Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

So, this last week and a half (starting basically when I no longer had to do a bunch of work for Junior Poet) I sat down and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Verdict: It’s amazing, but I just don’t get it.

That is all.

Dies Irae

Today I went to an All Souls Day Requiem mass. In an interesting coincidence, that mass opens with the Latin hymn “Dies Irae,” and my “exemplary poem” for Junior Poet, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” draws its title from the hymn’s opening stanza: “Dies iræ! dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla!” Thus, I will endeavor to give a reading of it now, while the coincidence is still interesting.

The poem itself, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (full text here), is a fascinating look at three of the four last things: death, judgement, and hell. One of Hopkin’s darkest poems, it does not speak about heaven; the reasons given for this vary, among them that it is a pre-Christian poem in content, that it stemmed from an Ignatian meditation on hell, and that logically it ends by rejecting poetry while it is meant to aesthetically, through the music of the words, redeem poetry.

In any case, whatever caused Hopkins to write the poem, its substance is him confronting the fact that all life boils down to a choice between good and evil. The octave presents the world disintegrating, the image being one of the sun setting, the stars rising, and, while in the heavens the stars are fixed, stable, below on earth, everything succumbs to entropy. Here we find such great lines as “womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” and “her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height / Waste”; these descriptions blend the distinction between symbol and what is symbolized, and we feel that the nightfall is the Apocalypse.

In the sestet Hopkins turns inward, seeing that now that the world has ended, the dappled and pied beauty of things is irrelevant. It begins with the cryptic but evocative line “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,” going on to explain the threat implied there as one of morality: now that the world has come to an end, the only distinction that matters is “black, white; ‘ right, wrong.” Aesthetics no longer matter, Hopkins fears; even as he strives to assent to it. In a sense the poem is about poetry, and whether it is worthwhile to write beautiful poetry about the beauty of the world; Hopkins concludes that it is not, unless that beauty serves a moral purpose.

But of course that is what all of Hopkins’ poems are about – his nature sonnets all begin with observing the natural world and move up to God. Some people think “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is somehow atypical of Hopkins; on the contrary, it perhaps best encapsulates his concerns: nature, the self, sin, and God. It is written in the Baroque style of earlier poems like “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and “The Windhover,” which he returned to with e.g. “That Nature is a Heraclitan Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (these four poems I would say are Hopkins’ most important), but its darkness ties it in to his later sonnets of desolation, which are written in a more plain style.

What I’ve left out so far from my explanation of the poem are the last two lines – and indeed, those who want to place the poem as an extremity, not an example, of Hopkins’ poetry look to those two lines to make their argument. They’re difficult lines; they’re also what first turned me on to the poem, as I at first grew frustrated with Hopkins for not making any sense and then slowly realized the brilliance of them. They describe the damned souls after the Last Judgment, and their difficult rhythm – it is almost painful to put the stresses where they are marked, rather than where they would naturally fall – makes them sound like a drumbeat out of Hell. They’re not unmusical; it’s just a terrifying sort of music. Nor is it hopeless terror; the poem is a prophecy and a warning. “Teste David cum sibylla.”

—

So that’s my exemplary poem. With any luck, I’ve convinced you at least that the poem is worth looking at. It’s really amazing, in sound and sense (Hopkins is a master of combining form and content). I get to do a practice presentation of it tomorrow morning, then my panel’s Friday the 13th; I hope writing this out in the last half hour will actually help me with those (and the paper we have to write in a month) rather than prove a hindrance. We’ll see.

Done!

Today I finished the most important part of the Junior Poet project: an annotated bibliography of the criticism on Gerard Manley Hopkins (for which I read and commented on 6 books and 22 articles). It wasn’t actually that much work – maybe 2000 pages of reading spread across two months, plus writing a paragraph about each work read – and was certainly amusing at times. I do feel sorry, though, for those who are only halfway done, given that it’s due on Monday – that gives them four days to read 1000 pages. Doable, but not fun.

One strange fact: I actually enjoy reading deconstructionist literary criticism. It is often absurd, yes, but also often has fascinating insights; and they often talk about how language can convey meaning, a subject I find fascinating. Wikipedia describes deconstruction as “rigorously pursu[ing] the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible”; what exactly is wrong with that, done well? It can result in absurd theories, but is often more insightful than the other two main types of criticism I saw, those being “just read the poem and closely analyse the metaphor and language used so that we can rephrase the poem in philosophical language” and “look at the philosophical/literary/cultural influences on the poet and then try to find evidence of their having influenced the poet in the poems themselves.”

So, uh, yeah. Anyone else have anything insightful to say about different types of literary criticism? If not, you probably won’t be hearing about JPo from me until I get around to writing a post analyzing “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.”

Finitude

I’ve been thinking a lot about the finitude of the world recently. What I mean by that is this: While we interact with the physical world as if it were infinitely variable – everything can be subdivided, including time and space – it seems scientifically quite likely that this is not in fact the case, that rather the world is finite, that there are finitely many particles in the universe, that each of them has finitely many positions, and thus that the universe has finitely many possible states – an absurdly large number, but still finitely many.

This possibility disturbs me, and I think I’ve figured out why. Mathematically speaking, if we have infinitely many points, we can find only one equation that fits it, for it is a smooth curve, a definite function – the universe would have only one explanation. But if we have finitely many points, there are infinitely many equations that would fit the given data – for example, if we just have the points (0,0) and (1,1), the equations y=x and y=x^2 both equally well describe the data. If we have (0,0), (1,1), and (2,0), both y=-(x-1)^2+1 and y=-(x-1)^4+1 work. Et cetera. And those were all just polynomials – there’s lots of other kinds of equations out there. So a finite universe means that the universe has many possible explanations, and even at the end of time, when all is said and done, there’s no way to know which one was correct.

So finitude somewhat scares me. Then again – if the universe is finite, there are many possible explanations, but one will, I hope, be much more elegant than the others, and that will be the “true” one… that, or, since by “the universe is finite” I really mean only the physical world, the atoms and quarks and leptons and dimensions of space and time, meaning will in the end be found not in the physical, but the metaphysical. That is, I suppose, what I believe – but I’d would like to be able to find meaning in both.

Does finitude scare anyone else, or is it just me?

Difference and Indifference

I’ve become aware of an interesting phenomenon over the past month or so regarding the reading of argumentative non-fiction. It’s probably because of the JPo project, in which we read a bunch of literary criticism about our focal poet, but I’ve experienced it regarding other subjects as well, including philosophy and politics.

What I’m talking about without naming is essentially an experience that I’ve had multiple times, in different forms: I read a book. I disagree with the argument of the book, and “officially” declare that to be my response to the book. I go about my life. Days, weeks, or months later, I encounter something related in some way to the argument the book made. I then approach the new situation in the light of the book I previously read, whether explicitly or implicitly, and treat it as providing me a unique insight into the new situation, regardless of the fact that I completely disagree with the book when I originally read it.

I have a theory as to why this happens. Essentially, I think, when I read something, I’ve invested several hours, perhaps days, into reading and thinking about what it is I’ve read; that time spent has created an emotional bond with the material. I may disagree with what it says, but I disagree with it; I don’t just vaguely not like that way of approaching the subject, I have grappled with a particular person’s argument and formed an emotional bond with it – perhaps negative, but still, an emotional.

After writing that last sentence, it occured to me that this seems related to something I’ve written before, I don’t remember where, about interpersonal relationships. To dislike someone is still to have an emotional connection to someone. To actively dislike someone – rather than simply ignoring them – is to have a closer bond with someone than to just vaguely not mind their being around.

Also, I think, a strong enmity is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than into nothing at all; and, in fact, I think it is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than is a weak friendship, by which I mean one where the two people are not good friends not because they don’t know each other well, but because they just don’t particularly like each other, even if they don’t particularly dislike each other. The former case, after all, is just one of changing the type of emotion felt; the latter is one of changing the intensity of emotion, a more difficult proposition.

Spells

“Spell” is one of my favorite words. It relates language and magic; to spell a word is to describe what phonemes it is composed of, to cast a spell is to say a word of power and thus control reality. It also just means “word” or “news,” as in “Gospel” = “Good News,” and its German cognate “Spiele” means, in  addition to everything the word means in English, “play” and “game” -  “Ich spiele Cello,” “Die Baseball-Spiel hat Spaß gemacht.”

This is just one of the reasons that the poem I’m almost certainly going to choose for my “exemplary poem” in Junior Poet (we choose one poem by our poet, memorize it, recite it at the beginning of our panel, then give a reading of it; at that point the professors start asking questions and other poems come into the picture) is “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” supposedly the longest sonnet ever written in the English language (there are eight stresses per line).

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ‘ vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ‘ stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ‘ her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ‘ self ín self steepèd and páshed—qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ‘ áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘ whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ‘ Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ‘ upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ‘ right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ‘ twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ‘ thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

I don’t want to give a detailed reading of this poem right now – perhaps in a month or so. But keep it in mind. It’s one of my favorite poems in the English language, and one of the main reasons for that is its incantatory quality – Hopkins said it was meant to be “almost sung” – and howo the word “spelt” is there in the title. What does it mean? That the prophecy of the Apocalypse (this poem is about the end of the world) is there to be read in the Sibyl’s leaves? Or that the prophecy is spelt out, caused, by the fact of it being prophesied? I think both connotations are meant to be present. And that’s what’s great about the word spell – it takes many distinct but related concepts and gives one word to the entire set, so you can use this one word “spell” and evoke an entire backdrop of meaning – “language,” “magic,” “news,” “game,” etc.

Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal Lie

So, it’s October now. Isn’t it supposed to be… at least cool, rather than warm, outside? Ah well. I suppose this is Texas.

The title of this post is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “Spring and Fall.” It runs as follows:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

A beautifully written poem, though not terribly complex in its meaning. It comes to mind for two reasons, both of which are interesting but unrelated: it is now fall, and so (in theory) I should still be seeing “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”; also, I’m doing Gerard Manley Hopkins for my Junior Poet project.

Regarding JPo; it seems fitting to reference Hopkins this month, of all months, since my annotated bibliography is due November 2nd and thus I will this month finish Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins (I have about 70 pages left), read three books of literary criticism (I have two done, and need five), and read sixteen articles (I have four done, need twenty). That is a lot of reading to do over just thirty days; it comes out to about thirty pages a day, actually. So that’s what my life for the next month will be about, for the most part.

And regarding the fact that it is now fall; I find fascinating the question of seasonal preferences. Hopkins’ poem seems implicitly to say that fall is depressing, it being the dying of the natural world, and spring being its rebirth. But I actually prefer fall, as a season; that was the main reason I went to Rome Fall ‘08 rather than Spring ‘09. I’ve already explored the question of what it means for me to prefer winter to summer; it means I think of myself as being in combat with the world, rather than allied with it. What does it mean to prefer fall to spring?

It’s not that I like the fall holidays better than the spring. I’m not a big fan of Thanksgiving, Christmas (technically winter, but a lot of the buildup is in fall) is just OK, and I love Easter. Nor, I think, is it just that I dislike summer so much I want to be as far from it as possible – if that were the case, fall would be my favorite, since it leaves nine whole months until summer comes again, but I prefer winter to fall. But I don’t want to say it is because I hate nature, either, even though that seems a reasonable answer (my favorite season is when nature is dead, my second favorite is when it is dying)…

I think the answer, in the end, is that I prefer mourning to rejoicing. It’s not that I have a problem with nature being reborn, but I am more fascinated with its going away. It has a bittersweet feeling to it; spring is more triumphant, and a triumphant attitude seems out of place in this so fallen world.

Educating a Wizard

More stuff about Harry Potter.

So, I agree with that article in almost every aspect, and I thik it makes mary good points. But the entire argument relies on the following:

I like to hope that if most of us were handed a magic wand (literally) that removed a lot of the drudgery of modern life, we’d use that extra time in cultural pursuits. We’d read more, write more, take a dance class, go backpack around Europe, etc. We’d produce magical three-dimensional movies, and paintings conjured out of our dreams. Magic would be a tool for knowledge and truth and beauty. And yes, I know that most of us would just watch more TV. But still: magic would (theoretically) give us the opportunity to devote ourselves to the liberal arts, or at least explore them more than our non-magical lives currently allow.

But for the wizards of Harry Potter, magic is an end unto itself.

So the question becomes – why? Why are all of those “cultural” things worth doing, if there is absolutely no drudgery to modern life? What point is there in leisure, if our entire lives are leisure? This is the question Harry Potter accidentally raises but refuses to answer, getting around it by having wizards spend all of their time working in cubicles. Essentially, Rowling turns their lives into drudgery even though there is no need to do so within the logic of the world. She does it anyway.

So what should we take away from this? That Rowling is a bad writer? (Perhaps. In certain respects, she certainly is.) But the other possible interpretation is, that human life cannot be made sense of if there are not certain things we must do in order to survive. If we have no duties, this interpretation says, our lives cease to have meaning.

This interpretation makes a certain amount of sense in a Christian light, actually. God cursed Adam and said he would have to work for his food. This is not just a change to the how easy man’s life is – it was easy, now it’s hard – it is also a change to how human life is correctly structured. In the postlapsarian world, we ought to do work; it is unnatural not to have to struggle to survive.

Any world in which no such struggle is necessary, then, will feel hollow – because that aspect of Adam’s curse has been lifted, but not the part that made it necessary. It’s just like how immortality, it is often said, would be tortuous – because, while in man’s unfallen state he is immortal, fallen man is not capable a good immortality.

In this interpretation, the world of the wizards in J.K. Rowling is somewhat hellish; the wizards have nothing to do, and so they have to occupy themselves with pointless work to distract themselves from how meaningless their lives are.

It would have been fascinating if the books had actually explored this question.

Alice and Bob is Married

Several friends of mine are taking Symbolic Logic this semester, and one of them has brought to my attention something somewhat bizarre. His textbook, it seems, treats “and” as if it is never equivocal. Just intuitively, this seems wrong.

Take these two examples: firstly, “The lines A and B are parallel,” secondly, “Alice and Bob are Moroccan.” In normal English, the first example almost always means that the lines A and B are parallel to each other; re-phrased unambiguously, one would say “The lines A and B are parallel to each other.” But in normal English, the second example almost never intends any connection between Alice and Bob, except for their both being Moroccan; it could be re-phrased “Alice is Moroccan and Bob is Moroccan.”

Even worse, though, there are some words that can be taken either way by a reasonable person. Take the sentence “Alice and Bob are married.” Usually this means “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).” But I could imagine a situation where it meant “Alice and Bob are married (to Charlie and Deborah, respectively).” The word “and”, it seems, can be ambiguous even knowing the definitions of all the words in the sentence – while the textbook writer for this Symbolic Logic class wants to claim it is never ambiguous, ever!

It took a few minutes of thinking for me to figure out exactly how to phrase the ambiguity formally, but here it is. “A and B are C” can mean one of two things. Either “A and B are C” = “A&B are C” = “(A is C)&(B is C)”, or “A and B are C” = “{A,B} is C” – the collection of objects {A,B} possesses a quality, namely C. This is what we mean when we say “line A and line B are parallel,” or “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).”

In other words, we use “and” to do two different things – to apply attributes to multiple things at a time (what we do when we mean “A&B are C”), and to associate things into groups, and then talk about the groups (what we do when we mean “{A,B} is C”). And there’s no way to distinguish between the two without context.

There’s an easy way to fix this, of course. Change the grammar so that when we mean “{A,B} is C”, we don’t say “Alice and Bob are married” – we say “Alice and Bob is married.” It makes sense; after all, we don’t mean “Alice is married and Bob is married,” we mean they can be considered as a unit – “Alice and Bob” – and that unit is married. Is. Not are, because it’s one thing. It’s a set containing two elements, but it’s still a single set.

of course, we’ll never actually talk like this. It sounds stupid. “Alice and Bob is married”? But it does eliminate considerable ambiguity. It’s worth thinking about.

Ofermod

We recently read the Battle of Maldon in my Medieval Literature class. It’s essentially a narrative of a battle between heathen Viking invaders and the Christian Englishmen, resulting in the defeat of the English and tribute – “danegeld” – being paid to the Norsemen.

What people find interesting about the poem is the description of the main character. It portrays Beorhtnoth, the English thane, as a courageous, pious man, who is ‘tricked’ by the Danes into letting them cross a bridge, essentially giving up a defensible position and making it inevitable the Danes would win. By ‘tricked’, I mean the Danes asked him if they could cross and he said yes.

The poem is ambiguous as to whether this was a wrong action or not – the word used to describe his character at that point is “ofermod”. There are no other examples of “ofermod” in Old English, so we just don’t know what it means. It is literally “over-courage”, “over-heart”; but does this mean he has too much courage, i.e. is foolhardy, or that he has an impressive amount of courage, a good thing? No one knows. People read it different ways. (Incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”, about the aftermath of this battle, that addresses the ambiguity in question. It’s good, go read it.)

There’s a similar disagreement about the poem “The Windhover”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom I’m studying for Junior Poet). The word is “buckle”. Does it mean that the thing buckling is collapsing? That it is being bound together, as in buckling a belt? Does it mean “buckle” as in “buckler”, a type of shield? No one knows, and which it is makes a huge difference in how the poem is read.

I’m not sure what to think of ambiguities like that. They are certainly interesting, and make possible multiple interpretations. To that extent, I like them.

But this might be just because I don’t like having a work of literature be too “preachy”, and having ambiguity makes it less preachy – but really, ambiguity only makes it seem less preachy, it doesn’t change the actual meaning of the poem, assuming there is one. After all, it seems like the poet himself knew what the poem ought to have meant, but that we cannot, which is immeasurably frustrating, and implies the poet failed somehow. Especially when which it is doesn’t determine just some nuance of meaning, but how to read the entire poem.

Which is it? Is ambiguity in literature desirable? If so, to what extent? This is a question I haven’t been thinking about for as long as I probably should have been, and I don’t really have an answer formulated yet. I have a gut reaction against books that try to preach a certain moral, and try to avoid doing so in my own stories, but then again most of my favorite books do have messages they’re trying to convey, and I don’t fault them for it. What’s going on here?