Month: July 2011

The Waste Land

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T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Waste-Land-cover

‘The Waste Land’ is the early Modernist poem classic. T. S. Eliot was striving to understand a shattered world post WWI and how the inherited cultural knowledge could offer direction or solace in a broken, mechanistic world. His use of literary and cultural allusions may feel overwhelming at first, but an open mind and supportive discussion will illuminate this gorgeous poem.
At this moment of Modernism, the urge was to separate from the oppressing past (‘Make it new!’ charged Ezra Pound, Eliot’s mentor) but this becomes a double gesture. The attempt to repress or break free from the past ends up haunting the writers and thinkers of the modern period—until they negotiate a link with the myths and images of the past that threatened. ‘Waste Land’ demonstrates this in the specific allusions to past works and in its melding of characters of the past and the present (Cleopatra becoming a modern working woman in ‘A Game of Chess’ for example) as well as the use of myth to reconnect our lost modern psyche to a past of ritual and meaning.

The experience of ‘The Waste Land’ combines a dig through allusions to a sense of what we hear: the journey is impressionistic. Eliot struggles to rediscover primitive, authentic emotion against the falseness of modern life. He employs the poetic technique of multiplying references (thinking of form of sedimentary rock—the layers evoking ages but holding discordant impressions together).

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—from The Burial of the DeadSALON DETAILS

  • Two-meeting Salon intensive

Four Quartets

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T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

–From ‘Burnt Norton’

T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ is often described as the best long poem of the 20th century. Eliot’s vast final work attempted to order and understand the movement of time, the dissatisfaction of worldly experience, the nature of purgation and the struggle towards artistic wholeness and spiritual health(modified from C.K. Stead). In the poem, Eliot weaves belief systems and diverse influences including Dante, The Bhagavad Gita, The Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the New Testament, medieval mystics, Greek myths and the Grail Legend: so our study will also involve comparing wisdom traditions.

I will provide each participant with pages of annotations and reference reading (gratefully donated by Mike McGarry, fellow educator and philosopher)—but as always with the Salon work, the focus is on the text itself. In previous Salons, we have found our way to thoughtful considerations of various belief systems in a respectful atmosphere; this study will open up space for such considerations using the poem as a spring board. What we believe—as individuals, as cultures—addresses how we live and how we try to invest our lives with meaning. Eliot is taking on these elemental questions through his Anglo-Catholic faith but drawing into this perspective wisdom across time and beliefs.

Christopher Guerin, writing in the on-line magazine ‘When Falls the Coliseum’, describes his pleasure in the poem:

“Though I first studied the poem in college — emphasis on “studied”, which doesn’t always mean “experience” or “appreciate” — my firstencounter with Four Quartets took place while being chased by fierce thunderstorms across Interstate 70 in Kansas in the early evening. (I learned the next day that I had been surrounded by tornados!) I had put in a cassette recording I’d made off an LP of Four Quartets being read by Sir Alec Guinness.
No, the incredible impression the poem made on me at the time had nothing to do with Obi Wan Kenobi. Guinness’ delivery, though, seems the perfect voice for this poem, much more earnest and spiritually aware than Eliot’s own weary, almost defeated delivery. (The recording is hard to find, but well worth the search. Highly recommended.)
From the beginning, I was captivated by the cadence, the imagery, and the playful, seeking nature of the words. It’s impossible to quote anything less than the whole of the first section…”
Which he does—and you can read the rest of his commentary and selections of the poem here.

SALON INTENSIVE DETAILS
The Salon Intensive offers a wonderfully dynamic five-hour study (with a necessary pot-luck meal break half way through). Although this format may feel intimidating, those who have participated find the conversation gallops along and we take the book in one big and satisfying gulp. The study is a rich weave of participant questions and responses, readings of significant passages and consideration of the themes and genres that the book illuminates.

The facilitated discussion will use the text of the poem as a springboard for our conversation; participant questions, responses and ideas are welcomed to help navigate the challenges of the work. There is no expectation of previous study or work with the poem nor in the academic tradition: this study will challenge and invigorate the first time reader as well as the life-long lover of T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary vision.

The poem can be found in T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-62 (Faber & Faber; ISBN-13: 978-0571105489).

Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

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Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

From Beowulf through The Odyssey, our study of the classics informs our understanding of the role of art and literature in forming our sense of ourselves and human history. This will be the first Salon study of the Oresteia so will have the energy of new and unexplored territory. Aeschylus explores the shift from a world ruled by force and feud to a time when human rationale and the early ideas of civilisation start to inform law and behaviour.

From http://www.neebo.com/Textbook/the-oresteiab9780140443332/ISBN-9780140443332:

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. Aeschylus (525-456 BC) was born near Athens. He wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived, all translated for Penguin Classics: The Supplicants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. If you enjoyed The Oresteia, you might like Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘Conveys more vividly and powerfully than any of the ten competitors I have consulted the eternal power of this masterpiece … a triumph’ –Bernard Levin

‘How satisfying to read at last a modern translation which is rooted in Greek feeling and Greek thought … both the stature and the profound instinctive genius of Aeschylus are recognised’ –Mary Renault, author of The King Must Die

The Waves

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Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

9780141182711

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Reading Virginia Woolf requires a releasing of the faculty we have so carefully trained to be grounded in time and fact. Her fluid and probing prose allows such a deep and troubling glimpse in to the human heart that one comes away wiser and broader than before. This is not my first floating into The Waves—what I have already tasted makes me want to swim far out into her embracing world of character and reflection.

This review from a GoodReads reader sounds perfect for the Salon!!

My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There’s not a wasted word here: Woolf’s attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven’s nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.

The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.

Salon Details

  • Four-meeting study
  • Recommended edition:
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Kate Flint; Penguin edition (2000); ISBN-13: 978-0141182711
      OR
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Jeanette Winterson; Vintage Classics Ed. (Oct. 2016) ; ISBN-13: 978-1784870843

To the Lighthouse in St Ives

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Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse–St Ives Weekend Study

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives. The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity and identity in her novel To The Lighthouse. We have already completed two magical weekends in this book in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!

You will have the opportunity to visit the iconic Tate St. Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse. We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home.  For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St. Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died.  Although the complete family never returned to St. Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.

This is something I have dreamed of doing since I first read Woolf’s magical book To the Lighthouse–it has haunted me always. The opportunity to study this work with a keen group of minds in the place that is so crucial to the writing is simply delicious.

“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without doubt stands upon this memory.  It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, haf awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind. . . . If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green.  There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.”

“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.”

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surace of a deep river.  Then one sees through the surface to the depths.  The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”

—Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.

Salonsitas going to the Lighthouse

SALON DETAILS

  • Friday – Sunday weekend  in St. Ives with one Monday preparation meeting in London.
  • Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)

More on the study:   

As one of the primary modernist works, To the Lighthouse demonstrates Woolf at play with language; testing the ability of language to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. One of the characteristics of Modernist writing is a shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Her model, Mrs. Ramsey, (Queen-like) holds her daughters to the awe of the noble men that surround her and allows them to “sport with infidel ideas…of a life different…in Paris perhaps; …for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry…though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts…” (TtL, pgs. 10-11)

This quote also demonstrates the Modernist reworking of absolute truth…it is not a question of either this (a male-dominated world) or that (a world of female emancipation): the apparently rigid gender roles borrow from each other—“manliness in their girlish hearts” , “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection…”: there is another Imperialism her, an intimate Imperialism of female over male. The truth in this work is not rigid (although Mr. R would like it to be) but can be permeated, blended…seen from another view.

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography (review quoted below) this reading has me turning over the search one makes for lost childhood—often for a place that might hold a time—but of course, never does. For Woolf, that search included a grappling with the impact & idealization of the parent figures—especially the lost mother, whose influence and contradictions continue to wrap around the child inside. VW and a few of her siblings returned to the house in St. Ives (that we are lucky enough to visit) years after her mother’s death and the sale of the house. They were like ghosts, sneaking around the gardens, peering in the windows: as though searching for their lost selves and a past that can never be re-captured. That visit—and the need to lay to rest her grief enwrapped memories of her mother—were the catalyst for TtL.

For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermione Lee’s wonderful biography. The book, Virginia Woolf is a great read.

From ‘This Loose, Drifting Material of Life’ by Daphne Merkin
“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicized agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its center — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond.
From its very first page Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: “There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”

Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics & readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. It may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of violently changing world, as we go into the read. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.

To the Lighthouse

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Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

beach

“Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke…”

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

In this exquisite work, Woolf seeks to break through the restraints of language to access the interior voice of passions, fears, unspeakable thoughts and human dynamics. By employing stream of consciousness narrative and the early stirrings of the modernist aesthetic, Woolf gives insights into the nature of relationships and the formation of self in relation to others that will be recognisable – and revealing to each reader.

Eudora Welty writes in her forward to To the Lighthouse: “Radiant as [TtL] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”

SALON DETAILS

  • Five-meeting study
  • Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee; Penguin Classics; (ISBN 0-14-118341-1)

Orlando

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Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I have worked with many of Virginia Woolf’s texts, and each one leaves me breathless with its narrative beauty, unique aesthetic and remarkable understanding of the depths of the human mind. Orlando is new territory for me: an ironic biography – or possibly a love letter to Vita Sackville-West – or perhaps imagined autobiography? Critics disagree on how to categorise this book, making it all the more intriguing.

The proposal of Virginia Woolf as a comic genius is not how we usually consider this writer of such depth and nuance. In Orlando, Woolf seeks to probe the limits of gender before gender was understood to be a societal construct – ahead of her time, as always. The central character survives centuries and does the Tiresias – by changing genders, the character gets the unique ability to compare what it is to be male and what it is to be female. As always, reading this work and the discussions that will be provoked – around gender, same-sex love, societal constraints and the search for joy across historical epochs – will illuminate the chaotic world we live in,where gender continues to be problematised and re-considered.

SALON DETAILS

  • One meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Orlando by Virginia Woolf Vintage Classics (October 2016) ISBN-10: 1784870854

Mrs Dalloway

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Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Mrs-Dalloway-Oxford World Classics Edition

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone;
she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first—‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism—all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and questing minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality—and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet—a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier… What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”

SALON DETAILS

  • Four meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

Liar

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Tobias Wolff’s Liar

This short study is a good way to experience the Salon for the first time: the brief study will give you the room to consider this unique form of writing – the short story is not a novel, and not a poem, but perhaps between – and probably even more. “The Liar” by Tobias Wolff offers a protagonist caught in his own world, using language to separate and shield himself from those he loves – and fears. From a 2008 review on Slate by Judith Shulevitz: “One of the best stories in Our Story Begins, a collection of new and selected older stories by Tobias Wolff, is called “The Liar.” It’s about a teenage boy who regales strangers with dark fictions about his family—appalling accounts of misfortune and disease. These drive his mother crazy; a concrete, pious person, she can’t stand dishonesty, and she sends him to the family doctor. The charm of the story lies in the likability of its characters.”

Edgar Allen Poe argues that the writer of a short story should aim at creating a single and total psychological/spiritual effect upon the reader. The theme or plot of the piece is always subordinate to the author’s calculated construction of a single, intense mood in the reader’s or listener’s mind, be it melancholy, suspense, or horror. There are no extra elements in Poe, no subplots, no minor characters, and no digressions except those that show the madness of deranged first-person (“I”) narrators. Ultimately, Poe took writing to be a moral task that worked not through teaching lessons, but in simultaneously stimulating his readers’ mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties through texts of absolute integrity. As a literary ancestor of the form, Poe’s theories and practice offer a starting point to the development of the short story.

From a 1996 interview in Salon.com: “Short stories, like poems, demand a lot from their readers. Novels may be longer, but they don’t require the same compressed attention. They allow moments of relaxation; their narratives promise to hold you, however casual the concentration you invest.”
But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward. “The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story,” he once said. And the writer’s thrill is “working a miracle, making life where there was none” in the space of a few precisely and elegantly distilled pages. “There’s a joy in writing short stories,” he says, “a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.”

Song of Myself

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Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning—as, first, I here and now
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

–Walt Whitman (From introduction to Leaves of Grass)

What better way to offset the lethargy of winter and the exhaustion of the holiday schedules then to dip into the poetry of Whitman? His poetry is exuberant, embracing and evocative of the Transcendentalist philosophy that he admired.

In the words of Clifton Fadiman:

“It is Whitman’s language rather than his message that exerts power. He worked with all his soul to become a national bard, the voice of “the divine average, ”the Muse of Democracy…He has penetrated our consciousness not because he is accepted by the “powerful uneducated persons ”he idealizes, but because he is a poet in the original sense: a maker, a coiner of wonderful new language.”

Our study will consider “A Noiseless Patient Spider” and selections from “Song of Myself”…we will read aloud, with gusto his words of expanse and celebration; we will use the sounds, words and rhythms to explore meaning and recognize mystery.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

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