Isabel Archer's blog

I don’t believe in God. Not the God of my Catholic school classmates, the one who didn’t exist when they were out partying on Saturday nights, drinking and sleeping around, but who loved them on Sunday mornings and forgave them for their sins, even if they were still hung over. This God hasn’t appealed to me since I was twelve, when I decided I didn’t want to be confirmed in my parents’ church. I guess I believed in God before that, but I can’t remember. I know I liked going to church on Sundays and baking the bread for Communion in my Sunday School class. I have never been to Europe and been inside the Duomo in Florence, or the Siena Cathedral or walked around the Cathedral Complex at Pisa, but I do study art history, so I know what they look like. They are impressive, especially when you think about how they were built. They didn’t have modern technology. These immense buildings, all the more impressive as they move towards High Gothic, towards the sky, were built by hand. Many workers, stonemasons and artists and sculptors, put their entire life into a building that wasn’t completed in their lifetime. St. John the DivineThe first time I walked into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, near Columbia, I got goosebumps. It is HUGE (it is, after all, the largest cathedral in the world, and the third largest church). Like, jaw-dropping huge. Bobst is overwhelming in its own way, but Bobst is not a House of God. This building was constructed (with a lot of problems along the way, not unlike many of the thirteenth and fourteenth century churches) as a monument to this Lord. It was designed by an architectural firm, and its design has changed many times, and it is still unfinished. But despite all of this, it is still a House of God. I remember standing in the nave the first time I went there and being overwhelmed. I have already said I don’t believe in God. And I still stand by that statement, but for that moment, I felt like there had to be something to this: people have devoted their entire lives to this building, and hundreds and thousands of people have devoted their entire lives to churches and cathedrals across Europe. Are they doing their lives’ work for something or someone that doesn’t exist? It made me hope that there was something to it: that there really is a God, even a Christian one. It seems like too many people have devoted too much time to something for it not to exist.

Dorothea Lang, Toward Los Angeles, California. 1937 March

On the Road is one of, if not the most important book of the Beat Generation. It defines an era, an attitude, a way of life. And it is utterly annoying and frustrating. I read On the Road and Dharma Bums in high school, and I enjoyed them both, but rereading this novel was torturous. I haven’t had any experiences like some of the people in our class, although I have felt out of place in my life, but I found nothing to identify myself with Sal and his friends. They were selfish, whiney alcoholics and drug addicts, looking for something to waste time on. I think many of them may have been genuine, but this fact didn’t redeem their aimless lives. I don’t think Jack Kerouac’s value as an American novelist can be debated, because he surely embodied the aimless feeling of this generation, but I think in many ways he is seen as a role model, and many teenagers and young adults have the desire to embody his lifestyle and to go on the road as he did. I think what is missing here is what he discovers at the end. How do his journeys change him, or inspire him to change; what does he learn? I read the book before, and I remembered nothing about it. I think that says something. The novels we love the most we may forget, but when we start to read them again it comes back to us. On the Road stayed a mystery all the way through. I didn’t learn anything from Sal or his friends, except maybe what not to do.

Dictionary

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary by Xiaolu Guo suggests a kind of epiphany very different from what an epiphany is traditionally thought to be. The Oxford English Dictionary defines epiphany as “a manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being,” and this is typical: a religious experience. But Xiaolu Guo makes the idea of an epiphany a very ordinary, everyday experience, without removing the sacred from it. In the novel Zhuang is living in a foreign country, learning about both the culture she is trying to become a part of and about love. The book is set up as both a dictionary and a journal. Each entry is a new word: it contains the definition, provided by a dictionary, and her experiences of the word. Each new word, and each new entry, is a kind of epiphany. She is not just learning words but she is learning what they mean, and how their meaning affects her life. In learning these new words and their meanings she is learning the difference between her culture at home in China and the Western culture.

One entry is entitled “Future Tense,” and in it she discusses Love, as a Chinese concept and as a Western concept:

‘Love,” this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’ All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

If our loved existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.

She explains that Chinese does not have past, present, or future tenses. Everything is in one tense: this makes learning English very difficult because the Chinese speaker must learn that things exist “in a particulr period of time:” she must learn this about love as well, but not in the abstract way in which she learns is school. She is not learning about love from a teacher in a classroom, but from a lover in the world. She must learn as she experiences.

Every new experience she has and every new word she learns is an epiphany. Even though these epiphanies become commonplace, I think they are sacred experiences, if not in a religious sense. Love is a sacred thing, and so is everything else that she learns about. Everything she learns is taken for granted by those who already know it, but for her each word is something completely new, and her joy in learning words is expressed to other people.

Tennessee Williams reviewed Paul Bowles’s freshman novel The Sheltering Sky for the New York Times Book Review in December 1949. He discusses the typical author of a first novel: usually just out of college, and because “success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.” Williams “thinks that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence. Paul Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism.” Bowles was thirty-eight when The Sheltering Sky was published, and he was able to write about the actual experiences of his life, as opposed to the typical young author, who wrote “in the place of” actual living. Paul Bowles had been going to Africa off and on since about 1930.

Williams says, “In its interior aspect, The Sheltering Sky is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience.” I still, after a few weeks, don’t know how I feel about Bowles’s novel. I was shocked and a little appalled by the nature of it, but it also drew me in, perhaps because it was such an enthralling and basic experience: I do not function on a primitive level, and it was interesting to watch Kit as she was overwhelmed by this desire for the primitive.

“I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.” Williams said this about the book as well, and I think I agree with him. The book on the outer layer is one of adventure and intrigue, and it is easy to leave it at that, but I think what Paul Bowles had to say about nihilism and primitive nature was very interesting, a bit like a car accident: you don’t want to look but you can’t help but stare.

Ian McEwanWhen we started The Comfort of Strangers, I had a little history with Ian McEwan. I read Atonement (as did most teenage girls, I think) in high school, and I had only a small inkling of his apparent tendency towards perversity (If you’ve read Atonement, no explanation is necessary) in his writing. In that novel, Robbie’s unintentional switch of his letters to Cecilia, one innocent, one not-so, also leads to his death, but in a way that is less shocking, and I think less horrifying than Mary and Colin’s in The Comfort of Strangers. It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that I realized the intensity of Atonement and the starring role played by misunderstanding and perversity in that novel.

My previous statement was true, I did only have a small inkling of the author’s tendency towards perversity, but I’m not sure that I can explain why I didn’t better grasp the theme of the novel. The Comfort of Strangers was perhaps more shocking because Colin’s death is more violent, and intimate. Robbie and Cecilia died because of World War II, Colin has no such grand end: his death was not caused by septicemia as the result of a gun-shot wound, and he did not drown when the Germans bombed Balham station in London. I cried when I read Atonement, but I felt no such compassion for Colin or Mary. I think I threw the book across the room when I finished it. I was disgusted by them, and even more so by Robert and Caroline.

Mary and Colin’s relationship compared to Robbie and Cecilia’s is much less moving, and the latter pair, though they make no claim to perfection, is more pitiable and attractive because of what they suffered and the strength of their love. Colin and Mary are rather annoying, and Robert and Caroline are in no way an attractive pair, yet Colin and Mary find themselves inexplicably drawn to them. After this novel, I don’t feel inclined to give Ian McEwan another chance, although I have yet to decide whether Atonement redeems him.

Love

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo was a new kind of reading experience for me. I have never read a novel either in that kind of format, like a dictionary, or a book written in the style of someone with such a poor grasp of the language. In one of the articles it said it took the author a year to complete the first twenty pages, and write them so it really sounded like someone who was just learning English. It’s interesting that un-learning the language, as it were, seems to be as difficult (or at least nearly) as learning it in the first place. In any case, she did a very convincing job. It sounded very much like the author was doing the best they could to make coherent sentences, and failing pretty miserably.

One of the things I found the most charming about the book (because that is really the best adjective I can find to describe it) is the author’s comparison of the Chinese language (and society) with the English language (and society). She not only was forced to learn a new language but a new culture as well, and it is obvious that things in England are very different than they are in China. One of the most notable is the difference between love in Chinese and English.

“‘Love,’ this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’ All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Live in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

“If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.”

I thought this passage, in the entry for “Future Tense” was heartbreaking. Love being defined as something infinite and then redefined as something time-limited is hard for me to comprehend, let alone a Chinese girl alone in London.

In his essay “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experience” Erik Cohen attempts to reconcile the two most common opposing views of tourists and tourism, as defined by Daniel Boorstin, as a “pseudo-event,” a “trivial, superficial, frivolous pursuit of vicarious, contrived experiences,” in his 1964 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and by Dean MacCannell, as a quest for authentic experiences, akin to a religious pilgrimage in his 1973 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class.

Erik Cohen has trouble with both of these theories because he finds that “the tourist does not exist as a type.” He attempts to examine “the place and significance of tourism in a modern person’s life,” and finds five modes of travel, based on the tourist’s relation to their “centre.” The fives modes he defines are: 1. The Recreational Mode; 2. The Diversionary Mode; 3. The Experiental Mode; 4. The Experimental Mode; and 5. The Existential Mode. I attempted to define some of the characters from our novels in terms of these kinds of tourist experiences, but it was difficult to classify them as just one (as Cohen has warned) and unhelpful to organize them by which mode they fit into more than the others.

I think Cohen’s essay is very insightful. Boorstin and MacCannell’s opinions, at least as they were presented here, are doomed to be inaccurate because there will always be some person that doesn’t fit their mold. People, whether characters in fiction or real human beings, will always differ at some time from the expectations set forth by others. Cohen’s classification system is much more realistic and pragmatic, and in many cases he hit the nail on the head, so to speak, when I thought to some experience one of our travelers had on their journeys. I think his essay was important to help us think about the characters’ as well as our own mode of travel, and perhaps view it from another light.

Chinua Achebe

In an interview by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe discusses Conrad’s racist attitude towards the natives on his character Marlow’s journey up the Congo River. Achebe published his first book in 1958. Things Fall Apart “stood fiction writing about Africa on its head” because it told about the coming of the British to African as Africans experienced it.

Achebe said he grew up identifying with Marlow, but (Siegel reads a quote from a corresponding article Achebe wrote), “A time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me: I was not on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness, rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbanks.” Achebe says that was when he realized “how terribly, terribly wrong it was to portray my people, any people, from that attitude, from that point of view.” In the article Achebe says others have argued that Conrad was not endorsing the view Marlow took of the natives, but instead he was “holding it up to irony and criticism.” Achebe defends his argument by saying that Conrad neglected to hint at any alternate frame of reference.

I agree with Achebe in his assessment of Conrad’s novella. “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely, that Conrad was a bloody racist.” His descriptions of the natives withhold any sense of human expression, and establish the natives and the white men as having two opposing humanities. Africa as the setting dissociates the natives from any human factor. They are merely props. Achebe says that Heart of Darkness cannot be called a great work of art because it “celebrates this dehumanization,” and “depersonalizes a portion of the human race.”

Bullfight Aftermath

“Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.” (136) Ernest Hemingway, as well as his main character Jake Barnes, are both aficionados. Hemingway first attended the festival of San Fermin in 1923 with his first wife Hadley, and “it became one of the reigning passions of his life.” He participated in a few amateur bull-fighting competitions, but ultimately decided he was best served as a writer. In 1932 he published the non-fiction Death in the Afternoon, about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting. It is also “a deeper contemplation on the nature of fear and courage.”

The fiesta of San Fermin was originally in October (the saint’s feast day is 10 October), but in 1591 it was officially changed, from 7 July to 14 July, beginning at noon the day before with the chupinazo-the shooting off of rockets that signaled the beginning of the fiesta. “At noon on Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.” (156) Hemingway doesn't really involve the moral issues of bullfighting in The Sun Also Rises, other than Jake's concern for Brett: he tells her not to watch the horse after it has been gored by the bull. Bill also decides, with a sense of tragedy and irony, that it "Must be swell being a steer." (138) In bullfighting, if the torero succeeds, the bull is killed. If the bull defeats or injures the torero, he is studded and new bulls are bred from him. It is an archaic, cruel practice to many, but the tradition remains in Spain and Mexico.

“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.” (158)

The Sun Also Rises brought a great deal of attention to the festival in Pamplona, and Death in the Afternoon is considered the utmost authority on Spanish bullfighting extant. Hemingway’s style is very sparse, but when he writes about the fights, the toreros, the preparations for the festival and everything that goes with it, his sentences are filled with passion and adjectives-it might even be called flowery. Hemingway was a true aficionado: “after his suicide in 1961, two tickets to the upcoming Pamplona bullfights were discovered in his desk drawer.”

Chateau de Chillon

Frederick Winterbourne takes Daisy Miller on an excursion to the Château de Chillon shortly after they meet in Vevey, Switzerland. Winterbourne is more than willing to take Daisy to the historic castle overlooking Lake Geneva, and, on Daisy’s insistence, they take a steamer. At the Château, Daisy “turned a singularly well-shaped ear to everything that Winterbourne told her about the place. But he saw that she cared very little for feudal antiquities, and that the dusty traditions of Chillon made but a slight impression of her.” (Daisy Miller, 28-29) The “dusty traditions” of the Château de Chillon stretch back to the Bronze Age, and Daisy was not wrong in her attitude of boredom: for the most part, the history is not very interesting. The Savoyards occupied the land and the castle around 1151, which gave them control over the trade route along the shore of Lake Geneva. The Savoys lived in the Château at various points, but it eventually became the financial and administrative center in the northern Savoyard lands- this area, stretching between the castellanies Vevey and Aigle on the south banks of Lake Geneva, became the largest Savoyard dominion. The Bernese conquered the Savoys in 1536, and though for some time it was used for administrative purposes eventually it was used for storage. The Château became national property during the Vaud revolution, but it was never used for any other function. “The Romantic Movement rediscovered the Middle Ages with considerable enthusiasm, and a new image of Chillon began to become popular.” Rousseau referred to it in his 1762 La Nouvelle Héloïse, but it was Lord Byron “who was to invest Chillon with a mythical dimension,” with the creation of his poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” about Francois Bonnivard, a political activist who opposed Charles III, Duke of Savoy, and was imprisoned in the castle from 1530 to 1536, when he was freed by the Bernese.

“My hair is grey, but not with years,

Nor grew it white

In a single night,1

As men's have grown from sudden fears:

My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,

But rusted with a vile repose,

For they have been a dungeon's spoil,

And mine has been the fate of those

To whom the goodly earth and air

Are bann'd, and barr'd -- forbidden fare;

But this was for my father's faith

I suffer'd chains and courted death;

That father perish'd at the stake

For tenets he would not forsake;

And for the same his lineal race

In darkness found a dwelling-place;

We were seven - who now are one,

Six in youth and one in age,

Finish'd as they had begun,

Proud of Persecution's rage;

One in fire, and two in field,

Their belief with blood have seal'd:

Dying as their father died,

For the God their foes denied; --

Three were in a dungeon cast,

Of whom this wreck is left the last.”

-from “The Prisoner of Chillon”