P1 – LIONEL TRILLING

- modern literature: shockingly personal, asks personal questions

- anti heroes: subversive, unhappy, criminal
- a quarrel between an individual and his community
- Matthew Arnold – ideas of modern culture: well-being, rationality, tolerance
- betrayed by our culture (Marcuse, Rich)
- no adequate knowledge of the self (identification of self with rationality) at the cost of
imagination, feelings, Eros
- Nietzsche: two opposing principles: Dionysian (non-ethical) and Apollonian (reason)
- outburst of suppressed energies: war, genocide
- loss of vital connection with the world
- accepting the concept by coercion or seduction
- options of escape: 1. alternative tradition, 2. biological fact (the death wish - Thanatos)

Lionel Trilling is a teacher of modern literature. He starts his essay saying that modern
literature is shockingly personal, that it tends to ask all sorts of personal questions: whether we are
satisfied with our personal life, career, sexual life, but also asks if we feel saved or damned, whether
our life is meaningful, what is it that redeem sour life, if we feel like living in heaven or hell. It asks
these questions by introducing characters which are subversive, unhappy, critical of the society, even
criminals sometimes. The hero of modern literature is basically an anti-hero. In the previous epochs,
literature would tend to show how he/she would belong to a culture, that is, it would teach how to
belong. Modern literature, on the contrary, opens up a quarrel between an individual and a culture. In
his lectures Trilling very early abandoned formalism and focused on the question WHY. He thought
that it was the most important question: Why is the hero of the modern literature unhappy. What is it
that‟s wrong with modern culture that produces hostility? He tries to explain this by quoting an old
lecture by Matthew Arnold in which he expressed his vision of what modern culture should be like.
What M. A. praised mostly were material well-being, tolerance of various opinions, rationality, order--
-Trilling points out that all these ideas are hypocritically betrayed by our civilization – not openly, but
hypocritically: existing in form, but not in substance. For instance, the notion of tolerance is very
problematic. Marcuse wrote a very influential essay in the 60’s called Repressive tolerance. He
wanted to point out that in the western civilization very often the most negative, repressive ideas are
tolerated alongside with the most progressive ones so that eventually you lose your moral compass. In
addition, according to Trilling, the idea of well-being is also hypocritical, because we are led to believe
that a certain society or political option is acceptable if it provides material abundance. It can be a very
corrupting concept: people accept certain political opinions simply because they offer material well-
being; they do not worry about moral consequences. Also, wrong with modern culture is that it does
not provide us with the adequate knowledge of the self. Modern culture can give a very high place to
an individual self, and yet not know what the self is or what it might become. The modern civilization
has not the concept of the self – how one can develop and grow. The self in our civilization is mostly
identified with rationality: Cogito, ergo sum. – Descartes. According to Trilling, what is not included
in the concept of the self are imagination and feelings – these things are usually of secondary
importance, they are left aside.
A similar idea is described by Nietzsche. What is important in our life is dialectical relation of
the two opposing principles. There is the Dionysian principle that represents non-ethical, irrational
energies. This was the idea that individuals disappear during the orgiastic rites, oneness is achieved
and these periodical returns to Mother Nature are very important. On the other hand, there is this
Apollonian principle – rationality, individuality; after all this is what makes us human. Both
principles are promoted and the second one encourages the feeling of separation. Both Trilling and
Nietzsche point out that if we disregard imagination, feelings and urges, we lose the vital connection
with the world. Furthermore, these suppressed irrational energies can burst out in a highly
destructive way – events such as wars and genocides are the revenge of such energies. This
inadequate, narrow concept of the self that is proposed by the culture is forced upon an individual by
either coercion or seduction. There are societies such as Stalinism (eastern societies), where people
are forced to accept a system by sheer force and repression. Seduction can also be a way of imposing
certain patterns. It is more characteristic of western society. “Our desire is stolen from us.” – Adrianne
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Rich. Our deepest human desires seems to be stolen from us: to be happy, to be loved, to be able to
love, to find meaning in life. However, the society usually cannot grant such wishes. It can provide
material well-being, comfort… So, she says: “Our desire is stolen from us, then false desires are
fabricated and sold back to us.” The society will try to persuade us that what is important in life is to
have money, travel, have a lot of cars, because that’s what society can grant us: material artifacts,
luxury… Western societies function by reducing the range of desires. According to Trilling, these are
the reasons that the modern hero is unhappy.
The option is an escape from the omnipotent culture. Trilling discusses the option by talking
about the life of Sigmund Freud. He was a Jew living in a very anti-Semitist culture: Vienna, Austria.
It was oppressive in many ways. Trilling says that Freud managed to survive by being able to find a
point beyond culture, (Trilling’s book Beyond Culture) where you can detach yourself from the
culture. Freud was very much interested in ancient cultures and knew a lot about the English culture.
There was also his own Jewish culture. One of the possibilities that the modern writer explores is to
find an alternative tradition, so that you are able to make comparisons, to judge and perhaps revise
your own culture. The other option, according to Trilling, is to be able to think about oneself as a
biological fact. Freud was able to distance himself from an anti-Semitist world by thinking about this
portion of the self which culture cannot influence. It is like a residue of our personality, a small part of
us that cannot be reached by the manipulations of the culture. When culture manipulates us, it creates
stereotypes. Freud’s idea is not regressive, but optimistic.
Another important idea in Freud is the idea of the death wish. An English writer, E. M. Forster
said: “Death destroys man, but the idea of death saves him from the omnipotence of culture.” If you
do not want to be broken by the culture, sometimes the only option is death. That is the last option.

On the Teaching of Modern Literature

from Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
by Lionel Trilling

#1, p 19 – I propose … through it. He says he is going to discuss a particular theme of

modern literature – the disappointment of culture itself. The theme of the modern literature is the
bitter line of hostility to civilization.
#2, p 23 –No literature … of spirituality. Modern literature poses personal questions:
whether you are happy with your marriage… It makes you feel uneasy, uncomfortable. The writer is
not o critic of his culture because the questions are not about culture but about individuals.
Literature is also concerned with salvation: we are concerned with our own spirituality. It is
about being saved – secularization of spirituality.
#3, pp 29/30 Arnold … energy and passion.– M. Arnold’s idea of modern culture –
material well-being is important. Trilling about these ideas: the achievements of modern civilization
are not available to everybody. Modern literature has taught us to think critically about these ideals.
The benefits are limited to a particular class and a particular country. You enjoy certain benefits at the
cost of others who do not.
But the historic sense … as mainly contemptible. He is trying to suppress our awareness of the
violence present in the civilization. Literature does not want to suppress the knowledge of this history
of violence and destructiveness. The order of the modern culture is achieved at the cost of personal
repression. We have to fit in so that the society can function. A great part of our personality has to be
suppressed. There are two methods: coercion and seduction/ acquiescence. Material growth is
corrupting. People are content with the material well-being only. They are happy if they are rich. Their
desires are reduced. (Devil’s advocate – in order to gain money and fame he renounced his
principles.)
#4, pp 35/36 – For one thing, he puts to us … masculine moral character.
According to Freud, is there an alternative to the civilization? Freud does not believe in primitive
innocence. He tells about this as about the only alternative. There is no way out, you can only accept
this civilization. Each rebellion leads to neurosis, insanity. There is a sort of stoicism in Freud. There is
no way out even though the civilization has its disadvantages: sternness - man does not belong to his
family. Stoic response to life. Man suppresses a great part of his personality but that is the only
possible way – to accept this patriarchal society, civilization. Modern literature is suspicious about the
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ideas of modern culture. It asks too much from us in comparison to what it gives in return. The loss
is not compensated for. Female characters suffer in patriarchal civilizations: Antigona, Ophelia,
Tess…

Within and Beyond Culture

from Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
by Sigmund Freud

#1, pp 97/98 – Literature offers itself … at this time. It is about the relationship
between an individual and literature. Literature can offer us a more adequate concept of the self and in
that way it helps. This is how literature is subversive – it can show us what we miss. The culture does
not offer us that.
#2, pp 101/102 – It can of course … to life in culture. Freud believed that there was a
point beyond the reach of culture – death – the idea of death saves man because death is the last
resort when you do no want to be crushed by the system- the idea that there is such a resort saves
man.
Jean Paul Sartre: “The extent of an individual’s freedom is measured by his/her
capacity to say „rather death than‟ – I am not going to accept some things even if my life is in danger.
#3 pp 104/105 – Why did it not … being absolute. – Freud lived in an anti-Semitic
society and was a Jew. To escape it and avoid death he studied other cultures – he was above his
culture and saw the disadvantages of the society he lived in. he moved beyond the reach of the
dominant culture so that it could not possess him or affect him. You need a point of view – here other
cultures – in order to be critical to other views.
Being a human being, he can also resist that society by using your biological powers – a sort of
rebellion of the body. Trilling says that some people considered Freud’s idea as reactionary and that it
was progressive to think you can change everything. The idealistic view – these manipulations should
be positive but we can resist them when they are negative. Trilling says it is not like this – when a
culture wants to manipulate us it is not for our benefit. As this Freud‟s idea is no reactionary but
saving because there is a part of our being which cannot be affected.

L1 – LEAVIS, WILSON, TRILLING

- humanist criticism:
1. romantic conception of the self – man can create himself
2. divided self – can become whole, imagination
3. literature – a medium of this healing - privileged space
4. continuity with the past traditions
- anti-humanist criticism
1. subject determined by ideology
2. split subject: desire of the other
3. literature - one of ideological practices complicit with culture
4. break with the past – nostalgia – an impotent longing for nonexistent origin
- Three Honest Men – moral approach to literature: values of life and literature are the same –
minds more important than methods
- Literature: questioning the dominant ethos:
Trilling – options: - great fights over images of personal being
- hostility to culture: false, inaccurate knowledge of the self
Wilson – continuity: romanticism – symbolism – modernism; reactions against
reductive conceptions of the self: classicism/naturalism
Symbolists’ options: imagination (Axel)/ action (Rimbaud) – Y is another
Leavis – Blake: Life is a necessary word.
- Jerusalem – symbol of resurrection
- poetry and the modern world – the poet more alive, more conscious than ordinary man
- late Victorian poetry – more dead than bad
- split: cerebral muscle/simple emotions
- withdrawal – not a valid criticism of life
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 1. Humanist criticism and anti-humanist criticism have two different conceptions of the self.
The humanist criticism (Leavis) has preserved the Romantic conception of the self. In Romanticism,
the individual has capacity to create, shape his life, his own self. In the Anti-Humanist criticism, the
self is no longer called the self; it has been replaced by the term subject. We are all subject. The word
has two meanings: 1 – doer of the action, 2 – subjected - from birth, predetermined by external forces,
has no his deepest desires. He is subjected to the laws of culture. His desires are primarily desires of
the other. We are enveloped into a network of social wishes even before we are born. Our wishes are
determined by the society.
Adrienne Rich – our desires are stolen from us, fabricated and sold back. According to
humanists, we can remember what we actually longed for. According to anti-humanists, we are born
into a system and unable to find our self, since it is changed.
2. Romantic man (Blake) was aware that man is a divided being; there is a split between head
and heart, reason and imagination, body and soul. The split is due to the culture that suppressed
feelings and imagination. Romantics believed that the split can be overcome. Man can be resurrected
and not be a fallen man. Humanist critics show the conviction that man, although fragmented, can
achieve wholeness. According to the Anti-Humanists, man is forever split. He is never one with
himself. He can never penetrate to his deepest self because it does not exist. It is even desirable to
feel you are divided, that you are a multiplicity never integrated morally. This theory of man
suits the modern system. In that way, you can prevent rebellion, you can eliminate resistance and
any questioning. Inner fragmentation means global unification. Anti-Humanist theorists
described themselves as revolutionary and progressive. According to them, it is a step forward.
3. According to Leavis, literature is a privileged space, a special medium in which this
process of becoming one takes place. It is a medium in which coming together of various contradictory
parts takes place. Literature has an important role. In true literature, which is the product of
imagination, we are urged to fine our true place. That is where an individual finds strength to resist
culture. It is a place where an individual is infused with the power necessary for living.
According to Anti-Humanists, this is nonsense. Whatever we do is covered with ideology and
literature is also one among many ideological practices. Through a writer ideology writes itself
– there is no special status of literature. According to them there is no difference between
different kinds of literature. Everything is relativized. Great literature is just a phrase that you cannot
use without being accused of being a conservative. Every literature is ideology.
4. For Leavis, it is important for a critic to keep in touch with his or her cultural heritage and
to save memory of it. Specially those traditions in which images of the wholeness of being are
preserved. The Romantics try to preserve the wholeness of being. They look back towards those
traditions where they can find a model of integrity of a person. Post- Modernism is inimical to history
and nostalgia. Every looking back to the past means weakness, conservative. There is no justification
for looking back at the literature of the past. According to them, Shakespeare is considered a
misogynist- he was either shaped by the patriarchal culture and therefore he could not resist hostile
attitude to women or he was a defender of monarchy. This is preposterous. When King Lear became
an ordinary man, foolish, he was transformed into a real human being. Anti-Humanists use a
hypocritical role. Behind their revolutionary mask, they are in fact serving the system. Not all of them,
though. There are those who combine scientific approach to literature with Humanist approach.
Derrida – individual in his Anti-Humanist. Literature is to be criticized.
Three Honest Man: Leavis, Wilson and Trilling can be together designated as moral critics.
They maintain that the values we summon in order to judge the work of art are the same as values we
live by. Life and literature here are one and the same thing. Literature is a moral activity. The
interpretation of literature is a moral choice. Wilson (a journalist), for example, used an
accessible kind of language. His basic idea was to communicate with his readers, to talk about
literature with a wide public circle. Leavis and Trilling are the founding fathers who introduced
English literature into Cambridge and the University of Columbia and made literature the most
serious subject matter and the moral core to humanistic sciences. They refused to fall into any
specialized jargon – you have a feeling you are talking to an intelligent man and not a specialist. Their
primary wish was to inspire the love for literature. No conscious method has developed because they
thought that the love is more important than method. If we just use a method, when we finish analysis

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of the book, the question why is not answered. They confronted with the whole personality with a
book. That was the only approach for them – to tackle it with a complete moral awareness.
Trilling was a moral critic. According to him, literature is about great moral fights over the
personal images of being, it is about the self, about identity, about what individual is. Modern
literature is very hostile to culture. Why this open quarrel in such a subversive way? Because the kind
of the self that culture offers us is a very reductive type of the self we have to follow – it asks us to
identify with the concept of personality that is very reduced. Modern literature is shockingly personal.
For a while, he avoided it resorting to a method. Then he realized it was against the grain. He realized
he had to ask these questions, all else was evasion. Culture promotes the kind of self that is
inadequate. It is proud because it gives honorific place to the personal self, and yet, the democratic
culture does that without knowing what the self is or what its desires are. The chef values are success
and prestige. In order to achieve this and to win the social race, the modern man has to be ruthless,
without scruples, to have instrumentalized mind.
C. P. Snow?. We are living in two cultures: humanist and scientific. We have to choose one.
For Leavis, this was outrageous. Snow was an ill omen, he pointed to the way in which most people
chose to live.
The ultimate question is if we are saved. Are we saved by more jam tomorrow? from Two
Cultures by Leaves. What is it that people live for? What do we live by or what do we live for?
More jam or more emotional completeness thanks to which we can love.
According to Trilling, literature asks us shocking questions in order to subvert the system
according to which we live: reduced desires of individuals, modern culture can be proud of its ideology
after it has convinced and individual to like what he has. Literature is the last enclave in which those
values can be radically questioned. The ultimate question is if we are saved or doomed – not
identified with physical survival.
Freud. Literature charts ways of going beyond culture, beyond the system of values. There are
two chief options:
1. One way to resist the omnipotence of culture is to compare it to other cultures. These critics
maintain that the connection with the past is important because it helps us judge and revise our
culture. When we see the alternative, we can choose, refuse, judge. Coetzee: his character managed to
jump over the fence – restriction of culture. Garden is the ideal, the mental attitude.
2. Certain people have a gift to experience themselves as a being with biological reason, as
biological facts. They have not lost touch with their inner selves. There are people who have the gift to
preserve blood knowledge, to have biological reason that will not yield to any pressure that is against
biological in man. Barker – biological soul – soul is the expression of the oldest writings of
humanity in us; my entire body is my soul. Biological reason that does not yield to any pressure –
such people can resist culture. Michael K – Whenever he was arrested, he was forced to eat, do
exercises, but threw up. Then, they put tubes in his nose. Doctor – your mind does not rebel, but
your body refuses to eat prison food. He could eat only what he produced by his own hands. Each man
has to find what nourishes him, the food of freedom.
Axel and Rimbaud by Wilson. The whole book is devoted to symbolist writers. The purpose
of the book is to establish continuity, links between Romanticism, Symbolism and Modernism.
The question is What is the self? Both Romanticism and Symbolism were reactions against two
reductive ideas of the self – Classicism and Naturalism. Classicism – the main assumption about
man is taken from mathematics and astronomy. The world is seen as a clockwork mechanism. Man
equals reason. What made man a man was his reason and not imagination and emotions. Literature
was to follow the rules that excluded to much of life. Blake and Keats stood up against the classicism
in the name of visionary kind of knowledge, against the rational, scientific optics excluding
imagination and Eros. Byron - Classicism did not exclude Eros and libido – the image of the self as a
lover. Then, the pendulum swung again to the other extreme – Naturalism. According to
Naturalism, man is conditioned by his heredity and cultural factors. According to Zola, man is
conditioned by 3 factors: social milieu, historical time and heredity. Symbolists rebelled against this in
the name of the freedom of vision, erotic life and imagination. In the conclusion of this book Wilson
speaks about the options as defined by the symbolists at the end of the century. He uses two most
illustrative examples: Rimbaud and a fictional character of a French writer – Axel. Axel (one
option) is intelligent and noble; he is the owner of secret hermetic traditions. He meets a woman
called Sara and the two of them fall in love. Life will never be equal to our imagination. Life is
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servitude. Culture turned life into servitude and he committed suicide. It was his refusal to interact
with society, to retreat to the ivory castle and to save what is most human in oneself. This is not a good
solution; ultimately, it is a defeat. Another example is the French poet – Rimbaud. He is another
extreme. In order to become a visionary poet, he had to destroy all his senses. He felt handicapped by
the prevailing optics. He had to see the invisible, something that the bourgeois optics excluded. He
indulged all kinds of perverted activity in order to penetrate to that layer of being that he called soul –
not Christian but biological soul. He discerned it and the results were One Season in Hell and
Illumination. I is another – he used all means to reach this epiphany. He chose pure action, in
contrast to Axel, who chose pure contemplation. He felt that, in spite of his poetry, he could not assure
the kind of life he wanted to live. He left Europe. He spat into the faces of his teachers and masters.
Teachers and masters, you know nothing about soul. I‟m a nigger, I‟m a beast. He came to realize
that the soul was what they had told him it was not. After he had left, he died.
Wilson does not approve either of Axel’s or Rimbaud’s solution. You gave to combine them
both – action and contemplation/imagination, a public person and inner self – in order to become a
complete human being and live in this society. Ultimately, this oscillation between reason and
imagination must cease. If you withdraw from the society, you have to deteriorate and degenerate. In
Modernism – Ulysses – these opposing aspects will be reconciled.
Nor Shall My Sword (1972), English Literature in the University (1964) and New
Bearings in English Literature (1932) by Leavis. In New Bearings in English Literature, he
parallels with Wilson. He condemns symbolists for failing to provide us with new ethics. He gave a
similar pigment on the late Victorian and Georgian poetry in Poetry in the Modern World– world
is too harsh for their poetic sensibility so they withdrew to the poetic dream world. Life is a
necessary word – you do not achieve life if you withdraw. Leavis is deploying the fact that
the modern poet – the late Victorian poet – is split between sensuous experience and cerebral muscle.
If divorced from intelligence, emotions degenerate and become cheaply sentimental;
and intelligence itself without emotions cannot lead you to proper pigments. If it is vice
versa, if intelligence is divorced from emotions, it becomes vulgar shrewdness that
enables you to have more jam. Life presupposes completeness.
This poetry is not so much bad as dead. Poet refuses to confront the world. He finds rescue in
the dream world, a product of Poetic diction, preconception of what are proper poetic themes. This
was adequate in Romanticism. Now poetry was not about weeping and so on – the poets produce
poems that do not respond to experience – do not engage contemporary experience and this is dead.
He looks back to Romanticism as a proper model of completeness. He goes back to Blake – Nor Shall
My Sword – Jerusalem for Blake was a symbol of resurrection and reintegration of a fragmented man
into a new personality. According to Blake, man of his age was a divided person: Urisen and Loss.
Urisen – a projection of man who wants to master life of manageable formality, control it by
knowledge. There is something in man that wants to master the mystery of life in order to feel safe.
However, it is not enough. One has to surrender oneself to the incessant vital game. You also have to
serve life. Loss welcomes novelty; it is in our capacity to be moved by something. Loss is imagination.
In order to achieve Jerusalem, reintegration of Urisen and the Loss in us is
necessary. If we overdevelop Urisen, our imagination will die. If the poet wants to perform his
function, he must be more alive than an ordinary man. In poets, the self is shown most obviously. He
should reintegrate in himself the Loss and Urisen. The late Victorian poets did not manage to do so.
The modern poets can achieve this reintegration. Leavis never ceased from his own mental fight. He
fought against postmodern literature. One should remain true and preserve cultural tradition. We
always start at home and end up with a common tradition. It is America that thinks our cultural
tradition is provincial. We should share our cultural tradition with the third realm that capitalist
economy and technology despise.

P2 – RICHARDS, RANSOM, ELIOT

- from Renaissance on, literature is on the defensive (escapism – not true scientifically)
- Romanticism: ‘imagination’ – 1. imaginary = untrue, 2. imaginative = inventive, creative
- a vision of what should be created
- empiricism, rationality (neutralization of nature), materialism in ethics
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Richards:
- science – proper statement, factual reality
- poetry – pseudo-statements = release and organize our instincts – meaning
- God, soul as pseudo-statement
Ransom:
- ideas vs. images
- ideas reduce the world to a manageable, simple formula
Blake: Urisen vs. loss = mastery vs. service to life
- image appeals to the entire being, intuition, imagination
- Platonic impulse – to reduce image to an idea – man as habitual killer
- metaphor: to connect the facts of life into a meaningful whole – metaphysical poetry
T. S. Eliot
- anti-individualist (Catholic, royalist, traditionalist)
- selfish/generic self– psychological needs – ego – encouraged by modern societies
- genuine self– surrender – spiritual realm – selfless love
- to surrender one’s idiosyncrasies to the mind of Europe – historical sense - presence of past
values
- to surrender to the creative process, poet as a catalyst – fusion
- tradition: Shakespeare – metaphysical poets – unified sensibility

These 3 belong to the new criticism. They developed a new approach to analyzing literature
which is called ‘close-reading’. They focused closely on the stylistic, structural devices. They were not
interested in the outside facts but in the body of the work. Metaphor is very important for them. The
way they understand metaphor is closely related to how they defend poetry. From the Renaissance on
literature has been on the defensive- many writers felt the need to defend poetry. Phillip Sydney felt
that poetry was at odds with the reality. Because of the statements made by poetry are not true in
scientific sense, literature is often accused of being an escape from reality. In Romanticism, the terms
‘imaginary’ and ‘imaginative’ were identified. These terms can have both positive and negative
connotations. ‘Imaginary’ = something that is not true, opposite to reality. ‘Imaginative? = creative,
inventive. In that sense, science is also imaginative. The Romantics thought about imagination as a
faculty that enables them to express that which is lacking, a kind of poverty, a feeling of loss,
inadequacy in the world around them. It was more important for them to write about that which does
no exist, to point out and in a way represent a vision of what should be created. Romanticist rebelled
against rationality; they were trying to point out the values that were lacking. The characteristic of the
modern world that created this feeling of poverty and loss, the feeling that soul is impoverished, are
first of all: empiricism – a kind of fetishism of the fact: only that which can be scientifically proved as
a fact is recognized; rationality – to observe the world as a neutral object of investigation. Also,
materialism in ethics – what is good is equalized with what is useful – utilitarianism – marriage: an
issue of social standard, a means of improving social position.
Richards: he talks about 2 kinds of statements: 1st statements proper = statements made by
science, science establishes facts and deals with factual reality; it replies to the question HOW. It
glues the world by the principle of cause and effect. The statements that science makes are true
without doubt. However, the statements that poetry makes are true on a different level – for our inner
life. As opposed to science, we have poetry that makes 2nd pseudo-statements. Richards says that their
purpose is to release and organize our instincts and emotions. In this way, it gives us the sense of
direction and it provides us with meaning. Science cannot supply the meaning of live – it only
describes; whereas literature by writing down the most important human experiences actually tries to
answer the question WHY. Science explains the lightening but not our feelings when we see it. What
we feel when it is thundering is primordial awe. For this reason, notions such as god and soul are also
pseudo-statements. They cannot be scientifically proved, are no scientific facts. However, they are, in
a way, the metaphors for our inner reality and for our need to give life meaning. So, without the
workings of religion, or myth or creative imagination, our inner world cannot be expressed. It is not
just that our inner nature remains dumb if we rely on science, but we also cannot express any feeling
of empathy with nature because science neutralizes nature.
Ransom: (the essay is from the book The World’s Body) he says that science and reason
supply only the skeleton and poetry is like the living body. He criticizes the kind of poetry that lies only
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on ideas. He says that ideas tend to reduce and simplify the world, whereas art should be based on
images. Images as we encounter in the physical world consist of numerous qualities and appeal to
our whole being. For instance, the sun can stand for various ideas: light, life, heat, drying, deserts…
various meanings can be extracted from one image. And if poetry deals with images it will also appeal
to our whole being. This tendency to reduce a complex image or a complex life experience
to an idea is what Ransom calls ‘the Platonic impulse’. There is a tendency to reduce the
complexity of life to some manageable formula and Ransom says that we do it out of fear. We are
afraid of the things we cannot fully comprehend: the mystery of the inner and the outer nature and so
we tend to oversimplify. This is the activity of human life that Blake personifies in the figure of Urisen
– represented with a compass in his hands – he draws borders, creates definitions. This is an
activity that is necessary for us to comprehend the world. On the other hand, it can destroy the
feeling of novelty, our capacity to wonder, to experience something new and fresh, which is why
Blake created a counter figure, an opposite figure – the figure of loss. The Urisenic attitude to life
makes us feel as masters. We reduce the world to a manageable formula. The loss creativity makes us
feel as joyous servants of life- Leavis. Loss represents this free creative imagination, capacity to
wonder. Platonic impulse is very prominent in ideologies and it can be very dangerous because it
can be used to justify murdering, for example, in wars – you are not killing human beings, but a
concept – your enemies. This is why this Platonic impulse is destructive. Ransom basically expresses
the same idea as Richards – that the best kind, the most proper kind of poetry is the metaphysical
poetry, because it manages to unite physical images with abstract metaphysical ideas. In this way, the
poet not only represents the physical reality to us, but also supplies meaning – a connection between
physical image and a deeper meaning.
T. S. Eliot: Just like these two critics, Eliot believes that the concept of the self offered by the
modern world is inadequate. He has somewhat different solutions to the problem. In his personal life
he was conservative, in all areas of life he was an anti-individualist. He wanted to be converted from
Protestantism to Catholicism. In Protestantism there is a stress on the relationship between the
individual and God. In Catholicism, every individual is subordinated to the Church as a community. In
Politics, he was a royalist, in literature he was a classicist and a traditionalist. So, in every area of life
he was against individualism, he was always looking for ways to transcend personal
egotism. He claimed that in every person, there exists selfish/generic self – it is egotistic, selfish. It
demands physiological things such as food, sex, material comfort. Eliot says that if our life is based on
the needs of this selfish self, then it could be presented as: birth, copulation, death – this is the life of
the generic self. This generic self is aggressive and it always demands more. Eliot says that as long as
we are entrapped within that egotistic, selfish self, we cannot truly communicate with the world.
We think of the key
Each in his prison
Thinking of the key
Each confirms a prison
The Waste Land
Each ego is like a prison and the only way to transcend this loneliness, this isolation
is to surrender to something larger and more important than the self. This is how we
achieve the genuine self. For Eliot, this that is larger than our ego is the spiritual realm and what we
have to surrender to is love. It is a message conveyed in all religions – surrender to love. Without this
spiritual realm, Eliot claims that life is meaningless. It is a kind of life that is not possessive. It is
represented by Christ. Eliot‟s criticism of society: society usually encourages egotistic self. This is
why he was against individualism as practiced in the modern society. This idea of transcending
egotism can also be applied to literature. In literature Eliot demands that the writer should not
express his personality, but try to relate, connect to the Mind of Europe. The poet should be aware of
tradition of the past. He should acquire the historical sense. He should be aware of the values of the
past that are still relevant for the present. The spiritual values that Eliot emphasized may be found in
the past and it is the role of the poet to explain how and why they should be restored to the modern
world. Another way in which the poet transcends his egotistic self is surrender it to the creative
process, surrender is the key word. The poet has the role that is analogous to the role of a catalyst in a
chemical process. A chemical reaction cannot succeed without a catalyst, but the catalyst itself does
not exist in the product of the reaction. The poet starts from various experiences. T. S. Eliot says that
the poet can, for example, read Spinoza, hear something from the other room, smell something and
8
connect all these experiences into a new whole. What is important and praised in poetry is not the
intensity of a personal emotion because it leads to perversion, but the intensity of fusion.
Important for each poet is to establish, to find his own tradition. Eliot felt that he belonged to a
tradition that leads from Shakespeare to metaphysical poets. Metaphysics possessed unified
sensibility. At the moment when a metaphysical poet was writing it was still possible to connect the
imaginary and the scientific. They could use a scientific discovery, notion in a poem as a part of a
metaphor. They did not experience this as a kind of split. They were capable of using any experience in
poetry. They did not experience this dissociation between reason and emotions.

Pseudo-statements in Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature

by I. A. Richards

#1, pp 86/87 We must look further … mind can be based. A pseudo-statement is true
if it serves some attitude or links together attitudes, if it connects our emotions and feelings. A
pseudo-statement is justified by its effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes, we feel
it is true in effect; a statement is intensified by its truth. Scientific statement is related to facts,
pseudo-statement to effect on us, our emotions, what we experience as true, when it evokes a kind of
response in us - then we feel it as true.
Both these statements are important for our everyday life. The great danger in the modern age
he perceives is this extreme rationality, reliance on the scientific worldview that discards pseudo-
statements. In addition, the loss of religious certainties – they are rejected; some people rely on
scientific truths completely and have no way to express their inner being. That is no more a language
in which that inner being is to be expressed.
#2, pp 88/89 The long-established … and sex alone. Relation between neutrality of
nature and divorce from poetry – science neutralizes nature. Poetry is closely connected to nature.
They are both neutralized by science. Poetry deals with that by trying to describe nature and its
meaning. We are embedded in our own psychological nature and do not know how to communicate
with it. The modern man is uprooted - he has lost the contact with his roots.
The feeling of desolation – the thirst for life-giving water. A thirst for some sort of inner energy
with which we cannot connect.
Our impulses are explained through our biological needs. We recognize a certain need but
some other psychological needs are not justified. People cannot find the meaning of life in food only.

Poetry – A Note on Ontology

from The World’s Body in American Tradition: the Makers and the Making
by J. C. Ransom

#1, p2845 But we must be very careful … freshness upon them. Image is a universal
poetry. Science does not observe the whole complexity; it reduces it to one property. Novel tries to
represent a whole man alive, it tries to present the complexity, offers a comprehensive view and
science focuses on some segments only, it can never give us the whole thing. Science destroys the
image by abstraction and we lose the power of imagination. We become aware of the complexity of
reality in our dreams, in our imagination. Dream reproaches during the day and we become aware of
something we have forgotten. We dream in images. Every image has many meanings – just like in
poetry. The language of modern dreams is picturesque and metaphoric. It starts from pictures and our
entire being reacts to pictures, whereas our mind reacts only to conceptions. The language of dreams
is more comprehensive.
#2, p2847 Platonism in the sense … fly in shame. Platonism is a worldview, pretty
limited because it reduces world. People like to apply this worldview because they need to understand
everything – they are afraid. But, when people understand everything, it is a predatory impulse – we
think that we control the world.
Platonic view versus the original perception – these two fail to coincide. The world of
perception is populated by stubborn, contingent objects. The artists feel that the Platonic world is
inadequate and they go back to the world of perceptions. They do not believe the conceptions that
simplify the world.
9
 #3, pp 2852/2853 Specifically, the miraculism … principles and abstractions.
Cowley depicted in a poem himself and his beloved exchanging their hearts – literally. They actually
exchanged their love – conceit.
There is a connection between religion and a conceit. We cannot scientifically prove that there
is God. Bible is full of powerful images and these images address our whole being – they evoke
emotional, sensual response, that is, all kinds of responses. Every religion is a kind of a metaphor for
our need to understand the world as a meaningful whole – God is a metaphor for meaning. Physical
world and the world of abstractions are unified and with imagination provide meaning. Religion tries
to do the same, that is, to connect and give meaning.

Tradition and the Individual Talent in Oxford Anthology of Modern British

Culture
by T. S. Eliot

#1, p 506 Yet, if the only … of his own contemporaneity. He sees tradition as
something that cannot be inherited, you must obtain it. There has to be this historical sense: involves
perception of the pastness and presence of past. To consider the values that existed and still exist, that
is, to find those values today, in present – look at the past. (related to Trilling – you find something
wrong with your tradition – in order to find out what is that, look at other traditions.)
#2, p 508 The analogy was … which are its material. The mind of the poet is
compared to a catalyst – a catalyst is necessary for the process to happen, but the result contains no
catalyst. Platinum symbolizes the poet’s personality and the result – the poem. The poet is necessary
to make this fusion happen – he combines various experiences together – the better the poet, the less
personal the poem will be. The poem is supposed to have some universal meaning. It should be able to
communicate to all of us.
#3, p 510 It is not … from these things. Eliot does not except complex emotions or
different feelings from a poet, but an intensity of fusion – everything that happens should be blended
together. Emotions in a work of art are different from personal emotions. It does not mean that
Shakespeare experienced Othello’s feelings – this is artistic emotion that conveys a meaning to us.
The Dark Embryo.

P3 - LUKACS AND LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Lukacs:
- hope as a moral obligation (Dostoyevsky)
- Romantics: withdrawal to nature only temporary
- decrease of the possibility of integration (Axel, Rimbaud, Leavis)
- What is man? 1. zoom politicon (traditional), 2. solitary being (modern)
- Heidegger: throwness into being
- static vision of human condition (Godot)
- potentialities – choice – moment of self – realization
1. terminus a quo: discontent with the bourgeois society
2. terminus ad quem: psychopathology
- Marxism as a new map and way of reading history
Althusser:
- ideology: imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence
- individual vs. subject, 1. free subjectivity (author of one’s actions),
3. subjected being
- ideological state apparatuses (ISA) – family, education, media, language
repressive state apparatuses (RSA) – police, the law, army
- material practice governed by rituals, prescribed by ISA
- hailing: transformation of individual into a subject
- art: makes us see, perceive, feel lived experience of an ideology
- scientific knowledge: makes us penetrate, define the means for remedy
- Solzhenitsyn, Balzac
10
 Lukacs: Hope is an essential human characteristic. Likewise, it is a moral obligation of a
writer to offer a kind of hope in his works. He mentions a work by Dostoyevsky – The House of
the Dead that is about a prison. There is an episode when the prisoners are very lazy, then somebody
promises them that when they finish they will be released. From that moment on, there is an outburst
of energy – they start working. Lukacs: Without hope, human beings are reduced to beasts. It is
possible to observe through history a gradual decrease of hope in literature. For the Romantics, hope
was a moral obligation. The Romantics are aware that society is not a spiritual community, but they
hope that it may become one. Their withdrawal to nature is only temporary. They hope to acquire a
vision and then return to society and show it how it can reform. In symbolism and modernism, there
is less and less belief in the possibility of integration. These writers no longer believe that the poetic
vision can be integrated into society.
(Axel – escape from reality: dream never equals reality; Rimbaud – goes to the wild part of
the world, leaves civilization;.) Leavis – poets at the turn of the century who withdraw to the dream
world.
Lukacs criticizes modernism for the same reason. He says that modernist literature is hopeless
and that it does not offer a new vision by which society can be reformed. All literature, he says, has a
certain ideological content. That is, all literature tries to answer the question What is man?
Traditional literature, says Lukacs, always defines an individual in connection to his social
environment. For traditional literature, man is zoom politician (social animal). We cannot understand
an individual without knowing something about his/her society.
For Modernist literature, man is a solitary being. Solitariness is presented as a general human
condition. Lukacs says this is very similar to Heidegger’s philosophy: man is thrown into being. He is
alone, feels isolated from people and social environment. He cannot establish the origin and goal of
his existence. This vision that modernists offer is static. It means that the Modernists present us with
no way to change this condition. The only thing that changes in a modernist work of art is that the
character slowly becomes aware of his condition. (Waiting for Godot is a typical modernist work.)
Lukacs also wants to point out how important it is to act in the real world. He says that within
each human being there are a number of potentials – those of both good and bad, for all sorts of
actions and behaviors. This is what he calls abstract potentiality. He says it is impossible to define one
man’s personality on the basis of this abstract potentialities. Our personality is defined when we
choose a potentiality. Sometimes comes a moment in the real life when we are under pressure and we
are forced to make a choice. At this moment, we choose one of these potentialities and this is the
moment of self-realization – when one of these potentialities becomes a concrete potentiality. (Harry
Potter’s teacher tells him It is not our potentials that makes who we are – it is our choices.) The point
is, according to Lukacs, if we remain trapped in our inner world, within our subjective vision, then we
never get a chance to make such a choice and then the personality disintegrates. He says that the
Modernist literature has a good starting point. 1st terminus a quo: discontent with the bourgeois
society. But it does not have a good goal. This is 2nd terminus ad quem, because modern literature
simply escapes into psychopathology. Modernist literature is obsessed with mad man, with some
suppressed states of consciousness, according to Lukacs, this does not offer us any hope. Since Lukacs
is a Marxist, the proper solution for him would be a social reform. He sees Marxism as a new way of
reading history. According to him, Marxism offers a social code because it shows how human society
evolves and how it moves forward. Perhaps Lukacs is too harsh to modernist writers. They are not
quite hopeless. A number of modernist writers find certain values in the past.
Althusser: Lukacs mainly criticizes Modernists because of the ideology that influences their
work. It seems to him that modernists are trapped within bourgeois society and they cannot move
forward. Ideology is also one of the main concerns of Althusser’s theory. He defines it as an imaginary
relation to the real conditions of existence. This means that we, living in an ideology, do no have a
proper consciousness of the social relationships. Ideology creates an imaginary relation to the real
conditions of existence. The way an ideology functions is through a number of apparatuses that
Althusser calls ISA. These are the structures within a society, such as the family, educational
system, political system, language, media, health service. All these structures conspire to create a
worldview that will make individuals behave and think in a socially acceptable and desirable way.
They appear to be objective and neutral but they are ideologically slanted to serve the interests of
some particular group. They prescribe what Althusser calls, rituals, certain modes of behavior
11
and rituals in turn govern the material practice. Each of us unconsciously accepts an ideology by
practicing some rituals. Each one of us is a practitioner of an ideology. There is an example of this in
Owners – the ideology of possessing in the western society. Her husband considers her his property
and she wants to escape that. In the end, supposedly cured, she becomes a real estate agent – she is no
longer a possession but a possessor, but she is still the practitioner of the same ideology. It is possible
because we are no longer individuals, we are subjects. Individual would be something produced
by nature, something given, whereas subject is produced by culture. Subject can have 2
possible meanings: 1. somebody who is not an object, who is a free author of his actions, somebody
who is free, 2. subordinated, somebody who is subjected, who submits his will to some higher
authority. Althusser plays with these 2 meanings. He says that within a society we have the illusion
that we are a free subject, but we are actually subjected, have the illusion that we are free to decide,
that we have our own beliefs, ideas, but actually, the only freedom we display is that we subject
ourselves freely to ideology. The process by which an individual becomes a subject is what Althusser
calls hailing: we recognize ourselves in the roles imposed by the society. RSA - Althusser deals less
with this type of apparatuses. They are a concrete force practicing,which makes us behave in a
way which is socially accepted.
There are to ways to recognize ideology: 1st by means of art, 2nd by means of scientific
knowledge. According to Althusser, art has the ability to make us see, perceive, feel the ideology in
which the author creates his work. However, it does not explain to us the mechanisms of this ideology.
Art only gives us the lived experience of an ideology. It helps us to distance ourselves from ideology
and perceive it. The only proper knowledge of ideology is supplied by science. Especially of Marxism.
Science makes us penetrate the mechanisms of ideology and defines the means by which the effects
may be changed. Althusser gives us example of Solzhenitsyn who talks about Stalinism and Stalinist
era. By reading his novels, we get an impression of what this cult of personality (Stalin) was like.
However, S. does not explain scientifically the methods and mechanisms of this cult. In order to
understand a mechanism we need to have knowledge of a social science.
Another example is Balzac. Sometimes an author is completely supportive of a certain system.
Althusser say that Balzac was a reactionary. What he wrote enables us to see the society as it is and be
critical to it. Even when the author is completely supportive of a certain ideology, sometimes the work
he creates descends the determinants of this ideology. Althusser say that we need literary criticism
that would also be scientific and that would explain how it is possible, but he does not actually talk
about this.

The Ideology of Modernism in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism

by Lukacs

#1, p 476 Here is a point of division … beyond significant human relationship.

The point of division. Relationships with human beings are superficial, not meaningful relationships
(in a Modernist novel).
#2, pp 476/477 The latter of course … the examined reality is static. Lukacs refers
to Heidegger’s notion: throwness into being. Social circumstances? We do not know anything about
personal history, nor about social circumstances. About his own existence? They do not know either
the goal or the origin of existence (Godot). He does not form the world nor is formed by it – no
interaction with the society. He says that the examined reality is static: no way out of ideology, it
cannot be changed, an idea of hopelessness, no idea of hope for development.
#3, p 478 The possibilities … reveals the distinction. A character cannot be defined by
means of potentialities. Only when we choose some of them we are determined as persons.
#4, p 482 It is to the credit … against capitalism. Both in Naturalism and Modernism
there is an interest in psychopathology. The difference is that in Naturalism it is neurotic,
psychopathology as an escape from reality, an aesthetic need. In Modernism it is a protest against the
society. It is a moral protest against capitalism.
#5, pp 482/483 With Musil … historical position. Terminus a quo – the starting point;
terminus ad quem – the suggested path that we should take in our life. The criticism of the corrupt
society. It leads us into nothingness. For Lukacs, the proper goal is the reform of the society – since he
is a reformist - establishment of a new order.

12
 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Althusser

#1, p 301 The idea of Hailing. The society hails us by giving us a certain notion of our identity
and we accept this, we accept this ideology. Difference between individuals and subjects. Subject is
constructed by the ideology. A biological female may be constituted by the patriarchal society. It is
conditioned by the ideology and behaves in accordance with the ideology. Scientific knowledge gives
us prospective – shows us how to fight ideology.
#2, p 302 There are two types of subjects: the subject – Althusser plays with this idea –
divinity, some kind of divine law, that governs/rules the society. Good/bad subjects. Good subjects -
Somebody who thinks he has free will is under the influence of ideology. Bad subjects – they are in
ideology, although they fight what is proscribed by the ideology. There are two possible meanings of
the word subject: 1. something that is not an object, is free; 2. somebody who is subjected and submits
to some higher authority.

A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre

#1, p 152 The difference between science and art. Solzhenitsyn in his novel deals with this
ideology of the cult of personality. Solzhenitsyn gives us the lived experience, the effects of the
ideology, but not which produces ideology. He questions ideology, but he cannot provide the remedy.

P4 – NORTHOP FRYE

- 1. centrifugal criticism: positivism – biographical or towards history, philosophy

- 2. centripetal criticism: world view created by means and devices of a poem
- T. S. Eliot: tradition - meaning in relation to the mind of Europe
- Frye: to contextualize literature into the culture
- integrating principle: myth
1. world of inner desire
2. objective world
3. world created by man; imagination as a source of meaning (myth, culture, civilization: the
constructed word built in the image of human desires and anxieties)
- elements of a myth:
1. ritual – synchronizing the rhythm in nature and human life – narrative
2. oracle – meaning – epiphanic moments
- central myth: the quest
- Art is a dream for awakened minds. – Plato – resolution of the opposition
- comic mode – (triumph of desire) and tragic mode (triumph of reality)
- the rise of science (Newton – space, Darwin – time) exposes Christianity as authoritarian
- Blake: an attempt to recover the mythological universe for human imagination
- Resurrection – an attempt to stop projecting power on an objective God - means of achieving
social and individual freedom
- Prometheus and Eros (social and individual freedom) ascending movement
- Adonis: descending
- anxiety about authority: to abolish Eros
- Jung: a progress from the ego to the individual (material prima) – glowering stone
- works of art not icons, but mandalas (techniques of meditation, way of cultivation, focusing and
ordering one’s mental processes on the basis of a symbol

New criticism (formalists) started as a reaction against positivism. Positivism is a way of

studying literature that Frye describes as centrifugal. These critics pull you away from a work of art.
They explain the work of art either by referring to the author‟s biography or the historical
conditions, or philosophy or any other social science. As opposed to this, there is the centripetal
moment – new criticism; these critics focus on the very work of art. New critics will analyze the work
in minute details; he will look for the means/devices within poem to discover the author’s worldview.
The drawback of new criticism is that it completely rejects the context. T. S. Eliot also focuses on the
13
inner structure of a work, but he introduces the term of tradition. He contextualizes a work of art
among other works – a poem is partly explained in relation to other poems. He has his meaning in
relation to the mind of Europe. N. Frye says that his intention is to contextualize literature as a
whole within the culture as a whole. It is important to him to answer the question Why is
literature created at all? He tries to understand the phenomenon of literature within the culture. He
is looking for an integrating principle that will allow us to see literature as a part of culture. He
finds this integrating principle in myth. He explains it by trying to imagine a man on a desert island.
He lives in this objective world of nature and he feels lonely – this is his usual mental state – lonely,
separated from his environment, detached. There is another mental state – there are certain rare
moments of insight, epiphany. These are the moments when he feels united, in a harmony with
nature. This is the world of his inner desire – his inner desire is to live in a world in which he would
not feel alone; in a world that he could consider his home. This is why he creates this world
number 3. He sets out to transform the objective reality and this transformation is prompted by his
inner desire to recapture the lost sense of harmony. Transformation can be physical, but it can also be
imaginative. (For each event the pre historic man searched for the explanation in his imagination.)
in his imagination man finds a source of meaning for various phenomena. So, his imagination will
explain what the stars are, what the sun is… and then out of these explanations and elements he will
create a myth. Myth is actually a way of creating reality – myth is always anthropocentric – man is
always in its center. In the objective world man is not in its center. (Man explains everything in
relation to himself.)
Apart from myth, we can also think about culture, civilization as a whole as the examples of
this world number 3. So, a culture or a whole civilization is also built/created as a sort of man made
world. This world will reflect what we desire and what we are afraid of.
The main elements of myth: According to N. F. what we can discern in myth are: ritual and
oracle. Ritual springs from the human need to synchronize the rhythm of human life with the rhythm
of nature. (Birth = the birth of the sun = spring) So, every important moment of human life has a
ritual attached to it. For example, when it is harvest time, a farmer has to do a harvest – that is not a
ritual, but they also have harvest songs and reeds. These rituals connect man with nature. A myth tells
a story about a hero who is at the same time an archetypal human being, a god, and a sort of
embodiment, spirit of nature. A myth tells a story beginning with the birth and ending with the death
of a hero. This is the origin of a narrative.
The other element of myth is oracle. N.F. describes oracle as a sort of epiphany, a projection
of some unconscious content, flesh of meaning from the unconscious that is projected on the outer
reality. The closest to oracle are short proverbs. In order to express this deep meaning you need a
narrative, you need to tell a story. If you are a writer, you become aware of something about human
life and you have to present it to the reader – you have to use narration. When you understand the
whole, you get the meaning. Also, in connection to meaning, N.F. defines the central myth of
literature as a quest. It is a quest for immortality – our basic fear is that we are going to die. It is
actually a quest to liberate ourselves from the impact of natural powers. (N.F. is a Christian and he
looks at the world from that perspective – if a man remains connected to these cycles and does not
find the myth that liberates man from that cycle of nature, that is tragedy according to Frye – that is
a kind of slavery). He says that the basic human dream is the dream of victory, triumph
over nature. We dream about a world in which we are all powerful and in which the cycles of nature
have no influence on us. We could associate this with the dream world – when we are asleep – when
we wake up we face the reality, see that we are week, subject to the power of nature. There is a kind
of opposition between dream and reality. This opposition can be resolved by means of art or myth.
This is why Plato said that Art is a dream for awakened minds. If our dream is to live in a
progressive world where man gets happier and freer, then art can give us a vision of goals towards
which we are moving. It is a vision of possible goals. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium – when man is
old the very act of creation makes him eternal. The hero is looking for the final resolution. This myth
can have a happy and unhappy ending. Since N.F. is a Christian, for him a happy end is when you can
pull away from the rotary cycle of nature. According to this division, Christianity is a comic myth.
There is a happy ending – Christianity promises us the heavenly city, everlasting life. The hero of the
myth, Jesus, has this apotheosis – he is not subjected to the cycles – he is not dead, he resurrected.
This is a triumph of desire. If the hero fails in his quest, the myth is tragic and we have a triumph of

14
reality. Adonis – half of his cycle he spent with goddess Aphrodite and the other half with Persephone
under the earth – man as a part of the whole. It is tragic end for Frye.
In his essay The Expanding Eyes Frye talks about Christianity and the way William Blake
has attempted to recover this myth for human imagination. In Blake’s time people realized that
Christianity has become an authoritarian concept (people equalized the objective and the imaginary
world). They forgot that they had created the power structures: churches, nobility… , that this is the
world number 3 – created by man and they started perceive this mythological universe as objective
and given. Man created institutions, started to see them as something that is not a part of himself and
to obey them. People in that time did not know that hell does not really exist – they believed it was
really some place. (People started to think about the Biblical story as a real time – there will be an
apocalypse).
Then came the rise of science and scientists such as Newton and such as Darwin bring about
the crisis of mythological space and mythological time. He tells us that the world was not created in
seven days, that there was a gradual evolution of organisms. Darwin changes our concept of time.
People become aware that there is a difference between this mythological universe = world number 3
and the objective reality = world number 2. however, there is another crisis of the mythological
universe and this one is a bit more difficult to cope with. (The difference between our biological and
imaginary life). There is a difference between our ordinary waking consciousness; awareness
of external reality on the one hand, and on the other the creative and transforming aspects
of the mind. These creative aspects of life are important because they offer us new perspectives.
William Blake was aware that the mythological universe cannot be identified with objective reality. He
used the myth of resurrection to symbolize human, individual freedom. The resurrection no more
means the resurrection of Jesus – not in the Biblical sense. It is the resurrection of human
imagination. Imagination can be the means of achieving the social and individual freedom (man
created all the structures meaning that he can change them too – he can use his imagination to create
something else.)
N.F. observes two movements in history: the descending movement symbolized by Adonis –
related to natural cycles and there is the ascending movement – symbolized by Prometheus and Eros.
(Prometheus rebelled against the authority and helped people – each myth that rebels against
authority is symbolized by Prometheus.) Northrop Frye says that Marxism is also that kind of a myth.
Another interesting point N.F. makes is that very often when these myths (Marxism, Christianity) gain
social power they try to abolish any kind of liberation that the institutions cannot control. Christianity
in the beginning was a myth of freedom that promises to liberate us by means of love. Then, there is
this anxiety about Eros because Eros symbolizes the forces of nature that cannot be controlled. Very
often institutional Christianity propose the rejection of the sensual, biological, sexual… We live
simultaneously in the external reality and in the world that we create by imagination.!!!! Frye says
that in works of Jung it is presented how a person can make this progress from the ego to the
individual. The ego has haphazard (=nasumično), unordered perception of reality. We can transform
our ego so that we start perceiving reality in a coordinated way. This is what Jung means by
individual. How does art enable us to do that? Art manages to bring to the surface some contents
from the unconscious and they enrich our understanding of reality.
Jung also wrote about the alchemists who start from the materia prima and try to create the
glowing stone. Jung sees this as a metaphor of how we can transform ourselves by means of
imagination. A work of art can help in this process if we view it not as an icon but as a mandala, the
difference being that icon is what we observe and admire; mandala is something that initiates
the mental processes in ourselves. That connects different perceptions of reality into a whole. If
a work of art is seen as mandala, then it urges us to think about the world. A work of art presents us
with ways of cultivating, focusing and ordering our mental processes on the basis of a symbol and not
a concept.

The Archetypes of Literature by Northrop Frye

#1, p428 Rhythm or recurrent movement … constructing narrative. The ritual is

conscious – voluntary effort – to synchronize one’s life with the rhythm of nature. An example of
ritual is harvest.
15
 The oracle – epiphanic moments when man can understand natural processes – deep,
intuitive insights into nature or in man himself. Oracle itself would not be communicable, so
narrative is necessary; commandments, riddles, proverbs.
#2, p429 The myth is the central … dunciad. There is a single pattern of meaning
which seems to be correspondent in various realms, example: solar cycle – various people find in it the
same meaning. Solar cycle, day and year – when you relate these three you get meaning. This central
narrative story is concentrated around Jesus – Sun as God, figure that is partly sun, partly vegetative
fertility, partly god. Out of these elements a primitive man constructs a story which gives meaning to
his life and nature because everything is connected into a pattern.
Mythical story about the birth of a hero – Christianity – 1st phase = ritual celebration –
Christmas, Easter – rebirth of nature and of God. This is also the beginning of spring. 2nd phase = the
resurrection of Jesus and his marriage to the heavenly city of Jerusalem; connected to
Shakespeare’s green comedies – in nature – a sort of sacred marriage at the end (Twelfth Night,
As you like it). 3rd phase - Traitor Judah (Hamlet). 4th phase – myths of the flood – the whole human
world has become corrupted; general destruction, only water, no earth. Gotterdammerung = the dusk
of gods = sumrak bogova.
#3, p431 We have identified … its ordained cycle. The idea of the quest! The dream of
people about immortality, to be triumphant over the forces of nature – not to be the subject anymore.
Opposed to this dream – reality, circumstances. The mingling of the sun and the hero. Art gives us the
goal – tells us in which direction we should develop. When does our heroic self awake? This happens
in our dreams – this mingling - and when we awake we realize that we are week – this is antithesis; art
is just like dreaming during the day – mixture of sun and hero.
How does Fry see the comic vision? Human life is tied to natural cycles – if we liberate – it is a
comic vision; we are destined to be born and die – it liberates us from the rotary cycle – it creates the
heavenly world, an escape from death. Tragic vision: the cycle itself becomes something that is sacred.
It is experienced in that way – Myths of Eternal Return by Mircca Eliade.
#4, p432 In the comic vision … established. We cannot liberate ourselves from the
society. Natural forces are stronger and cannot be overruled. In Waiting for Godot, the tree is
supposed to present life but it is not.

Expanding Eyes by Northrop Frye

#1, p 108 Blake was … external order. In the early development of a civilization the two
worlds – real and created – are mixed. But later, there was the rise of science and that changed. Blake
knew that mythological construct is not valid in explaining the objective reality. If it was not valid
anymore, it is still valid for our imagination. Blake used it as a myth for our imagination – tries to
recover it from there.
The world – a construct – Christian myth –utilitarian construct – following without thinking
what we should do.
Imaginative birthright – as if we got the right to imagination at our birth and we project it on
the outer god. Blake suggests that we should recover it.
#2, p 110 Mythological space… the world we are now in.
God → the world of innocence → the world of experience → a man ← ascending resurrection.
Descent of man, descending movement, man has fallen into the state of subordination. What
characterizes this world is hierarchy, 3rd level - subordination. Resurrection is an opposite movement
– ascending. Man can recover from the fallen state. God is reincarnated into Jesus and goes to the
third level and then we have resurrection. It means that man can recover from this fallen state. Jesus
sacrificed himself willingly. It was the principle of love, not of power. We are not supposed to kill the
others in order to live, but vice versa. Altruistic love is the message of Christianity. Blake: we have to
reactivate our imagination. The state is seen as an oppressive force and the positive force is of all
people together.
#3, p 117 I am continually asked … see things that way. Art is a technique of
mediation – helps us concentrate. Art is not an icon; we are not just observing it. It is a mandala. We
are provoked by it! Art imitates a mental process; you are invited to interpret art. In Ransom, we
have one impulse – a human tendency to translate something into a simple concept – Platonic
impulse. As opposed to this, we have art that gives us symbols, images and metaphors.
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 #4, p 120 Those who seek perfection … birds. According to Frye, a poem consists of
both conscious and unconscious. The unconscious reveals us more about ourselves – transformer of
mental power – enriches our vision and then our eyes are expanded. Insight into unconscious. The art
helps us transform the reality.
A Nazi-lover of a classical music – a paradox. Problematic about this story is that from
somebody who is a lover of art we expect to be creative, not a murderer. How come that the art did not
transform this man! The problem is that in the modern world we observe art as a luxury and pastime
– thus, it cannot reform, although it gives pleasure.
The culture of Eskimos discussed in the next paragraphs. The basis of their life – poetry – they
are materially poor. Art – on of the essential human needs. Read pp 114 and 115.

P5 – VICO AND BARTHES

- Northrop Frye: tendency to perceive the world number 3. (man-made between desire and
reality) as natural and given
- Vico: the new science (1725) – verum factum
(transfer of culture into nature – the shape imposed upon the world is presented as
objective reality)
- sapienza poetica (poet’s wisdom) of the primitive man
- myth – a way to provide life with metaphysical truth and impose a humanizing shape upon reality
- no direct knowledge is possible: knowing through impressing the categories of the mind
- two way process: structures (institutions, social laws) act as brainwashing mechanisms which
condition us
- Northrop Frye, The Critical Path
1. the myth of concern (continuity of communal life – a system of values)
2. the myth of freedom (appears when first becomes a prison – new values)
- Christianity: myth of freedom – dogma; science – new myth of freedom
- R. Barthes: the moment when myth of concern becomes a prison
- ideology of the French bourgeois: celebration of status quo
- myth as depoliticized speech (Negro saluting the French flag)
- anti-physis – pseudo-physis: emptying history and meaning out of signs; prohibition against
inventing oneself
- petit-bourgeois – remains within the limits of his own reality (other identities neutralized,
excluded, changed: woman, child, Negro, madman)
- toys: child as a small man-user/owner instead of creator; reality as given (Henney:
Waterbabies)

Northrop Frye – man facing the society creates this third world – between desire and
objective reality. He also talks about our tendency to mix between the second and third. To start
perceiving the man-made world as something natural, given and unchangeable.
At the beginning of 18th century – 1725 – Vico wrote a book The New Science – the new
science he proposed was the basis of social science. Vico came up with some ideas that were very
similar to Frye’s. He said that the principle we can perceive in observing cultures is the principle of
verum factum. It means that within a certain structure such as social institutions, things get their
meaning and they start being perceived as something that is true, natural, objective, eternal and
unalterable. We can also call it the transfer of culture into nature. Just as we know we cannot change
the sky, we start perceiving the social structure as unchangeable – something that is given. But we
should be aware that any human culture is a man-made shape that is imposed upon the world. Vico
came to this conclusion by studying primitive, archaic societies. Usually, we consider these primitive
societies as incapable of understanding reality. Usually we consider them inferior to us; whereas Vico
points out that this is wrong. He says that primitive man possesses poetic wisdom - it means that he
basically thinks in metaphors – has a metaphorical mind. He explains everything as related to man.
The man has a poetic mind. This means, as Vico says, that myth is not a description of objective
reality – it is a way of coping with reality. By creating a myth, the primitive man imposes a humanizing
17
shape upon reality. At the same time, he provides life with metaphysical truth. This same process, as
Vico claims, has also produced human cultures. Furthermore, Vico claims that no direct knowledge of
reality is possible. This is what man always does. He always imposes the shape of his own mind upon
the world and then gets to know the world only through these categories. That is why this movement is
called structuralism – we see everything in reality as structures.
Vico also points out that this is a two-way process. Not only do we create structures:
religion, social institutions…, but they in turn also create us. We are being structured as well.
Structures of any society condition us – they determine our understanding of reality. It could be said
that they act as brainwashing mechanisms because they present themselves as something given and
natural. The same idea is expressed in Frye. The Critical Path – here he talks about the myth of
concern, concern with the continuity of communal life. It is a kind of myth that determines the system
of values within the given society. It also gives people a sense of unity – it is like a governing principle.
This myth of concern can sometimes turn into a prison. It can become too dogmatic, restrictive; at
that moment, a new myth appears – it is a myth proposed by dissatisfied individuals. It proposes a
new system of values. For example, Christianity that started as a myth of freedom offered liberation
from the law of nature. This means that by means of love one can overcome the fear of mortality. First,
it was proposed only by a few individuals and then became embraced by the whole Europe,
institutionalized – the governing system of thought – it became the myth of concern. Christianity was
preached by dogmatic church and turned into a myth of prison. It denied the personal experience of
love, it demonized nature and natural urges and also restricted the creative use of reason. This is
why the new myth of freedom appeared. This new myth of freedom appeared as a kind of rebellion for
the sake of reason. There is a demand for a new, creative use of reason. In this way, science
becomes a new myth of freedom. Today, science becomes a myth of concern. Ransom
and Richards – science is not sufficient for explaining human life and that is why we need art. In this
way, science can also be viewed as a kind of prison – art is now a myth of freedom.
R. Barthes: His works focus on the phase when the myth of concern becomes prison. He
observes this phase by studying the ideology of the French bourgeois. Again, the same idea that the
structures of the French society (that Barthes describes) act as brainwashing mechanisms. They tend
to present themselves as something that cannot be changed. Their purpose is to celebrate and
preserve the status quo. He gives an example of a photo that appeared in a newspaper. There was a
French soldier in the photograph saluting the French flag. The point is that he was Black! (From
Africa, Algeria – a French colony.) Barthes says that this photo functions in our mind like a
myth, because it changes anti-physis (something natural, a part of nature) into pseudo-
physis. This black man and the flag – not natural – anti-physis. But myth changes it into a pseudo-
physis. It makes us perceive it as something natural. It means that by accepting this photograph, we
accept colonialism as something normal, given without questioning it. If you perceive this
photograph as a sign, this is a sign out of which history and meaning have been emptied.
This photo has a certain historical background: the story of imperialism, conquest of something –
which is wrong – but you do not perceive this story when you look at the photo. The history has been
erased by it. You are simply presented by the fact of colonialism. Myth functions as a
depoliticized speech. It prevents man from inventing himself. If this reality is given, eternal, it
cannot be changed, then an individual feels helpless and insignificant.
Barthes also gives us some examples of this restrictive sense of reality. He talks about petit-
bourgeois, who cannot imagine anything different, any different identity from his own – because any
different identity would invite comparison and then he would see what he is lacking. This is why he
explains all the other identities by translating them into his own terms. Woman is seen as a castrated
man. He sees other races as inhuman or he changes them – Negro is either inhuman or he is changed
into a cloud, spectacle. Madmen are neutralized, confined, sent to asylums. All these identities would
be a threat to the structure in which the French petit-bourgeois lives. We can compare it to the idea of
verum factum – what is within the structure is true – what is out of it does not exist.
Toys: In order to avoid comparisons, to fit a child into the structure, the grown-up perceived
the child as a small man. This becomes very evident when we study the types of toys given to children.
These toys are really like the small copies that reproduce the world of grown-ups. The child plays with
miniature soldiers, airplanes, and cars. All the structures of the grown-ups are imposed on him. In this
way, the child accepts all the products of the world he lives in. It becomes a consumer of such a reality.
Also, the child gets an impression that this reality cannot be changed – that it has always existed. Such
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toys turn child into a small owner/user – he gets a toy car, a toy computer, all sorts of possessions –
you are reproducing the possessions of the grown-ups – the ideology of possessions of the capitalist
world. The kaleidoscope of our inner being must not be destroyed by the world.

Introduction from Structuralism and Semiotics

by T. Hawkes

#1, p 12 The master key … in fables (51). We should perceive primitive myths not as
childish and barbarous. We should look for metaphors. The primitive man possesses poetic wisdom;
the myth is a way of accepting with the reality. It is an attempt of a primitive man to connect the world
with his inner being, to explain the world metaphorically.
#2, p 13 All myths, that is … considered false. His explanation of myths: myths are
made out of generalized experiences of these people and make them able to grasp the reality. Then,
something happens that he calls verum factum = a transfer of culture into nature – culture became
something natural, give. We first impose the shape of our mind upon the world and then we start
perceiving this shape as something natural and true. Things are confirmed as true only if they belong
to this structure.
#3, pp 13/14 In short … (Bergin and Fisch, Introduction, op. cit. p. xliv) By
creating the structure man creates himself. Then he is structured by the institutions – two-way
process.
#4, p 14 Once ‘structured’ by man… human institutions. Structures are seen as
brainwashing mechanisms because we cannot escape them, we just accept them as something artless
and natural. Anesthetic – we are conditioned by what existed before them he is like existentionalized -
human being can also make themselves.

Myth is Depoliticized Speech by R. Barthes

#1, p 155 What the world … perceptible essence. The relationship between myth and
history: what the world supplies to myth is cultural reality. But in France, in the bourgeois reality it
does not. The function of a myth is to enter the reality and make it a perceptible absence. Things lose
the memory that they were once made – how Algeria became a colony – that is perceived as something
natural. We are deprived of the historical dimension.
#2, p 155 the continuation. Myth as depoliticized speech – the importance of the prefix –
de – something demolishing – French Negro soldier saluting the flag – we are removed from the
history – imperialism is something we accept. Myth does not give us the explanation, just the fact.
Everything is natural – it goes without saying.

Toys from Mythologies by R. Barthes

Frenchmen see a child as a small man, not a person with separate identity. The kids repeat the
structures of the world of grown-ups: instrument – cases for dolls. These toys prepare the children for
the world they are supposed to live in. if you five a girl a doll that urinates and the child has to change
the diapers – she is being prepared for the role of mother.
Examples of good toys – those that encourage children’s creativity: Lego, puzzle, provided they
are not defined. Otherwise, children are prepared for capitalist society – they become users and
owners, not creators.

P6 - FREUD AND JUNG

- Northrop Frye: myth of concern – prison

Christianity: nature demonized
Science: nature neutralized (mastery of logos)
- Sigmund Freud: questions the ideal of the male conscious mind
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1. super ego (social demands)
2. ego (mediator)
3. id
- daydreams: dissatisfaction with the culture
- early childhood /prenatal period
- Father’s law: substitution of incestual desire by something socially acceptable – the law of
separation
- artist: makes fantasying/daydreaming plausible
- Frye: desire socially acceptable
- Freud: reality unalterable – those who do not fit are neurotic
- Eros and Thanatos (desire for the unconscious state)
- Jung: two kinds of knowledge:

thinking

sensation feeling

intuition
- archetypes: the physic manifestation of instincts (mother, father, animus, anima, Shadow,
Self)
- archetypal image – in dreams, visions, fantasies
- the law of phylogeny: collective structural elements of the psyche are inherited (collective
unconscious)
- common rhythms of humanity vs. the isolated self
- mythology: textbook of archetypes
- myth: superior to conceptual thinking, reflecting the living process of the psyche by means of
imagination
- visions: correction of the inadequate concept of reality: neurosis cure us
- compensatory role in balancing the one-sided attitude of ego/the whole culture (Ovid,
Goethe)

It is said that both Christianity and science represent myth of self-control: mastery of
logos over nature. In Christianity nature was represented as demonic, dark, dangerous, it was
demonized. The age of enlightenment, on the other hand, did not recognize anything dark in man. The
outer nature was something you can control, observe, utilize, whereas the qualities that were praised
in a human being were consciousness, rationality, analytical mind. The idea of the age of science is a
fully functioning adult, conscious, male mind.
Freud was the first of modern scientists who questioned and undermined this ideal. He says it
is an illusion that we are fully conscious and rational. Human psyche really consists of one
part that is conscious and six parts that are unconscious. What we consciously know about ourselves
is a very small part – the tip of an iceberg. The way Freud explains the constitution of the human
psyche - there are 3 main parts: 1st superego – represents a set of social demands. It is an ideal of how
man should behave and what he should be like. 2nd ego – a mediator between the demands of the
super ego and the demands of the unconscious 3rd Id.
Freud’s patients in Vienna were all discontent, unhappy people especially women. Freud says
that there is a general dissatisfaction with the culture and it is often expressed in our daydreams and
fantasies. Daydreaming is a general phenomenon. On one ay or another, daydreams are always
connected to the period of early childhood or even prenatal period. According to Freud, it was the only
period of life when we were perfectly happy. The child in the mother’s womb or in the mother’s
embrace experiences a blissful sense of unity. At some moment of childhood, the child becomes
aware of the presence of the father. Father figure in the child‟s psyche represents this awareness that
the child has to give up this incestual desire – for mother‟s body. This desire for the mother‟s body
has to be replaced by some other desire that is socially acceptable. The child becomes aware of his
own separate identity; there is no more the sense of blissful union with the mother. In other words,
the father‟s law is the law of separation. The only difference according to Freud between artist and
20
other people is that artist has a way to present his daydreams so that they are plausible to us. Most of
us are ashamed of our fantasies or people feel unpleasant while listening to them, whereas an artist
is able to overcome this repulsion by masking his ego – he can even present us with four or five
characters that present him; also, an artist uses aesthetic devices: rhyme, metaphor, rhythm, melody…
All these things make fantasying plausible to us. This also explains why we like to read literature, for
Freud, there is the reality principle – governed by the father’s law and the pleasure
principle. An artist escaping from reality, escapes into dreams and imagination, but then, he is
able to return to reality refreshed. In this way he also makes this refreshment available to us. The
person who cannot go back to reality from his fantasies is neurotic.
The difference between Frye and Freud is important: Frye talks about 3rd world – the world of
human culture that was created by man and can be changed by man. For Frye desire is something
socially acceptable. It shows us how the society should change, evolve, move forward. For him, there
is the desire to triumph over nature and mortality, to make the world understandable. For Freud,
the basic desire is to go back to the mother and desire, dream shows us the possible course of action,
whereas for Freud no change is possible – we live in the only possible reality and in order to be
civilized beings, we have to repress the incestual desire. Our whole culture is based on this repression
and those who are not able to accept this are neurotic. Freud says that two basic urges/ instincts in
life are Eros and Thanatos. We move from one desire to another and since we can never reach
complete fulfillment we finally long for death – to go back to inorganic state, to be unconscious. For
Freud, the only paradise is at the beginning of life. The instinct of death can be projected on other
people – the wish to kill.
The basic idea in Freud is that this dark unconscious Id should be completely mastered. Lionel
Trilling says Freud discovered the darkness but he never endorsed it. Where Id was, there should ego
be. Freud wanted to reclaim man completely from any influence of the dark irrational urges. He
wanted a complete mastery over the irrational.
Jung has a completely different opinion. We can see that Freud created a sort of polarization,
a complete, total polarization and then he opted for only one side of this polarity.
Id ego
desire reality
Mother father

On the other hand, Jung says that to choose between these two sides is wrong. For him, the
goal of human life is not to suppress or abolish this dark side, subconscious, but to
integrate it – the goal of human life is what he calls individuation - like a process of
personal growth, self-growth. We start from the ego – this is really a small part of the self – but
then we should integrate the suppressed, unconscious portions of our psyche and our actions then
become guided, governed by the self (ego –self) – this should be the self in its totality, the totality of
our psyche. At the end of the process of individuation man positions himself in the center of these
opposites (thinking, intuition, sensation, feeling). The basic difference from 1 - the analytical
thinking and 2- intuition: 1 – you are separated from the object and observe it, 2- you become one
with the object of knowledge.
A very important notion in Jungian psychology is archetype. All the archetypes are stored
in the part of the psyche that Jung calls collective unconscious – that is something analogous to the
law of phylogeny. Our body still preserves the traces of the early stages of the evolution. The same
goes for the psyche – the psyche also preserves these remnants of the early stages of evolution.
This is why in the collective unconscious we find some archetypes that are common to all human
beings. Jung says that archetypes are psychic manifestations of instincts. We can only
perceive them when they assume an image, when they are connected to an image. Archetypes are
not culturally conditioned but archetypal images are; e.g., the need to have a mother is an
archetype. Archetypes are like determinants of our behavior and imagination and they are
inherited. Psychic manifestation of instincts: through an action, we become aware of an instinct. If
a boy falls in love with a girl, the reaction would be to embrace her. That is the physical
manifestation of the instinct. It is called anima (archetype of the feeling of love to a woman –
animus – to a man). Jung says that we all in our beings possess these two – animus and anima in
the psyche. Animus is the masculine principle: analytical, individual, rational. Anima is the
feminine principle: the intuitive sense of belonging. Other important archetypes are The Self – the
21
notion of totality and Shadow – all the portions of the character that are suppressed because they
are shameful, repulsive, dangerous, negative, evil and what very of the happens is what Jung calls
shadow projection. This means that we tend to project everything that we consider negative in our
psyche upon another person. It is extremely difficult to withdraw projection, to recognize these
repulsive traits as akin to oneself and to integrate the shadow. There is also a collective shadow
projection – it often happens in wars – tendency on war to represent the other side as completely
vicious, evil…
The archetypal images that are usually in the unconscious can sometimes come to conscious
mind by means of vision, dreams, fantasies. This is a sort of a passive process: a vision induced by
drugs or that comes in dreams. These archetypal images are arranged, combined in such a way to
create a story. This is an active process – when people use their imagination and create either a
myth or an individual work of art. This is why Jung says that mythology is a textbook of archetypes
- to get in touch with the collective unconscious is a healing process – when we get in touch with the
collective unconscious we participate in the common rhythms of humanity. For him, this is the way
to transcend the isolated ego/consciousness. When these visions from the collective unconscious
appear, they also have the role to correct the inadequate concept of reality. Jung claims that our
understanding of reality is narrow, one-sided and biased. The culture favors the Ego, reality,
father. The role of these images from the collective unconscious is to restore the balance. They
show us what we miss in our everyday reality. They bring to consciousness that portion of reality
that is suppressed. This can be observed both on the example of an individual and the whole
culture. These dreams can have a compensatory or a healing effect on an individual; they can come
to us either to cure us or to warn us, to convey some important meaning/message to us. However,
they can also be the messages from the collective unconscious to the whole culture.
For Freud, neurotic is an ill person who has lost the touch with reality. His fantasies are
the result of a personal trauma and he has to be cured. For Jung, neuroses cure us because in our
dreams and fantasies we became aware of this portion of reality that is suppressed. Goethe’s
Faust is important for Jung’s myth of Faust. Faust symbolizes a yearning for power, mastery, a
dangerous, unscrupulous and unbalanced masculine principle. Then, there is the figure of a girl,
who is a balancing figure. She is tender, loving and represents the element that is suppressed in
culture. The artist through his vision represented that which is compensatory. Also the figure of
Faustus is a warning. It is a good representation of what is dangerous in human psyche. In a way, he
predicted the WWII.
There is also Ovid, the Roman poet and his Metamorphoses – mostly erotic, love stories,
full of fantasies. The environment in which he wrote his stories: he was living in the Roman republic
– an empire – the domination of the masculine principle: power, conquest, mastery. This work has
a sort of compensatory function.

Creative Writers and Day-dreaming by Sigmund Freud

#1, p 38 Let us make … equally strong demands. Here we have Freud’s explanation
of fantasy. It is a reaction to the unsatisfying reality. Two main types of fantasies are: 1st erotic, 2nd
ambitious wishes. 1st is to be found in a female and 2nd in male. Women in society are not allowed to
show sexual desire. The erotic wishes are thus suppressed and revealed in day-dreaming.
#2, pp 41/42 You will remember … self-reproach or shame. The difference
between the day-dreaming of an ordinary person and the artist? Ordinary people tend to conceal
day-dreams and are ashamed when told about other people’s day-dreams. Artists express their day-
dream in such a way that we can read it and they also use metaphors to make it readable and
likeable. The effect on us is two types of pleasure: 1st fore pleasure – pure aesthetic pleasure, 2nd
greater pleasure?

Jung talks about two modes of writing: 1st psycho analogical (telling a story about a family,
realist novel…) it usually looks into relations between people – it is self-explanatory and deals with
everyday reality, 2nd visionary mode – the work of art that uses symbols that spring from the
unconscious, uses archetypal images and cannot be understood rationally.

22
 Psychology and Literature by Jung

#1, p 178 The profound difference … none of these. Visionary works of art are some
basic human experiences, but they cannot be rationally understood – these visions are just
represented by an artist, not explained nor understood.
Jung thinks that myth is superior to conceptual thinking because it operates in images and
in this way these mythical images represent the limited process of the psyche. It is not just the
people who have recorded a myth that analyze it, but also we are able to have the same experience.
Freud always talks about the language of the unconscious an Jung about the images of the
unconscious.
#2, p 180 If we insist on deriving … conceal it from himself. He says that it is
wrong to present a vision as a symptom of abnormality. It is a kind of criticism of Freud. We defend
our image of reality – everything in it is clear to us, no doubts – when somebody has a vision of
something we do not understand we call him a lunatic. For Freud, those with visions are neurotic.
For Jung, it comes from the collective unconscious, it needs not to be cured but it carries a message.
In a work of art, we see a message – that means that it comes from the collective unconscious. The
artist managed to reach the collective unconscious and to convey something that is important to all
of us. If vision is just a personal thing, then it is a symptom of madness.
Freud describes a work of art as the expression of something personal and it is a symptom of
something – maybe that something is wrong with a man. On the other hand, Jung says this is a sort
of defense because if we interpret visions only as personal disturbances, then we are reassured that
there is nothing wrong with our ordered image of reality, that is, the world. However, if we interpret
the vision not as a symptom of illness but as some important message from the unconscious to us,
then we have to ask ourselves in what way it corrects our one-sided vision of reality or warns us,
balances us or makes us feel disturbed.
Pregnant chaos – pregnant with meaning, full of meaning, important. Freud: it is not that
something is wrong with the world but with the individual – if you remove the crazy individuals
everything is OK again.
The last sentence: even to a poet (when he rationally thinks about it) can occur that he is
crazy, that it is some personal trauma from childhood.
#3, p 183 Psychology can do nothing … in its positive aspect. That which appears
in a vision is collective unconscious. It is akin to phylogeny law also. This collective unconscious
comes to us in a particular state: e.g. under drugs. These manifestations have certain function –
compensatory – help us understand - our culture is rational and these manifestations help us
balance the one-sided understanding of reality.
#4, p 184 If we consider … or its destruction. When we observe great works of art,
what is their importance? They convey messages to all people, are not compensatory just for the
author but expresses desires of the whole epoch.
Faust and German culture – desire for power – every epoch is like an individual, has its
prejudices, limitations and requires compensation. Each society can be jus as sick as an individual.
In some cultures, apart from a poet, sorcerers can have these visions.

L2 - STRUCTURALISM

- Structuralism – discovery of the deep structure between the diverse phenomena

- Marx – ideology – forces of production/relationships in production
- Freud – the unconscious – tension – Id/Ego; fantasy vs. reality
- Jung – vision – a deeper knowledge of the real
- Frye – underlying principle – myth – desire vs. reality; nature vs. culture – literature:
the third realm
- French structuralism based on linguistics of de Saussure : signifier vs. signified = sign
used by Levi Strauss for anthropological analysis
savage mind vs. the civilized mind; analogical thinking

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- Myth and Incest:
1. myth 1: incest, solution of a puzzle, plague, summer
2. myth 2: sexual abstinence, silence, failure of crops, winter
middle way: exchange of women and exchange of words in frank communication
- Marx, Jung, Frye, Strauss: critics of western culture – both scientists and humanists
- the other trend in structuralism: purely scientific, value-free analysis
- binary opposition - emptied of human content
- the question WHY dropped – author and reader not agents of meaning, they do not speak,
language speaks them

Structuralism is usually associated with the French movement that flourished in 60’s and
that is based on the linguistics of de Saussure. All paroles and utterances are a
manifestation of a deep system. He was interested in the underlying system of rules not
utterances. Structuralists wanted to see the whole culture as generating various phenomena from
this underlying structure, the center. The idea was to discover the deep structure – the things were
not as it seemed. They used linguistics to do this. The French were not the first to think about this.
Marx – 19th century - was also a structuralist in the sense that he wanted to find the deep
structure. This world is animated by invisible things. The hidden structure is ideology – always a
product of the ruling class in order to conceal the injustices between the forces of the production
and the relations in production, relations to those who produce - exploitative. The laborer is
alienated from the products of his work and from nature. There will be time when the products will
be free.
Freud was in a way a structuralist, too. He discovered the subconscious – our conduct is
determined by the hidden forces – the tension between Id, Ego and Superego. In Id, we find the
Oedipus complex – desires. It is instinctual Superego demands a repression of the forces of Id. It is
conscious. Ego is in between. There is a contrast between reality principle and pleasure principle.
According to Freud, literature, by transcribing our daydreams and fantasies, leads us away from
reality. It is an excursion away from reality and the reader must return to the civilization and
reconcile with the discontent. Freud disregarded the fact that the real world is man-made, creative,
created and as such, can be changed.
Jung was much more humanistic. According to him, fantasy and vision of a neurotic, that is
neurosis, represent the protest of a body soul against one-sided, too narrow concept of the real.
Artistic vision is not an escape. The vision offers us the corrected conception of the real. This is not
a spring of destructive energy. On the contrary, those visions present something that is our demand
to correct reality.
Fry was the first to use the term structure. He did not rely on linguistics for his criticism.
Literature is a transfer of energy that can help us change the reality. The main source of this
imagination is found in literature. He uses binary opposition but he calls it antithesis:
dream/reality. We are torn between desire and reality. He is a structuralist. Literature is a sort of
organism, a structure. There is a unifying principle – myth. The purpose of myth is to reconcile the
desire and reality. There are two realms – of culture and nature. The third realm in which these two
can come together is literature, myth. Thus reconciled, they are a model of what we can become. In
comedies, we see each life as it could be. In tragedies, we see life worse than it is. We must make an
end to such a world. According to Fry, literature is not an escape. It is a model of what we strive
for. It is about possibilities imagination. He prefers comedies because they speak. In comic
vision, life is transformed by love and about man’s inner capacity to turn nature into
something that can be loved. There is no cutting off from nature in comedies. Comedy achieves
reclamation of the creative power. Man projected his creativity upon leaders, authorities and god.
Comedy reminds us of that. It is reclamation of the inner power. Blake translated the myth of
resurrection into an everlasting gospel. He believes in human liberation. All serious literature from
Blake tells us that all deities were originally created by man. Man sees himself as a deity and then
the power to create is within him. That is what comedy reminds us of.
All these men – Freud, Jung and Fry – are structuralists. Antithesis is used for criticizing
culture – a highly humanistic purpose. Trilling – each man, thanks to literature – can criticize
culture. That is the only way.

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 Levi-Strauss. Literary criticism is a humanistic discipline. Whatever is the underlying
structure, man can change it. There are others who say that whatever underlying structure is, it is
determining form. Man cannot resist it. Freud is the most pessimistic about this. Levi-Strauss
was extremely scientific. His arguments are on the level of algebra. He is above all an anthropologist
and a humanist. All his science leads to the discovery of how this culture can be condemned,
revised and criticized. That is the intention and aim of his anthropology. He relied on de
Saussure and his binary opposition – the signifier – does not derive its meaning from the object
it represents. Signs have meaning because they are different from other signs – voice/voiceless. His
conclusion is that literature cuts us off from reality. Language creates our reality. We live in
the geography of mind.
Myth and Incest by Levi-Strauss. In this essay we see how his idea is in fact to criticize
civilized mind and to praise the primitive one. He bases his analysis on the binary opposition –
culture/nature. He points to the way in which this contrast culture/nature has been solved by the
civilized and primitive mind. Civilized people have lost the ties with nature and want to destroy all
who have not severed their ties to the nature. He compares these two and says that the primitive
people are superior.
In his essay, he analyzed the myth of North-American Indians. He says that in many myths
of theirs, there are three motifs brought together: 1. the solution of the puzzle – similarity to the
Oedipus’ myth, 2. incest and 3. natural catastrophe, some natural disaster usually in summer.
Now, there is an opposite kind of myth (binary opposition). It is best represented by the Grail myth.
It is a riddle, puzzle without answer and in myths, there is the solution. In this myth, the whole
thing is reversed. There is the absence of speech in these myths and it is associated with sexual
abstinence. It is related to winter – the failure of the crops. In these two types of myths, there is a
number of opposites – contrasts between the natural order and human order. In the first myth,
there is the excess of natural energies – summer, excess of arrogant knowledge - arrogant speech
that tends to find out everything, and the excess of sexuality – incest. In the second myth, there is
winter in nature, symbolizing sterility; there is also silence as the opposite to the extensive speech,
also sexual abstinence – chastity. According to Levi-Strauss, these to myths reflect the capacity of
the primitive mind to learn from the nature. Chastity to the point of sterility, on the one hand and
on the other, excess of sexuality. Man chooses between these two myths. Man is supposed to find
the middle because there is in nature always the middle way and man should learn this. The middle
was is exchange of women between tribes, but not incest and exchange words. Also, the middle way
about speech is to be found - frank communication whose purpose is understanding among people.
They refused to sever themselves from nature. Incest is a taboo because it is to sever us from nature,
but we need to synchronize our culture with nature. Levi-Strauss believes that the primitive people
have still remained in this garden. Ethically, he is in favor of the primitive cultures. It is not an
impotent nostalgia. He is not completely turned to the past life. On the contrary, Trilling says that
other cultures are a criterion for judging our own and that is what Levi-Strauss does. To be logical is
to say that I is different from the other. We should remember those myths. Levi-Strauss represents
the trend in French criticism that has not forgotten. Vico: man is a maker. He can change his
culture.
Another stream in the French structuralism lost this that man is a maker and is exclusively
scientific – man is not a maker any more. They apply binary opposition but without human
element. Althusser – Only a scientist can be subjectless.
There is a great difference between Levi-Strauss and other structuralists. Russian
formalists eliminated the subjective element, human content and concentrated on the form.
Mythology of Fairytales by Roman Jacobson. He classified all the fairytales of the world into
several prototypes. Those structuralists that rejected the human element relied on the Russian
formalism. They reduced all to value-free abstract analysis.
Terry Eagletone gives us an imaginary example: a father and a son quarrel. The son goes
away from home, falls into a pit, the father follows, comes to the pit. The sun shines. It is in the
zenith. The son goes out. Happy ending. A structuralist would analyze the story in terms of binary
opposition – between high – father and low – son. The low rebels against the high, then the low
goes to the horizontal – the pit – the recovery of proper balance. The human importance does not
exist in the story.It means that the roles of the father and the son can be played by anything in

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relation high vs. low, even by animals. That is wrong. It does not ask about the purpose it serves.
This is not asked. Freud at least believed that in psychotherapy could help people to understand
themselves a bit better. Literature can at least help us understand other purpose.
LaCanne? - rewrote Freud in terms of linguistics. Man does not speak language.
Language speaks him.

L3 – DECONSTRUCTION – A LIBERATING THEORY

- J. Derrida: deconstruction of the structure – language: not sable

- signifier vs. signified; absence vs. presence
Derrida – trace: 1. spatial: presence; 2. temporal: postponment
- meaning – never full, never present: half of it is not there, the other half is not that
- speech vs. writing
- attack on the metaphysics of presence
- attack on logo-centrism: the assumption that logos, God, idea, man exist outside language
- absence of transcendental signifier extends the domain of the free play indefinitely
- Deconstruction – warning against monstrous certainty or denial of truth – fault, memory,
wholeness, remorse
- Levi Strauss – guilty of Romantic Humanism

Structuralism from the initially liberating turned into a restrictive approach to life and
literature. When Structuralism was entering the crisis, some people used it. Structuralism was seen
to be in the complicity with nature. Among the intellectuals, it was felt at the moment of crisis of
Structuralism that the principle of binary opposition is a servant of a regime – rejection of one of
the options. It promotes only culture, man, the mind and discards woman and nature. And if
Structuralism uses the binary opposition to describe the regime that itself rejects one opposition
then such a culture is reactionary. The task was no longer to see how structures operate
but to see how they can be deconstructed and use the energies they possess for the
creation of a new culture. Most people praised the deconstruction for having liberating us
from structuralism. Is this true or Derridian philosophy is just another strategy of shutting us into a
structure even more. !!!
Grammatology, Writing and Difference by J. Derrida. Derrida began by
deconstructing structures, de Saussurian sign. According to de Saussure, within language, signs
can produce stable and clear meanings. In his deconstruction of de Saussurian sign, Derrida
showed that language is much less meaningful and stable. Meaning is never complete. He showed
this by undermining the binary opposition – signifier/signified. This is not an absolute difference.
If we look up a word in a dictionary, the word still has no meaning. Signified then becomes
another signifier, and so on. There is no stable relationship between the two. He goes even further.
He undermines the idea that the meaning of signifier is determined by the minimal difference
between two signifiers. What determines the meaning is another binary opposition –
presence/absence. He shows that this is not an absolute opposition. He introduces a new concept –
the trace (differance) – meaning both deferring and difference. It is one of Derrida’s
favorite puns. Trace operates on two levels: spatial and temporal. On the spatial level, trace refers to
the presence of all the absent alternatives: hat is hat not because it is not bat but because
there are many words that sound similar – a network of possibilities that are excluded in order that
the meaning is constituted. In order to understand the meaning, we must keep in mind the
presence of the absence of alternatives. On the temporal level, it is a postponement. Our
anticipation, memory of all the words that preceded the trace and all that can follow. The meaning
is never full, never present. There is never a point at which the dance of signifiers stops. The process
is endless. Within speech, we are never in possession of complete meaning. We can
never say what we mean and mean what we say – half of it is not there, the other half
is not it.
The deconstruction of the opposition presence/absence he extended to the opposition
speech/writing. We tend to favor speech believing that writing is just a supplement. We believe that

26
while we speak meaning is present. Writing is open to various interpretations. It is not as original as
speech. Derrida says it is vice versa, that writing is the first, supreme and primary, whereas speech
is secondary. We cannot say anything original because we are born into a language that precedes
us. Writing, as a system of rules, precedes speech. It also means that we can no longer believe in the
presence of any ideas, in any founding principles and categories. However, we believe that there
are certain categories and that those categories signify the logos. This logos was at the same time
the center of all philosophical theories and systems. According to Derrida, we want to believe that
God existed outside the story, in order to believe in him. Bible is a system and God is a creation of
language. Because we want him to be real, we would like him to exist outside the system. Only if we
imagine that he is an ideal outside the system/language can we feel secure. This is called logo
centrism. God is both the center and outside of language. Derrida say that this is simply
impossible. There is no category that exists outside of language. When we realize that there is no
transcendental signifier, we are free to play indefinitely. According to Derrida, we should use
language empty of meaning., truths and laws. If it is not so, there is no difference between true and
false. Language that speaks us simply does not allow us to know ourselves. It is because it exists
inherently. It is because when we think about ourselves we think in terms of language. I can never
know myself. We are forever fragmentized, split and disseminated. There is no center. All we can do
is play with language and in literature show that language cannot render meaning,
cannot speak. In literature, it can only speak of its failure to say anything. Literature is
undetermined (indeterminacy) – neither the author nor the reader is the aim of literature.
(Barthes started as a critic and ended up writing The Death of the Author.) Its another
characteristic is multiplicity. We cannot reach any meaning; we can only show how structure is
created and how no interpretation is true and superior to any other. There is plurality and inability
to choose any interpretation. The reader is merely a site, place in which various discourses
intercept. The term play was used by Romanticists. It was their ethical experiment. For
Modernists, play was the most valuable ability because it represents the awareness of an artist
of inexhaustible possibilities. In Post Structuralism, play was trivialized – visually and
esthetically perfect elements without meaning – modern commercials. The point is to reduce man
to one dimension, to cut him off from his ethical dimension that may help man to transcend
culture. (They say that there is only surface; we cannot reach any meaning.) One-
dimensional Man by Derrida. The first part of the essay is an analysis of Levi-Strauss. Levi-
Strauss saw that culture and nature are not necessarily absolute opposites. Taboo on incest is
common to all cultures. Everything that is universal is natural. This led him to conclusion that
culture/nature is not a correct assumption, but it offers knowledge about how primitive people
saw nature. Derrida says that Levi-Strauss cannot say what he thinks because culture/nature is not
an absolute opposition. According to him, Levi-Strauss should deconstruct the opposition
completely and admit the defeat of language. He belongs to Romantic Humanism that
believes in the origin of man and life and that is wrong. He wants to discredit the idea of
Humanism that there are alternatives; that in other cultures, there was a better option and that we
can change and improve our culture. According to him, language has always been the same. There
is no way of being present in nature. Since everything has been the same, there is no reason to
mourn the past or to regret the crimes over the ancient peoples, because they never even were in
touch with nature. Levi-Strauss says that this is a crime against our conception of ourselves.
Derrida says that, instead of feeling regret, we should learn to interpret the world by
accepting that it has no center, no meaning. We should accept the free play without love;
perform free-play without truths and meanings that are coherent. We should enjoy such a world
without guilt, remorse, fault. Anything goes. Monstrous certainty can be both dangerous
and deconstruction could be good against ideology. However, the deconstruction
itself is used by ideology. Betrayal is inherent in the theory. It does not lead to truth because its
premise is that there is no truth, no meaning, no choice.
Remember/dismember – to be cut off from a part of one’s self.

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 P7 – FEMINIST CRITICISM

Elaine Showalter:
- woman as reader – feminist critique (stereotypes, misconceptions)
- woman as writer – gynocritique (themes, language, imagery, experience)
- 2 phases of dependency: 1. Feminine (pseudonyms – imitations),
2. Feminist (protest)
- independent experience: 3. Female (V. Woolf)
- authority of experience in criticism: opposing the impersonal, rigorous, masculine
Adrienne Rich:
- conservatism vs. the subversive function of imagination
- writing is renaming
- to unite the energy of creation and the energy of relation
- Orion – the half-brother, principle of energetic imagination
- cold and egotistical vs. altruistic, motherly love
- the word love in need of revision
Gilbert and Gubar:
- Is pen a metaphorical penis? (writer fathers his text)
- Edward Said: author and authority
- James Joyce: paternity itself is a legal fiction
To increase your Numbers and swell the account of your delights.
- women – Ciphers (acted on by men), Ibsen: When we Dead Awaken

Elaine Showalter: She makes a difference between feminist critiques = critical essays
written by a woman as a reader. As such she reads works of are that are established, canonized by
male authors. She looks for the way woman is represented in those writers – she points out to
misconception, stereotypes, illusions that man who wrote had about women. This feminist critique
points out to such failures and the way that misconceptions are reflected in these works. It is called
gynocritique. These are critical essays dealing with works written by women. Here, the focus is on
woman as a writer. The question is whether there are certain themes, certain imagery, some
characteristics of language that can be discerned specifically in the works of the female authors. Quite
often, this is related to a certain historical or cultural period. For instance, Showalter says that in
Victorian period in many female authors there appeared the image of a bird, especially bird in a cage.
He says this is probably an expression of how women felt confined in this culture.
As Showalter observes the development of female writing, she says that there are 3 historical
phases. She also says that female writing developed as a sort of subculture, not mainstream. 1st phase:
the feminine – the phase in which female authors tried to prove that they could match male authors in
quality, so they completely appropriated, internalized the characteristics of the male writers. The
acquired the same system of thought, all the definitions of the mainstream culture, all the conceptions.
They simply tried to prove that they could be as good as men. What is characteristic for this period is
that many women assume male pseudonyms, e.g., George Eliot. If these women say anything critical
of male culture, then it is much hidden, in the form of irony.
2nd phase she calls Feminist. This is the phase that historically lasts from Victorian period till
1920, when women go the right to vote – a period of protests and demands of women to be equal as
men. In this phase women writers most often write about the wronged womanhood – about all the
injustices that women suffer in patriarchal culture. Showalter says that these are dependant phases –
either women imitate patriarchal culture, or protest against it, but they are always in some way
dependant on it.
3rd phase is marked by independence - Female. In this phase authors such as Virginia Woolf
look for a specifically feminine approach to language, experience and to the writing process in general.
(Feminine – something cultural, how culture sees woman, female – biological, something given;
women cannot help being female, but they refuse to be feminine.)
Showalter also talks about masculine and feminine trends in criticism. The masculine is
scientific, tends to be objective, impersonal and there it tries to use the tools similar to natural

28
sciences’ tools: strict, rigorous tools. They use difficult terminology –form, e.g., structure. She says
that criticism written by women/feminine criticism should oppose this and it should focus on the
authority of experience. It is not the same as the stereotype that women feel and men think – no,
experience is not just an emotion.
Adrienne Rich: She is aware that there are not many women who can get emancipation. This
is something allowed by the patriarchal culture – patriarchal culture will appreciate this segment
provided that the rest of the women remain unemancipated.!!! The society remains the same. She as a
student read a lot of male poets. Poems are like dreams – in them, we express something we do not
consciously know. As a student, she had almost ecstatic experience of herself. She wanted to prove
that she could have women life – children… By the age of 30 she had 3 children. But at the same time,
there was a feeling of discontent that she could not place. She was no longer in touch with herself, felt
no unity of being, felt fatigue, no continuity of thinking – interrupted by children and chores.
Fatigue, according to her was a consequence of not being in touch with herself and she
tries to explain it: all people have daydreams, fantasies and fantasies are passive. They
are not something that we have to act upon. As opposed to this, there is the
transformative process of imagination and this has to be acted – it is not passive. It is
important to be able to think in continuity in long stretches of time, to be able to focus on these inner
processes. Another point she makes is that the function of imagination is to be subversive. A poet
when using their imagination has to be able to turn everything upside down. She says that in the
process of writing nothing should be sacred. A poet must feel free to examine and question every
concept. The day may be night, love may be hate. This subversive way of thinking is contrasted and is
very incompatible with a creative marriage – to live with the husband and children is not something
that allows the poet to use imagination subversively – it confines. This is why she says that writing is
renaming – because the author should be enabled to name everything differently. She says these must
not be opposites – life in marriage vs. life as a writer. She is looking for a way in which her love for her
family and the energy that she invests in this relation can be united with the energy of creation. She
says she does not want to be a devouring ego. She does not want to focus on writing only, and not be
able to give anything to people. There must be a way in which her love for her family can be used as a
raw material for writing. In her essay, she mentions her poem Orion – it represents a warrior with a
sword. She says this warrior is a creative power of her personality. She uses it as an image, symbol she
also calls him my half-brother. In this poem she examines this egotistic urge in her: the need to be
ambitious, to create, to make achievements. In a way it is like the imaginative part of her, the part that
creates is masculine. She says that throughout the patriarchal culture, there has always been this
division. Women have always been supposed to be altruistic, to sacrifice the selves for the family –
their goal in life, their destiny was this motherly, altruistic love – it was though that women were most
accomplished through this. On the other hand, the desirable destiny fro man throughout patriarchy
has always been to be ambitious, creative, to make some achievements. They were allowed, even
encouraged to be egotistic. She says that this division is wrong. She will not accept this concept of an
egotistic artist, who is unavailable to others because this is the concept of the patriarchal structure.
This is why she says that the very word love is in need of revision.
Gilbert and Gubar - Mad Woman in the Attic: A beautiful woman fell in love with a man
who is married and hides his wife in the attic. His mistress is emancipated but not a woman. They ask
if there is a connection between the sexual energy and the energy that informs the work of a masculine
writer. They start by quoting G. M. Hopkins who quite often in his poetry uses the metaphor of a
sexual act. He says he fathers his text or that he has engendered it. It seems that this metaphor often
appears. Male authors for centuries felt the creativity as something essentially masculine – the ability
to create, the creative power is something masculine; it seems to be an exclusive right of men. There is
a notion of generations – literature follows a masculine line – one author as the father to the other.
They mention and quote Edward Said. He makes a study of word author. When do we use
this word? There is the author of a work of art, but this word is also etymologically related to the word
authority – someone who is the master – the author is the master of his work. At the same time, this is
related to the authority of a father, and of God who is also a kind of author. Just like there is the
notion in a patriarchal religion that God, the father is the sole creator of the universe, the writer is also
a kind of a lesser god. Women in this system of values, thoughts are denied creative powers – even in
creating a child, woman is patriarchally seen as a kind of vessel – so her role is passive, she is an
empty container in which man’s child actually grows – he is the one who has created it, engendered it.
29
 They also quote James Joyce. In his Ulysses, he says that paternity is a legal fiction. The
very notion of being the father is like a little story. Man has to use his imagination in order to convince
himself that the child is actually his. Basically, the idea is that a woman does not need this – the child
grows in her belly and she can feel the child’s presence, she knows that the child is hers. With the
father, there is always a sense of anxiety, a sense of doubt. He creates this little story and the whole
patriarchal culture is based on this story. He imagines how his seed grows in the woman’s body. He
has to use imagination. There are men that are brave enough to accept this uncertainty.
They also quote a poem by a female writer that criticizes this idea that women are
passive, that they have no creative powers, and that they can only serve as inspiration
for men’s art. She says Women exist only to increase your numbers … women are like
Ciphers.- (=zero) – like this empty vessel that can take man’s child and so she increases
his numbers. The other idea s when you put 0 on a number – 1 +0 =10 – increased
numbers. It can also mean to increase the number of your works. A woman can be a
source of inspiration, like a model for a painter. In any case, her role here is passive.
This is why she says We exist to swell the account of your delights. Either a woman will
arouse man sexually or she will inspire him to artistic creativity, but in both cases, she
herself is given a passive role. The notion is that women are here to be acted on by men.
This concept has also been criticized by Ibsen in When We Dead Awaken. The idea is that
there is this author who meets a beautiful woman and falls in love with her. They do not create a work
of art – she gets the passive role – poses for a painting and he uses her as a model. She is an
accomplice – she agrees because she is under the influence of the culture. They create a sculpture
Resurrection – instead of this resurrection what happens is that the two of them wasted their human
potentials to have a relationship. He used her for his own ambition.

P8 – LACAN AND KRISTEVA

from T. Eagleton, Psychoanalysis, from Literary Theory

Lacan:
- to rewrite Freudian theories in relationship to language
- pre-Oedipal imaginary (imaginary identifications)
- mirror stage – blurring of subject and object – metaphorical
- external reality: the mother’s body – a world of plentitude
- the law: social taboo on incest
- language: substitute for wordless possession
- no direct access to reality
- social/sexual identity defined by exclusion and absence: sign – symbolic order
Kristeva:
- symbolic is in reality patriarchal
- semiotic: residue of the pre-Oedipal
- heterogeneous flow that precedes language
- tone, rhythm, bodily qualities, silence, absence, contradiction
- unconscious drives that split apart received social meanings
- no distinction of gender
- Jung – what the mother stands for
- 1. Essentialities (Showalter, Rich) – gender as a set of essential qualities – oppression,
consciousness, power, prescription for action
2. Constructionists (Kristeva) – gender as cultural construct – repression, the
unconscious, pleasure, inscription in culture

Lacan: Tried to rewrite Freudian theory so as to relate it to language. This phase in the
development of a child that Freud calls pre-Oedipal, Lacan calls imaginary. It is the phase in which the
child feels at complete unity with the mother’s body – it does not experience itself as a separate object.
The whole external reality is presented to it to the mother’s body and the child does not feel separate
from it. There is a blurring from subject to object. Lacan also calls this phase mirror stage – just like a
little child gets some notion of its identity by looking at the mirror, it can look at any other object in
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the same way. In a way it identifies with everything it sees – there is no clear distinction between a
child and the world. Its identity is somehow recognized in everything. It can identify with the whole
world. In a way, this phase can also be called metaphorical because a child compares/likens itself to all
images. Lacan says this is a world of plentitude because a child is not separate from the mother’s body
and it feels it possesses the whole world. This harmonious state is disrupted when a child becomes
aware of the father laws. The first social law proposes that a child cannot have its mother as a lover;
there is a taboo on incest. Lacan claims that once the child realizes that its identity is separate from
the mother’s it will never again have a direct access to reality. The child has no more this feeling of
unity with the world – the childe is the subject and the world the object. The child also becomes aware
of the difference, so it becomes aware of its own identity as different from the identity of the mother
and it also becomes aware of the absence. The child can no longer desire mother’s body. This desire
has to be pushed into subconscious. In this way the child’s social and cultural identities are defined by
exclusion and absence. Lacan says that this psychological process happens at the same time as
acquisition of language because the child can no longer feel that it possesses the whole world
through mother’s body. It now accepts language as a substitute. Pre-Oedipal phase is like a
phase of wordless possession. It has no longer a direct access to reality but it has language
by which it accesses it. Language is a sort of substitute. Modern linguists use these same
terms: exclusion and absence. It tells us that one sign is defined by its difference from another sign. In
order to define feminine or masculine identity, you have to define what is not, what is
different from it. This is what Lacan calls the entry into the symbolic order. Just like
Freud, Lacan sees no alternative to our civilization, sees no alternative to the symbolic order – he says
that we have to enter language; we have to accept that we no longer have a direct access to reality.
Kristeva: A French feminist who criticizes Lacan’s symbolic order. She says in reality it is a
patriarchal social and sexual order and the law governing this order is the father’s law. This is how
patriarchal culture sees man and woman. As an alternative, she suggests the semiotic. The semiotic is
not a special kind of language. It is something that can be discerned within the language we
use. She says that we still preserve in some way the original sense of unity with the
mother’s body. There is a residue of the pre-Oedipal phase. In this phase, a child cannot speak – the
word infant means speechless. However, there was a sort of a flow – heterogeneous flow in the
consciousness of child that precedes language. It is like a stream, flow. When language appears, the
flow is chopped. She claims that this notion of the oceanic oneness still remains, we are not completely
deprived of it. It is not completely lost. It can still be discerned in some physical feature of the
language, e.g., in tone, rhythm, bodily/physical qualities of certain sounds. Also semiotic as a layer of
language is present in silence, absence and contradictions. This feature/layer of language that Kristeva
calls semiotic is not something that can be found in female writing. It is possible to discern it in both
works of the male and female authors, especially because it is related to the pre-Oedipal phase and
there is no distinction of gender in this phase. She specially praises the works of Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, the French symbolists, by making us pay attention to this semiotic realm through
contradictions, absence and silence. These writers wake up the unconscious strives which, as Kristeva
says, split apart the received social meaning.
The whole point of Kristeva’s criticism of Lacan can be explained by comparing it to the
difference between Freud and Jung. For Freud, the desire for the mother’s body is wrong because it is
incestuous, it has to be repressed and this is the only way to create civilization. For Jung, what we
desire is not the mother, but what the mother symbolically stands for: the unconscious, urges,
instincts, intuition. It is one whole aspect of our being and Kristeva claims that through semiotic we
have a contact with this.
Kristeva is also a feminist, but different from feminists such as Showalter. Showalter talks
about female authors and readers. She thinks not about gender as a set of essential qualities. She
belongs to essentialists – they are more political. They talk about social oppression, social injustice,
about consciousness in terms of awareness of the position in society. What they offer us is a
prescription for action – how to act in the world in order to change it.
On the other hand, Kristeva belongs to constructionists – she is looking for the feminine as a
quality that can be discerned in the authors who are both male and female- she is looking for the
portion of ourselves that is called the feminine and how to connect with it. She is interested in the
feminine as a part of both male and female part of the psyche. Constructionists are concerned with
repression, in what is repressed both consciously and unconsciously in both male and female. Instead
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of offering a prescription for action they are talking about the inscription in culture. They are looking
for the way in which this feminine, subversive, semiotic has left a trace in writing and in culture.

L4 – MODERN DRAMA, R. WILLIAMS: Drama from Ibsen to Brecht

- A. Ibsen (1828 – 1906)

- A. Strindberg (1849 – 1912)
- Chekhov (1860 – 1904)
- Naturalism: passion for truth in strictly contemporary terms
- conventions: lifelines, probability, realistic setting and speech
- the full truth inaccessible to naturalist form
- the room – defines what characters seem to be, but cannot accept what they are - a trap
- consciousness vs. action
- A Doll’s House (1879) – an exit from structure
- The Ghosts (1881) – the woman who did not abandon her husband
- Ghosts – symbolic of destroyed humanity
- Naturalism – Symbolism – a way of defining humanity that cannot be lived within the
confinement of bourgeois world
- Strindberg - The Wild Duck – injured humanity
- Strindberg – Miss Julie: Serena vs. Diana, Soul vs. Sexuality
- Chekhov – The Seagull – the dead birds stuffed with straw
- Ibsen - When we Dead Awaken (1900)
- Gilbert and Gubar, Cixous, Rich = female activity, passive vs. active, male art – vampirism
- woman – model killed into art
- Rubek – egotistic artist – betrayal not only of theme, but of art and his own creativity
- both are dead: Irene deprived of the soul by the sculpture Resurrection – a nun
- the enlightenment comes too late: when they awake they see they have never lived
- heights vs. depths
- Maya/Ulfheim – become equal friends

R. Williams begins with Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. In the introduction, these three are
associated to the world of Naturalism. He explains what Naturalism meant. It was a revolutionary
change but limited. Then, Symbolism and Expressionism evolved from Naturalism. He explains
Naturalism as a change associated with the first new conception of reality – the new structure of
feeling – the change in the conception of the self. The perception of what it means to be alive comes
with a change of style. There was a new structural theme and change in experience. Before Naturalism,
the drama that dominated was a degraded version of pre-scientific worldview – all reality was
determined by forces that cannot be understood. This drama dominated Europe. Out of this reality,
drama and melodrama evolved. It is a debased form because in theatre it simply meant entertainment,
a play where the plot is complicated and comes out of chance, sudden turns, coincidence, recognition
by birthmarks, talismans - everything depends on it. The plot does not proceed from characters. Its
chief virtues are suspense of excitement in order to supply the masses of audience with entertainment.
Usually, it ended with happy marriage. Shaw called this kind of drama unwholesome
confectionary. It meant a kind of sweet with sugary coat that makes the bitter content easier to
swallow. Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov wanted to reveal the truth, the corruption that existed beneath
the sugary layer.
Naturalism sprang from this passion for truth. It demanded from its audience to face the truth
in contemporary and human terms. Complicated plots, sentimentality and myth were rejected and
they tried to reproduce contemporary environment and speech on the stage. The conventions
accompanying this truth were lifelikeness, probability, realistic setting… They believed in recreating
the way of ordinary speech and setting. In recreating the rules in which the bourgeoisie people lived
and the way they talk, they will reveal them too and the truth. They discovered, just like Vico, at the
same moment, that man live in a manmade world. This world can turn into the structure creating us,
it shapes us, not for beneficial purposes. Ibsen discovered this as soon as he placed his characters in
the rooms of bourgeoisie. He realized that they showed what those bourgeoisie rooms represented an
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emblem of the society distracting the development of the individual. They became the obstacle to what
the character felt. It is no longer the medium of the truth, but that we cannot reveal the truth about
ourselves. The style assumed the probability but the very form shared revealed the world that
frustrates and prevents the development of a free man. The room becomes a trap preventing an
individual from proper growth. The question was how to escape; how to find an exit from this
confinement. Ibsen’s Doll’s House is an early Naturalist play. Ibsen began as a poet, but later he
entered Naturalist phase.
His first phase was poetic drama. Pirguin – a wonderful poetic verse play. The theme is not
treated in naturalist style. The characters are archetypal characters. One character represents the big
black thing, something in us that prevents us from doing things in a proper way. It is about a man who
took a roundabout way, spent one year away and returned to his love. One central issue is why
marriage does not succeed in our modern civilization. Ibsen confronted this issue in this play. Pirguin
is loved by all girls, he stands out, is immensely independent. He is also imaginative and a liar. Girls
love him and boys hate him. At the festival, he wants a girl who sings Solvega’s Song. She falls in love.
He misinterprets a remark of hers. He disappears, is insecure and he kidnaps the bride. The hut
happens an incident that renders his decision. He comes across the tribal trolls – malignant beings
and they submit him to the initiation ritual. He accepts their motto – To thyself be enough. He has
become a troll, subhuman. He decides he will not enter the hut, then he goes on a long journey
following the principle – egotistical ruthless. He succeeds, has a lot of money, but he finds out very
late what his self is. He is troubled with the sense of inauthenticity. He meets archetypal figures – The
Button Molder – he says he is seeking for Pirguin to put him into the mold in order to be recreated
and understand his own self. The Button Molder knew this is the wrong conception. Being true to
thyself involves recognition – you are a button capable of being attached to other people. The
fulfillment of the self lies in the ability to love. Now, it is too late, he has to be remoulded. He
betrayed the true human self. He is given one day of reproof. He approaches the hut of the girl
waiting her departed lover without suspicion he would not come. He appears before her and asks her
When was I made. She says he has always been complete in her faith, love and hope. It is a
redefinition of the whole concept of human feelings. For man, completeness lies in woman’s love.
Ibsen discovered that the verse was the enemy of drama. He approached this theme using the
naturalist style. He dealt with various issues: economic repression, hypocrisy, marriage, women. In his
second phase, naturalist drama, he addressed the same questions. The question was about woman in a
bourgeoisie marriage and world and whether there is a way out. The first play of this phase was A
Doll’s House. Nora is treated as a doll in her house. She is a doll to her father and to her husband.
She accepts her role. She is given pet name implying confinement – a singing bird. She is only
pretending that she is complying with the role of a submissive girl. Underneath, there is an
independent, resourceful woman. When her father gets ill, the doctor says that the only remedy is to
travel south. She borrows money from a strange man and spends the rest of her life working at night
or saving in order to pay back the money. The man who borrowed her the money blackmails her. He
finds out a secret about her – she signed a bond instead of father – forged his signature – simply
because he was dying and she was convinced that he would sign it. The man works in her husband’s
firm. He blackmails her pressing her to exert influence on her husband in order to repay it to him. her
husband says she is silly and remains deaf to her pleas. A letter arrives revealing the secret of forgery.
When her husband finds out that she also forged a check he does not protect her, he takes away their
children. Law and moral are completely mixed here. She realizes where she stands. The man decided
to withdraw the incriminating letter. Her husband changes instantaneously. He says I‟m saved. But
she has already seen the truth. She says they have never exchanged one word of serious conversation.
She decides to leave him and show her children what duty, morality and religion are. He is stupefied
by the courage of the woman able to find her own identity. It was the blasphemy on her husband’s
moral. After that, there was an outcry against Ibsen. At the time, it was a courageously radical play –
woman can stand up. Many people accused him of undermining marriage, although the play was
about the right of an individual to seek truth and discover things for oneself. Ibsen said that he
belonged to the minority. Minority is always right, but when majority catches up with him, the
minority will have to be far away from the point the majority reached.
His response to the public was his second play The Ghost about the woman who does not
leave her husband and children and remained within the confinement in order to protect appearance.
This play is about Helena, a woman who gets married. Marriage was a bargain at the time – to
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renounce her right in exchange for economic safety. After the marriage, she falls in love with another
man – Pastor Menders (doctor of the soul – always appears in Ibsen’s plays) – the pillar of religious
respectability. The pastor advises her strongly to conquer her wild passion and be a good wife, since
that is her duty as a woman. She does so. She gets pregnant. Her husband is a womanizer and in order
to protect her son from this shame, she sends him away. Fifteen years later, he comes back and reveals
why his mother sent him away. However, her son suffers from syphilis. He thinks that he contracted it
in Paris, from a girl, but she says that his illness is congenital. She says that his father has it because he
was a womanizer. He complies and in that way, she destroys her son’s life. Her son wants her to hive
him morpheme when the time comes. That is the last thing she can do for him. It is a complete
exposure of what women are made to be under bourgeoisie society. They should be milk-giving
mothers, but they are turned into killers. This play caused even a greater uproar. All the critics
described it as a rotten, putrid, naked loathsomeness, abominable.
Ibsen continued his career. The Ghost symbolizes a new symbolic phase in his drama. The
Ghost itself is a symbol – we are but remains of what we once were. The play introduces a phase that
moves to the broader use of symbols. This phase introduces what naturalism would turn to. The
problem was how to define the humanity that cannot believe in those suffocating rooms. They have to
resort to symbols, and ghost is one such symbol. The writers of the period started writing plays such as
The Wild Duck, Miss Julie (Strindberg), The Seagull (Chekhov) – symbol of wasted human
potentials. Naturalism was bursting out of its convention to find the truth. In The Wild Duck, the
wild duck appears in the play and is associated with all the characters in the family. The destruction of
the feminine is the core. The family consists of grandfather, father, wife and daughter. Gina’s
daughter is not her father’s daughter but of some other man. Her husband married her believing that
the child was his. In this play, Ibsen reveals that seeking truth at all costs may be injurious to people.
The rigid idealism is destructive for the whole family. The whole family is living in an illusion that
saves them from collapse. A wild duck is shot and Hedwig finds it. It was shot and hides at the
bottom of the lake to survive. Old Hilmar hides in the attic to survive. He lives in the illusion that he
is the father. There is something of the wild duck in all of them. They all live in illusions. One of the
characters, the son of the main villain, insists that the truth is told. When it is, the family falls apart.
The girl is asked to show how much she loves her father by killing the duck, but she has already
identified with the duck and she kills herself. The illusion does not harm any of them; it helps them
survive. The seeker of the truth finds out that the insistence on truth ends in a tragedy.
He examines whether his ideas stand or fall. He would always insist on contradictions. There
are contradictions in all his plays.
Miss Julie by Strindberg. This play is an illustration of naturalism breaking beyond its form
and turning to symbols. It is his early play in which two animals appear to define something in the
characters that would otherwise remain unresolved. It is a one-act play. Miss Julie is torn apart
between two streams, both destructive to her. She is the daughter of an aristocrat so she cannot mix
with lower classes. She is very lonely and there is no way of her fulfilling her sexuality. It is not spoken
directly, but we get to know about distorted sexuality through a bitch called Diana (Diana – goddess of
hunting, who pledged never to marry; symbol of the characters inner nature). She got pregnant with a
mešanac and Julie is cooking something for her to cause a miscarriage – it is a projection of the idea
that there should be no mixing. A canary bird, Serena, is an outward, external symbol/projection of
the girl’s soul. The girl is caught within this code of honor and she breaks it. She sleeps with a servant
and she knows that she has betrayed her father. The only option is to elope. Jean represents a
different system of values. He saves money to become a hotelkeeper in order to become a member of
the middle class. After the event he is so intolerant and dismissive of her. She is desperate and knows
that Jean is not a person she could live with. She takes Serena with herself – wants to preserve her
serenity. Jean asks her whether she is crazy. He chops the bird’s head off and he says she must leave
all these ideas if she wants to succeed in the middle class - the system of value of the middle class –
practical, instrumental. He wanted her to leave all the sentiments behind. She commits suicide.
The Seagull by Chekhov. The seagull is a bird that one of the characters kills and drops at
the feet of his love. There are two female characters – one of them wants to become an actress, the
other is a famous actress. There are two artists – the real actress’s son and her lover. The mother is a
distracted mother. Her son is a mythological writer, a symbolist. Her son writes a play in which birds
speak. He wants to show the invisible, the soul. Mother is the first to respond with scorn to his play.
He is in love with Nina – would-be-actress but she does not want to respond to his love. Treplev meets
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her one morning and kills the seagull. At that moment Tvigorin appears. He says it is a good idea for a
story – an innocent girl lives in a village and then comes a sophisticated artist who seduces her and
abandons her and she commits suicide – anticipated. At the end, Nina finds out he has taken the dead
bird and stuffed it with straw – decoration, an emblem of wasted human potential, a dead trophy. She
dies as a seagull. She still loves him madly. It is about how people remain in love forever with
somebody who is undeserving of that love. She says I‟m a seagull. No, I‟m an actress. As a seagull she
is dead spending all her potential into acting. Unlike the mother, who is successful, famous, knows
acting is laborious and survives by putting all potential into acting, seeking, making art on a stage, the
other one dies.
When We Dead Awaken by Ibsen. It is connected to the text of feminist writers talking
about the liberating moment when the women awake from the dead language, ideas, words. The
theme of Gilbert and Gubar is female creativity - the possibility of a woman writer to step out of
male tradition and write about herself. The woman would deconstruct the stereotypical role imposed
by patriarchal culture – the passive role. Women are traditionally passive and men active. Cioxous –
women are passive and denied within even their roles as mothers active roles. Man defined himself as
associated with nature and mother as a raw material that can be turned into something only when it is
purged from some aspects. The matter or red blood of the female body is what philosophers do not
want to face. On this raw material man projects his wishes about life being an ordering thing. The
richness of nature is reduced to one platonic idea. Man only reflects, speculates. Male philosopher
thinks about nature and the female as a mirror of himself. He saw himself in woman. Woman is only a
mirror, he wants to see in her spirituality, pure essence, angelic essence that women were supposed to
follow. If she does not follow, she is seen as a monster. So, woman is either an angel, or a monster.
Women are denied the ability to create themselves. The same is true with art – women are forever
models, inspiration of male artists who, gazing upon them, superimpose on them their desire, sucking
their blood, turning them into images that would satisfy their desire. A pure angelic – woman is
reduced to a simple formula that man can master. The initial sentence – metaphorical penis – woman
is passive; the generative power is a male prerogative. The only source of creative power is the penis.
Any kind of authorship belongs to males – they are the authors, fathers of their books that relegate
women. Women are passive.
Male art is a continual kind of vampirism – men are sucking their blood, turning them into the
object of their desires. Women are killed into art. (The Last Duchess – she was not what was
expected of her to be.) Ibsen killed his model Irene in art.
Adrianne Rich also speaks about this idea. Women are considered passive, lacking creative
and generative power since they lack penises. She speaks about this activity/passivity opposition as
opposition between male egotism and female selflessness. Even in the sphere of maternity, women are
denied real creativity. Even there, they are passive. Their only responsibility was to tend to the
physical needs of the child. The father was taking care about the future of the child and raising-up. She
was not expected to teach her children anything. In this maternal sphere, she is not expected to exert
creativity. Woman has no self. She is destroyed by this idea of selflessness – not only unselfish, but
also, destroying her own self – mother without soul to realize. She is not a loving mother. She is not
allowed to shape her children. This is destructive not only for mothers but for children also.
There are two concepts of the mother. The 1st type of mother is instrumentalized mother – the
mothers that serve the system – on-it or with-it (Laconic Spartan mother). She is conditioned to give
education to her child that would help him obey the system. The 2nd type is milk and cookie mother.
That is her only identity. She is an enemy to the intellectual identity of the child. This is the mother
that feeds on her children. The food becomes the poison she feeds into them. When the time comes for
the children to leave, she will not let them. They are after their children with food. In Pinter’s plays,
women either are whores or obsessed with food. They reproduce their attitude in husbanding
children. Warm-shawl mother = protection. Even here, they have been rendered passive. Gilbert and
Gubar belong to the school of female feminist criticism whose purpose is to read male canon and
accuse male writing of rejecting woman. Out of that school of criticism originates the idea that
Shakespeare was a misogynist. One of the misreadings used to support great militancy against
males and male artists. This is bad. It is not only within women’s hands to deconstruct this polarity
women=passive vs. men=active. Male writers are too tired to revise the injustice of rejecting women.
The injustice pondered by Ibsen is about the denied creativity. Rich begins her essay by paying tribute
to Ibsen. It is a judgment passed on male artist.
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 In When We Dead Awaken, there is a woman symbolically killed into art. Rubek is an
artist married to Maya. A young beautiful Irene appeared to open his eyes. He symbolically killed a
woman in order to make a work of art – Resurrection. After the two of them had parted, she as
disappointed, she took her clothes of in inns. She did not want to have children because she did not
have what to nourish her children with. He did betray her – she renounced her role as a mother. Knife
under her pillow – symbolic – incapable of having children because her soul was dead. (The nun –
always after her alter ego – renounced the life of the body.) She is now full of hatred and revenge. She
calls him a poet. The play is an exploration of Ibsen’s own sense of guilt for having abandoned poetry
at the age of 40 when he moved to drama. He had no creativity in the last years of his life because he
had left poetry. The play is about his own guilt, but also about an artist who killed his model. When we
meet Rubek, his sense of creativity has dried up and now he needs Irene, who is now full of hatred for
him as a poet because he was always first a poet and then a lover. It takes him some time to
understand what he has done, and then realizes how big a mistake he made to pay more attention to a
dead thing than to a living being. Now he wants the two of them to forget about art. When he realized
this, he said Can we dead two beings live a full life? When he admits his crime, she is transfigured.
She does not want to kill herself. She says the only thing dead people can do when they awake is to see
what they are missing and that they have never lived. They go up to the top of a mountain to see what
they are missing. There is a storm coming. There is also whiteness, sterility. He was always a
mountaineer, wanted adventure. If he goes too high, he forgets the everyday problems. However, in
order to balance it, there is depth – he forgot full-fledged life. They hope to see what they miss,
repeating the same pattern. The two of them go there, but she still calls him My Lord, My Master –
nothing changes except that now they know that they are wrong. The play ends with an avalanche –
after this illumination, they can die.
Maia, Rubek’s wife, feels betrayed and cheated. He married her but was never inspired by her.
She is treated in a condescending, dismissing way. She meets there a bear hunter Ulfheim. He seems
to be the opposite of Rubek – raw, illiterate, vital, hunter. His face is rosy and reach with blood. Maya
is interested in Ulfheim. Yet, there are similarities. Ulfheim himself is a mountaineer, hunts what ever
is warm-blooded – bears, rabbits, women, birds. There is a desire to dominate over nature and
women. When they go mountaineering, it turns out that he has premeditated to force upon her. She is
not intimidated by him. She begins to tell him about her life as a confinement, prison with walls
decorated and she does not want to return here. She rebuffs very easily. He recognizes in her a fellow
sufferer and triggers his own story of an injured person. His first wife was a prostitute and unfaithful
to him. Since then, he became a cynical womanizer, a mere hunter. When they tell their stories, they
recognize in each other their own doubles. They were equally disabled by the wrong roles imposed on
them. Shall we patch up our tatters? they say, to make a decent life. No, it is too late. They are torn
out. Let us stand naked, reveal our souls and begin a new life. Let us be friends = to discard their
social garment, fall back on their authentic selves, which indicates that they are equal – two beings
preserving their authenticity and able to confront themselves as equals. They meet Irene and Rubek
going up. Maya and the hunter are going down – they are free. The polar opposition – heights and
depths resolved because Maya and the hunter are not just the physical aspect, but also a spiritual one.
In Strindberg’s plays, two people can never become friends. It turned into a deadly battle in
which one loses – the man. In Strindberg, women are always dangerous. Sex is a deadly war where the
stronger would win and it was the woman. He was resentful of women, an anti-feminist. He could not
achieve mental bisexuality. Father was a response to A Doll’s House. In Father, the male
character is a symbol of all patriarchal ideals. He is a scientist – it is something that has already been
crystallized. Penis gives him the prerogative of all authorship. He wants to control his daughter’s
future. His wife starts stealing his letters. She starts rumoring that he is crazy and then she creates
doubt. All the certainties rest on the idea of paternity. Laura asks him if he is certain that he is the
father. The assumption she could not desire anybody else makes him certain, but she systematically
undermines his belief. The egocentric mind cannot accept the doubt. In the end, he goes crazy. Laura
is represented as a monster. She puts him into an asylum. A doctor and a pastor are on her side. At
first, the doctor is sympathetic. The accusation that your reason has failed is enough to put you to an
asylum. To be mad borders the monstrosity of the reasonable culture. The point is that he is the
monster and Laura’s monstrosity is dependent on the system in which mothers are banished from
making decision. He blames her.

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 The question is Who is to blame? God or the Goddess of Strife. When man does not accept
woman as a goddess, she turns into a monster. When they confront each other in deadly hatred – an
attempt to cure the inferiority complex by achievement. He says they are like two persons that were
asleep and someone awoke them. These are no awakenings but wild dreams in a deadly false dawn.
This is a false dawn because their selves have been completely destroyed by the roles imposed by the
society. If they had woken up on time, it would have been different. He failed in science and the only
thing he had left was his child and she took that away from him. that is how he saw it. But she did not
tell him that the child was not his, she said maybe! Had he trusted her, it would have been all right.
Their sexual difference had been completely smoldered. They cannot become friends because they are
crippled by the culture.

P9 – The Father by Strindberg

#1, p 51 On trust when it concerns … gets it. Adventures from Europe before he,
Captain got married. Those events shake his opinion about women, they appear to him as dishonest,
untrustworthy. The only person he had ever trusted was his wife. Here we have a religious person and
he never expected something like that from her. She said to her husband that she was in love with
him. According to him, women are unconscious of what they are doing. What is Strindberg trying to
say about women? Their behavior is juxtaposed to the patriarchal moral. The idea is that these sexual
unconscious urges of women are something that is related to the mysteries of nature. It seems that
female sexuality transgresses all the norms – power of nature cannot be held in check. It is a mystery
of nature that can never be completely solved nor controlled. Captain, the Doctor and the Priest never
have complete certainty – they feel they cannot master the situation.
#2, p 54 Then you surrender … Yes and No. Laura never explicitly told her husband he
was not the father. He wants it to be true, that Bertha is not his daughter because it is something that
can be proved; he is afraid of uncertainty represented by women, by sensuality. He is afraid of the
feminine principle. This can be claimed as true. Vigo: verum factum – things only exist in a structure.
Captain is used to simple patterns and he wants to fit Laura into his structure. He wants to label her –
she is either a faithful wife or a whore. What the Captain was unable to accept – the free play
(Derrida) the idea that you can play freely with meanings and signifiers.
#3, p 58 Cry then, child … to realize it too! A conversation between Laura and Captain.
Their relationship functioned at one level but not on the other – at the beginning of their relationship
they were like a mother and son. Two kinds of love: maternal and erotic. Better the first one – mother
is his friend, woman his enemy. The first relationship still functions and the other one not.
The Great Goddess – man was both a son and a lover. There was a harmony between maternal
and erotic love. Archaic man – son and lover of nature. The attitude of nature – respected and
worshipped nature. Here in the play woman represent nature so we see how the relationship changes.
In patriarchy, there is a tendency of man to control, subdue one aspect – a split between maternal and
erotic live that ends in tragedy. Laura cannot enjoy properly the erotic relationship with a man. The
whole system mutilates this erotic love – something has gone wrong.
#4, pp 58/9 You always had the advantage … was no awakening. How did Captain
try to destroy this feeling that he was inferior? He wanted to go to war, but it was peace and he turned
to science. He wanted to redeem his honor by turning to war or science. How are these things
connected to his concept of honor? These are the things valued in the patriarchal structure: war,
science, authority, intellect, physical strength. He tried to be superior to her, he was afraid of the
power of nature he felt in her. His speech But we … like the rest of mankind. is given because
Captain thinks that things like this happen everywhere- he talks about the general condition, the
society, the whole culture – it is not about himself only. Understanding of reality is based on certain
ideas, e.g., military power, authority… How did Captain feel about his awakening? Awakening should
be something positive! But it is not for him. How did he awake? They were awakened by a sleepwalker
– someone who had been a sleepwalker himself – they woke up with their feet on the pillow – turned
upside down – they find themselves in ruins, in a terribly wrong position that cannot be rectified.
Women grow old– they become like men – they become a part of the structure – he talks about
potency – he seems to suggest that both men and women have lost their normal sexual potencies –
both of them have been mutilated by the society. Capons, pullets – the ones that have been made
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sexless, castrated cocks, a sort of hens that cannot have children. There is this sterility as a result of
the wrong structuring – no healthy sensual, normal bodily urges, the loss of erotic dimension of
human life and sterility of the bourgeois marriage – the potential for erotic love has been destroyed by
society – instead of sunrise – ruins and no awakening. They are so deep in that structures that they
cannot find a way out, they have just realized they have lived their life in illusions.
#5, pp 65/66 It is all to be found here … that is what I know! Practically everybody
consider Captain mad; he gets out of his room and carries a pile of books. He is quoting these books:
Odyssey, Telemachus. What he says about his mother – that he can never be sure who his father is
although Penelope is an image of virtue, faithful wife and here we have Telemachus doubting her
virtue and faithfulness. Even Penelope is not completely certain. Hen he mentions Russian literature –
Pushkin – went to a duel because of the rumors of his wife’s infidelity – on his deathbed he swore in
her innocence. Captain is giving all these examples because he is not certain of his wife’s infidelity –
he is trying to prove that man can never be sure – he can only believe and in that way be saved. Doubt
can destroy this patriarchal system that has always been undermined by women, this system of
authority, certainty… Women bring free play into certain structure. He is not the first – it is something
that has existed throughout patriarchy.
#6, p 66 Be quiet! … anyone else. These two, Doctor and Parson, often appear in modern
drama. One is the doctor of the body, the other the doctor of the soul – a feeling that we are sick both
physically and mentally. They think that Captain has gone mad because he talks about their wives’
infidelity. Parson and his wife – maybe there is a doubt in his mind about his children and the same
goes for the Doctor who is upset. There is a feeling that their wives are cheating on them – in every
marriage, there is a feeling of uncertainty. A way to defend – instead of accepting something, as a
general truth we simply do away with the man telling the truth and then the truth is not dangerous.
Captain is trying to present this disturbing truth that they do not want to accept. Freud and Jung
again: Freud – we should cure neuroses, they do not fit in the society. Jung – listen to the neuroses,
they are telling us something. These two want to believe that he is mad but they say something that
concerns them – the easiest way to neutralize and suppress the truth is by saying that Captain is mad.
This is why it seems that both the Doctor and the Parson enter a conspiracy with Laura – in a way to
preserve their own sanity – certainty about their wives and lives – otherwise they would have to think
about that. Perhaps, this principle of uncertainty is the general state of the world.
#7, pp 68/69 Bertha, dear, darling child … to be myself. Who is to take care of
Bertha’s future? She is the reason of their quarrels. He wants a complete control over his daughter. In
patriarchy, child belongs to the father. He claims an exclusive right to shape her personality. What
disturbs him is that she has her own self- she also looks like her mother and it is an element he
dislikes – the feminine. The Captain is a modern version of Agamemnon – what he did to his daughter
– killed her to please the Gods. He had three children but killed the one that was most like their
mother. Agamemnon sacrificed his own child for the sake of a war victory – a man who chooses
between his loyalty to his own flesh and blood and loyalty to the state and he chooses the second
claiming it is his right – his right is his property. There is a character in Shakespeare who does the
same: Polonius uses his daughter knowing that she is in love with Hamlet. He uses her for his
intrigues, for political ends. He chooses loyalty to the crown. There is a song about the judge of Israel
who had one fair daughter and no more. The judge did the same thing – he went to wore and swore to
gods if he won, he would sacrifice his daughter. Men claim right to their children and are ready to
sacrifice them for some sort of power. Captain does not care about his daughter’s feelings. A character
suggested that he and Laura should meet half-ways – he was very ironic about it. He did not want to
compromise at all.
#8, pp 71/72 I don’t know that … of the spiritual child. Laura does not admit she
consciously plotted to destroy him. She claims she is innocent. She knows she will find her guilty and
that cannot be changed, but she feels innocent. It was like a survival instinct against his dominance.
Because of his behavior, she did what she did – her reaction against that. Is Laura a winner in this
story? She is still in the system, structure, so she cannot be free. She is in a system and uses its means
to gain control, to be in a way man, to be powerful and masculine. She abides by the masculine
principle, patriarchal system – she has not stepped out of the system – she just wants her piece of
power. It is not a real change, just a shift from one position in a structure to the other – from the
position of being dominated to the position of being dominant. She, as a woman, has been mutilated
by the structure but not just she, he also. He calls her a Goddess of strife – woman is no more a
38
Goddess of complete being but embodiment of a Goddess of strife – aggressive, wanting power.
Captain here criticizes marriage as an institution, partnership with a woman. This businesslike
marriage destroys healthy, normal, physical love between man and woman. The language he uses is
the language of economy. Modern marriage is like a business agreement. It is based on profit, material
things – that is why people get married. Marriage is not a matter of love, but prestige. He does not
blame Laura, he blames the system!
This is a representation of vulgar and not real feminism – it is not a struggle to uphold
feminine principles: love and intuition. Here, we just have a woman fighting for power in the man’s
world, a kind of female character that Strindberg criticizes.

L5 – GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856 – 1950) - PASSION FOR TRUTH

- an Ibsenite who misunderstood Ibsen as a social reformer; feminist, didactic playwright

- discussion – the chief element of his plays – the stage is a platform from which he denounces
shame, hypocrisy, snobbery, slums, militarism, prostitution
- wit, humane irony, incurable optimism
- began as a critic, a Fabian socialist
- philosophically an evolutionist – evolution not by blind chance, but by will – a conscious
active force for a benevolent purpose
- intelligence – the mind’s eye helping – see through deception to the direction of life force
- the New Theology – God – not the origin but the goal of creation, the perfection of intellect the
ecstasy of the brain
- quintessence of Ibsenism – definition of a superman, saint, realist
- evolution – growth in courage and spirit, courage to face reality and facts
- Philistines, Idealists, Realists – submit themselves to the principle of creative evolution
- St. Joan – a realist: My business is God’s business – a rebel against her gender role and
conventional warfare, a rebel against two major pillars of Medieval society: Feudal
aristocracy and Catholic church; the first nationalist and the first protestant; the
protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest and peer between private man and
his god
- the inner voice: vision of what is possible, accepts rather than renounce the vision
- her heart would not burn – a cultural hero: criterion of full humanity
- the irony of making amends
- Oh Earth, when will you receive your Saints?

Shaw was an Irishman by birth, but moved to London when he was 20 and stayed there until
his death. He hoped he would never die. He was a self-confident, energetic man. He used the stage to
dramatize the naturalist tradition of English Drama. With him, the new drama begins. R. Williams
does not mention Shaw’s essence. He just criticizes him. Shaw has important things to tell us. Some of
his characteristics are the sense of irony, humor, wit – the way he can laugh at all sorts of inborn
prejudices, hypocrisy, snobbery. He turns his irony in St. Joan against the prejudices about English,
against colonialism, hypocrisy. He shows St. Joan as infinitely superior to English hypocrisy. She is a
character that Shaw created to use against prejudices of the English and their sense of inborn
superiority. Shaw’s wit and ability to pin down hypocrisy and snobbery is a very satisfying experience.
Williams points to the way Shaw misunderstood Ibsen – he was an Ibsenite. He believed he was
moving in the direction Ibsen initiated. Before him, stage was dominated by cheap melodrama, and he
used stage discussion. He believed that was the most important element. It was also an important
element in Ibsen. (In Ibsen’s Doll’s House, Nora – Let us sit down and discuss our marriage –
but this is an anticlimax in the play.) Ibsen drops the idea of discussing and moves towards
symbolism. He begins as a social reformer and moves to the examination of the soul, but not as a cure
of all human ills. He concentrated on the sickness of personality, on inner personality and not on the
reform of society. If he was a feminist, he did not believe all problems could be solved by giving the
right to women to vote. He did not believe that by acquiring power, they would improve social state.
We have to reevaluate that, both men and women. The important element was something infinite,
fluctuating, the sense of love. He was not a vulgar feminist, but Shaw interpreted him as a liberating
39
feminist. Women who settled great store by marriage are not liberated. Ibsen ended his career by
celebrating earthly, sensual love – Irene and Rubek. Shaw believed women should give life to
children; they should subdue their sexuality in order to progress. It is a liberation comprising even
marginalization of the motherly function. Ibsen: men should understand how this element, the female
element is important.
Shaw used the stage as a platform to discuss the important issues. Slums – a way of gaining a
lot of money, prostitution – bad because it brings profit to those seemingly respectable people who
denounce prostitution, not because women are included. He was a relentless explainer of the
mechanism of exploitation behind the sainthood, prejudices and respectability. He discussed the
problems with tremendous wit. He does not spare anybody. Shaw was a social reformer, whereas
Ibsen was a symbolist playwright. Shaw: a social movement for liberation of women, Ibsen: to
reevaluate the female principle. In Ibsen, there are no humorous characters. He is not funny and even
those characters who want to achieve the joy of life yearn to do it by using humorless language. On the
other hand, Shaw’s characters are extremely witty. They use humorous, ironic language to reject the
joy of life as vulgar yearning for higher goals.
Shaw was primarily a critic believing that social reforms are the cure for social ills. He began
his career as a critic of drama and music, but he felt that to criticize is too negative; he felt the need for
positive belief. He radiated an incurable optimism, the faith in the possibility of change. He was a
Fabian socialist – believed in realization of change through gradual change, reform philosophically, an
evolutionist, not Darwinian belief in the survival of the fittest. There was another evolution – La
Marc – evolution comes about through will, not by chance. Darwin – giraffes have long necks; when
climate changed, they could reach the leaves on trees and therefore survived. According to La Marc,
they have long necks because at the critical point some of them willed to grow their necks. In physical
and social evolution, it is a conscious force that works through lower organism realizing a benevolent
purpose. It is the life force. Like Lucaks, he believed that there is will in the world. History has its
purpose – it is benevolently purposeful. He believes in this inherent direction in all life – creative
evolution seeking to express itself through organisms moving to ever better forms of social conditions.
He believed in creative evolution.
St. Joan is a cultural hero, a perennial experience still valid. She is a rebel against institution;
she can say No! to them.
According to Shaw’s New Theology, at a certain point of evolution organisms are supplied
with a new organ - eye – to help them orient in physical surrounding. It is at the same time
intelligence. Human intelligence appeared as an organ for moral orientation – the mind’s eye. People
who possess intelligence see through illusions. They see into which direction the life force is moving
and they identify with it. In the new theology, god is not the origin but the goal of creation. God is not
god in Christian sense. His audience was offended by his atheism. He finds god in a secular sense as
goal and not the origin of creation. It is not God that created us. It is the purpose to which people are
going. Realist, saint, God, superman – these words Shaw uses to show us what the life forces are
aiming at. God is to be identified with superman. Life force aims at a perfect man achieved by those
who managed to rid of flesh and blood and exist only by intelligence. They use the intelligence to see
where the life force is moving. Such people identify with it and enjoy in the ecstasy of brain. This
ecstasy, triumph of intelligence cannot realize itself unless it finds instruments of realization = people
able to identify with that life force. Not many people have this ability. Out of 1000 people, one is a
realist, 700 philistines – the unthinking majority. They are adjusted to institutions, convention and
work against man’s potentials. As long as they have their generic needs satisfied, they are quite happy
with the institutions. They think that the institutions are natural, given, unchanging. The remaining
299 are idealists. For Shaw, that does not have the meaning of a person faithful to perfect vision; they
are people who live in illusions, ideal masks of lies. These are people whose needs are not satisfied
within conventions. Above all, they are frustrated; they are limited and suffer within the social
institutions. Bourgeoisie marriage is hypocritical because they are against human instincts. Ibsen
disagrees. According to him, marriage can turn into a miracle. For Shaw, marriage and family are a
limitation of human freedom. The 299 feel it painfully that a desire for woman does not last forever; it
fades. They are forced to love the members of their family. Families are far from being perfect and
holy as the bourgeoisie wants it. Women are never allowed to show desire for and attachment to man.
For them, marriage and family are frustrating, but they do not have the courage to get rid of it.
Without marriage free love and libido would become a subversive force and because of that, marriage
40
has to last. It is an unpleasant truth for both men and women and idealists want to hide this truth. The
idealists invented the idea of everlasting love in order to make their lives bearable and survive in a
conventional marriage. The only one realist does not lack the courage to see the truth. He sees what
idealists do not see. He may preach free love, but he wants to submit the desire for pleasure for
something higher. He identifies his aspiration with up heaving force. Human evolution has been that
of growth – the greatest courage is to face facts. The realists have courage to see it. When that
happens, idealists and philistines persecute him. Idealists are shaken by it because he would somehow
strip their lives of their saving illusions.
In St. Joan, idealists prosecute Joan. This play is Shaw’s masterpiece. He wrote about
prostitution, slums, snobbery. In his Cesar and Cleopatra, Cesar is the hero. Women for Shaw do
not have moral virtues. They are admired when they want to be like men. In Pygmalion, Harry does
not marry Elisa because he cannot conceive marrying a woman who cannot be like a man. Cesar is
teaching Cleopatra of man’s ruling and governing.
St. Joan is on one level a very successful social comedy against the hypocrisy of the English.
The idea of life is superior to the idea of English. The events in the play happen during the 100 years’
war. Joan is a young energetic uneducated woman who got a message from god that she is to liberate a
French town. Shaw shows that she is here the realist. There is also a dramatization of the life force
here. Why can‟t you mind your own business, they ask her. Her business on Earth is to mind the
sheep. No business or Earth is God‟s business. It was only through the metaphor of god that Shaw
could show the idea of life force, creative force. She is a realist identifying herself with the directive
creative evaluation. She goes to that direction of evolution subordinating all other roles (woman,
mother) to this one – to save France. God’s business is to save France and her business is to do
something about it. She sacrifices herself. Any other thing or work is a distraction from this properly
defined purpose. She is completely identified with life force. She is a rebel against the role of a woman
– her gender role. She does not wear a petticoat, she bobs her hair, refuses to have children. She steps
beyond the role assigned to women. The Chaplain cannot forgive her that sin. Her greatest rebellion
is against the two pillars of the medieval society – the feudal aristocracy and the church/ecclesiastical
aristocracy. She believes she is the most devout prayer of the Catholic Church. However, she wants to
listen to her inner voices. This means you will disregard what the only institution interpreted. She is
wiser than her enemy. They say it is her imagination, but she says that that is how God’s messages are
transmitted. She is the first protestant. God – imaginative vision of what the purpose of her life is.
Shaw defends her imaginative vision. Her own intuition tells her that the Catholic Church is an
institution that forbids man to be in connection with his deepest self. She is also the first nationalist.
Her idea is that the land does not belong to the feudal aristocracy. King is to rule the land as God’s
ambassador, but here, he is a symbol without any substance and power. The aristocracy rule through
Charles. Her saying that France is for French and England for English – now she comes up with the
idea that land is identified with the people speaking one language – king rules the land in the name of
God. Aristocratic power immediately realizes that her nationalism is a blow against the power of
aristocracy. Secular power is represented by Warwick. She is against that secular power. Warwick is
a Machiavellian aesthete. The Catholic Church is represented by bishop. Warwick is offended by her
not talking about feudal aristocracy but about King and people. Her protest is the protest of the
individual against the interference of the peer or priest with the private self. Warwick knows that her
nationalism and Protestantism are a blow against the power of the two pillars. Since her vision allows
her to see what is possible she identifies intuitively with the life force. From the point of view of the
17th century, king worship and nationalist state is a step forward as well as Protestantism –
Protestantism and nationalism were revolutionary then. She fought for what was to come, identifying
with the life force within herself. She sees reality. Warwick is intent upon the power of aristocracy.
Archbishop claims he must preserve totalitarianism. They want to preserve the status quo by illusion.
She stood at this moment of time predicting and fighting for what was to come through her voice from
God. The feudal aristocracy and Church could not stand each other. Whatever bishop does, he does it
believing he is doing it for the good of people. Warwick is not deceived. He is a politician, a cynic. He
is doing it for the feudal aristocracy and is open about it. He is completely unhypocritical. He wants to
preserve his position – he will be the secular arm to kill her body. The soul cannot be saved without
ruining the body. In the end, after she was allowed to do whatever she wanted to do with her soul, she
inspired courage into Charles, who let others bully him. She inspired the initiative into soldiers to
abandon the conventional warfare. She used gunpowder, cannon and said they needed people who
41
believed in France. The moment they see god on their side, they will win. That is what happens – she
gives them hope and breathes courage into common people. She achieves all political aims,
whereupon she starts feeling the coldness. Now, they want to get rid of her. She becomes a burden to
all of them. If she remained in their proximity, she would have always reminded the King that their
lives sunk to the status quo. She is a tremendously creative person who will never stop. Once she saved
them, they no longer need her. She becomes an obstacle, a reminder of their mediocrity. They want to
ruin her, particularly Cauchon and Warwick. Even archbishop says she is a heretic. She is sold to
the English and brought to trial. (Catastrophe in Scene 6) She will lose her life unless she renounces
her beliefs. She refuses to do that. She remains loyal. At first, she refuses to sign, but she will sign
eventually. There are very sympathetic people. The punishment is the perpetual imprisonment. That
means being separated from the church bells through which she hears the voices. She will be
separated from her own inner self. She will not renounce her voice, even if she loses her life. This
scene is paradigmatic. First she signs the recantation betraying herself in order to preserve herself, but
when she realizes that signing means renouncing herself, she tears the document. She says that her
life is not the dearest thing to her. she is burnt. Warwick doubts it because her heart would not burn.
She becomes a cultural hero. She is important because she supplies them with the criterion
what is full Christianity – to assert vision against the greatest threat. She remains loyal to her vision –
that is the meaning of heretic! Her heart will not burn and people will remember that as the utmost
limit of humanity that they will never reach. However, she at least provided the measure. Those who
die for ideals are more conscious of what human potential is than those who do not have ideals. The
death of the realist is never a waste because they provide the measure. The spirit has to be defended
with blood. It is necessary to tell man that she belongs to the spiritual, not only physical dimension.
This is the story of the sainthood – the way a cultural hero asserts the power of spirit over the fear of
death. The Romance is her rise, the burning – Tragedy, and the Epilogue – comedy. It is a comedy of
making amends. The epilogue takes place in Charles’s dream. He sees Joan and comes to know that
she is going to be rehabilitated, proclaimed venerable. A bureaucrat from the 20th century says she is
canonized. The irony of making amends consists in the fact that when they all come and kneel in front
of her, they all admit they learned from her courage. De Stogumber – a chauvinist – the prototype
of the English colonialist. When he saw her burn, he repented, underwent a crisis, a complete reversal.
He said that it was so unnatural and he becomes a new man trying to expiate his sin. He kneels before
her offering his repentance. They all see the reality of the innocent death. Must then a Christ perish in
torment in every age to save those that have no imagination. – Cauchon. They admit all what they
learned from her. She suggests returning to them, and then one by one, they all step away. Joan: Oh
God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, how
long? We would rather not have saints because such realists would show other people’s shortcomings.
Those who killed her, now proclaim her a saint, just because of the feeling of guilt.
Eliot’s Cocktail Party can also be read in context of sainthood. Eliot wanted to show that
sainthood is possible even here. Celia, a character from The Cocktail Party, is an actress. There are
thematic similarities between St. Joan and this play. The question here is to what extent we can
accept the vision of marriage and how valid it is. For Shaw and Eliot, human love does not have the
same dimension as for Ibsen. For all the three of them, ego becomes most real when it becomes
attached to something else. However, that something else is different. For Ibsen, it is woman’s love –
sensual love is necessary for the completeness of being. For Eliot and Shaw, there is completeness
without sensual love. For Shaw, that else is separation from the physical existence. Look Back in
Anger is a parody on Eliot.

P10 – T. S. ELIOT: Cocktail Party

- Shaw, Lukacs, Eliot: human condition is not hopeless – movement is possible

(Lukacs: society, Shaw: evolution, Eliot: spiritual realm)
- verse: used by Eliot to introduce deeper meaning
- selfish self vs. the genuine self
- the unconscious man and the conscious few: Celia’s vision
- to transcend the ego by means of life: a third person, us
- Celia: 1st sense of solitude (selfish self: a prison; love of projection – strangers),
42
 2nd sense of sin (treasure – vision of a life completely fulfilled)
- two possibilities: 1. conventional life: Edward and Lavinia – unloving and unlovable – to
reconcile with the human condition – learn one’s limitations – a good life
2. transhumanization: surrender to something more important than
the self
- Celia dies rather than to betray her vision
- Eliot: possessive love/attachment to people (objects) cannot lead to spiritual fulfillment

What Eliot has in common with Lukacs and Shaw is the belief that the modern man is not
hopeless. They all believe a certain movement is possible. For Lukacs, who is a Marxist, this
movement is through history and society. The society moves forward if the artist can grasp his vision
of new society. Shaw is an evolutionist – he believes that there is a life force and god at the end of
evolution; that all living creatures and man move towards perfection. He sees this perfection as the
ecstasy of brain, so the potential for human improvement is our intellect.
For Eliot, there is also hope but it does not lie in history. For him, history has the shape of the
inverted U. the best period for him has a peak – Elizabethan Period – the age when human faculty
of imagination was not separated from intellect and also when spirituality permeated the whole social
life. further on, history leads to dissociation of sensibility – our thoughts and feelings are no longer in
harmony. Another thing brought by historical development is the modern society that supports and
favorizes the selfish self. Eliot criticizes modern democracies because, although they assign a great
importance to the individual, they encourage the selfish tendencies in the individual. For Eliot, in
every man there is a potential to transcend the selfish self and reach a genuine self by means of
surrendering one’s selfish interests. This leads to something more important that is either Selfless
Christian Love or Divine Plan. This means that for Eliot hope does not lie in social progress but in the
spiritual realm. The idea is expressed in Eliot’s plays although he writes plays when realistic drama is
popular he does not observe this trend, he writes his plays in verse and feels that the everyday realistic
prose talk cannot express the depth of human psyche. The people who are aware of this need to live a
more complete spiritual life are called by Eliot the conscious few. The others are the unconscious
many. Celia, the central character of The Cocktail Party belongs to the conscious few. She has had a
vision of meaningful and fulfilled life and she wants to fulfill this vision through her love relationship
with Edward, who is a married man and is not happy with Lavinia and has an affair with Celia, who
has great ideals regarding this affair. She hopes that through loving Edward she will manage to
transcend her ego, that through their love she and Edward will grow into the third person – us.
However, it turns out that Edward is not worth of such love. At one moment, Lavinia leaves Edward,
which is his opportunity for fulfillment and transcendence of ego, but when it happens, all he wants is
to get his wife back, he is afraid and cannot leave conventional life. He needs the security of his
conventional marriage.
There is also a psychologist in the play. The psychologist is a spokesman of Eliot’s ideas. Celia
goes to see this psychologist after her relationship with Edward has finished and tells him that she is
troubled by the sense of solitude and the sense of sin. She feels that all people around her and herself
are unloving or unlovable. We feel alone because we live in this prison of the isolated ego and unless
we transcend it, we never get to know other people. Celia says: We only think we fall in love with
somebody but what we love is only our projection and we are all the time strangers to each other.
We think of the key
Each in his prison
Thinking of the key
Each confirms a prison
The Waste Land
=we are afraid of sacrificing the I to a greater cause = love.
Another thing that troubles Celia is the sense of sin. She feels that she had a vision of
something important and that she has betrayed the vision that she calls treasure. She feels like a child
who went to a forest to find treasure and fails but there is still an urge not to betray the vision. She
says: I can put up with everything, live with anything, if only I can cherish it (ACT 2). She does not
want to be cured from this dream.
The other two that go to the psychiatrist after the crisis are Edward, whose problem is that his
wife does not love him and he cannot love her, so he feels he is not capable of giving a meaningful love
43
to wife. The thinks that she is to blame, so he tries to have an affair with Celia and realizes that he
cannot love her deeply or that he is unable to love deeply = unloving. The psychiatrist says that this
feeling is as disturbing as impotence. Lavinia has the same problem. First, she thinks that it is her
husband who does not love her and blames him. Then she finds a lover and realizes that she is such a
person whom no one can deeply love = unlovable. Eliot wants to tell us that we are unloving and
unlovable unless we manage to transcend the selfish self. This situation is not tragic for Edward and
Lavinia. The psychiatrist teaches them to learn and accept their limitations and he reconciles them
with a human condition. They have to accept that they are both unloving and unlovable but it is
important that they no longer delude themselves so there will be a certain improvement of their
relation at the end of the play. What they do: They make the best out of the bad job. According to
Eliot, this is still a good life in the world that is full of violence, stupidity and greed. Their lives are
good.
Celia says that she cannot accept this conventional life and says: No, it leaves me cold. She
chose another option. Eliot calls this transhumanization. He also says that it is a horrible journey into
the unknown because our selfish self dies and genuine self is born. Destruction of ego by
consciousness. Celia changes her life and becomes a nurse, goes to a mission in an African country and
dies there. She attends dying people and does not wand to desert them, wants to stay and give them
comfort. There is an attack of a hostile tribe and they kill her in a horrible manner: she is eaten by
ants. She actually commits an act of willing sacrifice and remains faithful to her vision of sacred love.
She rather dies than to betray her vision. We do not see her dead in the play, from the beginning to the
end the play remains in the room of the upper-class English society. We have a messenger who tells a
story about how she died. Impression is that Celia’s death is something that happens outside society.
Within the conventional life, she cannot have the kind of relationship that would enable her to
transcend her ego, so for Eliot, this movement to spiritual realm is something that does not happen in
society.
What is specific about Eliot is the kind of love he cherishes – selfless universal love. He does
not believe in the potential of male-female relationship; he believes in universal love that is not
related to only one thing. He thinks that any form of love that implies attachment to another person
will not lead to spiritual fulfillment. This makes him not appreciate erotic love. Erotic love has no
deeper meaning according to him, only universal love is important. This is a very Christian
philosophy.

hope Ruben, Irena

LUKACS SHAW, ELIOT IBSEN

Ulfheim, Maya

For Ibsen, physical aspect of human relationship is very important. He believes in erotic love.

When We Dead Awaken by H. Ibsen

#1, p 243 Does he live there … rise a little from the dead. Irene carries a knife with her
to protect herself. She does not want to have children. She is not fit to be a wife, mother. She has
become destructive, it is as if she carries death in her, something destructive. She cannot be a mother.
The dagger is connected to her sexuality. At the end of the passage, she says that she begins to rise
from the dead. Her son is dead. There is a contrast between the title of the sculpture that Rubek makes
Resurrection, which is supposed to be a kind of improvement, a promise of some final fulfillment for
us. Irene is destroyed from inside. She rises from the dead and is as a ghost, haunts Rubek and is not
resurrected to something good.
#2, p 245 A little apart from each other … in your image Irene. She accepts his
invitation. She wants to grow up, to become a woman. The words she uses sound frank, honest but
also very solemn. She expresses it as a marriage oath. There is an author – creator of work of art, the
authority in heaven – God – she addresses him as Oh, my Lord – she sees him as being above her,
whereas Maya and Ulfheim are equal.

44
 Gazed at her. He is looking at her and sees beauty but does not communicate with her. He
has the wish to touch her, when we gaze at things we study them from afar.
There are two kinds of knowledge: intuitive – you become one or intellectual – distant from
the object – he does not see her as a woman.
He calls the sculpture our child – he thinks of it as of an offspring of their love, but that is not
the truth.
For him, the perfect woman is supposed to be pure – he believes in intellectual love with no
implication of sexuality. Ideal of ascetic spiritual perfection.
Symbolism of high mountains. Something he always strove for, it stands for Rubek’s ideal of
perfection. Perfection is a male ideal and female ideal is wholeness. Patriarchal civilization has the
ideal of perfection. Eliot is also talking about that kind of perfection but this means the rejection of our
sexuality. Feminine principle is to unite all things, complete being. Rubek has the ideal of a beautiful
virgin who is because of that destroyed as a human being.
#3, p 258 Exactly of her … blocks of stones. He is not satisfied with the sculpture. He
thought it would bring him more happiness. He destroyed something in himself because of the way he
treated Irene. He then starts making portraits with animal features – to show the bad human
qualities. We all have an animal part in us, but the attitude of modern man is to suppress it and it is
not only suppressed but also perverted for Rubek (p 229 – when he talks about the portraits). He
wants to show that within the man there is a perverted animal.
Ulfheim – spa – feeling of death in life. there is a sort of general lack of vitality vs. Ulfheim who
is full of life but violent, rude, rough, he is the other extreme. At the end, he shows some good qualities
and changes. This is opposite to Rubek who does not want to touch Irene – two extremes because
Ulfheim wanted to rape Maya. At the end, he improves.
Rubek does not invest all his energy, only his intellect, the kind of art that he has practiced has
turned out to be meaningless and egotistic. He just used Irene to create a work of art. Her destiny was
to be loving, sacrificial and of him it was expected to be ambitious, to pursue career. Woman = selfless,
motherly love – by the society (connection to Adrienne Rich). Rubek has failed in this aspect –
devouring aspect of an ego - A.R.- has failed in Rubek. This idea of egotistic art led him to the idea that
art is meaningless and that he wants life instead.
#4, p 269 Resurrection Day you call it … stay forever in his own hell. He made a
group structure – she was at first in the middle, posed to represent life, something positive,
resurrection of life. she was to be rejoicing to the life and she changed because he added human
figures with animal shapes. He has become ironic, social life. He turned to a critique of society instead
of being just an artist. Robert Graves – the single theme of poets in matriarchal society – the
worship of the Goddess of complete being – she was a muse. Rubek says that there was a single model
for all his works. He does not worship woman in her totality. When she was the center of his
inspiration, he did not perceive her in her totality. Now, he is no longer inspired by a woman and he
has abandoned his muse and become a social critique.
The expression on her face subdued, there is no joy on her face, she is a disembodied figure, no
longer a symbol of joy of life. He is unconsciously aware that he has made a mistake and that his life is
meaningless. He wants to expiate his sins. He must stay forever in his own hell, in his own
misconception of life. After he has betrayed Irene, he has no normal life anymore.
#5, p 282 I once book a young woman … as we really are. Maya talks about her
marriage with Rubek and Ulfheim talks about his wife who left him because of another man. Rubek
offered to take her up to the mountains – offered perfection but failed again, that perception seemed
like a cage to her, she did not feel free there. Guilded walls – Rubek got rich and offered her wealth –
what he could offer her was material wealth. His sculptures were like ghosts in their house. Stone
specters – they both feel that they have rags because of everything they have lost. Ulfheim suggests
that they patch their rags together – relation based on understanding, friendship. The kind of
marriage he proposes is the kind where they are what they really are – relationship closer to the ideal
of wholeness rather than to the ideal of perfection.
A nun – ominous figure that suggests death and Irene cannot escape from this awareness that
she is dead inside, like a premonition of their death. Irene looks as though she had no eyesight – as if
she had no soul – somebody who is vegetating, death in life. She reads the last pray to bury them. Her
inner being is in total destruction.

45
 SAINT JOAN by George Bernard Shaw

#1, pp 1571/2 A faithful daughter of a church … if she once falls into my hand.
#2, pp 1573/5 O my Lord Byshum, I’m not … in a welter of war. + imp 1574 It
goes deep my lord
#3, p 1598 Give me that writing … that mine is of God.
+epilogue
L6 – OSBORNE

- Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1916, 1957) the room – a private sphere – consequence of
social
- Pinter, The Birthday Party (1957) forces; economy, religion, law, sexual politics -
acted
The Room (1957) out in family relationships
- Ibsen – exit, sought and found – marriage potentially a medium of human fulfillment – a miracle
- Murder in the Cathedral, St. Joan, the room disappears
- Sainthood – a timeless possibility:
The Cocktail Party – Celia – a secular saint
- Choice – the common routine; marriage – journey into the unknown - love beyond desire and fear
- Transhumanization – separation from human condition – marriage – a hell or making the best of
a bad job
- What is the meaning of the room in Look Back in Anger? ENTRAPMENT or A SHELTER;
refuge from the cruel traps outside
- Jimmy and Alison – unhappy – Why?
- Sunday morning – climax of the weekly cycle: nothing to do – conflict, strife, violence, hysteria
- Rage as the hypocrisy of the post WWII England
- Osborne, A Letter to my Countrymen – a declaration of hatred; England – a pile of junk
- Alison’s family – father, a pre WWI man – genuinely deceived, brother Nigel, the inheritor –
deliberately stupid and blind, mother – a monster of convention and snobbery
- the newspapers, the church bells/jazz
- no possibility of constructive action
- No brave causes left to fight for
- We are butchered by women:
Alison and Helena: class enemies
Upper class: indifference
Middle class: religious hypocrisy – a churchgoer
- believer in the book or rules – emotional virgin
- a saint, a stab at Eliot
- sainthood – a desire to escape the pain of love
- life – a cesspool
- no dry cleaners in Cambodia
- bears and squirrels – the room: a zoo
- a possibility of fuller humanity or the loss of humanity
- neither opposes nor suffers, Alison betrays Jimmy

What is wrong with women? Osborne

He was very uncertain about his attitude to women. At certain points he is antifeminist, but
also an enemy of Eliot. He never reconciled these two attitudes in his writings.
In Look Back in Anger, the action takes place in a one-room flat somewhere in a provincial
town in midlands. People are of humble origin. In Pinter, it happens in a boarding house. The room
is a central stage metaphor. R. Williams would be pleased because his entire critique of the modern
drama is from that perspective. The room suggests a private sphere, a space within which the
consequences of social forces are acted out. The room is a confined space from which an exit is sought.

46
 In both A Doll’s House and Wild Duck, there is the room, though not so obviously. It is a
place from which an exit is sought. In both plays, women are treated as toys. Nora, in A Doll’s
House goes away to search her own identity – she leaves the room, that is the house.
In When We Dead Awaken, most of the action takes place outside. We are made to understand
that Rubek and Irena have found an exit from conventions. The exit is found, but, unfortunately, too
late. They die having recognizing that they have not lived. They are partially redeemed by this
recognition. Maia’s life with Rubek has been an imprisonment in sepulcher. Maia asks whether
there are works of art in his place, because Rubek sacrificed everything to his work of art. Ulfheim
says No. The room will not be a museum. She realizes she has found a partner. According to Ibsen,
marriage is an institution where it is still possible to find fulfillment.
In Murder in the Cathedral and St. Joan, there are historical situations. It was easy for
them within this context to dramatize their, so the room disappears. There is no room because there is
no marriage that can be represented by this sphere. Saints are people who will never be confined to
social order. Saints by definition do not marry.
In Cocktail Party, the room reappears. The room is suggestive of marriage and here it
reappears to define the marriage of Edward and Lavinia. Sainthood is a transhistorical
phenomenon achievable at all time. Celia is a fashionable upper-class girl in love with Edward. She is
a modern atheistic saint. She believes that by loving Edward beyond desire they will transcend the
ego, their own beings and merge into a third being. It is possible to give yourself to a cause that
transcends your own egotistic self. However, Edward fails her. He wants to go back to his
conventional life because he could not live up to her standards. When Celia goes to see him, Reily
offers two cures: 1st is to leave the room and 2nd to return to the room, meaning to return to the
conventions and behave as the majority unconscious people – philistines. She chooses the second and
becomes a saint. She realizes that erotic love is always an illusion. Reily also helps Edward and
Lavinia. They learn to become tolerant of each other’s limitations and live together. Celia realizes
that in erotic love we are all either unlovable or unloving – she generalizes. One projects one’s own
desire on the husband or wife and that is what one loves – not wife or husband. Love is always an
illusion. When we expect our partner to be our preconception, it is our fault, not his or hers. That is
why she feels guilt in the end. When Reily offers her the everyday life, she says it would be dishonest
to offer somebody a love that belongs to a vision. She chooses between the ordinary routine and the
unknown, and chooses the unknown. It is beyond fear, desire, and heterosexual love. She dies because
of this selfless love. She becomes a nurse. She could have fled but she stays. She remains faithful to her
vision even if that means death. In this sense she becomes a modern, secular saint. She does not want
to die – she is not like people who consciously choose death. She remains faithful to her self and that
is her last test and sacrifice. She chooses to preserve her integrity. She was crucified on an anthill and
she is eaten by the ants.
The same theme is also present in 1984. The main character remained alive although he was
transformed by the Party. To be human, to survive without being corrupted. There are various worlds
in which you can survive: professional, emotional… In Ghost, we see that the compromises by which
we live are the compromises by which we die. Transhumanization demands a separation from human
condition: love, flesh, marriage and Celia becomes a saint through this kind if renunciation. She is a
saint because she rather died than to betray herself.
For Shaw, marriage is hell. We see that in Don Juan in Hell. Here we see that to seek
pleasure is vulgar. To be in Hell is synonymous to chasing pleasures. Here people drift. In Paradise,
people steer – they see the direction in which they are going. For Eliot, marriage is a kind of Hell but
it can be transformed. Lavinia’s and Edward’s marriage is turned into a decent relationship. They
must stop blaming each other for failing to live up the preconception. Marriage is either a hell, or, in
the best case, making the best of a bad job. Lavinia and Edward are reconciled in the third act. In
the first act, they were arguing. When the party failed, they saw through the preconceptions and
realized that they were mediocrities. They begin to learn how to get on. They are reconciled to
institutionalized life, which is symbolized by the stage metaphor of the room. Reconciliation is
according to Eliot a decent but partial life.
What is the meaning of the room in Look Back in Anger? They live in a one-room flat. They
are poor. What kind of life is possible within this place? Is the room a shelter from social forces or it is
symbolical of the entrapment of the destructive social forces. The room is an alternative to the kind of
life outside. Jimmy says There are cruel traps waiting outside. The suggestion is that the room is a
47
shelter for them. In this room, they are trying to protect themselves. It is a withdrawal from social
forces – they are trying to sustain themselves by love.
However, they are not happy – there is anger, rage and frustration. Alison, Jimmy and Cliff
, Jimmy’s roommate live together. It is Sunday. Traditionally, it is the day when there is no work, it is
God’s day and one needs to devote oneself to spiritual pursuit. Sunday is the crown of a weekly cycle
and the three of them have nothing to do except read newspapers. There is a routine scene that turns
into a spectacle of conflict, violence and hysteria. Jimmy is angry. He is shouting at his wife - they are
substitutes for the real enemies. Post WWII social order in England was characterized by hypocrisy.
Labor Government was elected and its main program was to insure greater justice for all, particularly
equal opportunities for education. Jimmy is one of the beneficiaries of the new law. They were paid
education and went to the red brick universities. On leaving them, those people found that the highest
positions were reserved for the Oxford and Cambridge university students – jobs that allow you to
advance belong to them. The result was that people like Jimmy became misfits. The education made
them conscious about their unadjustment in this society. If they had not been educated, they would
not even have the consciousness. Now, they are aware that nobody wants them. Jimmy sells sweets
for living and has a University degree. The society still obeys the values of the highly stratified class
system. He is highly frustrated. Osborne gave voice to the whole generation of Angry, young men.
Osborne left Britain –because of this false democracy. From France, he wrote A Letter to My
Fellow Countrymen, in which he expressed his hatred to England and compared it to a pile of junk
laid over with manners on which those in power sit pretending not to feel the stench. That is why
Jimmy is angry.
Alison comes from an upper class family belonging to the people who pretend not to feel the
stench. Her father provokes the least of Jimmy’s anger. They feel some kindness for one another.
Her father was the pillar of the empire. Now that empire has collapsed, he is confused because for
him everything has changed. He is a loser now, just like Jimmy, which is the exact reason why
Jimmy feels sympathy for him. At that time – the beginning of the 20th century - people genuinely
believed that imperialism and colonialism were noble projects. Alison’s father belongs to those who
were genuinely deceived and believed in that. He never doubted that they were bringing progress to
the colonies. He was not hypocritical, so there is some excuse for him. The play is ambivalent at this
point. Even though Jimmy knows it was a plunder, he looks back in nostalgia. People believed then.
That time passed and Jimmy feels envy because he belongs to no world – has no world of his own. It is
no longer possible not to know the truth. There is no excuse for pretending not to know. You must
know. His rage is directed towards Nigel, Alison’s brother, who is deliberately stupid. He is vague
about everything. Jimmy cannot forgive him because he belongs to the generation that keeps
plundering hiding behind stupidity. He suppresses the idea by hiding behind the stupidity and
ignorance, by surrounding himself with clichés. He knows intuitively but will do nothing to recognize
the facts. He is the kind of man Jimmy cannot forgive – he is deliberately blind. The great faculties of
England are for the education of the political personnel (Osborn – the American age - cynical,
deliberately stupid people who will enforce the continuity of their ideas without even blinking.
Osborne suggests that one way of being American is refusing to see. Maybe, all of our children will be
Americans. He refuses to feel anything about the state of affairs. It is a pervasive, disillusioned view- a
sense that there are no brave causes left to fight for. There was one war in Spain in which his father
fought and another against fascism was won against Hitler for greater justice at home. The bitter line
that penetrates the plan is that no causes are left to fight for. The mood that is present in the play –
futility. Even if we die, we will die not heroically. There is nothing left to us but to be butchered by
women. Why does he say that? Can love be an alternative for the frustrating experience in the outer
world?
Alison’s mother and brother do not appear in the play – we get to know about them through
dialogs. It is to stress their isolation from the outer world – to escape the crippling influences of the
outer world. The external world gets in, mainly, trough newspapers; Church will give full support to
the manufacturer of the Atom Bomb – a sentence from the newspapers. Church is highly hypocritical.
He also says that church does not hate the working class but ascribes to them the lie that they hate the
church. It shows the hypocrisy of the church. Jimmy cannot stand the sound of the church bells
because of the perversity of the church. The church should offer hope but it does not. There are no
causes he can fight for. There is no visible enemy he can fight against and he projects it on the church.
All he can do is oppose the sound, so he plays a trumpet. His other response is his rage against women
48
(Alison and Helena). He almost hates Alison. Alison abandoned her class by marrying him. Alison’s
mother is the essence of the corrupted, snobbish empire. She is the essence of patriarchy by
promoting the worst and the most snobbish of the upper class. For her, Jimmy’s (also the motif is
present in St. Mawr) long hair was a sign of something daemonic. She never forgave her daughter for
marrying below her. Alison was drawn to him by his vitality and energy. He objects to her indifference.
That is an upper class habit to be indifferent. All she wants is a little peace. He calls her sleeping
beauty. She is unconcerned with social injustices. She is of small courage, mind, and brain. He is
concerned with Hamlet’s dilemma – to suffer or to oppose. She does neither. She betrayed him in a
way by writing letters to her mother where he is not mentioned. She remained a loyal daughter. He
wishes her to have a baby and than lose it, which is, exactly, what will happen. He wants to make her
suffer in order to become a recognizable human being. According to him, she is not a human being
because she refuses to suffer. She does not share his concern and rage.
Helena is an actress in the real life as well. She shapes her conduct by prescribed script. She
is present at one point when Jimmy suffers the most. His friend’s mother is dying and instead of
going to the deathbed of the dying woman with him, Alison goes to the church. The form is more
important than the essence. She is a formal observer of the ritual. She is won over by Helena. The
formal act wins over the essence and she goes to church. This is the moment when he feels most
betrayed. Alison leaves him eventually. Helena is an epitome of hypocrisy. She urges Alison
to leave Jimmy partly motivated by Helena’s desire to be with Jimmy. In the third act,
there is Helena instead of Alison. Helena is now his lover. She is not as passive as Alison; it
turns out that she is worse than Alison because she is an epitome of middle-class hypocrisy.
She believes in the book of rules. She feels that she breaks the Christian and social norms – she does
not go to church for sometime because that drives Jimmy crazy. When Alison, who has suffered,
appears Helena withdraws because she is his lawful wife and she has to do everything by the book. The
way Helena goes to church is meaningless. Jimmy says it is her desire to escape from the pain of being
alive. She wants to regain the meaning of life by returning to religion. She wants to live without
dirtying her hands. It is either Sainthood or Humanity. Love presupposes some contamination. Love
is contaminated since its mediums are blood and flesh. If you want to be a saint you will
never be a human being – sainthood is a diminishing of our humanity. These are allusions
to Eliot. In Eliot, we have formal language, whereas here, there is the language of young people as
Jimmy. The spoken language, the physicality of the theatre is opposed to the Eliot’s solemnity. One
of the lyrics is about cesspool – No dry cleaners in Cambodia. If you want to be clean, you are not a
human being. Jimmy has been thrown into the cesspool, so he is human. If you want to make yourself
transhuman, it is not possible because life is a septic tank. The idea is that there is no exit from this
hell – we can only think it through. He says at the end that though women butcher us, they are
unavoidable – we cannot live without them.
There is their play of squirrels and bears – they are compared to these little animals – they
hide in order to be saved from the outer world. This household is less than human, reduced to the
bestial level. It is becoming a zoo more and more. Does it imply that the room is a trap or
recreating the animal love in us – true affection and building from there to the
intellectual level. Everyone who does not suffer is a difficult case of emotional virginity. Maybe he
wants Alison to go back to the beginning – she has lost her child and is not indifferent anymore – she
is contaminated by suffering. There is a new way open for a new beginning. Here, a way out from the
confinement of society is by descent. They sank to the level that is not words and intellect but animal
affection. It is completely different from Shaw for whom the ecstasy of brain is the most important.
Osborn rejects that here. Here we have not intellect and words but affection. In Eliot, there is
elevation.
Webster was the only one to preserve intelligence. Jimmy says that he does not want to be a
part of his revolution – Gay Revolution. It was the only revolution left. Jimmy wants to say that he is
a heterosexual.
For Alison, he says that she swallows him whenever they make love – there are no indications
that her indifference is class condition. Osborne speaks against all women. He speaks against women,
not as social beings but as natural beings - they are all immersed in marriage, sex and child bearing.
If they suffer, it is only because of love. Women are not progressive. She is indifferent to social
changes because she is interested only in sexual love.

49
 In Osborne, one can be saved by developing his potentials. In Pinter, the protagonist
has the worst of the both worlds – room, door and the knock on the door.

P 11 – The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot

#1, pp 121/3 Now, I want to point out to both of you … my fault. What Reilly says to
Edward is that he is a person who is unloving and not able to love other persons and Edward realized
that when his wife left him. Edward had a choice before Lavinia left him. However, he was afraid to
love Celia deeply and he went back to the traditional and conventional. Lukacs says about choice:
every human being has abstract potential and when a moment of crisis in life comes and asks you to
make a choice, the choice sometimes surprises even you and that choice determines your character –
that was the case with Edward – he chose to go back to Lavinia. The feeling of being unloving is
compared to the fear of impotence – spiritual and emotional impotence.
Lavinia discovered that her problem was that she was unlovable – she could not be loved. In
the beginning, she thought that only Edward could not love her, but then she realized that her lover
could not love her so she concluded that she was unlovable.
#2, pp 123/4 And now, you begin to see … the condition. Edward and Lavinia have in
common the same isolation. She is unlovable, and he unloving. Two perceptions of the self according
to Eliot. Both of them are trapped in their ego consciousness and as long as it is so, you cannot
establish a deep emotional relationship with other people.
After this, their position improved in a way. They realized that they should learn to live within
their own limitations and not to cherish illusion. Before, they always accused each other and now, they
are aware of their own faults.
Sanatorium – the symbol of what? Maybe it is a spiritual school. Reilly is supposed to be a
psychiatrist, but he talks as a priest. Why would the two of them become the prey for the devil in the
sanatorium? Maybe because they have not enough courage to change. he mentions the possibility that
they go there, so that they could change spiritually. Reilly saves them from living in illusions. It is a
very destructive way of living – they are always accusing each other.
Edward says that they should make the best of a bad job – to make the best of their marriage.
Except, of course, the Saints - saints are faithful to their dreams, like Celia and all other just make the
best of a bad job. According to Eliot, every human life is like this. This unconventional life is called a
human condition. For Eliot, hell is when you live in illusions – the moment we become reconciled with
this human condition, when you realize your limitations, it ceases to be hell. There are two acceptable
ways for Eliot: accept conventional life with awareness of the limitation and transhumanization.
#3, pp 130/131 An awareness of solitude … to speak to anyone. Celia says there are
two things bothering her. firstly, solitude: not a simple kind of solitude after a break-up; it is no longer
worthwhile to speak to anyone. She feels that one is always alone – she has always been alone.
Loneness as universal human condition.
#4, pp 134/5 It is not the feeling of anything … can you cure me? She says one feels
a sense of sin and then tries to define it. It is not that she is sinful, or has a sinful thought, but a failure
of reaching something spiritual outside herself. Some spiritual entity that she tried to grasp, but failed.
To reach the deepest self. She tried to reach it in this relationship with Edward. The relationship
between Edward and Celia failed because she wanted to create the third person – a way of
transcending egotism. She was trying to reach some higher level of consciousness, but not Edward.
They see each other as projections, not real persons. As long as we remain trapped in this prison of
ego, we are unlovable and unloving.
She makes the metaphor of the forest. Forest is always a place of experience. Edward is
compared to a child who came to the forest. He got lost in this world of experience. Celia went to the
forest to find treasure – a vision of a meaningful, fulfilling, complete existence. She was looking for
this treasure in the affair with Edward, did not find it and now she wonders if it even exists. But, Reilly
says that this treasure exists, she should not give up. Was there anything real or positive about their
relationship? Both of them had illusions about each other, but the intensity of feelings and ecstasy was
real. It is not physical but spiritual love – desire is fulfilled in the delight of loving. Celia thinks that
spiritual love matters. What she values is the intensity of loving. It is a part of the treasure she is

50
looking for and she wants to experience this again. It is a sort of search for this genuine, selfless,
altruistic self.
#5, pp 136-9 The condition is curable … it is a terrifying journey. Celia can be cured
in two ways: 1st to go back to conventional life, to reconcile with the human condition, to remain in the
prison of ego. Those who returned to conventional life remember the vision, but do not regret it
anymore, they do not ask too much of life; marriage is such a state – married people know they do not
understand each other. The relationship between married people is superficial, there is no deep
contact but they are within their egos. This is a conventional marriage – the kind of life Edward and
Lavinia accepted. In comparison to the violence of the world, this way of life is good – it preserves us
from destructiveness, it is a decent life. Celia feels that accepting this way of life would mean a betrayal
of her own vision, she does not want to forget her vision, she cannot live without it. At this moment,
her vision is so strong that she cannot ignore it. She longs to reach this spiritual goal. This other way
that Reilly suggests to her is 2nd way of being cured. It requires both faith and courage – the
destination cannot be described in familiar terms. 1st way is conventional, but 2nd is unconventional. It
means leaving society and relationships existing within it. It is unknown. The goal, what will happen
at the end of the journey is spiritual realm, deep genuine self – it is the process called
transhumanization. It is trying to reach this selfless self. Reilly, about this journey that Celia has
chosen, says that it is a terrifying journey because it is lonely; it is a different kind of life. You have to
transcend the egotistic self, dissolution of ego, death of the old and birth of the new self, a process of
transformation. This is why it is terrifying.

Look Back in Anger by John Osborne

#1, pp 20/1 Have you ever seen her brother … better than anybody else. About
Alison’s brother Nigel. Redbrick Universities are for lower classes. Nigel belongs to the upper class.
The top jobs are reserved for the upper classes. Jimmy feels betrayed because of this. Osborne
criticizes the hypocrisy of English society. Nigel went to the top universities and will have the top job.
Nagel has vague knowledge; he is completely ignorant of lower classes. Hi is very vague, but he talks
like an upper-class politician – about commonplaces (platitude = usiljene fraze). That is what Nigel
uses. He never expresses any original idea; he is shaped by the ruling structures. Did Nigel have any
alternative? Not only cannot he change but he is also incapable of conceiving any alternative system.
His school is a brainwashing system and it was there that his character was shaped. He is conditioned
by the system.
#2, pp 37/8 Oh, my dear wife … nothing left of me. He is very cruel to his wife because
he thinks she is insensitive and indifferent. She is passive and he wants her to be active. Pusillanimous
is the perfect adjective for her. She is in a beauty sleep. Jimmy hopes that such an experience will
change her. He wants her to suffer. He thinks that what makes us human is when we are capable of
suffering: either to suffer or oppose – both choices imply being fully human. Your rage shows that you
are human.
Jimmy lost his emotional virginity when his father died and his mother did not care. He was
the only one who cared. He felt helpless and angry. He wants Alison to become fully human by
experiencing intense emotions.
Her passivity is shown even in their relationship and in sex although she is passionate in her
own way – as a python. She devours him – an image of a passive female just devouring the man. She
does not support Jimmy’s progressive ideas, his anger at the society and protest. Another passive
woman in literature is Ophelia. She listens to her father and Alison listens to her mother. Parents
symbolize the forces of society. Their children can never develop fully. Polonius is faithful to his
system, not to his daughter. Such children, as Alison and Ophelia are the pillars of society; they
sustain the society. On the other hand, Jimmy is a rebel and Alison betrays him, she does not support
him, she is just like Ophelia who betrayed Hamlet.
#3, p 47 You see that bear and that squirrel … and no brains. Alison shows Helena
two fluffy toys – a bear and a squirrel – that represent Jimmy and her. There is a level at which they
play this game, the level of uncomplicated affection, the level of their relationship that concerns
emotions. At other levels they disagree. At one level, they usually have conflicts – it is the intellectual
level. Important of these animals is that they are all love and no brains – just like Jimmy and Alison –
51
they disagree on the intellectual level. Apart of feelings, this level also symbolizes the physical, sexual,
carnal love, the animal part of the psyche, the part of us that is natural as contrasted to the part that is
socially conditioned.
According to Lionel Trilling, there are two ways in which one can go beyond culture: 1 st
looking at other cultures or 2nd to experience ourselves as biological facts – beyond the reach of
culture.

Eliot history individual can move upwards in the spiritual

realm

Shaw history saint, realist; ecstasy of brain

Helena, a saint, wants

to
escape the pain of
being
Osborne history American age, alive, but fails as a
human
hope for an individual being; not a real saint
bears and squirrels;
uncomplicated level of
affection where we can
learn
to love again

#4, pp 93/4 Very well … this world or the next. Alison has returned as a transformed
person. Helena leaves in a hurry. She is talking about train. She wants to escape the moment the
problem has emerged, to escape the moment of crisis. Her feelings are deeply superficial. For Jimmy,
suffering is the proof that you are a human being and when she says that she cannot take part in the
suffering, he hates her even more. She does not want to dirty her hands. People who want to escape
the pain of being alive he calls saints, but in negative sense; she is an escapist, not a human being.
Hot-house feelings – superficial. She wants to escape the complications, she is an emotional virgin,
she is trying to protect herself from suffering. She cannot stand intense experience; she is fragile,
artificial and not natural.
#5, pp 94-96 You never even sent … poor squirrels. The woman who died was Hugh’s
mother, Jimmy’s friend’s mother. She was dying and Alison did not want to go to see her, she went to
Church, Helena took her there. Alison did not want to get involved in the suffering. She turned to
formal, conventional – you preach, not perform. She could have performed a real religious act – be
with the dying woman, but she chose conventional, she conformed to formality and observed the
custom. She goes to church just to look like a religious person, she is not really religious.
Now, she has undergone a strong emotional experience, she has really suffered. Helena does
not want to suffer. She wants to be a saint. The moment she needs to fight she runs away. Alison wants
to get her hands dirty now.
The End: Bears and squirrels – the level where they could be restored and heeled. Where they
could function as a couple. For Osborne, this is where hope lies. It is their only cure, their world in
which they are true to each other.

L7 – HAROLD PINTER

- drama must not make sense; you have to try really hard to understand it
- Osborne: the use of the room; private relationship drained of all meaning
- Pinter: external world – difficult to recognize, define, know; communication is all too easy –
characters try to protect themselves from it
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1. newspapers – a barrier to silence
2. the recurring motifs: the room, the identity of the intrusive figure of the blind negro
3. speech – a smoke screen thrown against mutual recognition; invented stories to conceal identity
4. confusion of names, confusion of identities
5. food – substitute for true nourishment
- Stanley not allowed to remain in the room
The Birthday Party:
- Goldberg and McCann– to identify the menace – to detach oneself from it
political, theological, parental authority = forces of convention
- Lukacs – criticism of Modernism – inability to define the enemy
- Kafka, Beckett – universal human condition – hopeless?
- Pinter’s plays: they are defamiliarized – the subjective vision of horror, bur in order to mobilize
fully the power of perception
- power - from unseen center but pervasive and ubiquitous: effort needed to resist it

- The Dumb Waiter – blind and dumb obedience

- the system maintained by paid killers – instruments and victims squeezed – empty of all resources
– there is no food left here
- the internal relationship: the unadjusted must be eliminated
- Play up, play up and play the game. Goldberg

The experience dramatized by Osborne and Pinter is similar-the antagonistic relationship

between an individual and society. There are also some differences. Pinter wrote plays of absurd
unlike Osborne. Naturalist XX century drama- Pinter, Beckett - the theatre of the absurd. With
Osborne, the enemies are identified (church, new politicians, snobbery). Osborne- we identify
destructive forces that penetrate into Jimmy’s private space, we identify and recognize it, whereas
Pinter’s plays are puzzling. For Pinter the archetypal motive is a room; two people hidden in what
seems to be heaven and than somebody knocks on the door. However, here these forces are strange,
unidentifiable. The world outside is unbearable and seems to have lost all historical identification.
There has to be made a great effort in order to identify it. The truth in our world has become very
difficult to decipher. The truth is very problematic. The audience has to be active in perceiving the
world. Pinter wants the audience to mobilize perception so that they can see the truth that has
become increasingly invisible. We experience power through some ideology so we did nit recognize it
as power. Power is pervasive. It is everywhere. Pinter had a very active political life; he was a critic of
the American ideology; he urges us through his drama to recognize the power that is destructive in
order to resist it- manipulative. We do not expect from somebody who is against ideology to say in his
plays that truth does not exist and that it cannot be identified. He said it explicitly that, as an artist, he
came to the conclusion that the truth cannot be identified in that way. Pinter’s final ambition is not to
say that the truth, ultimately, does not exist. Postmodernism - truth is unrecognizable, the truth
does not exist. There is no base for the motivation to be built on (p. 56-57). Drama makes the truth
almost impenetrable. What is more problematic is something that looks like truth. He strived to prove
that the truth is problematic and unreachable (as an artist); however, the truth must be found in the
political world (as a citizen). It is horrible to offer ready answers to the audience. He does not do that.
He wants to stimulate the wish for the truth. The audience should be trained to think about the world.
Later, he refused to allow his dramas to be interpreted in an ideological way. The theatre of the
absurd- we are prepared for the unexpected truth; revelation of a hidden, unexpected, horrifying and
appalling truth.
Differences between Osborne and Pinter:
1. Enemy; emissaries from external forces not easily identifying
2. The very use of the room. Is the room in Pinter the space of the authentic life?
Unlike Alison and Jimmy (Alison awakes), they live the lives of no sense; when they resume
their broken relationship they are lost to the world but they find each other again- bears and squirrels.
The game is no longer on a subhuman level but represents a higher level. There is a deep affection
now. Such affection does not exist in Pinter’s room. According to Pinter, there is no possibility for
affection, life, love and humanity. His characters remain within the room where meaningful
relation is not possible; they have the worst of the both worlds; if they remain in the room they are
53
blind and vs. if they are taken out. Marriage within these rooms does not exist. There is neither
awakening nor recognition. Frightening platitudes refer to the way in which the characters talk, to the
clichés not giving any moral; also, subdued aggression is visible only when the characters are silent. It
is not that they fail to communicate. When they try, communication is all too easy to enter your
personality, your inner life and to see your pettiness and triviality/ banality, which is not human.
However, there is a deliberate evasion/avoidance of recognition/ communication.
The devices/motives he employed to show this: Newspapers - at least one person reads the
newspapers in his plays; the stronger one reads them. It is a kind of a shield protecting them from the
questions and intrusions of the other characters. Speech is another one. The way they talk is an
abundance of platitudes. The characters speak not in order to say something but in order to hide
something. They invent stories to conceal their real identity or the total absence of identity. Speech is
a smoke screen thrown into the faces of other people. They are more readily discoverable when they
are silent. (Room and The Birthday Party are about the same experience). Do not ignore the
pauses in the plays. When there is a pause we must also pause and think about what is concealed in
what they have said. Silences are the moments of the greatest aggression against each other. There is
no affection, no love, just concealed animosity, hatred, and resentment in those rooms. However,
they pretend that they are friends. When Stanley is silent and looks at Meg, he is trying to conceal
the feeling. What feeling? Aggression! That is hidden in the silence. Meg looks at him as if he were her
son – the mother who does not let the child to develop. The mother bought him a drum in order to tie
him, a human being reduced to a baby, to herself.
There is a very frequent confusion of names. In The Birthday Party, one of the gangsters,
Goldberg, turns out to have another name. We often discover that the characters have different
names meaning that they are trying to hide their past and identities. She called me Jimmy. His
characters have two names or more that they do not allow other to use. They try to cover an identity
by the other but the previous identity is not necessarily the real, authentic one. The identity they are
hiding may be equally false. Food in every play is very important. It defines a certain kind of women.
Women are obsessed by food; the food they offer is no longer nourishing. It almost stinks. Food has
become a surrogate for affection, substitute for truth, feeling, and love…all of these motives appear in
his work Room.
The Room- Rose and Berth, a married couple, are occupying a tiny, small room which we
do not know where is located. In addition, it is not certain how many floors are there. I stopped
counting them (floors) long time ago. If that building is a symbol of personality, they do not have
knowledge about themselves. He reads newspaper; she prepares food and talks about how the room is
comfortable. People know nothing of the universe they live in. She is obsessed with food. His husband
has directed all his passions to the. The van is his proper wife. At the end of the play, when he returns
from the journey, he describes his van and the relationship between him and the van as an erotic love.
His van becomes his mate. Therefore, there is nothing left for his real life but to prepare food to feed
their relationship. There are two persons: one from the cellar and one from the outside, from the cold.
She feels threatened. Two threats are haunting the wife:
1. Darkness, winter
2. Cold, wet cellar (the womb-female principle, the unconscious).
She is upset when there is a knock on the door. Another married couple has come, thinking
that the room is free for rent. Christina tells the woman: My name is Christina, I am very proud of
it; my parents gave it to me, which is very puzzling. It is an anticipation of a more disruptive figure- a
blind Negro who comes from the cold and is hiding in the cellar for several days. Rose immediately
wants to throw him out and he tells her Your father calls you to come home, Sal. Her husband, Berth,
kills the Negro, beats him to death and eliminates the threat but there is no resumption of the
relationship between Rose and Berth. When the dead Negro is on the floor, Rose says I am blind, I
cannot see anymore, meaning that even if the threats are eliminated, the life is meaningful again.
Their relationship will be even deader than before. The Negro comes from her father. Father stands
for parental authority; his traditional role is to socialize the child. If her father gave her the name Sal
and she is now Rose that means that she has fled from her real identity and created another. It is
running away from her real name and assuming another identity. The arrival of the Negro is an
attempt to reclaim her. He comes from the cellar, meaning from the sub-conscience. She tried to
escape the influence of her family, to build another identity for herself, to bloom into another human
being. If it comes from sub consciousness, than you should confront the past, you cannot amputate it.
54
The remedy is not in eliminating this sub-conscience. You have to come to terms with this. In their
marriage, he is the possessor. He will defend his wife as a piece of commodity. He does not allow her
to come to terms with her sub-conscience by killing the Negro and she ends up blind.
(Contrast - The Lady from the Sea). The same motives are used in The Birthday Party.
There is no sexual passion. Meg transfers her motherly love to Stanley, their lodger. She is diverting
her passions in a way that is detrimental for his development. They believe that they can stay in the
room forever. The threat could not be eliminated. Stanley does not remain in his room; he is driven
away to a psychiatrist who will finish the job that Goldberg and McCann started. The Birthday
Party is not a real birthday party but a celebration of a moment at which Stanley is prevented from
growth. He is not allowed to remain in the room. He is snatched away by the figures as mysterious as
the Negro. They snatch him away after an absurd interrogation. Initiation- you are born into a new
identity- the final reshaping of the individual; reshaping him into an obedient servant. Mother is not
allowed to keep her child, although she will also destroy him. Ironically, the mothers might destroy the
children as well. Goldberg, an Irish, and McCann, a Jew, become very ambiguous figures hard to be
identified- emissaries from some forces. They might be some theological authority. They ask him
whether he recognizes the theological force taking care of him. Another question, Why did you betray
organization? suggests some kind of political force/authority. Stanley also makes up stories about
himself such as that he used to be a famous pianist but a mysterious past event destroyed his career.
The absurdity of communication is present in Act II when Meg retells the story. She does not
understand the story completely. The story is invented in order to justify his not doing anything, his
withdrawal. Why did you pick your nose? What is your true name? They also ask him about his real
name. He flees from his past. These people are the projection of his inner guilt as if in Joseph Kafka,
The Arrest (he has renounced women and love; he is stopped in his development or dependent on
the external authorities because two people come to arrest him, as in Process. Joseph K. simply
stopped to live because it is hard to live in this world). In the end, Stanley is broken down, reduced to
somebody who cannot speak; his glasses are broken. He is under the power of the conventions of life.
He is only then dressed properly. The forces destroying him are unknown and unnamable. Petey is
the only person who rebels against this. However, he withdraws and Stanley is crashed. Either way
you are crashed.
Lukacs and other labeled this kind of drama as hopeless. In the theater of absurd
(modernism) people are unable to identify their enemies. The ideological forces are so strong that
the alienation is complete. Literature offers no remedy because it does not recognize the enemy as a
historic but as a personal product (Lena disagrees with him). Historical product is treated in literature
as unchangeable human condition. The enemy is historically determined, according to Lukacs.
Modernism does not give us any character. Modernism raises this to the level of universal human
condition. Truth/reality is accessible. In Waiting for Godot, the number of leaves on the tree in first
pages of the drama suggests some optimism (there is no leaves, then there are four).
There is no alternative in Pinter’s dramas but that does not mean that we cannot recognize
the power. We interpret it as power accumulated in the hands of bourgeoisie. The power becomes less
and less visible. Power is everywhere. Ultimately, whatever these figures represent They are the
system. They is what in the end gets you. (Hamlet- the power is behind the curtains, Polonius).
Stanley is in the end defamiliarized. We cannot see the central power anymore but there is hope. The
advertisements are means for manipulation. According to Pinter, we can see power. We must see what
the world is like in order to resist it. It is not hopeless- we must recognize and resist. The readers, not
the characters, are to find solutions.
The Dumb Waiter is about two characters, about the reincarnation of McCann and
Goldberg; it is the insight into the internal relationship between the two gangsters. We can see how
different they are. In The Birthday Party, McCann is more human, shattered by the spectacle of
Stanley when he sees him catatonic; not so cool about doing his job. Goldberg instructs him; Play the
game as you are required to play. Do not step out of the game. In The Birthday Party, this
difference is in the background, but not in the Dumb Waiter. The system produces and maintains
paid killers. The condemnation of the culture that turns man into a blind follower; not natural order.
Now, the differences are fore-grounded. That is what the play is about - about the differences between
Gas and Ben. Dumb Waiter is somebody who blindly follows, obeys the orders and the system.
That is criticized. These two people come to this place, a room in a basement. Ben is perfectly
adjusted. Serve somebody dumbly, the bureaucratic obedience to the system. Ben is quite cool but the
55
other character is different- he cannot obey blindly, he cannot restrain from asking questions. This
brings resentment and insecurity in Ben. Room in basement symbolizes that they are on the lowest
level of the social system. One is displeased with the other man’s behavior. That is the real conflict-
Ben cannot stand his partner who still cannot obey blindly. Instead of that, they quarrel about some
insignificant things, which causes disproportion-the real difference is in their adjusting to the system.
One fidgets about. Trivial things are important in Pinter. One of them reading a newspaper comes
across an article about a killed man and these two killers cannot stand reading about the death of an
old man, about a killed man. Another episode is even more obvious. They are shocked at the fact that a
kid of eight killed a cat. They blindly obey but cannot stand violence in newspapers. They indulge in
violence, live on killing others, and than they are disgusted at somebody else’s violence. They cannot
find connections between these two things - cogito interruptus - interrupted judging. They are there to
kill somebody; they hear the noise made by the dumb waiter- steak and clips. Those who consume are
on the top; those who produce food are on the lowest level. Kitchen is deserted, meaning that there is
no nourishment left. The two killers provide the food for the system. The orders become increasingly
exotic. They desperately try to give the last scrap of theirs to feed the system- a bar of chocolate, a tea
bag and an éclair cake. Gas is not quite brain washed; he hides the éclair. Gas wants to retain
something although Ben gives everything, suggesting that Gas is not completely brainwashed, he still
has humanity. We see the system emptying them of the last scrap of humanity, squeezing them of the
last strength; they are reduced to sending desperate messages. There is no food left down here. The
final orders are exotic. Gas is not ready to give; he will not completely obediently follow the order. Gas
goes on to be displeased; he goes on asking questions: Why the master is treated us in this way? No
food, no clean sheets, no gas for making tea. Gas is angry. Ben tells him to do the job without asking
the questions. The question that haunts Gas is whether the next victim is to be a woman, indicating
that the system destroys the feminine, and the female values. Last time he killed a woman. Intuitively,
he knows that this is the last betrayal- if you kill a woman; you kill maternal love- the end. Gas
wonders how and why the system operates. Towards the end of the play, they rehearse. Gas repeats.
He is not perfect for the job; he is distracted. The next victim is Gas- undesirable killer because he is
not good enough. Job done by Ben is perfect. He aims at Gas in order to preserve the system. When
doing the job you should be impeccably dressed- as bureaucrats. The last of those who are capable of
asking questions are destroyed. The system has to be purged of all potential subversive elements. The
inheritors are those like Ben. Reality is hard but not impossible to be recognized!

P12 – PETER SHAFFER

- Godot and The Royal Hunt: man confronted with his existential condition – Time and Death
- Pizzaro dies between two darks: the blind sky and Atahuallpa’s blind eyes
- all words and values are shelters against the bigness of the world: barriers and pebbles men drop
to tell them where they are – structures – two hates
- Pizzaro yearns for a country after rain – a new faith
- two concepts of Time: Christians = prison, Incas = eternity on Earth
- Robert Bly: The Western man or woman lives in a pairing of opposites that destroy the soul
(body/spirit; nature/soul)
- gang love vs. individual love: Pizzaro’s first human relationship
- immortal business: to make water in a sand world
- two characters: victim – executioner
Atahuallpa – Pizzaro Equus
Alan – Dysart
- Dysart: reined up in old belief, old assumptions – normal, conventional society
- Alan: capacity for passionate worship
- Mother – ascetic Christianity; Father – atheistic Rationality
- Equus: Christ, but also an animal: fusing the halves separated by culture
- Jung: self-regulating function of the psyche (neuroses, dreams)
- Dysart’s marriage Vs. Alan’s worship
- Dysart’s dream: to amputate all personality, potentials offensive to the current gods of normal;
pain and personality – inseparable
56
- Alan: blinds the horses (pagan vision of life)

Both Shaffer and Beckett are interested in existentional questions and they both examine
human attitude towards time and death. They want to point out that time can become a prison and
that the awareness of mortality can be frightening. This is an attitude produced by a certain culture.
Therefore, it does not have to be a universal human attitude to mortality and time. In The Royal
Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer uses historical background, the conquest of Peru. Pizzaro, the protagonist
of the play, leads people who are looking for gold and commits a massacre of Incas. The play deals
with colonization of America. Pizzaro is in the play represented as a bastard, a man who does not
belong anywhere. Because of his low origin, he is not accepted in the Spanish society, regardless of his
achievements as a soldier and for this reason he never fully embraces the values of this society. All the
justifications of conquest and the ideas and principles by which the atrocities are justified are for him
fake, false. He sees all these principles as false. Ha says that he lives between two hates. He hates those
who believe in these principles and himself for losing the beliefs. He says: I despise the keeping and I
loath the losing. He sees all the values on which his culture is based and all the noble words such as
Glory, God, Victory, Honor simply as shelters. World is like a big dark place, like a vast plain which
has no landmarks. And those values, principles, the structures of a society are like pebbles that men
drop to tell them where they are. However, for Pizzaro, all these principles have lost meaning, and he
yearns for a country after rain – a rein to wash away all these markings and then he could search for
some new meaning, new positive faith. Before, he was trying to reach a higher position in the society,
but now he realizes that he is looking for God – some concept in life that would give him hope and
meaning.
Throughout the play Pizzaro’s chief enemy is time. He is an old man, he fears death and sees
life as prison, is afraid of the fact that he is going to die. This view of time is conditioned by this culture
and by Christianity and Pizzaro realizes this when he encounters the Incas. The Incas are not afraid of
the passage of time because their concept of immortality is different: whereas Christians believe in the
afterlife, eternity after the earthly life, Incas have created a kind of eternity, heaven on Earth. Their
chief divinity is the Sun, who is born every morning. They are closely connected to nature and Earth
and their concept of time is cyclical, so they view life through natural cycles. They feel immortal
because they are a part of nature.
Another thing that Pizzaro finds fascinating about Incas is that they are not greedy. Pizzaro
thought that greed is an inborn human quality but now he sees that this is also produced by
civilization. The Incas are not greedy because they have equal shares of land and property. Their lives
are completely in accordance with nature. After certain age they are fed by the community. There is
synchronization between the human age and the cycles of nature. Christian priests who have come
with Pizzaro refuse to accept such a concept of life. They believe that it is necessary to make a choice:
you either enjoy this life or you devote yourself to the afterlife, you give priority to either body or soul,
you either live in nature of beyond natural cycles. The whole western civilization seems to be based on
these binary oppositions.
Robert Bly: The western man/woman lives in a pairing of opposites that destroy the soul,
whereas the Incas’ concept of divinity proposes a kind of union.
Another important experience that Pizzaro has I Peru is the experience f individual love. He
slowly makes a friendly relationship with Atahuallpa after he has captured him. First, Pizzaro commits
this horrible massacre. When soldiers appear, the Incas think they are some sort of gods and want to
meet them. The soldiers want to capture the chief, Atahuallpa. First, they try to convert him into
Christianity. However, Christians cannot give him anything as a proof of their religion and they wage
war against Incas. They kill all the Incas who are protecting the chief. Christians, hypocritically, are
driven to kill for their beliefs and Incas die for their beliefs. The play is also a criticism of the
hypocritical betrayal of the original concept of Christianity. When Pizzaro asks do they think that
Christ would kill Atahuallpa if he were here, he wants to say that it used to be different. Love for god
has become gang love. It all comes down to us against them, war games to destroy anyone who is not
one of us.
The play emphasizes the value and importance of the individual love. When he captured
Atahuallpa, Pizzaro had his first meaningful relationship. At one moment, Atahuallpa teaches Pizzaro
how to dance, Pizzaor trips and laughs and realizes that this is the first time he has laughed in his life.

57
In addition, Pizzaro cries for the first time when Atahuallpa is killed. Two first emotional responses he
makes in his life.
Pizzaro was looking for a new god, a positive faith. For a while, Pizzaro hopes that there is an
immortal god. Atahuallpa say he will die to show him that he would rise after death. Atahuallpa is god
in his fearlessness, in his faith. He is a god-like man. However, in the literal sense of the word he is not
immortal. He dies. When Pizzaro sees that Atahuallpa will not rise after death, he realizes that he
cannot find a religion with absolute truth and meaning. Both religions are just pebbles, structures that
people make. He says: I lived between two faiths, I die between two darks – dark sky and the dark
eyes of Atahuallpa who has not resurrected. This is the moment when Pizzaro starts to cry for the first
time in his life and he says: This is our ability to make water in a sand world and this is some
immortal business. It turns out that the only religion, positive faith is found in our capacity to love,
our emotional and imaginative response to the world. This is a kind of marvel, the only one we can
create.
It is just like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They are waiting for something transcendental
to give them hope, but the only hope is their friendship, the only sanctuary is in the other person’s
heart. Shaffer’s vision is atheistic unlike Eliot’s. Shaffer says that We are the creators of the world we
make, we create all those pebbles, we impose meaning upon the world.
There is always a pair of characters in Shaffer’s plays. One is a victim and the other
executioner. The character who is the executioner is very powerful. He is backed up by the powers of
the structures. The character who is the victim is seemingly powerless. However, as the play develops,
we discover that the character who is the victim has some insight, attitude to the life that actually
makes him superior. What happens in the course of the play is that the executioner slowly begins to
doubt. His position, the structures he supports and the whole system he represents. Atahuallpa is the
prisoner and Pizzaro is the executioner. Pizzaro changes with Atahuallpa who has a superior attitude
to life. The same thing happens between Dysart, a psychiatrist and Alan, his patient. He has been
brought to hospital after he has committed a horrible crime: blinded six horses. He loved those horses.
Dysart accepts to work on his case. The first night after he learnt about this he has a terrible dream:
about children whom he carves and takes out their inner organs. He wakes up and tries to connect this
to his life. That is what he does to children he cures. Dysart in a way feels like a reined horse: reined
up in old beliefs and assumptions. So, he feels trapped in a way in all beliefs and assumptions. He
says: I longed to jump clean hoofed and to a new track of being. The same idea as in Pizzaro –
somebody who is looking for a new vision of life. Dysart in this play represents the conventional
society. He treats children who suffer from various psychic illnesses and it is his job to restore them
back to society. However, this dream tells Dysart that in the process of curing the children he actually
destroys some valuable parts of their psyche.
Alan is, in a way, a typical modern citizen. He is very lonely, practically has no friends. He feels
alienated, works in a shop selling electrical devices he does not understand, has no knowledge to tell
him how they work. The world he lives in is rather unreal for him. He has practically no knowledge of
art – painting, literature, music, nothing to give him a deeper insight into life. The only kind of melody
he sings are commercials. So, Alan is cut off from meaningful life by the upbringing he gets from his
parents. His mother is a Christian, but she preaches a kind of very extreme, ascetic Christianity. She
teaches him that there is sexual love, but it is not so important as the higher, spiritual form of love.
She cannot offer him a proper attitude to his body, cannot help him develop. His father is an atheist –
extremely rational, does not believe in anything spiritual. They are the two extremes of the modern
society and they bring Alan to a kind of spiritual starvation. When he was riding a horse in his
formative years, it was a kind of erotic experience for him. Alan tries to form a kind of religion that
would sustain him and cure him, a religion where his god is Equus.
According to Jung, neuroses give us messages – we should learn from them. The symptom of
this illness is something that we lack – an attempt of our psyche to bring us back to balance.
Alan is trying to find a new positive faith. For him, Equus becomes god. It is his concept of god.
Riding one of the horses who becomes Equus at the moment Alan feels that he and this animal
become one person. It is a kind of divinity that fuses the animal, the human and the divine. It brings
together those elements that have been separated in our culture. It is also an erotic experience, ecstasy
when he rides this horse. It is a passionate worship that includes both body and spirit. Eros is what
connects us to the world, what creates the feeling of oneness with the world. For Alan it is a feeling of
oneness with the horse. In this ritual, Alan can reconnect with the world, with his own body.
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 Dysart realizes that if he cures Alan from this madness, this psychic disturbance, he will also
destroy the boy’s passion and his capacity for worship. He says that passionate worship is something
that is indispensable, we cannot live without it. Without this capacity, our life is sterile. It is the
moment when Dysart feels that Alan is superior to him. Dysart says that he has not kissed his wife for
six years. He lives in a sterile marriage. He is the doctor of the soul, she of the body (a dentist). They
go to Greece every year and he is enchanted by the sights he sees there. He has a little statue of
Dionysius and of a donkey, he reads about this myth, but he cannot live this myth. All this interest in
pagan myths is for him superficial, an intellectual interest. Then, we have Alan, who can become a
centaur not knowing anything about the myth, but he succeeds to live that myth. Dysart says: Pain
and personality are inseparable. If Alan is cured of his pain, he will also lose his capacity for
passionate worship and will become like all the other members of this society. Dysart realizes that
what he does to children is destroy some of their potentials in order to make them fit the given
standards of normal. These are the sacrifices to the god of normal. The whole society seems to lack
Alan’s capacity for love and worship. After Alan is cured, he will no longer love horses, no longer love
nature but cities. The only remaining relationship to horses would be betting. Alan was deranged, he
blinded the horses but if Dysart cures him, he will become even worse – he will fit the society.
A clash of two visions: of the pagan vision and ________ He tries to enter civilization by
having sex with a girl but feels after that a need to destroy the pagan vision. In order to return to the
modern world, to enter civilization he has to kill his vision. The play is based on a true story.

L8 – SAMUEL BECKETT (1906 – 1989)

- Waiting for Godot 1952 – 1955

- The Theater of the Absurd – philosophical assumption: reality inaccessible, unknowable, man
cannot determine the origin and goal of existence
- Beckett: this condition is not universal: a criticism of rationalist Cartesian mind
- rationalist mentality dissociated from intuition, destabilized by the absence of absolutes
- Beckett: heir to Cartesian tradition
- Descartes: Cogito, ergo sum. – all being reduced to thinking
- Bishop Berkley: Esse est percipi. – God perceives the mind; external world and objects in it
are cosa mentale – mental projection
- the status of friendship and love: functions of cowardice
- to describe communication as successful – vulgar or horribly comic
- to dramatize failure: tragic dignity
- the task of the artist: to confront the audience with failure, impotence, non-being
- the artist: non-knower, non-canner
- Nothing is more real than nothing.
- Watt – a mock quest - knott; movement beyond this nihilistic stage
- I cannot go on, I must go on.
- another obstacle: conventional mind – social criticism
- Happy Days – sinking into a pile of junk – the shopping bag
- a significant step – detachment from bankrupt (philosophical and religious traditions)
- Vladimir and Estragon, Pizzaro – outsiders;
- theme: possibly of hope, salvation in a world without God, the problem of time
- Pozzo and Lucky – within culture, belief in progress – final disillusionment
- the speech on the sky: a stride of a grave
- master/slave, body/mind
- Lucky’s speech; the collapse of traditional mind: the skull, the skull
- Vladimir and Estragon: beyond culture
- the open road: waiting for Godot – a better option
- feeble hope: perhaps, 50% - reasonable percentage
- nothing to be done, they do not move but informal relationship: play, love
- mind/body: properly bonded
- the lullaby: Vladimir watching Estragon

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 Beckett was not only a playwright, but also wrote novels, screen plays and TV plays. Film is a
movie S.B. made in America. He lost the hope and faith in language. His TV plays are just images; they
go beyond words. He used TV to communicate important experience. Schubert- Night and
Dreams, an old man supporting his head with his hand and looking up when he hears the music.
Beckett was a master of minimal dramatic forms. One of his radio-plays lasts for several minutes only.
„Words and Music‟ is that radio play: silence- breathing silence. He wanted the audience to listen, to
confront the nothingness of which he spoke-life without love.
He began by writing novels. Only at the end of his career, he started using these short
metaphors. His first work is a philosophical poem, Horoscope, but he spelt it Whoroscope; it is
about time. Time cheats us as a whore unless we know how to use it creatively. WG was written in
1955 in French and then translated into English in 1956. The play precedes Pinter and Osborne.
The Royal Hunt of the Sun and WG have similar themes. The second belongs to the
theatre of absurd- it does not state a theme-betrayal of all our expectations of the audience, refusal to
define the author and the themes, so it is very demanding for the audience. The Royal Hunt of the
Sun has a theme; it is about time- the possibility of transformation, transcending the fear of death
and despair; the possibility to give one’s life a meaning. It tells about meaninglessness of the theme,
the viewer should be confronted with it. The reader is asked to confront life without being given any
logical explanation.
Pizzaro, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, is capable to spell out the theme of the play so that it will
be easier for us to understand it. In WG, we are not told about the theme. Pizzaro is expressive; his
language is fluent. He is a philosopher whose main enemy is time- time and death in the world
without God. Everything vanishes in time. Ultimately, he is engaged in an attempt to give his life
meaning. He realizes that the values are fictional. How to live in a world where all the values are
fictional? He faces the absence of God; God is fiction. The end: the image, Pizzaro’s last speech I live
between two hates. The play is not so much about the superiority of the Incas above the whites but
about the fictionality of all our beliefs. Pizzaro realizes that there is no one he could address, the sky
is blind. He expected Atahuallpa to rise after his death. If there is a God, he suffers from the inability
to speak. If there is no God, how do we love? The revelation is that there is no God. The play
dramatizes the same experience as in WG but The Royal Hunt is written in a realistic way. One play
reads the other. The crucial speech: Life is just a brief passage in the darkness. How do we make a
sense of life then? Time is meaningless here. WG- from the darkness of the womb to the darkness of
the tomb.
The theater of the absurd- nothing is defined, unresolvable paradoxes. In more realistic
theaters we have characters who explain the play. The philosophical assumption: reality is
unknowable, impenetrable, and inaccessible; man cannot determine the origin or the goal of his
existence. Reality cannot be explained. According to Lukacs, in these plays, the impotence of the mind
is present as something unchangeable and universal. However, a crisis in a bourgeois society shows
that it is not so. It is changeable in Beckett’s plays, either. This impenetrability of reality and
impotence of the mind is the quality of a rational, Cartesian mind - split from other modes of knowing
(intuition), body but just absolute knowledge. To this kind of mind that depends on certainties, a
sudden discovery that there are no meanings, certainties and absolutes outside us is only shattering.
(Nice knew that God is dead, and he did not despair). When such a mind discovers that we live on
assumptions and not on certainties, life becomes absurd. There are things that cannot be checked, i.e.
uncertainties. Beckett’s plays are implied criticism; they dramatize the despair of such a mind but also
the attempt to go beyond this type of mind. The attempt in Beckett is a personal experience. He
underwent it himself; he was in a tremendous crisis; his mind experienced despair because there are
no absolutes. Beckett was an heir to this tradition. Rene Descartes - cogito ergo sum we exist (only
as far as) because we think; he believed in God, meaning a split from the feelings and heart. What I
think is justified by the existence of God. If God is doubted, if his existence is problematical,
everything becomes problematical.
Bishop Berkley- to be is to be perceived; esse est percipi. Things exist only as as far as we
perceive them. Objects in the external world exist only in the perception of the mind. The mind exists
because God perceives it. Remove God from the picture and everything becomes a problem; the
objects of the external world become unreal. Cosa mentale - a figment of a mind. For Beckett, it
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becomes impossible to believe in God; God no longer exists. Both these philosophical assumptions
disappear when we remove God from the picture. How does one communicate? How does one
convince oneself that one exists? What about friendship and love? If the objects are cosa mentale they
are only functions helping us to fidget the grief because of our solitude. Love is a function of grief. We
fear solitude and friendship is a function of cowardice. Beckett was convinced that to pretend to be
able to communicate as an artist with his audience or to describe it in his works is a sort of monkish
vulgarity or it is horribly comical and vulgar. As an artist, you have to be courageous. He undergoes
that personally. To admit a failure of communication that you cannot know the world and people has
some sort of a tragic dignity in it because it is all a cosa mentale. His task was to confront the audience
with non-being better than with ____-being, - with the impotence of mind, with nothingness. At the
beginning of his career, he thought that the only position open to the artist is the position of a non-
knower, non-canner.
Watt is one of his novels. It dramatizes Backett’s belief that Nothing is more real than nothing.
The absence of communication is the real reality. The play is a mock quest, a quest for meaning that
culminates when Watt comes to the house owned by Knott. What? The spelling Watt conceals the fact
that it is an existential question. The answer is in the word Knott- not; naught; knot; enigma (enigma,
čvor, zagonetka, ništa). Confrontation of not is obvious. He did not remain on this nihilist stage. He
confronted the audience with nothingness. He wanted to bring people to a zero- position so that they
could make a step forward. The existence was unreal to him due to his disbelief in God. He says: I
cannot go on, I must go on- this is a precondition for a step beyond. According to him, the revelation
of nothingness causes mental crisis, in Beckett nothing is definitive, just a painful struggle for
knowledge. This implies that the only problem in him is philosophical, which is not true. His plays are
also full of social criticism of a utilitarian bourgeoisie society; of social criticism of the conventional
life in an unjust, commercial, bourgeois world - all of this is a critic of a certain mind and of a
historical conscience. This deconstruction of false conscious is not enough. It is not as in Derrida and
in poststructuralists. For Beckett, this caused despair. If modern man was to make any step beyond,
he had to go beyond social norms. He was aware of the waste of life.
There are two pairs of characters in Waiting for Godot: those who play social roles and
those who go beyond the culture and are destroyed. (Trilling)?.He wanted to show a devastating effect
on people who play social roles.
Happy Days is a play, a monologue. A woman is on the stage. She is swallowed in the
common routine of life. She has with her an enormous shopping bag, the emblem of the waste of her
potentials, and spends her life shopping. At the end of the play, she is still talking, unaware of the loss
of humanity and of her ordinary routine. In order to make this further state to gain hope, one has to
extract oneself from the society and to go beyond the culture. It is not enough to detach oneself from
the bankrupt philosophies and religion. Both Vladimir and Estragon do this and Pizzaro, too They
are outsiders. Unlike Vladimir and Estragon, Pizzaro started as an outsider. He was illegitimate. He
worked hard to win the recognition of the world that rejected him. He was ultimately accepted by this
society by becoming a soldier and playing by their rules. The real drama begins when he realizes that
the values he believed in were not real but illusions, shelters that protected one from universal
vastness. The greatest disappointment is God; he realizes that there is no God. Christian love is a gang
love- a way to divide US from THEM. It has been used in the game of US against THEM. They killed
6000 Incas in a day-the motive was money and they prayed to the virgin. A part of his disappointment
was the fact that we live by fiction and words. They are empty signs. The greatest problem is that he
sees these values to have been excuses for bloodshed and conquest, for merciless exploitation and
plunder. They strayed hypocritically from Christianity all the time. They betray Christian God and
Christian love; they strayed from the path of Christianity in this hypocritical world. He realizes that he
cannot believe in fiction in which the society believes, he starts a hunt for the God, so he once again
became an outsider. One consequence of the loss of faith is that time becomes absurd. Mentally he
detaches himself from war, money and honor. He comes to Peru and begins to feel that the meeting
with Atahuallpa will be extremely important for him. He expects to find another God and the place
that will be a perpetual source of life. He becomes an outsider again; he realizes he can no longer
believe in the values the society rests on. Suddenly, time becomes absurd. If life leads to death what is
the meaning of life? What can guarantee infernal life? What is it that can transcend life? Peru is a
place of purity, washed away of all evils. In Atahuallpa, he finds God. He wants Atahuallpa to show
him a place of perpetual life. At first, this God is understood literally. He wants resurrection literary to
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happen. Atahuallpa is a better Christian than the Christians. Athuallpa wants to protect him from
death; it was the first thing somebody ever did for him. Athuallpa teaches him how to laugh and love.
However, he still does not believe he has found God because he wants literal God and Atahuallpa does
not resurrect after they kill him, he does not realize that resurrection is a state of mind not a spectacle.
I lived between two hates. He hates all people who live in illusions, but he also hates himself as a
loser. The sky is not seen, only vast emptiness. Pizzaro moves from the total nihilism to the state of
utter experience of affirmation. He wanted to transcend the state of nihilism. We watch one another
with love. We can see, feel and cry; the sky cannot. The sky cannot be seen in the absence of God, but
man can feel. He cries for his dead friend. This ability to feel loss and sadness testifies the human
divine nature and his being human. Honor, love, fearlessness are the values. Man creates them and
because of that, he is the sole creator of his spiritual life and deserves respect. Only Pizzaro
experiences this. He finally realizes how dreams can become reality. At one point, Pizzaro is both
Pozzo and Lucky, and when he realizes he was wrong he becomes Vladimir and Estragon. He is
within, and then he goes out and becomes similar to Vladimir and Estragon, then he goes beyond
them because he has a complete experience of the affirmation of the meaning of life. What is
important in the play are two pairs of characters dramatizing different stages in one man’s life that is
the phases in Pizzaro’s life. There is no definition and explanation as in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It
is a defiance of all techniques, even more than in Pinter. This play is more absurd than Pinter’s plays.
Waiting for Godot is seemingly without movement and change; there is no climax, no
resolution, as if nothing happened. It begins twice and ends twice in the same way. In America, it was
first performed in a prison and the convicts responded to it well. They understood it because they were
themselves outcasts, crippled by expectations and not educated. There was a hope that life would have
a meaning if there were no God. The play was about time and the frustration of waiting. They could
identify these two pairs of characters. They were in prison because they rejected the culture. Pozzo and
Lucky are hopeless because they remain within the culture. The theme of time is related to them. Their
disappointment is much more catastrophic than Vladimir and Estragon’s disillusionment. Pozzo is
self-complacent, bourgeois is the one who thrives on the illusion and the hypocrisy of bourgeois
society. We see class-consciousness. He believes he is a Christian but he destroys all the principles of
Christianity, particularly the Christian idea of equality (greed, gluttony). Their relationship is the one
of master/slave, of the dominating and the dominated. Their rules are inescapable as long as you
are within a society. His problem is time, too. There is a movement in the play- a disappointment of a
man who initially believes in progress. Schedule- the time has meaning. He is carrying a
suitcase- all the traditional beliefs; he has a vaporizer, a stool, a match, a spray (so that he would
not smell, and a watch (suggesting that he believes in the meaningfulness of life). He is very self-
complacent. In the second act, he looses everything. He has sand in his suitcase symbolizing
nothingness, Christian illusion, and vanity. He is in despair. There is a hint of his problem when he
gives his first speech about time; he indulges in the sentimental rhetoric. He ends up blind being
pulled by the rope by Lucky. He has philosophical pretensions- qua sky (nebo kao takvo). We see
how he later becomes puzzled, worried, and troubled with death. This culminates in the second act- he
is blind and dumb. He is worried that the sky will be dark soon. Darkness stands for death. Time has
become faceless, impersonal; everything is the same; all the movement leads to death; he looses his
illusions and is tied to his servant. In the speech on sky, the colors mingle and soon become dark,
meaning death. When V ask him WHEN? he says: Stop that WHEN! meaning that time is not
important. Master is mastered by the one he dominates, which is harmful to both the mind and the
body. Pozzo is an overfed bourgeois body exploiting the mind. Lucky is a practical mind, a Christian
mind going to a certain point; he satisfied his master to a point but he cannot go further. Mind who
thrives on certainties was defeated in 20th century. Such a mind can no more console the body. This is
the purpose of Lucky’s speech. The mind unsuccessfully tries to recreate the traditional concept of
time and certainties about time but it fails. The speech on sky is circular, funny, and illogical. It begins
with the traditional phase (‘given the’- the mind residing on logical phraseology). We see an
ambivalent relationship of Beckett to the Bible. The Bible directed man to heaven, directed him from
here to there, meaning that there is an end, a goal. However, it does not exist anymore. There is no
such a purpose now. Nostalgia for the Bible is present. However, even the Bible contains uncertainties
and paradoxes (Calvinist). According to Augustine, only some people will be saved. The Bible ends
with a book of revelation. We do not arrive at any conclusion. He also alludes to the progress. Belief in
progress is another false belief. There are no logical conclusions, the circularity continues. This God,
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Pizzaro’s God, does not exist. Although he begins with existence, he arrives at no conclusion. There is
another idea: the mind overwhelmed by the fact of death. It is the collapse of a mind that cannot
provide any consolation.
Lucky did everything for Pozzo. Then Lucky asked him to explain the selling of his slave who
could not satisfy him anymore. He wanted to sell the mind. Once he finds the mind cannot satisfy him,
he rejects it instead of having a more tolerant attitude to life and reason - the modern philosophy
celebrates total irrationality. Pozzo is a bourgeois consumer; he wants to sell Lucky, to sell his mind.
When he asks Vladimir and Estragon what Lucky’s speach is called, they say HARD STOOL. Pozzo
calls it the NET because mind is trapped in a web of its own syllogism that leads nowhere except from
the fact of death. V and E’ position is much better than P and L’s. V and E have habituated themselves
to the fact of death. They have renounced false hopes. They know what to expect, they have turned
away from society, religion. Death is nothing new to them. They feel nostalgia for the Bible, but they
are aware of things. V- the last moment: Hope deferred makes the heart sick but when the desire
comes it becomes a tree of life. This is a quotation from the Bible, but it is not valid for them. They
cannot remember the real quotation. The Bible is the forgotten thing. (The room is no longer a
metaphor. The Open Road- a search for a better option.) They believe that somebody, Godot, will
come. They are waiting for him. Godot may be some external authority because they believe that when
Godot comes they will be at home. Godot is their hope. A desire to go to a place where you are safe is
present because life is meaningful again. They are waiting for meaning that never comes. That
meaning should provide them security. It is also possible to interpret Godot in a sense of divinity, not
an external authority but something similar to what Pizzaro tried to find. Pizzaro gives it meaning, not
a spiritual force; it may mean whatever; it can provide to a particular person a sense of fulfillment;
human creativity. If Godor is an external authority, then the waiting is illusory. If he is an internal
authority, our inner capacity to love without any external influence, then there is hope for Vladimir
and Estragon. They are already saved unconsciously because thay are not a master and a slave; they
are not tied to each other like Pozzo and Lucky. Their relationship is very free. They will find
fulfillment through affection; there is a tentative hope for them. V loves E- affection. V nourishes E.
They try to part but they cannot. They come back together in the morning and celebrate that. They will
not be defeated. They protect their humanity by their love to each other and survive. The hope is
feeble, yet it exists. The dignity of a man who is a vagabond. There is a limit to the communication
between them but they survive. They are also a projection of body and mind- not tied but suggest a
single person. The body exploits the mind. They have advantage when compared to Pozzo and Lucky.
Nothing is certain in Beckett. Everything is tentative, even communication. That is why we
cannot say that they are completely saved. The whole play is on the edge. What they achieved is seen
only when compared to Pozzo and Lucky. Beckett never moves beyond 50%. The more difficult the
meaning the more trustworthy it is.
E has problems with his boots = body. V = breath-spirit-mind. Everything is „perhaps‟;
nothing is final. Man was thrown into being and his hat was thrown after him to give him a sense of
dignity. As the mind and the body, they have a perfect relationship- play games, quarrel but love each
other. There is a scene when V sings lullaby to E who is sleeping. Body does not expect from the mind
big explanations but to sing a lullaby. If esse est percipi, then we do not need God and we realize that
the very perception with affection makes us real and the very existence of perceiver makes the
existence of God unnecessary. The ability to see others makes us dignified. The fact that a man looks at
another one with affection is enough without God. Vladimir says Is somebody watching me, whereas
Pozzo goes blind because he could never see in that way. They renounce the mind giving final answers;
they renounce the master/slave relationship and wait for Godot; maybe, they have already found him
unconsciously (love) and they have no need to wait for him any more. Somebody is watching, which is
redemptive. P goes blind in the end because he was never able to see.
The play seemingly offers no hope. By comparing them, we see that they have not only made
certain movements to being saved, they are already saved.
The rest of his plays, especially radio-plays, make it even more obvious that love is a
redeeming force. There is a spiritual, mental movement. Love is enough to make our life acceptable.
Love in Waiting for Godot is a missed opportunity. The salvation: the cultivation of the mind
that is not rational but combined with feelings and capable of love.
Words and Music is a radio drama. Crow is Joe and Bob’s master, the master of words
and music because Joe and Bob are projections of words and music. Music comes from primordial
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soulness within us- feelings, intuition, creativity; words are a more recent source- intellect, reason.
They are consolation to Crow. He gives them three themes: time, sloth (laziness), and love. Man who
does not fall in love, who scorns love, is due to the mental laziness. There is a tune, music for these
words. Crow sees a woman and starts thinking about these three things. Joe responds by a brief,
tentative tune. By the end, the tune invites words to follow it. They do adjust to the music and the
harmony is achieved. There is some sort of harmony but we are in manure (đubrivo), in a dark place
without sense. The words produce something. Inward quest in the deepest self is the only thing worth
doing. Eventually, words disappear and only tune can be heard. The music invites again to be followed
to the place where the well is seen. In that way, the love is possible. The only cure for a dissociated soul
is music.
The boy is a reference to the Bible, Godot’s messenger, a hint at the absurdity, a new life, a
promise of a new life.

P14 – Equus by Peter Shaffer

#1, p 24 That night I had a very explicit dream … I woke up. Jung’s explanation of
dreams – dreams are important because they reveal the suppressed part of our personality. The
dreams also reveal a collective level – collective unconscious. They are important because they are a
warning that something is wrong about our conscious daily attitude. These dreams are either a
warning or compensation. They have a healing function. The dream is either a criticism or a warning
about his daily activities. Children are brutally slaved, their inner organs are taken out and this
symbolizes our personality, nature, which makes us specific. This dream tells about his practice. He is
supposed to heal children, but he does the opposite. He is uncertain about his profession. He is
supposed to restore them, to make them a part of society but he now realizes that he actually destroys
them. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter for the sake of victory. That is what the doctor does.
He puts his loyalty to the society above the loyalty to family.
Dysart is powerful. The society backs him up. The boy is powerless but has something; his
wisdom is to some extent superior to the doctor’s so he falls under the influence of his victim.
It this mask slipped his social role would fail. He is afraid to change his role because he might
become the victim of that society.
#2, p 34 Mr. Strong, how do you … I simply don’t understand. His father is not a
believer. His mother is a teacher, a sort of a religious fanatic. She wants her son to become a religious
man. She instructs him according to Christian religion. Everything is in a way determined. The crucial
thin between Pagan and Christian religion: in Christian religion, ecstasy has only biological aspect. In
Pagan religion, sexuality is inseparable from spirituality. The greatest problem of our civilization is
that it deals with everything in binary opposition. Alan is looking for religion in which ecstasy is not
only physical but also spiritual experience. Alan has no opportunity to make his own attitude to sex
and religion. Sex is either an act of God or physical – everything is predetermined.
#3, p 65 The normal is the good smile … as sixty months. Dysart here calls himself
the priest of normal. There is a discrepancy between what the society wants to create and what it really
creates: zombies. The society has this tendency of shaping people so that they fit into some abstract
image/idea of what is normal. Everything has to fit certain standards. We also have the crucial role of
psychiatrists in shaping personalities – criticism of education: brainwashing machines.
Dysart is aware of the danger of what he is doing. Then we have Bradshaw in Mrs.
Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. He is even more dangerous. He makes people fit the pattern and has
no doubt about that. Then, O’Brian in 1984 by George Orwell - a member of the Inner Party –
totalitarian regime. He turns members of society into obedient members. The powers of society are
getting stronger and stronger. O’Brian is a merciless controller of his society. All these writers deal
with the tendency of society to crash individuals, to crash what is unique in each of us.
#4, p 73 Equus – son of … make us one person. Stetsons = cowboy hats. The way Alan
rode the horse in the night. Like a religious ritual for him. His neck comes out of my body. – Centaur,
a kind of divinity. The divine, human, animal in him. Alan feels that the society is fragmented and
wants to put these three together.
We ride against them all. During the day he works in a shop of electrical appliances and feels
totally alienated from this, he does not understand it. That society represented by those appliances is
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his enemy. The enemies of the horse are those who do not appreciate the beauty of the animal. There
is this abuse of the animal’s beauty by the nobility. That is humiliation according to Alan. Alan likes
cowboys because they do not use these animals but also because he thinks they are orphans. They do
not have parents as obstacles to their development. They symbolize freedom – free of parents and of
society. The ritual ends with Alan’s saying: Make us one person. – a fusion of the elements. Person
refers to the whole personality: both body and soul. If he said human that would refer to rational only.
The animal part in Look Back in Anger – bears and squirrels. Alan is trying to create a
more comprehensive view of himself – to integrate the animal part.
#5, p9 81-83 Worship isn’t destructive … Do you see? Dysart’s explanation of Alan –
he sees him as a lonely, suffering human being that no one understands. He also has no contact with
art – like most modern citizens. He sings only commercials. If he knew about the science, the modern
society would be more real to him. Alan’s pain is important. (Look Back – either suffer or oppose.)
Alan experienced pain and tried to heal himself through the religion he created – horses. Inseparable
from his personality and his pain. Dysart realizes that Alan is superior to him because Alan practices
all that. He is passionate and full of life. On the other hand, sterility in Dysart’s relationship in his wife
is present. Modern society is represented as sterile. Alan opposes this sterility. A pun: I shrank my
own life – shrink =psychiatrist – the one who shrinks you to your proper size. Dysart does not practice
Paganism although he has theoretical interest in Pagan religions. He cannot follow Alan’s path.
#6, p 107 I’ll heal the rash of his body … it never comes out. He is describing what his
cure will be like. He realizes what the society does to people. He will no longer be sensual, passionate.
There are images suggesting sterility: instead of being in some natural place, he will be in high-ways
driving scooters instead of horses. Horse vs. scooter, land vs. high-way. This world is separated from
nature, alienated. Alan’s future attitude to horses: he will only bet on horse races. Total alienation
from nature. Sex will be funny, in control; his rationality will be superior to his passions and will
control them.
Dysart needs a way of seeing in the dark – symbolism of seeing – awareness, but also a vision.
He needs a new vision of himself. Alan blinded the horses with a pick. Dysart seems himself as a
villain picking children’s brains.

Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer

#1, pp 134/5 Look, boy … I can’t believe that sir. Court Army Church – shelters against
loneliness and bigness of the world. People create social structures and they represent security to
them, a sort of meaning. According to Frye, it is world number 3, the world of culture, what man
creates. According to structuralists, the only meaning that the reality has is the meaning we impose
on it. We impose some kind of graspable, humanizing shape. According to Vico, we imprint the
structures of our mind. The world is big and human beings are afraid of it, so they try to impose some
meaning, to explain the world. Pizzaro is talking about social structures that we create to help us feel
life is meaningful and we are safe within these structures. Pizzaro realizes that they are shelters
against loneliness. Abstract principles used to justify some wrong deeds such as murder, plunder.
Platonic impulse – the complexity of our experience is reduced. When we are afraid of things we tend
to simplify them, reduce them to some manageable formula, so that they would not be frightening.
The idea of Christianity is used as a justification of plundering; nobility – Platonic ideas. Platonic
impulse justifies anything by generalizing: you do not kill and individual but a people. In this way
they justify.
#2, pp 155/6 I had a girl once … anyway. A different moment in Pizzaro’s life. He felt
great. He was with a girl, feeling one with nature. He speaks of it. Time did not matter then. It is not
something he could express in words. It cannot be reduced to a Platonic phrase. It is a comprehensive
experience of world. On the other hand, we have this simplified Platonic concept by which we live. He
resents time. He lost his vision, did not continue to pursue this vision of unity with nature. That
moment with the girl was not characteristic of him. The rest of the time he is afraid of the passage of
time. At first he was an outcast and wanted to belong, to be a soldier sot that he would belong. He
himself made such a choice. According to Lukacs, not our potentials determine our personality, bur
our choices. These moments are short, and during the rest of life these moments do not exist. Time is
seen as a trap. He is afraid of the passage of time. He does not feel this unity with love and nature; as a
result, he is afraid of time.
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 #3, pp 195/6 Dung balls to all churches … if I feel none for him? Here Pizzaro talks
to a Christian priest. According to him, Church is another shelter. Priests are there because of
colonization, plunder, conquest of land and wealth. There is an official justification: the Incas are
infidels, they have to be Christianized. They will be deprived of their myth and another myth will be
imposed on them. There is always a replacement of myths in colonization. If they are deprived of the
myth, they are deprived of the link with the land, of their identity and you easily get them.
This occurs in:
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
Cloud Nine – the same process happens in Africa. Joshua was Christianized. Christian myth
that women are evil has been imposed on him.
Heart of Darkness – again in Africa. A man comes to plunder ivory justifying it with
Christianity.
Dusklands – about Vietnam; brothers conspire to take over the power. Their father is not
omnipotent. There is a balance between father and mother. One myth is replaced by another in
colonization.
Pizzaro’s comparison of the two religions: Incas are related to nature, they do not see time as a
trap. Christians see time as a kind of prison. About Christian cheats – what they propose is choice
between good and evil as the greatest freedom. However, there is a problem – there is no strict
division between good and evil, body and soul. Our civilization lives by binary oppositions. Pizzaro
resents polarization. Incas’ society is completely without gree. On the other hand, we are brought up
believing that it is completely normal and inborn. Pizzaro prefers the paradise of Incas. He criticizes
Christian religion: there is no love, no appreciation of other people’s needs beyond what is proposed
by religion. To save his soul he has to kill. That is what he criticizes.
Christ as a figure is not to blame. If he were there, Incas would not be killed. Christianity
changed. It is a criticism of structures, not of Christ’s teaching.
#4, pp 203/4 Cheat! … Save you all. Pizzaro is crying. He feels for the first time. It is his
first meaningful human relationship. He also loved – Atahuallpa taught him to dance, love, cry, he
taught him deep human emotions and reactions. It is important for Pizzaro because at this moment he
realizes that objectively there is no god, no divinity. Two hates and two darks – blind Atahuallpa’s
eyes. He has not resurrected although Pizzaro hoped for a while he would since he thought Atahuallpa
was god. He does not believe in myths anymore. He hates himself because he realizes they are not
true. I despise the keeping and I loath the losing. Where can a man live, between two hates? He hates
those who kept the faith and himself for losing it.
Pizzaro finds some kind of religion: love, feelings. He can feel for somebody. It is something to
sustain him, to make water in a sand world, to bring love into a loveless world – immortal business. It
is the only thing that makes life meaningful. Our feeling of sympathy is the only good thing in this
world; otherwise, it has no meaning.
Shaffer is basically a structuralist. According to him, we are the sole creators of the world. We
create structures. We create our sense of what is good and this is the immortal business.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

In this play we have an idea similar to Shaffer’s idea about time as a trap. There is also a tree
and a road. They are waiting for Godot. There is also a fear of death unless we find some meaning in
life and Godot stands for that meaning.
#1, p 12 Did you ever read the Bible … the ignorant apes. Vladimir starts a
conversation. Estragon is talking about the Holy Land. Bible is not something they live by. They
remember it in fragments. This is no longer a myth that people in modern world can life by. It no
longer suffices. It used to be a map of meaning. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness we
see that man always needs a map of meaning and the object of worship. The old map of meaning in
this play is Bible, but it is no longer valid. There is a gap. Vladimir and Estragon are trying to find a
new map. They are in between. They remember a specific story from the Bible.
There is a sort of religion full of irrationality. Beckett was a Calvinist and Calvinists see
Christians in a particular way. People do not know who will be chosen. People, however, do have some
sort of hope – 50% of us will be saved. This is how the world appears to man – chaotic, irrational. Man
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does not know on what to base his hope. There are four versions of this story, the Bible. Everybody
knows the version in which there is hope. In other versions there is no hope.
#2, p 40 Then let him dance … I can’t find my pulverizer. One who exploits and one
who is exploiter. These are the only two roles in the modern society. However, they are both tied, the
master also. It is a sort of relationship based on confinement, restrictions, restraints. Vladimir
symbolizes the mind, Estragon the body; but their relationship is not compulsory. They are free. They
do not even tie shoelaces. It is a relationship between mind and body based on freedom. For one night
they separate. The other pair of characters: Lucky and Pozzo are within society, whereas Vladimir and
Estragon are beyond, above and out of society.
The meaning of Lucky’s dancing: creative mind and artistic potentials. But what happens to
mind is that they remain within society. Pozzo here is a consumer, enjoys pulverizer, watch, pipe. He
is full of possessions. It is a profile of a man who governs the society, master. Lucky is a slave. Such a
society destroys the creative potentials of the mind. Lucky symbolizes an entrapped mind. His mind is
entrapped in a net. Hard stool – Lucky was trying hard to produce something but he does not succeed.
Another image in the play symbolizing the entrapped mind is Lucky’s speech, which is
confused, circular, entangled. Becket suggests that within these social structures one cannot grasp
meaning. The song is like a circle. It is about not being able to transcend your situation.
The recurring thought in Lucky’s speech: p 42 Given the existence… qua – meaning as it is,
apathia – inability to feel, aphasia – inability to speak, athumbia – inability to be frightened, to
experience terror. God loves us dearly for the reasons unknown. Something that will give meaning.
But there is so much insecurity and irrationality inherent in this belief. In spite reoccurs – in spite of
this illusion of a healthy life, man goes down for unknown reasons.
p 44 Something that is repeated as a refrain: the air and the earth, the skull, the skull –
feeling of insecurity and a pervasive fear of death. Within society Lucky as an entrapped mind cannot
reach existentional meaning. He shrinks; he only states facts.
#3, pp 88/9 Where do you go from here … on. Lucky is down. Pozzo replies ON.
Progress is important – Pozzo and Lucky symbolize society, sort of people who live in society. Here is
an illusion that they move forward, they believe that some kind of progress is possible within society,
but this is an illusion. As opposed to them, we have Vladimir and Estragon out of society.
The bag that Pozzo is carrying symbolizes possessions and it is a burden of civilization, weight
of civilization. What is really in the bag – sand – suggests that the meaning provided by society is
illusory.
In Pinter’s Birthday Party, two men are coming and one of them is carrying a bag that
symbolizes the burden of conscience.
Pozzo is blind because eyes symbolize vision. Something happened to Pozzo’s vision. It was
rather narrow – a complete reduction of potentials. Pozzo had a vision of progress within society but
he has become blind. Lucky symbolizes the creative mind – the artist has turned dumb, has nothing
left to say. In a commercialized, materialistic world art becomes dumb. Pozzo’s speech: he hates time
because he realizes there is no progress, that time is not meaningful. Before, he used to look at the
watch, but he has lost it.
Women giving birth above tombs – the idea of biological time – the fact that you are born
means that your are going to die. There is a very short time for us to make some meaning of life
between two darks. So, there is also a stress on the shortness of life. Very pessimistic.
p 90/91 Vladimir is even more pessimistic. The grave-digger, his habit is a great deadener –
you get use to the modern life. You forget the horror and meaninglessness of human situation.
This is not a hopeless play. The only HOPE that the play offers is a meaningful relationship –
their relationship because it is not based on exploitation and compulsion. This waiting is an illusion,
but this illusion is not destructive. It is positive faith. They are allowed to keep their illusion. They are
not deprived of hope. The hope is their relationship that is a voluntary relationship outside of society.

P15 – CARYL CHURCHILL: Owners

- Spaniards in The Royal Hunt: greed as an inborn trait

- Erich Fromm: To Have or to Be: having as an existential choice
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 1. existential having (natural)
2. pathological – characterological having (the impact of social conditions)
- capitalism – not only appeals to greed, but generates it
- Marx: alienation of physical and intellectual senses – only utilitarian appropriation considered
relevant
- patriarchy: owing human beings
- Marion in Owners: originally considered property
- the most highly cherished sphere: not art, but making a profit
- Fromm: women’s lib as antipower; Marion: complete identification with patriarchal tradition
- Althusser: individual vs. subject, ISA (Ideological State Apparatuses); If you want a girl, I‟ll buy
you one; shift/change
- Marion as modern Shylock; analogies with large scale events
- Alec: learning things wasn’t any use
- beyond language and culture: bottom fell of a pail
- Zen: absence of craving and possessive love
- willing sacrifice: Alec vs. Worsley

In The Royal Hunt of the Sun people are brought up to believe that greed is an inborn
human trait. They were astonished when they encountered Incas who were not greedy at all, not
interested in material possessions.
Erich Fromm also talks about greed inherent in the western culture. He says that this is a
matter of existential choice. He agrees with Shaffer that this is not natural. His book is entitled To
Have or to Be: two primary existential choices: being vs. having. He distinguishes between two
kinds of having. 1st – existential having, which is natural: take care about our body, have shelters =
natural impulse to survive and sustain our lives. Contrary to this, there is what he calls 2nd–
characterological having. This, according to Fromm, is not a natural impulse. It has been
developed as a result of the impact of social impulse upon human nature. This is a kind of
pathological need to possess, to own and to identify oneself with one‟s possessions. It is not just that
there is greed, but people see their own personality in terms of what they have, they identify
themselves with what they possess. Not only with material possession, but with the possession of
power, of other people. He especially criticizes capitalism. He says that capitalism is such a social
system that not only relies on greed, but actually generates it. It generates it, supports greed and
avarice in order to sustain itself. All the institutions of society support this selfish, egotistic trait of our
being because that is how capitalism functions. In his book Erich Fromm also refers to some of
Marx’s teachings and Marx criticizes capitalism for the same reasons. He says that capitalism
produces an impoverished human psyche. It tends to alienate all our senses, both physical and
intellectual and replace them with the single sense of having. In capitalism, no other form of
appropriation is considered valid. The only form that is considered valid is utilitarian: the object is
ours if we can possess it and make use of it – utilize it in some way. E.g., Erich Fromm gives the
example of a flower. We appropriate the flower by plucking it, that is the first thing that occurs to us.
However, there are many other ways to appropriate it: to take a picture, write a song about it, come
every day to appreciate it. There are many ways to appropriate reality. In one of Tennyson’s poems we
have a description of a man plucking a flower and thinking how to understand God by means of it.
Disregarding the thinking, by plucking the flower, he killed it. This possessiveness is the greatest
problem of modern civilization. Fromm says that even those poor can have this feeling that they
possess something. Namely, in patriarchy, every man can feel that he is the master of his wife,
children, animals. Even love between the sexes has become possessive. As a result, we have a
tremendous reduction of meaningful human relationships and of the ways in which we can
understand, appropriate reality and, of course, the reduction of how we understand ourselves.
This is also the central motif of Caryl Churchill’s Owners. Characters identify themselves
with their possessions, they see themselves as a part of this having structure. In the prehistory of the
play, she was actually considered property – she has a chauvinist husband, Clag, a butcher, who tries
to be a despotic figure of authority, but is quite funny. He says that Marion is his property and that he
invested heavily in her. He claims her. Marion at the beginning of the play is a person of great energy
and vitality. She naturally rebels against this passive position that is traditionally assigned by
patriarchal society. She says she has always felt she is not a butcher’s wife. So, she decides to change
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her life. She attends evening classes, has a love affair with another man and ends up in a mental
institution. While she is in hospital, they tell her she would be happier as a good wife supporting her
husband. Also, she has a hobby. She likes to paint, but she is never encouraged to develop her
potentials. Her husband says that creative hobbies are nice for women. Society does not appreciate
art very much. It is just a creative hobby for a woman. It degrades both art and women. What
Marion understands about society is that the most cherished thing in society is not art, but making
profit. Painting should be a creative human endeavor in understanding oneself, but this is not
appreciated by the society. Instead, Marion realizes that the society appreciates profit and she focuses
on becoming an owner, a proprietor. As soon as she leaves the mental institution, she gathers all the
money, loans from her husband, buys a house, makes profit and very soon becomes a rich proprietor.
She controls a number of people – she enjoys this feeling of power.
In his book, Eric Fromm was very optimistic about liberation movement of women. He said
that women would play an important role in building society only if they identify themselves as
representatives of anti-power. According to him, if women want just their share in man’s power then it
is fruitless. Marion does not represent this anti-power idea. She just wants her share of power in the
patriarchal male world. The fight for power of women who want to take a position within the
patriarchal structure and not change it is vulgar feminism. Marion identifies herself with the
patriarchal tradition. She quotes the Bible, talks about conquests and conquerors, soldiers … She lost
her femininity.
Althusser talked about difference between subject and individual. Individual is a natural
given identity to a person, somebody who is free, not subjected to any system. Subject is somebody
who is formed by ideological state apparatuses. I.S.A. in this play that form Marion’s personality are
family, education, health service. These apparatuses in their own way create subject. Your own way
towards society is a kind of illusion, distortion of your real position in society. At the beginning of the
play Marion wanted to change something. She was a subject. But she still has not succeeded to become
individual. She is still under the influence of the same ideological apparatuses. She does not create her
own identity. In the play, she is represented as a person who has vitality. Originally, she wants to
struggle, but these apparatuses direct her energy in a direction that is not dangerous for the society.
These ideological apparatuses convince Marion that the only change she can make, the only possible
growth is from being property to becoming a proprietor, from a victim to an executioner. This is not a
real change, but a shift from one position in society to another. However, she remains trapped in the
same structure of having. She says to her husband: If you want a girl, I‟ll buy you one. She does not
think about the subjected position of the girl, she never questions the system. There is one person in
the play she cannot posses – her ex-lover Alec. He has a particular mental disposition and what ever
she tries to do to control his life she fails; she cannot possess him in any way. First, she tries to buy the
house where he lives with his wife and children; she manages to legally adopt his newborn baby.
However, Alec cannot be possessed being blackmailed like this. Marion’s love for Alec is her last
remnant of humanity. The only thing left that makes her human is that love. Because she cannot
possess him, she turns into a monster wanting to possess his baby, a part of him. She cannot
understand selfless love that Alec offers her. Instead of true affection, she appropriates this baby. It is
similar to Shylock, who wants human flesh – a substitution for human heart because he is rejected by
the Christian community. She wants this baby as a substitute for true affection. At the end of the play,
Marion finally destroys her last remnants of humanity. She orders one of her employees to kill Alec.
Worsley sets fire in the house where Alec lives. Alec comes back to save a baby of another family and
dies in this fire. Marion destroys the last remnant of her humanity. She says she never knew she could
do that, she is beginning to find out what she is capable of. It is a terrifying message: once we kill love
and humanity, we are capable of everything.
Throughout the play, we have analogies with events on a larger scale. The backdrop of the play
is war, turmoil, unrest. The war areas are always present. We get an impression that the whole
western civilization is like this. It is getting rid of humanity and escapable of everything in the pursuit
of wealth and power.
Alec is different from everyone else in the play. He is the only one not governed by this having
structure. Alec and Marion started together – set out from the same feeling of discontent and Alec
was very eager to learn. He hoped that education would change his position in the society. He and
Marion met at classes. He was moving from one subject to another. He never knew which subject was
the answer. However, he got disappointed very quickly because education is also one of the
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apparatuses, one of the pillars of society. You cannot step beyond culture by learning and being a
part of the educational system. However, he somehow managed to go beyond the ideological
structure. This is some kind of revelation that comes to him naturally, intuitively, but the author
herself says that she was influenced by Buddhist philosophy while creating this character. What
seems to other characters as Alec‟s breakdown is actually passivity and quietness. Alec says that for
him it was a break-through. He says: Suddenly, at one moment, everything fell through. There is an
expression in Buddhism: bottom fell of a pail – no more burden. The problem is solved because the
solution was found, but because they cease to be regarded as problems. He reached some state of
inner harmony with his world, and he wanted nothing more than that for himself.
There is a total absence of craving in Zen stories for material possessions. Alec behaves
almost the same as people in Zen stories. He does not want to call the police. He is different from the
rest of the society. He does not want to posses, not even his children. When Marion adopts his child,
he says: OK, the baby is well taken care of. He wanted to be free of possessions and not to be
controlled by possessions. We are always under pressure not to lose something and that is why we are
blackmailed.
The most interesting result of Alec’s transformation is his attitude to love. It would be wrong
to love anyone more than anyone else. He does not want to do that. This is problematic for his wife.
He is nice to her, but to everyone else, too. He is making love to Marion when she is plotting to destroy
him because she asked him. He did not want to refuse anyone who asked for love and affection from
him. However, she cannot possess him, so she decides to kill him. Alec’s selfless love is the most
hopeful message in the play – the willing sacrifice that he makes – he dies in an attempt to save his
landlord’s baby from the fire. There are two juxtaposed characters: Alec, who dies in an attempt to
save other person’s life and Worsley, who is all the time trying to commit suicide but does not manage
to do it. Worsley’s character represents a kind of failure in this modern society obsessed with having.
People are alienated from meaningful existence. There is a failure of both life and death, they fail to
both live and die meaningfully.

Owners by Caryl Churchill

#1, pp 9/10 I’ve been a butcher … She only had to ask. Clegg lived in a family in which
the father was proprietor. Children are also his property – strict patriarchal upbringing. His father was
also a butcher. Clegg and son – if you do not have a son, your life is meaningless. His wife was his
property. He is patriarchal, despotic and he appreciates rude expression of courage. He says about the
mental hospital that they told her she would be happier as a good wife – she has to accept the role in
the society. The mental hospital and psychiatrists there serve the system, they try to fit you into
society; do not support you in your rebellion. Painting according to him is a hobby for women – this
degrades both art and women. As art, painting helps us identify ourselves. However, she wanted to
become an owner, not owned. She is no longer his property. She became just like men. Moreover, he
would like her to lose her money.
Worsley wanted somebody to appreciate him, he adored Marion, he liked her energy and
vitality because he himself was weak. He is almost empty inside and cannot stand pressure.
#2, p 30 My face will go like hers … but I’m the dog. They are talking about Alec’s
mother who is about to die in hospital. Marion cannot accept mortality. If she accepts it, that will
mean losing everything. She identifies with her possessions and with her egotistic self. She cannot
cope with death.
T. S. Eliot says that there is this selfish, egotistic self vs. true, genuine self that can connect
with other people willing to sacrifice its own existence. If you reach this genuine self, you are not
afraid of dying. You get something you can surrender to, something larger than self. Marion is trapped
in her egotistic self. She does not want to die because she would have to give up the things she has. It
is a sort of aggressive attitude to life – go on, conquer, plunder, get more! Competitive spirit is also
present – be better, beat your competition. She identifies with this patriarchal tradition – she uses
people for her own purposes. On and on – just like Pozzo. He has an illusion of progress, similar to
Marion. They are both acquisitive. She is a typical consumer. They both have some sort of servants.
They enjoy their property. In addition, there is a possessive attitude to the whole world. It is there for
them to consume it.

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 Guilt – she feels guilt but does not act upon it. There are some remnants of humanity in her.
she goes on, continues in this wrong direction despite this feeling of guilt. There is nothing that
opposes this patriarchal structure: possessive, aggressive…
#3, p 49 Just buying a dress … I’m done things to. Lisa is jealous, envious because she
does not have what her landlords have. She is brainwasher. Lisa also belongs to this ideology, she does
not own but she wants to, she wants to own her baby. She signed something Marion claimed was
giving them the legal possession of the house, but it was an adoption paper. She renounced her child
in that way not knowing what she was doing. Now she wants it back – dead or alive. The mother –
child relationship is distorted by the ideology. She wants to do something, but she is passive, unlike
Marion. Lisa is always done things to, she always suffers consequences of other people’s actions.
#4, p 62 I should like him back … to say he does. Marion wants the baby because it is
only part of him she can possess. She says: I will keep what is mine. The more you want it … she
thinks in terms of money. She is like a man, she rejects tenderness. She also wants the baby because
on one loves her (remnants of humanity) and she wants somebody to love her. if Alec does not love
her, the baby will be a substitute for affection, for meaningful love.
Alec does not want to possess his son. However, he goes to the other extreme. His attitude – he
will not love anyone more than any one else – does not function. However, he sacrifices his life for a
baby. Maybe there are two levels. His attitude functions on the general level, but not on the personal
because he does not even love his wife and child more than he does other people.
Robert Bly – binary oppositions: people like either Alec or Marion. Out of the great wish tot
go beyond the culture Alec went to the other extreme. He is too passive, she should have tried to
influence Marion and change her.

L9 –

- H. Barker – I will paint the why of all your horrors – to paint the truth – the project of all 20th
century drama from Ibsen to Churchill
- Ibsen – shameful family secrets concealed by respectability – repressive society
- the waste to go on behind the lie of permissive society
- new conventions needed to shock the audience into the awareness of the truth
- Pinter, Becket – allegorical remove from reality
- since ___ to 60’s – politically more explicit, hard – hitting plays
- shock – tactics – combination of images of brutality and the tradition of Look Back in Anger
- WHY violence – to awaken the audience from their numb or fascinating complicity with cruelty
and force them to search for the reasons in the rest of the play
- violence done to children, sexual violence, political violence
- E. Bond – The Saved – child murder
- Pinter – Ashes to Ashes (1996) genocide
- Churchill – Thyestes – cannibalism
- S. Kane – Cleansed – mutilation, rape, murder
- Cloud 9 (1979) – political and sexual violence brought together
- crimes of patriarchy – patriarchal identity; masculine & cultural = destruction of the other
- mythological matrix: the crime against the goddess
- the dark races; the darkness of the female lust
- Act 1 - characters – partly living
- indoctrination: forcing gendered identity
- characters played by actors of the opposite sex/color
- beneath it – misery and perversion, adultery, fantasies, homosexuality, lesbianism
- marriage – a way of hushing up the scandal
- sacrifice of private attachments
- willing blindness
- Mrs. Saunders: penetrating intelligence, independent judgment from the picture
- Act 2 - willingness to acknowledge their wounds and learn from them
- a series of divorces, forming of new bonds – incest, homosexuality
- sexual anarchy – a solution or a transitory stage
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 - dissolution of patriarchal rigidity before we can find who we are
- the embrace of Betty 1 and Betty 2

A character from the play Scenes from the Execution by Barker–the play is about
imperialism comparable to modern Western Neo-Colonialism - a Venetian painter has a
commission to paint a battle in such a way to celebrate the glory of the republic and inspire the pride
of Venetian citizens of their own Christianity. She decides to do it her own way and instead of
celebrating, she decides to give the truth about the battle. There were two winds of opinion about the
event: 1st official – presenting violence as being inspired by aims to spread Christianity, 2nd bloodshed
of innocent people. She decides she will help the birth of the truth; she decides to be a midwife at the
birth of the truth. There is a soldier wounded in the battle, mutilated and now he exposes his looks to
curious people in exchange for money. His name is Prodo. Financial transaction – commodity equal
to the money you give. He sells his wasted potential for a couple of dollars. He is wounded; he sells
himself; he has come to terms with his life thinking that his wound is due to the great causes. She
says she will paint the whys of all his horrors, but he does not want her to do that; he is afraid. She, as
a painter, has to convince him who suffered most to face the truth, to be angry at the stupidity of
wasting life in war. She succeeded in it. He is terrified – the victims do not seem to acknowledge that
they have been used.
This is the motto of all great 20th century dramas: to paint the truth in the way only artists can,
in opposition to the manufactured truths made by those in power. It began with Ibsen, who wanted to
reveal the shameful secrets, the waste of human potentials concealed by respectability. He depicts a
highly repressive society. At the end of the 20th century, other writers do so, but by using more radical
and brutal images, to reveal the truth, because it is difficult to reveal truth in a society that has been
created on the myth of democracy and human rights, that has created permissiveness. We live in a
permissive society and it is difficult to break through this. Behind this permissiveness and tolerance,
there is a terrible destruction of human potentials and a terrible repression. It requires daring
techniques. Ibsen modified his naturalist techniques and started using symbols. His plays became
symbolic and this symbolism evolves in expressionism in Beckett and Pinter, in whom we have a
subjective projection of the bourgeois world. They paint images of brutality and cruelty, but those are
always treated in the way for the reader to see them as socially relevant at the time and as removed
from the historical events. They are important for the further development of drama in England – the
need for hard-hitting images. It was not enough to stage metaphysical plays, the political images were
important. There was a need for more political statements. There were no historical representations
but political images. The new generation from the 70’s on combined brutal stage images of violence,
incredibly more grotesque, visceral with images created in Osborn’s’ Look Back in Anger – outburst of
political revolt. This political specificity was staged explicitly in what became in-your-face theater –
theater that abounds in violence scenes. This is the mark of Greek, Senecan drama and of Jacobian
drama and contemporary theatre now. Periods of the greatest confidence in history. Theaters give us
pictures that do not coincide with the official pictures, showing a hidden version of
________violence. They use shock-tactics. Violent modern commercial films make us numb to the
violence or in time we become completely indifferent and begin to enjoy this violence without the
responsibility of questioning it. Violence in these great dramas is different. It is violence done to
children, sexual, political violence – these are the themes of this theater.
In The Saved by Edward Bond, there is the killing of a baby by the hooligans. Among the
people who killed it was the father. People refused to watch the play. It is highly metaphorical and
talks about society. These dramas make the audience confront their own nature. In commercial films,
there is no urge to explore the reasons for violence, no urge for questioning. Here, the audience is
forced to ask these questions. Censorship in England demanded that such plays never be staged.
However, this play is a metaphor about what our culture is doing to children – behind the talk, there is
cannibalism and violence, there is a mechanism of devouring the potentials of the young mind.
In Thyestes by Churchill, there is also cannibalism. It is a rewritten Seneca drama- based on
eating one’s children
In Ashes to Ashes by Pinter, there is political and social violence. Genocide is represented
as taking place in civilized England. Parting babies with their mothers – silent genocide or silent
cannibalism of children- the treatment of children in civilized societies.

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 Cleansed by Sarah Kane was influenced by Pinter, Bond and Barker. She also wrote The
Blasted. These plays are about what modern education is doing to young people. University campus
is also a concentration camp – prisons within which the minds are destroyed and also the capacity to
love. The dean of the university is a drug dealer. All organs by which you can make mutilation and
which enable love and communication are cut off – the tongues, hands. There are also two
homosexual people and ultimately, they remain loyal to each other. Other political themes – violence
done to homosexuals by each other, political violence – can be also found in the play.
In Cloud 9 by Churchill, (there is also a political theme in The Royal Hunt– colonization,
imperialism and time and hope) politics is explored, just like in other play of the 60’s. The Royal Hunt
does not talk about sexuality. Cloud 9 is a play that speaks about imperialism and sexuality, about the
crimes of patriarchy. It is an exploration of the violence inherent in patriarchal ideology – the way of
constitution of patriarchal identity which involves the destruction of the other. The masculine identity
is connected with the need to destroy the female layer of the psyche – the other within us that has to
be suppressed. In addition, we have cultural identity, the destruction of the external other – black
people. This must be excluded in order that the ideal patriarchal identity may be constituted. The
theme is directly stated on page 277. The play has two acts.
Act 1. A British family in the British colony in Africa. The father is a tyrannical despotic
person. What happens to the family is violation of probability – we see all characters are older than 25
years. Historical time – there are 100 years separating the two acts. Act 2 places characters in the
modern ‘80s London. Caryl Churchill wants to show how radical the changes were, but she telescopes
the time in order to make historical perspective more active. Here, we have the dissolution of the false
identity but it also shows that the sexual anarchy takes place according to sexual politics. To Clive,
the main character, both external and internal other are combined into a single enemy. He was
informed that she was having an affair – these are the important lines on page 277. You tame a wild
animal only so far’. Joshua is a humiliated servant, trust-worthier than a woman. Clive winks to
Joshua. They have a male understanding among them. ‘We must resist this dark woman‟s lust or it
will swallow us up. He thinks that his identity will disappear if the lust swallows him. Clive was at first
fascinated by Mrs. Sanders, but he decides that women are treacherous, unreliable and smell
different from man. The myth that this is based on is the myth of Adam and Eve. Joshua, a black
servant, tells the boy a story about the Great Goddess, but also that this is a wrong story and goes on to
tell him about Adam and Eve and Joshua and Edward feel that this story is better. For Edward the
story about Goddess is another option. God created man and then created a woman who liked the
snake and gave us all these troubles. The justification of imperialism and patriarchy is present in
this story. The indoctrination goes on all the time; boys have no business to have feelings, they should
kill disobedient servants, and they should not play with dolls, they should not be feminine. Women’s
duty is to be unhappy Girls should be unhappy and lonely, but married life is even worse. They should
give birth to children and bring them up – all that without pleasure. Sons must love their fathers –
through them, they love the empire and God. The Holy Trinity is upheld in Act I – Father, Queen,
Empire. We see that perversion and misery that is eating people underneath because they do not
want to say no to the ideology.
Betty is played by a man because she wants to be what her husband wants her to be.
Joshua is played by a white man. There is a suppressed hatred of Joshua and Edward, the son, but
they do nothing. Victoria, the daughter, is dumb and is played by a doll – she is not a human being.
The renunciation of judgment is shown in the mother-in-law. She wants to be protected. She is
obsessed with preventing the exposure of reality. When it comes to flagging the servants, she is
unhappy that the men do the entire job. A woman is fortunate because she is protected from moral
judgment; she has to be thankful to her not having to make moral decisions.
Edward is played by a girl. Everybody tries hard to make a man of him. That he is played by a
girl shows his resistance to what they are trying. There is a natural reaction in him against his natural
identity. In addition, he overdevelops his feminine side. He slowly becomes a homosexual and is
playing with a doll all the time. This homosexuality is a reaction against the imposed roles.
Homosexuality comes because of the unequal distribution of female parts in a person. Edward is in
the end seduced by Harry Bagley.
Joshua, the black servant, is played by a white man. We see the revelation of their perversion
in this being acted by different characters. Clive himself is not satisfied with his wife, though he calls
her dove. Art is for women = art in the service of ideology. The art has nothing to do with the reality
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around. He is having and affair with Mrs. Saunders, who is erotically uninhibited and is independent.
She wants to look into everything. He is amazed by such a woman. He practically rapes her –the 2nd
time –the first time she said yes. She does not like Clive but like the sexual sensation. She disappears
from the picture because there is no place for such a woman in this community. She goes beyond the
culture. The end is horrible – savage humor of it all.
Betty is in love with Harry Bagley. She has sexual fantasies about him. He is a concealed
homosexual – seduced and abused Edward when he was 7 or 8. When Harry comes back again, the
child wants to do it again, but Harry does not and he has sex with Joshua. Harry wants also to have
sex with Clive, but he is disgusted. Ellen is becoming a lesbian. Harry is made to marry Ellen –
stereotype of woman being shy, and man strong. Harry and Ellen renounce whatever private desires
they have for the good of the empire.
Act 2. They acknowledge who they really are. Now, they are openly who they are. They are
played by the actors of their own sex, except for Kathy, who is played by a boy. Her mother wants to
make a buy out of her. They do not lie anymore. We see them as they really are. We have a series of
divorces and break-ups. Betty wants to leave Clive; Vicky also wants to leave her husband, Martin.
There is sexual anarchy – people openly show their state of mind. Vicky turns into a lesbian. Edward is
openly homosexual. Vicky and Edward sleep in one bad. Edward says that he wants to be a woman. In
his partners, he tries to find a woman but preserves the patriarchal pattern. His lover is a masculine
homosexual – he likes to fuck and forget, and is not capable of true affection. Edward is a wife. Gerry
would like a male partner who has no female feelings. Edward decides to be a lesbian. Edward, Vicky
and Lin make a marriage in three – also an incest = sexual anarchy. Homosexual is not presented as
natural happiness. This sexual anarchy is a transitional stage and it is a consequence of the patriarchy.
Being a homosexual is not a proper solution. They have to go through this stage to see what it means
to be a true man and a true woman. They are trying to revive the feminine in themselves. Lin is a
lesbian only in principle. Vicky knows everything through books. That is why when they evoke the
Goddess she does not appear. What they lack is true love. Martin does not love his wife. The one thing
he did not tell her is that he loved her. In Act 1, lust was something to be controlled, something
forbidden. In Act 2 we have reading manuals on techniques of orgasm. Love and lust according to
Martin is the fine art we have to acquire. He is missing love; he offers her freedom and independence
but he does not love her; he approaches love with too much rationality. She is frustrated by the lack of
emotions on his part. Acceptance of freedom is devoid of real feelings. Vicky wants to establish a
better relationship to Lin.
The ultimate meaning of the play: Betty 1 and Betty 2 get together and embrace each other – to
discover true manhood and true woman hood. All the anarchy should lead to reconciliation of men
and women. There is a possibility of finding better means of communication.

L10 –

- (Re-) read: Axel & Rimbaud, On the Teaching of Modern Literature

- W. Woolf: Modern Fiction
- Lawrence: Why the Novel Matters
- Fromm: Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
- Conrad: Preface to the Nigger and Narcissus
- Andess, Barker, Conrad – the task of the artist to make the reader see that glimpse of truth he
has forgotten to ask for
- real motives behind ideological lies manufactured to justify Imperialism – Greek, Venetian,
Modern
- exploitation and profit
- Shield of Achilles – existential reason – western man’s soft spot – mortality
- Fromm: two ways of solving the problem posed by dichotomy:
man/ nature, self consciousness/the other; creative destructive: sadism, masochism
- Baudrillard – archaic societies: give, exchange; west culture: take (physically and mentally –
Platonic Impulse), kill, devour

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- Heart of Darkness: Kurtz – voracious megalomaniac – materialist and intellectual greed –
possessiveness; moral fall of the whole Europe, madness of the European soul; Why? Possibility of
salvation
- Woolf – praised Conrad and Joyce – concerned with the soul; predefinition of the soul –
traditionally absorbed into rational faculty
- Trilling – biological reason
- Barker – biological soul – resistant to ideological manipulation
- Rimbaud – soul identified with nigger, beast
- Conrad – distant kinship with the natives: inborn strength, moral core; the seat of moral decision
- Kurtz’s soul – mad / intelligence lucid
- Why? Went mad in the jungle or had been mad all along
- moral project – latent perversion of the soul detectible in his pamphlet – arrogance, superiority,
racism
- external restraint/ inner restraint – the soul – natural sympathies with the rest of the living
world
- final redemption – the vision of horror
- Marlow – saved: recognition of common humanity and work; gradual realization; savages
monstrous – morally superior
- I was a silly little bird – loss of innocence
- the second narration – guarantee of successful communication

Barker and Andess. Their works are about the artists commissioned to celebrate the state.
However, artists refuse to do so and show the truth. Behind various lies and falsehood, both Galatia?
and Marlow (a kind of an artist, seaman) reveal that the only motive is profit, utilitarianism. From
1880 to 1920, about 10 million people were killed in Belgium Congo. The economic reasons were not
the only ones; there was something deeper. In one of Andess’s poem, the hero of the poem is
Achilles – he has one vulnerable spot – a soft spot – awareness of his mortality. He has a sense of
inferiority towards nature. He tries to overcome this by choosing to be destructive, to kill the other.
Achilles is an archetypal Western man.
According to Fromm, there are two existential options, two ways of coming to terms with
oneself. The problem is how to relate with the other, which am not me. 1st way is creativity, work, love
– not make oneself one with nature, but bridge the gap between man and nature – separateness is
presupposed. 2nd way is a desire of a man to annihilate the other, to close the gap. Whatever exists
beside me is a thread – Sadism. Masochism – a man tends to annihilate his self, his consciousness. He
uses alcohol and drug in order to know and experience. It prevents critical thinking. However, there
are many civilizations that chose the creative way.
Baudrillard in his Symbolic Exchange and Death compares archaic societies and
modern ones. In archaic societies, there is give and exchange – the principle of reciprocity,
reversibility that ends in a vertigo of death. Western civilization strives for its confirmation by
inflicting death to the others: to take, kill and devour. That is the impulse both physical – destroy and
mental – possess. Platonic impulse means to reduce the nature’s mystery to the idea.
In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Kurtz is a voracious megalomaniac. He is an
agent of a company. He is a painter, musician and eloquent. Marlow has to bring him back to
civilization because something has gone wrong. He wanted to devour the whole mystery of wilderness.
He wanted to be their master. He crawled back to the fires of the natives and became the most savage
of all of them. Irony – fetish – god they bowed to. Colonialism may be in a way justified by the idea
behind it. It is the idea to which Faithless Pilgrims bowed. Ivory – we turn a living thing into material
wealth. Kurtz is interesting because he came full of ideas. Marlow sees Kurtz and says that his soul is
mad. He was the best Europe could offer and he failed. Why did Europe experience a tremendous
moral fall? Trilling asks whether the salvation of the soul is possible. Woolf is a modernist proper
and materialist – social surface of things – the description is always from the outside.
Conrad and Joyce plunge into the depths of the soul like the great Russians of the 19 th century
– Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and maybe even Lawrence – the stream of consciousness -. They
were concerned with the soul so they had to redefine what soul was. The traditional definitions of the
soul tended to identify the soul with reason, something abstract, completely purged of intuitive and
bodily. Intellect is a relatively late development in humans. Before that, there was intuition, sensuous
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response to the world. The soul is intellect, and the primitive people lack soul – they are in the need of
education. Soul is a moral judgement. With these authors, soul is something very old, ancient; it is not
intellect. Soul is biological reason. It is the biological that is most resistant to culture – biological soul
refuses to be absorbed by stereotypical ideas. It does not depend on acquired principle – Rimbaud
left Europe. ‘I is another‟. Soul is the area in the mind that can be identified with the beast and the
niggers. Lives of Animals by Coetzee.
Conrad comes to a similar definition. The soul is a sense of distant kinship with the natives in
the Belgium Congo. Only then does the soul become a seat of moral judgment. Kurtz’s soul is mad
because of the dissociation of such a view of soul and intellect. His intelligence was perfectly mad. The
soul that should have intervened was inoperative – it is perverted. There are points where it seems
that Kurtz was OK before he came to wilderness. But it was not so. The point is to reveal that Kurtz’s
soul has been mad all along. The jungle provided the circumstances in which his perversion became
open. External restraints are laws and norms. Inner restraint could have saved him, if he had had it.
He is taken out of external restraint – civilization and taken to jungle in order to make it visible. Inner
restraint is not acquired by education – it is an inborn strength – the soul – the feeling of kinship.
Even in his pamphlet, there is an audible note of arrogance, hubris, which is just a mild expression of
racism. If I am god and they are subhuman, I can kill them. There is no idea that could justify such a
thing. There is for Kurtz a partial redemption. He belonged to nothing – was separated from earth.
Everything is just his consciousness. The only thing he can do is invoking him to himself. He allows
Marlow to take him to the ship. Marlow has to do that because that means that the possibility of
Europe’s salvation exists. Before he dies, pride and various expressions go over his face, but he sees
his own soul and judges himself: The horror, the horror. Kurtz had soul to lose, but he realized that at
the end. Marlow is this other option. He preserves sanity – 1st, there is his dedication to work (man is
saved by working with others for a common goal); 2nd - he could see in the savages the image of
common humanity. He does not consider them inferior. The idea comes gradually and slowly. At first,
he is appalled. Savages are compared to lunatics. They are monstrous. He had to invent two narrators
to gain the readers. Only gradually does Marlow realize the truth. Cannibals are on the ship and they
have more inner restraint that Kurtz. He described himself as a silly little bird - his development, loss
of innocence. The journey was a journey into the moral darkness of the Western man – dark and then
light, so he has to readjust his vision when he comes there. His mental perception is not prepared to
see the ornaments as severed heads. There is another narrator. The story is based on questions. It is a
fantasy that turns into a nightmare. He problematizes all the norms. The other narrator is even more
prejudiced. The Thames is invoked – adventures and missionaries. He glorifies the past of the country.
In the past, we were primitive, too – like Africans. The purpose Marlow assigned himself (an
accountant, a lawyer and the Director of Companies are listening to him) is the purpose of art. He
lived the story once and was influenced by it. The purpose of art is communication of knowledge so
that we can see. A writer of a modern novel cannot rely on assumption of what is significant for his
readers. He presents what is important to him. The truth has become much more hidden, problematic.
The main issue is the point of view. They refused omniscience because the truth is invisible.
There was limited point of view of one or two narrators in order to identify with one point of view,
unlike in Jane Austen’s novels. Wuthering Heights is opposed to such novels, here we have life,
love, etc.

P16 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

#1, p 8 He is talking about England as a dark place of the Earth. Marlow is not a typical
storyteller. He looked at the things differently. The illumination of mist by the man – mist – to show
off something we do not usually see.
Jung, Robert Bly: 1st ego – the part of us we show to the world
2nd shadow – vague portion of reality
3rd the self – if we wish to illuminate them, the whole circle
If we do not recover the ego, it can burst out destructively. Number 2 is shadow projection –
that which we do not like in ourselves. We project it to the other; they become the object of our hatred.
The black Africans remind us of the portion of ourselves which we have rejected. The
psychological reason for the conquest of Africa is to destroy this remainder. Romans in Britain – there
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was an ideology behind their conquest, profit. They did not need the hypocritical justification. We see
a kind of continuity of imperialism and patriarchy. Once, Britain was prey to colonialism. Conquest of
the Earth means taking the land from other people. The Other – we perceive other groups as Others,
they can become our enemies, objects of destructiveness. Reasons: different race, religion… what lies
at the basis of civilization is robbery. The only thing that saves the enterprise is the idea behind it. –
The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Marlow is very ironic here. The idea is to enlighten the savages. The
work is a noble enterprise – very ironic. When he reminds his aunt that this is just for money, she says
it is a kind of reward.
#2, p 22 The idleness of a passenger … ? Marlow is on the ship going down the African
coast. The only image that seem real to him is the voice of the surf, the boat of the natives. To some
degree he perceives them as the Other, but he sees them as full of live and vitality. The savages were a
part of nature. He himself had a sense of illusion in the French boat going to conquer Africa. There is
nothing to be seen but they are firing at the continent – irrational hatred of Africa, of the Other.
Psychological hatred of Africa, of the Other; psychological display of the irrational, insane hatred.
Colonialism: 1 – ivory – materialistic motive; 2 – wish to conquer the Other, the other part of oneself
– psychological motive.
#3, p 22 A horn tooted to the right …. ? It is highly ironical. Black people are in chains.
The railway is being built there. Conversion – the whites are trying to reclaim the blacks from the
wilderness, to teach black Africans our civilized ways. There was no obvious reason for blasting. These
are irrational, pointless actions. When the whites go to Africa, they go slightly insane. You cannot
really conquer this shadowy part of oneself. He constantly has this feeling or unreal in Africa. Those
who do the work are not enemies but criminals. The whites pronounce the criminals by the white
people’s laws. The blacks have no idea what is going on. There is a reclaimed black carrying a rifle. He
is like Joshua from Cloud 9 – reclaimed, converted. He represents this system. Savage vs. salvage –
save from darkness.
#4, p 33 I went to work the next day … ? Marlow is repairing his ship. He does not
condemn the whole of culture. Work helps him preserve his sanity. There are two positive things
about civilization: work/ship and a book. There is a dream, human aspiration to grow. There are two
dreams: Kurtz’s dream is a dream of mastery, conquest, arrogant dream – Jack from The Lord of
the Flies. Marlow’s dream is not arrogant; it is a positive dream of work that preserves his integrity,
positive human effort to build something, to work. The other possibility, creative attitude to life. Ralf
from The Lord of the Flies.
The other passengers resembled pilgrims, but they were not really pilgrims. Their divinity is
ivory. I‟ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. There is a huge being waiting for all the insane
people to leave. Whatever Kurtz did there would be no trace, it was a vain attempt – grass is up
immediately.
#5, p 51 The Earth seemed unearthly … ? The whites can perceive those others only if
they can categorize them in their own terms and categories. This refers to our own nature; we are not
allowed to show that wild part of ourselves, we are shackled by our own society. Here, the black did
not suppress their own feelings, they behaved naturally. They were mostly regarded as beasts, as
something monstrous, but he cannot view them in that way. He sees a remote kinship between them.
The only way to be saved by the shadow is to bring it back to light. That which he sees in the blacks, he
recognizes in himself – the need to act instinctively, intuitively and therefore he will not be destroyed
by the shadow, nor will he feel destructive towards the blacks. The only sin is the sin of separateness –
only if we see some group of people as something separate can we find a reason to destroy it.
He is frank enough to admit that he recognized the same thing in himself. He had word to do
on the ship: his task was different from the other people’s task. He managed to control his instinct
through work and preserve his integrity. P 54 – an inquiry into some Points of Seamanship - the book
is real for him, man-made reality, the world number 3 according to Frye. What he stresses here is that
this was honest work. These pages are humble, not arrogant.
#6, p 58 I would no doubt have been properly horrified … ? The cannibals are on the
ship. They are hungry and ask the whites to give them the body. They are paid with 3 inches of brass
wire. They do not want to eat the whites. Marlow asks himself why the Cannibals did not eat them. It
seemed to him that there was some sort of inner restraint. They managed to control their instincts
unlike Kurtz. They suffer from horrible hunger. The devilry of hungering starvation. – They have an
inner integrity, inborn strength, it is natural, inborn.
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 #7, p 70 You should have heard him say my ivory … ? Kurtz wants to believe that
everything belongs to him and Marlow waits for the jungle to start laughing. He was claimed by the
_____ he wants to possess. Wildlife of Africa invoked his instincts. His shadow burst out. His wild
destructive impulses burst out. Kurtz has a very improper attitude towards his shadow. The butcher
and the policeman: butcher provides meat – no hunger; policeman means external restraint. Most of
us are tempted to do something evil, but some of us are not: fools – they are too naïve, simple even to
see that there is temptation. Saints – people who have so clean a soul that they are not capable of even
being tempted, but they are detached form experience. Most of us are neither fools nor saints. The
only salvation is work.
#8, p 71 All Europe … ? Kurtz symbolizes the mind of modern Europe of his time, a perfect
representative of the European society. He symbolizes both the best and the worst of Europe. Marlow
tries to make him see the horror of what he did, not only him but through him the whole Europe and if
he sees, then there is hope for Europe, too.
The idea of work. The whites were there to civilize the Africans, to suppress the savage
customs, to change the Africans. Marlow says about this report: Kurtz is eloquent, good with words, a
wonderful narrator. Behind this eloquence an attitude is conveyed in this report: his attitude to the
blacks. He calls them savages. His tone is arrogant. This is supposes to be an optimistic speech and he
uses a degrading word. He assumes that the white people in comparison to the whites are like gods. At
the same time, the speech is full of phrases of ideals. However, he does not expose the method how he
is going to change these people – there is nothing practical in his speech, just empty phrases, a flow of
eloquence. The end of the report is later added by Kurtz: exterminate all the brutes! By using the word
exterminate he degrades them and he is supposed to be a benevolent god. We see a discrepancy. He
really believed that he would bring progress and civilization although there is this arrogant attitude
present. However, something happened to him there. That is why we cannot say it is hypocrisy.
Lukacs – abstract and concrete potentials - our character is determined by our choices. Kurtz
had many potentials, he was gifted in many ways, but he chose to actualize the hatred.
#9, p 99 One evening … contempt. , However, … of desire and hate. Marlow is
watching Kurtz die. He admires Kurtz. The image of a veil – suggests that something is hidden.
Human kind cannot bear too much reality. T. S. Eliot. Throughout the book, Marlow is haunted by
the image of unreality, everything seems unreal to him, but now it looks as reality. Kurtz has managed
to recognize the depth of his downfall, the horror of what he has committed. There was a split in Kurtz
up to this moment – between his vision and what he did, but now he recognizes the downfall. He had
the courage to look at himself and see what he had done. That is why the veil is mentioned.
Marlow calls this moment when Kurtz pronounces his last words the moment of supreme
knowledge because Kurtz gains total, supreme knowledge of himself.
The black boy reported about Kurtz’s death. He talked about the general impact that Kurtz
made in the tone of scathing contempt. He is totally indifferent to Kurtz’s death.
The only thing we can get out of our life is self-knowledge and to Kurtz it only came at the
moment of death. Eh calls Kurtz a remarkable man because he was able to say it, had courage to do it.
Marlow was also on the verge of death and had nothing important to say, whereas Kurtz glimpsed the
utmost truth and said it. Similar to this, in Boj na Kosovu – a man who got blind but got another
kind of sight – he saw his inside.

P17 – D. H. LAWRENCE

- Conrad: the element out of which the mind evolved: the dark double has to be recognized and
controlled
- Lawrence: spirit of the place – IT: the source of creativity and vitality; IT chooses and
decides for us – opposite to disaster
- pagan traditions: focus on the worship of natural powers and its flow
- Pan-Devil – vitality degraded as evil
- St. Mawr: horse falls over the rider (modern man tries to control the flow of natural energy)
- conscious will on top: betrayal of the hierarchy of being: outburst of destructiveness
- modern civilization: to undermine the strong ones
- St. Mawr: the agent of change – Pan
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- Lou gets in touch with her inner being – reality
- Lou and Rico: friction of two wills; man contained in their heads
- Vestal Virgin: looking for a man who would have blood knowledge
- cowboys: two-dimensional
- nature: not a romantic unity but struggle

There is a crucial difference in worldviews in Lawrence and Conrad. In their works they
both explore the deepest layers of psyche: unconscious, irrational, instinctive. Conrad views this dark
layer of our psyche as the element out of which our mind evolved. It is very important that we
recognize it and accept it as our origin. It is also important to control it. For him, this portion of our
psyche, the dark double in us must be controlled. Marlow controls it through work and creativity. On
the other hand, for Lawrence, this deep layer of the psyche should actually be our guide. He calls it
IT – he says that it is the source of our vitality and creativity. It is like the deepest self of man, the
center of out being. There is and introductory essay Spirit of the Place – people came to America in
order to be free, had the urge for freedom. That was the original dream of the colonizers. Lawrence
says that what people achieved this way was a kind of a negative freedom, - just freedom from – they
got free from the class system. Fromm differentiates between two types of freedom: freedom from
and freedom for. By means of the other type of freedom we find the real meaning of life – something
to invest the freedom into, to use it for. Lawrence also says that we achieve this real positive freedom
when we get in touch with this source of life. If we cannot get in touch with it – creative, vital, natural
flow in our being, if we choose and decide for us from this very center of our being, then we achieve
this real, positive freedom. If we try to oppose this flow of energy, it always ends in some kind of
disaster.
Both Lawrence and Joyce were very interested in Pagan tradition, especially in the idea of
the worship of this energy often symbolized by water. For Lawrence, the embodiment of this natural
energy is Greek god Pan (=all). Originally, in the Greek mythology, it was a god of all, it symbolically
represented the wholeness of being. In his essay The Death of Pan he talks about how Pan gradually
was degraded and regressed so that in some later stages of mythology we have representations of him
with horse les. The figure that replaces him in Christianity is Devil. That which used to be the symbol
of wholeness, of the completeness of our being is now replaced by a mythological figure that
represents only our discarded vitality according to Lawrence, modern man has discarded this vital
flow and tries to control it by this conscious will, this narrow rational mind that tries to control the
flow on nature. The horse is lying on his master – this energy rebelled against its weal master. It is a
terrifying scene. Lou has a vision of evil, Rico’s leg is broken, she asks who is the evil, the source of
destructiveness – the horse or the rider. She realizes that by trying to master, to control the IT, we
betray the hierarchy of being. When this suppressed energy finally bursts out, it becomes destructive.
She thinks about the whole modern civilization, about whole movements such as bolshevism and
fascism. She observes the modern society, the general tendency to undermine the strong individuals.
There are people who are in touch with this source, creative energy, natural flow and because of that
they are strong in spirits. The general tendency is to undermine these strong people. There is a
reversal of natural hierarchy and we always observe the weak mastering the strong. In Lawrence’s
works, people in low social positions are servants but in their character and spirit, they are stronger
than those in high positions, e.g., the lover of Lady Chatterley.
In St. Mawr, there are characters of two servants. One is Welsh, Lewis, the other one
American Indian, Phoenix. The two of them are the representatives of these other traditions. When
Lewis talks about the stars we are connected to natural phenomena; mystic belief, in a way pagan.
There is an episode in which Mrs. Witt cuts Lewis’s hair – she as a master. As she cuts his hair, she
feels the flow of life. His hair symbolizes this natural energy.
Two principal characters are Lou and Rico. They are married to each other. They belong to
the upper class, socially are successful, handsome, young, rich, popular. Their life seems to be a
constant shift from one party to another. However, there is not much passion in their marriage. Very
soon after the wedding, their marriage becomes a friction of two wills. Bodily passion is not present in
their marriage. When Lou buys St. Mawr and looks into his eyes for the first time something happens.
The same motif – looking at a horse’s eyes – is present in Equus, too. She suddenly starts to cry. We
are told that she has never cried before in her life. St. Mawr acts as an agent of change. When she
encounters the horse, the encounter opens a crack in her being, in her perception of the self. She gets
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in touch with her inner being. Our usual concept of the self – the self is put on a pedestal and we do
not even know what it is. Ego, persona, how we see ourselves. This part in Lou dissolved and she
became a part of this portion of reality. Suddenly, she starts wondering what is real. The same thing
occurs in Conrad: two true things – book and jungle. Here Lou realizes that she has been living in a
phony world. A lot of pretence has been present. Now, she gets in touch with this deep hidden reality;
her social self, her social role now seems unreal to her. It seems to her that the young men she meets
in these social occasions are wholly contained in their heads. They all have handsome, well-shaved
faces, pleasant to watch and they keep in talking, exercising their wit. They seem to be completely
bodiless, they have lost all the touch with their bodies, with the instinctual portion of their being. St.
Mawr reminds Lou of this totality of being. He symbolizes Pan, the god of all. He is a creature in
whom Pan is still alive. Lou fails to find a man in whom Pan is still alive. She leaves Rico and hopes to
find a mystical man – the kind of man who would have blood-knowledge – a kind of intuitive
knowledge. Lawrence believes that when we use our intellect, we are separated from the object of
knowledge. When we use our intuition, we try to become one with the object of knowledge. Lou leaves
Rico, goes to America and buys a ranch somewhere in the wilderness. She says that by living on that
ranch, working, struggling for nature she wants to get in touch with her wild spirit. She says that living
on that ranch will not be romantic, not a romantic unity with nature - it will be a hard back-braking
business.
Mrs. Witt, Lou’s mother is an interesting character. She admires men who are witty and
intelligent, but at the same time always manages to beat them in these games. She is ironical, cynical
and seems to overpower them all the time. Lawrence compares her to the pillar of salt – sea, a
feminine element; sun, a masculine one, has dried the feminine and what is left is salt. Woman,
instead of being a life-giving element, water, has become just a pillar of salt, a destructive element.
This is her effect on men. She is not in touch with the vital source, she is also dry.
There is the image of cowboys. Lou observes them and she sees them as two-dimensional. They
lack the third dimension. They are masterless, have achieved this negative freedom from, escaped the
class system. The third dimension – they are not in touch with the source. We cannot be completely
free without coming in touch with the source.

St. Mawr by D. H. Lawrence

#1, p 336 She never did cry … of the horse. When Lou sees the horse for the first time,
she cries. She has been deeply moved – a great emotional disturbance. She is also scared of the
daemonic head of the horse. She sees through that natural flow, everything that is denied and
suppressed in civilization she sees in the horse. This is juxtaposed to her concept of the self: she –
socially involved, in social life she is defined as young Lady Carrington. She later sees that this is an
unimportant portion of what she is. The dark eyes of the horse symbolize the darkness, the inner self
and are juxtaposed to the blue eyes of Rico symbolizing intelligence. There is something dangerous in
Rico, some dangerous mistrust, something perverted, something wrong, suppressed animal. There is
something dangerous in him. There is also this powerlessness – Rico is not in touch with himself.
What he emanates is powerlessness and he is self-centered.
Real vs. unreal. In the whole society everything seems to be a bluff – people are pretending all
the time. Lou sees the suppressed portion of reality in the horse.
#2, p 358 Isn’t that curious now … with a man like Lewis. When she touches his hair
she says he is like animal she is not in touch with the self and she is fascinated by it now. There is a
sort of degradation here. She sees him as animal and at the same time she is fascinated by him but
does not respect him. she says that intelligence defines man – young men from the upper class. She
appreciates fine mind in men but does not find it in this young man. These young minds all knit the
same pattern; there is nothing that would suggest their real mind but what they are doing is just
repeating the same phrases and patterns. Lou recognizes the true value – that mind should be able to
use natural powers, intuition, all the faculties given by nature. Her mother says he is under her as a
servant. She is a rich lady and she cannot be in love with someone like Lewis. Lawrence’s belief in
natural hierarchy is present – those naturally stronger are socially low, inferior by the social status.
Lou is talking about St. Mawr. Some men who would be in touch with the source would be real
men for her.
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 #3, p 359 I don’t want intimacy … instead of serving. Deadness in them – we are
away from the source of life. There is a comparison to a camel that lives from her hump and that hump
one day disappears. However, we do not take life from the source, from natural energy.
There is still the animal in us, but we are tamed. The animal part is perverted, humbled and
domesticated. Some young men resemble a well-bred dog. There is nothing exciting, wild in us. Rico is
a typical representative of such young men. What sort of men does Lou desire? Men like Phoenix and
Lewis, but they are servants instead of masters. She would like a kind of society in which they would
be masters. They are in touch with the natural. They would not repeat phrases but would be explorers.
He would also have a shifting character, difficult to define.
#4, p 372 And, she had a vision … good sport. Are people of the modern society aware
of the truth? Do they consciously want evil? No! They want to do good but without questioning,
without conscious thinking. They just want to stay on the surface, have good time, are not interested
in the depths, in the hidden part of the self, in the hidden reality. St. Mawr made Lou see the evil, his
falling on his back and the rider crushed under its back. She saw the same in people – go backward;
she sees it as the image of the evil that exist nowadays and we are still pretending that we are holding
the ropes although we are under the horse. Rico is still pretending that he is the master. He is an
impotent master and the horse symbolizes the real state of things. The horse symbolizes that which is
suppressed by the society – natural strength and Rico symbolizes a narrow mind that cannot properly
control the natural instinct because the natural instincts cannot be controlled by rational mind.
Undermine – about the true nature of man that is being undermined. Whenever Lou tried to
be authentic, Rico would undermine her and other people undermined him. Whenever somebody
shows a strength of spirit, connection to the source, others would try to undermine it. Historically, all
the spiritually strong personalities were killed. Thomas Beckett in The Murder in the
Cathedral. – a choir of women: We do not want anything to happen – that would question their
concept of reality.
#5, p 373 The evil … the most potent. Historical movements are mentioned – fascism and
bolshevism = outbreak of evil. Evil became apparent. Lou sees the betrayal as a betrayal of their true
selves, they suppress the natural energy in themselves. When we suppress our instincts, they become
perverted, degraded, evil. Betrayal of life is betrayal of these energies. We are not obeying the deepest
center of our being; we betray that which is natural in us.
Creation destroys as it … - Mankind does not accept, embrace death as a part of life. It ends
our ego. We cannot come to terms with natural processes: creation and destruction. We should
undergo changes. This civilization has become something as death in life. Civilization reaches its peak
and then its degradation begins. Man should return to nature. Otherwise, he gets more and more
distanced from nature and the natural world.
Lapis Lazuli by W. B. Yeats, meaning a blue stone. This poem is a meditation on this blue
stone:
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay!
The same idea is present in Lawrence. We have to accept death as a part of the natural process
and reconstruct, rebuild our civilization.
#6, p 383 Mother, do you really like watching … the terror of too late. Mrs. Witt
thought that hardly anyone lived so they can hardly die. St. Mawr is a symbol of this fullness of life.
True believers are not afraid of life, they believe in afterlife. She believes that she has never lived fully
and that is why she is not afraid of death. Her whole life has been full of the feeling of vagueness so she
would like death to be real and painful, something that is palpable, that has reality. There is a girl, they
are burying her and her death also seems unreal to her. Her life is reduced to social conventions and
her social role – the life of the upper class. She refers to unreality of her own experience. She has not
lived in accordance to her natural feelings, the feelings within her. There is a change from the
beginning of the novel to this part – Lou realizes she has only one life to live. It was just like living
somebody else’s life. It is too late for her mother. She does not have enough time to change.
#7, p 431 So it is mother … could never do that to me. She says it is the beginning of
something else. She has discovered the IT in herself through the agency of St. Mawr and does not want
to live the superficial life anymore. Mrs. Witt is always cynical: convents for something bigger –
alluding to girls who wanted to become nuns. She sees the girls who wanted to go to the covenant
differently. She disagrees with her mother. That kind of life seemed to her like running away from
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facing men. She does not see in men what St. Mawr has. She longs for a mystical man. She will either
find that kind of man or never be with a man again. The sexual intercourse has to have deep meaning,
unity with the man who would be in touch with the source.
Hieros gamos – Jung = holly marriage – the way to become whole is to unite the masculine
and feminine in ourselves. The archetype presiding over a relationship is hieros gamos – that is what
couples want to achieve. Jung believes that in this heterosexual relationship there is a potential, a
promise for spiritual growth. To have a deep emotional relationship, you have to be in touch with the
other aspect of your being. He also calls them Sol and Luna, Animus and Anima. This is the kind of
relationship that Lou wants. That is why she says she wants her relationship to a man to be
meaningful and a mystery.
Spirit that is wild, wild America - she has found the same principle in the wild nature.
Franklin –human life should be like an ordered garden. Lawrence – my life is the deepest forest. He
does not know about himself. There is a wild spirit within us. Lou wants to get in touch with the spirit
by getting in touch with nature.

L11 – JOYCE AND LAWRENCE

- creative questioning of the values on which the ambivalent success of our culture rests
1. Conrad: What is civilization? What has it become?
enlightenment of the mind/eating up of vital resources;
confrontation with the primitive needed to reveal the perversion of the soul
- Lawrence and Joyce – detect madness in inconspicuous incidents within culture
2. belated discovery/timely breakthrough – salvation involves voluntary exile
3. mythological approach – Lawrence, Joyce – redefinition of the soul in terms of pagan
mythology
- Lawrence, Spirit of the Place – soul – IT: creative source – the true another
soul is created by conscious will
- Apocalypse
Pagan/Christian – disturbance of natural balance
worship of nature/worship of logos, word, conscious mind
- Pagan apocalypse – reconciliation
- Christian apocalypse – severance out of fear; the cross – the defeat of the dragon
revenge of the weak upon the strong in the soul
- Lawrence, The Death of Pan – Pan = all
- Pan – Devil
- Nietzsche – Antichrist
- Stephen Dedalus – Lucifer: Non serviam
- growth in strength and power – Dedalus: pagan artist
- Joyce – Ireland, a priest-ridden country
To my church, the most abhorrent idea is that of a human being.
- Portrait visions:
St. Mawr I is another.
- Lou – living amidst the clockwork of fun – going dumb, dead, surrounded by mental lifers
John the Baptist – bodiless
- the weak secretly undermining the strong
- marriage with Rico – friction of two wills
- the horse – a catalyst
- a vision of a different reality, a different self
- the accident – paradigmatic: metaphor: horse/riders
- Who is to blame?
- choice : Rico - cerebral mind vs. St. Mawr - mystic, intuitive mind
- Vestal Virgin – keeping the theme of life alive
- Mrs. Witt/Lewis

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 Lewis: Literature questions always. Creative questioning continues after Conrad in the works
of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Conrad asks: What is civilization? and What it has
become? In order to answer this, he places the protagonist out of the civilization that is within
wilderness, in the jungle, and confronts him with the primitive. In this confrontation, man confronts
the natural element. Kurtz falls and our civilization is revealed to be morally bankrupt. He confronts
the man with the mythological mind. Over- development of the mind has destroyed the vital forces.
When the ‘large’ mind meets the ‘small’ mind, it wants to kill it. Modern man fails the test. The mind
has developed on the expense of the soul – the soul has gone mad.
The same destructive process is revealed in Joyce and Lawrence and the same question is
raised. However, they do not confront their protagonists with wilderness; they concentrate on what
happens within culture in order to show the condition of Western man’s soul – even within
civilization, symptoms of madness can be detected. They focus on the incidents that take place in the
civilisation and that pass unobserved. In the usual routine, they point to incidents that reveal
madness; e.g., Lawrence confronts his heroine with a horse. We see the life-denying attitude of
Western civilization. Another difference is that Conrad’s view is pessimistic and Lawrence’s and
Joyce’s are optimistic but not much more positive than Conrad. However, the attitude toward human
nature is not different. What is different is the moment in the point of the development of their
protagonist on which these writers choose to concentrate. Conrad concentrates on the moment when
Kurtz has already lost his soul irretrievably. Lawrence and Joyce depict protagonists who start to
question early enough to be able to see the destructiveness of the values and timely break through into
a more satisfying life. Protagonists decide that the salvation of the soul can be achieved through the
voluntary exile, detachment from the civilized tradition. Moral judgments made by artists are that in
order to save oneself, one has to detach from destructive Europe and go beyond culture. Lawrence
had a very short life and searched for a more life-sustaining mythology.
Both Joyce and Lawrence expressed criticism of Western civilization through another
mythology; they adopted a mythological approach. They created their own system inspired by a
different mythological system, not the one on which Western Europe rested. They looked back to
Blake. Joyce and Lawrence are much more articulate in pointing another way of life and mythology
– possibility of escaping culture. Lawrence wrote about the Soul. According to Conrad, the Soul was
destroyed by the development. Conrad depicts the outcome of the wrong conception of man but does
not confront it with a different mythology. Joyce and Lawrence point to another way of life. Joyce
also called it the soul and redefined it. That is the most primordial element in us according to
Lawrence. Lawrence called the soul IT – not close to Freud’s ID = shameful, antisocial, destructive
secrets and desires in the subconscious – ego is supposed to know IT and control. For him darkness
was never what it was for Lawrence. According to Lawrence, IT is the fountain of what is best in us,
creative energy, creative author of our life. Conrad would call it soul. If we want a complete balance,
we should accept it. We should live in accordance with the dictates of IT, but we oppose IT by the
power of conscious will and because of that a disaster is bound to happen. We have been trying to
degrade and master IT – that is the tragedy of America. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America
motivated by the desire for freedom. They forgot that there are two types of freedom – from and for.
They did not realize what this newly acquired freedom was for – it was for obedience to what is within
us. Proper freedom is allowing to be mastered by the deepest self. According to Lou, cowboys were
superior to the old English aristocracy but were also detached from the deepest self; they lacked one
dimension. The democratic episode is the last episode in which IT has been severed, degraded by the
conscious will. Lawrence seeks to find a way in which these two elements can be combined and
blended. He wrote Apocalypse in order to correct the Bible and condemn Christianity. Biblical
apocalypse is the dream of the final destruction of the physical world and the triumph of paradise.
Soul is defined as mind. According to him, it is a perversion of the Pagan apocalypse. Pagans never
saw life and death as separated. It was a reconciliation of the opposites according to them. Pagans
always worshipped nature and Eros. It was a commingling of the human and natural element.
Christian apocalypse means abolition of this existential physical world that is body, final destruction
of the natural world. There is a severance of the body doomed to remain on the cross; the cross
symbolizes the intersection of opposites; in Christianity, it is a separation of the two, it is a symbol of
final separation. Nature and cultural values should be commingled so as to strengthen. In the
apocalypse of the pagan peoples, all forms are abolished in order for civilized values to be revitalized
by this reunion with nature. The entire culture is commingled with nature and a new civilization
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occurs merged with nature. In pagan apocalypse, there are two existential elements: sun –associated
with intellect, and water – source of life, IT. Christian apocalypse, on the other hand, promises there
will be no water – there will be a destruction of everything that is not clear mind. In Christian
apocalypse, a Dragon is killed – a symbol of creative forces of nature. The defeat of this dragon, Pan, is
the revenge of those weak in the soul, of those not able to embrace the totality of experience. The weak
desire to defeat the strong. The defeat of the Pan is the late episode, a repetition of an episode that
happened long before Christianity. People succeeded to worship logos/logic. Pan was outlawed and
could not be seen. In Christianity later, it became identified with the devil.
Nietzsche raged against Christian priests who said no to the totality of life and identified Pan
with evil. What formerly was God of all was now devil. That was why he wrote Antichrist and
identified with it. This is echoed in The Portrait. The protagonist, Stephen, refuses to be weak. They
(church, parents…) wanted to implant in him the sense of weakness and he became a painter in order
to resist it. He says Non serviam= I will not serve. He is just like Lucifer, the devil. He will not serve.
The Church is a saw eating its offspring. It is a priest-ridden country. In order to become a complete
human being he becomes an artist. Throughout the book, Stephen (a Christian martyr, Dedalus – a
pagan artist) prepares to become a priest. Becoming a priest would be wrong because it would mean to
have power over the strong ones, over those who have courage to sin and over his inner desires.
Dedalus sees his pristine soul still alive and potent. Stephen went to the sea to find out what he
wanted to be. He realized that he did not want to be a priest but a painter. Epiphany – a vision
according to Joyce.
St. Mawr begins with the description of Lou’s marriage and it culminates in vision – she
sees she is another: ‘I is another‟. Joyce and Lawrence first give us scenes form the characters’ lives
in order to show us why the vision is necessary. Conrad is not concerned with marriage. According to
Lawrence and Joyce, man’s relationship to woman is of crucial importance, but in Conrad there the
relationship between man and woman is not studied. It shows us about man. Lou lives amidst the
clockwork of fun. Lou’s life is all about entertainment – events happening in society smothers
individual. She is surrounded by people who are detached by the source in themselves. She calls them
mental lifers. They are completely contained in postures. When she looks at their eyes, she sees a
central hollowness in them. She emphasizes the disbalance by saying that they are like John the
Baptist (his head was cut off because he refused the love of Salome) – they are polite, witty, clean-
shaven as if completely contained in their head, bodiless as if they are becoming dead – important
word. All the authors (Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad) depict civilization that is a sort of death. She feels
that their purpose is, while preserving the outer appearance, the surface, to undermine others who are
potentially strong; they do not do it obviously, openly. Lawrence – betraying another with a kiss of
Juda – they can kiss you, be polite to you and yet betray you irretrievably. Rico and Lou’s marriage
deteriorates. Rico is very much like a horse, but a horse subdued and perverted. Their marriage rests
on the friction of the wills- a game of power. They stop having sex and it all makes her secretly mad,
until the agent of change appears. Here, it is a horse, St. Mawr, a mysterious horse, ruddy, fiery, an
emblem of libido. Horse’s eyes flesh questions at her of her own identity. The questions are of
what/who she really is. (Just like Marlow in the jungle.) The dream of our civilization has the status
of a nightmare – a potent pagan would immerse in twilight. St. Mawr helps her to another discovery.
There is a crack in her ego. There is another world to which this horse belongs, in which animal is not
degraded, but it is a part of our being. When she looks at his eyes, she cries for the first time – she was
not in touch with her emotions before. She realizes that she is not only Lady Carrington, but that there
is some energy in her, too. She starts running away from her husband. The horse throws Rico out of
the saddle and Rico is badly hurt. St. Mawr is emblematic of the natural creative energy – IT. Rico, on
the other hand, is emblematic of intellect, conscious will. However, he takes the position that IT
should take. When the accident happens, a dead snake appears – compared to the Bible – no living
snake appears to give us knowledge. The horse is on top of Rico rolling his eyes in anger. Low asks
who is to blame for this evil. According to her, not the horse but the rider, the ignoble in Rico
degrading the animal. They now want to castrate the horse. She is faced with the choice – to choose
Rico and what he stands for or to choose St. Mawr and the values that it epitomizes. She wants a man
with a mystical mind, a man in whom Pan is alive. However, she cannot find such a man. She says that
in the horse, Pan is still alive. The horse is, powerful erotic masculine – the last in England – is to be
castrated, which means the annihilation of libido. That would mean the destruction of the root of
energy. She decides to prevent this. She leaves England and goes to America taking the horse with her.
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At the same time, America seems t be a place for unhindered development of oneself. She arrives at
Arizona and sees cowboys. She sees that something is wrong with them. She buys a house and sees
that there is no connection with nature. She goes back to nature, which is wild. She wants to develop
an existential model in which the relation is such that man does not annihilate the natural. She
decides to raise sheep, to cleanse herself from the layers of hubris, to purify. She feels she is not free
from the corrupt influences. She wants to arrive at the flame of life, to become a Vestal Virgin, not
because she hates men, but because she has not yet found a mystical man. She will not compromise by
entering a relationship that is not with a mystical man. She is not a marrying woman.
There is another man, Lewis. He is not a marrying man; he will not marry Mrs. Witt. They are
aware of the degree to which human relationships have become corrupted. As long as men and women
are not completely renewed, they will not have sex. Sex becomes impossible- pornography and
obscenity. Lewis is a groom. Mrs. Witt worships the power of conscious, intelligent mind. Then, she
first touches Lewis’s hair in which Pan is still alive. He can still experience himself as in touch with the
stars. He manages to see themselves through legends. He believes in legends and connects himself
with the stars. Mrs. Witt wants to cut his hair. He allows her to do that but does not allow her to cut
his beard. She discovers the value of intuitive, mystical, untutored mind and she is thrilled. She
proposes to him. He does not want to marry – by being a servant and a master they have already
participated in the unhealthy hierarchy and their relationship cannot be fruitfuled. She realizes she
has wasted her life. She was always critical and can be identified with the abrasive salt. She is negative,
never before found positive in life and now she finds it in Lewis and realizes she has wasted her life
living negatively. Now, she wants to die positively and wants to help Lewis to save St. Mawr. Lewis is
too young to die.

P18 – JAMES JOYCE

- Ireland: a priest-ridden country

- Stephen Dedalus: Non serviam – the sin of obedience
- to deconstruct false relationships and construct real ones by means of imagination
- epiphanies: revelation of meaning – increase in power and independence
- proper relationship with women: novels, encounter with a prostitute
- priest: feeling of guilt, lure of power
- priest of eternal imagination
- epiphany on the beach: Dedalus – father, Nature – mother
- the girl on the beach: an angel of passing youth and mortal beauty
- self-imposed exile

Joyce criticized Ireland of his time, beginning with his collection of stories Dubliners. He
depicted the paralysis of life. He saw Ireland as a priest-ridden country and thought it was especially
because of the dogmas of the Catholic Church that people lived in an inadequate way. This is why he
depicted a young artist. To a great degree, the novel is autobiographical. He realizes that the only way
to live fully is to commit the sin of disobedience. Non serviam – the Latin words mythologically said
by the devil. The young artist identifies himself with the fallen anger and rebels against the dogmas. I
will not serve that in which I no longer believe. There are not just Church dogmas, but also those of
the patriarchal culture in genera, the constraints of nationalism also. These structures he will no
longer serve nor belong to: religion, nationalism, the law of the father. The liberation is accomplished
by means of imagination. Whenever he encounters a dogma, a structure he questions it. He always
juxtaposes it to his own real experience. One of the first such contrasts is that even as a child in
relationship to girls he has to feel guilt and be shy. The notion of guilt and punishment from the early
age is related to the desire for women. However, young Stephen even at that age manages to overcome
his fear by means of creativity. He writes a poem Pull out his eyes, apologize – he is victorious over
the threat and over the fear. He does that all the time throughout the novel. Stephen is unjustly
punished because his glasses are broken and he rebels against the structure of authority and asks for
his right. All such moments in the novel Joyce calls epiphanies. Originally, epiphany is a religious term
meaning the appearance of God. God appears and reveals the meaning of things. However, for Joyce
epiphanies are moments in which the artist uses his creativity and imagination to understand
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something. It is the revelation of meaning but by means of imagination. Stephen struggles to define
various things for himself in his own authentic way. The most difficult, problematic to define is the
proper relationship to women. In the beginning, as a young boy, he reads romantic novels and his first
articles are about the heroines of these novels. They are really bodiless, just beautiful faces and
images. However, his first encounter with a woman is with a prostitute when he is 16. There is a very
interesting description of this encounter. Stephen suddenly wanders into a maze of streets where he
has never been before. He sees women walking dressed in vivid gowns. There is a scent of perfumes, a
fire of lit torches. The image that he wants to conjure up is the image of another religion; he seems to
have found himself in a completely different world. All the images suggest that he is no longer in the
Christian world, that he has somehow got in touch with the pagan tradition. In pagan tradition,
sexuality and spirituality were not separated and in this Stephen’s experience these two go together.
The images also suggest a ritual. There is Stephen’s encounter with a prostitute and it is a kind of a
ritual of initiation. In the eyes of the Christian church he commits a sin, does something that is
forbidden. However, he feels this act as an act of liberation.
Frye – there are two divinities that embody human wish for freedom: Prometheus – symbol
of social freedom, sacrifices himself for the humanity; Eros – symbol of inner, personal freedom.
Quite often, modern hero reaches freedom by the agency of Eros, e.g., One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell. When he encounters this prostitute, he is reluctant to kiss her, but
then he feels energy – a sudden release and independence. However, as Stephen attends a school
organized by Jesuit priests who organize sessions of brainwashing about what happens to sinners, he
feels guilt about his sin, makes a confession and receives a communion = counter-epiphany. He again
feels some kind of power. Soon, he realizes that priests impose on one a constant feeling of guilt. They
make a person feel that he or she can never be wholly, fully redeemed of guilt. One feels that one is
always under their sway. On the other hand, as he is a very gifted boy and attracted by the lure of the
church, the priest invites him to join the Jesuit order. There is an interesting scene – the way in which
the priest convinces him to join them. He promises him power to absolve people of sins. It is not
genuine spirituality, but a power trap. It has nothing to do with the original principles of Christianity.
At the same time, Stephen watches a priest standing by the window and the priest’s face resembles a
skull. He realizes that this life would be deprived of vitality and he refuses. There are two possible
choices: salvation offered by the church – dogmatic pattern – to ascend, live earthly life and try not to
fall, not to sin, however, Stephen as a young artist discovers that for him the proper salvation would be
the second option – to descend, to fall, to experience life fully, to plunge into life. Therefore, he refuses
to become a catholic priest and decides to be a priest of imagination.
The most important epiphany of the book is the epiphany on the beach. Stephen hears his
friends joking about his name, a composite name – Stephen: the name of a martyr, Dedalus: the father
of Icarus, the man who can fly. At this moment, Stephen identifies with his surname, Dedalus as a
figure. He symbolizes power of freedom – Dedalus could fly away from the labyrinth in which he was
captured, mythical/fabulous creator/artificer and Stephen says this is his real father. His mother is
nature. At this moment, he identifies with his last name. He wants his creativity to be in accordance
with the creativity of nature. This is also the moment when he encounters his muse – the symbol of his
inspiration. The woman on the beach finally shows what his attitude to women should be. The
doctrine of the church has taught him that women are either virgins or whores. This girl on the beach
is neither. He stares at her. The way she looks at him is neither of the two, but very naturally and
calmly. She endures his gaze calmly resembling a sea bird. White dove symbolizes Virgin Mary, but
this bird is a dark plumaged bird. This is the image of natural beauty. The girl is completely natural.
There is a piece of seaweed on her leg. It is a symbol of nature. She stands near the source, near the
water. For him, she is an angel of passing youth and mortal beauty. He decides that his role as an
artist would be to celebrate this mortal, passing beauty, earthly experience. What is immortal is the act
of creativity, but he as an artist wants to stay close to nature, to this changing cycle. He does not want
to escape from this life. he liberates himself from any sense of weakness. The whole novel is about
liberation. Finally, he leaves Ireland and goes to a self-imposed exile, just like Joyce, who left Ireland
but wrote about it during his entire life.

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 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

#1, p 1 Once upon a time … apologize. Stephen is a young boy and this passage is about a
story his father tells. Baby tuckoo – Stephen identifies with the baby, he is imaginative, for him the
fairy tale is real. Everything exists at the same level: his memories, emotions.
Eileen is the daughter of his father’s friends. He was shy and when she entered the room he hid
under the table. His mother said that he needed to apologize. In relation to women, he has the feeling
of guilt imposed on him in from childhood.
#2, pp 92/94 He had wandered into a maze … softly parting lips. One usually goes
through a maze in order to find something, it is a search, a quest to find meaning. Jews are mentioned
because they were persecuted by the Catholic Church. He is no longer within the realm of Christianity;
another tradition is present here. The girls are perfumed, dressed up, leisurely. He describes the
streets and the flames of yellow gas. The altar suggests pagan rituals: male achieves unity with the
goddess. These women are similar to the goddesses in pagan religion, female priests.
Awaken from the slumber of centuries – he was in another world in Western Civilization that
was asleep, but this world now is awake. A woman approaches him. She is gay, calm, serious and
grave. The emotions suggest that she is like a priestess and what is happening between the two of
them is like a holy ritual. Their encounter is as a ceremony. Something important is happening that is
not just physical. There are tears of joy in his eyes. There is a feeling of a great emotional relief. He
feels strongly and fearless and sure of himself in her arms. It is a moment of epiphany. There is a
change in him – he no longer belongs to the old world. With every epiphany in this book he feels the
increase of inner power and strength.
#3, pp 146/148 He was passing … spade in the Earth. He wondered which room
would be his. He sees a line of rooms and sees no difference between them. He would become one of
them and lose his individuality, peculiarity. There is a feeling of uniformity. He thinks about how it
would be to join the Jesuits. By joining them, he would lose his freedom, he would have to obey, he
would become just a face in the crowd. He does not like it. The voice of director – tried to impose
something on him. He offers him power to absolve sins. Claims of the church are proud – meaning
desire for power. Stephen feels it is wrong and that his destiny is not to obey, but to fall, to learn his
own wisdom meaning to experience life and learn it for himself. It is a personal experience, cannot be
found out from somebody else.
He symbolically makes a decision – the crossing of the bridge. He does not feel anything when
he sees Virgin. He is cold, it means nothing to him. he comes back to the mess of ordinary life. Man
with a hat symbolizes somebody who is in contact with earth, with everyday life. Sky is a sort of
abstraction.
#4, pp 153/154 Their banter … impalpable, imperishable. He identifies with Icarus.
He feels that his destiny is to bury his name to become somebody else. However, he carries a name of
a fabulous artificer – liberty. He tries to create something new, something material. The artist begins
with the disorderly experience of our everyday life and he creates his own being. He creates something
immortal he flies on the wings of imagination. He says he had a call of life and he was offered the call
of duty, the call of priesthood. He makes a decision. We have a notion of epiphany. He feels that he
had risen from boyhood. He feels freedom, the uncertainty and shame are behind him. This is the
epiphany concerning his name.
#5, pp 155/156 A girl stood … on and on and on. About a girl on the beach standing in
water that represents the source of life, natural flow, femininity. For both Joyce and Lawrence it is
important to be in touch with the source. Also, Seamus Heaney, Udine – a marriage between a
man and water. Here the girl is a kind of mermaid inviting man to connect with the natural. Seaweed
is a sign of nature.
He classifies her beauty as mortal, something that will perish and disappear. He as an artist
dedicates him self to the earthly passing beauty. She looks at him without shame. She is neither
wanton nor shy, neither a prostitute nor a virgin. She does not fit into the classifications of the church.
This is an archetype of woman that actually exists in this world. This is an actual woman. To recreate
life out of life – in order to live fully he has to experience life. she belongs to the world of mortal
beauty. He is trying to make a union with her. she is both his muse = a symbol of creativity and a real
woman = palpable, mortal. She belongs to this world. We have to live here and now.
Jung describes four types of Anima and four types of Animus.
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 #6, pp 222/223 Look here, Cranly … as eternity, too! Stephen says he is not going to
serve the church, that in which he no longer believes. He sees the institutions as suppressive. There is
also a reference to nationalism, patriotism. He will try to express himself in another mode of life – art,
divorced from church. This mode of life, art, will enable him to live freely and wholly, to be a complete
being, not just the logical, conscious part. His devices: silence, exile and cunning. Silence (The
Government of the Tongue by Seamus Heaney) as opposed to the language governed by the
rational mind, against dogmas. Cunning: he us fighting against a powerful institution and has to be
cunning.

P19 – JAMES JOYCE: Clay

Clay – the Holy Spirit, an element in constituting a person is not enough, it has to be endowed
with the Holy Spirit. Joyce rejects the Christian religion. For him, it is not a classic concept; he uses a
Christian term and gives it another meaning. In the story, the word refers to Maria, similar to Virgin
Mary. She is a spinster, possesses characteristics such as ability to make peace, sooth others, reconcile
others. She is kind and gentle, especially to children – she buys cakes for Joe’s children. She is like
clay, an element in constituting a person. However, according to Joyce, she lacks passion,
imagination, life force in order to be fully human. She is not fully realized as a person, not liberated
form all the confinements of the culture. She is very quiet, lacks freedom of imagination and spirit,
inner strength that helped Stephen Dedalus to free himself.
She is a spinster, a good aunt that never marries. She plans to do something after the party.
She is religious, conventional. Joyce presents us with a woman terribly confined by these oppressions.
She has no courage to let her soul be born. She works in a laundry. She also grows plants in the
conservatory, which again suggests confinement. She herself is like a plant living in a conservatory –
cannot breathe freely. People usually tease her about getting married. She is a middle-aged spinster
who never had a normal, complete relationship with a man. This motif reappears.
There is a sort of game they play on the Hallow Eve. You are supposed to have your eyes
blindfolded; you touch saucers on the table looking for objects: book, clay, water, ring – a religious
game connected to the society. If you find ring, you will get married, but she finds clay. Her brothers
are very nice to her. They even ask her to come to live with them. She always sings love songs, which is
contrary to her dull life, without meaningful relationships. She sings about love and she has never
fallen in love with anybody. She always tries to make peace. She is a benevolent and timid soul who
has never liberated herself. Children are nasty to her. Their parents have to make them say thanks for
the cakes she buys them. They feel contempt and they put clay on her saucer because the person who
finds clay is going to die soon. There is this double symbolism of clay: 1. she is an incomplete human
being, 2. death. She is like a living dead. Her life resembles death. This object, clay, is not supposed to
be put on the saucer but the children put it. The parents ask themselves why the clay is there. She does
not know what she is touching. When she finds out, she is given another opportunity to find
something else and she finds a prayer book meaning nothing is going to change. Her life will be of the
kind that Stephen Dedalus wanted to avoid: so conventional and confined by dogmas that she might
as well enter a convent.
The atmosphere of the whole collection of stories, The Dubliners, forms a background that
shows us why Stephen Dedalus have to leave Ireland and go to Europe. The thing that the stories have
in common is paralysis of life. There is a large number of characters suffocating. They cannot find
their souls and are confined in dogmas. Joyce is especially critical of the Catholic Church. According to
him, it is guilty of creating the paralysis of life and putting the ban on sexual life. We see why Stephen
wanted to resemble the old Greek creator who liberated from the confinements. The whole Ireland is
seen like a prison and The Dubliners explain (autobiographically) why Joyce felt he had to leave
Ireland.

JAMES JOYCE: The Dead

The same motif is present here – people living dead. Michael Furey is really dead in the
story. He died for a girl. She had to leave for a year to go to a convent – classical education for a girl at
the time. He wanted to die because she was leaving. He was passionate, capable of deep live,
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sacrificing – just like Romeo and Juliet. There is a picture of Romeo under Juliet’s balcony in the
house where three spinsters live. They live a detached life, but there is this memory, the painting, of
something that they lost, some deep involvement. Michael was really like Romeo, he was ready to die
for his beloved. Symbolism of his name: Michael = an angel, an archangel on the top of hierarchy. In
relation to Gabriel, Michael has a higher position in the hierarchy. Here, he is a stronger character
than Gabriel. Furey suggests earthly passion, deep involvement in life, the same combination as in
Stephen Dedalus.
The three aunts are connected to music. One is in a choir, one a teacher. They are supposed to
be lovers of art, artistic, but are not artistic in the sense in which Dedalus was – to liberate themselves
through art, using art. They are not very rich, but what they find important is to eat well. They eat a lot
of sweets.
Another element that these two stories have in common: drunkards – Joe in Clay and
Freddie in The Dead. They suggest sort of response to the pressure and dogmas. People feel
suffocated and resort to drinking. Conventional life is a façade behind which unhappy life is hidden. It
is important to have somebody who misbehaves, who makes everyone feel awkward, embarrassed;
somebody who stands out. Freddie Mollins behaves in a way that makes everybody feel embarrassed.
We see in their behavior that something is wrong. An intellectual talks about opera and he, a
drunkard, mentions a Negro, a black man singing in some musical and says that this guy has a good
tenor. It is an embarrassing remark.
The recurrent, predominant imagery is something that characters allude to. It is the snow
outside. Galoshes (=kaljače) are also mentioned and they refer to snow. It is cold, white and then,
towards the end of the story somebody says that the forecast says there is snow all over the island,
which has not happened for a while. This symbolizes a sort of winter of the spirit: passivity in
creativity. Everything is asleep. Snow and winter symbolize the death of nature. Here, it is a sort of
death in human spirit. All over Ireland: structures that govern life have affected the inner death. As
opposed to his inner death and physical life, we have Michael Furey, who is physically dead but was
fully alive.
Gabriel vs. Stephen Dedalus. Gabriel is what Stephen would have become if he had stayed
in Ireland. Gabriel had potential to liberate himself, but did not realize it. How does he feel about the
people present at his aunts’ party? He feels he does not belong there, he feels a bit out of place and
awkward. Lily takes his coat and he asks her if she is going to get married. She is very bitter and says
that men today just want to use girls. He concludes that his tone and approach were wrong. The
feeling of not belonging is present. He is trying to fit in all the time. He is more intelligent, has broader
views. His speech is full of commonplaces. He compares his aunts to three graces.
Gabriel is a university teacher. He writes books reviews and teaches literature. He is different
from Stephen Dedalus who created whereas Gabriel taught – remained connected to secondary
relationship. He did not liberate himself fully. His book reviews are published in newspapers and he is
criticized about that. Mrs. Ivors criticizes him for publishing the reviews in a british journal. He says
that literature is not to be mixed with politics. Her name, Ivors = ivory – bone, not a living thing. She
criticizes Gabriel for going to Europe every summer. He is different from Stephen, who left Ireland
forever. Gabriel leaves occasionally and is away for several months. He is timid. He finds excuses for
going to Europe: to learn, to practice the language. It was the period of nationalism in Ireland and
everybody was learning Irish. Mrs. Ivors is a passionate nationalist. She criticizes Gabriel for not
visiting his country. he says he is sick of his country, she asks why and he does not reply because he
has not cleared it with himself. He does not know what it is that he dislikes in Ireland, whereas
Stephen is clear about what he dislikes. Gabriel cannot express himself so fully and completely. He
thinks that behind her propaganda and phrases, she seems to be hollow inside, although she seems to
be full of passion. Gabriel sees that she uses this nationalism to cover this inner hollowness.
The spinsters have a picture of Romeo and Juliet on the wall and they sing a song called
Arrayed for the Bridal – highly ironic. They have reminders of the real, full life in the picture and
in the song but they do not have it in the real life.
There are also other images that suggest death in life:
The story about the place where Freddie and his mother go during the summer: to a sort of
summer resort organized by a monastery. You can enjoy the hospitality of monks. They talk about
these monks who sleep in coffins. It is a reminder of death for them. They are all the time aware of
mortality. When this is mentioned at the party, everybody becomes aware of their inner death.
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 The story about a horse working in a mill, going round and round – in circles – turning the
mill. There was a day when this man wanted to look fine and put the horse into a cart and when the
horse saw the statue it started circling around it. The people have been brainwashed, got used to the
routine; they keep going in circles.
Gabriel’s wife after the party starts singing a sad song. He sees her singing standing in half-
light. He sees her as fragile, full of sorrow. She is full of sorrow because she remembers Michael but he
does not know that and he feels desire for her. The symbolism of shadow – something she hides from
him. She lost Michael and she will never have that kind of relationship. She remembers the time when
she was fully alive and will never be again. He falls in love with her again: ironic because the outburst
of her emotions is not for him, but for Michael. In the hotel, he realizes that what she feels is not for
him, but for Michael. He asks himself what he is to her. He sees himself in the mirror and he sees that
he is different from the picture he had of himself.
She is not the same person that Michael was ready to die for. She was full of life once and is not
anymore. Now, she has betrayed the fullness of life. Her husband tells her that she is not anymore the
same person. The way he reacts at the end is nice. At first, he is jealous, but the negative feelings do
not prevail. He is full of some sympathy, feels a friendly feeling for her. Something positive prevails in
him: understanding and sympathy.
The last paragraphs are important.

L12 – JAMES JOYCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

- modernists – redefinition of the self

- the missing element
- criticism of the Western tradition – symbiosis of Christianity and Enlightenment – platonic,
urisenic, logo centric
- imposition of the logos, structure of words on the flow of experience
fear of temporal aspects of life = desire for stability
- overstructuring on all levels – philosophical, social, psychological; rigid boundaries
- ego/the soul
- Lawrence – there is no stable ego; libido and imagination = the least stable
- subversion of culture through the subversion of literary conventions
- Lawrence – poetic, rhythmic prose
- Joyce, Woolf – stream of consciousness – interior monolog
- turning inward – life is not a series of jig lamps symmetrically arranged, but a luminous hallow-
dissolving old building
- Joyce – within rigid patterns – life decays – death in life caused by the Irish respectably piety
- The Dubliners – paralysis – The Dead
epiphanies: revelations of failure in passionate living
- The Portrait: process of liberation, deconstructions of authoritarian self from a sense of
weakness, fear, shame, guilt
epiphanies: increase in power resulting from acts of disobedience
- discovering his true position within even larger, more comprehensive portions of the world
- rejection of false father and mother images – symbolic father Dedalus, mother Nature;
ascent – beyond culture, descent – into life
epiphany on the beach: salvation antithetical movement
- Ulysses – totality of experience – the uncreated conscience of the race - Stephen, Molly, Bloom
- Finnegan’s Wake – H. C. E. – Anna Livia Plurabella

Modernism - One story and one story only (R. Graves) (20s and 30s of 20th century)-
Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Eliot, Kafka, Beckett…They were extremely concerned with
technical and formal experiments in language. They wanted to subvert the language hoping they could
convert the culture. Their common intention was to offer an adequate notion of the self and it was all
because they realized that there was a missing element because the knowledge of the self was
inadequate. With criticizing it and trying to formulate that missing element, which Lawrence called IT,
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they tried to solve this. The majority of them called it the soul- a kind of symbiosis of Christianity and
Enlightenment. They included it in the________ energy.
Criticism. Ransom criticized our tradition as being platonic saying that our experience of the
world is impoverished. Blake says that it all stems from our over- development of Urizenic mind/
knowledge that is aiming only for progress but prevents us from taking real part in life, it wants to
master the world not to save it. That game is very important but for the post-modernists it is ethically
without sense so that they insist on the esthetic. That game consists of being blinded by the esthetic
shapes. They do not believe in the existence of the ethical things. Modernists have developed already
known truths in order to build a new and better truth. They begin the criticism of the Western culture.
Derrida said it was a logo-centric culture. Their starting point is the criticism of our own culture
formulated in the imposition of logos upon the flow of experience. There was a fear of a temporal
aspect of life and it brought about an urge for something stable. Out of this existential fear, there
became an over- structuralism on all levels. Life should be becoming not being. Virginia Woolf says
that there are the reach and the poor and that the rich fights for their sense of proportion (Mrs.
Dalloway). Rigid barriers were on all levels: black/white (Conrad-races); psychological levels/levels of
the mind: sane/ insane- ‘the other’; ego/soul; consciousness /sub- consciousness. Of all these writers,
Virginia Woolf was the most ambivalent one. All of them challenge the patterns in which life simply
decays and wanted to destabilize them. Freud said ego is the most stable part but Lawrence denied it.
The least stable are imagination and libido. Therefore, the crucial effort is to bring back the sanity of
these two. He believed that libido is holy because sexual energy restores all our other energies. Joyce
also wanted to rehabilitate the body. They all did so by inventing new literary conventions and new
forms. They subverted the habitual language and form of fiction. Up to that time, it was logical plot,
chronology, crucial events of life depicted, fixed form- but not always. For example, it was not in
Wuthering Heights. Virginia Woolf said that the crucial events in life, which had been described
before, should not be the only thing written about. These events were not just gig lamps. No, she said;
life is a luminous hallow. She means consciousness. She wants to turn inward into the mind of the
character and see what is important for him. That is the opposition between the objectivity and
subjectivity. We must subjectively find what really is important in life. For her and Joyce, the
luminous hallow is the stream of consciousness. Joyce also used this technique in his later works. The
content of the mind of a character is transcribed within punctuation and the transcription of what the
character thinks is not announced. No punctuation and no logical progression of one’s inner thoughts
are present- only free associations that bind together the memories from the past. These memories
exist simultaneously with the outside world and with the subconscious. Therefore, there is a mixture
of flashbacks and the impressions coming from the outside and our inward impulses. It all creates an
illusion of the fluid stream of consciousness.
Virginia Woolf says that life is a luminous hollow that is consciousness, but there are also
external factors - when it is all shaped into an objective world, it appears to us that what is significant
for us is not significant for the convention. Only some small impulses, such as a scrap of paper, a stain
on the wall and a tune, bring about revelations about meaning and the real values, such as love.
Modernists wanted to_______ the true, liquid nature of life with the language working on various,
simultaneous levels. She says that, in modernism, not a button will be sewed according to the
conventions and praises Joyce for following this without fear of what is descent, proper or
conventional. Lawrence says that we have put our lives into perfect corsets. The aim of the modernists
is to make something different, to make us take off these corsets. A new man will be born. The
modernist authors’ purpose is to free life of all the limitations and conventions and to show it as such.
Lawrence’s phase is based on some poetic techniques, on the repetitions, presenting bodily rhythms-
everything is rhythmic; everything is an imitation of natural rhythms that are human and bodily.
Joyce changed his style and techniques radically. Portrait is very different from Ulysses that
is an interior monologue. He started with the Dubliners, naturalistic style. Joyce: the style of
scrupulous meanness. He pointed to what always seemed to be a small epiphany, but epiphany in a
completely secular sense. The Dubliners end in the failure of the characters to live passionately. He
described the meaning of life in Dublin full of rigid patterns imposed by the Irish Church. Joyce hated
it because being normal meant being a heretic. Whenever a soul is born, nets are thrown over it to
prevent it from flying. For Joyce, Ireland was the center of European paralysis (an important word).
Another important word is ‘dead’. There is a story ‘The Dead’ (and a film- John Huston): a husband
and a wife come to the house of three women- three spinsters - (he calls them three graces) on
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Christmas- symbolically a renewal. They talk about music and famous ______, which is important in
the end.
Gabriel is an important name, an angel. He is weak in his soul but not all negative. When
Gabriel realizes his wife is missing, he finds her staring, standing still at the top of the staircase,
listening to an old-fashioned melody. She hears a tune and her face is transformed. He sees that there
is a part of his wife that is completely inaccessible to him. As a result, he feels inferior and insecure.
On their way home, he asks questions and they lose their way. They go in circles symbolizing that the
life is a routine. The tune reminds her of a person, Michael Fury (again a name), who was in love with
her in High School. The night he had to leave Dublin he spent under her window. He was already ill,
his lungs hurt, and he got pneumonia and died in three days. Greta tells her husband this and he
realizes that the two of them never had such moments in their life, that there has never been any
passion. The story ends with the ‘Dead’. He looks through the window; the snow is falling (the
symbolism of WHITE).
The Clay (ilovača) is a story about an extremely benevolent old lady who is ultimately put
forward for our criticism. She is a baby-sitter called Maria. The name Maria used to be a baby’s. She
comes to a family, watches kids playing with the piece of paper – the one who takes out the piece of
paper with clay on it will die. She takes it out but she is already dead; she is a spinster, a common clay
who has never had a power to resist.
The Portrait depicts the process of liberation, the process of resisting culture and church that
want to install in him a sense of being weak, a sense of fear. Stephen becomes an artist; he matures
and develops his identity. It is about a series of events, all of which end in epiphany. They are there to
deconstruct the false construct he was slowly being turned into. He has already defined himself as a
wild red rose; in the first part, there are only sensory perceptions of a child. He writes a song about a
wild red rose- his life, potential, passion. However, the song is transformed into an apology- eagle’s
will pull his eye. In childhood, he was thought to be ashamed of and to fear women. At such a moment,
he escapes to a poem, he responses as an artist. From then on, he has been trying to remove the
pattern that is imposed on him. Now, his imagination has been thwarted, forced to create a life-
denying poem. He has the faculty to bring the two together and he will use it from that time on to
deconstruct the pseudo-construct. His first resistance happens in school. Unlike other boys, he was
weak and shortsighted. The first act of disobedience ends at the end of the book in non serviam. He
wants to find his true position in the world, to reestablish and decompose his position; he wants to
redefine the relationships in the universe. All these events end in epiphanies connected with his even
larger surroundings. He begins with the rejection of mother-biological, real mother; then church
(because he was religious) and land/ country. Then he rejects God and his biological father who had
an ambition for his son to become a gentleman. He rejects all these false concepts and returns to
pagan, artistic concepts. It took some time for this to happen. It took the most of time to redefine the
Christian view of women, being either whores or virgins. He defines himself as the son of the pagan
god, Dedalus, and accepts the Nature as his mother. He tests whatever he is told in reality. ‘ By
thinking about things, man can understand them’- one should experience the ideas and then turn
them again into ideas. Then he encounters a prostitute. Before that, he found himself in a labyrinth
and could not find a way out. A woman shows him the way. When he goes to that part of the town, he
has an experience similar to the experience of Lou when she encounters St. Mawr for the first time. As
in a pagan ritual, he is undergoing the process of initiation. Once he kisses her, he is strong in the body
and the soul. With every epiphany a sense of power increases. However, it is not always the same
power. In the second part, during a sermon on hell, he decides to repent, to confess and receive a
communion. In the end, he feels the pressure of Christ’s biscuit on the tongue in his mouth. The power
stressed in this part is the one of the mind over body. The priest is trying to test Stephen, to see how he
has managed to subdue his passion. Epiphany is on the beach-the sea, movement, flow, the girl-
everything gets together, the mortal life and the beauty.
His liberation is performed in two ways: up and down; increase and decrease. In Christianity,
the salvation of the soul is up to heaven. At first, he identifies himself with God in the air. Then he
ascends- the ascent suggests the flight of imagination over culture. He has to ascend in order to be
able to fall into life and descend. The church says that there is no disappointment in life; we should
strive to heaven. His salvation is falling into life even deeper. He realizes that the real life is everyday
life. In the end, he realizes that in order to live, he has to leave Ireland. He is ready to establish an

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unconventional relationship with women, which cannot be found in Ireland and that is why he leaves
that place. His purpose is both esthetic and ethic.
‘The Ulysses’ is a play whose hero is Leopold Bloom, a Jew standing for curiosity and
imagination, an earthly man capable of sympathy; there is also his wife, Molly, and an intellectual,
Stephen. This is a novel about an archetypal man, a version of a man who cannot be like Christ
because Christ was not a lover, husband and father. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular organ,
suggesting the rehabilitation of the body. The flow of experience in the book is recreated in the stream
of consciousness. Molly is identified with the flow of life- indestructible but never quite controllable
and governable. Her husbands are usually cuckolds. They achieve a kind of heroic stature because they
realize they cannot capture it. He wrote it for six years, combining various techniques- even the one
from woman magazines. There is no punctuation in some parts, the words are not complete, and what
one reads, feels or thinks is mingled as in the stream of consciousness. The last part is her internal
monologue long about 50 pages without punctuation.
All the time there are sudden menstruation, flows of blood, meaning that woman is a part of
the natural process.
‘The Dead’- a triangle. Gabriel sees that there is something in his wife that he cannot
understand. He has to realize that woman, like life, cannot be possessed. For example, L. Bloom is
cheated by his wife and his son dies. In the end, it can be concluded from her monologue how loyal
they were to each other, although she had a lover. In the end, she remembers the way he proposes to
her and her saying Yes, which is very important.
Finnegan’s Wake? by H.C.E also means Here Comes Everybody. The woman in the book
Annalivia Plurabella is associated with the river running through Dublin- the flow of life.

P20 – VIRGINIA WOOLF: Mrs. Dalloway

- Clarissa Dalloway and Stephen Dedalus: choice – name

- the sea metaphor: Clarissa and Septimus
- Clarissa: on the surface lives without emotional involvement
- Sally and Peter: true communication – treasure
- Septimus’s death: an attempt to communicate
- Peter: a new romance – pocket knife – Clarissa, a perfect hostess
- time and biological clock: Fear no more the heat of the Sun
- parties instead of real communication
- Clarissa lost her treasure; Septimus preserved it; Othello
- Bradshaw: proportion and conversion

The symbolism of Clarissa’s and Stephen’s names. The choice that each of these characters
makes is symbolically represented as the choice between their names and surnames. Stephen =
Christian martyr, but he chose the symbolism of his surname, the pagan attitude to life, which he
considers more comprehensive. Clarissa’s choice is somewhat different. She, throughout the novel,
tries to make a choice between her private and social self. Socially, her identity is Mrs. Dalloway. She
is the wife of an upper-class parliament member, a distinguished representative of the upper-class
English society. Her private self is Clarissa. Her problem is basically with emotions – she is afraid of
deep emotional involvement. In the novel, this is symbolically represented as plunging. Once upon a
time, she threw a little coin in a fountain – symbolical sacrifice: throw a coin and make a wish. This
was symbolically the only plunge she made in life. She, throughout her life, runs away form deep
emotions and lives on the surface.
The other major character in the novel is Septimus. He belongs to the lower classes and due
to a shock he experienced in war; he lost his ability to feel. For him, this is horrible. He thinks that life
without emotions is not life. He does not want to live like that. These two characters never meet
throughout the novel, but there are motifs and stream of consciousness that they have in common.
The only time in the novel when they really meet is when the two stories come together. When Clarissa
is giving a party and Dr. Bradshaw, a psychologist, says he is late to the party because one of his
patients committed suicide. Upon hearing this news, Clarissa thinks about her own life. We see that
she can sympathize with him. In a way, they seem to be two halves of the same person. They are very
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closely connected. Clarissa was not always like this. When she was young, she had the experiences of
deep emotional involvement, of passionate life. The two people with whom she could communicate
deeply and whom she loved were Sally Seton and Peter Walsh. Both of them had unconventional
life. Clarissa was very much in love with Peter, but was also afraid of him in a way. He always
demanded from her a deep emotional involvement, complete intimacy. She was afraid of his demands,
intensity and passion and wanted to stay detached. He always played with his pocketknife, which
symbolizes his tendency to pierce through the surface, his wish to go beyond the surface and into the
depths. Later in life, Peter remains fully alive he has not lost his virility at the moment he comes back
to Clarissa’s life, we find out that he is in love with a married woman. He is still alive, not dull.
Sally also inspired Clarissa in her youth. The first thing Clarissa learns about her is that Sally
comes from a family in which there are always quarrels. Her parents do not get along. Clarissa is
shocked at this knowledge; it is something new for her. Sally seems to bring this unconventional,
revolutionary element into Clarissa’s life. Sally is a leftist. She wants to change the world. She inspires
Clarissa to read books by revolutionary writers: Shelly, Morris. There was one moment of great
intensity in her life when she was the happiest. It was when Sally kissed her in the garden. She was
perfectly happy at that moment and this moment is like a treasure for her. Clarissa had an epiphany of
what it means to live fully. However, she has lost this treasure. She deliberately ran away from the
intensity of her relationships with Sally and Peter. She was afraid because they invited her to live an
unconventional life. Instead, she married Richard Dalloway with whom she has a very conventional
marriage and not too much emotional involvement. At the moment the book stars, they have separate
rooms. There is a vague notion that she is suffering from some feminine disease – many women in the
novel do. Symbolically, this indicates a certain sterility and dull emotional life. Clarissa was ill for a
while. Her hair turned white after illness. She lost her vitality. Richard is a member of the parliament,
he comes home late and doctors advised him to sleep in a separate room and go to bed earlier. Their
marriage is sterile. They are kind to each other, but there is a feeling of detachment and separation
between them.
Communication is very important in the novel. The deepest means of communication between
two people is love. It is the most profound communication. Septimus tries to compensate for his
inability to feel. He tries to compensate by marrying an Italian girl Lucrezia. When he enters their
house and hears them talking loudly, he is attracted by the communication. He hopes Lucrezia will
help him regain the ability to communicate from the depths of his being. Septimus wanted to be a
poet. The idea of poet’s being able to communicate most deeply is present. Septimus believes in
certain ideas of English culture and when he goes to war (WWI) he believes he is going to war to
defend the England of Shakespeare, Byron and other poets and rich history. As a soldier, he tries to
comply with the notion of a rigid masculine identity, to conform to it. When his best friend Evans dies
in war, he tries to behave in a rigid masculine manner, not to feel too much. He congratulates himself
on feeling very little and very reasonably. Because he has suppressed this shock and pain he stopped
feeling and eventually he went mad. First, he became emotionally dead, numb, which he tried to cure
by marrying Lucrezia and ended with a great mental disorder. There are two doctors trying to cure
him: Holmes, a bluffer, does not know anything. He simply tries to make Septimus fit into this
masculine structure, to behave like a proper Englishman. There is also Bradshaw, who is much more
dangerous. He is the same type as Dysart. He has the same social role but Dysart is much more
positive. With Bradshaw, we have complete certainty. He does not question what he is doing. The
character of Bradshaw symbolizes this very dangerous tendency in modern society – to force every
individual to fit into some average notion of what is normal. In his work, he is guided and protected by
two goddesses: Proportion and Conversion. Proportion refers to his sense of rationality and order.
There are some norms of behavior in society that you have to comply to in order to be considered
normal and there are always strict divisions between a lunatic and a normal mind. It is the case of so-
called over-structuring – everything has to fit in the structures. The other goddess is much crueler.
Actually, it refers to the capacity of society to exert power on those who are misfits, who do not
conform to the norm. You are either mentally persuaded to fit or some sort of power is exerted that
forces you to fit. It is similar to two notions that Althusser talks about – two sorts of apparatuses:
I.S.A. and R.S.A. The society makes you comply to its norms either willfully or by brute force. Clarissa
has a vague notion that he is in some way evil. When she hears that Septimus committed suicide, she
understands what happened to him. In a way, he managed to cure himself. He threw himself into
lunacy, but through visions he managed to cure himself. He could not see the visions clearly anymore
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– the door between the conscious and unconscious were closing and he was cured. When they are
laughing about the hat, he realizes that he has regained the ability to feel. However, he feels insecure,
he is afraid of pressure of people that are like his psychiatrists. He is afraid that they will return him
into the previous state, into the rigid society. At that moment, Holmes comes to his door and
Septimus, not wanting to lose the newly acquired knowledge about himself, commits suicide.
Clarissa is able to sympathize with him, to understand his action. She says: this young man
plunged holding his treasure. On the one hand, Clarissa lost her vision of intense meaningful life =
her treasure. On the other hand, Septimus did not want to lose this treasure. He died rather than to
lose this treasure. His death is also in a way an attempt to communicate. Clarissa’s substitute for real,
in-depth communication are parties – a lot of people come and they chat. It is a pretence of
communication. This is why Peter always called her a perfect hostess.
There are interesting references to Shakespeare throughout the novel. First, there is a
quotation from Othello: If it were now to die, „twere now to die most happy. When Desdemona goes
to Othello one of them says this. The moment is so perfect that they need nothing more from life.
Septimus tries to preserve this moment by killing himself. He does not want to lose it again under the
pressure of society. For Clarissa, the moment of perfect happiness was when Sally kissed her. She was
so happy that she wanted to die.
The other quotation is Fear no more of the heat of the Sun from Cymbeline. The novel takes
place in June. Everything is right. Mrs. Dalloway goes out to buy flowers. Nature is blooming and her
feelings are opposite. There is the heat of the sun. Clarissa says this and sun here symbolizes passion,
erotic, emotional intensity. All these things are now behind her. She feels she is practically dying.
Now, she is beyond nature. She does not have to be afraid anymore.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

#1, pp 28/29 Fear no more … to her like a sheet. Clarissa is very upset because Mrs.
Burton invited only her husband to lunch, not her. The only way of her existence was her social role,
her social identity. It is very important for her and something disturbs the image and she realizes all
the trouble that was beneath the surface deep inside her.
There is a metaphor – boat – her inner self is disturbed because her social identity is
disrupted. There is another metaphor – water – she feels suspense like a diver who is about to enter
water. Plunging in to sea = emotional involvement and she is afraid of plunging. She will always
remain at the surface.
It is summer, nature is fully alive and she and her feelings are in contrast to all these things.
Breathless – there is no ability to feel, to sustain; she has ceased to be feminine. It is a symbol of good,
of positive, of a life-giving quality in a woman. She is compared to a nun withdrawing because she has
also withdrawn from life, she has run away from its intensity. She feels emptiness and she undresses =
takes off her social mask and gets in touch with who you are. She is getting in touch with this fragile
being. The bed – narrower and narrower – like a coffin. It suggests a sort of death in life. She is
nearer to death. The reason why she sleeps in the attic room – she was sick, the doctor advised her
and because of that, she and her husband became distanced from each other.
The candle half burnt – her life is half spent, it is nearing to its end. She reads Memoirs. She
thinks about the past. Then she felt some intensity. She reads Memoirs of a soldier who left the city in
which it was too cold for the soldiers to conquer it. She is like a castle, she would not let anyone come
in, she is cold, emotionless. Virginity preserved – emotional virginity similar to Alison.
#2, pp 29-32 Lovely in girlhood … papa said. At some moments, Clarissa failed her
husband by staying detached. She lacked deep communication with people, she was always distant.
She at some moments feels happiness. Sometimes with women, when they share secrets she feels
excitement. However, these are short and rare moments. Her routine is experienced through the
metaphors mentioned in the previous passage.
Sally, dark-haired, looked passionate, like she was not English. She was an idealist, had
passionate projects about changing the world. Some motifs mentioned suggest her unconventionality,
e.g., her parents quarrel. She is unconventional in many ways. She cuts off the tops of flowers and puts
them in water to float. She runs around naked. She has no social restraints about how a young lady is
to behave. Some people her unconventionality see as untidiness. She is completely free. She is not a
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part of the system she is not trying to fit the social system. She has new liberal ideas about sexuality,
the position of women. She smokes. Clarissa’s first reaction: she sees that Sally is strange, sees in her
what she herself lacks and is attracted to her because of that. Clarissa starts reading Shelly and Plato.
Sally enlarges Clarissa’s mind, makes her more conscious about society, about identity as a woman.
#3, p 33 All this was only a … said Peter. This moment is a sort of epiphany. It is
important for Clarissa. They walked together and Sally kissed Clarissa on the lips. She felt she had
been given a present, a kind of treasure, something precious – realization, she experienced at this
moment what it means to live fully and meaningfully. Like Celia in T. S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party.
Celia feels a sort of loss. She cannot find the treasure. Why does she feel guilty about not having found
it if the treasure does not exist? The treasure is love, full meaningful life, a chance for inner growth.
She realizes that treasure exists and looks for it in another way. Here, Clarissa had a chance to find the
treasure with Sally and Peter. Reference to Othello is also present. She was so happy she could stop
living.
#4, pp 99/89 To his patients … his sense of proportion. The methods he uses to cure
his patients: a lot of rest, seclusion from everything = a kind of death, a complete passivity. After this
physical passivity, people put on weight, start eating food instead of food for soul. Proportion –
everyone has his or her place in society and there is a need to make strict borders. He secludes lunatics
and forbids them to have children. This suggests a kind of evil, power that society exerts on you.
Somebody decides whether you are fit to have children or not. If you feel despair, something is wrong
with you.
A theory by a psychiatrist William James: In every society, there are two kinds of
personalities: the tough-minded and the tender-minded. The first group represents the majority and
they feel content, satisfied with the culture, they can comply with the goals of the society. The second
group is the minority; they feel alienated from the culture. They want to seek reality beyond its
confines. They do not feel satisfied by the goals of society. They know they will not feel satisfied if they
reach them. William Bradshaw is a typical tough-minded, Septimus is a typical tender-minded. He
looks for reality beyond the boundaries of culture, tries to find a definition of life that would satisfy
him. There is always some kind of liminal? state – on the edge of despair.
#5, pp 89-91 But the proportion … of his victims. The suburbs of London, heath of
India… These suggest some extremities where people live in difficult conditions. (Kurtz in Africa and
his behavior there – he could not control his instincts.) Difficult conditions where the law of people
and the instincts are let loose. The forces of society make you fit in the structure by force. Opposition
to society and they have to be converted. Conversion is disguised – talks about ideals or uses power to
make you conform. The first person whom Dr. Bradshaw converted was his wife. Originally, she was a
free spirit. She used to go fishing. She married Dr. Bradshaw and he imposed his will on her. First, he
submitted his own wife and now he forces people to conform – the people who attended their party.
The Bradshaws threw a dinner and people felt nervous and relieved at the end of the party. During the
dinner, the people felt that his own wife was in a way subdued, just pretended to be free and happy.
They could not wait to get out and breath in fresh air, but his patients could not do that.
The questions his patients pose: Why is life good? = Good income, beautiful wife… They are
not happy because they lack the sense of proportion, according to him. If they had it they would be
happy. If you cannot conform, there is something else to force you to conform: force, police. If you are
not convinced by ideology, you are forced by police.
The origin of people’s behavior, why people behave unfriendly: lower classes, foreigners are the
cause of dissatisfaction. He swooped and devoured – like a bird of prey.
#6, pp 162-164 Sinking her voice .. had killed himself. Septimus belonged to lower
class; he is a tender-minded man. He committed suicide. Clarissa is giving a party – a sort of surrogate
for real communication. Dr. Bradshaw comes and says he is late because his patient committed
suicide. Clarissa is shocked how somebody can talk about death at her party. She goes to an empty
room, she needs privacy, withdraws from society to confront her feelings. She imagines how it felt for
him to die like that. The only time she plunged in life, her only sacrifice was when she threw a coin. On
the other hand, Septimus rather died than to lose his emotions. He made a much greater sacrifice, he
gave his life. However, he managed to preserve that which makes life meaningful. There is a motif of
treasure – to preserve the treasure, one’s vision of completeness of life.
She sees something evil in Dr. Bradshaw and he made Septimus’s life intolerable. He made
him live in death. Dr. Bradshaw represents the forces of society and he makes life impossible for
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people like Septimus. In the depths of her heart there is an awful fear. Life is given like a sort of task.
You are given a chance to live your life fully and meaningfully. She feels she has wasted her life. She
fights against this fear. She sits next to Richard, crouches and thinks about this feeling. Richard is
sitting next to her reading newspapers. The newspapers represent a wall between the two of them. In
Birthday Party, Petey is reading newspapers; there is no real communication, just hiding behind
the wall of newspapers. At the end, pieces fall – he not allowed to hide anymore.) Mrs. Killman,
somebody who kills men, is filled with hatred. Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter likes the company of that
woman because of the feeling of emptiness within her. If you cannot fill it with love, fill it with hatred.

L13 – VIRGINIA WOOLF: MRS. DALLOWAY

- C. Dalloway – a woman who stayed within culture; she knew what she lacked
- P. Walsh – The Death of the Soul
- S. W. Smith – preserved his treasure
- suicide – a measure of modern culture hostility to the soul
- Holmes/Bradshaw – silencing creative questioning;
proportion – unnatural hierarchy
death – rather than conversion
To remain human or to remain alive.
- the uses of Shakespeare – criterion of humanity
- Brave New World (1932), 1984 (1948), Lord of the Flies (1954) – dystopias
- B. N. W. – proportion – stability – totalitarianism
- B. N. W. - elimination of feeling; prevention and seduction
- 1984 – perversion of feeling; coercion, persecution
- consciousness, human subjectivity; nature, the other – reformulated
- B. N. W. – nature abolished
- 1984 – mind control
How?
- 1. elimination of family ties, 2. elimination/falsification of history, 3. hypnopoedia/surveillance
- soma/newspeak – orthodoxy is nothing
- privacy = anti-social: discouraged/punished
- sex – promiscuity – orgy porgy/a principle crime
- illusion of success – no leisure from pleasure – B. N. W./ illusion of power – 1984
Why?
- the outsiders
- private standards of loyalty – Shakespeare; dreams of the mother, Golden Country, falling in
love
- the explanation by the world controllers
1. happiness: at the cost of humanity, fears of thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to
2. power: death – the greatest defeat; the future – an image of a victim at the mercy of a party
member
The party is immortal.
Winston converted: Do it to Julia!

Clarissa is sb who (like Lavinia from The Cocktail Party) remained within the culture,
satisfied with making the best out of a bad job, unlike Celia, an exile who stepped beyond culture.
Within the society, Clarissa is a perfect hostess, and tries to persuade herself that it is the right choice.
We can easily sympathize with her, because she requestions her choice- congratulating herself or
being bitter about it. Whenever she has a vision, it passes without her being able to act upon that
truth. Stephen had visions throughout his childhood, which made him stronger. Her epiphanies pass
without being acted upon, it’s a vision which forces her to see her life as a failure, to make her realize
that she misses something: not wit, not intelligence, but something warm that breaks the surface- she
was a virgin, although she was a mother. What she suppressed were feelings, emotions, which are a
present, a gift from one’s parents. When she meets Peter Walsh she thought that he could allow
himself to fall in love, though he is 52, with scraggy neck - that is when we see that for her love is a
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monster. For V. Woolf a flux can be potentially dangerous. Woolf was very uneasy about sex, she
was a lesbian, very insecure, a snob who protected herself from knowing anything about the working
class, and she projects that in Clarissa. Richard allowed Clarissa privacy- a kind of life in which her
soul was in peace, and where it was not necessary to examine why her soul was in such a state. On the
other hand, she had to share everything with Peter, which didn’t suit her, he wouldn’t accept
remaining on the surface, he wanted to reach her soul. She preferred to leave her soul alone. ‘If I had
married him (Peter) all this happiness would have been mine.’ However, she chose Richard, a life
away from the sea, a conventional life of an emotional decline. The death of the soul – with this
sentence Peter sums up Clarissa’s life. A scene when she says that she never spoke with the girl who
had illegitimate baby - thus revealing her frigidity, she realized that and fell on her knees and started
patting her dog look I can love, I love my dog.
Septimus didn’t loose his soul, when he realized that his existence was not worth at all, he
had to kill himself in order to defend his soul, and the fact that he had to do it shows us how hostile is
the modern culture towards the soul. Doctors see to it that the condition like the one Septimus has,
had to be in proportion- as Bradshaw sees it. For Lawrence- those incapable of love should rule those
who can feel. Those people have diverted their lust into a desire for power. Lady Bradshaw lies - she
cannot realize and express herself in the marriage with the doctor, she knows that he scoops down on
people in order to stop their questioning of such conditions. Clarissa knows what kind of persons
Bradshaw’s are. They presume that they have a message to deliver: Septimus saw Evans dead)?
though he could understand sparrows etc. There was a germ of sanity in his madness. The trees should
not be cut, there is no death, and people will be saved by love. This kind of questioning should be
stopped by putting those people into the asylums- the treatment is called conversion- a violent,
forceful method by which people will accept Bradshaw’s sense of life. Right at the moment when he
begins to feel better: like a hen, she spread her arms to stop Bradshaw/ Holmes but fails. But he
throws himself through the window I will give it to you- my body, not my soul. The doctors thought
that those sick could not be helped by love, or by those who love them, which is wrong. Those who
want to preserve their humanity have to die- it is the same in 1984. Brave New World, and 1984 are
stylistically different from Mrs. Dalloway, yet they all deal with the Shakespearian quest- ‘to remain
human or to remain alive’. The message was that it was extremely urgent for people to understand, so
they should be addressed as soon as possible, and as directly as possible. In the peacetime Europe, the
soul was being destroyed by invisible means. 1984 almost a pamphlet, an inventory of evil in this
world, and it is very direct. The themes similar to V. Woolf- dystopias (reverse from utopia) pointing
to the catastrophe bound to happen if we accept Bradshaw’s proportion, which will lead to
totalitarianism. The appearance of three dystopian depictions of the horrible picture of the future is
done in order to make people move, and do sth against it.
How does Shakespeare function in Mrs. Dalloway? He is a criterion to judge a success or
failure of a character- how human has the character remained. Septimus believed he was protecting
the England of Shakespeare, the love as professed by Shakespeare. Holmes throws away a
Shakespearian book, because he thinks that no knowledge is useful. Richard Dalloway is a decent
man, benevolent, successful for him reading Shakespeare’s sonnets is indecent, like peeping through a
keyhole. Even love is indecent for him and he can not say to Clarissa that he loves her, whereas Peter
is a social failure, yet capable of feeling, crying. There are two quotations of Shakespeare’s Othello:
if it were now to die it would be now to be happy- love that could have triumphed over death, fear of
death dissolves before such love, but since she betrays her love -fear no more the heat of the sun-
shows that she was afraid of the feelings, she chose life devoid of any risks, crisis, and lived peacefully
without feelings, ecstasy, love. The first alternative is excluded from the totalitarian society, there are
only two outsiders who manage to remember the private standards celebrated by Shakespeare.
In Brave New World stability is an ideal of the community. Bradshaw’s proportion turned
into stability. Brave New World and 1984 describe the process where stability is kept by denouncing
the feelings that are only obstacles for the society. The slogan of Brave New World is when the
individual feels, the community reels, so everyone has to fit the social structure. Wheels must keep on
turning; the individual has to be a cog of a machine. In 1984 feelings are not eliminated, they pervert
feelings rather than destroy them. These two societies represent Eastern, and Western societies whose
models are the same- they tend to crush the individuality. In Brave New World Western, culture has
sufficient means to eliminate nature, to prevent feelings from ever happening. In 1984 the Eastern-
Stalinist model - they are too poor, so they use prosecution, seduction into forgetting. These two
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modes have the same goal. In Brave New World when they fail in their intention to destroy
consciousness, they use seduction, so the range of desire is seduced. They no longer long for anything
other than what society has to give them. Liking what you got is the Eastern model, which is
combination of coercion and persecution. In E. Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness he shows that human condition is contradictory. There is a tendency in Brave New
World to abolish the nature. The culture is seen as an artificial substitute for everything, even as a pile
for violent passion surrogate, it stimulates adrenalin without being put in danger, it keeps us at a safe
distance from any natural experience. Prolong life of keep at a safe distance from any natural
experience, and prolong life of keep you young; death is not something unpleasant; there is music, the
abuse of morphine etc. In 1984 they don’t have enough money to control nature, so they control the
mind. It is all coming true in Western civilization, but they had mixed these two ways into one.
O’Brian- if I have the means to force you to believe that what I say is true, then everything is ok. In
the first part we ask‟ How is the individual crushed? 1+2 How are emotions eliminated? The second
part (of both novels) asks the more important question- Why it all happened? In Lord of the Flies
there is the question – Why is it a no go (because nothing happens in the right way) Children live on a
deserted island, it’s an experiment to check whether these children have already become perverted. In
the end, one boy is running away from a tribe of children, with a chief carrying a stick pointed at both
ends - jedan kraj je na zemlji, drugi da nabije Ralfa na njega. You search for the answers throughout
the book, so one of the methods can be 1) elimination of family ties. In Brave New World, there is a
scene in maternity ward where babies are not born, but made in a lab, so love between the child and
the mother is eliminated. They have already achieved success by doing this in hatchery. One student
faints when the word mother is mentioned, because it has become something like a swear word. When
fetus is several months old they insert alcohol in the bottle, so that in the end you get the desired
product, instead of one individual you get 78 copies of the same person, and they are all without
identity. In 1984 they can not eliminate parents, so children are trained to spy on their parents the
most important thing is loyalty to society. In Brave New World, history is blank 2) elimination,
falsification of history. Why? Because by comparing our culture with others you can find alternatives,
so the past is whipped away, it doesn’t exist. In 1984 they are rewriting history whenever something
goes wrong, in order to make the past conform with the present. In Brave New World hypnopoedia
is used to teach you in sleep- it is propaganda, it teaches you without disturbing. In 1984 there is
surveillance- everyone is watched, always under control. If there remains any discontent in Brave
New World they use Soma (now Prozac) which sends you on a stupor after which you feel renewed
(instead of being hangover), so there is no rebelliousness. In 1984 Newspeak is the only painless
means of doing this, it is the reduction of vocabulary, so the whole portion of life, reality will disappear
because we have no means to describe it. Orthodoxy is not-thinking; the creator of Newspeak was
destroyed because he understood what he was doing. It is also a change in meaning of words, and it is
presented by the slogans in the novel: ‘ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery, and war is peace’.
People were to follow this without questioning. Privacy is either discouraged or punished. In Brand
New World sex is encouraged, whereas in 1984 it is capital offence, ministry of love punishes it by
death. Sex has been reduced to mare pleasure. Eros is what Lawrence celebrated; it means sexual
desire, and nourishing protective maternal emotion. Now Eros is separated from sex, and has been
reduced to mechanical friction. In 1984 sex is still a part of the whole experience, an act of political
resistance - because nature works its way. In Brand New World promiscuity is the opposite of privacy.
They stage orgy porgy -which is absurd-because in pagan times orgy was supposed to help people
connect with nature. Orgy porgy is just a sensation after which the outsider feels sad, disgusted.
Bernard is an outsider because he feels sad afterwards, so he is a minor rebel, because he was given
less alcohol than he was supposed to. There is another character, a potential artist, who is deprived
from any goal, because art was necessary when we lead a natural life. Two minutes hate in 1984
consisted of viewing an imagery enemy, it was collective expression of hatred (booing, yelling). Both
societies rest on illusions of pleasure and power. They say ‘no leisure for pleasure’, and their illusions
of power shows that their only emotion was hatred. In Brand New World John Savage is born by a
mother, and he remembers in his dreams that she died in order for him to live. She was loyal to love,
and his dreams of her are dangerous. He dreams of golden country- the pasture, a patch of land dug
up by moles, and he believes that love is still possible. In his dream, he sees Julia taking off her clothes
(both sexual and political statement). He was educated on Shakespeare, and is a complete outsider,
yet he wakes up from this dream with words of Shakespeare on his lips. The book ends by a
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conversation. Remembering Shakespeare, and taking him as a criterion of normal life, he becomes
rebellious and is sent to an island. He asks Mustafa: ’Why?’ he tells him that it is because of
happiness. Brand New World comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest- it is the kind of knowledge
presented by Miranda’s father- growing of soul is possible. The principles governing this world are not
allowing the growth of the soul in Brand New World. Savage becomes a champion of revolution; he
realizes that happiness is bought at a high cost for humanity, because it makes you get away from
everything that is natural. He remains human rather than allowing to be converted. Winston does not
remain human. He starts by keeping a diary, then he falls in love with Julia, they find a flat where they
are protected from ideology, and there they develop their emotions. They are tempted by the outside
world, they promise to do anything in order to check the power of the party-they accept to kill, poison
children etc. They betray the laws of love, and we see the final consequence when they are arrested. He
is taken to room 101 where there is no darkness. They want to convert him so they torture him (they
put him in a cage full of rats) The only thing he has to do is say’ Do it to Julia’- so he has to betray love.
After that he is no longer dangerous, they release him and he watches the movie of The Big Brother-
the party. His mother died in order for him to live, she did not do it, yet he betrayed love. Why? We do
not want happiness, what we want is power. We are the priests of power, because the greatest defeat of
a man is death- if alone man dies, if he joins a larger organization, he as a part of that organization
also becomes immortal. So you will join the party, that larger organization within which you will
survive your death- this represents symbolical suicide. Man always suffers from inferiority complex-
we control nature by inventing a weaker enemy and practice our power and superiority on him. Since
they cannot fight nature, they are fighting the weaker enemy – instead of receiving blows they injure
others. The explanations come down to the same thing – a fear from nature – so nature needs to be
annulled and the world will be changed. Winsent is re-socialized, but he looses his humanity, and he
no longer dreams his mother.

L 14 - WILLIAM GOLDING

In V. Woolf we have subversive questioning, whereas in Brand New World, 1984, and
Lord of the Flies they do away with the aesthetic, and make the message as clear as possible. In his
essay The Fable Golding tried to convey a direct moral message, which the times needed very badly.
He tried to make people see that when something is done it pushes this world toward self-destruction.
In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness atrocities committed by Kurtz can be compared to those from
Lord of the Flies. We have to confront our own destruction in order to survive, so a very clear
diagnosis has to be reached. The whole Western tradition is based on highly optimistic, political
systems, made to conceal something very problematic in a Western man- a soft spot according to
Conrad. Golding takes his children out of the reach of any external restraints. It is a 20 th century
version of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. In The Coral Island- Valentine we see that a Western man is a
wholly rational being, infinitely perfectible, who when he comes against the unknown natural
surrounding, he is able to build a replica of society. In ‘The Coral Island’ a group of British boys who
behaved themselves imposed order on the island; however, the boys from Lord of the Flies failed in
doing it. Golding asks why? They began building a rational society; they light the fire - stands for
enlightenment, and they establish the couch democracy. This ends in the outburst of irrationality. The
condition they encountered resembles the Eden- hospitable surrounding, with fruits, clear water, and
free from authorities. The other part of the island is different- bare.
At one point, they seem to believe they have seen a snake - they can see the beast. They try to
locate the beast, and the only location they do not look into is within themselves. Only one boy
discovers it. Is it their primordial nature? Were they born with the potential for evil? One group of the
boys wears uniforms, and they are on the way of forgetting their true self. Their soul is already in a
state of destruction. They sing a song ’in the glory of God’ the song they learnt in the church. Piggy,
Ralph, and Simon have somehow managed to escape such an influence, they are the first to see the
surrounding as menacing polarization.
At one hand, we have the red haired devil - Jack, whose looks suggest his evil nature, and on
the other hand, we have Ralph, Piggy, and Simon. This is dramatization of Fromm’s dichotomy,
done in an obvious way. How will the dichotomy between me and not me be solved? They are either to
establish a connection, or annihilation. Jack opts for the second solution. Ralph insist that they should
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work- gather fruits, and thinks that it is not necessary to go hunting, or to build huts, and use fire.
Jack is for hunting, not for food, but because he had a sense of being threatened, though he need not
feel that. There is something larger than him, so he hunts in order to show his power over nature. The
process of forgetting external restraints-the first time he tried to kill a pig.
They have to paint their faces, and the painted face is a mask, an uniform. That is the way to
get rid of their private consciousness, soul. They were educated into a kind of collective consciousness.
They kill a saw- it represents a damage done to the feminine, maternal. The killing is done in terms of
sexual relationship. They were wedded to her by the spilt blood- they were all over her. The collective
orgasm achieved through rape. They offer the head to the force of the darkness, which they worship.
They worship death. From this point to the killing of Simon and Piggy there is only one step.
Ralph stands for creative option, whereas Simon, and Piggy are projections of the same part of
human being. Piggy is a rationalist, and pacifist at his best, but it is insufficient. He is short- sighted,
yet he is the only one claiming that there is no beast. He fails to see that something has happened to
the boys, he simply refuses to see the beast in them. He stands for optimism and rationality, which
cannot see. We have turned our soul into monstrous being. There is a storm, a frenzy of panic, nature
in its most frightening aspect. The protection is found in tribe, but Simon (who stands for Christ in
that society) is killed - all truth tellers are killed. Ralph, and Piggy are outside the circle, they did not
kill him, but they were there. Only Ralph admits that it was a murder, Piggy tells that it was an
accident, yet he dies in the end too. Simon is a visionary; epileptic- epilepsy gives him glimpses of
aura, and vision before the epileptic fit. Only those who suffer from mental disorder have preserved
the deepest contact with their inner soul. Mohamed is also an epileptic. Simon is familiar with the
darkness inside, and he does not fear the darkness outside. He like Christ thinks that nature is the
source of goodness, and it is something holy for him. He is the only one who can guess the truth
Maybe it is only us. He cannot communicate his vision. The greatest irony is that those people cannot
put into words what they know, maybe because the language used is not adequate. What is the dirtiest
thing? If there is something dirty, outrageous, it will come from within. This is confirmed when he
goes to see what kind of beast it is. Simon sees it too, but he wants to check, and when he comes upon
a thing, all his intuition is confirmed. The dead parachutist- shows how future after nuclear war will
fall apart. The boys are looking for a sign, some kind of direction what to do next, and the only sign
they receive from the adults is the dead parachutist. It encourages the boys to go on with their
violence. When Simon first sees it, he is afraid. What he sees is death, mortality, and fear of mortality.
He alternately lies down, and sits up- civilization, which cannot outgrow the response to the mortality
that is always violence. The history of violence- the dead body constantly raising up, and getting down.
Simon buries the body; it is an attempt to bury the dead, to bury the whole concession of answers,
cures. Simon frees the body, and goes down to make them understand that fear is not necessary.
Before he reaches them, he comes upon a pig’s head-which stands for the worship of death, Thanatos.
He has an epileptic fit, hallucinates, and starts talking with the head, which assumes the voice of the
teacher. You will not spoil our fun. You believe you know the truth. It shows the kind of education we
have, the kind that will never allow us to see the truth. The war is to be lead in such a manner for the
students not to understand its workings. The boys are already half mad, changing the song. Simon
simply rushes into the horseshoe, and they kill him. The sky clears up, and they can see that it was not
such a big animal after all. The tide comes, and it takes Simon’s body away. The moon was pulling the
tide- nature. Ralph survives, because he is like Marlow- insists upon work, and is capable of moral
growth. In the beginning, he is laughing at Piggy, but he learns to appreciate him, and he commingles
the visions of Simon. He joins those two traits in himself, because he is capable of self- searching, and
of passing a judgment on himself. He is the only remaining human being on the island, and he
remains fateful to his dreams. The boys chase him, and set the island on fire. They were just about to
catch him when the perspective changed. The naval officer looks, but he doesn’t see the real thing; he
says’ You’ve been having fun and games’. The big thing remains hidden from him. When Ralph
remembers his dead friends, the Edenic island, he cries, and is completely mute. The naval officer
does not ask him why he is crying. This is a fall into experience, initiation into the evil at the heart of
Western civilization. Ralph is rescued, but is he really saved? He had a vision, he understands but he
cannot communicate his knowledge. Ralph has saved his soul here, but will he be able to preserve his
soul? If there is no one in the book, there are the readers.

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 P21 – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The author is also talking about something that we are experiencing how. He is alluding to our
age. It is about how people are forced to abandon their private lives by ideology and the whole issue of
power is mentioned.
#1, p 30 Winston was dreaming ... on his lips. This passage is about Winston’s dreams.
They are about his mother and his sister. He sees them in some subterranean place, some sinking
ship. They sink deeper and deeper. Subterranean & sinking – something subconscious, something
deep inside. His mother and sister are a part of his subconsciousness. He has a feeling of guilt related
to the two of them. He feels that the two of them sacrificed themselves for him, in a way. However, he
does not know whether that is true or not. There is this notion of sacrifice – they had to be down there
so that he could be up here. He repressed the thoughts of his mother and sister because the system
required it. He felt he had to suppress it in order to stay alive in the society. Mother and sister
symbolize one part of our being: emotions, feelings, private loyalties and not loyalties to ideas and
concepts such as Big Brother. It is loyalty that exists between friends and family members. It also
stands for his individuality – love for individual people, memories, dreams – this is that which makes
us individuals and he has to repress it. He betrays his loyalty to Julia, too. His mother was ready to die
for him, and he was not ready to die for his beliefs and ideals – he was ready to kill. Winston is
different from his mother. The system has turned him into a destructive and hating person and in that
way defeated him before he is physically captured.
Jung thinks that dreams have a compensatory role. Dreams warn us that our conscious
outlook is narrow. They send us some kind of message to compensate, to heal us. For Jung, dreams
have a liberating function. If the system is oppressive, we can recover our wholeness by means of
dreams. Also, neurosis are important according to him. We have this motif related to Septimus, Alan…
The healing role of dreams is obvious in the second part of this dream. This landscape recurs in
his dreams. This beautiful place in nature symbolize something: they are alienated from nature in the
sense that there are no technical devices to control nature. They have persecution, coercion,
repression. They control nature in people. The feeling that has to be suppressed and controlled in such
a society is Eros – the mystical feeling of oneness that connects you to other people and nature. This is
a society based on hatred. Eros is not only sex, it is more than that. It is carnal love, but it is also this
mystical feeling of oneness. That is what the Party wants to erase.
The Golden Country – symbolizes the Eden, the place where man lives in complete harmony
with the other world.
In Life and Times of Michael K there is a world at war in an imaginary place. Michael
leaves the destructive civilization and makes a garden! Dylan Thomas in his Fern Hill remembers
his garden from childhood.
The girl in Winston’s dreams (later we find out it is Julia) takes her clothes off and he is not
arouses. The act of taking clothes off stands for liberation. The act of making love for him is an act of
defiance. His primary need is to liberate himself from the system.
According to Frye, there is Prometheus, who is the symbol of social and collective freedom,
and Eros, who is the symbol of individual freedom. The way to achieve individual freedom is by means
of love. (Just like Stephen Dedalus.) Later on in the novel, Winston goes to see a prostitute. It is an
act of defiance for him.According to Trilling, we can go beyond culture in two ways: 1. by finding a
different tradition, 2. by experiencing yourself as a biological fact – the part of us the society does not
control.
There is a reference to Shakespeare: Winston is a modern Romeo who betrays his Julia.
Shakespeare talked about love and the characters in Shakespeare’s plays who experienced love created
their way of resisting the system/society. Shakespeare’s period is here the criterion for humanity.
Winston is questioning what it means to be human.
#2, p 6o The aim of the Party … although she was his wife. Sex instincts had to be
killed. They thought it to be subversive. It was the part of them the Party could not control: a way of
defining your own individuality.
Catherine used to be his wife. She wanted to conceive a child because it was their duty to the
Party. She lost her feminine, natural instinct. The Party for the first time tries to kill this instinct
through education and if it does not succeed, it has to dirty it. Winston goes to that fifty-year-old
prostitute. The whole atmosphere is dirty. By killing Eros, they prevent the humanization of the
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instinct. Marshal music is also opposed to sexual instinct. Energy is used the other way around –
destructively.
According to Freud, there are two basic instincts in us: Eros and Thanatos. Here, Thanatos
rules over Eros. Love is turned into Thanatos. The society in this novel is governed by this death
instinct Thanatos and they project their ideas on others and instead of killing themselves, they kill
another. Culture and society are repressive. Rebellion has to start from discovering Eros. This positive
instinct is not possible with Catherine here.
#3, p 145 The dream was still vivid … had been a cabbage-stalk. Winston as a child
stole chocolate from his sister. Their mother hugged her. Love is what remains even when it cannot
save our lives; it is what makes us human. Throughout the book, Winston questions what it is that
makes us human. He is aware that he cannot be free physically, but he wants to preserve the notion of
humanity for the generations to come as a sort of heritage. Private love is what makes us human
according to the author. It is mentioned here: mother is trying to protect her child from bullets. Here,
hand/arm is a symbol of human touch, contact, protection. He sees a severed hand and he kicks it.
However, he tries to preserve this trace of humanity in him. He feels. In Scenes from Execution
hand is also important.
There is something that he has to relearn. The proles (=proletariat) still remember the private
loyalty, they practice that principle. This principle is not utilitarian, it will not save their lives, but it is
important because it is what makes them human. The proles still have not been affected and
conditioned by society. They are still loyal to one another.
#4, p 186 As he fastened the belt … could not kill. The old, fat woman fascinates
Winston. She has given birth to a lot of children. She has a fertile belly. She strikes him as beautiful.
She symbolizes humanity, vitality and creativity (by giving birth to children). The system has not yet
killed the vitality in proles.
Winston looks at the sky and says that the sky was the same for everybody. There were three
blocks always at war and the normal feeling one should have for enemies is hatred. Hatred is
supported by political and ideological manipulation. Their differences are stressed. They create an
impression that we do not belong to the same humanity. He is trying to say that people are held apart
by these walls of hatred. They project all the hatred and all their problems on others. The neighbor’s
children are angry because he did not want to take them to see the hanging. Winston realizes that we
all belong to the same humanity. There is no us and them, there is only us. Winston realizes that
women like this one exist all over the world.
#5, p 227 Now, I will tell you … inside the skull. The Party and power – human beings
should subdue, sacrifice their individuality to the collective body. It was also present in Nazism and
Stalinism – they were convincing themselves that they were doing it for a greater cause. Here, they do
it only for power. If you belong to the Party, you become immortal because you belong to this
immortal body.
Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Man is in heaven as long as he is one with
nature. When he separates from nature, he realizes that there is one part of him that he cannot run
away from, that he cannot destroy – biological. I and Not I – everything that is not my own ego
belongs to some other I, e.g., some other races. This is what Fromm calls existentional gap. Every
civilization tries to bridge this gap. There are both positive and negative/destructive ways of bridging
the gap. The destructive way is destroying either I or Not I – your feeling of separateness,
individuality. You can also destroy nature, other races… The other way is to become a member of a
great movement because you are afraid of being an individual. Freud called this escape from freedom
– you sacrifice your freedom, submit yourself to a negative activity. Then, you feel power and no
longer feel fear of mortality. In Lord of the Flies, they are dancing to become one. There is safety in
numbers. A destructive way of bridging the gap is destruction in_______ O’Brien is tired. We see his
face as old and tired and he talks about power. He is only a part of the Party. When he dies, the Party
will go on living. He is powerful and immortal in so far as he identifies with the Party. Every human
being is mortal but if you submit to the Party, you become immortal. Control matter – the Party. They
live in horrible conditions.

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 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

This world is based on seduction – you are seduced by certain products, by commodity. It is a
fierce criticism of the modern/western lifestyle. However, it is more hopeful. Heretics are sent away to
an island; they remain alive and as long as you are physically alive, there is chance to find out the
truth. However, some claim that 1984 is more hopeful.
#1, pp 17-19 Bokanovsky Process … at last applied to biology. It is a process of
making twins. Eggs are exposed to X-rays. Some eggs die, some start duplication. Budding – is there
symbolical meaning in this word? Symbolically they prevent the natural development of individual
consciousness, of the faculties that make us human and check our development and growth. That is
what this society is doing. They also use alcohol. By mistake, Bernard was injected alcohol. He is
highly intelligent, but shorter than others. They create 96 twins. They justify it with the fact that it
creates social stability. It prevents unexpected behavior and events. The tendency of the totalitarian
society is to make all people uniform and prevent individuality. The character that exemplifies this
attitude to uniformity in Mrs. Dalloway is Dr. Bradshaw. Here, it is the principle of mass
production applied to biology.
#2, pp 193-195 But why is it prohibited … scent organ instead. He comments on the
products of civilization. He quotes Shakespeare because in literature people can express their most
profound experiences of themselves, of people around them… the best way to communicate your
emotions is literature. There is also Trilling’s solution. Leavis says Writer should be able to
communicate the experience of his own age. – to express the complexity of the experience better than
anyone else. That is why Savage can resort to Shakespeare and literature.
At the very end of 9184 there is an appendix – principles of Newspeak. It is a speech in which
language is terribly reduced. Dictionaries are getting thinner and thinner. Declaration of
independence has become thought crime. If some feeling cannot be expressed, then it is gradually
lost. The possibility of expressing one’s feelings is being reduced. You do not know how to express
your discontent to yourself and to others. That is why it is important to resort to literature. I. A.
Richards: Literature/art is our storehouse of recorded values. Literature enables you to make
subversive comparisons. That is why literature is prohibited in Brave New World. They cannot
write like Shakespeare because nobody would understand it. There is a total degradation of art. Art is
reduced to sensual, biological experience.
Helmholtz is in a way exceptional. He writes some sort of slogans. He has poetic nature. He is
very good with words. His problem is that he cannot writhe something like Othello because he does
not know how to express that which he feels. He is a frustrated artist. At one moment, he managed to
write a poem and he showed it to Savage. In return, he showed him Romeo and Juliet but Hemholtz
mocked him. He could not understand these feelings.
People get what they want and never want what they can‟t get. They are happy. The society
offers material comfort, good life conditions, nothing spiritual, only material comfort and sensual
pleasure.
Adrianne Rich in one of her poems says Our true desires are taken away,
processed/transformed and sold back to us. The first woman that one man has is his mother. The
notion of mother in B. N. W.: they are horrified when they hear this word. It has become a dirty
word. Everything that mother stands for is suppressed and our false desires are sold back to us. We
want only what the society can give us. What society gives is a substitute for your original desires and
it is not a good substitute for emotions. When people feel discontent, they resort to taking soma. It is a
kind of drug that erases any consciousness about something problematic.
#3, pp 195 I suppose not … This passage is about conditioning.
#4, p 207 Do you remember that bit … instrument to degrade him. gods are just!
What gods do to human beings. The two characters from King Lear are punished: Kant and his son
Edmund. Subplot of King Lear: Kant’s two sons Edward is his legitimate son Edmund is
illegitimate. Kant is destroyed by Edmund – something universal – parents destroy their children.
Kant was unjust to Edmund. He loved him less because he was the son of his mistress. Edmund blinds
his father, gets wounded and dies. There is the notion of pleasant vices. He is indulging the pleasant
vices, just like the whole society and will be punished and should be punished for indulging these
meaningless vices, for living in such a way. In B. N. W., Edmund would be sitting in a pneumatic

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chair. Savage’s answer: here people are not physically punished, but they are degraded as human
beings. They are denied love, feelings. The punishment is loss of humanity and individuality.
#5, pp 210/211 The savage nodded, frowning … you’re welcome, he said. Mustafa
Mond: People neither suffer nor oppose. It is a quotation from Hamlet. People in B. N. W. just
abolish emotions. Linda, Savage’s mother and Tomakin, his father, have runaway from difficult
emotions into the world of drugs. Linda died because of that. They simply runaway from difficult
things.
Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an
egg-shell. – Hamlet saw that F. was going to conquer some countries and he admired his courage. In
the past, people were ready to do something to sacrifice themselves for a small cause.
Substitute for dangerous things – they just give you certain chemical stimulants and they do
this for your health. You are of good health after that. It if were a natural feeling, there would be
consequences. They feel a catharsis, not emotional, but physiological. It is wrong because it is just
physical, it does not affect man mentally. The experience is on the physical level, there is no spiritual,
mental experience. There is a divorce between physical sensations and spiritual sensations. People are
encouraged in fulfilling their urges but at the same time, these urges are divorced from anything
spiritual, anything on a higher level.
Savage claims that he wants to feel. He does not want to have surrogates. He is willing to take
this risk. If he wants positive emotions, he also has to experience the negative ones – the whole range
goes together. He wants to get to know the whole range of human experience.

L15 - J. M. COETZEE: DUSKLANDS

The cleansing operation- to purge the world of ethical sense. Coetzee stood on the behalf of
victims. He is obsessed with history, for him it is terror, and violence. The analysis of meaning of
history is remembered in his novel in the persistent, eloquent way. He develops historical sense, which
enables him to see the history as continuous story. While you read Dusklans you see the current
policy of colonization.
Dusklands is Coetzee’s first novel, which is at the same time aesthetically and formally the
best. According to all these characteristics it is equal to anything he wrote before it, and it also
surpasses even some of his later novels. Dusklands consists of two stories, which complement each
other, and turn the book into a novel. The stories are separated by a period of 150 years. In the first
story there is a man whose project is Vietnam, he is a protagonist of politics in Vietnam. The second is
the narrative of J. Coetzee, a character who has the same surname as the author. It is a first person
narration, full of monologues, and it tells us about the colonization of South Africa, and the genocide
integrated in the South- African mission. What connects the stories is the quality of the mind that
protagonists have- it is the same kind of mind, and its continuity.
The first motto: American military expert, Herman Kan is considering the ethical side of
Vietnam. It s natural that we should sympathize with the horrors, unreasonable to expect the US pilots
to be guilt- ridden, because it will prevent them from conveying missions of civilization. This is similar
to Marlow in The Heart of Darkness, because we have the same dissociation between soul, and the
reason; the intelligence that fully calculates the means by which the mission can be accomplished. The
soul cannot intervene, because it has atrophied. The second motto: A quotation from Flaubert- what is
important is the philosophy of history. We should understand the history, and the way it creates this
kind of mind. Where did we go bad? Why hasn’t this civilization experiment succeeded? S. Heaney: to
find the source of violence in history, he found it in the historical event- Hercules, and Antaen- a myth
whose purpose is to celebrate the independence of Greeks from Earth to which they had been bound.
For Heaney this independence is the beginning of catastrophe. Antaens, the son of the goddess of
earth, is weaned (odbijen od sise), and every night he slept in his caves, and finally he regained his
power through the contact with the earth. Hercules, the son of Zeus, the son of the Sun, points to the
contrast between darkness, and brightness, suggesting reason. His main asset is intelligence, whereas
for Antaes it is emotions. Hercules throws him into a dream of origin, and loss. The poem is about two
traditions: the first one is more archaic- Antean is over-perverted by a new tradition, which is the
official history of the West. Hercules’ history is marked by two twin phenomena- one is imperialism,
the elimination of those who live by Antean tradition; and the other is rationalism, the conquest of the
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inner space, the conquest of blood by reason. Antean dreams of of exceptional, eccentric people, it is
the legacy bequeathed to elegists, to poets – the task to receive this option that poets should recover.
Hercules had the task to choke the snakes, which were originally associated with life, continuity,
resurrection.
In Coetziee’s novels, especially in Dusklands we see wars as a replay of this ancient conflict of
two traditions, so that the violence in his novels (parents against children, against races, animals, and
women) is the product of the meaning of Antaens. His protagonists represent hatred, Herculean
tradition, hatred of a civilized man against races, nature, and their own biological being.
This hatred inspires two men: Dawn, and Coetzee. Although they are different, one is an
intellectual, the man of contemplation, and the other man of action; they both suffer from the
hypertrophy of Cartesian reason. They are both philosophers. The two stories: Jacobson is a Dutch,
lives in South Africa, is a slave owner, explorer, hunter, and sees himself as a tamer of the wild. We see
how lucid, and blind he is. He roams the wilderness, and feels as if the vast space threatens to
annihilate him. Rather than to be contained by the space, he wants to devour, pierce, penetrate it.
Hoffentots don’t know anything about penetration of the mind, guns, rapes, girls are offered for the
white man’s pleasure, and they have the complete freedom to copulate a Hoffentot girl. If you cannot
posses something by mind, you do it by gun- it is a metaphysical necessity. The dead people are
metaphysical food, because it prevents him by merging into wilderness. Fromm says that we lull the
other in order not to be devoured by it. J. Coetzee meditates on the possibility of killing a tree. When
he says that the kind of flame- throwing device will be useful, he actually anticipates, gives vent to his
imagination. He does not stop here, but he wants to kill other animals. His project is not hunting; he
simply wants to meet the tribe of Hoffentots, and punish them- especially in the second part, because
in the first part he meets a tribe, which is very hospitable. They are nice to him, but they do not quite
obey his wishes; there is a joke played on him, the children take his clothes when he is bathing, and he
bites off the ear of one child. J. Coetzee decides to return, and punish them, which he really fulfilled
one day- he shoot the girl who was going to fetch water. There he, like thundering Jehovah, sees
himself as a punisher; he burns the village, and kills them all. He wonders-‘What have I achieved by
death of all these people?’ ‘Haven’t I destroyed the world of delight?’ ‘Well I should have left them
alive’. Finally, he says, no, because it is a historical mission to kill what I cannot penetrate, to
annihilate all those, as he says, in the name of the spirit- perfect example of white man’s
consciousness. He considers that this massacre was simply his duty to history.
Eugene Dawn also believes that he is a fool of the history. The goal of history requires from
us anthropic yearning for supremacy of mind, and strive for the technocratic paradise, and glory of
consciousness. As a boy, he wanted to grow a garden, but it rotted, so he started growing a crystal
garden, which obeys the dead force. He will obey the dead force in his life, which will be the
achievement of technocratic paradise. In order to enter this technocratic paradise we have to go to
purgatory- Vietnam. We have to purge people living by Antean tradition either by killing, or
converting them. America is helpless because Vietnamese invincible mythology, which is the
symbiosis of the earth, and the sky. Periodically, the mother conspires incestuously with the son in
order to overpower the father. Here the father is American, the mother Vietnamese, and the sons of
the earth are Vietnamese. They cannot be vanquished, because in their mythic scenario, there is no
surrender, or if you surrender, you will be dead. Therefore, Eugene suggests that they must be taught
to love American ideology, they must change mythology, and thus Vietnamese pagans will be turned.
Once you destroy nature, you destroy pagan mother, and you get Cartesian mind. Such people will be
easily converted, because the will start believing in the fear of death. Though he is just Eugene Dawn,
he considers himself a Messiah, a prophet, a creator of the new paradise. His purpose is to bring to
light the hidden meaning of Vietnamese adventure. His purpose is to advise American compatriots to
press back any feeling of guilt, because they are serving the highest purposes. The radio stations with
father’s voice, snipers assassinations, bombs, all this combined will make them start feeling guilty for
the suffering they feel. The most ironic episodes in the book are those in which mythic conflicts are
within him, the conflict with his wife, son, and most importantly, the conflict between mind and soul-
the residue of natural connection. He abducts his son to prevent him from the influence of his wife,
and stabs him with the knife- da bi prisvojio voce samo za sebe, da ne ode majci. He ends up in a
psychiatric hospital. His body is one of his greatest enemies. He has to struggle all the time to forget
he has a body, and suffers all sorts of its spasms; ticks- a man who feels that he is all the time subject
to the revolting flesh, and body. He feels that the archaic self in him is still alive, he calls it a
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mongoloid boy, troglodyte (a person who lives in a cave), the dark self, the outward war between
darks, and whites, transposed into the war between bright, and dark self. Bright self is obedient, seeks
order, authoritarian. His bright self has tremendous respect for hierarchy, seeks to kneel before the
superior social rank. His dark self seeks to kneel before the socially inferior it shows compassion. It is
also not obedient, rebellious, amoral, and its chief virtues are blood, emotion, and courage. The dark
self feels guilt, it is the source of guilt that makes him feel sick. His desire to free himself from this
dark self, and achieve the authentic American myth, to purge the world of ethical sense, makes him
sick. He is put into hospital where he hopes to find out whose mistake it was. The obedience continues
to persist. He cannot find out whose mistake it was because he, unlike Kurtz, will stay blind. The
mother is the vampire, and the father is God. Is an escape from this history possible? Coetzee believed
that it is possible for the people who belong to such tradition, and an antipode to this man is Michael
K.- speechless, retarded, black, philosopher, outsider, and a drop out. He strives to revive this
memory, and to return to the farm, which his mother remembers to be the place she spent her
childhood at. J. Coetzee, and E. Dawn are people who sold their pagan mother, whereas Michael will
not abandon her. He represents the residue of the biological self, which will help him resist
technology. Michael K. was an orphan, he never had a father, who could install in him the order of
system. He asks: ‘Why am I brought to life?’ The answer he finds is: that he is to take care of his
mother. He takes her to the farm, but she died in a hospital. He continued his journey, was not
deterred much longer. Ashes is buried in a wood. He finds some seeds, and then spends a wild night
trying to kill a goat. He finds out that he is not a hunter, but a pagan tiller of the land. He grows
pumpkins. When the first harvest is there, he takes his pumpkins, and offers a prayer of Thanksgiving,
but not to the sky, but to the earth. The rest are put in rehabilitation camps, yet he always manages to
escape, and find his freedom. The contrast between the camp, and the garden: camp stands for our
history, and the garden for life, it is marked by a different conceptions. Time is biologically cyclical.
The camp as a symbol of history is based on Christian concept of time, a linear development of time
until the catastrophe after which we will get to the paradise, which is hierarchically ordered. The
background is the war, some unidentified war in the future, which is a dystopia, it is a time out of
which Michael is trying to escape. He is not a kind of man able to tell a story, he is not eloquent. He
identified himself as a kind of animal, he even hibernates managing to survive. His vitality is
enormous. He identifies himself with a mole and a worm - the creatures of the earth, which do not
talk. The silence is the best protection from this kind of life. Words will contaminate; therefore, he is
silent.
The second part is a monologue of a doctor, a very developed consciousness which interprets
Michael’s silence It is first person narration. He belongs to one of the three types of characters 1)
complete representation of history, 2) outsiders, 3) trying to meditate between the two, has the
sympathy for 2), they doubt the values of history, want to follow 2) but cannot, They would like to
cross the barrier dividing the empire from the barbarians, but cannot. He has a very sympathetic
imagination, yet not thoroughly developed. He is like Dysart, who feels guilty for curing Alan, but
cannot jump out of the barriers. The doctor’s interest is aroused when a patient who refuses to eat is
brought to hospital. Then his vision deepens when he realizes he is not the victim of history, but the
hero of rebellion. His first revelation- Michael who followed his idiot light, mentally retarded has
preserved his humanity in the myths of dehumanizing myths. He lived outside the main stream of
modern world. He is worried that history will crush him. There is the imaginary letter he writes to
Michael with the words Michael will never understand. He says yield- you will be crushed, history in
its movement will whip you out of existence. He questions why we are waging wars. He understands
that his own life has grown empty, and realizes that his patient is more vivid in his dying than he is in
his living. Michael disappeared- he who did not have any strength jumped over the wall. He is an
escape artist, he understands he should have packed his bag, and followed to the garden, which is not
a real place found in a map, but a mental attitude. He sees why Michael refused to eat, it was the
rebellion of the body, not of the intellect. He never believed that body wants its a extinction, but the
body here is more prepared to die than to eat the food from the camp. The body did not want to obey.
Now he sees he is not a casualty. No history can grind him to dust, because Michael is like pebble.
When the state swallowed you, you got out of its intestines undigested. He was not influenced by
history, yet the pebble is a symbol of history. Body longed for the food of freedom, even if it means
growing pumpkins. Yet he cannot follow Michael, which is a paradox. Does it mean that only mentally
retarded can go beyond culture? Yes, because the doctor, who is intellectual cannot. Coetzee is
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pessimistic her. Doctor’s greatest failure is the failure to understand the role of mother, because she is
the one who gives substance, and courage to resist- both pagan, and natural mother. Mother is
interpreted as a factor in Michael’s life which makes him feel dead, it is a daemonic factor. He does not
understand that mother sustains him, she constantly beckons to him leaving him in his garden.
The last part ends in factory, Michael is exhausted, but he is still the indomitable hero of
resistance. The episode when he meets trice vagabonds who offer him ‘charity’- sex and alcohol; they
stole from him the only valuable item- his seeds. Even those who live on the margins of the city are
already contaminated, but he escapes them, because he knows that they want him to tell them the
story of his life. Once he starts telling a story, he becomes a part of that guardian system. Worms work
in silence, so if he goes on being silent, he will escape he will escape charity as he escaped camps. He
survives the temptation to be incorporated in the city. He fantasies about an old man, who is not
converted, contaminated, to take him to the farm. Once they are on the farm, the pump will be all rust,
yet he imagines making the water go, and finding a coffee spoon with which they could take scoops of
water and water the pumpkins- so we can survive even with this coffee spoon!

P22 – The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

#1, pp 49-51 Smoke was rising here and there … continued. They first lit fire to
attract ships but they burnt a good deal of forest. They are quite excited; they are cheering, laughing…
They are reckless; they do not have compassion and do not care about the destruction of nature.
Power set free – symbolical meaning. They released the destructive force both in the external and the
internal nature (=themselves). Energies, that have been suppressed, burst out in a destructive way.
One of them is missing. He was the first to see something like snake. He was frightened.
Snakes are similar to the snakes of fire. He was afraid of the snake that had nothing to do with the
boys but with nature. In the end, the snake that killed him was the one that had to do with the boys.
There is an externalization of evil. They saw the external evil, but not the evil in themselves. Jung
talked about shadow projection – we always see evil in the others but we do not recognize it in
ourselves.
#2, pp 67/8 The subsoil beneath the palm trees … wandered off. Henry is one of
the youngest, whereas Roger is one of the oldest. There is no reason for animosity between them but
it still exists. It is a completely innocent little boy playing with insects and Roger with no reason for
animosity feels an outburst of negative energy in himself. In civilization, parents, upbringing, school
prevent children from hurting one another. All the structures that can punish them, that are
responsible for the control of our instincts prevent them. The restrictions are so deeply seeded for him
that he still does not hurt him. He is prevented from hurting him not because he likes the boy. These
restraints later disappear. We have destructiveness and restraints mentioned in The Heart of
Darkness, also. Roger is prevented from hurting the little boy by external, not internal restraints.
When these external restraints are gone in the course of the novel, there are no internal restraints,
either. Children are killed; there is nothing to guide these children, no internal principle that will
prevent them from being destructive. They become utterly destructive.
Roger is breathing deeply, he is excited. He is almost in a fit because of the release of
destructive energy. There is a kind of narrowing of conscious. Most of these boys have no internal
restraints. Piggy and Simon have them. Piggy always insists on some rules, he is compassionate and
kind, but his problem is extreme rationality. He does not recognize evil. Ralph is practical and
constructive. Simon is an epileptic. When he has fits of epilepsy, he feels as in darkness, engulfed. He
knows his darkness and he does not try to master it. He brings fruits for the little children. He does
not suffer from shadow projection. He accepts darkness as natural part of a being.
#3, pp 96-98 In a moment … defenseless to his seat. It is about the fear of the beast.
There is an assembly. We see breaking up of sanity – everybody is talking about the beast. Simon
realizes the problem but he cannot articulate it. He sees that the beast is in us and not in the external
nature. He is trying to tell them that evil is in them. We always see the evil parts of others and not of
our own being. There has always been this wish to externalize evil and assign it to some other people
and peoples.

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 What is the dirtiest thing there is? – Simon. This suggests excitement. He wants to say that it
is the same with the human psyche. People produce the dirtiest things in nature – shit, but we also
produce it on the psychological level. Everybody starts laughing at these words.
#4, pp 157-159 You are a silly little boy … lost consciousness. Simon is talking to the
Lord of the Flies. It is about a sacrifice for the beast that has been made. Sow symbolizes the part of
us that we in the development of our civilization denied and destroyed. It became because of that a
monster, totally immoral, a terrible aspect of nature, insatiable. This is our fear of natural forces and a
sort of perversion of the original notion of the goddess. It was once a part of the goddess of complete
being but it has become something completely evil. Simon, being an epileptic, is capable of
confronting this dark part of the psyche. He has a vision while he is looking at the stick. The Lord of
the Flies is mocking him. They could not hung it and kill it because it was a part of them all. They
perverted the natural part and Simon is the only one who knew that. Piggy is always asking Why is it…
This is an image of the forest laughing at the boy.
Just like in Conrad – the jungle mocks the whites that are trying to colonize them. Kurtz
wants to become the lord of the wilderness but he is destroyed. Nature just waits for the fantastic
invasion to pass.
The Lord of the Flies at one moment speaks with the voice of the schoolmaster. The evil
part of us speaks with the voice of the schoolmaster. This is a criticism of civilization and education.
Education is the first that makes us become a part of the destructive civilization. The education
structures these young people to become destructive.
#5, pp 167/8 There was a blink of bright light … teeth and claws. It is the scene of
Simon’s murder. Thy did not make the shelters. They preferred to fight. Now, they are afraid. They are
dancing in circle. The circle is important. They are making this circle because if makes them feel safe –
they are tighter – it is collectivity as a defense from fear. As individuals, we feel defenseless and in
order to fell secure we willingly sacrifice our individuality and feel protected. In 1984, O’Brian says
We need to belong to the Party in order to feel powerful. Here, the boys sacrificed their individual
consciousness to become a part of the living organism. At the end of the passage, the collective entity
becomes a beast. They believe they are killing a beast but they are actually becoming one.
Piggy and Ralph try to enter this organism because they are also afraid of this natural power.
This is a psychological shelter. Simon enters the circle and he is trying to tell them that there is a
parachute – a dead parachutist as a message. They have been waiting for adults to help them and they
got a dead soldier. Again, the man who saves them later is also a soldier. They are not saved at all.
They return to destructiveness of civilization.
First, they are afraid of nature, and then they become the hunters of the beast. Freud:
projection of Thanatos. We have the death instinct and instead of finding a way to deal with this
instinct, we project it on others.
#6, pp 172-175 At last Ralph stopped … We left early. They have all participated in the
murder of Simon. We do not know who actually used the stick, but they all shared the responsibility.
Ralph is the only one who takes the responsibility, but Piggy is not ready to even say the word murder.
Piggy looks for some kind of justification – it was dark, he could not see, Simon asked for it…
Ransom uses the term Platonic impulse = Piggy is trying to find excuses for what they have done.
Ralph here accepts his shadowy part, the evil in him. he feels responsible, he does not run away from
responsibility. Piggy does not have enough moral courage.
Sam and Eric and their reaction to what happened. They also try to avoid responsibility for
what happened. They all have compulsory physical movements: looking at the toes, finger on the
forehead, split lips. They all have wounds they received in the dance – physical evidence that they
were a part of it. They say they left early, none of them mentions the dance; they suppress the memory
of it and the feeling of guilt and responsibility also.
#7, pp 222/223 Nobody killed … cruiser in the distance. The officer comforts himself
by looking at the warship. It is a symbol of civilization. When he talks to the children, one of them
comes out and tries to say his name. It is the little boy, Percival. His parents taught him to say his
name and last name when he gets lost and someone will take him home. He repeats it all the time, but
the identity that the civilization gave him is of no use on the island and he forgets it as the time goes
by. Now, he cannot remember his name.
The officer asks who is in charge. Ralph answers, although it was Jack who was in charge.
Ralph now takes responsibility. He has grown consciously and spiritually unlike Jack, who steps
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forward and changes his mind. He is not ready to take the responsibility although he is the one who is
the most responsible.
The officer says I should have thought … He believes in the superiority of the British culture,
but we see that he is wrong.
Coral Island – a book for teenagers. It is about a group of boys on an island that creates a
copy of civilization. Evil is completely externalized. Pirates are the ones that are bad and they defeat
the pirates. They are good British boys. Here, evil is in them and cannot be defeated.
The darkness of man‟s heart – an allusion and at the same time homage to Conrad.
It is a very ironic rescue. They are saved by a soldier. The background of the book – war,
civilization is destructive and the boys simply repeat the pattern.

Romancing the Shadow by C. Zweig and S. Wolfe – not for the exam

The book Life and Times of Michael K deals with two concepts of time: mythical and
historical. Everyone else lives in civilization (at war), whereas Michael leaves it and goes to nature. He
lives as a gardener and learns to listen to his bodily rhythm and cycles.
Two types of time are mentioned in this passage: Chronos – Father Time – his father was a
watchmaker, his whole daily life was subdued to this. He never managed to conquer time. The whole
life was structured by the concept of time and time is seen as enemy. People who live under the sway
of this see time as their enemy. Robinson Crusoe could not forget time even at the island – he saw it
as his enemy and life there as in prison.
The other type of time is Demeter Time. It is cyclical, time of reason. It is important to learn to
listen to the natural rhythm of our body. Organic time – one observes both nature and his own inner
nature and obeys their rhythm of his body. Time becomes his ally. He does not thing about passage of
time. The boy was forced to play football and the body does not want to accept the uniform movement
– the mind is like a tyrant. The body rebels and breaks his limbs. Historically, people rebelled against
he tyrant. Her, the body rebels against something unnatural, an unnatural rhythm.

Life and Times of Michael K by John Michael Coetzee

#1, pp 149/150 His heart was pounding … that was why. They are fighting for some
just cause and he wants to give them food. He is attracted to them. He used to be in some camps and it
was interesting to him to listen to the stories of war, about fighting and victories. It is a sort of
masculine heroism – fit in patriarchal tradition. They are within history, a part of the destructive
pattern, although they are fighting fort the just cause unlike K. he finally decides not to join them.
Cord – between mother earth and her children – umbilical cord. Gardening here stands for a creative
attitude to life. The other people are at war and they want to destroy.
Those fighters and their inner being – they will grow hard and insensitive. There has to be
somebody who is to preserve the tender, vulnerable, sensitive part of our being and that is what K
preserves.
#2, pp 155/156 Then came the evening … one by one. K cuts the first pumpkin. He
treats it as a child and says a prayer. It is a kind of ritual. He creates his own religion and mythology.
He is retarded and has no sense of philosophy, but he manages to create a myth. Mythological
tradition that he relates to is matriarchal, not patriarchal. He prays to the Mother Earth. Sensual
pleasure = eating food. He also feels thankfulness and gratitude. He feels joy. His whole being is
involved in this ritual. It is not just a mental prayer. He is truly happy.
#3, pp 157-159 He did not know … lizard under a stone. K’s attitude to time. He keeps
no record of time. His concept of time is Demeter Time. He is not a prisoner of time. He observes the
rhythm of his body. The sense that we most often use – our eyes and we neglect all other senses.
However, he develops all of them. He has revived the part of himself that was neglected.
The trace of the other time are only the whistle of the jet-fighters – Chronos – historical time.
#4, pp 205/206 And, if I may be personal … by the taste of manna. Michael’s doctor
is talking to him. He addresses him Michaels, which is a last name, which suggests that the doctor is
subconsciously trying to fit Michael in the patriarchal tradition. The only part of the goddess that
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patriarchal culture sees is destructive. The archetype inspired Michael’s creativity and he does not see
that. Doctor guesses about Michael’s food. Manna – when Moses took the Jews out of the desert, God
sent them manna. It is the food that God gives you. This may be true for Michael. His pumpkins are
similar to manna. Pumpkin is food of the goddess, given to him by the Goddess Earth. The way he
performed gardening was like a ritual, a sacred duty. As a gardener, he also expressed piety towards
Mother Earth; he was creating relationship to the Goddess Earth.
#5, pp 207/8 If you will not compromise … sand does. The doctor sees Michael as the
last of his kind, he sees him the original soul untouched by history, doctrine. That is why he is saved.
He is not spoilt by education. He was not brainwashed by structures. All the concepts of the modern
civilization could not stick to him, our civilization is pathological and rational. It lays stress on
rationality and leaves the other parts undeveloped. He managed to escape the Platonic concept that
did not influence his mind. Michael is out of history. He is like an archaic man, he is the preserved
form. He appreciates him as the original archaic soul.
#6, p 223-225 READ It is about the rebellion of the body. The body rejects the food that is
imposed by the mind.
#7, pp 227/228 At this moment … only you know the way. The doctor imagines that
he escaped with Michael. First, there was an imaginary letter and now an imaginary conversation.
This suggests that the communication between the man living in historical time oppressed by culture
and the man living in the mythical time is impossible. There is a wall between those who live outside
history and those who live in the history. The doctor uses sophisticated language. He is trying to
escape history; he is conditioned by civilization. Michael exists in the system, but he could not be
explained by some Platonic system. The same is present in Father – he tried to fit his wife into the
structure but could not. Garden produces the food of life. he does not see K’s garden as giving physical
existence. It is a state of mind. Camps symbolize restraint, social structures. Garden is related to K’s
mythological identity. There is no road by which you get to the garden. The quest is spiritual. Michael
knows the way and the doctor sees him as someone who can show him the way.
#8, pp 248-250 Now they have camps … one can live. This civilization managed to put
people into camps. There are categories of people and the only way to survive is not to see yourself as
belonging to these categories. How many people are there left… There are people who are locked up
and those standing at the gate, who are in a way prisoners, part of structure. The same thing is present
in Owners. If you are a guard, you are still a part of the system. (Master and slave – Waiting for
Godot). There is time for everything, since he lives in accordance with nature. Michael is not
intelligent, he is retarded, but comes to this conclusion. He strikes us as a wise man. Wisdom is here
opposed to intelligence. It is intuitive intelligence. The man disregarding the curfew – an outsider who
is not a part of the structure. K would share a bed with him. The man is looking for a guide who knows
the road. He is looking for somebody who will lead another life. K is a spiritual guide. K has the
fantasy of the contact with patriarchal civilization. He sees the old man as a father figure to whom he
will show the way. He needs a teaspoon. We only need the minimal amount of things. It may also
suggest we should not take much from nature, but should take minimum in order to survive. Getting
in touch with the depths of your being. There is the rubble in the pool; we have to get through the
surface levels to get in touch with the deepest selves of our beings.

P23 – Dusklands by John Michael Coetzee

The name of the main character is symbolical – Eugene Dawn. Something dawned not only
to him, but on the whole nation. He is a man of a new age. Coetzee is trying to warn us against some
new dangerous tendencies that are dawning represented by this character. This principle that Michael
K represents had to be coped with, whereas Eugene Dawn stands for the destruction of the Goddess
Earth and some new principles. He here explicitly mentions Athena (meaning the father’s). Eugene
suggests replacing the old, maternal principle with this new one, Athena, who is the product of her
father and calls here techne = the goddess of technology. We no longer need nature.
Throughout the book, we have instances of his being at war with his body, his wife, nature and
Vietnamese, who are the representatives of the old myth.
#1, pp 7/8 The lights of Harry S. Truman … reproductive ducts. The first paragraph
is about his body and the second about his wife. Eugene Dawn is opposed to this maternal principle:
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instincts, bodily urges. Woman also stands for nature – biologically closer to natural being, to what
Eugene feels animosity to. He works on this library. He is specialized in war psychology. The library is
a part of the civilization that he supports. He enjoys this totally artificial world. However, something
torments him and he cannot enjoy completely. His body betrays him. The pain of his body is depicted.
Body rebels against what he is doing and against his lifestyle. It does not allow him to enjoy the
excursions of his spirit. It is like a gigantic starfish clutching his body.
He also complains about his marriage. The most problematic segment of their life is sex life.
they tried reading a marriage manual, but they realized that the bliss the book suggests has eluded
them they do not have this spontaneity in them, they have to learn it in a rational way, thorough the
book when he is abut to have an orgasm he does not feel tat she is accepting him. She is retreating,
betraying him. He has a feeling of emptiness. There is no communion and no communication. The
word that flashes to him at that moment is evacuation = retreating, emptying, instead of ejaculation.
Mr. Smith and Catherine have a similar attitude. In 1984, she withdraws; there is no real
communication with the feminine.
#2, pp 17/18 These poisoned bodies … out of pity. Coetzee tries to give an
anthropological explanation for the destructiveness of Vietnam – Vietnam is used as a sort of
purgatory from feminine principle and similar. There is hope that they will not destroy the Vietnamese
and that they will not die, they will not suffer but prove immortal. The white people have for centuries
been in the course of colonization. It is an individual ego of Western man who is separated form the
totality of life. There is a tendency in humans to destroy everything that is Not I, and that was the
original idea of colonization – destructiveness. In the 20th century, Eugene Dawn stands for the final
stage of the development of isolated mind and ego. If everything you touch perishes, there is a final
fear that not even such a mind exists. Everything you touch is subject to destruction. The isolated ego
of man has gone crazy and man came to conclusion that he himself does not exist. Now the mind
seems to reach for transcendence. You became afraid of your isolation because in it nothing seems
real, so you try to reach out, to transcend your ego. Eugene and the others do it again by destruction.
They brought with them weapons. Western man longs for something that cannot be destroyed,
something outside him that he can rely on, something he will not be able to destroy in order to
confirm his own existence. Seamus Heaney – Wall – not even the wall was not strong enough. The
thing that could not be destroyed used to be nature, but contact to nature has been lost. The only way
Western man communicates with the others is destruction. That is why they would want the
Vietnamese to be immortal, that is indestructible = a tragic reach for transcendence – the final stage
of the isolation of ego.
#3, p 25 In popular … fraternal order. + The myth of rebellion … the man of
future paradise. Vietnamese myth: mother, father and conspiracy of overthrowing of father done in
cycles and the whole process repeats. Both principles are present and equal. It is important that
mother must never be destroyed. She always remains there. There is a balance between the two
principles. Eugene Dawn suggests as a counter tactic: mother is no more a divinity, she is devoured.
She is replaced by a woman without feminine part. Athena means her father‟s – parthenogene – born
from his head. This female deity is a product of the masculine principle. The rebellion of the
Vietnamese is successful because of the myth. They have this unconscious fidelity to the old myth.
This myth gives them strength. Here father is not omnipotent. The strategy that Eugene suggests for
winning the war: their myth has to be changed. They are physically destroying Mother Earth. Where
there is no landscape to support their myth, they would feel isolated and will turn to the other myth –
the rational one. If you lose your identity, you become immortal (just like in 1984). It is a totalitarian
idea. You become completely obedient to the father. The way in which colonization is done is
psychological – replacing one myth with another. Royal Hunt of the Sun – Incas worshipped the
sun, Cloud 9, Joshua’s goddess… The same idea – the tree – the original myth, the new myth – the
new god of sun. Hercules and Antaeus. One myth is replaced by another.
#4, p 30 When I was a boy … taking place. His knowledge is not used for good
purposes. His experience is completely opposed to Michael K’s. He likes the encyclopedia. He believes
in the alphabetical order of the universe. What lacks is contact with nature. An image of a person
trapped in his own mind is present. There is also a sense of sterility. Plants grow out of earth and he
out of books. His life nowadays is compared to Crystal life. The Crystals he grew were in endless space.
Now the space is in his head. It is a sealed, endless world in which ideas grow. However, the ideas are
distorted because of this isolated space. He ruins his body by this way of life – reading encyclopedia.
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 #5, pp 42/43 Put it down … of the haft. He feels that his wife is not bringing the child up
properly and he decides to take the child away – just like the Vietnamese are taken away from their
Mother Earth – solely for the father. His consciousness has narrowed. He wants to kill his own son
with a fruit knife. His son is the fruit and he wants to cut off the fruit from its root. It is a destructive
act. He is totally detached from emotions. Widgeon by Seamus Heaney – when he killed the bird,
he killed himself. He heard his own scream.
Eugene Dawn is the last stage in the evolution of the process.
#6, pp 78/79 I meditated and perhaps … ? He has strange meditations. In reality, he has
fever and diarrhea. During the time, his mind is floating. First, he talks about dreams. He
contemplates the meaning of dreams as opposed to the real world. He is not sure whether he is in a
dream. He wonders whether this journey to this tribe was a dream, whether the whole life was a
dream. He imagines waking up. If he woke up he would be alone in this universe. It is a rational,
egotistic way of life – isolation, loneliness. The same feeling of unreality haunts both characters. First,
he talks about the experience of his senses and he is afraid of wilderness because he loses his sense of
boundaries. Four senses fail him and the only sense left is sight. That suggests that he does not
communicate with nature, with his senses. He uses just his sight, which is typical of Western
Civilization. Eyes enable us to distance and to remain detached, to have the feeling of separation and
objectivity. (Ted Hughes, Myth and Education – about this detachment.)
For him, all the reality is contained within his smell. He is afraid of the unreal. It is a
psychological phenomenon – to confirm the reality of the other and the only way to do it is by killing
it. He mentions all the animals he killed. It is the only way to confirm that he is alive. The second
phase: the only way in which he confirms his life is by turning living beings into objects. It is a
paranoid phase. The third phase: when he is shooting and wants things to survive.
If the rabbit is just an image of his, will it die? Death is the only way in which we can confirm
reality.
#7, p 106 How do I know that … in the hands of history. His explanation for
committing the massacre. They are all guilty. He has some vague idea about God. He says that he is an
explorer and is to open that which is closed, to bring light. The dark for us is what we do not know and
do not understand: the way they lived, their psychology. He had two options: kill them and skirt them;
however, that would be evasion; that would be failing to fulfill his mission, so he chooses to destroy
them. The Hottentots who became his servants were all detached from their culture. He sees them as
creations of his own mind. He re-created them. They are the reclaimed ones – converted. (Also,
Cloud 9 – Joshua, Conrad – the little boy; a young prisoner – Marlow says he is one of the
reclaimed. Royal Hunt – the boy mistranslating.) He could not prove himself as a master and thus
could not prove his existence.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Surfacing

- childhood farm: parents as guides

- the heroine prevented from becoming a mother
- north – away from destructive civilization
- ecological and emotional damage
- the virus of Americanism – friendly metal killers
- the dead heron – senseless destruction
- David: random samples; Anna: make up; geometric sex
- the problem in the neck: mind/body; surface/depth
- father: pacifist and botanist – gardens – beyond logic – how to see
- mother: drawings: how to act
- diving and surfacing; abortion: amputation of vital potential
- the heroine’s brother: a soldier/scientist – Hitler
- Kristeva: pre-Oedipal flow
- a God who is a verb
- Joe – atavistic traces – a man of silence

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 It is similar to Michael K. Both characters move to their childhood farm. It is a symbolical
removal from civilization. The heroine in Surfacing remembers that she had good parents and she,
on the farm, traces back some of her memories and some kind of legacy that her parents left her. Here
we have parents as guides. We find out that the heroine has lost her child. She had an affair with a
married man, got pregnant and he persuaded her to have an abortion. It is a sort of
cultural/anthropological issue in the book – the heroine was prevented from becoming a mother, from
fulfilling some kind of basic feminine role. There is a hint that what happens in civilization is the
destruction of the feminine, that the feminine is endangered. The movement in the novel is north. The
novel takes place in Canada – it is a movement away from the U.S.A. that becomes a symbol of
destructive civilization. She travels with her new boyfriend and another couple. She is looking at the
trees and she knows that the trees are dying – ecological damage – parallel the emotional damage
done to the heroine. The heroine calls this a virus of destructiveness that is spreading. It is a virus of
Americanism not confined only to U.S. citizens. It refers to the mode of living. She encounters a group
of Canadians who are also infected by this virus of Americanism. They smile all the time, are friendly
and talkative, but she sees that they have committed a totally senseless, meaningless killing. They
killed a heron (=čaplja) and hung it upside down. They turned a living being into a corpse. It is similar
to the motif in Dusklands. She calls them friendly metal killers, because they behave friendly. Metal
– they do not seem to have normal bodies, but seem to be made of metal. The dead heron becomes a
symbol of this senseless violence that is first directed towards animals, but it is implied that when we
become such towards animals, we become such towards human beings. The motif is connected with
the scene in which the heroine’s lover tells her it is OK to kill the fetus because it is still not a human,
but like an animal. It is here that the cruelty begins – when we lose feelings for animals, we become
insensitive to people, too. The couple traveling with the heroine and her boyfriend are David and
Anna. David is also infected with Americanism. However, he speaks politically against the U.S. All the
time he talks in American slang. His language is a line of political phrases, commonplaces. He sets out
on his journey with a camera and his idea is to make a movie called Random Samples. This suggests
that he cannot make a choice of images. He does not have a concept of his own that would enable him
to select. His relationship with Anna is superficial. He wants her to always appear as a chick and wear
make-up. Two people in love should transform, but David only wants false transformation - by means
of make-up. Sex has also become a meaningless act in their relationship. David calls this geometrical
sex, because Anna has cheated on him and spent a night with Joe, who now wants to be with the
heroine. There is a constant line of betrayal between the two of them.
The heroine does not remember the act of abortion. She suppressed it because she could not
live with this memory. She has a psychological problem that manifests as a sore throat. Symbolically,
the neck is a link between the head and the rest of the body. The neck also creates an illusion that the
head is separated from the body. She thinks about the fish – no separation between the head and the
body. It is neckless. It can also symbolize her inability to reach the depth of her inner being. It has
been blocked.
She reaches the farm where she lived as a child. She looks for guidelines that would help her
recover her wholeness. Her father was a scientist but a positive figure. He used science in the best
positive way – was a botanist. He used science to grow his own garden. He was also a pacifist, realist
and an atheist. Among his papers, the heroine discovers a number of Indian drawings. She concludes
that her father started a spiritual quest. At one moment, he seems to have reached the end of
knowledge. He could not use logic any more and had to go beyond logic. The, he started searching
Indian visionary tradition. A number of drawings appeared on the rocks. The first images in his
sketchbook were copies. Later on, he started creating some of his own. The Indians used these
drawings to mark places in nature – where in communion with nature it is possible to have a vision,
epiphany. Later on, he started having his own visions and started a visionary tradition. The heroine
starts following these drawings to see where they would lead her. They lead her to the shore of a lake.
It is illogical. She expects to find the next picture in the lake. But, what kind of colors are not washed
away by water. She dives into the lake to look for the drawing. At the bottom of the lake, she does not
find an Indian drawing but has a vision of her aborted child. She remembers what she has suppressed.
Symbolically, the act of diving is the act of reconnecting with the depths of one’s being – the deepest
levels of the psyche. The whole novel is called Surfacing, because surfacing would mean then
becoming whole again, the act of recovering wholeness. The abortion is symbolically also amputation
of our vital potential.
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 Just like her father told her how to see, her mother has told her how to act. Her mother has
simply preserved some old drawings that her father drew when she was a child. She looks at these
drawings and finds a drawing of God, Goddess, Sun and Moon. It is a complete balance, nothing is
separated. The woman has a transparent belly and there is a child inside. This shows to the heroine
how she should act. She wants to reconnect with this animal part of her being. For a short while, she
casts off her clothes, leaves the farm, goes into the woods and becomes like an animal: eats wild plants
and does not speak. She wants to get in touch with this pre-Oedipal phase – the phase that Julia
Kristeva, a theorists , calls the semiotic flow, in which we have not yet mastered the language, but
our communication wit the mother’s body is like a flow. Here, the heroine’s communication with the
mother nature becomes like a flow, a silent body language. She has a mystical experience in which she
first feels she leans against the tree, feels she is a tree and then she says she is a place. She recovers the
unity with nature. Participation mystique – mystical participation – when you feel you are
participating the life of nature. She says she is looking for a divinity who is not a noun but a verb.
Nouns are obstructions. They are fixed concepts. She feels that life is a process, something that always
flows, changes. Another thing she wants to do to recover the wholeness is become pregnant again. She
conceives a child with Hoe. She knows she will eventually have to go back to civilization with this new
knowledge and new attitude. When she returns to civilization she says she hoper her child, when
he/she is born, will be a complete human being. She will try to teach him/her wholeness. She also says
she decides never again to be a victim. She will not allow patriarchal civilization to victimize her again.
An important motif in the novel is the discussion of evil – where it comes from, what is its
source… She remembers that, when she was young, at the end of WWII, people had this naïve idea
that Hitler was destroyed. The evil is destroyed, but Hitler was just a symptom of evil. So, the evil
remains. She could also observe the traces of evil in her own brother. Her brother has completely
embraced the patriarchal civilization and its worse aspects. As a boy, he captured little animals and
kept them in jars to study them. He practiced cruelty. He was cruel and insensitive towards animals.
Later on, he became interested in military machines, toy guns… he was a proto scientist and a proto
soldier. Again, the suggestion of the link – first cruelty towards animals, and than towards human
beings.
Joe is a different character for whom there is hope. He seems to belong to a different species.
He is a man of silence – does not talk much. in the book, those who speak a lot have nothing smart to
say, they just use phrases and platonic justification for cruelty. Margaret Atwood appreciates silence as
a mute language, the language of the body. Atavistic traces – his whole body is hairy – he has not lost
the animal part. (Also, in St. Mawr – Lewis, Kurtz, Pozzo, Goldberg are bald.)

L16 – MICHAEL K, SURFACING, THE WHITE HOTEL, THE BLACK DOGS

- Michael K, Surfacing, The White Hotel, The Black Dogs – revival, recovery of the ancient
tradition
- refusal to participate in history engendered by Hercules’ victory
- war episodes – holocaust, unspecified war in U.K.
- peace time periods – destructive assumption pervading language we speak and contaminating
friendship
- human exchange becomes an act of spiritual usurpation
- Michael’s encounter with 3 tramps – symbolic emasculation
- Atwood’s heroine’s lover – friendly offer to arrange her abortion; she enters a conspiracy of
murderers; friendly metal killers – the killing of the heron
- David’s language – platitudes picked up from TV – he sums her growing moral awareness by a
phrase: man-hater
- Scientists – false friends too: predatory impulse
- Atwood’s heroine’s brother
- Bernard – the killing of the dragonfly; his politics part of the same logic: not brotherhood of man
but an efficient organization of man
- Doctor: Michael K – failure to understand and make himself understood by Michael; mother, a
factor of illness not health

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- Freud in The White Hotel – misinterprets his patients’ symptoms; associates her other
symptoms with mother in a negative way: she is petrified by the Medusa – the sight of mother’s
genitals
- Lisa’s own interpretation: the trauma caused by the forces whose agents are men
- the fantasy of The White Hotel – memory of the first love, yet also a desire for the extinction of
consciousness, nirvana – death, orgasm – la petite mort
- Lisa dies and survives in the manner predicted by her hallucinations
- No water can quench love nor floods drown it. – The Song of Solomon, the Bible
- The end: in keeping with pagan tradition and with Jung’s mysticism rather than Freud’s
rationalism
- paradise – return to the mother
- death – an emigration, June – another emigrant
- L’s mother: Whenever there is love, there is hope.

All these novels are about the revival of the Antaen tradition in our minds. The characters
refuse to take part in the Hercules’ history- imperial colonialism, and excessive rationalism. These
characters are emigrants from this history. Lisa, heroine of Surfacing, keeps a journal which is
internal into a form of mind of Antaen tradition. Michael is mentally retarded, and Lisa is mentally
disturbed, she suffers from amnesia. All this happens in a man- made world, and these people are
trying to escape it. Some return to it. June goes to a farm in France, and Lisa returns to history, and is
killed by it. Lisa confronts the history not as a victim, but as a fighter for a better future for her child.
War- The Sleeping Carriage- Babiar, a place where one of the most horrible massacre of the Jews, and
Gypsies took place. Holocaust is mentioned in The Black Dogs, Michael K. it is a racial war. In
Surfacing Hitler is mentioned. How can we understand the nature of evil? Now he is dead, and evil
continues. Are the Americans perhaps worse than Hitler? Even in peacetime this is evident- heron, a
bird is killed, which means that the same tendencies are operative in peacetime periods. The less
visible symptoms of destructiveness are to be shown by these books. In St. Mawr they all seem to be
wearing gloves, in a way they want to undermine (in the seemingly ordinary language there are inbuilt
predatory impulses, spiritual usurpation) an act of control, possession. In Michael K. there are three
tramps who want to help him, but symbolically they emasculate him, because they take his seeds. They
strip him of the creative potentials, and in return, they offer him alcohol and sex. In return, they want
him to tell them the story of his life told as if he were a victim. The same is seen in the friendly offer in
Surfacing to arrange for abortion. Michael, and she are prevented from being creative. The fetus is a
nothing. She enters a conspiracy of murder by allowing them to take the baby out of her. She becomes
sick; she fights to the end to transform herself from a murderer into a creator, life- giver. When they
kill heron, which revealed the underlying evil, we see that she is unique, because she is the only one
who sees evil in that act. This leads to hatred not of men, but of people infected by Americanism, who
worship death.
David, her friend thinks that to be a man-hater is easily contained. He can hatred, but he
cannot stand love. He reduces her rebellion as being a lesbian, and a man- hater. He is undermining
her, and wants to seduce her into a love affair with him.
Black Dogs and The White Hotel depict scientists as false friends. The language of the
doctors is such that even when they want to help they fail. In Surfacing her father is a rationalist in
its best, yet that too is limiting. You have to cross the border of logic, and enter a field of visions.
Nietzsche- nauka ce da se razvija do tog trenutka dok naucnik nece gledati u stvari koje su
neobjasnjive, and then he will abolish himself, and exchange it for a vision, a myth. Another scientist
is her brother who is not a benevolent scientist, because his scientific uniqueness led him to kill small
creatures. He went to America, and became successful. One should live without imitating them, and
should criticize them. This episode can be related to the episode in Black Dogs- a married couple
estranged from each other for life, they ask what is evil. She is a mystic, a visionary. Her husband is a
scientist, and a politician. Bernard studies insects, is an entomologist. There is an episode when she is
pregnant, and he sees a particularly beautiful specimen of dragonfly, and he goes to catch it. She is
appalled, because his desire to know about animals has nothing human in it. He is arrogant,
unemotional. He treats her as a part in his collection of dead things. He is a politician and what
motivates him is not the brotherhood of men, but ordering of man. He hates untidiness. He used to be

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a socialist but in fact, he loathes them, he simply wants to control. Yet there is something in it, which
is extremely banal.
Scientists as false friends appear in Michael K. and White Hotel. In Michael K. his doctor has
all the benevolence, but cannot help him. What is responsible for his inability to understand is his
misunderstanding of the role of mother. She is leading him into new life. The same limitation is
displayed by fictional Freud. Partially he understands, but at a crucial moment he misinterprets, and
relates mother to death not to life. In Surfacing we have flashbacks but from the consciousness of the
narrator. The White Hotel has much more demanding form; there are 5 chapters all of which are
written with different technique, and points of view. The novel is much more appropriately
interpreted by Jungian theory. There is a poem of one of his patients, then a prose narrative, his fictive
Freud. Then there is another chapter where Freud’s technique is questioned. The last chapter is a
complete mixture. There are light motifs- images and symbols, which require new interpretations, so
there is always a new effort at understanding the book- black cat, milk, blood, an orange, whale?,
corset, rose, swan. Forma muzickog kontrapunkta. Lisa’s symptoms are easy to misinterpret. A young
woman refuses to eat anything except oranges, hallucinates- flood, fire, falling from great heights,
being buried alive. In the poem one hallucination is the white hotel- the lake, the mountain. All this is
called pornographic; the white hotel is a place where love is without seams, the place of selfishlesness.
The scenes of lovemaking are interspersed by the catastrophes- flood, fire, a fall from a great height,
buried people, blood, sperm, milk- she begins to lactate, and the guests drink her milk. He interprets
sex in terms of what it once was. Freud’s task is to interpret the white hotel, which he relates to
everything related to the mother, and a desire for death. Partly he is right; it is a desire to achieve the
oceanic oneness with our mothers when we were babies. Desire for extinction of consciousness- mora
da se potisne cak i secanje na matrijahalni period da bi kultura bila zdrava isto i ontoloski. Neurotici
ne mogu da zaborave taj blazen period. Love is just a masochistic desire for death, in orgasm we obey
the Thanatos. Eros u sustini sluzi Tanatosu. All instances of visions in which the ego dissolves, those
are moments of mystic unity. We die as the Ego, but we are reborn refreshed, new. Her pains are
organic, stem from a sexual trauma in her childhood. It was a scene when she witnessed her mother,
uncle and aunt in a sexual act. Since then she could not resolve her Oedipal complex. She identified
her mother with the Medusa, so the one who loves her turns to stone. Za Frojda Meduza su majčine
genitalije, and concealed homosexuality is developed. Her fear of pregnancy, she wants a child by her
friend.
In the next chapter, Lisa marries an opera singer. She meditates on love, but her mates
petrified her, probably because she was abused by sailors as a very young girl in 1905. This triggers in
her a precognition that she would die in the same disaster. Ever since then she concealed the fact that
she was half-Jewish. She induced her own miscarriage, because she saw that her child would be
destroyed by the same forces. She married a man who was anti- Semite. She was fleeing from
motherhood, and her Jewish origin. To accept precognition would require somebody like Jung not
Freud.
In the Sleeping Carriage, she dies in the way her hallucinations predict, she dies because she
was Jew. She adopted Victor’s son- Kolja and the only thing she can do is die with him. They go to the
Promised Land full with oranges. Oranges predict Paradise. They take off her corset- korset je za
žensko telo isto sto i dogma za dušu. Oslobađanje od katoličke I Frojdove dogme. In Odessa she was
raped, here she is discovered by two Ukraine soldiers, and a German officer- they rape her with the
bayonet, and that is how they kill her. They cut off her left breast, and they kick her on the left ovary.
Kurten- man murderer- zaklao je labuda- boginja Kibela. Mi zaista živimo u kulturi ukojoj Eros zaista
služi Tanatosu. Eros serves life, and love. Kurten’s killing can be interpreted as collective madness.
The song of Solomon no waters can quench love, nor floods drown it - the only sentence in Hebrew
that she knows. We see how life triumphs. The bodies form biological layer, and this has nothing to do
with the soul.
Lisa decides to remain human not alive. As long as this exists, there is hope for us. We meet all
those people in life after death- paradise, but not a Christian one. The place is very mobile, and earthly
wounds are healing. She gives herself her mother’s maiden name, and with it, she is back into
matriarchal tradition. There is a stream of life; mother and daughter feed each other. The last
emigrant appears, it is the cat Vaska, who was nursing five kittens, yet she was sterilized, and the
father was unknown. It is intertwined with Christian miracle of Resurrection. Emans Christ together
with two of his disciples goes to Emans, and we know that Christian is the resurrection of the soul, not
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of the body. A silhouette of a cat on the screen was much more entertaining than Christian
Resurrection. Miracle of Christian Resurrection was superimposed by different pagan miracle-
creativity. The necessity of combining the two religions – Jung- nadlično preživljavanje smrti, and for
Freud the end was disappearance of a person which intermingles with the inanimate- sudbina I
nužnost. There is no transcending death; for Jung transcendentalist’s function is to exist in the space
and time, which are eternal. She was standing by the lake, and smelled a fur tree, and had a vision da
je dete od pre 40 god. sa njom. Looking back with the source of creation, she saw herself, looking
forward she saw herself standing beyond death- Pagan paradise.

P24 – Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

#1, p 598 But they’d killed the heron anyway … ? They do not come from America but
they behave as Americans do. They have the destructive attitude to animals, nature and all living
things. She compares it to SF movies. The difference shows in the eyes – eyes are the mirror of the
soul. The egg as well. Evil is not somewhere else, but in us. Hitler is seen as the origin of all evil. He
was an externalization of evil. But it was not so. He was gone, but the evil remained. He was just a
symptom. Friendly metal killers – they act friendly, mental – because they have no soul. Only
animals and enemies can be killed. If you say food instead of animals, you are already detached from
the act itself; enemy is a dehumanizing concept. We simplify reality by translating it into different
concept – Platonic impulse. She recalls a legend of a King who learned to speak with animals. They
told him accusations and laments. Hitler was considered evil and then all Germans are considered
evil, some feel guilty because of what was done in the past. She feels guilty being human because of
what people do to nature and to one another. The killing of the heron was causeless; there is no
justification unlike with war. Her brother used to keep animals in jars. He was trying to be a scientist.
She set the animals free. Next time, she did not save the animals because she was afraid. Her baby was
killed because of her fear. She succumbed to the pressure. She allowed to be a victim. At the end of the
novel, she decides never to be a victim again. Her brother also enjoyed weapons, tanks, soldiers. He
was a proto-scientist and a proto-soldier. Children are given toys to accept the world of the adults
unquestionably.
#2, pp 607-610 I was there but it wasn’t a painting … and a Greek sun. She dived
into the lake. She followed the map her father drew. He marked the places where the Indian
pictographs were. In the lake, she had a vision. She saw her aborted child. To dive into the lake means
to dive into one’s subconsciousness in order to become whole again. Her brother did not drown ? In
The Lady from the Sea). He did not dive into the subconscious. There is no clear barrier between
killing an animal and a human. Water – archetypal female symbol. Grail – the goal of the quest. The
blood of Christ was gathered in it; the grail symbolizes eternal life. here it is ironic. She connects it to
the animals her brother killed. She tried to suppress the memory first. She started wearing a ring as if
she were married. It was as if she were living a different life, a paper life. I could have said no – she
feels guilty of being an accomplice. Instead of carrying a child, she felt as if she was carrying a cyst,
death.
Her father was following the Indian, pagan gods. The Indian people mark places in nature
where you can have a vision. They connect external and internal nature. Her father was a scientist, a
rationalist. He was not religious at all. He could no longer define things and he entered the pagan
tradition after the failure of logic. Her mother preserved some of her own paintings when she was a
child.
#3, pp 620/1 I went into the other room … how to act. She picks up the scrapbook
because it is heavier and warmer. She uses her sense of touch. Sight enables us to detach from the
object. (Dusklands) The painting is of a woman with a baby in her stomach and a man. It represents
wholeness, a union. Her stomach is related to the Moon. The union of the feminine and the masculine
principle. When she was a child, she believed in complete harmony of human, animal and divine. Your
human nature does not divide you from the animal part. (Alan in Equus)
In order to reach these gods, she needs to be transformed and she needs to reach other
language. The language of the rational culture is the language of the pagan tradition. (Images appeal
to your whole being, are not like concepts, ideas and abstractions.) David and Anna are playing a game

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of solitaire. There is no true communication. Joe does not talk much and the heroin thinks that it is
good for him; he is closer to the intuitive knowledge. The others are already turning to mental.
#4, p 637 Slowly, I retrace the trail … I am a tree leaning. It is the moment when she
feels one with the nature. There is no separation between the tree and a human being. She feels
transparent. There are no straight division lines or boundaries. She sees what is outside and inside.
Everything is made of water even rocks. - There is a sort of flow, the rhythm of nature. There are no
nouns, only verbs. – She cannot name things. Verbs can describe the flow, movement, process. It is
the pre-Oedipal phase, semiotic flow. (Colin Falck: Myth, Truth and Literature.) The origin of
human being was in dancing. When we talk it is still not completely abstract. We use our body, we
move, we send a message wit our body, jut like separate voices. Jung talked about mystical
participation – the feeling of oneness with nature. The tree is the symbol of immortality in pagan
tradition. Jung: causality and synchronicity – the other dimension of time. The things exist
simultaneously. Lisa is able to connect with other being. (The tree in Waiting for Godot.)
#5, pp 644/645 This above all I refuse to be a victim … asking and giving
nothing. By her passivity, she allows others to commit destructive deeds. Joe has a potential to
develop. She realizes she cannot live in nature, she has to return to the culture. We have to restore our
lives with knowledge. She carries a new baby from nature. The baby goes through its watery changes.
Joe stands on the dock; the dock is međuprostor, he is still half-formed.

P25 – The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas

The book opens with a quarrel between Jung and Freud. The book is homage to Jungian
theory. White Hotel stands for love with out sin, selfishness, plenty of pleasure. There are units? of
death and destruction. The White Hotel is a sort of unfallen world, Eden, the world before time and
history. Freud believes in biological paradise. The feeling of bliss is when the child is in mother’s
womb or sucking at her breast. Infants feel oneness with the mother’s body. Thanatos – longing for
death: we long for Thantos because we cannot return to the oceanic oneness. There is libido, the desire
to live and find other objects of pleasure. Jung, on the other hand, is mystical, unlike Freud, who is a
rationalist. We start from ego – isolated individual. The goal that we strive for is for ego to become an
individual. The process is individuation. We have to recover our wholeness, to gain understanding of
ourselves, to transcend our loneliness by experiencing a kind of feeling of oneness with the rest of
creation, nature. The feeling of becoming one with the rest of creation is represented in the concept of
Anima Mundi = the Soul of the World. There is a need to transcend one’s selfishness, isolation and
become one with the Soul of the World. For Freud, there is only biological mother; for Jung, there is
a mystical concept of the Soul of the World to which we can return. For Jung, return to mother is
possible at the mystical, spiritual level. Lisa transcends her ego and joins Anima Mundi.
#1, pp 105/106 There is no joking … the doomed hotel. Gea – Mother Earth. Lisa is
attempting to become the great mother – when she is breastfeeding all people – not only sexual love,
but also maternal love. Love is a homesickness – man is trying to return to that state of oneness,
original bliss – baby in the womb or sucking at mother’s breast. The whole concept of the White Hotel
is important – how to identify which part of the Hotel stands for which part of a body. She comes
without any cultural burdened: suitcase, toothbrush. Father’s law: you must not direct your love
towards mother – Oedipus complex. The feeling in White Hotel is orgiastic, Anna G. and lover, a
widow, a cook, somebody looking at them from the balcony. Love without seems. Lisa feels pain in her
left breath and left ovary. She suffers from anorexia; she wants only to eat oranges. The last scene
when she and her mother are breastfeeding each other – her mother’s breasts are orange. The black
cat survives everything; it appears in paradise at the end with kittens – indestructibility of life, nature,
life-giving principle. However, White Hotel has another element, that of destructiveness – in every life
there is death and there should be death in order to be life. Accepting death as something normal, as a
cyclic, pagan concept. The prevalent view of death today includes fear of death, so we project death on
others. In this novel, death is projected on the Jews – WWII. We can start by creative acceptance of
death – from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. – Instead of thinking about death as
something imposed on us, we can die willingly out of love: she does not project death upon others, but
sacrifices herself, dies willingly out of love. She transcends her isolated ego and joins Anima Mundi.

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#2, p 116 Strange also … le petite mort. There is a compulsion to relive the unpleasant tha had
happened in the past. Lisa’s neurosis was a consequence of her mother’s incestuous relationship with
her uncle, of the scene from the childhood. She was threatened by men in her life, her anti-Semitic
husband, a Russian terrorist, the sailors. For Freud, the repetition is Thanatos at work – like children
building towers and then destroying them. To return to the inorganic state. Even at the moment of
greatest pleasure, we experience Thanatos – la petite mort - the moment when we have no
consciousness of ourselves. These two instincts are juxtaposed. For Jung, it is just the death of the
isolated ego. In pagan communities, it was a mystical feeling o union with something larger than
oneself.
Eros: 1. maternal tenderness, 2. mystical experience of union, 3. physical pleasure – sexual
gratification. Lisa longs for love in which these three elements would be joined. These elements have
been separated in the patriarchal culture. Tenderness = Christ. The element of mystical experience is
denied.
#3, p 158 An event from a long way away … would not awake. It is a projection of
Thanatos. Kurten killed women and children. He is a necrophil, as well – Eros , but perverted. Eros is
in the service of death instinct. Her received love letters from women when he was caught. The other
moment is when the soldiers rapes her with his bajonet. Everybody talks about whether Kurten should
be killed, everybody feels passionately and self-righteously. Just like Hitler in Surfacing - People
project their guilt on him. Shadow projection – we deny any guilt and everything in us that is negative
is projected on the other. Kurten had a horrible childhood- his father was a psychopathic alcoholic, he
was sexually abused. Lisa feels compassion for him. She cried. She has understanding for everybody –
altruistic love for human kind. She is also able to feel mercy, compassion for everybody. She cannot
feel good being Lisa, when there is somebody who had to be Kurten. Maria Halm is one of his victims
and Lisa identifies with her. She feels related to all other human beings in the world. She has dreams
about what is going to happen – WWII. Lisa realizes that it is universal problem. When Hitler was
killed, the evil and destructiveness remained. Kurten drinks blood of his victims. One night he killed a
swan/heron. (In a dream, the only way to survive is to turn into a tree. When Apollo fell in love with
Daphne, she asked gods to protect her and gods turned her into a tree. Priests used to chew lovor leaf,
which led them to the state of changed consciousness. lovor was used as a reward, put it was put on
heads, not chewed – the rational governs.) The killing of the swan/heron – if you kill a part of nature
you kill a part of yourself. It is a very direct projection of Thanatos. Kurten is a kind of premonition for
the killing of Jews – killing without justification.
#4, p 190 She had the feeling that she was no more … a pine tree. Her vision is
caused by the smell of a tree. Kolya is her stepson. She is afraid of getting pregnant. When she was
pregnant, she fell form the stairs. Assuming the role of a mother in this destructive world frightens
her. This is the first time she accepts responsibility of being a mother to a child. She realizes her
potential of being a mother. Surfacing – she will never allow herself to be a victim eh world is still
the same, destructive, she becomes a mother protecting her child. Her experience: she fells union with
the world and oneness is achieved. Originally, she was cut off from time, but the whole concept
changes. She can connect to herself as a child and herself in the future, beyond death. She transcends
her ego, she joins the world as a whole. Her individual death does not frighten her. Her vision is
related to the ability to have a child and sacrifice herself for him.
#5, p 235 They sat, resting their back. The cycles of nature are still valid. It is different
from Christian paradise where everything is still and unchangeable. It is a sort of pagan paradise.
Kurten appears in the paradise. He is now good. There is a hope for improvement. Lisa and her
mother are drinking each other’s milk. The sexual and maternal elements are unified – Eros as it was
supposed to be. Her mother and she are reconciled. Lisa saw her mother as a sinner. She was ashamed
of her mother. Christian God is a punisher. Oranges – the return of Eden

L17 - POETRY
According to Lewis, what distinguishes a poet is the fact that he is more alive, aware, than the
ordinary man. This allows him to question the reality. Why is the late Victorian poetry dead? Because
the poets, instead of confronting a problem, they withdrew into a dream world. This imaginary
landscape was defined by obsolete words, by clichés – pale rose, wild rose, pale moonlight. Instead of
waking the reader, those poems lulled the reader to sleep. This kind of poetry criticizes life. A poet
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should bring into his works his whole self- knowledge of history, their intelligence, late Victorian
poetry: 1) withdrawal into a dream world, 2) imaginary landscape – not city, urban life, and confront
problems of modern life. It would be a completely new diction, feel something which would remind
you of the inside combustion machinery.
T. S. Eliot & W. B. Yeats
Eliot is the first poet of demonic city. The imagery, the landscape of the city, but also who the
poetry was written for. It used to be consumed by a large middle class, but now it was intended for
intelligentsia. The poetry was difficult, and complex, it was meant to disturb by various means. There
was no logical or narrative sequentiality, no unity. Sharp, acute juxtaposition of things is used instead,
symbols coming from many traditions, and illusions of the poetry of old – for example Shakespeare.
He does not explain anything. Those metaphors and symbols juxtaposed come from various
mythologies in order to explain and interpret modern life – St. Mawr, The Death of Pan. For Eliot
historical sense will show us where we are on the scale of tradition (storijski smisao ce nam pokazati
gde se nalazimo na skali tradicije).
Yeats – paganism rooted on mythical tradition, ballades, stories, legends. Eliot was more of a
Christian.
W. Stevens defines what a task of a modern poet should be. ‘What will suffice’ is crucial. New
poetry will be wholly the product of the mind- like Hawkins on structuralism- mi sami konstruišemo
svoja značenja. We are the source of whatever meaning there is. Is it sufficient just to live from day to
day? Do we have to have a fiction of order? Merely to live is not enough. What was in the script? - a
familiar frame of reference, it drew on already existing symbols; imitative, not inventive. It is like a
stage, and a poet is an actor supposed to show the times, its own body and pressure, to interpret the
society, and community of the time. The script used is the old and the new testimony, the story that
supplied all metaphorical answers a poet could ask for. A spiritual map, a sense of orientation- people
look for a spiritual goal. But to supply man with destiny is not enough anymore- script became a ? It
has to bare the speech of changed circumstances of the time. There is a confrontation between men
and women of the time stripped of the conventional dogmas- in the Bible women were given an
inferior role. Wars are necessary for progress, but this explanation will no longer suffice the poet, he
must find a new explanation, a new stage, and an obsolete explanation is discarded, so the new one
must be supplied. The new actor, the poet was asked whether he would repeat any already existing
lines. No, he will utterly rely on himself, he will try to find words that will express his inner desires,
and he will coincide with the audience’s wishes. Ono što publika želi da prepozna u nekom delu jeste
ono što ce mu pomoći da on u sebi otkrije stvaralačku moć. Metaphysics in a part of our humanity,
answering such questions is left solely for the poets. The meaning, which will completely contain his
mind, which will not descend bellow the mind, beyond which it has no will to rise. Merely instinctual
existence is animal like. Nothing super-human or subhuman will depend on transcendental truths. We
have to clothe our metaphysical nakedness. Are there any preconceptions on what the subject of a
poem should be? No.
There is a similar idea, that of a childish prank. Is this a familiar script? Yes, it is a story of
creation, but this is the reconstruction of the myth. We recognize the setting, the Garden of Eden,
unanimated bodies of Adam and Eve. Biblically God breathed his divine spirit into men, and women.
According to Hughes, we live by something else. God simply went to sleep; the whole story is deflated.
Crow as an ill omen, here serpent is God’s only son- the crow lit it (the worm). Worm represents an
organ of fertility, phallus; but it also stands for decomposition, death. What is built into men and
women is Eros and Thanatos, this is what we live by. He simply drops God out of the picture, because
he went on sleeping. There is something laughable in this story. Biological drives make us alive, and
not the breath. In order to become fully human you have to re-mythologize. Compulsions are not
sufficient, if we have to deconstruct traditional myths, we must not stop there. We have to invent the
new mythologies, to take the very instincts by which we live. Ladders serve as a means for a man to
transcend his biological condition and achieve something of profound spiritual meaning.
Yeats ‘Coat’- human life is stripped from mythological explanation, and man is searching for
a way to explain life. With the advent of science, man has lost his faith in myths and lost his
imagination. We can no longer meditate between the inner being, and the other world. The
fragmented culture causes dissociation of sensibility. There were various kinds of splits, which
drove Yeats to search for integrity. I am a man, a bundle of fragments. I need a system of
interconnected things. Yeats searched in all philosophies. What was the split in Christianity? - man vs.
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woman; soul vs. body, yet in ancient philosophies there existed the connection. He tried to find justice
and physics in connection. Three wise men were trying to find a place where the new life will be found.
In ‘Magi’, we have the end of old law, and the beginning of the world redeemed by love.
Stevens- The story of Christianity is just a souvenir. Eliot and Yeats want to re-discover
some values from the old mythologies that are still valuable; they want to salvage what can be used.
Yeats ‘Magi’ (1681 or 1688) shows the pale, unsatisfied ones. There are three wise men,
whose faces look like stones, hoping to find Calvary-a word associated with Christ’s Crucifixion. ‘The
uncontrollable mystery born on the bestial floor’- the birth of Christ. It is a fact that the birth is bestial.
Was his death already included in his birth? Yes, calvary’s turbulence, this child carries some hidden
mystery in him. It was the biological fact that his death (an uncontrollable mystery) will usher in love.
A symbolic equivalent of what happens in the soul of every man when he realizes that love can
triumph over any biological compulsion. This recurrence of the event has not happened in the lives of
every man. It has to happen in every man’s house, but because it did not, their faces are turned to
stone. The fact that it happened only once is not enough, if it becomes just a historic event, it is no
longer life- inspiring. Toliko smo iscrpili taj mit da bi trebalo da nađemo novi mit po kome bismo
živeli, it would mean the renewal of the whole culture. But at this moment our civilization has not
been recreated, ni biološki, a ni renesansno. Magi is more capable of the wholeness, of the connection
between spiritual and physical world; whatever exists is permeated by the same thing. For Yeats-
‘There is a place where everything comes together’. ‘There’ is everywhere, but it also has a center
where you can encounter it. Every fresh start must spring out of violence. Yeats says that creation
demands violence, what is dead has to be excluded.
Eliot-‘Journey of the Magi’- one of them is the speaker, and expresses the hardships of the
journey. He is like a tourist, says this place was beautiful; here it was expensive, etc. Eliot’s Magi are
also the modern men who want to break through – the Magi seeking to see the birth of Christ.
Temperate valley stands for fertility. For Eliot, a wasteland is a metaphor for an empty human
heart, metaphor for city life. Three trees on the low sky coincide with the three crosses when Christ
was crucified together with two thieves. A white horse galloped away- from the Bible. Wine leaves –
wine stands for Christ’s blood. Roman soldiers gambled for Christ’s shirt, and Jude Iscariot sold Christ
for silver. There was no information- they see but they do not understand. Then the tone changes and
a question whether that road lead to birth or death was imposed.
Capitalized birth and death refers to Christ’s death. Witnessing the Christ’s birth was the bitter
and hard agony. The Magi have changed and cannot live any longer in the old dispensation. For them
the birth was a vision of mystery, not a threshold for a new life. They have seen the real thing, but
could not recreate it in their own lives. The unconscious few can recognize their fear of life, and what
is wrong with them, but they cannot change themselves. They witness a transformation and this
becomes a reproach for their own kind of life. Mrs. Dalloway sees a Christ-like figure, who dies
willingly in order to preserve his treasure, his vision of life as love. They saw life in death in Christ, and
Magi represent a contrast, they stand for death in life – da i mi umremo sada kad ne moženo da
živimo. The same is with Clarissa Dalloway, but she manages to forget that wish, and she finds
comfort in the fact that she is a perfect hostess.

P26 – W. B. YEATS

- Modern man has allowed his imagination to die. – Ted Hughes

- a sense of integrity, wholeness, a map: myth
- Yeats and fragmentalization – man/rest of creation; rational/irrational, reason/imagination
- man is a bundle of incoherent facts
- the biological fundamentalism not sufficient: archaic energies need to be redeemed by imagination
- Crazy Jane and Magi: experience available to everyone
- Sailing to Byzantium and Circus Animal’s Desertion: a poetic transformation of reality
- Lapis Lazuli and Second Coming: heroic acceptance of the destructive principle in nature
- to integrate one’s private experience into a mythical story – suffering is transcended by shifting the
energy to the act of creation – Countess Cathleen

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 Ted Hughes talks about archaic energies of instincts and feelings. The only way to
communicate with them is by means of myth and poetic imagination. The problem with modern man
is that he has allowed his imagination to die. There is no way of communicating with these energies
and they often burst out in chaotic and destructive forms. For this reason, a major project of modern
poetry has been to replace myth with the works of poetic imagination. We live in a demythologized
world but poets try to construct imaginative world in order to become able to communicate with the
archaic energies in us. What we need metaphysically is a sense of wholeness and a map of meaning,
something that would make the inner and outer experiences meaningful and related to each other.
Yeats also perceived this need for reintegration. Modern man is troubled by overall fragmentation.
There is a split between man and outer creation, reason and imagination. He sees man as a bundle of
incoherent facts. The experiences need to be interrelated and then relate them to the metaphysical in
order to get meaning.
Yeats’s poems contain antithetic ideas: in one poem, he shows a solution as a good and in the
other, he shows that it is not as good. Crazy Jane – she is an old woman. She displays her sensuality
very freely. Now, the Bishop tells her that she should renounce her nature and turn to ascetic,
Christian religion. However, she refuses to do so. She does not want to disown one part of her
experience. The pride of our ? is compatible with the dirty bodily urges. These things should not be
separate. Love has built its mania in the house of excrement. Yeats urges us not to forget their
biological aspect of our nature. Fair and foul are next of kin. As a sort of antithesis to this poem, there
is Magi. The three wise old men, they were to be at the Christ’s birth. Magi points out that the
biological fundamental is not enough. Jesus was born on the bestial floor- it is our basis. This is not
sufficient to give meaning to lives. This is not enough, we need more than that. We can be liberated
from it. The Magi in Yeats’s poem say they have witnessed a mystery on the bestial floor. His birth,
death and resurrection – an uncontrollable mystery. Freedom from biological is achieved. They saw
the ability to start from the biological fundamental and add a spiritual component to it. Yeats
expresses his belief that this can happen over and over again. The magi are dissatisfied with only one
mystery. They want us all to look for the deeper meaning in life. They believe such experience is
available to everyone. It must recur in every individual.
Sailing to Byzantium vs. Circus Animal Desertion. They are both about poetic
transformation of reality. In Sailing, the poet is an old man. All around him he sees sights
representing sensuality, youth, indulgence in biological life. However, he longs to transcend these
natural cycles and attain some form of immortality. Yeats believes that immortality can be reached
through the very act of creation. At the moment of creation we get separated from what is inside us
that needs to die. Byzantium is a symbol of the realm of art. Yeats admired it very much. Here, he
talks to the old artists of Byzantium – be the singing masters of his soul – to teach his soul to sing. By
becoming an artist, the poet hopes to transform his understanding of reality and his own transience
and death.
Circus Animal’s Desertion. This does not work. The poet tries to transform reality but he
loses his inspiration. These, Circus Animal’s Desertion, are his previous poems and they also
symbolize his inspiration. Once, the poet loses his inspiration, again he has to go back to the bestial
floor, to the archaic energies of instincts and feelings. His inspiration is like a ladder – beginning from
the floor – I have to go back to where all the ladders start.
Lapis Lazuli vs. Second Coming. Second Coming is an apocalyptic vision of total
disaster. It was written in 1920s. he felt that there was great turbulence in the world. In conventional
Christianity., second coming is the coming of Jesus, divine principle comes. What Yeats sees is some
horrible monster waking up in the desert. It has a body of a lion and a head of man – the split in our
nature, our archaic energies that we can no longer control. In this poem, Yeats has the vision of these
energies bursting out in a destructive form ruining a good deal of civilization as we know it. Lapis
Lazuli tries to reconcile us to this fact. If our civilization is nearing some sort of disaster, we should
try to accept it. It mentions many old civilizations that we destroyed in history, so that the new ones
could be built. On another level, it is also an attempt to reconcile with one’s death. The poem mentions
Shakespeare’s tragic heroes: King Lear, Hamlet. After their death, a kind of new, positive order
emerges. They accept their death stoically because it would be a kind of rebirth. Acceptance of the
destructive principle in nature (Lawrence – creation destroys as it goes). This principle Yeats has
acquired from the Chinese philosophy. Lapis Lazuli is a kind of a blue stone. It is a small Chinese work
of art. Some figures are carved. These are two old Chinamen and they climb up a hill – the process of
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life. There is a cherry tree in bloom, which is a sign of rebirth in nature. The poem ends by telling us
that their faces are happy. They feel content although they are old. There is another motif. He tries to
integrate his private experience into a longer, mythical story. If I can connect my personal suffering
with some longer mythical story, I will find in the myth a kind of explanation. Through the very act of
creating a poem, one’s personal suffering is transcended. Maud Gonne – Yeats’s great love. Countess
Cathleen – who woman who sells her own soul to the devil in order to save the souls of others.

Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats

Young people in one another’s arms – dying generation. They are all going to die. He observes
the totality of the biological life. Sensual music – they all neglect works of art. They are unageing – the
monuments of unageing intellect.
A tattered coat upon a stick - a scarecrow, nothing, that is what the old man reminds him of.
He rejects his heart and his creativity to learn him, to transcend the body, sensuality and learn the
trick of immortality, so that only creativity remains. But he can be redeemed if he can teach his soul to
sing, to be creative, then the old age does not matters. Byzantium – the realm of art.
He evokes sages to learn this art from here. Gyre – a main concept in Yeats. The old man are
above him on the spiral. Dying animal – his biological body that is going to die. Symbolically he wants
to be reborn as a work of art. He does not want pagan immortality. He wants to be beyond nature. He
wants to be transformed into a golden bird that resembles Byzantium art. Gold – precious and does
not change – it transcends the cycles of nature.
I will sing about past, present and future. The poet has transcended time but he does not want
to forget it. He will continue to sing about time although he has transcended it.

Circus Animals’ Desertion by W. B. Yeats

He lost his creativity and feels remorse and pity because he cannot transform events of his life
into art. He feels as if his animals have deserted him. Circus – not real.
Circus Animals symbolize his inspiration and old themes. He cannot write anything. He has to
be satisfied with his daily experience, with his heart – return to emotions – usually a starting point.
Oisin is an old Irish legend. Here he represents himself as Oisin. He feels bitterness about old
themes of his poetry. When he created them, he felt bitter. Oisin was in live with a fairy. It is a
metaphor for his own love - he was in love with Maud Gonne. He started with the pain of his own
love and then managed to console himself by connecting his own emotions and experience of love to
Oisin and his love with the myth.
He remembers to sources of his previous inspiration. Another theme of his poetry was
Countess Cathleen – symbolically Maud Gonne, very active politically and obsessed with hatred
towards the English. she sold her soul to the devil in myth and Maud did the same thing in politics.
However, he has a way to justify her. Cathleen saved her peasants doing that. He thought that these
politic fantasies destroy the soul, but through the myth, he forgives her and can love her again through
his creation - all his emotions were now transformed into the creation of a poem. The sufferings of his
life are turned into the beautiful dreams of his poetry. He transcends his own experience by
imagination.
Cuchulian – hero from Irish mythology. One should be aware of the past to live in the present.
The balance between reality and art for Yeats. Art makes reality hearable, through art one can
transcend the painful reality. However, he forgets the original feeling and experience from which art
generated and became enchanted by the dream/art itself. The dream itself enchanted me – dream –
his imagination. He creates a beautiful poem and it enchants him. He is no longer in love with the real
things but with the works of art. It is a sort of escapism.
Now, there is a return to reality. Basic human needs and trivialities can produce art. He used
his mind to create these imaged, but out of a chaotic world. Why trash? Because they resemble a pile
of garbage. Those are basic instincts, dirty, bodily every day experiences. That raving slut who keeps
the till (=neka luda žena koja radi na kasi) – his turbulent emotions, his soul. There are chaotic
feelings and emotions. Ladder – he does not have the ability to get up and he has to go back. Ladder –
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his imagination, his ability to transform dirt into beautiful art. He has to ? what the raw material of his
poetry is.

Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

He is not satisfied with the rational explanation of the world. He created his own system of
philosophy – society develops into gyres. Here, we are getting further and further away from the
center. At this point, when it is widest, the opposite gyre starts. When a certain cycle reaches its
climax, another one begins in the opposite direction. One started with the birth of Christ. The western
civilization as having had some sort of end and the opposite movement has to start. Falcon – archaic
energies that are bursting out and cannot be controlled, our instincts. Falcon is a bird of prey.
Things fall apart – the images of universe, the self – our whole life seems fragmentary. There
is no myth to connect them into a meaningful whole. The ceremony of innocence – order, the opposite
of anarchy, some ceremony that existed in the beginning is drowned, only anarchy is left.
According to the Bible, the Second Coming is when Christ will come and wrongdoers will be
doomed. Here, it is an image of anarchy, chaos, blood, evil. It is the coming of the beast. When he said
the words Second Coming, he had a vision. Spiritus Mundi – a spiritual realm that contains images.
Jung’s collective unconscious. Images can be warnings or they can heal. There is a collapse of
consciousness. we can reach this in dreams. When we reach it, we become a part of the whole
mankind – unity. The image he had troubles him, it is a warning, a beast, a sort of sphinx that terrifies
you. Yeats sees a beast and he cannot connect the two parts in a right way. Head – reason, body of a
violent animal. Violent energies are subdued by reason. They are not humanized, not tamed, they
remain destructive. Desert – disaster, nothing grows there. Our inner being and the entire world
became a desert. Bird is a symbol of his soul, omen of bad luck also present. All these images suggest a
death of our soul. Our body – our instincts that we no longer control. Something has been asleep for
centuries – our instincts, our biological fundaments. Ted Hughes – we possess archaic energies, but
if we do not use imagination, they become destructive. Falcon – instincts, feelings; Falconer – our
mind, consciousness, the attempt to control these energies. He cannot hear – there is a dissociation
between these two energies.
20 centuries of stony sleep – since the birth of Christ, something has been petrified – our
abilities to love, create – denial of body, bodily pleasure. Because of this, they were vexed to
nightmare. What started as a beautiful dream (Christianity) turned into a nightmare. These
suppressed energies burst out. It will be born in Bethlehem – dark and pessimistic vision.
Oedipus stands for rational man who turned nature into stone. He sees himself as a master.
Man has to be both the son and the lover of the Great Goddess.

Lapis Lazuli by W. B. Yeats

It deals with the end of civilization, but with a positive idea of rebirth. He wanted to see the
whole world connected – cycles of history with cycles of nature. And, as there is rebirth in nature,
there is a rebirth of civilization. Our own civilization is decaying and a sort of death and rebirth are
needed. It is a heroic attitude to life, the old thing has to be destroyed first.
The hysterical women are complaining about the artists who are always gay and exalted. They
are afraid and they criticize poets and artists in general. Poets seem irresponsible. Town lies flat after
destruction. This conception of civilization and falling apart and they do not care about it, they ignore
the truth, the history and destruction. They only care for the works of their imagination. It foresees the
oncoming war, the destruction.
Shakespeare’s characters were all tragic heroes. The old order had to be destroyed in order for
the new one to be established. Tragic heroes are able to comprehend that after their death a new order
will start. It is a heroic attitude to life. They know life will be renewed.
These are barbarians, destroyers. Many old civilizations were destroyed. With the coming of
new barbarians the old civilization dies. Callimachus – a sculptor – all his work was destroyed.
Even the works of art will not survive this great change. Beautiful, tender works of art are destroyed
but that is a part of natural cycles and the poet accepts it. The whole culture comes to climax and then
declines. We should rejoice because something new will be created.
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 A description of the stone itself. There is a long-legged bird, the symbol of longevity. There are
two Chinamen and one with a musical instrument – creativity. Everything that is on it seems to be
moving. Avalanche and snow – winter – death. The end of one cycle. Cherry branch – the old idea.
The promise of new life in spring. The new cycle starts. Life is indestructible. Man reconciles with this.
The Chinese are climbing up the mountain – spiritual growth, reaching higher levels of consciousness.
They are wise and happy. They have accepted the cyclic movement. Our civilization should accept it
too. They watch the tragic scene of life – dying and they feel sorry, but we should be gay, because new
life will come.
There is a movement from personal feeling toward organized structure of art. He was more
concerned with his heart, his own personal feelings.

L18 -
For greater part of their poetry, the quest is a failure. Both of them resort to various mystic tradition to
transcend the meaninglessness of what life has turned into.
Yeats’ Magi are dissatisfied, it shows the moment when the man becomes self oriented spirit,
and that should be repeated in every man’s life, they demand a repetition of uncontrollable mystery on
bestial floor. He visited Byzantium and was fascinated with the art, the eastern tradition had in store
tremendous treasures. Byzantium stands for 1) the permanence of actual works of art; the monuments
of the soul that knew how to live; and 2) ecstatic moment of creation; a poet stops being a dying
animal, and becomes indistinguishable from the object created- for a moment he dies, ant it is an
experience beyond time. The dancer and the dance become one and the same thing. Blood- begotten
man, is just an ordinary man, the one who gets up from bed every morning, etc.
In Eliot, we have extensive use of mythological traditions, contained in the same coherent
pattern of birth, love, sex, death, resurrection. Most men are afraid of Resurrection. His extensive
allusions, both Christian and pre- Christian, are used in order to comment ironically, to be a criterion
for squalor, meaninglessness, or boredom of life. Juxtaposition is used in order to determine just how
perfect life is – it shows incoherence, randomness, and solitariness. Literary tradition of Shakespeare,
Jacobean Dramatists, Metaphysical Poets, Wagner, and French Symbolist shows that they used
juxtaposition in their works.
In Yeats we have I or implied author, whereas Eliot wears a mask- influence from Browning-
dramatic personae. People who are to dramatize the spiritual condition of a modern man represent
the lost generation, the uprooted people, modern Pilgrims who have no destination, who change
places because they cannot change anything else. ‘I can connect nothing to nothing’- complete failure
in spiritual life. Why is this failure inevitable? The most important reason is because there is no real
questioning- what do we live for/ by? Tek u ‘4 kvarteta’ se Eliot pojavljuje kao on. Otherwise his
protagonists are scarecrows, banal, trivial, upper class people that evade questioning. The ‘more’ we
know is the poets of the past, and that is why this new poetry must be difficult, there is as much
footnotes as there is lines in the poem. The allusions in the footnotes amount to the experience which
will never be forgotten. Eliot made use of the myth of wasteland, or hell. The whole wasteland is filled
with paintings of modern life, it’s a pattern of a quest for a grail. We have not given anything, have not
sympathized with anyone. And in third part we have the answer why the quest for the grail ends in
failure.
In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ the motto is taken from Dante- Hell as a
condition of the spirit, but also a place of man’s habitation. You, the readers belong to Hell- that is
what Eliot tells us through Prufrock. A dramatic monologue follows the speaker through the streets,
which will lead us to an overwhelming question. ‘More dead than bad’- Leavis- it was well known what
was acceptable in poetry. All of a sudden’ a patient etherized upon a table’, it shows total absence of
awareness, the malady of modern life.
Sex gone wrong, sex for sale- ‘one night in cheap hotels’. Endless streets, etc. lead to the
question ‘Where does all this lead us?’ People long for love, but are at the same time love- proof. A
yearning for transformation, where the streets are leading him to. He is at a brink of some recognition,
but when he comes to it he retreats. He is going to a party. Mrs. Dalloway is a perfect hostess, talks
about art, Bradshaw too- had to bend down to see who the author was. Here we have a conversation
on Michelangelo only in order to make a kind of pretence, there are images from his mind, but there is
no coherence. Smoke/ fog rubs its muzzle, it is personified as an animal, a cat in order to enhance the
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image of stagnation, no movement. It is us in fact who are asleep. Cat fog curls about the house and
falls asleep. Now the excerpt from the Bible-Ecclesiastes for every human intention, that is also Eliots’
means for measuring. Biće vremena za sve te prazne rutine, biće vrmena da pripremim lice pre nego
što sretnem ljude koje srecem; he never does anything authentic. ‘To prepare the face’ but we do not
know who this ‘you’ refers to. It can be a reader, or somebody specific he has in mind, a vision, and it
refers to illumination. Revision is an economic word ‘before taking of a toast and tea’- shows routine.
He is obsessed with time, and the passage of time. You are defeated by time, if you do not use it
creatively, when you do not fill time with anything creative, the time closes in on you. Mrs. Dalloway
lived paranoically, she was afraid of life. She is only 54 and is obsessed with time. Prufrock is able to
question his choices but unable to change them. ‘Do I dare?’ behind everything is his fear. ‘Do I dare
disturb the universe?’- to shake universe by asking questions. His own ego is his universe, a prison-
house of his ego. On priprema nastup koji ce da uzdrma tu žabokrečinu, ali se plaši da to uradi. Even
when contemplating that step, he cannot forget that he is going bald. He imagines himself in a
moment of confrontation, yet he is concerned for his appearance, he belongs to the upper middle
class, he is a London snob. He is neurotically sensitive about his appearance. A very bitter line
‘measured out my life with coffee spoons’. Upoznao sam sve te ljude koji ce reći smanjile sum u se
noge, gubi kosu. His insecurity is not the only reason why he will not pose a question. Another reason
is the character of those people he knows. He is not really one of the pack, he is detached from them.
People are treating another person by categorizing them, giving them labels, and there are no real
encounters. He knows that he will be formulated in a fixed phrase-‘ispušena muštikla- a buff-off.’
Women’s hands as a flicker of erotic desire, but he is ensured that the woman in question should not
reply in a positive way. Utter desolation that occupies empty flats – they can only look through the
window, poignant solitariness and waste. He would like to evade making decision, what a relief it
would be if I was a mare animal. The choice is just too much, we cannot descend below the mind, but
he wants to do precisely that. Ice- mundane, banal experience; crisis- ecstatic experience represents
two different realms. John the Baptist’s hand cut off. He refused the love of powerful woman because
he was a prophet, he was engaged in highly important thing of saving people from meaningless life.
Prufrock has no such excuse, he, too, refused to love but he is not a prophet.
Footman- Death I dreamt about love but they passed without my doing anything about it. He
was afraid; he had no courage to ask a woman for love. Marvell proposes carpe diem- seize the day,
use time for passionate love. Lazarus- I know what death in life means, he comes to tell her. She is
abstracted, absentminded woman, a total failure of communication. Novel vs. teacups- they have
nothing in common; they are of the same value for people- iskustva istog reda. The same goes for Look
Back in Anger, when Jimmy talks about Vietnam: uniforms, ideas, volumes of poetry, etc. He is at a
loss for words to describe such a life. Summing up he says-‘That is not it at all’. He is an extra statistic,
he is not Hamlet, he does not ask questions. His role in life is to be servant; Polanius is a ‘bit obtuse’,
people keep laughing at him; and he is afraid that people mock him-‘at times a fool’. Perhaps he
should change his clothing, his hairstyle. He comes to a decision to go out of the city to the leach.
Compare this to Stephen Dedalus who goes to the beach. He has a hint of passionate life-
mermaids singing, Joyce is a girl with seaweed on her foot. He thinks that he is not important enough
for the mermaids and their song. Eliot: pripoda je umanjivanje ljudskosti, opasnost. S druge strane
mitovi su kreativnost. Odisej je morao da zapuši uši jer sum u sirene pevale- to je bio poziv prirode
čoveku koji se upravo izdiferencirao od prirode. Prufrock is standing at the end of this, mermaids will
not sin g to him, we can no longer hear their song. It is a strong natural movement from the first time-
there are waves, winds that blow the water, sirens combing their hair- red and brown, white and black.
For Odysseus the mermaid’s song had a hypnotic effect, it treatened to put him to sleep, which would
cause his drowning. But now, Prufrock is afraid of being awaken, on je čovek koga dave glasovi žena
koje pričaju o Mikelanđelu, a ne sirene koje pevaju. The sirens are ambiguous, but what sums it up is
human voices in which he ? ‘I’ become ‘we’ at the end of the poem.
The rhythm is for singing, chant of a religious service in Hollow Man- the rhythm says one
thing and the words completely the other. What they worship is a broken column, a broken stone.
Cellar represents subconsciousness, and serves as a source of creative energy. It is dried up, stands for
rottenness, little Gidding.

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 P27 – POETRY

Human mind imposes its meaning upon reality – Vico, and then we understand, comprehend
these kinds of structures. The Greek word for a poet = maker – creative poetic imagination can be
used to impose the sense of reality. The same idea is present in The Royal Hunt – there are no gods,
but we create meaning by ourselves. The ultimate meaning he looked for is love, to make water in the
world of sand.

The idea of Order at Key by West Wallace Stevens

The structuralist idea – a girl walking by the shore and as she hears the sound of the ocean, it
inspires her to create her own song. The chief point is that the sound of the ocean is just a natural
phenomenon, it does not have a meaning in itself. The only meaning is the one the girl imposes
herself. Therefore, symbolically, she is a poet, an artist, imposing meaning on the world by using
imagination.
Human nature is something that makes it different, the water itself is not articulate; its empty
sleeves… - like a scarecrow. We understand nature because we originate from there, but we also
transcend it. Stevens does not think that natural phenomena are just symbols – they are genuine
things. Separate voices of man/girl and nature. She is the one who articulate. She may be inspired, but
she translates this into man-made words. Stevens is an atheist – there is no spirit that permeates the
sea and the girl. They are two separate entities. The poet maintains that it is her word. These images of
nature do not have meaning in themselves. The song we hear is not some outer voice, the voice of
natural phenomena. We are the ones who interpret sounds and impose meaning on them. But if it was
more than that, even more than human voice, an act of human imagination, a creative act. We also
impose human emotions upon natural phenomena: sea is sad, lonely… Human emotions are inspired
by nature and so creates an integrate part. It was her voice that made the sky acute; she imposes the
sense of loneliness. We create our sense of reality. The man-made world – we impose meaning on it
and then live in that imposed structure. This is not an isolated example, but a general human tendency
– the night has fallen and all we see are the lights of town – a kind of order imposed by lights on the
night. The seawater is portioned out by the lights on boats. Imposition of human order – men create
order – the image of universe, they need the sense of order. Man is also a kind of a magician.
Deepening night – all images get a deeper meaning once we start thinking about them. Therefore, in
this sense, man is like a magician – man in his creative aspect. We cannot live in a world of chaotic
natural phenomena. Dimly starred – the sky – we need to outline our image of the world, to make it
comprehensive. The necessary angle of imagination – unless we have the fit of imagination, we will
not be able to impose meaning upon reality. This insight makes a meaningful whole between nature
and our inner self. What we will have if this does not happen is just a bundle of incoherent facts –
Yeats. When we are able to penetrate more deeply into reality, have glimpse, we have an epiphany.
This poem is about waiting fro this angel. Everything is void of meaning, world does not render
anything to the poet without the angel. The poet is looking at the black rock sitting on a branch.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath

Here imagination fails to connect events in the natural world with human inner world.Unless
inspiration and imagination transform this sight, it will remain meaningless. Throughout the poem,
there is a fear of this meaninglessness. In addition, there is a fear of neutrality. The poet is afraid that
the world of nature will remain neutral, that she will not be able to relate it. There is physical
description in the beginning. She does not believe in miracles, she lives in the age of reason. The idea
of order is present again – some design – portent – a bad sign. The poet just sits there and looks at the
signs. She would like to communicate with nature, but without imagination this is not possible. She
needs imagination to try to connect natural world (rook) and her experience, The mute sky –
indifferent. She does not hope for a revelation.She waits for some minor light, something that would
give her just enough insight to escape from this neutrality. Even simple objects – table, chairs – could
be, by the act of creative imagination, related to some deeper meaning. This act of creative
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imagination would bestow value, emotion, humor or reality. The poet is in the state of alertness,
waiting for something to happen. She does not know if there is an angel, imagination. She is afraid of
total neutrality of nature, that nature is totally indifferent to her existence, no need of connecting. If
the angel comes, she can transcend this despair. Plath depicts the feeling of rootlessness that haunts
the modern man. Patch – patch the world into meaning. Everything is incoherent, made of various
parts she must put together. Yeats and Eliot believed in tradition. In Plath, there are no myths, she
just states the modern man is feeling so uprooted, the only thing she can rely on are rare moments of
miracle/imagination. She waits for the imagination, it comes at random, the poet does not control his
imagination at all.

The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath

There are no major myths that help man impose meaning. Without the myth of integration,
human being feels lost. The major fear is fear of meaninglessness and death. She also fears that nature
is indifferent and of inability to transform it into an emotional relationship within us - it is the failure
of Christian myth. The Moon and the Yew Tree – symbols of the natural world, the mother
goddess. The moon – the face of the goddess, the yew tree – the symbol of immortality. Plath lives in a
demythologized world, nature has been demythologized by rational thinking, and she is not able to
connect these images into a mythical pattern. We have the failure of pagan myth, e.g., the failure of the
poet to reconnect to the pagan and to the Christian myth. The Christian myth has also lost its potency;
she cannot believe in Christianity and cannot connect to either religion because of the extreme
rationality of the world. The light of the mind – the blue light/the coldness of detached human mind
permeates the poem. Headstones = graveyard – transience of human existence and death – we are all
mortal. She simply does not see meaning of her existence: death awaits us all. The moon does not
open to deeper meaning, it has nothing to do with her, she cannot connect with it. Her own despair
because she cannot reach any deeper meaning. She acknowledges these natural phenomena, but she is
not connected to it. The promise of resurrection in Christianity, the promise of transcendental
meaning. Bang – she does not believe in what they are saying. The nature worship is in the next
stanza – Gothic shape – cathedral. The yew tree – pagan place of worship and a symbol of
immortality. A figure of speech – the moon is my mother – we can no longer connect to nature – not
sweet like Mary. The face of the effigy – she cannot connect the picture of resurrection with that myth,
she does not believe in it. I have fallen a long way – fall, sin in Christianity. There is no chance for her
to return to Christianity. There is an attempt to find new religion in nature and she fails. The moon
remains indifferent and wild. Blue – also symbolizes despair, sadness. Cold pews – she cannot warm
up to this. Hands and faces should be used for communication, but they are stiff with holiness. There
is only blackness and silence – no communication, no contact. No eternity either in Christianity or in
nature.

A Childish Prank by Ted Hughes

Hughes can be connected to Yeats. It is a parody of the biblical story, myth, an image of
Eden, God is trying to provide man and woman with some deeper meaning, but God ponders –,
cannot animate them. He is overwhelmed by the problem and falls asleep. The crow, the bird of ill
omen is also present. Serpent is here called god’s only son. Here, it is obvious that motives that
animate us are not divine but biological, sexual drives. They wake up to have sex. Warms are also
image of destruction, death, decay. Thanatos and Eros – the two urges that man is guided by, the
biological forces we live by. Biological instincts do not provide justification for living. There have been
movements that glorify sex, but the poet says that the biological urges will nor provide a meaningful
life. Dull and foolish – connected to eyes that should be the mirror of the soul. There is nothing to
make their urges noble and humanized. Man and woman are longing to reunite, the worm should be a
symbol of life, of biological urge. They are longing to reunite, but there is nothing beyond the instinct.
Man is guided by libido only.

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 Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

It is the name of his family farm. It is connected to the pastoral tradition to some degree. What
we usually have in pastorals are nostalgic thoughts of a better, past word, the innocence of the natural
world, man and nature are in harmony. These poems often have a false note, they mythologize, tend to
make past idealized. What is very genuine about them is that they are psychologically true. They
depict, express some deeply embedded human longing, yearning for some mythical period when man
lived in total harmony with nature. Mythologically, they present our yearning for the lost Eden – the
lost Garden. (Michael K, Winston Smith).
Fern Hill is also a nostalgic poem about a lost garden, a place where man and nature
coexisted in total harmony. Here, the garden is projected upon the period of early childhood, the bliss.
This was a period when the poet was not aware of the passage of time. The child is not afraid of the
passage of time because he shares a kind of sense of immortality with nature. From the very
beginning, there are allusions to Eden. Apple boughs – the two predominant colors are green and
gold. Both suggest immortality: gold – something that does not change, green – nature always renews
itself. In the fourth stanza, there is an allusion to Paradise – Adam and Maiden. He feels like the first
human in bliss of ignorance. He also tells us that the stars are simple - the child has no difficulties in
comprehending the natural world. Huntsman and herdsman – connection to nature, a sense of
playfulness. Nature is simply and comprehensive. He can relate to it in a very simple way. To fall out
of grace actually means to grow up. When a man grows up, he loses this simple connection because
intellect intervenes, objective consciousness. He becomes aware of the transience of his existence –
death.
He tells us that he has awakened; the farm no longer exists. When we grew up, he lost his
Eden. Sylvia Plath – there is no way of recovering the sense of wholeness in the modern world. The
only period when one perceives the world as a whole is early childhood. Our rationality divides us
from our sense of wholeness and we cannot recover it. Green – somebody who is inexperienced. He
was green; he did not know he was going to die. Even then, he was bound to grow up and die. The only
time when man can experience bliss is his childhood.

On the Move by Thom Gunn

We encounter the middle generation of poets. They all talk in the demythologized language.
Here, we have a very practical, down-to-earth speech. The image is also very modern – bikers – a
group of young men. The basic idea is that it is impossible to reach some final meaning, some goal in
human life. It is comparable to Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, journey. Yeats was going complete
his purpose, there was a final destination. These bikes are not going anywhere in particular. The poem
has a kind of positive tone. It invites us to accept this uncertainty, constant shifting movement (like
Derrida’s free play). It is better to live this way than to be static. It praises movement. If you cannot
find a meaning, at least you are searching. The blue jay – has a purpose, it is an instinctive being, it
follows its instincts. They do not have any uncertainties. This is juxtaposed to an image of a human
being. Unlike birds, we have battled senses or we use approximate words. it can never provide us with
a complete meaning.
2nd stanza - Physical image is of the boys. He is compared to flies, the image of insignificance.
These are not some grand figures. They are never certain. They make the noise and they almost hear
meaning – young people full of life, energy, passion. They refuse to stay still, to lead conventional lives
and there they almost find meaning.
3rd stanza – exact conclusion of their hardiness – they just move. We create both the outer
structures/machines and concepts such as soul. But we never control perfectly this man-made world.
Although the structures are imperfect, it is the only way we have to go on.
4th stanza – We no longer wholly belong to nature, but that does not mean that we are
damned. The image of a demythologized, modern world. Modern man no longer believes in the old
values but the young generation moves to find new values. Man is thrown into being – Heidegger.
He is not sure about the origin and purpose of his being. We throw ourselves, we create our own
direction.

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 5th stanza – They have only come to go – Derrida – free play. We should accept uncertainty
and enjoy our creativity. On the one hand, there is a bird, on the other saint – spiritual – humans are
somewhere in between. He is disturbed by the incompleteness, opposites within his nature. Human
towns are no place for birds and saints. Humans never seem to complete their purpose. They cannot
just opt for on or the other half. It is better to always look for meaning and accept the challenge.

The Cool Web by Robert Graves

It is a poem about language. Web is a network of meaning, organization that makes sense, an
idea of structure that we impose on the world. Cool – the poet maintains that if we rely on language,
rational, platonic language of our civilization, we will become in a way cold and detached from reality.
We use language as a kind of shield. Direct experience of the world is too intense for us. We protect
ourselves form that intensity by translating reality into phrases, concepts, words. It is quite similar to
Platonic impulse – Ransom. We feel like masters of reality in that way. Graves says that this is not
so with children. They have not mastered the experience language completely and have immediate
experience. Dumb – speechless, stupid.
1st stanza – children experience everything very intensely. They still have not learnt the
language we use to protect themselves. It is not recommendable to experience the world so intensely.
2nd stanza – We use language to protect ourselves. Spell away – using magic to make things
disappear but also spelling. Language is the magic we use.
3rd stanza – When you use a language in such a manner, you deprive yourself of intense
feelings. Language is a place of retreat from too intense experience. At the end, language makes us feel
as if we live like immersed in the medium of language that protects us from immediate reality but it is
also a sort of death.
4th stanza – the poem is very pessimistic. There is no other possibility. Lacan – the man who
does not enter symbolic language becomes a neurotic. We cannot be without language. Language has
a watery clasp – cools your senses. The other option, without language, would be madness. Kristeva
is against this theory. She talks about irrational characteristics of language.

P28 – SEAMUS HEANEY

The third generation of British poets: Yeats and Eliot – back to tradition, myth. Middle
generation – Gunn and Plath – they do not use myth. They simply talk about the despair of a man
who lives in a demythologized world.
In Seamus Heaney we encounter the need to find the roots. Heaney longs to reunite with
some past tradition. His forefathers were earth tillers, farmers and they dug for turf, peat (=treset).
His forefathers worked in close contact with the land and nature. He often uses the images of this
tradition, he uses them symbolically. One of the deeper symbolical meanings that he finds is that earth
tilling symbolizes a need to relate to nature in a creative, positive way. He symbolizes human effort to
adapt nature but on the inner level it can also symbolize humanizing one’s own inner nature. You
cultivate nature, but also your own inner being. This is also related to how he sees his role as a poet.
The poet is also someone who is digging. The poet is exploring the past, roots, tradition. In addition,
he is digging within his psyche, his inner being. The new ? become new plants. Poet wants to use his
discoveries for the cultural restoration and regeneration. He wants to refresh culture, to make it richer
by his discoveries. Digging is all about connecting his own poetical digging and his ancestors.

Digging by Seamus Heaney

There is a potential danger if you are looking for unconscious levels of being of reaching
something destructive, violent (pen/gun?). His father was also a digger, it is tradition. He keeps doing
the same job. Very striking physical images – his poems are embedded in material reality. He creates a
metaphor. Digging – psychological digging but it works at physical levels as well. He uses words to
fight Platonic impulse. The words have onomatopoeic effect. He really tries to conjure up reality by the
very sound?. Momentarily, we are transferred to the metaphorical level. As a poet, he digs through his
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own psyche. The roots are living – the connection with tradition is not lost. The deepest levels of hi
psyche. Poetry is a means of introspection.

Undine by Seamus Heaney

Another poem where he uses the imagery of farming. It is a story about the Irish water sprite
(=vila). She can become human if she falls in love with a man and gives birth to his child (Lady from
the Sea). There is a physical image of a land tiller. He unblocks the way to the water underneath. Silt
= mulj. He uses the spade to direct the water in a way that would suit his needs. The water is
personified as a mermaid and the encounter between the land tiller and the mermaid is like a
marriage – marriage between masculine and feminine, man and nature, culture and nature. Man
humanized nature. The ultimate purpose of every myth is to humanize the archaic energies in us so
that they do not become destructive. As we humanize nature, we cultivate ourselves, too. There are
very strong sexual metaphors. As if you are releasing your inner potentials. Man humanizes nature,
the wild, untamed portion of his psyche but on the other hand, this is the source of his future growth.
If he explores his inner being, he will grow spiritually. He explored me so completely – the poet urges
us to explore our inner nature completely and with love. The wild natural portion of our psyche can be
tamed, humanized, but only if we explore it completely and with love. Warm, humanized – love is that
which makes us human.

The Diviner by Seamus Heaney

Jungian notion of the role of poetry is expressed in this poem. The role of the poet is to get in
touch with the collective unconscious. The poet reaches the deep levels of the psyche and gets in touch
with the archetypes. These archetypes convey a message that important not only for him, but for the
whole community. In Heaney’s poems it is simply important that the poet gets in touch with the
suppressed psychic energies. If relieved it could bring us a kind of spiritual refreshment. Again sexual
overtones. The poem works on physical and metaphysical levels. The Diviner (=rašljač) finds water.
Symbolically, just like the diviner finds underground sources, the poet, too, finds some hidden parts
within our psyche. He discovered that Romans also had the same metaphor. Vates (Latin) means both
diviner and poet. V – forked stick, V can also refer to vates and introduce the idea of language. The
poet is using language as his tools. V is a letter, tool of a poet. The strong movement of the stick –
sexual metaphors – sensual experience. Broadcasting and stations – radio signals. Ezra Pound –
the poet gets signals that other people cannot. The poet is the antenna of the race. In the third stanza,
there is wider community. The end – an attempt of the poet to teach others. Introspection should be
available to everybody. Word/stirred – rhyme – the word is something that imitates the movement.

Hercules and Antaeus by Seamus Heaney

The metaphor of colonization. Antaeus – indigenous people. The role of conquerors,

imperialism. Hercules raises Antaeus off the ground. Hercules stands for the principle of reason. He
cuts the connection between Antaeus and the Mother Earth. This is a metaphor for colonizers who
separate indigenous people from their culture. They impose upon them new structures, beliefs. They
lose their primordial connections. Colonization always includes imposition of a new myth – Royal
Hung, Cloud 9, Dusklands – the metaphor for the asset of patriarchy.
Serpent: 1. both male and female principle, it stretches around the world and eats its own tail
2. the lover of the Great Goddess
Hercules wants to conquer, to master nature. His most important attitude is the mind. Antaeus
– mould hugger. Mature is humanized as a beloved mother. Outer and inner nature. Weaned =
odlučen, odvojen od sise.
Elegists sing of lost times, things that cannot be recovered. The mentioning of indigenous
people who have different attitudes to nature. Balor – an Irish god; remorseless V - Mussolini and
Churchill

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L19 - POETRY

In ‘The Four Quartets’ Eliot speaks in his own name and a poem is about inner pilgrimage, a
painful journey of a divided spirit groping to a new mode of being. The desire is the one to escape
meaningless time and occupy a place, or a moment, which is in a way timeless. All the names are
toponyms- names of geographical places, his return from America to a place from which his family
originated. At the same time it is the return to the remembered literary, spiritual tradition. They are
not used ironically, but the terror of the present moment is revealed (1941.) and the transcendence. By
using his memory, the ghost, the poetic tradition in England, Yeats paints the way to the
transcendence of this horrible movement.
Section III p.500
There are three conditions, three modes of living: attachment, detachment, and indifference.
Those who are vanishing- both places and people disappear.
1. Attachment- pastoral love, desire that we feel for the object of our vicinity.
Out of this private, possessive love grows love for your country, and out of this love, they are dieing.
Out of it grows something even larger, a part of a timeless pattern which emblem is Christ, saints,
artist. The spirit which refuses to be circumscribed to anything. Attachment is good but not enough.
2. Detachment- means not less love, but expanding of love beyond desire.
England in 1941 represents just another moment in history in which people can go beyond time.
3. Indifference is the most horrible mode of life; it is a kind of moral death. The people
are repeating incontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. The history is both slavery and freedom.
History is now. Everyone has the chance to transhumanize.
The symbol of fire, the flame-enveloped city, it is a destructive power that rages, but he says
that it is purgatorial fire through which people have to pass in order to reach Paradise. He speaks of
this fire as Pentecostal fire, fire that descends on Christ’s disciples at the moment when they lost all
their faith. Fire offers the meaning in Yeats, it is a symbol used to turn stone to gold. For Yeats it was
the fire of creativity, which burns down man into pure value. In section IV ‘burn we must’, it is a flame
of the Holly Ghost- plamenom užarenog užasa, which caused incandescent terror. The instruction of
the fire is possible, we can choose the creative fire and with it burn down all that was bad in us.
Greek myth of Hercules, who was given a poisoned shirt which burnt perpetually. His wife
believed that he would love her forever if he wore it. Passionate, erotic love is seen as a torment. When
you are between fire, it is better to choose the pure spiritual fire. The garden at which he ultimately
arrives is a destination that he accomplishes with love, and calling of the voice that ultimately
Christian. It is a love that is intellectual, and ascetic. It means simplicity when you turn your back to
the erotic, because such a state is impossible. A rose is a symbol of these blessed in heaven.
Leavis first praised Eliot, but later he said- yes but. After all Eliot left too little for human life to
do. Ordinary, human, erotic love was for Eliot an obstacle for transhumanisation. For D.H. Lowrence,
Eliot misses something, and Lowrence never turned his back on sexuality. Leavis nije istisnuo Eliota.
Eliot may be unconsciously searching for feminine, but consciously he could not reach that, probably
because he was a homosexual. He used all the images of pornography in his works, although he was
formalistic, Christian. ‘Every man desires only once to do a woman in’ says one of his characters in a
play. ‘A girl crying’ a man turns his back on a girl in the garden. ‘Marina’ is the lost daughter in
Shakespeare’s Pericles. Lament for the lost daughter who was never found.
R. Graves-Eliot is recognized in the book White Goddess, one of best. ‘To Juan in Winter
Solstice’- there is one story and one story only. In this context, we can understand Eliot’s groping for
meaning as groping for White Goddess which he failed to recognize. ‘Winter solstice’ stands for the
death of the sun, and birth of new you, resurrection. It is a critical point in pre- patriarchal myths- the
death of the old God killed by his counterpart, his alter ego. Psychological transformation through
which every poet has to pass to become a poet. The father gives advice to his son who wants to become
a poet. All the stories are underlined by this one story of the Goddess. He asks his son what he is
singing about, and realizes that no matter what he is saying he is speaking of the triple Goddess.
Prison- is a space you must not go beyond if you want to show your love for the nature and the
Goddess. Water appears as a symbol of Noah’s arch even in the pre-Bible myths. Twelve peers is a
Christian myth- junaci iz davnih vremena koji su se pokazivali prirodi I imali su petnaest svedoka. The
symbol of Christianity was first a fish uronjena u primordial environment, and later on it was a bird.
Quince is a symbol of life and sex.
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 You cannot do battle with the Goddess. It is winter, critical psychological moment in his son’s
life. Elder- sova, appears in horror movies and represents Goddess, it is one of the ways for it to reach
a new mind. The fire of a complete surrender to the sensual fully lived life. The boar is the emblem of
Goddess Persephone, the Goddess of the Underworld.Adonis se pretvorio u svet. Nightmare-
avetinjska jeza, boginja leprozno bela kao smrt. Ali ona ništa nije obecala a da nije ispunila.
The end of one period reveals the desire to recreate the mythical past. In the 50’s this comes to
an end. Larkin, Gunn- they abandon any quest for wholeness, completeness. They write in simple
colloquial language in order to revive the modern, uprooted man. Nema velikih gestova koji za cilj
imaju neku sintezu.The uprooted culture is recorded, but any grand gesture towards mythic synthesis
or the recovery of the wholeness is doomed to fail. Larkin and Gunn support the hippy philosophy, he
is satisfied that they almost hear the meaning. Hardiness, toughness in love. It is enough to be moving
even if it is without any clear destination. There is no place called ’there’ –it is the American tradition.
Larkin ‘Church Going’ is the English version, it describes his habit to stop at a church,
shows sceptic, demitologized world. He stops at a church when there is nothing going on. It would be
phony to pretend that the church should any lopnger satisfy his need to be more serious. The church
has become a souvenir, yet he always stops by it.
Marriage, birth- only fragments. Compulsion- drives, urges. Impuls ne moze da zastari, ali ne
moze kroz crkvu. On one hand he rejects the church, yet he is tolerant towards tradition. The past is
drained of anything that might be profitably remembered: ‘I remember, I remember’ is exclamation of
his childhood, tamo se ništa nije desilo što bi moglo da ga podrži u sadašnjosti.
D. Thomas ‘Fern Hell’ – in his poetry he cannot recreate his childhood on another level. Sex
and death are for him just brutal biological facts. He had it at least in his childhood, whereas Larkin’s
life is completely drained of any sustainable experience.
“I Remember, I Remember’- Larkin is no longer Pilgrim. His roots are firmly fixed. He is
ironical about the notion of ‘mine’. Cycle crates (nešto u vezi sa biciklom), He looked at his shoes and
it caused a sense of defeat. He is a rootless man. There is a garden. From now on everything is NOT.
His childhood is completely alienated. He never had an ecstatic first love. Doggerel- početnički
stihovi. Recent poetry is renewed attempt to reconnect to our mythology. What we are digging are
subconscious energies tamed by poetry.
S. Heaney ‘Undine’-talas, boginja, žena.
A. Rich ‘Diving into the Wreck’ ruin of our patriarchal tradition, the mother and the
memory of her are of carnal importance for leading a healthy life.

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