Monthly Archives: August 2007

Cultural Immersion

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I’ve mentioned before that I spent the summer reading half a dozen Patrick O’Brian sea novels. Set in the early 19th century, the stories feature a pair of friends — sort of Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson with their power relations reversed — Captain Jack Aubrey & Dr. Stephen Maturin, who sail around the world together in Royal Navy ships under Aubrey’s command, with Maturin, under cover of being a natural philosopher, carrying out intelligence work for the Admiralty. There is a good deal of historical detail & a great deal of natural history in the books — there is more ornithology here than one is likely to find in many other mystery / adventure novels, for instance. O’Brian also does a creditable job of describing various foreign locations & native peoples. The central characters are true to their historical & political moment as members of a vast colonial power, but Maturin, especially, is a keen & dispassionate observer of “native” peoples & their ways of life. There is a particularly fine moment in H.M.S. Surprise, a large chunk of which takes place in India, where Maturin changes his navel uniform for simple civilian clothes & without any sense that he is “going native” plunges into the swirling city of Bombay. It reminded me of the feeling I had walking endlessly around Hanoi a few years ago. Maturin writes in his journal:

I had expected wonders from Bombay; but my heated expectations, founded upon the Arabian Nights, a glimpse of the Moorish towns of North Africa, and books of travel, were poor thing insubstantial things compared with the reality. There is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, this incessant buying and selling, make that self-evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular.

Maturin goes on to describe the dirt, stench, disease & “gross superstition” of the city, but then exclaims, “What an agreeable city this is.” O’Brian’s character expresses here almost exactly what I have tried to describe about my residence in Hanoi, particularly the way the sacred exists alongside of the secular. Maturin is able to set aside, for the most part, his preconceptions about the Other in order to actually see the people who live in the city & I think I was able to do that — at least most of the time — during my year in Vietnam. O’Brian ends this section of the novel with a profoundly ironic incident, however, let the reader sentimentalize Bombay. During his wanderings through the city, Maturin is befriended by a little girl, Dil, an untouchable, who guides & advises him. (Dil is a beautifully drawn minor character.) Before leaving, he gives the child a set of silver bracelets of the sort she has envied on girls whose parents can afford them. The next day, Maturin discovers the child has been murdered by thieves for the gift he has given her.

It is a grave warning for all who would colonize another culture, even on a personal level. The scene has stuck in my mind since reading the novel earlier in the summer, perhaps because I am contemplating going back to Hanoi sometime in the next year or so. What draws me back is that sense that the sacred is constantly mixing in with the secular. Disorienting, but healing; psychologically & morally risky, but rewarding.

Cornel West on Democracy

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Via Wood s Lot, here is a link to an essay, “Democracy Matters,” by Cornel West:

Meanwhile the market-driven media—fueled by our vast ideological polarization and abetted by profit-hungry monopolies—have severely narrowed our political “dialogue.” The major problem is not the vociferous shouting from one camp to the other; rather it is that many have given up even being heard. We are losing the very value of dialogue—especially respectful communication—in the name of the sheer force of naked power. This is the classic triumph of authoritarianism over the kind of questioning, compassion, and hope requisite for any democratic experiment.

We have witnessed similar developments in our schools and universities—increasing monitoring of viewpoints, disrespecting of those with whom one disagrees, and foreclosing of the common ground upon which we can listen and learn. The major culprit here is not “political correctness,” a term coined by those who tend to trivialize the scars of others and minimize the suffering of victims while highlighting their own wounds. Rather the challenge is mustering the courage to scrutinize all forms of dogmatic policing of dialogue and to shatter all authoritarian strategies of silencing voices. We must respect the scars and wounds of each one of us—even if we are sometimes wrong (or right!).

Those are good words to meditate upon at the beginning of another school year.

Impressed

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I just had the first substantive discussions with the first-year students in my Clarkson Seminar class. (This is what we call “Freshman English” at Clarkson, though it is taught by people from across the Humanities & Social Sciences.) I am happy & impressed. The theme of this course, as I noted in a previous post, is: childhood, adulthood, innocence, experience, alienation, order & chaos. And probably six or seven things beside. But we began with Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience, which may appear simple on first acquaintance, but turn out of course to be subtle & sophisticated lyrics that require a good deal of the reader. And, as readers, my Engineering & Business & Psych majors did themselves proud. I’d say more than half the students in each section spoke, several more than once; but it was what they said that was most impressive. They were asking things like, “Why does Blake use this off rhyme here?” “What sort of religion did Blake have?” And they were picking up on the cyclic imagery of “The Echoing Green” & the bitterness of the two “Chimney Sweeper” poems. It is easy to read the Songs of Innocence, especially, as fantasies of an ideal childhood, but several students noticed that there is darkness & sleep at the end of even such a celebratory poem as “The Echoing Green” with its seasonal & diurnal cycles of life & death. It was great, by the way, to be able to pull up images of Blake’s hand-printed pages from the Blake Archive. We could actually look at the chimney sweeps being released from their coffin & see how Blake created a composition entirely of circles to illustrate “The Echoing Green.” I’m looking forward to the semester.

Jonathan Miller’s Alice

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Because I am teaching Alice in Wonderland this semester, I ordered Miller’s 1966 production, which includes turns by Peter Sellers, Sir John Gielgud, & Sir Michael Redgrave, though the most valuable minutes on the disk — certainly from a film history perspective — may be Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 silent film of the story. Miller’s telling of the story is certainly a period piece, with a sitar soundtrack & a portrayal of Alice (by Anne-Marie Mallik) remarkable for its stoned lack of affect. Miller says in the commentary that he wanted to avoid the “traditional concept a over-cheery seven-year-old” & he certainly succeeds, replacing her with a disturbingly sexualized hippie chick version of the character. It’s not the sexuality, though, that he gets wrong, but the lack of fear. Alice is supremely in control, bemused at what is taking place, but never startled or afraid. One of the most important themes of Carroll’s tale, though, is the frightening irrationality of the adult world. It is only Alice’s thin veneer of breeding that prevents her from flying completely to pieces. When the Mad Hatter confides to Alice that “we’re all mad here,” it is clear that Alice’s problem is her relationship to “here.” Is she a part of Wonderland, or does she stand apart? One should not be fooled by the fairytale title: Wonderland war originally merely Underground. The title was changed for marketing reasons. In any case, for Carroll, Wonderland might have meant something more like Puzzleland. The best scene in Miller’s Alice is the mad tea party, which is a simultaneously loony & terribly depressing meditation on the tyranny of time.

I’ll show my students that scene & the Hepworth film after they have read the story, though I think I may show the opening scene next week, which shows Alice & her sister (no Lewis Carroll anywhere to be seen) in a field of tall summer grass at the beginning of the story. Miller uses a voice-over in Alice’s voice: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. The words are not Lewis Carroll’s, but William Wordsworth’s, from the beginning of the “Immortality Ode,” a poem we will be discussing next week after Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience. The loss of childhood. Maybe I’ll begin the class with Van Morrison’s “Madam George” & “Cyprus Avenue” Morrison’s songs are studded with references to Blake & Yeats: Here is a remarkable live version of “Cyprus Avenue” that gains power from our having heard the folkier version from Astral Weeks . Thematically, all these texts work the same turns. As part of my project to demonstrate the false distinction between elite & popular arts, I’ll begin this opening phase of the course with Blake & Wordsworth & segue to Morrison. And all of that is just to set everybody up for Alice.