At the end of October, Michael Sheen and Ian Rickson offer their vision of this poem unlimited at the Young Vic. The upcoming Salon study of Hamlet will be an ideal launching pad to this performance…in the past, we have organized salon nights out to a production of the work we have studied–incredibly gratifying for all.
Hamlet contains some of Shakespeare’s most transcendent language–but the complexity and the layered nature of the thoughts and themes require some time. As a Salon member said recently “What I love about the Salons is that I am forced to slow down and reflect; to just think instead of rushing to do…and I understand so much more because of that.”
What is Hamlet about? Themes include the most precise questions of loyalty, revenge and allegiance, what it means to be human, the role of fate and self-will, the truth of madness- the essences of human experience. The language must stand up to the weight of these themes- we will closely examine the words and structures to decide if it does and if so, how. As I seek to describe the text, I am aware that the terms approximate that of a wisdom tradition. Harold Bloom, one of the twentieth centuries’ most highly regarded and prolific literary critics, puts Shakespeare even more emphatically in the role of deity:
“Shakespeare is my model and my mortal god…Hamlet is part of Shakespeare’s revenge upon revenge tragedy, and is of no genre. Of all poems, it is the most unlimited. As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death, it competes only with the world’s scriptures.” (Harold Bloom, Hamlet, Poem Unlimited, 2003)
Salon studies Short, Long and in-between…please use the events page for each of the following to register….once you have registered, I will send you a confirmation and the opening notes and reading schedule.
Measure for Measure Salon Intensive: Two Sundays 7-10 PM October 9th & 16th £50
Midnight’s Children day or evening options 4 sessions £65:
daytime: Thursdays 1-3 PM 20th October, 3rd, 10th and 17th November
evening: Thursdays 8:00-10 PM 20th October, 3rd, 10th and 17th November
Hamlet day or evening options four sessions (potentially an extra night for film viewing) £65:
daytime Tuesdays 12:30-2:30 PM 11th and 18th October, 1st and 8th November
evening Tuesdays 8-10:00 PM 11th and 18th October, 1st and 8th November
To the Lighthouse One night Intensive £40
Friday November 4th 5-10 PM
25 September
I am looking ahead from the depths of To the Lighthouse, Paradiso and Paradise Lost where we have been having some rich conversations around the nature of free will and gender, the imperialism of truth, the endless attempt to describe the indescribable, the social construction of love and romance, the omniscience of grief…all inspired by the words. Beautiful words.
Here is the upcoming Salon schedule with Salon studies short, long and in-between to fit with the demanding schedules we all dance within. For those who were unable to join the extended study of To the Lighthouse, there is a Salon evening intensive in early November—you need to have the book read in preparation for this study. Thanks to those who voted on the website, Hamlet will be studied in November; The Odyssey is next. Midnight’s Children has been rescheduled to start mid-October…this is a playful and powerful read and the film is about to be released. More details and descriptions can be found on the events page for each Salon. Please do register soon (Salons limited to 10 participants) and start reading!
The next study to start in London is in October, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure which is being performed in Stratford starting in November. Come read and understand the play and then join us for the production…many have found that the study deepens the enjoyment of the play immeasurably.
I always welcome suggestions for future Salons (someone recently suggested The Picture of Dorian Gray…there’s an idea!). Use the poll above for Tuesday afternoon Salon choice for November—now is a good time to weigh in. Do let me know as well your preference for scheduling: short or long Salons, afternoon or evenings…and Ulysses awaits in 2012…
I have had several Salon folks recommend Wittenberg to me and I plan to see it this week: the idea of Hamlet being pulled between two professors, Martin Luther and Dr. Faustus, and having to choose between the life of the mind or the salvation of the soul resonates with the current Salon study of Dante’s Paradiso and the upcoming Hamlet study. Also excited about the National Theatre’s readings of passages of the King James Bible coming up in November and October…until we get to the Bible as Literature Salon, this should satisfy.
The classic American campus drama gets a makeover in David Davalos‘s spry, old-fashioned comedy, in which the traditional liberal US college is substituted for the Catholic University of Wittenberg circa 1517. It was a time of new ideas, including those of the Polish astronomer Copernicus, challenging existing beliefs. Think Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and you have a taste of this smart-arse evening, in which Davalos doesn’t just wear his learning on his sleeve but plasters it all over the stage.
Something is rotten in the papal states. The pope is busy flogging off indulgences to fund his building projects. But at Wittenberg, the professor of theology, Martin Luther (Andrew Frame), still keeps the faith despite his frustrations: a severe case of constipation and constant needling from fellow academic Dr Faustus (Sean Campion). Faustus is the professor of philosophy who believes in free will and practises a little psychoanalysis on the side. We may all go to the devil, but at least we can do it thinkingly. Or maybe crooning: Faustus has a weekly gig singing at the local tavern, The Bunghole; Que Sera Sera is his theme tune. Into the mix comes Hamlet (Edward Franklin), prince of Denmark and college tennis champion, back for his senior year and in a teenage dither. Will Faustus win the confused young man’s mind, or can Luther win his soul?
In the pot, Davalos throws fiction and fact, real historical figures and those from literature, and with Tiggerish enthusiasm gives it a stir. The japes come thick and fast. Who really nailed Luther’s 95 theses to that church door? Will it be Hamlet or Laertes who is the victor in the Wittenberg versus Paris college tennis tournament? How many Poles does it take to make the world go round? It’s ticklish fun, but slightly exhausting, and so busy showing off that it almost entirely forgets to be about anything substantial.
The stand-off between faith and reason never materialises, either intellectually or dramatically, because Davalos is always heading off in search of the next joke. This is an evening that can take nothing seriously: not even the meaning of life. Christopher Hayden’s production has the brio to match the script, and there are terrific performances all round, but although I laughed and enjoyed the literary references and academic in-jokes, the earth never moved for me.
The results of this study are not surprising; during the delicious first session on To the Lighthouse today many noted that the book makes the reader more attentive to the nuances of communication and relationships. The act of reading literature widens an individuals’ life experience as travel and friendships do–though literature may offer more diversity as the journey is in time as well as place and the minds of others. Read..talk about what you have read…widen your heart.
Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires.
Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read, with the vampire group delving into an extract in which Edward Cullen tells his teenage love interest Bella what it is like to be a vampire, and the wizardly readers getting a section in which Harry and his cohorts are “sorted” into Hogwarts houses.
The candidates then went through a series of tests, in which they categorised “me” words (myself, mine) and “wizard” words (wand, broomstick, spells, potions) by pressing one key when they appeared on the screen, and “not me” words (they, theirs) and “vampire” words (blood, undead, fangs, bitten) by pressing another key, with the test then reversed. The study’s authors, Dr Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, expected them to respond more quickly to the “me” words when they were linked to the book they had just read.
Gabriel and Young then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed to measure their identification with the worlds they had been reading about – including “How long could you go without sleep?”, “How sharp are your teeth?” and “Do you think, if you tried really hard, you might be able to make an object move just using the power of your mind?” Their moods, life satisfaction, and absorption into the stories were then measured.
Published by the journal Psychological Science, the study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires. And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups. “The current research suggests that books give readers more than an opportunity to tune out and submerge themselves in fantasy worlds. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment,” Gabriel and Young write.
“My study definitely points to reading fulfilling a fundamental need – the need for social connection,” Gabriel said. She is currently trying to replicate the study with schoolchildren – using jedis versus wizards.
The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.
One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathising with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.
“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”
The findings could, Oatley believes, have significant implications, particularly in a climate where arts funding is under threat. “It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction,” he said. “It’s a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications.”
“Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed Friday; it’s amazing how much more there is to be got from a book than just reading it alone. I think the format of the evening works very well too. There are enough breaks and good chunks of time to really get some good work done. And of course you do a brilliant job of guiding and leading the conversation.”
Già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle.
Now my will and my desire were turned, like a wheel in perfect motion, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
These breathtaking lines conclude Dante’s Divine Comedy, a 14,000-line epic written in 1321 on the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called such poetry the most beautiful ever written—and yet so few of us have ever read it. Since the poem appeared, and especially in modern times, those readers intrepid enough to take on Dante have tended to focus on the first leg of his journey, through the burning fires of Inferno.
As I prepare opening notes for Dante’s Inferno, I am reading again about the medieval world view and how our idea of the human being has evolved. Dante offers a wonderful road into these deep and dense queries as his Divine Comedy is his attempt to construct an intellectual universe based on the visions of his faith. Several interested participants have wondered how the study of the Inferno might be approached if one is not formally religious. I am finding, as I did in the previous Paris-based study of this work, that the pilgrim’s exploration of his moral and spiritual universe—and the fantastic images that result—provide the reader a map for their own inquiry.
Dante fought the Church—his banishment from his beloved Florence was in part a result of his criticism of Pope Boniface and the political party he supported. His creation of the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise were his attempt to bring his intellect and faith in alignment; a struggle that humans have been inspired by since Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Although I will provide background on the historical moment of Dante’s Florentine world and the political and ecclesiastical struggles that tore at his home, these are background to the very human pursuit: to understand the human soul. Although Dante’s terms are Christian, I do not think this desire is limited to the Christian realm. As always, the Salon conversation is enriched with a variety of perspectives, those who hold a formal faith as well as those who hold a formal questioning, along with those, (and I would place myself in this category) whose inquiry is loose and fluid and lifelong. We have so few spaces to share diverse views in religious ideas or spiritual traditions; I propose the study of a great work that engages a vigorous questioning of a formal belief offers that space.
From Inferno, we move towards the mountain of Purgatory. . .
As Dante explains in the opening lines of the canticle, Purgatory is the place in which “the human spirit purges himself, and climbing to Heaven makes himself worthy.” Dante’s Purgatory consists of an island mountain, the only piece of land in the southern hemisphere. Divided into three sections, Antepurgatory, Purgatory proper, and the Earthly Paradise, the lower slopes are reserved for souls whose penance was delayed. The upper part of the mountain consists of seven terraces, each of which corresponds to one of the seven capital sins. Atop the mountain Dante locates, Eden, the Earthly Paradise, the place where the pilgrim is reunited with Beatrice, the woman who inspired the poem. (from The World of Dante: http://www.worldofdante.org/purgatory1.html)
Then on to Paradise. . .
In each translation and writing about the Divine Commedia that I have consulted, the unanimous conclusion is that Paradise is the most difficult—the least likely to be read—the most likely to be started and not finished. We are warned by Dante himself, in the longest address to the reader, that if we have followed thus far in our little boat we should turn back now while we can still see the shores, lest in “losing me, you would be lost yourselves. . .” (l.5, Canto 2). How can we turn back now? I recognize the going will be tough and this might not be the most enjoyable Salon read- but I have not known any of us to shrink from challenge.
Dante has these challenges of ineffability as he attempts both to describe Paradise and his journey—the experience is beyond memory, the visions beyond human words. Here he uses the examples of the human need to put feet and hands on God, to give the Angels wings—we cannot conceive of what he has seen because we are still in our human state. Thus Dante himself must change—transhumanize—(Canto I, l. 70) to manage the journey, and we must shuffle along as best we can in our mortal skins to understand what Dante is offering.
“O you, who in some pretty boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along
Turn back to look again upon your own shores;
Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,
In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
You other few who have neck uplifted
Betimes to the bread of angels upon
Which one lives and does not grow sated,
Well may you launch your vessel
Upon the deep sea.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
SALON DETAILS:
Three six-meeting studies, one on each book of the Divine Comedy
Recommended editions:
Inferno by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0142437223
Purgatorio by Dante Aligheri, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0140448962
Paradiso by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0140444438
From Joseph Luzzi\’s illuminating article in American Scholar 03.16
“Dante requires what Nietzsche called “slow reading”—attentive, profound, patient reading—because Francesca’s sparse, seemingly innocent-sounding words speak volumes about the kind of sinner she is. In the first place, she’s not “speaking” to Dante in a natural voice; she’s alluding to poetry. And it’s a very famous poem, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, “Love always returns to the gentle heart,” a gorgeous medieval lyric by Guido Guinizelli, one of Dante’s poetic mentors in the Sweet New Style, a movement in the late 1200s that nurtured Dante’s emerging artistic sensibilities. Francesca, by citing the poem and the Sweet New Style, is saying: it wasn’t my fault, blame it on love. Despite her prettiness, her sweetness, and her eloquence, she is like every other sinner in hell: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s. They never confess their guilt, the one thing necessary for redemption from sin. With one deft allusion, one lyrical dance amid the ferocious winds in the Circle of the Lustful, Dante delivers a magnificent psychological portrait of Francesca’s path to damnation.”
Excerpts from the London Literary Salon News
September 11, 2011
Highlights To the Lighthouse Salon starting Sept. 19
A potent day…a day that deserves reflection and some understanding of how we can be human together. So many days carry within them the history of suffering and struggle- one event should also ripple out to the others…how can we learn? How can we hear each other? How can we break through the boundaries that divide?
This past Friday a dynamic group gathered to consider Frankenstein over five hours…and we went miles: Many thanks to the voices that came together in the light of that amazing book. Some wonderful Salons ahead:
September/October Salons:
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf starts week of September 19; runs for five weeks: £65
o Monday afternoons 12:30- 2:30
o Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM
• Paradisoby Dante starts week of September 12; runs for five weeks: £70
o Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (celebratory dinner to be scheduled in October)
• Midnights Children Three sessions: Thursday evenings Sept. 22, 29 October 6 7:30-10 PM £60
• Young Writers’ Workshop for Writers 12-16 years old: Wednesdays 4:30-6 PM runs five weeks: £70
• Measure for Measure Intensive Sunday October 9th & October 16th 7-10 PM £50
To the Lighthouse **Starts NEXT WEEK*** space remaining in both afternoon and evening studies
– by Virginia Woolf
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 recognizable – 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.”
And a poem that evokes the sound of the waves…
Lake Song
Colette Inez
Every day our name is changed,
say stones colliding into waves.
Go read our names on the shore,
say waves colliding into stones.
Birds over water call their names
to each other again and again
to say where they are.
Where have you been, my small bird?
I know our names will change one day
to stones in a field
of anemones and lavender.
Before you read the farthest wave,
before our shadows disappear
in a starry blur, call out your name
to say where we are.
*****************************************************************
There is something there I think about the idea of infinity and the importance for us in our humanity to see our place in time…and it would not be indiscreet for me to mention at this point that waves and movement of water are essential elements to this work.
For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt of a review of Hermoine Lee’s wonderful biography. I encourage you to use the link here to read the whole review as it offers a good & brief summary of Woolf’s life and writings. 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.
Virginia Woolf is not always thought of as a social creature–her solitary tramps, descents into madness and disciplined writing periods seem to leave little room for a community of friends- particularly a community of such minds as John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey. But Virginia was regarded both as a great wit and hostess and a loyal friend with a wild sense of humor and an insatiable interest in her friends’ lives. Her ability to understand the depth and complexity of intimate relationships is what informs To the Lighthouse
‘Once more I cry aloud,” writes Clive Bell at the end of his 1954 essay What was “Bloomsbury”?. “Who were the members of Bloomsbury? For what did they stand?” Good questions.
The Bloomsbury group was not exactly a group. Nor was it merely a clique. There was no clear set of members, and no manifesto. It was, according to FR Leavis, merely a sort of coterie – of an inferior kind. DH Lawrence famously described various individuals associated with the group as “little swarming selves”. He imagined crushing them.
Leonard Woolf – a founding member – claimed that they were in fact “a largely imaginary group of persons with largely imaginary objects and characteristics”. According to Frances Spalding, in her indispensable illustrated introductory guide, The Bloomsbury Group (2005), the term is merely a useful “collective title for a group of friends”. Another way of looking at the Bloomsbury group is to see it as the coming together of two extraordinary families, the Stephens and the Stracheys, around whose effulgence a constellation of others gathered.
Leslie Stephen was a literary critic. His first wife, Harriet Marian, was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife, Julia Prinsep Jackson, was the niece of the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. His father was a permanent undersecretary in the British colonial office. His brother was a judge. With Julia, Leslie Stephen had four children: Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and Virginia. Julia Jackson died young, and when Leslie Stephen died in 1904 the siblings moved to 46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London, where they began to receive guests “at home”.
Some of those guests included the friends that Thoby Stephen had made when he was at Cambridge. One of these friends was Lytton Strachey. While the Stephens were solid members of the Victorian upper middle-class, the Stracheys were eccentric adventurers. Jane Strachey, the matriarch, was a pioneering feminist. Her husband, Richard, was an engineer and administrator in India. Among their 10 children were Pernel, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge; Pippa, a leading suffragist; Oliver, a cryptographer; and James, the psychoanalyst, and editor and translator of the 24-volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
Lytton Strachey’s friends and associates included Leonard Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, the writer Clive Bell, the painter Roger Fry, and the critic Desmond MacCarthy. They too became drawn into the Bloomsbury set. Thoby Stephen died of typhoid fever in 1906, but by then many of the important alliances between friends and families had been established. In 1907, Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, with whom she had two sons. In 1912, Leonard Woolf married Virginia Stephen, at Lytton Strachey’s urging; Strachey had already proposed to Virginia himself, before quickly realising his mistake. “I think there’s no doubt whatever that you ought to marry her,” he wrote to Leonard. “You would be great enough, and you’d have the advantage of physical desire.”
The plots thickened. The roots became ever more tangled. Vanessa had an affair with Duncan Grant, who was Lytton Strachey’s cousin, and with whom she had a child. Lytton Strachey was also in love with Duncan, though he lived in a menage a trois with the painter Dora Carrington and their friend Ralph Partridge. Virginia enjoyed a famous affair with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. Somehow, the whole thing hung together. Bloomsbury, according to Virginia, consisted of a group of friends who shared an outlook on life that “keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years; and no amount of quarrelling or success, or failure has altered this.”
There are other members of the Bloomsbury group, too many to mention. Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians (2002) is a good place to start, but there is probably nowhere to finish.
Robert Baird addresses this question in Slate magazine
Please click on the link for the whole article…
Paradise Lost
Why doesn’t anyone read Dante’s Paradiso?
By Robert P. Baird
Posted Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at 8:10 AM ET
Dante’s Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno’s nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur’s choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, “One finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica.” (A cantica, or canticle, is one of the three titled parts of the poem.) The time is ripe to reconsider Paradiso’s neglect, however, since three major new translations of the poem we know as the Divine Comedy are coming to completion. (Dante simply called it his Comedy; in what was perhaps the founding instance of publishing hype, divine was added by a Venetian printer in 1555.) Hollander’s edition, produced with his wife, Jean, was published this summer, and two more are due out next year: one by Robin Kirkpatrick and the other—the one I’m holding out for—by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez.
What keeps people from the Paradiso? For one, it lacks the Inferno’s irony. The characters Dante meets in hell know the circumstances of their sins, but with few exceptions, they can’t see the justice in their punishments. The tension between their knowledge and ours generates a kind of dramatic irony familiar to modern readers: the irony of the unreliable narrator. Another problem is narrative: The Purgatorio is almost too successful in wrapping things up, so that by the end of the second canticle, Dante has done almost everything that seemed worth doing. He’s crossed hell and climbed Mount Purgatory, he’s purged himself of his own sins, and he’s come face to face with Beatrice, the woman on account of whom his whole journey was undertaken. It doesn’t help matters that for most of the Paradiso, Beatrice acts more like a schoolmarm than a lover, delivering long speeches that read like lectures in Scholastic theology.
When it comes down to it, though, the real problem modern readers have with the Paradiso is the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that “we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry.” As the quote suggests, our trouble with heaven is less a problem of belief than it is a problem of imagination. From the opening lines of Anna Karenina on down, all our best literature teaches us that narrative thrives on adversity, and so heaven presents itself as little more than a blank screen of beatific blandness, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. (Consider, by contrast, how successfully hell has been deployed as a metaphor for modern life: Under the Volcano, The Invisible Man, The Descent of Alette, not to mention “The Waste Land.”)
At first glance, Dante’s nine spheres of heaven look to be exactly the kind of bright, boring place we’d expect. When the pilgrim meets Piccarda in the heaven of the moon, the lowest of the nine, he asks why she doesn’t wish to be higher up, to be nearer to God. Piccarda replies (in Jean Hollander’s translation), “Brother, the power of love subdues our will/ so that we long for only what we have/ and thirst for nothing else.” A statement like this would seem to drain the Paradiso of all possible interest: wanting only what one has may be admirable in life but it hardly bodes well for literature.
More voices! More words! The Southbank International School in London is hosting a community learning Salon: an exclusive opportunity for members of this lively educational community to join together in the exploration of ideas.
Community Learning Salon
Program description: The Community Learning Salon offers members of the Southbank community (parents, students in G9-12, staff, faculty, administrators…) an opportunity for a playful exchange of ideas beyond the classroom. In our weekly hour-long after-school meetings, we will use a short work of literature to consider the human experience and sharpen our critical learning skills through the discussion. The nature of the Salon conversation allows for a bridge across age and life experience to find shared ground in discovery and knowledge. The study is facilitated by Toby Brothers, a dynamic literature instructor with experience conducting seminars for adults and students in English and world literature, poetry and creative writing in London, Paris and San Francisco. For history and more details about the Salon, see http://clone.checkyourtestsite.co.uk/
“To think that we have at our disposal the biggest thing in the universe and that it is language. What one can do with language is infinite.” Helene Cixous, French Philosopher
Week OneIntroduction, poem study: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’ Bishop uses a demanding form to explore the uncontrollable nature of grief; this sharp and tender poem is a good starting place for a close consideration of language. No pre-reading is necessary for the first meeting.
Week Two: September 29th Short Story: ‘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. Email Toby for copies of the story at litsalon@gmail.com.
Week Three October 6th Short Story:‘The Yellow Wallpaper‘ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Often disappears into the category of a feminist work, this subversive first person narration gives a glimpse to the dangers of an artistic temperament smothered by care- loving, oppressive care. I will provide readers with notes on the world of late 19th ct. women, particularly in regards to medically care and psychiatric treatment. This is a haunting and riveting read.
Week Four Poetry study: Emily Dickinson: poetess of playful subversion… ‘I Started Early, Took My Dog’ and ‘Tell all the Truth But tell it slant’ Dickinson is considered one of the great American poets but many find her work elusive. We will use these two sample works to discover howDickinson uses language to enter profound questions about meaning, purpose and belief in short, tightly structured bursts of sparkling language.
Week Five ‘Sonny’s Blues‘ by James Baldwin Set in racially-divided Harlem in the 1950s, Baldwin’s long short story tells of a lost brother, mean streets, inheritance, nobility and cowardice, and ultimately of the transcendence available in art. This piece- with its riffs, swoops and echoes comes as close as almost any text I have read to the experience of musicality in writing.
The remaining five sessions will be determined by participant interest. Choices include a longer work (Rushdie, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Faulkner are just a few of the possibilities) or continued consideration of short stories and poetry with an opportunity for creative writing in response to the ideas generated by the Community Learning Salon.
DETAILS Thursdays 3:45 to 4:45 pm, starting 15 September…Study continues for 10 weeks (recommended participation: minimum 6 sessions). Free of charge to members of the Southbank Community.
