Norwegian Wood 2

November 18^th, 2013
Norwegian Wood 2^nd Reading Journal

World Literature / Mr. Garrioch

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

       Toru is indeed a very charming guy, a great listener who knows how to pay good attention to people’s words and to help them feel comfortable. His taciturnity is so great it almost indicates him as a very considerate guy. With people spilling out their secrets, Toru simply sits in front of them, listening and nodding. He does not try to either give solutions to their troubles or prove how their problems are mere trivialities, but merely keeps his lips tight until people magically divulge all their secrets to him. In this regard, Toru may be seen as someone who truly understands others. Toru is the only person who speaks to the eccentric outsider Storm Trooper, who can discuss deeply about The Great Gatsby with Nagasawa, who can maintain calm with no mark of astonishment when listening to Reiko’s grotesque past story. Toru is indeed a good conversationalist. The silence he keeps attracts a lot of people as if it is an embracement of their dirty secrets. But whether he understands others is a different issue. After all, how can Toru empathize with people with all different stances?

    Such is exactly the case Toru has with Nagasawa and Hatsumi. It is notable how Toru joins Nagasawa with one-night stands and yet still nods at Hatsumi’s story. Toru clearly recognizes Nagasawa’s excessive selfhood and arrogance that eat away Nagasawa and Hatsumi’s happy relationship. This is evident when Toru agrees to Nagasawa’s comment that “[he] don’t deserve a girl like Hatsumi.” Nonetheless, Toru becomes closest with Nagasawa in the whole dormitory, sometimes enjoying deep discussions and sometimes “swapping” and “switching” women. He sticks to a stance of a complete onlooker, never intervening in a conflict between Nagasawa and Hatsumi even when he grasps the fundamental problem lying between the two.

     Same applies for numerous intercourses Toru engages in. One dominant opinion about Norwegian Wood was displeasure of how frequently and easily Toru has sexes with women. Whether a girl asks for a dinner in her house or asks for a sexual relation, Toru comply with all women’s requests. He is self aware of his love towards Naoko and knows all relations with women are basically win-win strategies that bring pleasure and ease loneliness. There is no reason for Toru to turn down the proposals. He lets people ask him whatever they want, almost as if acting on the sidelines of issues around him.

     But what I notice is change in Toru’s attitude. This protagonist who nods at any requests others ask him starts expressing his position towards the end of the book. The turning point might be vague – it could be the last meeting with Hatsumi when she tells Toru to be himself, or it could be some point afterward. But the change itself is clear. During the latter half of the book, Toru refuses resolutely to Midori’s constant ask for sex. He asks Reiko for help when he has difficulty making sure of his mind. Realizing his affection toward Midori after long painful consideration, he tries to make up with Midori by calling her repeatedly and attempting conversations. He actually takes action according to his wills instead of enjoying sexes with Midori, being bewitched by Naoko’s dead beauty, and vacillating between the two with abrupt impulses driving him.

     This is a great shift for Toru. Toru might not appear as closed as Naoko at a first glance. Naoko’s emotional instability is explicit as to close herself in a secluded sanatorium, and Toru’s shut heart can easily be overlooked because of Naoko’s. But Kizuki was not a gem only to Naoko. Toru and Kizuki were friends of each other’s childhood, and Kizuki’s sudden suicide should have left deep wound to Toru as well as Naoko. As a matter of fact, Norwegian Wood, although narrated in Toru’s voice, barely contains any content of Toru himself. It gives detailed descriptions of Toru’s narration on other people but never reveals Toru’s own story. Even Nagasawa who talks with Toru the most puts Toru as a “tight lipped man” who would never disclose to anyone what he does not wish to. So Toru sharing his concerns with Reiko and struggling to make decisions is certainly a step change. Facing Naoko’s closure and his moving love, Toru finally learns to be involved in his own life more independently.

     Surely, settling down on a new girl (Midori) after the old lover’s death is not the most romantic ending. But would the ending be any more satisfactory if Toru was never able to forget Naoko? How is being shackled to a dead girl any different from Naoko failing to move on from shades of Kizuki? Toru chooses Midori over Naoko. Naoko lives in others’ lives, constantly concerning how others would view her and fearing she might eventually be removed from their memories someday. And she never succeeds to go back out into the world full of strangers. At first Toru shares Naoko's fears and let others lead his life. He assumes the attitude of a bystander even to his own situations. But he finally takes a step to live his life, trying to move on from the painful past. He struggles to find his own way out in “the dead center of this place that was no place.”

     “What stays in [your] heart will stay, …, and what vanishes will vanish.” When, in his middle years, he hears an orchestra cover version of “Norwegian Wood” in a plane, Toru finds himself feeling blue. The past that has been old enough for Toru to forget all but the small details still visits him from time to time and stirs his emotion. The scars Kizuki and Naoko left does not - and perhaps never will - vanish, but Toru is no more fettered to his past. He is not stirred up by this piece of bitter memory emerging and can wait for it to pass by. Because Toru is no more a spineless conformer, and has finally managed to move on.

Norwegian Wood

August 29, 2013

Norwegian Wood (1)

World Literature

12v1 Ho In Hee

Literature is a portrayal of reality. Regardless of its genre, a piece of literature reflects reality. Not necessarily that the plot is something likely to happen in the real world, but “reflecting reality” is more of capturing pieces of the reality. Only then it can evoke sympathy from the readers. Unfortunately, Murakami Haruki’s novel did not appear to be reflecting reality at a first glance. As I turn the pages of this book over, Toru Watanabe have an emotion-revealing conversation with a Stewardess he just met, Naoko let Watanabe be disconcerted as she gushes out her ludicrous worries, and Storm Trooper exhibits every eccentric behavior he can have. All the characters in were so different and so unique to portray the normal people of the normal world. But in making such hasty judgment, I overlooked a very important truth: that no one is normal.

Naoko is a character tied down by the past wound. She is a friend (or girlfriend) of Watanabe. Their relationship is not clearly defined- it is somewhere in between friends and lovers. But this indefinite relation between Naoko and Watanabe does not seem to be due to the absence of love between them. It is apparent that Watanabe loves Naoko. But Naoko also seems to have a feeling towards Watanabe. Naoko is depicted as a stand-off type of person who does not favor interacting with anyone. Her self-isolation bears an exception for Watanabe. She makes attempts to share her ideas with. The reason for their ambiguous relation seems to lie not on the absence of affection between the two but rather on Naoko’s not being ready to accept a new relationship. Since the death of her ex-boyfriend Kizuki, Naoko closes her from the world. She remains open to Watanabe, but even with Watanabe, Naoko often becomes neurotic on the subject of “eternity”. She does not doubt so much about Watanabe’s feeling of her, but does doubt strongly that such feeling would last long. This indicates that Naoko is still not free from the painful memory of Kizuki.

Unlike Naoko who is very delicate and vulnerable, Watanabe’s dorm roommate Storm Trooper is a self-determined man. He pursues nothing but his fascination. He does not bother to make any friends who do not understand him. Storm Trooper and Naoko have point of sameness in that they both refuse to associate with others. But if Naoko’s isolation is rooted in fear, Storm Trooper’s rests in that he does not find any friend necessary. Storm Trooper is disturbed by no one around him. While Watanabe shows small irritation at him from time to time, he realizes Storm Trooper’s pure interest in his career is reasonable. Same thing – finding Storm Trooper’s peculiar behaviors funny but realizing parts of him appealing – may be happening to Naoko when she laughs at Watanabe’s stories of his roommate.

Nagasawa is another very interesting character. He is a utilitarianist who does not refuse anything that is beneficial to him. He does not see any problem with his womanizing habit since it is something done under mutual consent. When womanizing, he allows nothing but physical intercourse. He also looks down at people. To Nagasawa, all the residents of the dorm are “idiots” who never read profound books from more than 30 years ago. Consequently, Nagasawa’s relations with others are very superficial.

The three characters show three different ways of reacting to confusion of the “Norwegian Wood”. Personally, I buy Naoko’s most captivating. I look forward to see how the three peculiar yet normal characters adopt to the confusion, and how they influence Watanabe in three remaining quarters of the book.

Metafiction - Student

June 23^rd, 2013

Metafiction – Student

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

        A lonely desert. Yes, definitely a lonely desert where red sands repeat themselves over and over vast space. North, south, west, and east all filled with sands - red sands that distract my consciousness. . I am just standing there, not knowing what to do like an extraterrestrial that accidentally landed on Earth. The earth under my feet belches out the heat into the red desert’s dry air. But I do not feel the heat. As if I do not exist in this desert. As if I do not exist at all.

        The sight fades out. The teacher is doing his presentation with all the lights off. The PowerPoint slide is stopped on its fourth page for several minutes. He knows that his voice tortures every part of us. He is just displaying extreme sadism by taking his time explaining every small detail of his PowerPoint slides. Time seems to be stuck. Students’ heads are moveless, all headed to the table. The teacher displays no sign of pausing. The only thing moving in the classroom is a little fly. The fly throws itself across the space, making a parabolic motion.

        My mind begins to blur. With the decrescendo of the buzzing of the fly and murmuring of the teacher, I lost consciousness. All the noises ceased. I existed and did not simultaneously, with my mind drifting off to where the zephyr carried me. I travel further and further away from the classroom, from the lecturer, from the world. I let my eyelids drop. A faint wind brushes through my ear. The sandyish wind is rough but gentle. And I am alone again in the desolate desert, under the burning sun. I look ahead at whatever is there. The desert throws up a weak breeze somewhere, blowing out its dry sand. The red sand ripples. I stretch my arms into the hazy dust. But nothing is caught, and my hands are lost. My shirt flutters in the wind. I begin to walk.

        There is no sign of a living creature in this vast desert. The hot sand that covers my ankle each time I take a step forward does not tell me where to go. I sink on the lonely desert, breathing in the hot air. I look back, and there it is, my staggering footprints. The footprints are the only evidence of anything alive. Sighing, I hear a familiar buzzing in my ears. I prick my ears up. There is the fly in my sight. I start to run after the fly. I run until I am out of breath, as if I am aiming somewhere. When the fly is near as I can reach, it vanishes. And there is a camel instead, The fly must have brought me to this camel. The camel looks at me and blinks its eyes slowly just as it is telling me to ride on it. I leap on it. And instead of the camel’s swollen back, there is..

        My hips, splat on the floor, are tingling. The teacher tells me to stand up. His eyes are fixed on me, and their firmness awakes me from my haziness. It is time to use reasonable deduction to predict the reason behind the lecturer’s judgment. What in me caused him to stare at me so fiercely? Or more precisely, Or more precisely, what angered him? Is it that important to beam at me that he should even stop talking? Then the bell rang, and I began to pack my bag. He told me to stay. The camel dim on the edge of my mind disappears into the red sand. And I am alone again in the trackless desert, all by myself.

+) The dozing (or dreaming? illusioned?) part is gray. Plus, I find the images attached not so pleasurable (especially the fly one), but they were inevitably put since they are the images used in the story.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

March 30^th, 2013

Gabriel Marquez – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

     “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” –Gabriel Marquez

     Gabriel Marquez is an eminent Latin American writer largely known for his magic realism pieces. Magic realism, also known as magical realism, is a literary movement in which the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. (Luis Leal, Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris) Though he used many apparently unrealistic and magical elements, Marquez had certain realistic issues he wanted to portray via his stories. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, one of his famous short stories, also takes real problems of the world.

     The story illustrates how people judge the supernatural. The old man with wings is a stranger to the town. No one of the townspeople can assure who the man is. The neighbor woman of Pelayo claims the man is an angel. But the man, with “a few faded hairs left on his bald skull, and a very few teeth in his mouth”, and “huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked”, in no sense accords with the angel they imagine, with a pure white dress and silky blonde hair. Thus they start treating the angel more like an animal than a holy creature. Moreover, Father Gonzaga doubts the man being an angel because in his measure, angel should speak Latin. Whereas humans are not omniscient and might not be able to fully understand the supernatural, the people in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings appraise the angel on their worldly and imperfect criteria.

     Readers can further get a sense of people’s superiority they feel over the old man. When Pelayo and Elisenda first find the old man with the wings, he regards the man as a “nightmare”. Even after they hear from a neighbor woman that the man is an angel, Pelayo “drags him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop.” That night, when Pelayo’s child wakes up without a fever, he feels “magnanimous” and “decides to put the angel on a raft for three days.” If the angel were a human being, Pelayo would not let that man on a raft and regard that as a behavior of magnanimity. Nor would Pelayo let the angel whom he truly regards as angel sleep on a raft when he feels magnanimous. Such decision to put the angel on a raft is driven not from Pelayo’s respect for the angel.

     Yet Pelayo is not the only one to regard the angel as a weak inferior. At the end of the story, when the angel loses his popularity but still does not leave the house, Elisenda gets “exasperated and unhinged”. The whole neighborhood has fun with the angel “without the slightest reverence”, as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Later on, the neighborhood and hundreds of people from distance away come to see this unusual being, as if it is a zoo animal. Elisenda takes benefit by charging five cents admission to see the angel. Every single character in the story does not show, as the author writes, the “slightest reverence” to this injured and aged winged man but rather a superiority we feel over animals.

     But the old man is not the only supernatural being presented in the story. Numerous people from faraway all visit Pelayo’s house to see the caged angel. The popularity of this angel seems like it would last for a while until the spider woman appears. The spider woman claims that she turned into a tarantula for not obeying her parents. This woman, who clearly knows (or assures she knows) how she became a tarantula, quickly fascinates the majority much more than the unidentified and wordless old angel does and the man is soon forgotten. But the people desire for a great lesson from the tarantula girl – such as to never disobey parents’ words. It is rather plausible to say that they are chasing anything unusual and surprising, just like a group of reporters running after hot issues for eye-catching headline. Marquez himself received public’s attention after publishing his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel won him many prestigious awards such as Noble Prize and Romulo Garllegos Prize as well as great popularity and critics’ acclaims. However, Marquez goes to live in Spain. He said that his book was not worthy of such attention and he knew the vain of such popularity. In this sense, the old angel in his book may be a portrayal of himself who is overburdened by the unwanted public attention.

     There are certain words that are hard to juxtapose with each other. ‘Magic’ and ‘Realism’ are some very typical ones. ‘Magic’, as Merriam-Webster defines, is the ‘use of means believed to have supernatural power over natural forces’, whereas ‘Realism’ is a literary movement basically focusing on replicating the true nature of reality. But this seemingly self-contradicting word has been used for decades to characterize a renowned novelist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Marquez effectively conveys realistic themes through unrealistic characters.

+) I tried hard to not go over 900 words. The journal is solely about our second story only- and perhaps I should post another one about the handsomest drowned man later?

The Dead

March 27^th, 2013

James Joyce – The Dead Reading Journal

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

James Joyce chose Dublin as the setting of his fifteen short stories because the city was, he saw, “the center of paralysis”. In such sense, The Dead, the final chapter of his collection Dubliners, should culminate in the lifelessness and paralysis. Surprisingly, however, the story is set in a seemingly lively party. Old Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia throw a magnificent annual dance party with their only niece Mary Jane. People from diverse classes are invited – from an educated scholar to a rum-dum. The party is held in a house upper of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, in Ireland upper of which is ruled by the Great Britain.

Amidst the majority in the party, who drinks, dances, and enjoys, Gabriel Conroy is a protagonist who thinks he is distinguished from other Irishmen. He is a college professor and a literary critic living in prosperous Monkstown with his wife Gretta, unlike Usher’s Islanders. An educated man himself, Gabriel can make a speech referring to John Milton and write a literary column with Browning’s poems. He is also a very considerate man who “sometimes [I] fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.” He is a Universalist who prefers to go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany than to visit his own land Ireland he is sick of.

Gabriel is a man with strong self-consciousness. When Gabriel asks her about love, Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, replies with great bitterness that “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Gabriel colors with embarrassment at her back answer. Deeply humiliated, he hastily trots to the stairs and wave his hand to Lily in deprecation after (almost forcefully) handing her some coins for Christmas tip. Gabriel encounters another disconcertion while dancing with Ms Ivors, a frank-mannered, talkative young lady. Ms Ivors refers what Gabriel considers as scholarly acts to unpatriotic. She calls him a West Briton in the midst of all partiers. Gabriel, frustrated by all the eyes on him, nervously shouts that he is “[I’m] sick of my own country!”

Apart from Gabriel’s frustration, the party reaches its full swing as goose and pudding are served. Aunt Julia sings an old song in her strong and clear voice, Mary Jane plays her piano, and Gabriel delivers a wise and witty speech. Guests sings “For they are jolly their gay fellows” in unison, and the party is over. After the guests leave Ms Morkan’s, tenor Mr D’Arcy sings The Lass of Aughrim. Gretta listens hard to this traditional Irish song standing right under the dusty fanlight. Looking at his absorbed wife, with colour on her cheeks and her eyes shining Gabriel finds “a sudden tide of joy going leaping out of his heart.” Gabriel’s desire toward Gretta mounts when they two reach hotel. Here, “only the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his body in check” while “[he] could have flung his arms about her hips and held her still, for his arms were trembling with desire.” Gabriel tries to see some passion or desire in Gretta’s eyes as well. But against Gabriel’s wish, Gretta remains abstracted. When Gretta talks to Gabriel about Michael Furey, a guy who got her mind lost, however, Gabriel finds a shameful consciousness of his own person assailing him. Gabriel is a man sure of his belief to embrace the present, to “not linger on the past”, as he addresses in his speech at Ms Morkan’s party. To him, whoever dead is the dead from the past, while he is the alive living the present. But Gabriel is “humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” While the dead Michael Furey is remembered by Gretta, Gabriel, facing her in the very present, is in nowhere in her heart.

Gabriel’s solid belief is challenged. What he thought was dead is alive and what he thought is alive is actually dead. He notices it is the foolish people lingering in the past who linger in time. Watching Gretta crying herself to sleep, Gabriel realizes that it is “better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” Generous tears start filling Gabriel’s eyes, as his soul approaches that region where dwells the vast hosts of the dead. The revelation of time, as Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Theologiae that “priority and posteriority are discerned, so the cessation of motion puts a stop to priority and posteriority; and so nothing remains but eternity, which is simultaneously whole,” illuminates Gabriel’s heart. Untangled from its own stubbornness and vanity, Gabriel’s mind goes on to accepting what Ms Ivors meant when calling him a West Briton. By the end of the story, when he says “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”, he finally concedes how he had disregarded people like Ms Ivors as an ignorant narrow-minded nationalist, how he had neglected his own country without properly understanding it.

Just like anyone else, I encountered diverse experiences and went through the break of my belief few times. The latest one of them happened during the Lunar New Year’s Holiday in February. But it was none of the bitter experiences or great adversities that brought me to such realization. It was but my grandmother’s phone call.

I was in my mom’s car when my grandmother called me. I was surprised to see my grandmother’s number on the screen since she did not call me so often. So I assumed there was some urgent matter she had to tell me. But opposed to what I expected, the question she asked me was plain and simple: “Are you staying in your school during the holidays?” I responded I was staying in my house. She then added some incoherent comments, like what she ate for dinner last night and when she is planning to go to church during the holidays. Then before hanging up the phone, she asked if I could come over to her house and have a dinner together. I replied yes. And that was the end of our talk.

After getting off the phone, I suddenly reminded what my mom had told me few days before about my grandmother. She told me that my grandmother these days barely visited or even called our house unlike before. Since last year when she was bereaved of my grandfather, my grandmother started visiting our house very often, sometimes twice a day in Sundays. She called us time to time without special event and asked us what we were doing. I was raised by my grandmother since I was little and I was for no reason uncomfortable with her. But my mother was different. She didn’t feel so comfortable with grandmother in my house. The general Korean ‘mother-in-law and daughter-in-law’ relationship might have worked in theirs as well. According to my mom, it is against manner to rest in bed with the presence of elders in the house or to serve a simple meal. To me, grandmother wasn’t a kind of person who would be cruel to my mom with such trifles, but my mom did feel very uncomfortable with my grandmother.

It wasn’t long after my grandfather’s death my mom started to get irritated with my grandmother’s frequent visits. She answered grandmother’s call with brusque words and greeted her with a sigh. She complained grandmother never notices how much my mom feels uncomfortable with her. But now, with grandmother knowing what my mom feels about her, would my mom feel comfortable than before?

If Gabriel was a wise man living the present and not dwelling on the past in his own conceit, I was the honest one in my own. I had long considered myself as an honest and truthful person who never dissembles. At the same time, I disliked those who often put a fake smile and feigned kindness. They were, in my viewpoint, tainted in secular society. But frankness is not always the best. If my mom made a little more effort to treat my grandmother with kindness, even if the kindness might be an affected one, no one would have to bear the awkwardness whenever my mom and grandmother are together. The emotion that is swirling my mind is not always rational and is better not shown. After all, the jealousy I might have toward a beautiful and talented girl is never worth being expressed. What I defined as ‘honesty’ was a convenient excuse to express whatever is in my mind and never containing it.

That frankness is not always the best choice might not be as philosophical as Gabriel’s realization of time. It may merely be seen as a ‘socializing’ of me rather than an epiphany. In fact, the immediate feeling the word ‘epiphany’ oozes is somewhat scholarly, as the word is mostly used in literature classes (especially when discussing eminent yet unkind writer James Joyce). It would be for similar reason that the word ‘epiphany’ seems very convoluted and profound. Even James Joyce defined epiphany as somewhat spiritual when he wrote in Stephen Hero, his autobiographical novel, that “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”

But the word itself does not exclude anything. What the narrator in Araby found as an epiphany might be seen as a simple disillusion of an ingenuous youth. The most crucial thing is, perhaps, readily realizing whatever an incident may teach. Like Gabriel, who accepted his wrong values of life instead of simply being furious when his wife got lost in the memories of her first love, the true realization may occur from the nastiest instances, or even the most trivial ones.

Araby-paragraph

March 19^th, 2013

James Joyce - Araby paragraph

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit.

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

  From a distance, James Joyce’s “Araby” might appear to be a story of a boy’s disillusionment with reality. After all, when the nameless narrator encounters a lady shopkeeper who is more interested in two young men flirting with her, he finds his eyes “burned with anguish and anger”. His fantasy about Araby as “Eastern enchantment” breaks when he actually reaches there, by its dark look and by feigned manners and flirtations of people in the bazaar. Such disappointment brings him a realization of how deluded his ideal has been. However, on the other hand, the narrator’s anger is also rooted himself as well. From the very beginning, the narrator’s love toward Mangan’s sister is depicted as more holy than physical. The narrator portrays his deep crush on her when he says “her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises” or “(I) murmured “O love! O love!” many times”. This contrasts his uninvolvement in the Irish Christian society alluded in phrases like “I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died”. The boy’s epiphany of his self contradiction takes place when he confronts a lady shopkeeper flirting with two young men and fake kindness, when he “sees himself as a creature driven and derided by vanity”. He comes to know his love was not simply platonic, as he depicted, but physical. Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that “Araby” extends beyond anguish over the outer world. The narrator, indulged in an illusion towards both the world and in himself, realizes the true selfish and affected mind as he goes through emotional crash. In this sense, the narrator’s disillusionment is not simply rooted in frustration towards the society but also in himself.

The Lady with the Dog

February 27^th, 2013

Love-Somewhere In Between

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” -Lao Tzu

“Where there is love there is life.” -Mahatma Gandhi

“A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” -Max Muller

Love is conceived as something powerful and holy. It is commonly believed to enable one overcome all adversities and endure all it costs. (And I’m referring to ‘romantic’ love, not platonic, religious, or familial one.) On one hand, love is regarded as something absolute that should be the top priority over anything, and not being fully devoted to the lover is of a great blame. On the other hand, ‘wrong’ form of love is an absolute taboo never to be followed.

Love appeared in The Lady with the Dog is one of those ‘wrong’ forms of love-adultery. Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna meet each other as it so happens. They feel strong affection, which they haven’t felt towards their own wife and husband, towards each other. Dmitri intentionally approaches Anna, after seeing her and her comely feature, and the two have intercourse (supposedly, or at least kiss several times, as directly stated in story). But does the sinful adultery between Dmitri and Anna feel so evil? Though people rationally judge this adultery as unacceptable, they probably do not feel the unacceptableness while reading through the story.

Adultery, for Dmitri Gurov, is one mechanism to desolateness. Dmitri is not very well belonged in the society he is involved. He lived in Moscow for his entire life; yet he isn’t so much deeply attached to the community. He always feels uncomfortable with other men, and regards women (whom he gets along with well) as “the lower race”. Women he encounter probably is 

The Lady with the Dog-Visual Depiction

February 24^th, 2013

The Lady with the Dog- Visual Depiction

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit.

12v1 111150 Ho In Hee

  The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov, contains a lot of detailed descriptions of the backgrounds of the novella. It delineates the world protagonist Dmitri Dmitritch sees with faithful portrayals rather than figurative expressions. I could explain some (apparent) ways this story qualifies as a Realism literature, but this time I’d like to give the image I picturized as reading the story, focusing on detailed depictions in it.

1.     Vivid Yalta

Yalta, where Anna and Dmitri met and spent their time together, is described as colorful and peaceful. They have some honest talk (or at least Anna thinks so) and kiss trying to avoid prying eyes. These rather blissful moments in Yalta can be seen in the way Yalta is described in the story. Yalta is depicted as a vibrant place with a lot of people, with its beautiful scene.

“Strange light on the sea: the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it.”

2.     Colorless S----

The city Anna Sergeyevna lives is never revealed in the story-it is merely known as S----. This diffident woman’s hometown is the place where Anna is suppressed by her husband, where she is always anxious. S---- can also be seen as ‘reality’; whereas Yalta is a dreamy place where Anna and Dmitri coincidently meet each other and share love, closing eyes to the exhausting reality, as Anna returns to where her husband is, both undergo separation and return to their usuality. Gurov goes back to Moscow in its dreary winter and Sergeyevna to S---- to live with her husband instead of Gurov. So S----, whatever the place is actually like, is a romanceless place for both Gurov and Sergeyevna. This view would go along with the notable shift in the color described in story, as Sergeyevna’s hometown is portrayed as mainly grey, a murky color contrasting with the cheerful ‘lilac’ and ‘golden’ colors filling Yalta.

“The hotel, in which the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, grey with dust and adorned with a figure on horseback.”

“A long grey fence adorned with nails”

“Fog above the chandelier”

3.     Dreary Moscow

As mentioned above, Moscow to Dmitri Gurov is a monotonous place that he lived for his entire life. Thus Moscow is described as a dull, mono-colored place with no aberration.

“At home in Moscow everything as in its winter routine”

“The white earth, the white roofs”

“White with hoar-frost”

                   
I will later post a more journal-like journal that sticks more strictly to the story itself :)

Realism as Being Real

February 16^th, 2013

Realism in The Student

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho InHee

     By the late 1900s, the powerful Romanticism was being substituted with Realism. From the Age of Reason when humans regarded themselves as all-knowing with a potential of understanding the world, through Romanticism portraying ideal world with sensibility its prime aspect, the literary movement reached so-called “Realism”. Whereas the previous Romanticism took aesthetic and emotional approach to the ideal world, Realism novels largely devoted to conveying the very true and detailed nature.

     Realism is commonly thought to have appeared as a response to Romanticism. The two occurred in consecutive order, with some opposing features such as ideal and real. Generally, ideal is somewhat optimistic, and at times, quixotic (and that’s where this word is from-Don Quixote who was deluded by heroic chivalric novels). Poet Walt Whiteman and others willingly adopted optimistic perspective. But not all Romantic literature was optimistic or realistic. Some of the most renowned Romanticism writers like Edgar Allan Poe stood far from idealistic but instead was much more grotesque.

     Being ‘real’, unlike being ‘ideal’ in Romanticism’, is one essential element in Realism, as the term Realism self-explains. But ‘real’, when juxtaposed with ideal, appears much less hopeful. As Realism is often regarded as a reaction to unrealistically ideal Romanticism, it is often misinterpreted as being pessimistic. True, many Realism literatures cope with rather unpleasant nature of humans that was left unrevealed. They also reach end without having the best resolution. But by definition, Realism includes nothing pessimistic. Movements more or less contemporaneous to Realism- such as Naturalism- together with Realism itself, build up the prevailing image of pessimism. (And in fact, Naturalist authors like Jack London and Stephen Crane did focus on dark human nature.) But again, Realism doesn’t necessarily have to be pessimistic or cynical.

     Anton Chekhov’s The Student, after spending the better part conveying biblical anecdote (of Crucifixion), ends up with the protagonist Ivan all of a sudden realizing the revelation of hopeful future. Readers are often misled to conclude this story as non-Realism due to the out of blue optimistic end. But strictly speaking, the ending itself can never determine a story as Realism (nor exclude it from Realism). Tragic ending is a mere wrong preconception of Realism.

     Then we reach our second question: can Realism include Biblical elements? To answer this, one must first consider the primary grounds for this Biblical anecdote in The Student. Clearly, the Bible itself didn’t contribute to Ivan’s realization of the hopeful world. Disputes among the meaning of the older widow Vasalisa’s tears, whether they are of an aching empathy or her sense of guilt and responsibility for her widowed daughter (not to mention the parallelism between Peter and Vasilisa, and Jesus and Lukerya), seem meaningless in determining Realism. What is important is how Ivan interpreted them, and how this interpretation affected in his realization.

     For me, setting the protagonist as a clerical student and letting him speak of a Bible are mere devices for making the story more probable and likely. Along with detailed descriptions of cold Russian night, sacristan protagonist functions as accurately portraying the late nineteenth century Russia.

     Realism isn’t restrictive in thematic issues. The one and only criterion for Realism is the fidelity to actuality. As literary critic William Dean Howells defines, Realism is “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”. Realism literatures surely can refer to religious anecdotes or beliefs. They also can present optimistic views. The Student in this sense underscores hasty preconceptions of Realism.

+)

I was also curious how Mark Twain was one of the major realist writers, and figured out he wrote, other than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, much more realistic pieces like Adam’s Diary and Eve’s Diary. And for his most sarcastic pieces like Huck Finn, Twain’s point of view in human nature pretty much satisfies the thematic criterion of realism literature (though I wonder then why realism literature is generally regarded as something not sarcastic.)

01. The Student

February 14^th, 2013

“The Student” by Anton Chekhov

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

12v1 111150 Ho InHee

It is almost too common to mention how having profound background knowledge of a literature is pivotal in comprehending it. And it was this regard that perplexed me in my first reading of “The Student” by Anton Chekhov- I literally knew nothing about Russian history or biblical tales. After all, how could I know anything about Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great? Referring to the 16^th century historical figures and using rhetoric, the style of this piece of writing seemed prolix and grandiose.

The plot was not so earthly or realistic. A student of the clerical academy, the protagonist Ivan Velikopolsky suddenly reminds the parallelism of current circumstances to the history. Then, finding two widows (two who are Vasilisa, fat old woman in a man’s coat, and Lukerya, her daughter, a little pock-marked woman with a stupid-looking face as Chekhov puts it) burning a fire, Ivan approaches them and talks about one of Christ’s twelve disciples St. Peter. When his words are done, he leaves the weeping woman. Then, on his way home Ivan has a flash of brilliant insight of the whole world in his mind.

So what is Chekhov trying to convey via this short story? That present is determined by the past? That there exists an unknown cycle that circulates past events again and again? Or that the story of the night before Crucifixion is so penetratingly sad?

Looking into the more technical than contextual, The Student utilizes realistic devices. It very elaborately delineates everything Ivan sees. The story uses phrases like ‘a cold, penetrating wind’, ‘needles of ice’, ‘cheerless, remote, and lonely’ in the introduction to convey the gloominess of night. It describes the appearance of two widows acutely as well (as mentioned above). Detailed descriptions satisfy “verisimilitude”, almost as extremely to seem subjective.

Chekhov also takes third person point of view, which is another major characteristic of realism literature. Through a third person narrative, Chekhov states the thought process of Ivan Velikopolsky directly through narration and Ivan’s words. Stating how Ivan thinks about Vasilisa and the world from time to time, the narrative but leaves out all other perspectives. The story never mentions about the reason for Vasilisa’s tears or Lukerya’s stare.

The Student portrays the reality of the time. Back in late 19^th century, when The Student was written, Russia was reaching towards the end of the Tsar (or ‘Czar’). The superficially successful reform of the established bureaucracy couldn’t save the country from deep recession. Large proportion of the serfs with economic downturn left powerless commoners’ lives impecunious. Further, Roman Catholic was the second most prevalent religion in Russia (following its state religion the Russian Orthodox Christianity). Anton Chekhov depicts both aspects accurately, along with other backdrops of the time such as the status of women.

So far, I found that The Student does satisfy qualities of realism literature. Anton Chekhov does make use of verisimilitude and third person narrative. It is also a pictorial of Russian life in 1890s. But still there is something that makes me uncomfortable fully admitting this story as a realism literature.