Looking At "Light of Thy Countenance"

Literature goes by one name, but is of forms as numerous as the stars. One will sometimes make out patterns here and there of nebulas and clusters, and when one looks back one is taken aback by the breathtaking beauty of the Milky Ways of literature. Allow me to draw your attention to one speck of light, dim or bright and red or blue depending on your own relativity. That speck of light is known as Alan Moore's “Light of Thy Countenance”.

Some would argue that works like it, often termed comic books or graphic novels, are not literature. I ask those critics to consider the origin of the term literature, deriving from the latin for ‘letter’ literature would seem to mean those works that make use of symbols. While critics still insist that merit is a factor, to shun the bad grammar of a child from their lofty categories, not only does this not apply to the genre of graphic novels, but is false reasoning, and would make all those who use it look like the petulant children they would avoid.

One can deny the merit or value of a thing, but not its being.

            Washing myself of the Greek-based fire of this tired and pointless war, I would like to look at this text. It mostly deals with a few (contemporarily) tired ideas dealing with television: the mediation or replacement of worldly experience, the sterile falsifications and perversions of beauty, the sheer waste of time, the advertisement, and arguably the idea that tv is a god. The last is more personally unoriginal because of intimate familiarity with the parlor idea years in advance. That said, I’m not sure how original this piece was in 1995. Maybe more, maybe less. But definitely old news for 2009.             Still, parts of it made me smile. The injuntion to “think not that gods find no enjoyment in apocalypse: it is our [the gods] greatest sport” reminds me so much of Gloucester’s lines about the gods' treatment of humanity, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” (Shakepeare’s King Lear, Act IV, Scene I). Moreover, I found the conceit of the narrator hilarious after reflecting that it, by its own logic, asserted humanity to be an enslaved god (Lucifer’s war was successful). But its conceit, along with the whole ‘in the image of god’ ideas of man, reflects on the conceit of man himself.

            That said, from where I float in space, this work is quite red and dim.

A Brief Exploration of Gender Roles in Hwang's "M. Butterfly"

To start off with, Song, Gallimard’s Butterfly, is a man. There is no way to avoid this spoiler and accomplish an analysis of the very interesting, and contradictory views of gender roles discussed within the play "M. Butterfly".

The play seems to love to play with reversing and re-reversing gender roles. To explain this, I will posit two terms: dominant and submissive, each a role within a relationship. These roles reflect relative power of one party over another.

Song brings up (definitively) his view on the assignments of power between the sexes and nations; strong, weak; West, East; and male, female (III, I, 83). These are conventional assignments, usually adding dominant and submissive to the list Ironically, Song defies these assignments.

Take the case of Gallimard’s first sexual encounter. Essentially, the woman he was with did all the work, and he just lied there (I, XI, 33-34). First off, we have a gender role flipped right there in this sexual act. So, in this encounter, the female was dominant, the male submissive.

But let’s also examine Gallimard’s role with Song. Song, a man, plays what is usually thought of as a submissive role (read woman), by sleeping with/being penetrated by Gallimard. In this way, it is revealed, as Song reveals to Gallimard that he used his sex appeal to will “the destiny of another” (III, II, 85), another being Gallimard. As an aside, seduction among adults is socially considered a feminine thing. But the question is “who was in control of whom?” Clearly, Song was in control of Gallimard. Thus Song, originally thought to be submissive, is clearly dominant. To use the vulgate, he topped from the bottom, unlike Gillard earlier.

Applying this to Song’s earlier logic, we now have either a. a breakdown of logic or b. a view expressing the feminine dominant to the masculine, the East dominant to the west (Song/ the storyline representing an infatuation of the East by the West, represented by Gallimard), and similar contradictions to prior assertions. This actually occurs a few times.

Agree with the conclusions that can be drawn from the play concerning gender roles or not, my previous claim seems to hold: the play likes to play with gender roles.

 

Elucidating Meaning

William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition has been held to be full of meaning. And in this case, the proof will be to attempt to show that for the novel, the devil is also in the details (as compared to the other glaring parts).

When Cayce, the protagonist, comes to be in Moscow in search of the mystery character, she stays in a very expensive hotel. The following is an innocuous scene noticing the details while waiting for an elevator.

“There is a large window between the two elevators draped ceiling to floor in nubby ocher fabric. Beside this is an upright glass cooler stocked with champagne, mineral water, what must be several exceptionally well-chilled bottles of burgundy, and much Pepsi” (p.276).

Here is the potential for comments on post-Soviet Russia in terms of globalization and the disparities of the wealthy and poor of that society. By making the curtains of ochre, combined with the burgundy, gives the place a somber, luxurious feel. Moreover, the juxtaposition of champagne, mineral water, and burgundy wine with Pepsi highlights the rise of globalization that Russia would have Pepsi next to fine wines. It could also highlight the nouveau riche of Russia, who, becoming rich within Russia, had acquired a taste for Pepsi and thus had brought it into competition for human consumption with fine wines (we’ll assume that price has diminished importance in a fancy Russian hotel).

However, there is a problem with that last argument. High-society Rusians, known for valuing the appearance of being cultured, would likely avoid Pepsi if it were to come into association with a nouveau riche class. Hence its presence could either point to strong foreign influence, given that the location is a hotel, where the clientele could be significantly foreign (and thus Pepsi-drinking), or an adoption of Pepsi by the Russians, both cases pointing still to further globalization.

Even the wine and water can be viewed as signs of globalization, although more tied to class divides than Pepsi. The reason the wine and water can be viewed as such is that, although they are historically more significant and less likely to raise eyebrows than Pepsi, they are both likely foreign to Russia. While the champagne may or may not be Russian (the Russians sometimes go against EU naming conventions), the burgundy is almost certainly just that: Burgundy from the Bourgogne region of France.  And the mineral water calls to mind regularly bottled water,  although it is probably in expensive glass bottles.

Another scene occurs when Cayce is in Japan, viewing advertisements, as is her wont. “Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs she sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan ‘No Reason’” (p. 125).

 In this scene, the author is displaying globalization, again, with soda. Again. This time, the soda is Coca-Cola rather than Pepsi, but both are American, and often viewed interchangeably as just American sodas.

Perhaps more interesting is the purposefully jarring syntax of “No Reason.” The phrase, although English, is decidedly not English, because it was meant to illustrate the very frequent butcheries or lost-in-mulitple-translations very common to Japan (although the grain cuts both ways). Another view is that the marketing was sound and intelligible to the Japanese (coke is actually well known for its marketing), but was more or less gratuitous English to go along with the Japanese advertisement. Though, in both cases, it is interesting to note that not only has a product been exported and globalized, Coca-Cola, but so has a fraction of a language.

A Brief Look at Two Themes of William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'

Internet and the prospects of online social networks:

The author seems to have a lot to say about the internet.

The Internet’s use in Pattern Recognition is more or less what it is today: an aggregation of data (implied) and a meeting ground for various internet forums. Even the protagonist’s own internet clique, Fetish:Footish:Forum is more or less a meeting grounds for like-minded people.

Continuing on the use of the internet, is the heavy use of email within the plot. Perhaps, as some social commentary, it is significant that the amount of email text is large and the spoken dialogue small. While possibly not true, and only appearing that way for the conservation of detail, it at least suggests that significant information is increasingly transmitted via email.

Amd moreover, the author clearly brings up some of the darker sides of the internet, albeit in an unusual way. The protagonist and her team of internet friends, in order to achieve a goal related to (up to at least page 184) the book’s unobtanium, I mean macguffins, create a false persona to lure a real person to meet them. The same tactic used by child predators, but in reverse (considering the false persona’s ambiguous age).

Meeting generic expectations of science fiction:

The novel simply doesn’t meet the generic expectations of scifi. If it were to be considered science fiction at all, it would be certainly expressive of a shift of the genre. The biggest problem with claiming the story to be science fiction is like claiming an older western novel (if one were to exist) featuring a train heist where the robbers cut the telegraph cables. It’s not so much science fiction, because it uses everyday, conventional objects that, even at the time it was written, were common and everyday. Science fiction in the generic sense is supposed to majorly use new, emerging, and usually, if not almost always, futuristic (be that a progressive or regressive future) technology in order to come to terms with the issues those technologies create. Perhaps if it fails at science fiction, it’s because it provides the reader with very little new things to think about. It could easily serve for historians looking back to understand the era it was written in. But in the meantime, just read The Stranger for the existentialist angst, along with the camera-like narrator, and any Sherlock Homes novel for the who-dunnit plot.

Author's Note: Pattern Recognition is a book by William Gibson, whose title should have been italicized (or underlined, at least) in the post title, but was not due to formatting issues.

A Change in View of "A Rose for Emily"

In Faulkner's poem "A Rose for Emily," a shift in point of view from the ‘we’ of the townspeople to the ‘I’ of Emily’s caretaker, creates a drastic change in the story. The events of the townspeople need not be lost and more insight would be gained.
By viewing the events of the story through the eyes of the caretaker, the reader would necessarily be exposed to what must have been an immense internal struggle within him. He must have suspected something was amiss with Emily, and not simply that which had occurred to Homer. One can speculate that he may have wrestled with outrage at Homer’s murder by Emily, and conflicting feelings of pity or caring for the aging woman, explaining why he would choose to stay loyal up to her death.
In a way, his abrupt departure after her death is suggestive that he knew. He left not only to escape any possible retribution a black man in the Old South might face (justice being irrelevant), but because his conscience could not allow him to remain involved in any foul deed when his only pretext for lingering, Miss Emily, is dead.
This change in point of view not only brings up different thematic elements, but changes the involvement of the reader. In the changed viewpoint, the reader empathizes with the caretaker, and becomes involved in his struggle due to empathy. In the author’s original viewpoint, the reader is not only exposed to the full extent of Emily’s nature until the end, and so misses out on the the caretaker's emotional strain, but also empathizes with the group mentality, and the declination of responsibility associated with it. The reader simply need not be involved: it is simply gossip.

My Criticism of Brautigan's "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace": or A Practical Demonstration on How to Bias a Review

Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" can easily be viewed to be in either a pro- or anti-technological stance.

As evidence for the poem's pro-technological undertones, the poem seems very much willing to incorporate computers and technology into an ecological fabric, using images such as a "cybernetic meadow" and those of where mammals and computers coexist in harmony. The author even seems to make that relationship sound natural, likening it to “pure water touching clear sky”. He juxtaposes images of deer and computers, not so much for the contrast as much as to say ‘yup. deer and computers. what of it?’. And what should seem a nail in the coffin is the maternalistic attributes given to machines, where the machines’ existence means less work (“free from our labors”), more one-ness with mother nature (“returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”), and finally, that we are “watched  over by machines of loving grace.”

Or anyways, that’s how the poem might appear if we were to ignore the evidence that might lead to the contrary conclusion. In each of the three strophes, Brautigan includes parenthetical text as part of the poem. Each reads like an internally-thought interjection on the text that they are respectively commenting on. These interjections are “and the sooner the better”, “right now, please!”, and “it has to be!”. The effect of these interjections is to cast doubt (or at least express a narrator’s doubt) on the apparent likelihood of the ideas expressed in each strophe actually coming about. It’s like someone saying “Sure, it’ll all work out fine!” only to mutter (for the audience’s sake, of course) their internal misgivings by saying “good god, i sure hope it does.”

Perhaps the more convincing view on the poem’s stance is the latter one. Yes, the poem is open to interpretation. And yes, the latter view (as I’ve so far expressed it, anyways) is a little deficient. It fails to reconcile all of the positive images presented with a negative attitude towards machines. But while the images are positive, they almost seem saccharine: strained. Interestingly enough, they also seem like the entirely-too-happy ramblings of the resident stoner of “That 70’s Show.” But the effect is that, to this blogger, anyways, that there is a sinister underside to the poem that sneers at its light-hearted facade.

A Review of "The Living Hand" Without Any Sexual Remarks

In John Keat’s poem “This Living Hand” the dominant image is that of a hand alive and well, and not just a hand, but presumably an important hand, as if that of someone the reader might be involved with, which is called to mind by calling the hand a “living” hand, “warm and capable/ of earnest grasping”. This word choice, together, is meant to elicit a positive emotion towards the hand, because warm hands are generally thought to be nice, capable hands, too, and because “earnest grasping” (though offset by a line, suggesting “capable” may have added importance) suggests a close personal bond, ranging the gambit from small child to lover. Let’s hope those extremes don’t get mixed.

 

But this image is quickly and purposely put into a different context: that of an icy hand of a corpse of the same relation. Not only does the author bring up the image of a corpse, but seems to try and make the reader imagine the tactile sensation of a cold hand of a close relation. Moreover, the fact that the hand remains a hand detached from any identifiable source, the hand becomes all the more disturbing when the author suggests that the hand will “haunt thy days” and “chill thy dreaming nights” (again calling up the cold imagery) because a disembodied hand carries with it the fear of the unknown.


And because the change occurs within a few heartbeats (I say heartbeats, because the author himself uses the image of a stopped heart, for obvious reasons), the effect is as if the author were to say “here, feel my hands, they’re warm,” and having after having touched the hands, saying “but I’m sorry, they’re actually quite cold.” And to top it all off, the author well knows this. His final two lines are

 

“And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.”

The purpose of these lines, after having suggested the hand’s deathly coldness, is to assuage the reader that the hand, in fact, is not cold and dead at all, and quite the same hand that was alive, well, and warm a few heartbeats ago. Even the title, “The Living Hand” seems to be a reassurance that the hand is still alive— the title is not “The Deathly Hand”. 

‘Don’t worry, dear. All is well. Shhh. Go to sleep.’

 

For added fun (very, very optional, as in: the assignment has ended), discover just how creepy disembodied hands can be (besides the obvious Macbeth reference), in this short video of a mini-boss named "Dead Hand": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwoujhcJeiU
Also suggested from TLoZ Ocarina of Time is the Wallmaster (who, sadly, had no ready video).