Richard Giblett
Recent work : 2006-2009
Represented by Galerie Dusseldorf
21.
Mycelium Rhizome, 2009
Pencil on paper
120 x 240 cm
Collection of the artist
Represented by Galerie Dusseldorf

The best novels are those that can guide us through complex connections and tackle diverse themes. They allow us to draw the connections between people, ideas, and objects that we might have only speculated about beforehand. Look at Times’ list of all-time “greatest” novels; in the top 20, we find 1984 by Orwell, Catch-22 by Heller, and Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. By itself 1984 has 19 characters and 8 main themes; Totalitarianism, Propaganda, Love/sexuality, Independence/Identity, Music, Loyalty, Power vs. Wealth, Technology, and language. Grapes of wrath has 26 characters and tackles 7 themes including; commonality of experience, corporate greed, industrialization, man’s connection to land, organized labor, hope vs hopelessness, death, and suffering. The two novels talk about the societies they find themselves within and are trying to understand through writing. Orwell’s dystopian society contains complex and constantly developing characters and themes that were tackled in 267 pages. In the end, the reader is left feeling that Orwell’s dystopian society “[does] not seem foreign to contemporary readers [us]” – Times review. Grapes of wrath achieves our emersion trough a much longer text but ultimately pulls us into the American agricultural society during the dust bowl and great depression. As a New Yorker book critic put it, “It is a long and thoughtful novel as one thinks about it. It is also a short and vivid scene as one feels it.” These stories are those of societies and cultures… at least how the author perceives them to be.
The length at which an author can write complex connections is limited to their own ability to perceive events of the world around them. No person perceives an event the exact same way that someone else does, in this way no perception is a subjective one. When we observe an event, we are impacted by our own experience of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, our senses and many, many more categorize that intersect and give us the ways in which we understand the world around us. The challenge of the novelist is acknowledging the ways in which their experiences impact their position of the world. Of course, acknowledging all the ways our experiences impact our understanding of the world would be nearly impossible but to negate it would be the false representation full of our own biased perspective. We can see issues of representation displayed in early European novels about African people and their society. Because the novelist was not fully immersing themselves in the society they were writing about, the novels reflected only an outsider’s gaze onto the picture that was drawn from Africa. Orwell displays a dystopian world was intriguing for the reader because in the fictional novel we saw realities of a world that depicted a reality not so far from our own. Published in 1949, 1984 explored the connections and themes in a society of growing surveillance, as tensions between global superpowers rose. Orwell experienced some of the extreme measures that Stalinism and Nazism were taking to ensure the compliance of their citizen, genocide, forced labor, and executions were something not too far-fetched from his reality. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, in it, the story of a migrant farmworker family is told. Steinbeck created the realities of this society because he traveled with migrant workers and listened to their stories of hope, despair, and drama. It was through the workers sharing of experiences, perceptions of the world, and Steinbeck’s personal experience with corporate farming that made writing the society in Grapes of Wrath possible. Without taking a step back and ingesting the world, the author would not be able to make these complicated connections in this way we allow others and the world to have control over us. In this sense, the one who is forced to listen the most might become the best novelist.
If the novel is a form of listening to the world and drawing connections from what is learned, then the subaltern once given the platform to write (speak) must be the best candidate for the job. The subaltern is, by definition, the marginalized, and by practice the oppressed. They are forced to listen to the stories of others because they do not have representation. They can also be studied by others in an attempt by the majority or oppressive group to try and include their representation. But because the novel cannot be written by an outsider and be exposed to more differentiation in positionalities, the subaltern will never be able to speak in their voice until they are given the means of producing their own narrative. Chinua Achebe is a subaltern who spoke.
Before becoming a writer, Achebe was raised in a colonized Igbo village with Christian parents. He later gained a scholarship to study at the government university in Nigeria. At the university, he discovered his passion for literature and the humanities, but the only type of literature that was available to him was European classics and literature of Africa written by Europeans. The novels he would later describe as having patronizing and explicitly racist remarks of African society. He read work like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary and admitted to siding with the white characters during his youth. But Achebe grew weary of these depictions so he started to work on his most acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart publishing it in 1959. The story was that of competing cultures, it was the humanization of the Igbo indigenous and the Christian missionaries. For Achebe, the humanization of these cultures meant building them to be human, a representation of the good and the bad not living in a vacuum from one another just as he did not live in a Christian family or and Igbo community he lived in both. Things Fall Apart has multiple historical contexts, the one of the novel and the one of Achebe’s life. In Things Fall Apart the novel depicts pre-colonial Igbo society and colonized Igbo society. During the writing of Things Fall Apart, the decolonization movement was in full swing the state was asking itself what direction is wanted to follow. Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo, a man who lives their life in fear of becoming like his father, a lazy man who never achieved a title in his clan. This leads him to hate everything that is associated with his father including arts, expressing emotions, and being idle. His repeal of all things like his father made him one of the most successful tribe’s man. But because of his rejection of any emotion, other than anger, his compassion was very limited and he did not think before he acted. Through his rigid action, Okonkwo led himself to commit actions like the beating of his wife during the week of peace, killing his inherited son Ikemefuna, which he took part in only in fear of seeming weak, and the killing of a Christian leader in the community. The acts brought him punishment from the spirits that lead to his exile, and ultimately his suicide. Parallel to Okonkwo’s conflicts run the conflict of colonialism and indigeneity. For Achebe, the was his way of writing a novel that would attempt to depict his society without the blurred line of racist deprivation of humanity or the exoticization of his culture. Before the novel even gets into the conflict of two societies it gives us the story of an Igbo tribe. We learn about the vast Igbo proverbs that people live by and the complex traditions that are held by the tribal council, gods, and spirits of ancestors.
Achebe wrote about his interactions with both cultures as he put it, he “lived in the crossroads of the two”. Because he was born into an Igbo community and raised a Christian, he would spend his afternoons in tribal circles listening to elders tell stories and proverbs and his nights studying the religion of the colonizer which his parents adopted before his birth. Through his constant existence in relation to the two cultures, he was forced to acknowledge their interwoven aspects rather than emphasizing their independence from one another. This is heavily expressed in Things Fall Apart where neither of the cultures is depicted as perfect. The missionaries are not depicted as inherently bad people. The novel has Mr. Brown, who is open to learning about the Igbo culture and incorporating it into his ways of teaching Christianity. Mr. Brown attempts to explore the possibility of their coexistence – A coexistence that Achebe would be raised in. In juxtaposition, his successor Mr. Smith “saw things as black and white. And Black was always evil.” Mr. Smith showed the ills of colonialism, he put the people against each other and imposed his beliefs onto others. For Achebe, the Igbo society is also not intact. Achebe depicts a society in which a man’s worth is valued at their ability to produce. Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, was not valued in the tribe because he could not hold responsibilities. He borrowed money from many people just to sustain his family and spent most of his time drinking or playing the flute. Okonkwo believed that opposing all that his father represented was his only way to become, not only a man but a man with many titles. For many years, this rejection of all things “feminine” worked for him, he married three wives and acquired many titles in the clan through his hard work in farming and his great wrestling skills. Although Okonkwo was a successful member of the tribe, it was obvious that he was not the most favored person. He would mock the men without a title. This extreme rejection of what he deemed “feminine” was what led him to make horrendous acts that cannot be justified. The book was not meant to argue the pureness of the Igbo people nor the horror of the Europeans. It was intended to show the complex interactions between the two cultures.
Achebe was a subaltern that spoke, he developed a novel that humanized the people of Igbo society and the colonizers. He humanized them to complicate their identity and allow for the critical approach to their positions. The two cultures ceased to be either good or evil, weak or strong, then escaped the childish analysis Melanie Klein called the depressive phase. An attempt by an outsider to try and humanize Igbo society would have to take extreme measure to consider how their own positionalities can create biases in their work. Before Achebe, no other subaltern gained such a large platform like he did. The only novels of African societies were published by Europeans and often, resembled the racism and patronizing ideas found in Mister Johnson and Heart of Darkness. If we want to continue to try and understand the world in its complexities, we must stop trying to speak for the subaltern and rather develop systems that no longer deprive the subaltern the access to speak. In the end, Achebe was only one subaltern, the world will only advance is we can escape this depressive phase of analysis. And to do this, we can begin by listening to some advice from the Igbo people, “If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.”

The History of Love is an ambitious title. It sounds like it should be on the cover a textbook, perhaps a cultural analysis of love over the ages. It suggests the enclosed pages will offer a comprehensive account of love, an all-encompassing, authoritative expose of love’s general nature. Rather, Nicole Krauss answers the questions raised by her novel’s title with a complex story of three people unwittingly connected by one man’s love. To describe love, to live up to her title, Krauss shows the crippling, lifelong romance that Leo Gursky has with Alma Mereminski, the lives affected by it, and how they all connect.

If you haven’t read the book, here are the plot points you need to know: Leo wrote a book called The History of Love for the love of his life, Alma Mereminksi, who left him in Poland when she escaped for America in 1942. Alma Singer, a fourteen year old girl who takes turns narrating the novel with Leo and others, was named after the Alma Mereminski in Leo’s book. After barely surviving the war, Leo follows his Alma to New York, where he finds that after giving birth to Leo’s son, Isaac, she assumed Leo had died and remarried, never telling Isaac about his true father. Leo lives alone in New York for the rest of his life, and is around eighty in the novel’s present.

With such a bold title, it is no surprise that Krauss disappointed some readers. The London Review says that the novel’s “important questions are soiled by the book’s inability to be primarily truthful about human conduct and motive, about life…. The centre of the book – its rendition of life, its ability to make one believe in it – is empty” (29). Wood blames the novel’s failure on Krauss’s forced attempts to please readers. But there’s another obstacle to achieving the primarily truthful understanding of love the title seems to promise, an obstacle Wood leaves out: The novel is polyglot – It is narrated by several distinct voices. Some readers see the competing voices as supporting each other. Jessica Lang writes in the Journal of Modern Literature that “The History of Love is the history of the self — “I” —  a single story. It is not so much about a Leo, or a soldier, or an Alma or a Bird; rather, the narration delivers a sense of meshed identity, a result of the various interactions accumulated over the course of a lifetime” (52-53). Although the novel’s different but connected characters may reinforce a broader, humanizing notion of togetherness, they have such different understandings of love that no coherently meshed characterization of love is delivered. If Leo’s perspective stood alone, we could take his conception of love as archetypal. However, the unique views presented by each narrator leave readers puzzled with a complex and internally conflicted picture of love. The History of Love shows that love means different things to everyone. To see this, we only need to look at Leo and his strongest foil, Alma Singer.

Leo Gursky

We see Leo’s voice in two contexts: We first catch glimpses of his voice in The History of Love, the book he wrote as a young adult for Alma Mereminski. As a young romantic, Leo is expressive, emotional, and invested in the world. He writes about Alma, “Her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering” (11). Leo’s passionate, aphoristic writing demonstrates how deeply he feels love’s beauty and power. His book details an imaginative history of love, describing angels’ love lives, the “Birth of Feeling”, the “Age of Glass” (106, 72). Leo’s writing is spirited, wrapped up in the joy of feeling. He falls deeply in love with Alma after his first interaction with her, begs her to marry him at age eleven, and promises never to love another girl. Leo’s young love is strong and joyful, the type found in Hollywood and readers’ dreams. However, Alma consumes his identity, which at first seems touching but quickly becomes dangerous. He later describes Alma’s love as the “only thing I knew,” and writes of his time hiding during the war, “I wanted to live very badly. And there was only one reason: her” (8, 226). Leo falls in love so strongly that it becomes his life’s purpose. But young Leo is satisfied, happy with love as his driving force.

Leo is a heartbroken old man when he narrates the novel, and the difference in his voice shows how losing Alma affected him. First, in contrast to the other narrators, Leo narrates dialogue in italics. Since italics are conventionally used for a character’s thoughts, when used for dialogue they emphasize Leo’s isolation and erect a boundary between the inside of Leo’s mind and the outside world. Communication with other people does not seem quite real – Leo travels in a haze, never really connecting with those around him. He spends his whole life yearning for the love he had as a teenager and recovering from its absence – he makes little effort to move on or pursue other interests. Second, Leo writes in short, frank sentences and often interjects with “And yet” or “But.” For example, he says of his occupation, “It’s not what I would have imagined for myself. And yet” before dropping the subject (5). Leo’s short sentences show his tiredness, and his brief self-contradictions express the irony he sees in the world and his frustration that every positive in his life has come with reservations. He appears tired of fighting back – he now takes injustice and incongruence for granted, hardly worth expanding upon. After losing Alma, and later Isaac, nothing energizes him. Third, Leo loves to joke about his own mortality. The first lines of the novel are Leo’s: “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT” (3). Hopeless about love, Leo has no reason to live. After losing Alma, Leo transfers his love to Isaac, Leo’s son who does not know he exists. Leo fantasizes about talking to his son for decades, but Isaac dies right as Leo begins to summon the courage. Leo writes, “Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed” (80). Just as for Alma, Leo lived because he loved Isaac. Leo’s narration shows readers that love is so wonderful that it is the highest purpose of life – without loved ones, life appears meaningless.

In the context of Leo’s extreme loss, valuing love so highly is unfortunate. But Leo finds no way around it. Leo writes in the third person, “If the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it” (13). Leo’s theory of love holds us slave to love whether we like it or not, fantastically happy when in love and helplessly lost, purposeless when out. This distinct understanding of love is powerful in Krauss’s novel, but Leo is opposed by the other narrators.

Alma Singer

Alma’s voice is very different from Leo’s, as is her conception of love. She writes in numbered sections that try but fail to organize her scattered narration. She never gets too invested in one train of thought, never too attached to one mindset. Her sentences are long, and often contain playful figurative language. For example, Alma writes of her mother, “Sometimes she would get stuck on a certain sentence for hours and go around like a dog with a bone until she’d shriek out, ‘I’VE GOT IT!’ and scurry off to her desk to dig a hole and bury it” (48). Alma’s youthful energy saturates her narration. Krauss constantly reminds us of Alma’s age – and her naivety. For example, after telling a powerful story about a blind photographer, Alma writes, “I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is” (39). This innocence may be absolved with age, but note that young Leo at this age was spouting wisdom about the depths of his love. Alma is a much more typical teenager, and the conception of love that her scatter-brained, youthful simplicity reveals is quite different from Leo’s.

Alma’s mother is similar to Leo – her life has been overtaken by love. After Alma’s father died, her mother “turned life away” to keep holding on to him (45). Witnessing her mother’s loss colored Alma’s perception of love. She writes, “When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, ‘One day you’re going to fall in love.’ I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years” (54). Alma views love as undesirable, something to be avoided, something that will ruin her life. Further, Alma is annoyed by her mother’s love for her. Alma says, “She’d call after me, ‘What can I do for you I love you so much,’ and I always wanted to say, but never said: Love me less” (43). While Leo views love as central to his identity, Alma does not want it to be a dominant part of her life. She views the depths of love as a dangerous place. With the pain that love has caused her mother and Leo in mind, readers may empathize with this idea. And Alma offers a way out, a way to free herself from love: Even when she does fall in love – She slowly develops feelings for her friend Misha – it never becomes inextricably tied to her purpose in life. Alma is also concerned with her hobbies, her brother’s sanity, her dream of becoming a wilderness explorer, helping her mother move on from her father, and the puzzle of determining the author of The History of Love. She is never slave to love like Leo. And unlike young Leo’s sudden, passionate romance, Alma’s is awkward and uncomfortable. She doesn’t know how to describe her feelings, and the resistance culminates when Misha kisses her for the first time. Alma tells him to stop. “And then I said: ‘I like someone else.’ As soon as I said it I regretted it” (142). Even as she feels the pull of love and wishes she could say the right thing, her confliction shows she is skeptical of love. Being in love is not bliss for Alma as it was for Leo, and she does not need it to find purpose in life. Alma opposes Leo’s perspective with well-founded skepticism about love’s virtue and by showing that there is more to life than love.

The novel contains many other speakers and unique interpretations of love. The third primary narrator shows a love between Zvi and Rosa that is desperate and built on deceit, Uncle Julian is driven to cheat on his wife by her distaste with painting, Alma’s brother’s love for his dead father causes him to think he is the Messiah, Herman Cooper bullies girls in an effort to earn their love – each of these complicates the novel’s definition of love and blocks the novel from revealing a unified theory. Since love in reality is more diverse than one man’s conception, the multi-faceted nature of love that The History of Love’s polyglossia reveals is valuable and demonstrates the power that a single novel can have to simultaneously represent many contradictory world views. Critics searching for a one-track theory should turn elsewhere – I’d recommend another genre entirely.

This essay was written in the style of Jake Romm and received preliminary feedback from Paul Griffith.

Works Cited

Krauss, Nicole. 2005. The History of Love. W.W. Norton & Company. Print.

Lang, Jessica. 2009. The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the Transmission of    Holocaust Memory. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol 33, No. 1. Indiana University      Press. Web.

Wood, James. 2005. “Tides of Treacle.” The London Review, Vol 27. No. 12. Web.

With the shift toward industrialization came the growth of consumerism, of materialism and the ever-utilitarian eye that goes with it. Along with the boom of these ideas in the nineteenth century grew a fear in the minds of some; artists and philosophers, poised to understand the changing dynamics of society, looked out and saw a movement away from the “actual world.” Martin Heidegger developed a school of thought which in its simplest terms insisted that men had removed themselves too far from true existence—backed by musings on art, language, and the essence of Being itself. To be in this position was really to have lost the world. Such a position is dire at best, and those who agree with Heidegger’s philosophy are eager to find an escape.

Genuine poetry is one thing which, above all else, does not lose us the world. Ordinary usages of language are careless and given to degenerating the connections between words and things through a focus on their more distant meanings. If not handled properly, poetry can have this effect as well. But true poetry uses the language of reality in refreshing ways, giving renewed meaning to the world itself by taking a step away from it. Poetry allows us to make our own connections rather than forcing them upon us and, in so doing, brings us that much closer to the actual world.

There is some question about the particulars of this “actual world,” which must be clarified; a stable definition is necessary for analysis to continue. The very nature of this project implies its complex result, and we must stop to address it before moving forward. Once we have settled on a definition there can be discussion of what in poetry touches a reality so defined.

Scholars cannot decide whether the “actual world” is most definitively the physical or creative. There is a world of external facts, and some believe in this world of external facts as the “actual world” in its eternally valuable completion (Spencer 174). Perception is then thrown out the door. But this is impossible to allow in a full definition, in an explanation of the “actual world” that accounts for its intricacies. At heart the “actual world” is not only the world of facts and the concrete, not only the way existence is imagined. It is hopeless to attempt a separation of the two. The “actual world” is made up of external objects and facts, and those who people it must learn it in their own imaginative terms as it unfolds, before it has crystallized beyond their understandings. All is lost if life becomes only what it might do down the line. The matter of importance is that the things in this world are understood for the sake of their own being.

According to Heidegger’s philosophy, poetry brings us nearer to this “actual world.” He argues its language functions “to declare, to make clear, light, bright, shining” (Versényi 132), whereas prosaic language would attempt to persuade, would seek to explain. Prose wants to tell something; poetry just wants to be heard. The poetic is considered by some the most important form of art (Rosiek 157), and as art it pushes the dreary, the expected, the day-to-day utilitarian slug out of our minds and off to some seldom-seen corner of consciousness. It “gives no knowledge for or impetus of controlling the things of the world” (Versényi 93)—it holds a non-exploitative relationship to actuality—and so it is valued.

There is a poem by William Carlos Williams which, among other possible examples, serves well to highlight this trait. It is called “The Children” and reads as follows:

Once in a while

we’d find a patch

of yellow violets

not many

but big big blue

ones in

the cemetery woods

we’d pick

bunches of them

there was a family

named Foltette

a big family

with lots of

children’s graves

so we’d take

bunches of violets

and place one

on each headstone

The poem is short and simple to read. The six stanzas connect easily, and that difficulty of comprehension so feared in poetry is nowhere to be found in the earthy cadence and common language of the piece. And more, there is nothing it chooses to tell. In the place of some point it could be making, the poem gives its reader things—moments, and objects, and images from the world—purely for their own sake. The reader is permitted to take it from there. Though counterintuitive to an extent, it seems this “amalgamation of outer and inner reality which is poetry at its best” is—well, “more ‘actual’ than the world it reflects” (Spencer 192).

The key is in the imagination. The poem does not insist on making connections or feeding one’s utilitarian point of view. It gathers flowers and children and graves together on the page, but its words do not extend beyond that point. The worlds that are created—that come alive in our minds through the “transactional and creative process” of reading (Kazemek 22)—are fresh, though they are made up of the most commonplace things. And this act of imagining is paramount. The give-and-take transaction between the reader and the words before him works precisely when “comprehension and creation go on together” (Kazemek 24). One is fed the information slowly—first the violets, then the cemetery woods—until there is a whole family beneath the ground. Children’s headstones are a poignant thing, but they are brought to view gradually, and hidden in the plainness of their mention, so the reader is forced to acknowledge the sad fact of those graves’ existence alone. With the act of imagining, the reader develops a closer tie to the world in these words, a world which, being made up of the same stuff as our own, can transpose this firmer connection onto the “actual” (Spencer 177). So we are brought back, readers swallowed by an instrumentalist society, tied again to the “actual world” we forgot.

There is more to it, to be sure, than leaving empty spaces to be filled by the reader’s mind. The imagination is given reign in a sense that extends beyond—or, rather, beneath—the level of content itself. In true poetry—in a way definitively unlike any other form of language—words are alive. They are reordered, refreshed, and reestablished to take on that most undervalued of all designations, the new. It is undeniable that those called “first-rate” poets have a style which “does more than fulfill our expectations, it surpasses them… and uses the ‘actual world’ in a fashion which makes it seem something new” (Spencer 176). For “The Children,” it is color, in part, that does it. We are told they find “a patch / of yellow violets” (2-3), and not two lines along the just congealed image is shattered. For the yellow violets become “big big blue / ones” (5-6). It is a small thing, almost accidental, no more than a moment of signal static if you aren’t looking for it, yet somehow it frees the imagery. “The literal inaccuracy of [these images] is what makes their poetic accuracy” (Spencer 177); the reader is freed from the constricting frame of long-decided meaning, and suddenly the work, the art, is all openness and accessible connections. The flowers are both yellow and blue at once, and there is no attempting to picture them like that. We could think of them as something to be used in a garden or fitted in a bouquet for the tea setting under other circumstances. But these are violets that do not exist, that cannot exist, and so stop any practicality from coming between us and the actual thing.

Of course, this all hinges on “genuine poetry.” There, is, to be sure, quite a lot called poetry which is nothing of the sort. This can range from the banal whose same words are used in the same ways we’ve always heard them before to, alternatively, those overly presumptuous pieces whose language “instead of sinking, [try] too ambitiously to rise” (Spencer 176). There are, too, those poems which negate everything we’ve been attributing to their art, those poems which seem to hide the world rather than find it for us in their material. These ones are garrulous and act like prose; they blow the upper hand they could hold by telling us what they have to say.

An uncannily effective example is “Pals,” a piece by the otherwise unoffending poet, David Yezzi. It has somehow committed every error. The language is mostly common and arranged in all the expected ways. Yezzi does not here present unexpected word pairings or surprising turns of language as Williams does. He creates images out of obvious, literal connections—no phrasing more original than the rather unsurprising, “your mirror’s best reflection” (5). The second line is uncomfortably colloquial, and the eighth includes over-exaggerated vocabulary. There is no inherent offense in any of those words he puts to work; the trouble is in the way they are used, in that none of it opens something new. This results only in a falsified work, proof of the piece’s very insincerity which keeps us at a distance from the reality described. Unlike Williams’ clear and surprising poem, this one is trite and heavy and predictable all along. Poetry of this sort is “dressed in robes hired from the costumer’s” (Spencer 176), as one scholar puts it, and the unexciting game of dress-up has no chance of bringing anyone closer to the world. The poem is decidedly talking at us. It is about pals and all the good they are worth, and the reader is not permitted for a second to consider another view. The author’s supercilious assumption is that he ought to be informing us of just how things are. So we are trapped by the poem.

The issue is, of course, that this is exactly what we are trying to escape in poetry. There is quite enough ‘being talked at’ in a society as full of “radio and movies continuously blaring out a series of emotional platitudes” (Spencer 190) as our own. We do not need the distance of Yezzi’s opinions on friendship or the temptation towards utility in his words. Poems like Williams’ are what we need, real poems, clear, hard poems that leave opinion out of it. We need the words, “a family / named Foltette / a big family / with lots of / children’s graves” (10-14) and the placement of violets. This is all. The “actual world” itself is present; it does not need the writer’s qualification to mean something.

Williams has a refrain of sorts, initially used in his poem, Paterson: “No ideas but in things.” This is the basis of all genuine poetry. It is one of those rare concepts with a quality of eternal intangibility in it, that you often only recognize in its absence. We can be sure there are ideas behind good poetry, and these ideas can be as concrete as any other. But the ideas—if the poem is written well and honestly—are not left to fend for themselves, affronting the reading and disrupting any connection to the world as they do. Instead, the ideas are securely nested in real things. Common language depicting common scenes in uncommon ways supports this thought in “The Children.” It presents us the things of which it is built without a blinding screen of ideas—Williams’ or our own—clouding the readerly line of sight. And so, illuminated is that “actual world” that’s been hidden in shadow. With this sort of work before us, so much can happen.

Even re-finding the world could happen, without any particular wonder.

———————————————————————————————————

References

Works Cited

Rosiek, Jan. Maintaining the Sublime: Heidegger and Adorno. Bern, Germany: Peter Lang AG, European Academic, 2000. Print.

Versenyi, Laszlo. Heidegger, Being and Truth. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. Print.

Spencer, Theodore. “Antaeus or Poetic Language and the Actual World.” ELH, vol. 10, no. 3, 1943, pp. 173–192.

Kazemek, Francis E. “William Carlos Williams, Literacy, and the Imagination.” The English Journal, vol. 76, no. 7, 1987, pp. 22–28.

Yezzi, David. “Pals.” Birds of the Air. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon UP, 2013. N. pp. 43.

Williams, William Carlos. “The Children.” Six American Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Joel Conarroe. New York: Random House, 1991. 185-86. Print.

Works Consulted

Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. New York: Viking, 1979. Print.

Peer reviewed by Alison Robey

Written in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with basis mainly on “Babylon Revisited” and The Great Gatsby

Poetry has always been something I never had a passion for, but I always believed that I had a good understanding of many types of poetry and how they operate. I knew about haikus and how they are Japanese and utilize the syllables of the words to create their structure. I was aware that sonnets generally dealt with a lover and an absent beloved along with being fourteen lines. I knew most songs derive from poetry. And I saw how poems expressed themselves through imagery and emotion. This culmination of information gave me the belief that I clearly understood lyric poetry- the time we most often associate with “poetry” when referenced by itself.

Well, this is how much I actually knew about lyric poetry: nothing.

I really should not be surprised by this because I do not read poetry nor write it in my free time, and I have no desire to. I definitely respect it and appreciate how it has given joy and passion to people. I have this friend who writes at least five poems a day. Some are short, but many are surprisingly long. He told me he just writes them because it is a way for him to be open almost like a journal, but poetry is viewed as more artistic. He told me he enjoys how free it is; how it does not have a set structure, and yet it can still be classified as something that people can be in awe of. Most importantly, he emphasized how cool it was to be personal and put focus on himself.

These opinions he has had come across my head as thought at some point and are the reasons why I respected poetry. These beliefs that poetry had no really strict rules and that it focuses on one thing, typically the “author,” gave me reason to believe that poetry was the way to go if one must write literature, and that poetry is the literature for personal. That is, it provides the writer with the ability to put themselves in the forefront and not worry about providing details about other things nor have to make several interconnections between people and things in the way that novels must. These things were concrete to me… until I read On Lyric Poetry and Society by Theodor Adorno. Adorno challenges each of these characteristics I assigned to poetry. Adorno does agree that lyric poetry is concerned with the dream of free self-expression: having the ability to communicate in deeply personal, individualized, non-conformist ways. But, Adorno holds that the history of lyric poetry is the history of individuality in crisis, and that, that history has become the history of a frustrated desire for realized humanity. He calls to question how one can rejoin the world they are fleeing.

This question derives from the question of how a poem establishes its lyric “I”- the poetic “me?” How can one distinguish a general “I” to a specified “I?” When the poet uses “I” in their poetry, how do we determine to what that “I” refers? Is it that you simply identify the “I” by itself? But, how can you focus on that one subject without the calling to attention the secondary-things around the first. Adorno’s argument is that you cannot. There is a special relationship that needs to exist between the lyric I and the other things involved. Even though poetry is categorized differently than a novel, it still relies upon the connection between other things. In order for the poetic me to be, there needs to be something for it to oppose, something that the me is fleeing. Thus, lyric poetry which is seemingly individualized, is very much collective and more social than believed to be.

The “I” then is not as self-oriented as originally perceived. This ties into Adorno’s central argument: all language is social and deindividualized. What made me realize I knew even less about poetry than I thought, was that nobody is really creative. This theory popped into my head several times in my life, but it was always very general in the sense that there is no proof that what someone says or does is actually original and was never thought of or done before. Adorno states that since the “I” is often underelaborated (it’s not specified nor contextualized much), it leaves poetry very open, accessible, and makes it social. This, in turn, makes poetry a language with more rules. For example, when you write a haiku, you are writing in a manner that thousands have attempted before. In this way, too, your language is social and shared. Even when writing peculiar or in a way that does not attempt to make sense in the usual fashion, poets are not achieving their individuality, because they are handing themselves over to language.

Poetry has something to do with our capacity to ignore norms themselves; It is a vehicle of nonconformity. In “Re-Reading ‘Impossibility’ and ‘Barbarism’: Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics,” Anthony Rowland asserts that although Adorno calls post-Holocaust poetry “barbaric,” Adorno is not arguing that “poems are unrestrained, uncultured or rough in subject matter,” but instead that Adorno is trying to describe a different type of poetry that writes in a way that does not attempt to make sense in a usual fashion. Rowland, then, calls to question how can Adorno argue that poetry is barbaric, but it is “impossible to write poetry.” The answer is that while poetry is very free and autonomous, poetry has many rules. As poetry strives to find fresh language, convention evolves with it, and rules are then created for such “freeness.” Poetry and convention are then essentially in an evolutionary arms race. As stated, poetry is in a constant search for fresh language. That is, poets have no tolerance for cliché. Poets will often try to find a novel way to do something or phrase something, especially if it is something that could have potentially been stated before. There is just so much history, that poems almost cannot avoid convention, but humans (because they can get very good at things) continue to find new ways to be innovative and go outside the bounds of convention. This causes convention to then evolve in response to the “freshness” of poetry, and thus a cycle is created. As poetry develops new ways to become “creative,” convention also evolves to create rules to limit poetry. This is one of the things I was the most shocked by based on my held belief that poetry was so free and boundless.

To further confuse me, I came to understand that in order for “I” to be “I” it has to set itself apart from another-term. If we look at the poem, I, too, sing America by Langston Hughes we can see how a poem- that’s central focus is the “I’- relies on another to distinguish itself.

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–
I, too, am America.
Langston Hughes

This can be blatantly observed by looking at how the first verse, “I am the darker brother,” essentially means nothing because it provides the reader with nothing to compare that “I” to, nor does it provide context to further identify the speaker. It is only through the second verse, “They send me to eat in the kitchen,” that the “I” becomes an “I.” Before setting itself apart from the “they” (which granted still is not very specific), the author despite his attempt to place himself into his poem gave us nothing and in fact left more questions than answers. Even though his use of “they,” “nobody,” and even the quotation marks themselves do not seem as prevalent or valuable as the “I” and one “me” in the poem, without them, the lyric “I” and the poetic “me” could not exist. Additionally, calling to mind the title itself, “I, too, sing America,” the simple word too adds that extra layer. By the addition of that word, the “I” immediately gets set apart because the “too” implies that there is another person or group that has sung America. Whether or not he wants to join with them to be apart of a chorus or be independent and sing his own refrain is a different story. But, nonetheless, the inclusion of the “too” adds a lot more to the formation of the poetic “me” Langston Hughes is attempting to create.

This poem, indeed, follows the conventions of the poetry we typically think of, but I ask you to think of a poem- any type of poem- where the main subject is actually alone; isolated from everything else with no connections or rejections to set it apart. In fact, try to think of anything like a novel or a fruit or even a person. How can you distinguish one from another without calling attention to the other subject and giving information about what it is or is not. Novels (which are all about connections and are the literature of relationships) do a great job of this. Novels tend to define what they are not and will often bring in other forms of literature to set themselves apart. Poems and the “I” are no different. They are dependent upon the existence of something else in order to gain more specificity and identity. In Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s “The Lyric Subject” within Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, she states that “IMPLICITLY OR explicitly, the speaker in a lyric poem is an “I…” The “I” in discourse is a universal, an indexical function,” meaning that this “I” is very general and encompasses all, however she also holds that “the poetic “I” is also heard as an individuated voice.” She further states, “The generic “I” and the individuated “I” cannot to be understood as oppositional: The “I” in poetry is both the generic “I” of language and an individuated “I.”” This subject which is the discourse shows how poetry foregrounds convention. Thus, “formal devices and conventions,” regulate the material “body.” According to her, “conventions that stylize the rules of a language represent the body, and in the lyric there is an excess of “body.”” Additionally, Blasing supports that the Lyric “I” cannot be alone. She writes, “the lyric “I” must also always be a “you…” the “I” is utterly dependent on an audience.” This further expands on the point that the poetic “me” must have something in addition to itself. Therefore, the “I” that is centralized within poetry of all categories, needs the presence of another subject in order for it to become a non-general “I” that attaches itself to the author, and not everyone.

Here is what I have learned about poetry: poetry is both one of the most free types of literature, but still bounded by conventions that continue to develop in order to keep up with the “newness” that poets bring with time. And, poetry is not very individualized; It is very social and decentralized. The “I (or the subject upon which is being focused)” that is referenced and at the heart of the poem has to have something to oppose; something to use to distinguish itself. Looking back, I think had made these realizations before, but set them aside because I never had much backing. I realize this is can be very harmful to state in a work I just gave credit to others for the things I learned. But, then again, I did not know much about the subject before and there is no proof that I know anymore now. I am simply on human living in a period encompassed by technology, and the next generation will likely be so engulfed by advancements that these statements about poetry may very well become inconsequential. I mean, how significant are “cavedrawings” and hieroglyphics to the youth now. Think about it, its only a matter of time before poetry becomes outdated.

An earlier draft of this essay was read by Anna Kim

I have written this essay in the style of Chuck Klosterman.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” Notes To Literature 1 (1991): 37-54. Columbia University Press. Web. 15 Dec. 2016.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. “THE LYRIC SUBJECT.” Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 27–44, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t8n8.5.

ROWLAND, ANTONY. “Re-Reading ‘Impossibility’ and ‘Barbarism’: Adorno and Post- Holocaust Poetics.” Critical Survey, vol. 9, no. 1, 1997, pp. 57–69. www.jstor.org/stable/ 41556053.

Antigone and Ismene

Prompt: 11. …Nietzsche’s argument about tragedy…

“Ismene, who?” seems to be the general consensus upon a first-time reading of the Greek tragedy Antigone. For those unfamiliar with the play, some context: Antigone is the third of the three Theban plays written by Sophocles. The previous two, Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus, concentrate on the mythical king Oedipus who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Oedipus dies under mysterious circumstances, and his sons (slash brothers – incest makes familial relations complicated) Polyneices and Eteocles fight to the death for his throne. King Creon declares Polyneices a traitor to Thebes for initiating civil war and bans the citizens from burying his corpse on pain of stoning to death. By the time Antigone begins, Antigone and Ismene are the last of this cursed family line. Antigone asks Ismene to help her bury their brother Polyneices, but Ismene refuses. Creon catches Antigone in the act and sentences her to be sealed into a cave for the remainder of her life. A domino effect of death proceeds (Antigone chooses death over buried life and hangs herself, her fiancé and Creon’s son Haemon falls on his sword, Creon’s wife Eurydice stabs herself), and by the end of Antigone, only a broken and regretful Creon is left standing. Ismene too is presumably alive within the palace, but we don’t really care about her at that point.

We don’t really care about Ismene at any point. While everyone around her is hell-bent on killing themselves spectacularly, Ismene is silent and stationary inside the royal palace. Initial impressions of the play would hardly deem her the most riveting of characters and would certainly not deem her an equal to the daring headliner who is her sister. Bonnie Honig describes, “For centuries, Ismene has been cast as the inert, drab backdrop against which her more colorful sister stands out.” Some work has been done to recover Ismene, but by and large the focus of readership and scholarship has always been on Antigone. This is an unfortunate oversight because we should care about Ismene. In fact, the opening words of the play, “ō koinon autadelphon Ismēnēs,” tell us that Ismene is just as important as Antigone (Badger 73, italics mine). Koinon means common, and Antigone’s greeting can be translated to something like, “Ismene, my own sister, sharing the self-same blood.” Furthermore, Antigone and Ismene use the grammatically dual number to refer to themselves as a “pair” of sisters (Ludwig 206). Thus, Ismene should not be thought of as less than Antigone but as equal and opposing.

I posit a new way of reading Antigone, one that maintains the parity between the two sisters. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche defines “two competing but also complementary impulses in Greek culture,” the Apollonian and the Dionysian (34). The first refers to Apollo, the god of light and dream, and the second to Dionysus, the god of intoxication and rapture. What exactly is the relationship between the two? Nietzsche states, “So the difficult relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy should really be symbolized through a fraternal bond between both deities” (84). And just as the two deities share a fraternal bond, so do Antigone and Ismene share a sororal bond. By applying Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian theory to Antigone, we can more clearly see that Ismene is not a backdrop to Antigone but a force in herself. Reading Ismene as an Apollonian embodiment and Antigone as a Dionysian embodiment highlights the doubleness of their fate and provides new insights into the dynamics of their relationship.

Ismene functions as the avatar of Apollo in Antigone. Apollo is linked with “visible form, comprehensible knowledge, and moderation,” and no character in the play better deserves the descriptor of “moderate” than Ismene. (Ansell-Pearson and Large 34). Concerned with the practicalities of everyday survival, she is prudent, rational, and adaptable. When Antigone urges her to defy Creon’s edict and bury their brother, Ismene demurs, “I know/that wild and futile action makes no sense” (Sophocles 68-70). Conventional readings peg Ismene as passive, even cowardly, compared to her heroic sister, yet it is precisely her mundanity that makes her so relatable. Slavoj Žižek argues, “the figure with which we can identify is her sister Ismene—kind, considerate, sensitive, prepared to give way and compromise, pathetic, ‘human’ in contrast to Antigone, who goes to the limits” (qtd. in Honig). We readers may prefer to imagine ourselves in the role of passionate martyr rather than that of compliant survivor, but we must admit that majority of us would be Ismenes and not Antigones in a given scenario. Antigone may catch our eye, but Ismene is our known quantity.

Ismene also exhibits the Apollonian artistic features. Apollo is the god of the plastic or representational arts, architecture in particular, and Ismene is bound to the royal palace. The stage directions in Antigone serve as an attestation. A sampling: Antigone and Ismene emerge from the royal palace, Ismene returns to the palace, Ismene is brought from the palace under guard, and Antigone and Ismene are taken inside. After being taken inside the palace with Antigone, we understand that Ismene remains in the palace for the rest of the play. This insistent grounding of Ismene in the palace can partially be explained by the fact that the setting of the play is in front of the palace, but other characters are allowed to enter and leave by side entrances or to complete unseen actions outside the palace (e.g. Antigone burying her brother) whereas Ismene is decidedly not. In addition to architecture, Ismene is associated with language. Antigone spurns her with a, “I cannot love a friend whose love is words,” and Ismene protests, “At least I was not silent. You were warned” (Sophocles 543-544, 556). Although Nietzsche does not directly assign language to the dominion of Apollo or Dionysus, in other works he reflects on “the extent to which human life is immersed in illusions and dream images […] and sees only the form of things” and offers the chief cause of the “conceited nature of human knowing” as language (Ansell-Pearson and Large 39). The associations of form, dream images, and illusory knowing with language seem to place language and thus Ismene as well firmly in the Apollonian field.

It follows that Antigone is her Dionysian counterpart, although she is not as perfect a fit. The editor’s’ footnote in The Birth of Tragedy suggests that Antigone’s sense of religious ritual puts her in line with Apollo, which seems odd considering that Dionysus is linked with “formless flux, mystical intuition, and excess” (Ansell-Pearson and Large 34). There are multiple candidates in the play for the descriptor of “excess,” but Antigone is the most saliently intransigent. The Chorus remarks of her Icarian overreaching, “You went to the furthest verge/of daring, but there you found/the high foundation of justice, and fell” (Sophocles 852-854). Moreover, mysticism seems to correlate well with religion, and Antigone repeatedly refers to the gods, proclaiming that she is obeying their “unwritten and unfailing laws” instead of the man-made laws of the city (Sophocles 454). However, Nietzsche portrays the Olympians as “born of dream” and as such, more Apollonian as Dionysian. Consequently, Antigone’s role as a pseudo-representative of the Olympian gods would be considered Apollonian as well. Another inconsistency: Antigone’s uncompromising will appears to preclude the other Dionysian quality of flux. Unlike Creon who experiences anagnorisis or Ismene who later decides to stand with Antigone, Antigone makes a decision and sticks with it. The only real change that occurs in Antigone is her physical/spiritual transition from not-dead to dead.

If Ismene is easily analogized to Apollo, then Antigone represents a complicated and at times inverted Dionysus. For Nietzsche, the Dionysian sanctifies pain, consecrates the future in the past, and ultimately symbolizes the primacy of a life-drive (Ansell-Pearson and Large 37). Acceptance of suffering is indeed treated as a noble achievement in the play; the Chorus states that Antigone will “have gone like a god” to her fate, and Antigone’s numerous monologues about her forthcoming death straddle the line between mournful and anticipatory – evidence which supports the Dionysian Antigone allegory. On the other hand, the Lacanian reading of Antigone diagnoses her with a death drive, which sounds like the exact opposite of the Dionysian life-drive. As Terry Eagleton states, Antigone “has been declaring from the outset ‘I am dead and desire death.’” Her central motivation is the obsessive need to bury the corpse of Polyneices; it isn’t much of a stretch to extend this fixation from the act of burying the corpse to the corpse itself and death more broadly. She says outright, “My life died long ago/and that has made me fit to help the dead” (Sophocles 559-560). For Antigone, the true life is not the life she has been living, and her future is found with the past, or more precisely, the passed. She hopes to rejoin her family, or as she puts it – “To my own people,” in the underworld. Antigone explains her logic to Ismene, “Longer the time in which to please the dead/than that for those up here. /There shall I lie forever” (Sophocles 75-78). Eternity cannot be not found “up here.” Rather, eternity is found in death. Antigone’s death drive is really a reflected life-drive since, for the Dionysian, eternal return is found in destruction of the individual.

Having established Ismene as an Apollonian figure and Antigone as a Dionysian figure, we can now examine their dynamic. Nietzsche characterizes the interaction of the Apollonian and Dionysian as thus: “And so, wherever the Dionysian broke through, the Apollonian was cancelled, absorbed, and annihilated” (53). Antigone tends to come off as a little cold to Ismene, but we note that this is hardly the same thing as “annihilation.” But, symbolically, annihilation might just be exactly what Antigone enacts on Ismene. We mentioned in the beginning that Ismene pales in comparison to her sister. In some sense, the presence of the Dionysian Antigone whittles away at the presence of the Apollonian Ismene. Other parts of the play seem to set up this dynamic as well. For example, the Chorus sings an ode about how man has conquered everything on earth except for death:

Language, and thought like the wind

and the feelings that make the town,

he has taught himself, and shelter against the cold,

[…] There’s only death

that he cannot find an escape from.

(Sophocles 355-360)

We have already demonstrated that the Apollonian Ismene is linked with language as well as the palace, which appears in this ode as the trappings of civilization (i.e. “the town” and “shelter against the cold”). We have also shown that Antigone is linked with death. Put those two affiliations together, and we infer from the ode that death in the form of Antigone smashes through the defenses of civilized life in the form of Ismene.

So does Antigone succeed in obliterating Ismene? Let’s go to Ismene’s last appearance in the play to check. Ismene claims to be Antigone’s accomplice, Antigone refuses to let Ismene join her doomed fate, Creon sends Antigone and Ismene into the palace, Antigone alone proceeds to the cave, and catch-all ruination ensues. And that’s it. Not only does Ismene not make a reappearance on the stage, but we never hear mention of her again in the play. I should say, we very deliberately do not hear mention of her again. Simon Goldhill argues in Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy that the “discourse of the play through Antigone’s language” essentially kills Ismene off (244). Antigone tells the Chorus, “I am last of your royal line,” an assertion that plainly ignores the fact that Ismene is A, alive, and B, also of the royal line (Sophocles 941). Ismene is no longer of the house of Oedipus – understandable. Perhaps Antigone feels that her refusal to bury Polyneices merited an excommunication from the family. Fine. That still doesn’t mean Ismene has been completely annihilated. But Antigone also sings, “Unwept, no wedding-song, unfriended, now I go” (Sophocles 878). Earlier on, the Chorus explicitly observes that Ismene mourns her sister with “tears on her lovely face” (Sophocles 530). With that in mind, the bemoaning about solitary fate sounds unwarranted and suggests an almost amnesic Antigone. Hello, has she completely forgotten Ismene? Her crying sister? Her mourning friend? Antigone doesn’t just speak Ismene out of her family; she speaks her out of existence. Antigone erases Ismene from the memory of the play.

Note that Ismene’s erasure occurs almost simultaneously with Antigone’s own death. Antigone “kills her off” in the speech right before she is led away to the sealed cave. We learn secondhand from the messenger later on that Antigone hangs herself in the cave, but her song with the chorus is her last onstage appearance. Nietzsche proposes that tragedy involves a clash between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, that these two forces are absolutely necessary to each other and the tragedy itself. If the Dionysian and Apollonian are inextricably bound to each other, then so are the fates of Ismene and Antigone. Antigone depends on Ismene, and Ismene depends on Antigone. Their natures can only be expressed in each other’s presence, and once one is gone the other cannot stay for long. The effect of their synchronous disappearances is that of mutual destruction. However, due to the abiding nature of the Dionysian and Apollonian, neither of the sisters are completely annihilated. Ismene may have been obliterated from the story, but she remains in the world. Similarly, Antigone has died, but her continuation lies in death. The two sisters are alive and dead at the same time. Hence, the Dionysian does not triumph over the Apollonian or vice versa. Rather, the two forces operate in tandem to form the tragedy. A Dionysian-Apollonian interpretation of Antigone reveals that Antigone and Ismene are in fact equal players in the world of the play.

Sources

Bonnie Honig. “Ismene’s Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone.” Arethusa, vol. 44 no. 1, 2011, pp. 29-68. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/413524.

Friedrich Nietzsche. “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.” The Nietzsche Reader, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large, Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Jonathan Badger. Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy. Routledge, 2013.

Jonathan Strauss. Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality. Fordham University Press, 2013. ProQuest ebrary. Web.

Paul W. Ludwig. “Fraternity in Antigone.” Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, edited by Yuval Levin, Thomas W. Merril, and Adam Schulman, Lexington Books, 2010.

Simon Goldhill. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, The University of Chicago Press, 1954.

Terry Eagleton. “Lacan’s Antigone.” 2010. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199559213.001.0001/acprof-9780199559213-chapter-6

Authors can often get too much credit for the their work. It is just very easy to praise the author because they wrote it the text and to credit the author with the ownership of a powerful meaning of a work. This is not appropriate because the author is unable to express every possible meaning and they are not the only person reading their work. Similarly, the text itself can gain praise for what it is- the words written- and the meanings that the words can create. In order for the text to rightly deserve credit for the meaning which it conveys, the text must be able to “stand on its own.” The text must be able to express its meaning without the author being present [to explain its meaning]. Thus, the text needs to be autonomous from the author; it must be able to give meaning without the assistance of another source. Therefore, it is the readers and neither the text nor the author who determines the meaning of a work. The readers have their own unique background and are capable of better getting messages across and elaborating on interpretations than the author and the text. What really sets the readers apart from the author and the text is that they have a fresh set of eyes that have not experienced the same things as the author. They have a different perspective from the author and this is vital to the value of their interpretation because it allows them to read the text with no prior history with the text, and thus they would only be able to read the text as it is written. Furthermore, the readers are the persons through whom the meaning of the work can be explained when the author is no longer present and the text is lost or indecipherable by itself.

The Bible is a great example of how valuable the readers are. The authors of the Bible are no longer present, so it is impossible to truly know what they meant. Secondly, we cannot even confirm whether or not they wrote the Bible. Additionally, the text itself can be very hard to fully understand. It is then on the readers to determine how important the text is to the meaning it is trying to get across. The readers also choose how to apply the meaning they gather from the work. Thus, readers hold a lot of the power to dictate which interpretation to take away from the work making their interpretations matter the most. The readers are the ones who preserve the meanings of the work and more readily and efficiently disseminate their interpretations to the masses. The readers, then, give meaning to the Bible; without the readers the Bible has no meaning.

Throughout history, many groups and individuals have taken up the Bible as a text from which they can learn about life and how one should live. However, interpretations of the Bible have varied, causing many disputes even amongst people of the same faith. One cause for this is the fact that the Bible is an incredibly hard text to read. Disregarding the length of the sacred text, the wording of the book is much different than that of modern-day books as a result of developments in language made over long periods of time. Many passages can be very abstract and difficult for one to wrap their heads around. Because the text can be indecipherable at times, readers end up being responsible for creating meaning from it and make it relevant to their lives, their reality, their world. After all, the readers are the individuals who are actively engaging in the world in which they live, and it is they who will determine the future, and for that reason they need to have priority in the “interpretation hierarchy” because they affect the things that will come. For when the Bible is decipherable, it is still up to the readers to give meaning to the text and ponder what they read in order for them to make sense of it.

Humans are unique beings: they have different backgrounds, mindsets, and experiences. Due to this, people are going to have different opinions and interpret things in a variety of ways. This allows for readers to have several meanings for even one phrase, let alone an entire book. Even groups that consist of individuals with very similar beliefs struggle to come up with one clear interpretation. This is partly because humans can be stubborn, but also because it is very difficult to have a group of people in which every member interprets things the exact same way. The text, in contrast, is unable to debate that which is written. Sure, some words have multiple meanings, but it is ultimately the readers who choose which meaning of a word or phrase to take and interpret. The text is an inanimate thing that cannot, on its own, argue for a certain meaning. According to E. D. Hirsch, the text is dependent on the readers for its meaning, and in terms of the author and their intent having significance, the critics as he mentions are the readers and the second an interpretation is made on the work, the author is removed from the work. As for the author, they are likely to have multiple ideas pass through their head, possibly causing them to lose track of their intent. This makes it extremely difficult and even impossible for the reader to even try to figure out the point or argument of the work.

My argument is not that the author or the text has no value, but that in terms of caring about the meaning of a work, neither the authorial intent nor the text has any greater significance than the reader’s equally viable interpretation. An undisputable fact about the Bible is that the authors are no longer alive or able to directly communicate their intent. But, even if they were, their intent does not matter. If there is no confirmed authorial intent, why bother looking for it or giving it attention? The text, by itself, is incapable of having an intent. Furthermore, the text can be read as straightforward or as cryptic, but again it is the readers who achieve those readings. Therefore, readers have the authority and ultimately the final say in assigning meaning to any work because they determine how the text affects them.

There are also just too many ways to interpret the Bible. Aside from each individual’s interpretation, nearly every sect of Christianity (and a few denominations of other religions), has different ways of interpreting the Bible. Examples of biblical interpretations include: interpreting passages as “the Word of God,” as a historical document, as midrash, or as folklore. To interpret the Bible as “the Word of God” is to interpret the passages as they are written because that which is written is exactly the words of God that were simply transcribed through his messengers. According to the source “Methods of Interpreting the Meaning of Bible Passages,” to interpret the Bible as a historical document is to believe that human beings wrote the contents of the Bible without the voice of God, and they did so for their own personal purposes. In addition, the authors made errors both in writing the work and in rewriting the contents with each new edition and the evolution of language. I am not in total agreement with this definition of reading the Bible as a historical document, but it still provides an additional way of interpreting the Bible. To interpret the Bible as midrash is to focus on the experience(s) of the past that allow a praiseworthy event to occur in the present. To interpret the Bible as the result of years of oral tradition is to say that the stories told within the Bible have been repeated and altered even if only slightly. Each of these examples proves how vital the reader is to the meaning of a work. For each interpretation can only be held by the reader who chooses their own way of reading. H. J. B. Combrink agrees and asserts that a text, especially the Bible, is very open to multiple interpretations, and that interpretation and application should not be separated from one another. This further supports the claim of the readers’ interpretations mattering the most because they will have various interpretations, but also the readers are the ones applying the interpretations to the world around them.

A specific example of how even a Biblical verse relies on the readers is the verse  “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).” This is a verse that is very popular and utilized quite often because it can be interpreted to provide false hope to the world in exchange for something so few actually have: faith in God. Popular belief holds that this verse states that it is possible to succeed and thrive simply by having faith in God. However, it can also mean that “ in Christ we find the sufficient comfort and support to carry on through all adversity,” and not that anything is possible and everything will turn out for the best because one has trust in God. Additionally, a reader could interpret this verse as a reason to live poorly, perform badly academically or career-wise, break the law, or become depressed, due to the “loose-phrasing” of the text and the ability of the reader to interpret things in various ways. The text is not specific enough, and even if it were more specific, it is incapable of being so specific that only one meaning can be drawn from it: that is one inevitable truth about literature. Therefore, looking at this one verse out of the approximately thirty-one thousand verses, it is apparent how the author(s) holds no authority in assigning meaning. It also shows how the text inadequately gets a message across uniformly. The text is just not able to provide a definite and universal meaning that will mean the same thing to everyone. Most importantly, this example shows how the reader grants meaning to the verse by assigning their own meaning to something in order for it to make sense and function in their world.

The readers must be the factor that determines the meaning of a poem, novel, play, or movie. The author can get lost in their work or in their own head and lose meaning. The thoughts circling around in the author’s head compounded with even a quick break of concentration can cause the author to lose track of their intended meaning. Above all, the author cannot exist forever; they cannot constantly be available to somehow adjust readers’ interpretations to fit their intentions. The text, which can potentially exist forever, lacks the ability to communicate a message in multiple ways to assist with conveying the message. Readers also possess the ability to alter their reading of the text to forgo its original, intended meaning for a new, readerly-imposed meaning. So long as humans (or intelligence) exist, readers shall exist. Thus, the readers undeniably determine the meaning of a poem, novel, play or movie; they have the most valuable interpretation.

Works Cited

“1 Peter and Theological Interpretation of Scripture.”

Written to Serve : The Use of Scripture in 1 Peter (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <http://www.sbts.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2010/08/sbjt_v14_n2_allison_only.pdf>.

“5 Reasons Why There Are So Many Interpretations of the Bible | by Karl Heitman.”

Glory Books. N.p., 05 May 2015. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

<http://www.glorybooks.org/5-reasons-why-there-are-so-many-interpretations-of-the-bible/>.

Combrink, H. J. B. “Multiple Meaning and/or Multiple Interpretation of a Text.”

Neotestamentica, vol. 18, 1984, pp. 26–37.

www.jstor.org/stable/43047857.

HIRSCH, E. D., and GARY ISEMINGER. “In Defense of the Author.” Intention Interpretation,

Temple University Press, 1992, pp. 11–23,

www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bs87q.5.

Lorand, Ruth. “The Logic of Interpretation.” Interpretation: Ways of Thinking about the Sciences

and the Arts, Edited by Peter Machamer and Gereon Wolters, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, pp. 16–30,

www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrd67.5.

“Methods of Interpreting the Meaning of Bible Passages.”

Methods of Interpreting the Bible. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

<http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_inte.htm>.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “Readers, Texts, Authors.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society,

vol. 34, no. 4, 1998, pp. 885–921.

www.jstor.org/stable/40320733.

“Top 5 Most Misquoted, Misused, and Misunderstood Bible Verses – Truth By Grace.”

Truth By Grace. N.p., 22 June 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <http://truthbygrace.org/top-5-most-misquoted-misused-and-misunderstood-bible-verses/>.