Speaking Notes: Forms of Alienation
Mar. 1st, 2003 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldHere they are, my in-class presentation for ENG 493 on the 27th of February:
The Romantics, we are told, are among the first writers–in English-language literature, or in the literatures of any other contemporary Western nation or language–to have focused upon the self. My Romantics textbook gives, as two of the three most obvious general features of Romantic poetry, “intimate self-revelation of the poet, and direct expression of strong, personal emotion” (the third, incidentally, being “persistent reference to nature and natural objects”). It was called an étalage du moi, a display of the self.m It could and often did reflect egoistic self-absoprtion, but this inward examination of one’s self and one desires could be part of a genberal effort to ground their speculative beliefs in experience–to act on Descartes’ belief, a century and a half earlier, that one could be certain of one’s existence as a sentient human being only by contemplation. Wordsworth wrote, in his poem “A Poet’s Epitaph” lines 37 to 52, that:
I remember being taught that the Romantics were pioneers, that they were the first ones to turn to the individual has the means by which knowledge was acquired. But then, I think of Dante’s Inferno, which I encountered in my first year at UPEI in the Continental Literature in Translation class. Looking at Canto 1, lines 1 through 21:
It sounds like Dante had a lot in common with Woodsworth, doesn’t it?
And it isn’t just Western civilization. Look at The Odyssey by Homer, one of the canonical texts of the Classical civilization that preceded and molded ours. It begins with the poor man Odysseus, stranded on an island far from his home, his wife, and his son, wanting to return to all three in order to become complete, to restore a world left fragmented and out of sorts. And don’t forget that the Trojan War that stranded Odysseus in the first place was driven by the desire to bring Paris home (never mind what she herself wanted).
What ties together the literatures of the English Romantics, the ancient Greeks, and the imperial Romans? Quite simply, the fact that their protagonists are outsiders–people who find themselves on the outside. I think of my experience in Anthropology, when we were taught about the participant-observer method of study, which involves remaining far enough outside of a particular society to retain a certain objectivity, while being far enough inside a society (interacting with a society’s members) to know what’s going on. The more that I look at my reading list, the more that I see that the position of the outsider as I’ve described above–the sensitive individual, the observer who takes not, who participates while remaining separate–is present throughout the books that I’ve read.
Examples:
The Romantics, we are told, are among the first writers–in English-language literature, or in the literatures of any other contemporary Western nation or language–to have focused upon the self. My Romantics textbook gives, as two of the three most obvious general features of Romantic poetry, “intimate self-revelation of the poet, and direct expression of strong, personal emotion” (the third, incidentally, being “persistent reference to nature and natural objects”). It was called an étalage du moi, a display of the self.m It could and often did reflect egoistic self-absoprtion, but this inward examination of one’s self and one desires could be part of a genberal effort to ground their speculative beliefs in experience–to act on Descartes’ belief, a century and a half earlier, that one could be certain of one’s existence as a sentient human being only by contemplation. Wordsworth wrote, in his poem “A Poet’s Epitaph” lines 37 to 52, that:
But who is He, with modest looks,
and clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,–
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
I remember being taught that the Romantics were pioneers, that they were the first ones to turn to the individual has the means by which knowledge was acquired. But then, I think of Dante’s Inferno, which I encountered in my first year at UPEI in the Continental Literature in Translation class. Looking at Canto 1, lines 1 through 21:
Midway in our life’s journey I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.
How I came to it I cannot rightly say,
so drugged and loose with sleep had I become
when I first wandered there from the True Way.
But at the far end of that valley of evil
whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear!
I found myself before a little hill
and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed
already with the sweet rays of that planet
whose virtue leads men straight on every road,
and the shining strengthened me against the fright
whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart
through all the terrors of that piteous night.
It sounds like Dante had a lot in common with Woodsworth, doesn’t it?
And it isn’t just Western civilization. Look at The Odyssey by Homer, one of the canonical texts of the Classical civilization that preceded and molded ours. It begins with the poor man Odysseus, stranded on an island far from his home, his wife, and his son, wanting to return to all three in order to become complete, to restore a world left fragmented and out of sorts. And don’t forget that the Trojan War that stranded Odysseus in the first place was driven by the desire to bring Paris home (never mind what she herself wanted).
What ties together the literatures of the English Romantics, the ancient Greeks, and the imperial Romans? Quite simply, the fact that their protagonists are outsiders–people who find themselves on the outside. I think of my experience in Anthropology, when we were taught about the participant-observer method of study, which involves remaining far enough outside of a particular society to retain a certain objectivity, while being far enough inside a society (interacting with a society’s members) to know what’s going on. The more that I look at my reading list, the more that I see that the position of the outsider as I’ve described above–the sensitive individual, the observer who takes not, who participates while remaining separate–is present throughout the books that I’ve read.
Examples:
- Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children
- Emily Montague in The History of Emily Montague
- Bazarov in Fathers and Sons
- Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises
- Mrs. Bentley in As For Me and My House
- Naomi Nakane in Obasan
- Oedipa Mass in The Crying of Lot 49
