Last semester, on a whim, I took a class on Classical Arabic poetry. Over the course of several months, I covered ground from the deserts of pre-Islamic Arabia to the tumultuous cities of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, reading everything from the boastful qasidas of tribal warriors to the mystical ghazals of Sufi masters to the musical muwashshahats of the noblemen of al-Andalus. I went in knowing nothing, but each passing week increasingly impressed on me the sense that not only do Arabs revere poetry in a manner unmatched by most, they especially love poetry about love, in all its forms. Then I got to the modern day, and encountered Nizar Qabbani.

A Syrian diplomat who left his post to compose in self-exile in London, Qabbani’s greatest inspiration for writing was women. He is hailed the Arab world over for his ability to portray male-female relationships, to capture love, as never before, and is thus often considered the love poet for modern women. Many of his poems have even been turned into popular songs—on the day of our seminar on Qabbani, I walked in to a video of a soulful crooner murmuring Qabbani’s verses to a packed audience of women, each new stanza sending them into paroxysms of joy.

Meanwhile, I was just confused. I didn’t get Qabbani, not the way those several thousand women did. His verses were plenty lovely, but I couldn’t understand why the man celebrated as the greatest poet of love of the last century was a man who seemingly didn’t care for love, or the writing of love, at all. One poem in his collection ends with the poet-persona declaring that he has discovered he is “incapable of loving the minutest creature” (26). Another poem proclaims that “Love, as we knew it, has ended” (138). And the last poem is sprinkled with outbursts about his desire to completely change the history of love, a wish that ends on a rather grim note: “I haven’t demolished the hurdles / of ugliness the way I imagined. / In fact, I’ve been exploding / in my own fire” (66). I had spent the whole semester with discovering Arabic’s extremely rich tradition of love poetry, and now I was puzzled over how to fit Qabbani, anti-love and anti-love poetry, within this storied heritage.

It is only when I read Nietzsche that I was able to resolve this tension in Qabbani’s work between his role as a poet of love and his disavowal of that love. In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche articulates a theory of the relation of a word to the “truth,” the object it is meant to encompass, that boils down to: there is no connection; language is independent of the object it purports to name, and a change in the latter does not constitute a change in the former. In applying this formulation to my knowledge of Arabic love poetry, however, it seems not that there is no link, but rather that it is flipped around—it is not the object that governs language, but language that governs the object.  It is not love, the reality and experience of it, that shapes the expression, the poetry of love; rather, it is the poetic tradition that shapes the reality and experience. And in many cases, this language, so long and refined in its literary history, highly codified and specific in its forms, is rather restrictive, shackling love by forcing it into set schemata for how it can emerge. A rich poetic tradition here is not a boon, but a fault. This is counterintuitive, I know, but it explains much of Qabbani’s glaring ambivalence towards love, the emotion and object, and love, the poetry and language. His poems are a record of his struggle as a lover and a poet to give voice to his own love, his uniquely personal love affair and beloved, within the context of a canon full to the brim already with love affairs and beloveds. Qabbani wishes to free love from the chains of past traditions, and to do so he must destroy it whole so that he can create it anew.

Let us look, for example, at “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green,” the poem in which Qabbani reveals the most heightened awareness of his position as a love poet in a long line of love poets. The poem is composed like a love letter, opening with an entreaty to the beloved to “Listen carefully. / Listen carefully,” and continuing with an ode to their love:

This love ordeal I’m going through

happens only once in a lifetime.

An ordeal that is poetic, aquatic,

mystical and sensual,

glorious in its sadness (60)

The following stanzas proceed along the same vein, Qabbani striving to elucidate, in as vivid and minute detail as possible, the intensity of his feelings for his beloved. Holding her makes him feel weightless, “as if my veins had dissolved / and my bones vaporized” (Qabbani, 60). Every small moment spent with her, every little thing she does—“The taste of the first kiss before breakfast. / Your white feet diving into the thick carpet, / the brush massaging your hair, / and the eye shadow in the corner of your eyes”—is cause for joy, “reason enough / for the entire universe / to transform itself into music and poetry” (Qabbani, 70). His love even approaches the transcendent—every time they meet, he says, “the colour of time in our watches / turns green, / the yearning in our eyes / turns green, / and the moon that rises from your cleavage / turns green,” green like the color of Paradise as described in the Quran (68). As described by Qabbani, his is special, so great that it touches the divine.

Strangely enough, however, Qabbani is unable to stop himself from repeating this refrain that their love is one of a kind over and over again. “So give me another chance to write history, / for history, my lady, does not recur,” he says to her, and repeats a few stanzas later, this time staccato, more emphatic: “All of this, my lady, are pages of history / that will never recur. / That will / never / recur” (70). But his very forcefulness casts doubt on this assertion, hinting at it does to an underlying tension in his words, a hidden anxiety he is trying to assuage. If he were as sure in his love as he pretends to be, we are led to ask, why would he feel the need to keep assuring us, and his lover, it is so?

Our suspicions are correct: an examination of the language Qabbani uses to depict his love affair reveals that it is suffused with the oft-used conventions of Classical Arabic literature. Early on, he asks of his beloved, “Wash your hair in the river of my madness. / But then, isn’t the madness of love inexplicable?” a line that to any Arab reader would immediately evoke that most famous pair of literary lovers: Layla and her Majnun, who loved her so fiercely that he was known by all as “Layla’s Madman” (60). He traces her arrival into his life back to “the spas of Granada / and the sorrows of the mandolin,” an allusion to the myth of the Golden Age of Andalusia, a halcyon period in the minds of many said to have witnessed the flowering of Arabic literature, and in particular the poetry of love (64). His compares their love to the intoxication of wine—“All the ports have closed, / and the marina’s wine runs red” when she is near—a metaphor that traces its roots in the canon back centuries, all the way to wine songs of the exalted mu’allaqas of the ancient tribes (64). Far from not having a “guidebook for love,” their love is clearly very much grounded in the canon of Classical Arabic poetry, a fact that even Qabbani implicitly admits in the end, when he says: “Whenever a new love tale / is added to the annals of love / in my town” (64, 66). His is this new love tale, added to the already great annals of Arabic love poetry.

But it is not only Qabbani’s ability to express love that is circumscribed by Arabic poetic tradition; love’s very course and reality is as well. Qabbani relates the text of love to the action of love when, early on in “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green,” he calls on his lover to

Read me intensely.

I am always searching for an avid reader,

one who wears poems about her wrists

like bracelets

and sees the whole world

in the portrait of a poet (62).

Qabbani’s very self is contained in literary terms, and it is his qualities as a poet that he credits for forging his connection with his beloved in the first place: “How wonderful for a woman to lose her head, / to become intoxicated before the face of poetry” (Qabbani, 62). The entirety of their love, their lives together, proceeds along the same lines, revolving around the reading and writing of poetry:

What really amazes me

is the feeling every morning

that whatever I touch or lay eyes on

turns into poetry.

My things and yours—no matter how trivial—

turn into poetry (68).

 The vast poetic tradition that is both Qabbani’s heritage and profession informs every aspect of his relationship with his beloved, such that it almost seems alive, a thing that looms over his life: “What’s happening to our histories, my lady? / Whenever I squander kisses on your hair, it grows before my eyes” (Qabbani, 72). Not that the plural “histories” makes this reference not to their personal story, their by-definition singular history, but rather to the broader “history of my time” and “history of females” (Qabbani, 64). Love the object, the emotion, the felt and sensate experience, converges with love the language, contrary to Nietzsche’s claim that there is no connection between the two. Poetry emerges here as the only framework in which love can be conducted, manifested.

But this dominance of language over love is a curse for Qabbani, imprisoning him and his lover within rigid archetypes that constrain their freedom to love as they will. About halfway into “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green” Qabbani exclaims: “In fifty years I haven’t met / a hind that fled her captor, / nor a woman who desired freedom” (66). The word “hind” is the stock metaphor in Classical Arabic poetry for women, and its use here conjures up an entire literary history in which women are portrayed as passive, helpless, captive. This vision of women is much than a simple figure of speech, as it has acquired the power to affect reality, influence Qabbani’s actual love life to the extent that all of the women he’s met so far are “hinds” and the men “her captor.” This theme of bondage by language resounds all over Qabbani’s oeuvre, and to an even greater degree than in “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green.” “Painting With Words,” for example, begins with Qabbani declaring that the “record of my life” is so long a story it is as if “I have lived through all the ages. / It’s as if I have existed thousands of years” (24). His descriptions of his love affairs with numerous women are couched in imagery that recalls the lengthy history of Arabic love poetry:

I try to use my traditional way of evasion—

through women.

Where are my concubines?

Where are the harems?

And where is the smell of incense

wafting through my chambers? (26)

Qabbani’s personal loves have been entirely subsumed within the preset patterns of Arabic love poetry, such that he and his any of his beloveds are unable to break away from these traditions and forge a love that is unique to them. “All kinds of love appear the same, / as indistinguishable as leaves in the forest” (Qabbani, 26). Qabbani joins the other poetic heroes, and his lover melds into the ranks of the women, becoming indistinguishable despite his protests to the contrary. “For I know exactly which among my women / and my poems I desire,” he says in his poem “The Last Declaration of King Schariar,” only to refute this idea in the very next line: “and I know that nothing is new in the realm of women” (134). Notice too how problematic, how sexist these all-consuming literary models are—love is depicted always as “conquests,” the man strong and daring, the woman pure and receptive (Qabbani, 24). In this way love becomes trite, Qabbani discovering that he is incapable of truly “loving the minutest creature” (Qabbani, 28). The language of love is all-encompassing and oppressive, absorbing every individual love and compelling it conform to rigid, dominant, and problematic archetypes passed down from literary history.

The only way to save love from the despotism of language is, ironically enough, to destroy all love as it is conceived in the present day. Even more ironically, the tool of destruction is more language, more poetry. “For what’s the value of poetry / if it doesn’t have the power of change? / And what’s a poet if he can’t command change?” Qabbani asks, indicating his great faith in the power of language to transform the meaning of other language even as it ossifies, becomes rigid and confining (64). But the roots of the poetic language are dug too deep in Arabic society and culture, and simply speaking and shouting ad infinitum to others will produce no results:

 For fifty years I’ve been jumping

from one landmine to another,

preaching to my people

so that they might change.

I haven’t demolished the hurdles

of ugliness the way I imagined.

In fact, I’ve been exploding

In my own fire (66).

No, the sole path out is to dismantle the very meaning of love as it is understood in the present day, a love that is based in the inherited language of Arabic literature. Thus Qabbani proclaims:

The era of Nizar has ended.

Love, as we knew it, has ended.

Lovers’ memory has shriveled,

and the Mythical Lover no longer remembers

the name of his sweetheart (138).

We must abandon love, and learn to “worship” ourselves instead, find our answers not in a “sweet mouth” but in our “notebooks,” our own ability to paint with words (Qabbani, 28). Only when we have rid ourselves of all love as it is manifest today, completely replaced the traditions of the past with our new metaphors and language and formulations, can we finally free ourselves to practice again the “religion of love” and this time reach its true “essence,” finally become “the work of heavens” he had characterized it as at the start (Qabbani, 138).

I had always assumed that love poetry is necessarily preceded by love, the purpose of language to capture as closely as possible the real emotions. How strange it is for me to see the way this relation is switched in Qabbani’s poetry, the language of love actually decreeing, limiting, the ways in which love can be materialized. The richer a literary tradition is, the more it bears on our lives—and in the case of Arabic poetry, with such a long and illustrious history, this means that all love is essentially chained by its poetic forms and types. To free love, as Qabbani discovers, recover its true essence, we must combat language with language, dismantle the calcified remains of the poetic past and replace it with new words of our own choosing.

Works Cited

Kabbani, Nizar. “Republic of Love: Selected Poems in English and Arabic.” Translated by Nayef al-Kalali. Edited by Lisa Kavchak, Kegan Paul, 2003.

Representation, representation, representation; what American student hasn’t been pelted with that word over and over again? The Revolution was fought for a lack of representation in Parliament. The Civil War was fought for a lack of representation for African Americans. Suffrage was fought for a lack of representation for women. We care about what stands for us, and we care about what our country stands for. We want the United States of America to represent good; good values, good people, good economies. Since the founding of our nation, one of our primary symbols for that sought-after status has been the American Dream. But does ‘the American Dream’ mean what it always meant? That definition fundamentally shapes how we view our country and its goals, and that understanding changes what people want out of their lives and what the government tries to give them. How this dream manifests itself profoundly affects our interactions with the world around us, and it is dangerous to assume that we completely understand and control this aspiration. It is always changing, always misunderstood, always just out of reach. If the American Dream is the ultimate goal we claim it to be, understanding what it is and how it changes is essential to understanding our own trajectory and fate in the world.

The American Dream has changed many times, but let’s focus on a particularly recent shift, because it is the most relevant. World War I spelled a sudden change in American perception of the world they lived in. They had witnessed people killing other people on a grand scale and had experienced shortages and loss in recent memory. While nothing compared to the difficulties coming in its sequel, the first World War gave the Americans a taste of hardship that was revolted against spectacularly in the interwar period. Out of that riotous quest for comfort was born F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: the ultimate symbol of money-loving, glory-seeking, party-going New York fame.

The Great Gatsby is a love story. Nick Carraway gets entangled in the romantic affair of his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and Nick’s cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan. Gatsby personifies a rags to riches story, clawing up the social ladder through the prosperous business of illegal alcohol. Daisy is frivolous, married, and old-money through and through. Naturally, it does not work out; Gatsby builds himself up from nothing so that he can deserve her, yet they are completely incompatible people. One of the main interpretations of this affair places Daisy as the American Dream and Gatsby as the citizen working tirelessly to achieve her.
The first description we get of Daisy is full of false promises. Nick describes her looking up to him in a way that “promis[ed] that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see” (9), and giving the appearance of “a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour” (9). Both are entirely false statements. Nick and Daisy are not close, and the last thing she did was sit in a room for hours doing nothing and the next thing she’ll do is sit in another room for hours doing nothing. She is perceived as offering some exciting prospect which she does not truly offer. It is revealed even in her words. She explains that she has “‘been everywhere and seen everything and done everything’” (17), again not possibly true, but it is the feeling she gives off. It matches the picture of her as a dream to be chased–something exciting, both attainable and exalted, in store just for us.

Gatsby thinks his key to that dream is money. He was born into a poor German family that farms for a living in the Midwest. After falling in love with Daisy, the only way he knew how to become worthy of her was joining the social elite through wealth. Even Fitzgerald’s descriptions of color stick solely with money. Gatsby reaches for “a single green light” (21) on the end of Daisy’s dock from his own house. Why choose green if not for the specific color of our currency? And the only color descriptions from the first party Nick attends at Gatsby’s are gilded; the only food given a color is meat “bewitched dark gold” (40), the band plays “yellow cocktail music” (40), the only outfits described are “two girls in twin yellow dresses” (42), and even the people descriptions are narrowed to “Jordan’s slender golden arm” (43). It’s a golden party in a green garden. Gatsby is surrounded by money symbolism from the start. This is what he worked for, the green and gold to get him to the top with Daisy. If he has wealth, he believes he can have her.

Then there’s Gatsby’s own falsehood about his past. He tells Nick that his “family all died and [he] came into a great deal of money” (65), which makes him old money instead of new. He further justifies his status with an education at Oxford, a decorated history in the war, and favors owed to him by important people; these are all marks of Daisy’s social circles instead of those he inherited. His fantasy mirrors a particular image from the American Dream. Once money and status are achieved, the past can be forgotten. The image of the American melting pot shows people coming in British or Irish or French or Italian and all coming out American, erasing the past and disowning their heritage. Gatsby remakes himself and tries to delete all that he once was. The American Dream he embodies, working hard for riches and status, says that anyone can make it.

The tragedy of the novel is that Gatsby doesn’t end up with Daisy. She chooses Tom, and Gatsby is killed in the aftermath. This man who has apparently done everything right, at least according to the model of hard work equals success, loses it all. Daisy, his American Dream, was not his to take. She chooses the old money, the thoroughly upper class American. The implications of Daisy representing the American Dream the nation seeks becomes troubling. The message that all can come to America and succeed is refuted, even though that was the slogan for so many years while American recruiters went to Europe in attempts to pull immigrant workers overseas for cheap labor. They made the United States attractive by feeding the foreigners the same lie that Jay Gatsby lost his life to: it does not matter where you are from because, if you have determination and intelligence, you can make it big. Yet, according to this template, Gatsby does everything right. He uses whatever means he can, and does the improbable thing of finding huge success for his trouble. He still cannot win Daisy; he still isn’t as ‘good’ as Tom.

Fitzgerald’s social criticism portrays the unfairness of the peddled American Dream. He proves that following the template doesn’t always get people where they want to be. He proves that that particular American Dream–trade smart labor for all you ever wanted–is a farce. The implication is that Daisy, as the American Dream, has become unattainable by wealth and success. The fact that he bothers to make that critique suggests that something has shifted, that the American Dream was once realistic and isn’t any more, but no one has realized it just yet.

The concept of an American Dream achievable for all spawned from the beginning of the country. Maybe the first American Dream was religious freedom for the pilgrims in their City on a Hill. Fast forward to the revolution in the British colonies, and the dream is the Founding Fathers’ American experiment: can a democratic republic, a previously unheard of governing style, truly function? Fast forward more: manifest destiny, the explicit need to expand west and span the continent. Fast forward again: industrialization, immigrants flooding in, everyone believing that America is a new opportunity, a fresh start, a melting pot where any nationality goes in and one nation comes out. World War I hits, and with it the Gatsby extravaganza: get rich to achieve the American Dream, but it won’t accept you, even if you do everything right, even if you try to erase the past. Keep moving on to today: what is our American Dream? Because if it is still Gatsby’s dream of riches and fame and love, we’re calling it what it’s not. We say the American Dream meaning a dream that has carried on from the Mayflower’s landing; we still talk about it as if it’s the same as it always was. The concept has changed without the word’s permission, and we have used it to justify lusting after an entirely different American Dream.

And that is why we need to care about the way words change. The American Dreams we’ve had in the past have been in reach. It was when its meaning changed that it became something as unachievable as Daisy always was for Gatsby. Daisy certainly loves him at some point, but in the end she leaves him. By that choice, she represents how this idea can entice us with no real reward, no matter how reachable it seems and how hard we might work for it. We believe it possible because the word itself once meant something possible for our country: religious freedom, basic human rights for humans other than white males, a fairly stable life. World War I made Americans want more, but they called it by the same name. They did not realize how they discredited the initial inspiration by filtering it through more material and commercial desires. By going in search of this new American Dream as Gatsby sought, we now seek what cannot be found.

Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925. Print.

Noah Cowit

For a while I hated 80’s pop. Or at least I thought I did. I thought I hated about “Call Me” and “Come on Eileen”, “Tainted Love” and “I Ran.” I thought I hated big synthesizers, repetitive melodies, and articulated lyrics. At the very least I saw these things as empty, a useless joke. Something to scoff at, not to listen to.

I was certainly not the only one.

80’s pop, and pop music in general, may be one of the most critically disregarded genres of music. There is none other so routinely criticized in popular intellectualism. Of course there is the occasional contrarian fluff piece, like the Huffington Post’s so called “Defense of Pop Music”[i], which boldly states that “Pop music is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these feeble defenses, I would’ve been content to hate 80’s pop forever. Except for one thing. It’s structure, it’s lyrics, were fantastic. It was form without truth, a glorious superficiality.

Maybe for this reason, it grew on me. 80’s pop began to become a guilty pleasure. It slowly ate through my playlists, becoming 10, then 20, then 30% of what I listened to. Trying to justify 80’s pop to myself, I searched for some significance in the lyrics. I can tell you that it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that looking for hidden truths in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is an exercise in futility. A friend of mine perhaps put it best when they said, “Music should have meaning, even if it is just about love and relationships; the music you listen to is about nothing.”

But that does not settle the matter. It should not settle the matter. It cannot just be accepted without a fight that meaning is all that matters, that form and style have no value. 80’s pop is hardly unique in this. People like meaningless lyrics. People like meaningless language. Yet they are bothered by a lack of meaning, and not by a lack of form.

So, this leaves us with one option. To develop a defense for meaninglessness, or find that it is impossible to listen to 80’s pop, or read detective novels, or the comics in a newspaper, without creeping feelings of guilt and insecurity. This is a defense of 80’s pop, and not only that, it is a defense of all language, all art, that does not carry an inherent meaning; that which is primarily form.

Interestingly enough, the route to doing this is through the song “Tom’s Diner”, by Suzanne Vega.[ii]

This may seem an odd choice at first. Although made in the 80’s, “Tom’s Diner” is not a pop song. For one, it is sung A Capella. No drums, no synthesizers, not even an acoustic guitar. It does not blast into being like most pop music, it smoothly flows. There is no repetitive chorus. In fact, there is no line repetition whatsoever. The events it describes are simple, the setting ordinary. And most importantly, “Tom’s Diner” arguably has hidden meanings, hidden “truths”. But this, of course, is absolutely necessary. You cannot elevate form unless it can be shown that it has some potential to outdo meaning. It cannot be done in a song with none.

Perhaps the best way of interpreting what meaning and form contribute to “Tom’s Diner” is by comparing what can be gained from both. We can try to separate the two, describing the song with meaning at the expense of form, and then form at the expense of meaning. Then we may be able to tell how they each contribute differently to our understanding of the song. We will start with meaning.

Tom’s Diner is a song about a lonely person in a diner. Some evidence that they’re lonely is because they look away when two of the characters in the diner show a level of familiarity with each other, kissing in greeting. This could also be attributed to social awkwardness or perhaps a general problem with intimacy. However, later contextual evidence points to the idea of loneliness over these later two premises. Additionally, the character feels isolated from the world, and from other people in general. Examples of this include when the character doesn’t know of the person they read about in an obituary. There is a level of blocked intimacy when the character finds themselves unable to make eye contact with a woman outside, because the glare from the glass blocks her view of the inside. So the woman outside can also be considered to be isolated. Also, there is a level of sexual tension, as the character outside is moving her skirt up on her leg, to straighten her underclothes, but despite her efforts the rain is making her hair damp. This could also be considered commentary on idealized perfection. Finally, there seems to be a romantic aspect to the loneliness the character may be experiencing, as another person in mentioned who seems to have a level of familiarity with the person at the diner.

Hopefully that didn’t completely ruin the song for you.

It could be questioned at this point why that read like the essay of a middle schooler. The answer is simple. If meaning is all that matters, everything of value in Tom’s Diner should be able to be gained from the paragraph above. Creative form shouldn’t be needed to supplement meaning, so long as the knowledge given is correct and clear. But there is something obviously wrong with this argument. Or if not wrong, at least not right. If it hadn’t explicitly said it, a person could honestly wonder if what is being described is a song, or just some weird passage about a person in a diner. Clearly something is missing.

Maybe it’s that the paragraph doesn’t take into account how seamlessly the words line up in “Toms Diner”, how even a slight syncopation grabs the attention like a vice. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t have quotes to show us how the language is so simple, and yet so effective. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t tell us that song is written in first person, that is “I am sitting-in the morning-at the diner-on the corner” and how the result is intensely visceral and personal. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t mention despite this first person narration, when the women is “outside looking in”, it is not “I think she sees her own reflection”, but “cause she sees-her own reflection” and how it isn’t “no she does not see me” but “no she does not-really see me”. Or maybe it’s all of these things. Maybe it’s that the story of “Tom’s Diner” is one that could be described in a million different ways, but that for some reason, this way, with this particular arrangement of words, is one that works.

Wasn’t that better? Doesn’t it seem that by concentrating on form instead of meaning-by focusing on the language-not the knowledge-we can gain a better sense of what “Tom’s Diner” really is? This may be because form alone has the potential to affect the reader, or the watcher, or the listener, in a way that meaning simply can’t. It is all about effect. If form is effective, if it makes the audience feel something, then it works. Form can exist in a palatable form without meaning, but meaning cannot do the same without form. This may be because form alone has the potential to create feeling, while meaning alone just has the potential to create more meaning. It is about emotion and subjectivity, about the potential of words to shape us.

More than that, it is about the potential of words to shape how we view the world.

The study of words is central to the understanding of form. Words are often incorrectly considered perfect descriptors. That is, the word “chair” is not just a representation of the thing we call the chair, the word chair is the chair. Or at least the thought connected to the word is the chair. But is it really? Are the word and the thing truly one and the same? In “Tom’s Diner”, would there really be no difference if the word wet was replaced with moist? Or better yet, saturated. The words all refer to the same thing, why couldn’t they just be swapped? Possibly it’s because words aren’t just descriptions, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Words are packages of connotations, “actively shaping the things they purport to describe.”[iii] Wet, moist, and saturated all bring different feelings into the mind, feelings that are shaped by our prior experiences with language. We need to study form, or risk being thoughtlessly swept up in these connotations. Words matter, especially if we think they don’t. Meaning cannot exist on its own in language; form will always create meaning of its own. It is then necessary to study form to fully understand a piece of writing.[iv]

Now, “Tom’s Diner” uses particularly broad and vague language. Words like “counter”, “man”, “coffee”, and “window” make up the majority of the song. The connotations these words are general and impersonal. They give the song a sense of transparency and clarity that could be mistaken for a lack of form. But this is simply untrue. Choosing to be broad with language creates an effect on the listener, just as the use of specific ornamentation does. In this case, it creates a sense of emptiness, leaving a vacuum where “horoscope”, “stockings”, and “cathedral” can take on a greater prominence. It is an active choice to use general language, not an unbiased default. Form is truly present everywhere.[v]

Yet even this does not do form justice. Sure, it shows why form is valuable to study, but it doesn’t give validation to our innate desire for it. It does nothing to show us why we enjoy form on its own. Meaning professes to tell us what are deepest desires are, how we think, how best to live a life. Its goal is to show us who we truly are as human beings. It makes sense that we would be drawn to meaning. Form can tell us a lot about a text, but what can it tell us about ourselves?

Perhaps the answer to this question can be found in “Toms Diner”.  Again, “Tom’s Diner” is about a person in the diner. But it’s about more than that. Ironically, it’s about a person who has a problem with form. The narrator, who is “turning to the horoscope and looking for the funnies”, but with an air of detached triviality. Who doesn’t talk to anyone for the entire period of the song, and in fact seems to avoid doing so. It’s about the instance with the women outside who looks and “does not-really see…cause she sees-her own reflection” Overall, there is a sense that the narrator in the diner can no longer appreciate form. And what is the result of this? The narrator seems profoundly isolated and deeply lonely. They seem unable to make basic connections, for want of deeper ones. They are stuck in a prison of import, where meaning is the only thing that matters.

An appreciation of the study of form is necessary to break out of this prison, by acknowledging that human beings are inherently social animals. We do not always talk about substantial matters. In fact, most of the time we talk about nothing. Yet we always talk with form. If a person who speaks with only form is shallow and superficial, then the person who speaks with only meaning is incomprehensible and insane. Yet for some reason, we act as if we are completely serious whenever we write, or we read, or we listen to music. We ignore the lighter social aspect of our nature, half of what makes us human.[vi] We ignore the part of us that is the not logical, but emotional, that is not knowledgeable, but creative. On some level we know that meaning isn’t everything. That is why we like form; that is why it is so important to music, cinema, and literature. We are naturally drawn to things that bleed form, the subjective and the superficial, because that is part of who we are. Through fantastic form a song, a movie, or any piece of writing can become greater than the sum of its parts. It can become something truly human. It can become art.

Both form and meaning have a purpose. Meaning can make us feel complete. It is part of our sense of being, the way we interpret the world. But sometimes looking at a piece of art for its form can tell us something more revealing than looking at it for its meaning. It can tell us that words matter for their own sake, that they change the way we look at the world. By imparting in us that form is naturally a part of who we are, it can make us feel more in touch with all aspects of our own humanity.

Form can make us feel free. Free from the stifling pressure that everything has to mean something, free from the idea that meaning is all that we are. We should embrace form. We should revere it. And at the very least, the next time you watch a superhero movie, or read a romance novel, or listen to a fantastic 80’s pop song, remember the unnamed women from “Toms Diner” and do as she did.

Look, and see your own reflection.

Footnotes:

[i] Harris, Austin S. “In Defense of Pop Music.” The Huffington Post. Accessed October 14, 2016.

[ii] Full Lyrics Sheet can be found at: https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tckcwalufy5dyxanbw75s5iae7y?lyrics=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=lyrics&pcampaignid=kp-lyrics&u=0#

[iii] Thorne, Christian. “Lecture: Theories of Language and Literature” September 2016

[iv] Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. S.l.: Aristeus Books, 2012. Nietzsche establishes in the idea that there is a separation between the word and the object described. This is the idea that words are metaphors themselves, and that they carry innate cultural connotations that are not vested in reality.

[v] Lanham, Richard A. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Lanham established the idea that form is most evident where it seems like there is none; that seeming transparency is sometimes the craftiest use of form.

[vi] In Motives, Lanham established the idea of the rhetorical (social) man as “half of man”. He compares the style of literature to social life, and the meaning of literature to meaningful life. Lanham considers the balance between meaning and meaninglessness the fundamental dichotomy of humankind, and tasks literature to be a projection of this balance.

Mi Yu

There is a famous anecdote about the Theory of Relativity. After Albert Einstein’s paper had been published, rumor has it that Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the propagators of the theory, was one of the only three persons in the world to understand it. When asked about the rumor during a casual conversation, Eddington allegedly paused for a moment, then replied: “I’m trying to think who the third person is.” Continue reading →

Leonard Bopp

In the American literary imagination, the figure of Ernest Hemingway carries a certain machismo mythos. Hemingway himself projected a quintessentially masculine image: he liked bullfighting and fly fishing, was a soldier in the First World War, and had an unbeatable tolerance for cocktails and whiskey. This aura of masculinity tended to cross over into his writing. Hemingway’s novels had no patience for the glossy romanticism of Fitzgerald or the philosophical inclinations of Steinbeck; his were stories of war, of sexy Spanish macho-men squaring off with the bulls, and his crisp, matter-of-fact writing, though sometimes sentimental, leaves little time for overt emotion.

The Old Man and the Sea, one of Hemingway’s most beloved novels, is no exception. This is the tale of an aging fisherman named Santiago who, after a long unlucky streak without catching anything, finds himself locked in a three-day-long battle with a massive marlin. On the surface, it’s a story about strength and will, an epic battle between man and nature. But things are more complicated than that, for as I shall show, this narrative is caught up in the language of traditional gender orthodoxy, the one-size-fits-all, he-she binary that language predicates.

Let me explain. From the novel’s first sentence, it emphasizes the old man’s feelings of alienation. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on the Gulf Stream,” it reads, accentuating the man’s isolation out on the water. If he had one companion, it was Manolin, the young boy who fished with him. Their relationship is special – the narrator writes that “the old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.” As we learn in the next few sentences, though, the old man has been so unlucky lately that the boy’s parents have made him fish with another boat, leaving the old man completely alone. But the old man is not merely alienated from the rest of the world; rather, the novel indicates that Santiago experiences a sense of alienation from his own body. The narration calls his body “old” and “strange,” for instance, and later, when he develops a cramp in his hand while battling the fish, the old man actually engages in a dialogue with his hand, treating his body as if it were an external being. “Be patient, hand,” he says; “let the cord go, hand, until you stop this nonsense.”  The old man treats his body, it seems, as an independent object, separate from himself.

This sense of alienation from his body seems related to an anxiety over the diminishing strength that comes with old age. While he’s dealing with this cramp, the old man tells himself an anecdote from his past about the time he beat “the great negro from Cienfugos,” who was the “strongest man on the docks,” in an arm wrestling match, earning him the nickname El Campeón, the champion. Santiago is also acutely focused on the ability to maintain one’s strength despite pain – he constantly idolizes Joe DiMaggio, the famous Yankees baseball player, saying “I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel,” and he tells himself he must continue to fight the fish despite the cramping in his hand. But the old man laments that he is no longer as strong as he once was, or as strong as he imagines himself to be. “I may not be as strong as I think,” he admits, indicating that the state of his body no longer aligns with his perception of himself. Indeed, the diminished strength that comes with age has made the old man’s body feel strange and foreign to him, like a suit that doesn’t quite fit.

But the novel goes on to equate this concern about strength and old age with a concern about masculinity. It must be noted that many of the traditional indicators of manliness – strength and perseverance through pain, for example – tend to diminish as one progresses into old age. The title itself demonstrates this – Santiago is not just a man on the sea, after all, but an old man, with the adjective “old” acting as a qualifier on his masculinity. Santiago’s battle with the fish, then, becomes an attempt to prove his enduring strength and reclaim his masculine identity. “I’ll kill him,” he says of the marlin, “in all his greatness and his glory. I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.” When the novel equates old age with a loss of masculinity, the whole thing boils down to an attempted re-masculinization narrative. After all, if the old man is so concerned with proving his continued manliness in his old age, it makes sense that he constantly compares himself Joe DiMaggio – in his time, DiMaggio was seen as the the ideal American man: incredibly athletic, strong, a World War Two veteran, and dating beautiful women (he and Marilyn Monroe, famously, were seen as one of the great celebrity romances of the 1950’s.) This might also explain the old man’s feeling feelings of kinship with the young boy, since boyhood, similar to old age, presents a certain qualification of masculinity – young boys have higher voices than grown men, for example, and are not yet as built and muscular, giving them fewer distinguishing characteristics than their female counterparts. The difference, of course, is that the boy still has the prospect of traditional masculinity before him; Santiago, however, fears that his days as a real man are behind him.

Let’s get back, however, to the battle with the marlin. The characterization of the marlin itself is revealing about the nature of gender in this novel. Throughout the book, the marlin is uniformly assigned male pronouns. Describing the fish, Santiago states that he could picture the fish “swimming in the water with his purple pectoral fins set wide as wings,” and asks “I wonder how much he sees at that depth.” He says he “will show him what a man can do,” and will “kill him in all his strength and glory.” There must be something curious about this, of course, because the old man, having not actually seen and inspected the fish, cannot actually know its biological sex. Seemingly unconsciously, the language of masculinity is projected onto a character whose actual sex is unknown. It must be that the novel designates the fish as masculine based only on the threat its strength presents to the old man’s masculinity. But the old man not only characterizes the fish as masculine – moreover, he aligns himself with the fish, he calls it his brother. Indeed, there is a sense in which the old man identifies with the fish for its masculine qualities – the fish becomes a manifestation of the masculinity the old man hopes to obtain.

Similarly, the other prominent character in the novel, the sea, is, like the marlin, characterized in gendered language, as we see in the following passage:

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even as an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine as as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

There are a few important things to note about this passage. First, we must state the obvious: to the old man, the sea is decidedly feminine; he thinks of the sea as la mar for her feminine qualities – lovely, sensuous, susceptible to patterns of the moon. The other important thing to note, however, is that the old man aligns himself with the sea in much the same way he aligned himself with the marlin. Those younger fishermen, after all, are the ones who think of the sea as a “contestant” or an “enemy” – but the old man is decidedly not like those young men. By juxtaposing the male characterization of the sea by the younger fishermen with Santiago’s female characterization of the sea, the novel shows that Santiago must think of the sea not as a contestant or enemy, like the younger fishermen, but as a partner or a friend. He admits as much in the next paragraph when he writes that he was “drifting with the current” and “letting the current do a third of the work” – as if he were one with the la mar, the feminine sea.

Indeed, if the novel casts the marlin as the manifestation of the man’s desire for masculinity, then the sea is a manifestation of his feminine leanings. This, it seems, is the central conflict of the novel’s gender narrative – that Santiago, the old man who feels alienated from his body, aligns himself with both the feminine sea and the masculine marlin. In presenting this conflict, the novel solidifies the old man as gender-queer, neither fully male nor fully female, stuck somewhere in between. The funny thing about re-masculinization narratives, after all, is that they must inherently admit that the gender of the de-masculinized character isn’t all that settled to begin with.

The other vital thing to notice about this passage, though, is that the novel becomes self-conscious of the problem of gender construction – it acknowledges a degree of Nietzschean anti-essentialism when it comes to gender, letting different people assign opposite genders to the same object, an object that has no biological sex itself. It admits that gender is unsettled and ambiguous, constructed by forces external to the object itself. Nietzsche tells us that this is bound to create some level of anxiety, for “only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency” (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 1873). Anti-essentialism, however, wants us to transcend this anxiety – it wants us to learn to embrace this ambiguity. Having become aware the anxiety of ambiguity, then, its up to the novel, in its resolution of this conflict in the gender narrative, to say whether or not it thinks the transcendence of gender is possible.

The climax of this conflict comes at the end of the old man’s battle with the marlin. Here’s the passage:

The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just summoned, into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man’s chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it further and then pushed all his weight after it.

Maybe you already see where this is going: the narrative of gender takes an erotic twist, with the language of sexuality tacking itself onto the image of the harpoon stabbing the fish. The old man lifted the harpoon and “drove it down with all his strength,” “felt the iron go in” and “drove it further,” pushing all his weight against it. The phallic image of the harpoon stabbing the marlin transforms the killing of the fish into a homoerotic act, since the marlin had already been constructed as the old man’s masculine counterpart. But if the iron rod of the harpoon becomes a manifestation of the old man’s masculinity, then a gender reversal occurs: the marlin, as the recipient of male penetration, is feminized.

In feminizing the marlin in the moment of the man’s victory over it, the novel temporarily allows the old man to reclaim his masculine identity – he even says “I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today.” Those of you who know the novel, though, know that the man’s victory is doesn’t last. As the old man heads back to the shore, his fresh kill in tow, the marlin is continually attacked by sharks, who eat away the flesh from its bones. At first glance, this seems to be yet another threat to the man’s masculinity by another masculine figure – sharks, after all, are strong, scary, seemingly unbeatable creatures who, at least in the traditional cultural imagination, are able to kill almost anything in their path (especially humans, in the style of Jaws.) But careful attention to the language here reveals the sharks not as masculine in their own right, but as products of the feminine sea. “The shark was not an accident,” the novel reads; “he had come up from deep down in the water,” creating an image of the sharks emerging from the sea’s hidden depths. In a way, the sharks are cast more as a cruel trick of the sea than as an enemy in and of themselves. But add to this the defining feature of sharks, which is, of course, their teeth – as the novel describes it, the “clicking chop” of their “thrusting, all-swallowing jaws.” When the novel portrays these toothy creatures as being products of the feminine sea, it seems to be conjuring up an image of the vagina dentata – the vagina with teeth. The result, of course, is female penetration, which masculinizes the feminine figure. Almost instantaneously, then, the novel experiences another gender reversal, the feminine sea becoming masculine. Furthermore, the image of the vagina dentata connotes a fear of male castration, which constitutes a de-masculinization of the male figure – which, in this case, is the old man, whose masculinity is once again under threat. After all, having been feminized by male penetration, the dead fish had became a symbol of the man’s masculinity; but when the sharks begin attacking the marlin, the novel states that, to Santiago, “when the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit.”

The novel’s resolution of the old man’s conflicting gender identities, then, is two-fold. First, in instantaneously reversing the genders of both the fish and sea, the novel admits that there is nothing concrete about gender, as the gender characterizations of the sea and the marlin are fluid, able to change. If the sea and the marlin can be either male or female, then it must be that they are at once both and neither. The novel allows them qualities of both masculinity and femininity without fully committing to either identity. This results in the dissolution of gender entirely, as the novel, having blurred its gender characterizations of the fish and the sea, affirms that gender identity is not intrinsic to an object itself. The secondary result, then, is that the old man, now unable to identify with either the gender-less fish and sea, is unable to reclaim his masculinity. The re-masculinization narrative is left nullified, unfulfilled. By the time the old man returns to the shore, after all, the marlin, which had been the symbol of his masculinity, has been completely eaten by the sharks, reduced to merely its skeletal remains, no longer identifiable as male or female.

While the novel does succeed in the dissolution of gender, it does so not triumphantly, but tragically. It laments the defeat of the old man’s masculinity. As he rows back to shore, trying to fend off the sharks, the old man seems to lose his motivation to fight – “I hope so much I do not have to fight again,” he thinks, his surrendering to the sharks indicating that he has finally surrendered his masculinity. Indeed, the novel portrays the old man as having been defeated; “they beat me,” he says to Manolin, telling him that he is “not lucky anymore.” Ultimately, the novel is unable to transcend the insecurity that comes with anti-essentialism, opting instead to portray the dissolution of gender as the end of life, the end of personhood, leaving the old man in a state of non-existence and non-identity – for as the man pulls back to the shore, re-entering the world after his battle at sea, the novel states that “he felt that perhaps he was already dead.” In the end, the novel grants the man no security in his non-masculinity; instead, he goes back to his bed and sleeps for days, “dreaming about the lions” – popularly thought of as the “king of the jungle,” a symbol of masculine domination over nature. Although the old man now knows he cannot be masculine, it seems the novel does not let him accept it.

But although the novel does not celebrate the deconstruction of gender, providing no vision of transcendence, it does reveal itself to be highly critical of gender essentialism. The novel systematically projects the language of gender and sexuality onto its inhuman objects, and designates its main character as the non-binary center of gender conflict; and in the end, it resolves this conflict not in a triumphant affirmation of traditional gender orthodoxy nor in the celebration of its transcendence, but deems the conflict tragically irreconcilable, leaving main character trapped in non-identity. Indeed, it turns out that one of American literature’s favorite wise-old-men turns out to be not so comfortable with his gender identity – and the novel’s claim seems to be that if he cannot conform to the gender binary, then he cannot continue to exist. But perhaps the narrative’s saving grace might be that it doesn’t treat its non-binary object as an outcast to be ridiculed, as many popular narratives tend to do – you’d need, say, Silence of the Lambs for that. No, this narrative treats it’s non-binary figure as a tragic protagonist, a victim of external forces whose downfall is no fault of its own. Indeed, one of the reasons the old man is such a beloved character is that readers tend to be sympathetic towards the old man in his struggle and ultimate plight – they feel sorry for him, maybe even empathetic. Given the novel’s gender narrative that we’ve just uncovered, though, in which the plight of the old man is the result of his status as non-binary, I don’t think its much of a stretch to suggest that if your average American reader feels sympathy for the old man, it must mean that your average American reader, whether or not they recognize it, doesn’t actually believe in, or maybe is even opposed to, the very construct of the gender binary.

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…