationship between the inner world of the African American individual and the culture of the historically subjugated and oppressed group is brought to awareness through multiple and interwoven meanings.”
There is a coming together in Du Bois’s rhetoric of individual and group, of inner and outer, of history and culture, and of “oneness”-es and “Two-ness”-es.
This is a unity and a “oneness” that is not lacking, that is not oversimplified or a “dangerous half-truth.” Similarly, all men must strive for a social unity and a coming-together “in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil, two world-races may give each to each other those characteristics both so sadly lack”(1709). The “burden belongs to the nation” (1719) as a whole. Like Douglass, whom Du Bois praises as “the greatest of American Negro leaders,” (1714) his main aim for his race is “ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms” (1714). In other words, to be really “two,” all these ideas must be melted and welded into a “oneness”: one nation, the “common Fatherland” (1709), with one aim when it comes to “the Negro problem,” which is to live peacefully and equably together.
Works Cited
Dubois, W.E.B. “From The Souls of Black Folk.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature
Shorter Sixth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.,
2003. 1702-1719. Print.
Harrell, Willie J. “A Call to Consciousness and Action: Mapping the African-American
Jeremiad”. Canadian Review of American Studies 36.2 (2006): 149-180. Project
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Harris, Shanette M. “Constructing a Psychological Perspective: The Observer and the Observed
in The Souls of Black Folk.” The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later. Ed.
Dolan Hubbard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 218-250. Rpt. In
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J.
Trudeau. Vol. 169. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 July 2010.
Kerkering, Jack. “’Of Me and Mine’: The Music of Racial Identity in Whitman and Lanier,
Dvorak and DuBois.” American Literature 73.1 (2001): 147-184. Project Muse. Web. 10
July 2010.
Washington, Booker T. “From Up From Slavery”. The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Shorter Sixth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, Inc., 2003. 1621-1630. Print.
Williams, Robert W. “Paradoxes of the South in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” The
Mississippi Quarterly 62.1-2 (2009): 71+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 July
2010.
thelowbrowintellectual 