Buoyed by the knowledge that even our illustrious professor spent some little time with this text before actually understanding it, this post is basically going to be a collection of my impressions after reading the Four Quartets through a few times. These observations are likely to range from the intuitive to the inaccurate, but I am nonetheless confident that Tom, were he living, would take comfort in knowing that time doth not wither nor custom stale his infinite variety. Besides, every time an English student is baffled by Eliot, an angel gets its wings. Or something.
As I leapt into “Burnt Norton,” I was reminded forcefully of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There is a theme, not just of time (which I’ve beat to death all semester, but hey, so did the modernists) but of an interrelation of the past, present and future. They are bound up together. In the essay Eliot claimed that as the past shaped the future, so the present reshaped the past. The lines “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” seem to say much the same thing to me.
There seems to be a great deal of play with binaries in the work. In particular the concept of the finite versus the infinite is played with over and over. The infinite, represented by the circle (an image repeated throughout the whole piece in various ways), is also connected intimately with… surprise! Time. Comparisons are drawn between the fluidity and circular (also seasonal) nature of time and the finite ideas of beginning and ending. The poem, in my opinion, favors the infinite as it often link beginning and end together – thus the circle again.
Other binaries that are explored at length are motion versus stillness, light versus darkness and sound versus silence. The references to sound caught my attention most as they included a host of different representations: singing, sounds of water (voices of the sea), clanging bells, et cetera. I think it’s interesting that while Eliot used onomatopoeia in other works, here he mentions noise without describing it in that way.
The whole poem was much more pleasant to fall into than The Wasteland. There certainly are some changes to his general philosophy. For example after his wicked lashing of marriage in The Wasteland, here he describes matrimony as “a dignified and commodious sacrament” in a better temper about that particular subject, certainly…
Eliot does use some interesting techniques. Sometimes he rhymes, mostly not. Here and there the poem feels like it speeds up. During a portion of East Coker he even slips into Middle English-y spelling. I don’t pretend to understand the significance of any of this beyond the fact that it looks and sounds pleasing to me. Obviously I have many questions. Not least of which is what in blue blazes did I read? I’m certain that with the help of some outside material (I intend to read more of the selection provided before Wednesday) we will leap into the meat of the work at length in class.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Recording Patterns of Thought
I think I’m really benefiting from reading a variety of Woolf’s work. In some ways I feel like To the Lighthouse displays elements of the styles and messages of Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own. I realize that A Room of One’s Own was written after To the Lighthouse, but my point is not to suggest that one was a product of the others, but that Woolf herself clearly displayed particular trends in her writing that have leapt out and danced in front of me.
One such line that seems to suggest things to come in A Room of One’s Own is this: “He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession.” Woolf is noting that men clearly associate themselves with scholarship and scholarship with success. This reminded me of the in class lecture two weeks ago regarding comments Woolf made about how ridiculous men in procession, accoutered in cap and gown and observing archaic traditions were to her. The reason it was significant to me was that as Lighthouse (at least part I) hasn’t an omniscient narrator, the line is actually referring to Tansley’s own conception, conscious or not. Men, Woolf says here, really do place this kind of inordinate importance on procession. On a side note relating to the topic of academia, it occurs to me to wonder if the name Cam (Camilla) was chosen to reflect some connection with the river Cam that runs through Cambridge. I’m not certain what the significance of such a connection might be, but it is interesting none-the-less. If there is a connection there (and in my opinion, Virginia Woolf was far too clever and deliberate no to have made that connection intentionally on some level), how does it connect to Mrs. Ramsay’s opinion of her children: “Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense.” This passage would seem to say that Mrs. Ramsey resents her childrens’ engagement with issues and their predilections toward argument and debate. Does she not want her children to be active intelligent people, involved in the global discussion? Am I placing too much contemporary sensibility onto the work?
Of course the narrative continues the style adopted two years earlier in Mrs. Dalloway. There is no question that Woolf is concerned with recording patterns of thought and the nature of human consciousness far more than she is with constructing a “story.” I can only imagine, though, how tiring it must be to write this type of narrative. It isn’t as though Woolf is simply recording her own thoughts and plopping them into a book. Her work is so finely crafted, every word chosen with incredible care. Since she has to construct each sentence in the narrative, she must therefore invent the patterns of thought that she shows. My question at this point on my Woolf learning journey is what is the difference between meaningful and intentional? Basically, she writes thoughts both profound and mundane; she has to in order to succeed with this type of narrative. Does she believe that the mundane paths that the mind flits down are necessarily meaningful? If not, how does one go about crafting a piece of writing that contains intentionally meaningless elements? If so, well, no wonder she went a bit mad sometimes! There were a couple other things that struck me that I just wanted to mention briefly. I noticed how often in the course of the narrative the large number of children in a particular household was mentioned. At least four times in the first twenty pages or so, “eight children” or “nine children” were brought up for some reason or other. I haven’t any conjectures on the significance of such a repetition, but I’ve always been trained to consider repetition as an important stylistic element, so, there you have it. I was also curious about the line “Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow.” Taken in isolation the line might be suggestive of a comment on the future in general. Obviously it takes ten years for them to actually get to the lighthouse, but as a larger metaphor, it may refer instead to the state of the family or even of Britain itself. From what I know of Woolf herself I’m not sure if I believe she necessarily thought that everything would be fine tomorrow. Perhaps years down the road, through war and death and tumult, it would be though. Maybe not tomorrow, this whole book said to me, but eventually, it will all be fine.
One such line that seems to suggest things to come in A Room of One’s Own is this: “He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession.” Woolf is noting that men clearly associate themselves with scholarship and scholarship with success. This reminded me of the in class lecture two weeks ago regarding comments Woolf made about how ridiculous men in procession, accoutered in cap and gown and observing archaic traditions were to her. The reason it was significant to me was that as Lighthouse (at least part I) hasn’t an omniscient narrator, the line is actually referring to Tansley’s own conception, conscious or not. Men, Woolf says here, really do place this kind of inordinate importance on procession. On a side note relating to the topic of academia, it occurs to me to wonder if the name Cam (Camilla) was chosen to reflect some connection with the river Cam that runs through Cambridge. I’m not certain what the significance of such a connection might be, but it is interesting none-the-less. If there is a connection there (and in my opinion, Virginia Woolf was far too clever and deliberate no to have made that connection intentionally on some level), how does it connect to Mrs. Ramsay’s opinion of her children: “Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense.” This passage would seem to say that Mrs. Ramsey resents her childrens’ engagement with issues and their predilections toward argument and debate. Does she not want her children to be active intelligent people, involved in the global discussion? Am I placing too much contemporary sensibility onto the work?
Of course the narrative continues the style adopted two years earlier in Mrs. Dalloway. There is no question that Woolf is concerned with recording patterns of thought and the nature of human consciousness far more than she is with constructing a “story.” I can only imagine, though, how tiring it must be to write this type of narrative. It isn’t as though Woolf is simply recording her own thoughts and plopping them into a book. Her work is so finely crafted, every word chosen with incredible care. Since she has to construct each sentence in the narrative, she must therefore invent the patterns of thought that she shows. My question at this point on my Woolf learning journey is what is the difference between meaningful and intentional? Basically, she writes thoughts both profound and mundane; she has to in order to succeed with this type of narrative. Does she believe that the mundane paths that the mind flits down are necessarily meaningful? If not, how does one go about crafting a piece of writing that contains intentionally meaningless elements? If so, well, no wonder she went a bit mad sometimes! There were a couple other things that struck me that I just wanted to mention briefly. I noticed how often in the course of the narrative the large number of children in a particular household was mentioned. At least four times in the first twenty pages or so, “eight children” or “nine children” were brought up for some reason or other. I haven’t any conjectures on the significance of such a repetition, but I’ve always been trained to consider repetition as an important stylistic element, so, there you have it. I was also curious about the line “Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow.” Taken in isolation the line might be suggestive of a comment on the future in general. Obviously it takes ten years for them to actually get to the lighthouse, but as a larger metaphor, it may refer instead to the state of the family or even of Britain itself. From what I know of Woolf herself I’m not sure if I believe she necessarily thought that everything would be fine tomorrow. Perhaps years down the road, through war and death and tumult, it would be though. Maybe not tomorrow, this whole book said to me, but eventually, it will all be fine.
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