Thoughts on Power and the Word


7 October 2012
The last few Salons in London and Paris have raised questions around the power of language: how language evokes power, how language may represent the struggle with power (Faulkner’s grappling with the structures—grammar, words—of language as he questions his culture’s systems of power) how language can evoke such responses through the portrayal of horror and violence. These issues are coalescing for me as I prepare the Paradise Lost study starting this week in London. Milton, as the image of literary authority, was also the figure of power resistance in his time: it is his writings that articulated the first (and in England, only) anti-monarchical rebellion resulting in the overturning of divine authority—only to see this reversed in his lifetime.

There are moments when I am reading the news or biking through the city streets when I wonder how relevant the study of literature is in a world facing epic challenges and gross inequalities—not somewhere else, but here, in my neighbourhood in the air I breathe, the water I relish and the education systems shaping our young people. I return again to the relevance of the word—the way that language determines relationships, the way language is employed for power. In our studies—in any engagement with a challenging and significant work of literature, our ability to use language is increased. The analysis and understanding of the characters in the literature increases our ability to be in relationship with others; reveals the limits of our own perception, widens our sense of how one lives in the world. The Salons in their structure also force us each to enter into the minds of other participants: to respond, to disagree with respect, to be inspired by, to learn from their ideas.
The dynamic nature of the Salons means that they are created in response to the needs and desires of participants. I WELCOME any requests, suggestions and feedback.

Paradise Lost and Faulkner –starting in October

 

“Meaning is an event, something that happens, not on the page, where we are accustomed to look for it, but in the interaction between the flow of print and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader.”–Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: the Reader in PARADISE LOST

In Paradise Lost, Milton dares to explore the Creation story at the core of the Christian belief, questioning how in a perfect vision pain and violence could exist. As Stanley Fish explains, it is our story that we consider in reading this epic work: Milton is deeply interested in understanding how humanity came to be divided from Heaven and what repercussions this has on our nature, our ideas around sin, gender, the natural world, justice…the poetry is majestic and the going may get tough: but to understand Paradise Lost is to probe deep into the structures of human spirit that we have inherited.

Heading off to Paris just now for two studies: Faulkner’s “The Bear” which will be happening in London next week as well and The Passion of New Eve  by Angela Carter…two mind-bending works that the Paris Salonistas have been willing to tackle…next up in London:

 

Faulkner’s “The Bear” Thursday October 4th 7-10 PM One meeting intensive (space remaining for three participants) *use the links or visit the events page to register*

Paradise Lost by John Milton Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM, Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (five week study) *use the links or visit the events page to register*

Here is one reviewer on Paradise Lost (Norton Edition–available at Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town):

“Milton is hard to read. There’s no way around it. He was incredibly well versed in Latin and Greek and the famous epics, and intentionally set out to imitate that style with this Christian poem. Thus, some of the sentences are close to thirty lines or more, and are almost unintelligible at first. I am a Latin scholar, so I am used to seeing this kind of writing, but Paradise Lost could be challenging to the uninitiated. That being said, it is definitely worth the effort. Milton set out not just to tell the story of the Fall of Man but also to “justify the ways of God to men.” It is frequently remarked that God is a secondary character and Satan is the most well-developed. I think this may be the same technique used by Dante to draw in the reader and have them commit the same sin as the characters. And this is what is most enjoyable about Milton: trying to unravel the many layers.

If you are a Christian, this book may ask some interesting questions. Milton was definitely pious, but he did have some interesting personal beliefs that may or may not have agreed with doctrine at the time.

If you are just a fan of the classics and great literature, I’m sure you will find Paradise Lost to be among the best poems in history, and certainly the best in English.

Finally, the Norton Critical Edition is superior in that it contains about 300 pages of criticisms and background information, all of which aid to one’s understanding and enjoyment of the poem. ”

Sin. Satan. Fall of Man. I think we are in for some fun.

LONDON Salon Updates…Wasteland 20th of September, Sound and the Fury….

Flexibility is one of the greatest human attributes and one of the hardest to evoke when it is demanded. September requires a great deal of this flexibility as I am learning: thus I will hold off the Aeneid study until there is a critical mass (post- Paradise Lost?) and offer some shorter studies in the meantime to meet the schedule needs of these days of schedules shifting, classes starting, Olympics ending and evening falling.

So here are the coming Salon studies–when possible, please sign up as soon as you can as some Salons have had to be cancelled due to lack of the minimum number of participants even though quite a few were interested in the study. The commitment to a Salon may be like the discipline of exercise–hard to take the plunge, daunting to schedule, but never regretted once you have embraced the work and energy of it.

Thursday 14th 8-10 PM “Sonny’s Blues” £5 (trial rate) Not too late to join this study which is designed particularly for those who would like to try a Salon (although experienced Salonistas are very welcome. This is a short story so there is still time to read, the story can be found here. *One Night study*

Thursday 20th September 7:30-10:30 The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot £20 Mary Karr in her introduction to The Wasteland: “The boundary between 20th century verse in English and its 19th century predecessors –Romantic poetry and the genteel Victorian stuff after it—didn’t simply dissolve. It came down with an axe swoop, and the blade was T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”. *One Night study*

Tuesday 25th September 8-10 PM The Sound and the Fury four week study £65

Thursday October 4th 7- 10 PM “The Bear” by William Faulkner *One Night study*

Wednesday October 10th (evening)/Thurs 11.10 (afternoons) Paradise Lost Five week study £75 (registration page will be up next week)

Still on the burner, looking for nudges: Howards End, Bleak House, Iliad, Aeneid….

IN writing this post, I searched for a poem on flexibility and found nothing but Hallmark card prattle– does anyone know of a good poem or short writing that explores flexibility with lively language?

Vote for Fall Salons London now

LONDON LITERARY SALON NEWS
23rd August 2012

FALL CHOICES

For the choices that interest you, mark preference for afternoon sessions, evening sessions, or one to two meeting intensives. There have been requests for more short intensives; while these offer an opportunity for a deep immersion, the struggle is to build a cohesive group in one or two meetings while covering the richness of the work. For some of the texts, I think this is particularly difficult therefore am scheduling two intensive meetings which would allow our work and momentum to move through the length of the work. For others, such as Paradise Lost, an intensive study is not ideal.

You can use the Doodle poll or simply contact me with your preferences in an email. Please complete this as soon as possible (by Monday August 27th noon at the latest) so I can announce the fall schedule with your input… the following will be scheduled (if there is interest) between the first week of September and mid-November. I am aiming for another Ulysseian spring so work in The Odyssey, Hamlet and The Portrait of the Artist are recommended if that is of interest.

*Descriptions for many of the following can be found by following the links to the website (please disregard the dates)*

The Aeneid by Virgil (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Howard’s End by E. M. Forster (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

The Iliad with Christopher Logue’s War Music (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

“The Bear” by William Faulkner Short Story Intensive: one four-hour meeting

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (Four two-hour meetings or one intensive)

Paradise Lost by John Milton (Five two-hour meetings)

The Odyssey by Homer (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Richard III by William Shakespeare (Five two-hour meetings or two intensives)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Five two-hour meetings)

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (Three two-hour meetings or one intensive)

 


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Frankenstein – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 00.46 UTC

Forget Boris Karloff with a bolt through his neck. Forget even Peter Boyle as the new, improved monster singing Puttin’ On The Ritz in the Mel Brooks pastiche. What you get in Danny Boyle’s production and Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s mythic fable, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, is neither shlock nor satire. Instead it’s a humane, intelligent retelling of the original story in which much of the focus is on the plight of the obsessive scientist’s sad creation, who becomes his alter ego and his nemesis: it’s rather like seeing The Tempest rewritten from Caliban’s point of view.

As a piece of staging, it is brilliant. But, before listing its virtues, one has to concede that Boyle and Dear, in focusing more on the victim than on Victor, downplay some of Shelley’s themes. Because Victor himself hardly figures until halfway through the action, his initial hubris in animating lifeless matter is minimised. Mary Shelley’s story also throbs with a fierce sense of injustice: a cultivated French family is ruined by its defiance of government, the innocent suffer through Victor’s divine presumption. The echoes are still there in Dear’s two-hour version but Shelley’s rage against existing social structures is muted.

If there are losses, there are also huge gains. We follow the painful progress of the Creature from his first sensational, stuttering steps as he bursts stark naked out of a vertical frame to his education in language and feeling by Karl Johnson’s blind, political exile. We also see the Creature’s yearning for companionship, his longing for love, his aching need for a female counterpart. Even when he is driven to murder, the guilt ultimately belongs to Victor. And when the Creature rapes Victor’s bride before killing her, it is as if he is expressing his creator’s own dark, suppressed desires.

In performance, it is also fascinating to compare the two actors. Cumberbatch’s Creature is unforgettable. “Tall as a pine tree,” as the text insists, he has humour as well as pathos: his naked entry into the world is marked by a totter on splayed feet and, when he moves, it is with a forward-thrusting, angular, almost Hulotesque curiosity. But there is also an epic grandeur about Cumberbatch. As he quotes Paradise Lost, his voice savours every syllable of Milton’s words and when, in outrage at his rejection by the exile’s family, he burns their cottage, he utters a Hamletesque cry of “I sweep to my revenge.” It is an astonishing performance.

Miller’s strength, in contrast, lies in his menace. Stockier than Cumberbatch, his Creature makes you believe in the character’s Satanic impulse and in his capacity for murder: when he hoists Victor’s brother on to his shoulders you instantly fear for the boy’s life. You feel Miller exults in the ultimate role-reversal in which the servant becomes the master. But when it comes to Frankenstein, I felt Cumberbatch had the edge in that he offered clearer hints of the scientist’s cold-hearted single-mindedness.

The actors complement each other perfectly rather than provide a contest and Boyle’s production is a bravura triumph in which Mark Tildesley’s design provides a whole series of visual coups. A candle-filled canopy overhangs the auditorium and blazes into light to evoke Victor’s galvanizing experiments. A steam-belching train surges ominously forward to summon up early 19th-century industrialisation. And the Creature’s rhapsodic discovery of nature is beautifully suggested through birds shooting forth from treetops and rain saturating a narrow strip of turf.

Once or twice the language lapses into bathos: you feel Victor’s bride might come up with something less prim than “We’ll have none of that” when the Creature paws her breast. But, on the whole, this a stunning evening. Dear and Boyle highlight the feminist critique of male usurpation of divinity that lurks in Shelley’s text. Above all, they constantly make us ask which of the two main characters is the real monster. Is it the disfigured, repulsive Creature or Frankenstein himself with his subordination of love and friendship to the idea of creative perfection? The issue is not so much resolved as left hanging as the two figures memorably depart into an eternal icy wilderness.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Paradise Lost

John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is, as one Salon participant put it, “ …an IMMENSE piece of English Literature. The language is mind boggling, wonderful rhetorical, metaphorical moments…such fabulous imagination…”. The work is a cornerstone of English literature; a natural bridge between Shakespeare and Joyce, Dante and Mary Shelley…but it is some work!
Milton seeks to justify the ways of God to humankind in this work. In revisiting the Fall (both Satan’s and Adam and Eve’s) and giving these ancient stories narrative flesh, we learn the Christian boundaries of Good and Evil.

Clifton Fadiman, in his Lifetime Reading Plan, says:

“It is hard to like John Milton. Suffering the penalty of charmlessness, of humourlessness, he has been less read than admired, less admired than merely accepted…Perhaps I have persuaded you to skip Milton…(but) for all the mustiness of his theology and morality…he remains a great artist in both verse and prose. With rock-like–he would say adamantine–grandeur, he continues to impose himself even on our age, which laughs at grandeur, at the noble style, and at erudition…at least read Paradise Lost for the gorgeous sound, the elaborate imagery, the portrait of Satan, that fallen god with whom Milton himself had so much in common…”

We will move through this work, hearing favorite parts aloud, sharing our knowledge of the Bible and English Renaissance History and love of language to help illuminate the text. There are some wonderful internet resources to help prepare you for our study, in particular the sites that offer audio readings. Some that I have found or Salonistas have recommended:

Paradise Lost Internet Resources

Why Read it thread
Notice how this conversation gets side-tracked to an intense feminist wrestling match…
Some resources I pulled from this conversation:
· The Milton Reading Room at Dartmouth

And perhaps the most exhaustive is the Darkness Visible site set up and maintained at Cambridge…very accessible and easy to lose an hour or two!

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