Penny Hero (dot) Net

Articulating Lawrence’s theories deadens them in the novel. the metaphors become dramatizations of his obscure language rather than open metaphors with the suggestion of what he’s writing about.

Similarly, The Rainbow is only successful because Ursula’s story is unfinished and unresolved. We don’t know what happens to her–only that she has the potential to become a nietzchian woman and able to find true Lawrentian fullfillment in the future. Lawrence must leave that open for the potential to exist. As long as she remains unarticulated, she comes to represent reader’s hopes for themselves and their own potential for change and spiritual growth.

Not just change on an individual level, but through the individuals who change, the potential to change the social structures which are clearly unbalanced and over-masculinized according to Lawrence and Feminists.

Andrew Harrison. “D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Perfervid futuristc Style” and the Writing of the Body in The Rainbow“. Writing the Body in D.H. Lawrence. Paul Poplawksi ed. Greenwood Press: Connecticut. 2001. p43

Essay examins and summarizes Galsworthy’s attack on The Rainbow, Futuristic style of writing in the Ursula sections. Galsworthy attacks Lawrence’s reiterative style. Essay examins how we gain insight into Ursula’s sections.

“balance through imbalance: the rainbow” the moon’s dominion. gavriel ben ephraim. p129.

description of lawrence’s oscilation toward deeper meaning… “the central experiences of the novel’s characters are structured, not in any neatly logical sequence, but in powerful contradictory waves…. perceptions occur, are contradicted, and are then reformed: the characters move slowly, cumbersomely, toward advancing their inner selves.”

translating inner into language: “the teller plays a special role… for only an authorial voice can translate the nonverbal inner experience into language…. events are narrated from within, the teller describes the hidden causes and consequences of actions through a technique of narrational inscape.” (131) what follows is a summary of tom’s deficiency due to him being molded by women all his life. lacking male confidence.

continues with other relationships examining their balance and imbalance and the mechanics of why it is like that.

other idea: oscillation dramatizes the slow pace of emotional and spiritual revelation and transformation. illustrates that the back and forth is never finished. that it is a process that needs constant maintenence and work.

The following are things I don’t want to forget, insights that I need to re-articulate, and possible points of tension/discovery that I might use in my essay on DH Lawrence.

Examination of HOW Lawrence is a modernist

• like Conrad, he’s reacting against old writing styles and cliches and conventions. Content and form changes, but conrad is more impressionistic and symbolic in his attempt to understand the unconscious mind. Lawrence attempts to articulate the unconscious and put into words the inner workings of human emotions and what he believes modern technological de-humanization is stripping from our human experience. (Look at his essays for where he says we are at fault and western world of materialism is bad etc. maybe…)
• critical or complicated relationship between human beings and the change that the modern world brings to them. Technology intrudes on the brangwens, and it is in part good. it brings success, opportunity etc. individuals can search for their Great Meaning in more places.

Lawrence’s ideas in terms of identity and the “social-construction of the soul” (my term)

• different characters find their individual meaning in different ways. Tom=land. Lydia=her secretiveness? Will=art/archetecture. Anna=children. Ursula=literature/school?
• all are still driven to love someone and be with someone else to find meaning. their different identities come into conflict or create tension with the other. (Anna and Will’s object/need-more struggle… Anna “wins” which difuses their relationship. Only after he finds a bodily object identification and feels empowered through that, does it reinvigorate.

Problems with Lawrence’s attempt to articulate what he and Lawrence both seem to realize is not articulatable.

• Conrad uses dense stream of consciousness symbolism and delayed decoding, imitates the thinking of a human being that suggests the effect of discovering and knowing the unconsciousness.
• Lawrence invents a new language to try to articulate what can’t be articulated in our language. I think this is very problematic. In my own reading, after reading his theories, it virtually “killed” the impact of his novel because what had previously been metaphor and subtle became direct and explicit. It just “felt wrong” in that way that can’t be clearly articulated. begs the question… how could lawrence think that he would be capable of doing justice to the unconscious pre-language workings of the human soul.

Other:

• Lawrence’s relationships are an oscillation between being the drive to be independent, and the drive to be with someone else and find meaning through someone else. Lawrence theorizes this in a metaphysical/psudoscientific way in his essays and believes in the magnetic fields etc. but the oscillation and back and forth is key. creates a living changing conduit that contributes to the health of the Relationship as an entity.

I’m currently using bittorrent to (illegally?) download an audio book reading of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”.

How’s that for technology intersecting with the English major?

I don’t even like American Revolutionary texts… but I saw it in my search results, and it had more than zero seeds, so… the English major in me had no choice but to download it.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m so tickled by this.

Paul armstrong says: power and justice are incompatible (page 5 on my preview)

possible that *shock* the two women characters are the only two heroic/incorruptable characters because they are inherently powerless, and transparent conduits through which male power travels… until the death of the two men in antonia’s life.

antonia as a female politician essay.

I’m finally getting engaged in my Joseph Conrad readings. So stay tuned for quotes and stuff.

Here’s the first that jumped out at me and reminded me of why I love being an English major:

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition–and, therefore more permanently enduring. he speaks to our capacity for delight and woner, to the sense of mystery surrounding our livers: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation–and to the subtle but invincible, conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds [people] to each other, which binds together all humanity–the dead to the living and the living to the unborn” (Conrad on Life and Art, p224 of the Norton Critical edition of Heart of Darkness. emp. mine btw)

*swoons* I think now I remember why I loved HoD back in high school and everyone else hated it: he weaves language into these convoluted web-like patterns. knots, but if you’re as obsessed with language like I am, it’s more like an awesome carpet. A piece of complicated clothing made up of scraps of all the things you’d thrown into the back of your closet thinking never to see again.

Here’s the next one. He finished talking about novelists and how their work has in common with other types of artists the use of the senses to reach a reader, yadda yadda… and he’s also just finished talking about how an artist of fiction should not get caught up in the (he implies true) insight that “there is much evil in the world” and to not take joy in discovering or expressing that. he says that’s not the proper way to approach the art of fiction because it gives the author a false sense of superiority, and then you’re basically just fucked because you A.) hate the world and B.) your readers hate you. Then he says:

“To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so” (p228).

:)

…

Last week, in this very class, I gained some sort of random cool insight into why being an English major rocks. We get to know how the world creates meaning out of the changes in our society. So, yes, practical degrees like engineering, CS, accounting, writing, whatever… they create the changes in our world. They do things in the microcosm of it all and build infrastructure, keep records, exchange money, make the system operate. But we get to see what all of that means. I want to hold onto this insight because all the time I feel conflicted about being an English major… it’s not practical. It doesn’t translate into money or a “real job”. It’s a waste of time. And there are a ton of essays explaining that it’s important to be a liberal arts major because it gives you a “wider perspective” or some such bullshit. empty rhetoric. I think I’m on the edge of understanding why I could never be anything else. I might create a better entry about it… write an essay someday… get anthologized in a wr121 textbook in a few years. That’d be bad-assed.

From Kenneth Keniston’s Social Change and Youth in America in The Challenge of Youth:

“If Growing up were merely a matter of becoming “socialized,” that is, of learning how to “fit into” society, it is hard to see how anyone could grow up at all in modern America, for the society into which young people will some day “fit” remains to be developed or even imagined (211).”

I’m enjoying this article, even though it’s fricken LONG.

A “holy shit” moment while I was reading a dissertation as part of my research for my writing class:

If people can experience punctuation in a personal, three-dimensional way–to grappling, playing, and having physical contact with these symbols–then perhaps it may lead to an awareness of how their own narrative is punctuated.

Wow. Sorry, but that just makes punctuation fucking hot. I don’t want to stop reading.

It’s from “Living the Punctuated Life” Punctuation as Symbol: Experiencing Archetypal Patterns through Punctuation as Personal Narrative by Gail Emily Arriola-Nickell. (2003)

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.

John Milton, from Areopagitica

“…for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul that whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

Isn’t that fucking awesome?