Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Chekhov and Williams
http://www.taganrogcity.com/chekhov.html
CONTEXTS
LITERARY CONTEXT
EUROPEAN INFLUENCES
The subject matter of Williams’s plays was deeply influenced by his image of the South, but he looked to the playwrights of Europe for models of the form. When a student at the University of Missouri, and already dreaming of a career as a playwright, Tennessee Williams immersed himself in the plays of Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen. August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) may well have influenced A Streetcar Named Desire in its equation of class antagonism with sexual tension.
Again, a parallel may be drawn between the plantation culture of Belle Reve and the household of Madame Ranevskaya in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904). Both are doomed, useless, their extravagant existence based on the labour of others, yet they both possess a charm and romantic appeal lacking equally in the blustering merchant Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard and in Stanley Kowalski.
As for Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams could have wished for no better models for constructing a play around one compelling central character than A Doll’s House (1879), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892) or John Gabriel Borkman (1896), to name a few among many.
The two cultures – the Southern and the European – meet successfully in A Streetcar Named Desire , in its Southern setting and its romantic doomed heroine Blanche DuBois, with her class pretensions and European-sounding name.
yorknotes.com
However, it was the playwright rather than work that first 7 attracted him and there were enough things common between the Russian author and Williams to hold on his attention: Chekhov and Williams both were the mediocre student in school who refused to bear the pressures from the outside world in the private activities of reading and writing. Louis Kronenberger, one of the reviewers of the New York premiere, said that “in its mingled pathos and comedy, it’s mingled naturalistic detail and gauzy atmosphere, its preoccupation with memory, its tissue of forlorn hopes and backward looks and languishing self pities, The Glass Menagerie is more than just like a little Chekhovian” (qtd. in Roudane 179). Since many of the dramatic elements “borrowed from The Seagull that appear in The Glass Menagerie” (Roudane 181). Therefore, it can be said, “Williams seized on a Russian play as a suitable model in the process of dramatizing his own material” (181). Just as The Seagull may have called the forerunner of The Glass Menagerie, The Cherry Orchard presents affinities with A Street Car Named Desire. Like Chekhov, Williams used “dramatic impressionism such as sound, lighting and stage effects” (181) as elements of psychological or thematic expressivity. In both places, the “decline of characters is accompanied by music: in the Russian play a Jewish orchestra” (181) was there that express disappointment and unhappiness; in the American plays, there is the Varsouviana, a formal “nineteenth-century polka specially associated with the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Blanche’s young husband and her subsequent sense of guilt” (181).
Roudane, M. C. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams.UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov have all been cited by critics as important influences on the drama of American playwright Tennessee Williams. While Harold Bloom argues that "Williams truly had one precursor only: Hart Crane," the critic acknowledges that Williams himself "asserted he had other precursors also: D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov in the drama" (Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams, ed. Harold Bloom [NY: Chelsea House, 1987], 2). According to Donald Spoto, when asked "which playwrights he thought most influenced his work, [Williams] usually replied Strindberg and Chekhov" (The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams [Boston: Little, Brown, 1985], 45). The influence of Chekhov on A Streetcar Named Desire is I think rendered obvious through conscious or deliberate allusion by Williams. Blanche Dubois explains the significance of her name to Mitch in scene 3 by asserting, "It's a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring!"([NY: Signet, 1972], 54-5). Blanche's delicate optimism here is undermined by the fact that "white woods" more readily recalls the image of a forest in the dead of winter. Yet her more appealing interpretation of her name also ironically heightens a sense of tragic decay, since "an orchard in spring" directly recalls Chekhov's A Cherry Orchard --that is, the answer to Anca Vlasopolos' query, "Was Williams thinking of Chekhov's ill-fated cherry orchard," is certainly yes ("Authorizing History: Victimization in A Streetcar Named Desire," Theatre Journal 38 [1986]: 334). Chekhov's play uses a seasonal progression from May to October that Williams mirrors in Streetcar...
McAdam, Ian. "Remembering Ibsen in Tennessee Williams." Notes on Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, 2012. Gale Literature Resource Center, . Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.
Monday, November 23, 2020
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Critical approaches to texts
A good deal of what text means depends on perspective the audience brings.
Perspective is the type of lens the reader brings with them.New Criticism: Emphasis explications or close reading.
Looking at images, paradox, irony, symbols, ext figurative language.
Irrelevant factors are those such as the writer intention, personal response, social context.
Judge the text by how well all the elements work together to create meaning.
e.g in dark night you would ask questions like what does the mask symbolise?
Feminist Criticism:
Role of women and the effects of gender stereotypes
Uncover and challenge essential attitudes that hold it is normal for women to be kept in domestic, secondary and subservient roles.
Look at the female characters and their roles how are they presented.
New Historicism:
Looking at the work in context of its historical and cultural setting.
Does the work support or condemn any historic actions??
Keep it in context of what has happened
Psychoanalytical Criticism:
Looks at "hero's journey" and archetypes.
Motives of the character
Role of the subconscious: ego, superego, id.
Question: how would you apply the hero's journey?, What motivates the protagonist? Is love a bigger motivator than hate?
Ethical Criticism:
The morality of characters and how they handle themselves.
Which characters make personal sacrifices for others.
Marxist Criticism:
Effects of class differences on plot characters and conflict.
Conflict between classes leads to upheaval and form ground work for a new order of society and economics where capitalism is abolished.
Who benefits from actions? what happens to capitalism?
Reader Response:
Individual brings their own experience to make meaning of the work.
Your own interpretation based on your own experience.
Incredulity or ......
outline example
Quote, context, explanation from one of the standpoints
"I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered."
The StrangerPart 1, Chapter 5
context: Meursault's boss has offered him the position in Paris but he has turned down the transfer because of the cold, grey weather there.
It could be argued that this is a nihilist quote and proof of the degree to which Meursault has already established that life is without meaning, so one may do as one pleases. Meursault sees no "reason to change his life," as he is satisfied with his situation in Algiers. In addition, Meursault states once again how things don't matter which is very much a tenet of Nihilistic philosophical reasoning.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Translating L'etranger
The first lines of Albert Camus' The Stranger go something like this:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday
It's told in the present tense, as in, when Meursault is recounting the event it had happened that very same day. This tense continues for the next two paragraphs, emphasis mine:
The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.”
and
Afterwards it struck me I needn’t have said that. I had no reason to excuse myself; it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth. Probably he will do so the day after tomorrow, when he sees me in black. For the present, it’s almost as if Mother weren’t really dead. The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak. ...
Basically, these paragraphs have Meursault speaking as is the telegram arrived the day is speaking, the funeral the next day, and Meursault already having taken time to act on it and call off work. He can take the 2:00 bus tomorrow to arrive on time.
However, the next paragraph and the rest of the book go like this:
I took the two-o’clock bus. It was a blazing hot afternoon. I’d lunched, as usual, at Céleste’s restaurant. Everyone was most kind, and Céleste said to me, “There’s no one like a mother.” When I left they came with me to the door. It was something of a rush, getting away, as at the last moment I had to call in at Emmanuel’s place to borrow his black tie and mourning band. He lost his uncle a few months ago
Reading from this, he's speaking as if he had already taken the bus, lunched, and so forth in the past tense. This continues for the rest of the book and it's finally revealed at the end of the story that Meurasault was speaking in the past tense after the court case and just before the execution.
The line "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday" and its variations have even come to represent the book.
Why is the tense different for the first few paragraphs of The Stranger?
A
The first sentence, in French, contains an ambiguity about time which can't be translated into English. The original line is: "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Où peut-être hier, je ne sais pas."
In written French the past historic tense is normally used, but as this novel has a first person narrator, he uses the "passé composé" tense normally used in everyday speech. To form this tense, you usually use the verb "to have" followed by the past participle (similar to one of the past constructions in English, e.g. "I have written a letter").
However - a peculiarity of French is that certain verbs (15 common ones, mostly to do with motion) use the verb "to be" instead of the verb "to have". So in French you don't say, for example, "I have gone"; you say "I am gone".
One of these non-standard verbs is the verb "to die".
Therefore, you can legitimately translate the first line of the novel as "Today, Mum died" or "Today, Mum is dead". Most translations take the first option (though they unaccountably change the word order!), because otherwise the second sentence doesn't follow on too well.
B
One thing to note is that the English translation you quote is reasonably faithful. It slightly misses the effect of the original, however, in that it doesn't use a future tense. A more accurate translation of the beginning of the second paragraph would be (my translation):
The old people's home is in Marengo, eighty kilometers from Algiers. I will take the bus at two o'clock and I will arrive in the afternoon. This way I will be able to hold the wake, and I will come back tomorrow night.
Another thing that isn't apparent in the English translation is which past tense is used in most of the book. The normal tense in a novel is the passé simple. This is a literary tense, rarely used in everyday life in the 20th century, suitable for expressing that something happened at some past time. The Stranger is (apart from the first two paragraphs) written in the passé composé, which in literary usage is only used to indicate that something has been accomplished, but in everyday language is used for any past action. The use of passé composé gives a feeling of immediacy — the events that are narrated are still very relevant, whereas passé simple would tend to indicate a tale from the past. The use of passé composé also gives a feeling of informality, which is expressed in other ways: Meursault is a working class person, who uses simple language (also visible, for example, in the tendency to use of short sentences).
In many ways, the book is written like a personal diary. In this respect, the succession of tenses makes sense. The first few sentences are written in the present tense. They describe what Meursault thinks when he writes the first entry in this diary, soon after receiving the news that his mother has died. The part starting with “I took the two-o'clock bus” is the next entry in the diary, written after the bus trip.
Where this simple interpretation fails is that as far as I can tell, the opening is the only place where Meursault uses the present tense. It is unlikely that he would never need to express actions in progress. This singles out Meursault's mother's death as an exceptional event. Furthermore, that event is not only where the book starts, it's where the idea of the book starts. This singular use of the present makes it look like the news of Meursault's mother's death caused Meursault to start holding this diary. He was considerably shaken, and this kicked off the chain of events in the rest of the book.
The whole book is built on several ambiguities, including the extent to which Meursault is emotionally shaken by his mother's death and other events. The text, superficially, makes him look extremely detached, cold, emotionless. He writes simple descriptive sentences, showing no emotion, just like he shows no emotion in many other ways (not crying at his mother's funeral, shrugging when asked about marriage, ...). Yet there is subtext that shows him more affected under his cold attitude. I think the use of the present tense in the opening shows that he is emotionally shaken at his mother's death but does not realize it consciously.
C
In 1946, Stuart Gilbert translated the novel's first sentence as “Mother died today” instead of “Mother has died today”. Since "today" implies a time frame that is not yet closed, you would expect the present perfect instead of the past simple, but the past simple sounds terser. (For the rules regarding past simple and the present perfect, I assume British English, since Stuart Gilbert was English. See e.g. the article Present perfect on the British Council's website.)
One of the challenges of translating L'Étranger is how to render its past tenses. Novels and autobiographies traditionally used passé simple (e.g. "elle mourut": she died) to represent events in the past. This tense is not used in spoken French, and even in written French it has gradually been replaced by the passé composé (e.g. "elle est morte": she died or she has died, depending on the time frame). For a long time, roughly from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, French authors used a 24-hour rule to choose between the passé simple and the passé composeé: for events more than 24 hours ago, use the passé simple, for events less than 24 hours ago, use the passé composé.
The first time indication in the novel, "aujourd'hui" (i.e. "today"), refers to a point in time less than 24 hours ago, hence the passé composé ("maman est morte").
However, the novel spans at least eleven months and Meursault relates the events from a point in time that is not consistent throughout the novel: in the novel's second paragraph, he says he'll take the bus; starting from the third paragraph, everything is in the past, and as the novel progresses, the distance in time between the events and the narration gradually increases until the end of the trial (Part Two, chapter IV). The first three chapters in the second part of the novel narrate events that are more than 24 hours in the past, so it is reasonable to expect the passé simple based on the rule mentioned above. In spite of this, Camus chose the passé composé. In the book's last two chapters, the distance in time is less obvious, but these also use the passé composé, like the rest of the novel. (Camus uses the imparfait when grammatical rules require this. I have found only two instances of the passé simple in the entire novel.)
One of the most famous analysis of the novel is Jean-Paul Sartre's "Explication de L’Étranger", first published in Cahiers du Sud in February 1943. This essay contains insightful comments on Camus's choice of tenses. According to Sartre, each sentence is an island separated from the story's other sentences; each sentence is another creation ex nihilo. Sarter writes:
C’est pour accentuer la solitude de chaque unité phrastique que M. Camus a choisi de faire son récit au parfait composé. Le passé défini est le temps de la continuité : « Il se promena longtemps », ces mots nous renvoient à un plus-que-parfait, à un futur ; la réalité de la phrase, c’est le verbe, c’est l’acte, avec son caractère transitif, avec sa transcendance. « Il s’est promené longtemps » dissimule la verbalité du verbe ; le verbe est rompu, brisé en deux :(...)
Translation:
It is in order to emphasise the solitude of each sentence unit that Mr. Camus chose to write his narration in the *parfait composé" [i.e. passé composé]. The passé défini [i.e. passé simple] is the tense of continuity: "Il se promena longtemps" ("He walked for a long time"), these words refer to a plus-que-parfait [pluperfect], to a futur [literally "future" but also future tense]; the reality of the sentence is in the verb, the action, with its transitive nature, with its transcendence. "Il s’est promené longtemps" ("He walked for a long time") conceals the verb's "verb nature"; the verb is fracture, broken in two pieces: (...)
The identical translations of "Il se promena longtemps" and "Il s’est promené longtemps" illustrate the issue: it is impossible to translate the passé composé without undoing the fracturing of the verb that resulted from Camus's choice for that tense. For example, "J'ai pris l'autobus à deux heures" is translated as "I took the two-o’clock bus". a literal translation would be "I have taken the bus at two o'clock", but that would fix the narration in a time frame that is less than 24 hours after the event and it is not obvious that this is what Camus intended. For this reason, the English translation of the passé composé will never be "right" because the use of a specific English tense will always imply a choice of time frame that Camus appears to have left open.
https://literature.stackexchange.com/
Why does Meursault shoot?
In Albert Camus' book The Stranger, Meursault kills a character known as "the Arab" for no real reason at all. Meursault even acknowledges that he doesn't have to kill "the Arab"
"It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it."
When he does shoot "the Arab", he notes that,
"each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing."
All in all, killing "the Arab" seems like a bad idea. But strangely enough, no real explanation is given for why Meursault killed "the Arab".
What's going on here?
(note also how the translation is different. How does this change meaning in the novel?)
A
What does not work well is looking for motivation at the surface level of the text. This is due to Camus's narrative technique. The entire story is told from a first-person perspective, i.e. a type of perspective that, in French literature before The Stranger, had been used to allow introspection. But introspection is exactly what we don't get; instead we get a narrative that gives us roughly the same insight into Meursault as a third-person perspective, almost as if an outsider were observing Meursault; only it is Meursault himself telling that story. Several early critics have commented on this, for example Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot and Claude-Edmonde Magny.
For this reason, analysing Meursault like a character from a realist novel is a vain pursuit. Camus himself remarked in his notebooks (in a draft for a letter in response to a review of The Stranger), "Realism is a meaningless word (Madame Bovary and Demons are realist novels and they have nothing in common." ("Le réalisme est un mot vide de sens (Mme Bovary et Les Possédés sont des romans réalistes et ils n'ont rien en commun." Quoted in Bernard Pingaud: L'Étranger d'Albert Camus. Gallimard, 1992, page 187.)
As mentioned above, Meursault tells his story with a kind of outsider's objectivity. He is also presented as a character that refuses to lie and play by society's conventional rules. After his mother's death, he does not seem to be mourning: he is not interested in having his mother's coffin opened so he can take a last look at her, he smokes during the wake, even falls asleep, and he doesn't weep during the funeral. These are examples of not playing by the normal social rules: he does not want to feign grief when he doesn't feel any. His lawyer later tells him that this could be used against him during the murder trial and suggest that he might say that his insensitivity at the funeral was not real but the result of an attempt to control his emotions. Meursault immediately rejects the idea because it was "untrue". This illustrates his refusal to lie.
Later on, during the trial, the killing of the Arab becomes an issue of secondary importance compared to Meursault's insensitiveness. Witnesses are questioned about Meursault's character and about his behaviour during and after the funeral but not about what they know about the killing. Meursualt is accused of "morally killing" his own mother; during his closing speech, the prosecutor even claims Meursault is also guilty of killing his father. (In reality, the cause of his mother's death is not known but she was definitely not killed by Meursault, while his father died when he was still a small child.) The prosecution's closing speech appears to mention the killing of the Arab only briefly, adding that Meursault "knows the value of words", which is another allusion to Meursault's commitment to truth (though probably not from the prosecutor's point of view).
From this point of view, Meursault is put on trial for refusing to lie and not playing by society's conventional rules. However, a novel about a character that is prosecuted solely for this reason would be implausible. This is why society needs an excuse to put Meursault on trial, and by letting Meursault unintentionally kill an Arab, the novelist provides exactly that excuse.
B
Initially, there isn't much. The final words of Part I read this:
I wanted to hear the murmur of its water again, to escape from the sum and the effort and the women's tears, and to relax in the shade again. But when I got nearer, I saw that Raymond's Arab had come back. He was alone. He was lying on his back, with his hands behind his head ... As far as I was concerned, it was all settled and I'd gone there without even thinking about it. As soon as he saw me, he sat up lightly and put his hand in his pocket.
pg. 58-59
There was a bit of a defensive mood at this point in the story. You have to remember that Meursault had simply gone with his friends for a day on the beach. Two Arabs were seemingly following them. Prior to these paragraphs, these Arabs had already engaged in a bit of a fight with Meursault and his friends, with one of them having slashed his friend with a knife. Moving on... (emphasis mine)
I took a few steps towards the spring. The Arab didn't move. Even now, he was still some distance away... I waited. The sun was beginning to burn on my cheeks, and I felt drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as on the day of my mother's funeral, and again it was my forehead that was hurting me most and all the veins were throbbing at once beneath the skin... I took a step, just one step forward. And this time, without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it out towards me in the sun... All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes.
pg. 59-60
This passage is also interesting. Meursault was undoubtedly under the sun, and it was affecting him. The parallel between the sun and his mother's funeral is also somewhat significant. At his mother's funeral, he was largely alone and almost kept to himself. He also defied many societal standards related to his mother's funeral.
The passages in these pages offer that parallel. Meursault wants to keep the peace within him, and he doesn't want anyone around him. The presence of the Arab disturbed him. When the Arab drew his knife, it disturbed this peace, bringing about provoking actions:
... That was when everything shook... The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. My whole being went tense and I tightened my grip on the gun. The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. I realized that I'd destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I'd been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.
pg. 60
These passages provide a direct narrative for what directly instigated the act. Meursault may not have been completely conscious of his act.
But what I find interesting is the last sentence. You see, this novel is largely about existentialism. Albert Camus, the author, was an existentialist. The murder came as a shock - here we are looking at the life of an absurd man. He doesn't necessarily follow social norms, he's not married... etc. Earlier in the chapter, he said:
When Raymond handed me his gun, the sun glinted off it... I realized at that point that you could either shoot or not shoot.
pg. 57
You can shoot or not shoot. It doesn't matter. If someone is murdered or not, the world doesn't care. The theme of existence is largely at play. Whatever happens, it doesn't matter.
No matter how you look at it, there is not a reasonable explanation for Meursault's actions. It conveys the theme of existentialism, as well as the title of the book overall - Mersualt is an outsider in the way that he defies the laws of society. You see this most notably in his trial, where he shows remorse, and is ultimately convicted not because he committed the murder, but because he doesn't live up to what society wishes.
https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1176/why-does-meursault-kill-the-arab-in-the-stranger
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