Where My Thoughts are These Days: 19th Century Final Paper

Songs and Silence:  Concealment of Home and the Natural in Chopin, Dubois, and Harper
Linda Dowling has written that both the Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s encountered a paradox between the restoration of Nature and the new worlds they wished to realize (Dowling 449). In my own paper, I wish to explore this paradox by expanding it further within  Chopin's The Awakening, Harper's Iola Leroy, and Dubois' Souls of Black Folk. The parallels which are evident throughout these three works will inform this paradox and how its resolution could be achieved i.e. the realization of a better, more honest, freer world. The parallels I will highlight consist of: the emphasis/de-emphasis on the Pastoral and the earthly, indigenous land and nature, nostalgia, roots and family, time, memory, and history, the metaphors of both water and hands (alien and otherwise), and voices and voiceless-ness.  Ultimately, the search will result in what it means to be “home” and how does an individual take ownership of this place, or the sense of being “at home” somewhere, especially those who are not given the agency to “be at home”? Burnham’s writing on the concept of “alien hands” will be an important jumping off point, as well as Gilbert’s theory that Edna’s entrance into the water is expressing the myth of Aphrodite will serve as a primary place of exploration. I wish to undergo a deep analysis of what home means as far as body, mind, and spirit, and how this applies to the grounded, natural world, as well as how we choose to express how we feel about this home, be it through song, poetry, or stories. Finally, I will be addressing the reason why there is a consistent separation between the old establishment vs. nature. Why not let them combine together as one, inseparably, and why so much effort to suppress the natural, even if chaotic?  Is this potentially linked to the concept of having a voice, thus linked to Nature and a true ownership of place?

Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and James Scott's Seeing like a State

According to James Scott in his book Seeing Like a State:  How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, the sort of mapping that Jefferson uses in Notes on the State of Virginia is a "state's attempt to make a society legible." The experience of reading Jefferson's Notes was one of having the feeling of being at the top of a church spire looking down across the land beyond. The observer isn't so much part of the land, but is above the land as a ruler would be, necessarily. Scott claims that "the designs of scientific forestry and agriculture and the layouts of plantations, collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed calculated to make the terrain, its products, its workforce more legible--and hence manipulable-from above and from the center (Scott 2). When you define something, you outline its edges and determine where that something stops and where something else begins. In rulership, the ruler needs to know what he or she has sovereignty over: what exactly is the scope of the rule and where does it end for someone else to take responsibility. So, Jefferson appears to be doing just that.: as he outlines the state of Virginia (measures and delineates) he accesses its quality and his subjective opinion fills in the map. Without his subjectivity, he wouldn't know where the work should be directed.

Scott uses the example of the manipulation of a beehive. You cannot just go in directly to reconfigure the hive in some way without some sort of destruction or disruption to occur to the system of the hive. So, there needs to be a plan in place and a surveying of the quality and structure of the hive. Scott also talks about remaking reality through state power. For Jefferson, he needs to know the reality first and foremost, before anything at all can be changed because what if you disrupt something that cannot be replaced? If we compare "seeing like a state" to "seeing like an Enlightenment subject", we can see a divergence happening from the way we are used to seeing knowledge and experience being handled. Typically, through these Enlightenment narratives, we see societies and places being described in depth and their use value and efficiency being analyzed "as is". Even if we are getting a very subjective, visceral viewpoint from the writer (as in Celia Fiennes' narrative Through England on a Side Saddle), we are still seeing straight out facts through a certain lens of experience. With Jefferson, we are seeing through the eyes of someone whose sole purpose is to govern. Not only is he giving us an inventory of what he has to work with, he is accessing it according to what the potential is of the state to not only function, but to thrive and become better (improvement). Jefferson is taking the present moment as a starting point and is seeing into the future.

One chapter stuck out to me from the book:  Query 18 on Manners. "There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us."  So, here Jefferson sees strong evidence that it is the manners of the people that is causing the practice  of slavery to continue. "The most boisterous passions", "the unremitting despotism", and "degrading submissions" are being pinpointed as the likely cause. The need for the people to continue to uphold these norms is the reason why the practices are not changing. This is where Jefferson diverges from previous narratives. In Grainger's Sugar Cane, practices are not being criticized and asked to be changed entirely. Jefferson, however, is using his control and sovereignty over the state in order to address future change that will occur under his watch.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening

April 14^th 2020



“She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.” (Chopin 62)

“But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult! (Chopin 17)

“She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.” (Chopin 42)



I chose these three passages because these three points and oppositions are what both problematize and give cohesion to Chopin’s novel. We are left at the end with the question “Why?”: why did Edna need to kill herself? Why was she driven there?

              Could it be that the author wanted to highlight the position of having the ultimate agency over one’s life, even to the point of choosing death and when and how to die? I think that is part of it, although I don’t think it goes deep enough. The answer is in the middle quote. She had shed her layers and was thrown into a world where we start from zero. The moment she accepted Robert’s kiss was the moment that she shed convention and all of the connections that convention holds within not only society, but within herself: all meaning for her had been lost at that point. She had reached “the beginning of things”. Unfortunately, her psyche and I would argue, also, her body were not prepared for this shaking off of ties to the world and society.

              The first quote talks off our soul, and Edna’s inability to express her soul through voicelessness. Her voicelessness stifled her agency. Because she was left in silence, and therefore unable to act upon her words, her life became not hers. The end result was that she was being led by “alien hands”. Her soul became utterly disconnected from her life at all. She could not act, she could not speak, she regressed into infancy where all that existed were her basic needs. She regressed so far “into the water” as to become one with it. My theory is that this ending scene is her regression back into the primeval beginning, or metaphorically back into the womb where she would achieve the ultimate sense of safety and free expression.

              I do think Chopin is asking us to think hard about what happened to Edna: to consider “why”. Because if we as the readers don’t consider Edna’s why then the only conclusion would be that she killed herself over Robert. We have no proof that she was distraught or overwrought by his leaving her “because he loves her”. What we do know is that it appears that Robert could not stop thinking about her and loving her. It was his own guilt acting against himself that promoted his final letter to her. Could Edna have expected this? Probably she did. It didn’t take much for her to make the choice of walking into the water. Almost like she was already on that trajectory. I think it was her feeling so utterly alone that caused her to continue to follow that path. Alone as an infant in the womb, caressed by the water and shielded from pain. The third quote signifies her relinquishing of agency to fate. It was as if she was saying “Let faith, or the water, take me and decide what it will do with me.” Edna had lost all agency in the end, and she gained all agency in the end. We are left only with that paradox. I don’t think we can make that choice as readers.  

We need a third option

Today I’m feeling for all those high school seniors who are missing their rites of passage, those young people going out on the job market for the first time (or not), those people who were at a moment in their lives that was pivotal and they won’t get it back, those who felt something starting that hit their passions and are seeing that dwindle away, those who are losing precious time with loved ones because they are prevented from seeing them, those who have lost loved ones and could not be with them in those final moments, those who are having mental and physical health difficulties who can’t reach those who are there to help them, those who’s job and purpose is now gone due to the Economic downturn, those who were in the middle of something (anything) and it was disrupted for the worse. I am thinking about all of those people today. And so I say...

We need a third option.

What is left for us now?

I am in between books right now, finishing one and making way for another: a sort of liminal space. What is striking to me on this day in particular (the day after Easter and mid global lockdown) is that the photos I am taking now fit peculiarly well into the theme I had chosen for my third book which I will be calling Spelling Bee: Locked Within/Locked Without (the name was decided upon long ago). The book itself will be tactile and visual (not just written). I wanted to document my hometown of Buffalo and its ruins and past through material objects. What I find as quite moving is that within all of this, we are experiencing a loss: a loss of the life that we knew before, a feeling of the loss that should have been acknowledged (our ecosystems and history), and most all of a loss of the feeling of being carefree and genuinely blessed by an abundance that may not return any time soon. I took a walk yesterday along the lakefront to one of the new parks that was built over the past five years in anticipation for Buffalo's newly planned waterfront. The ruins of these new spaces filled with hope show a particular moment of paradox. What is new is now old and now looked back upon as ":the moment". Not the future, but the past. The excitement we felt then was felt in the present moment. What is left for us now? in my opinion, we now do the real work of putting together what has been dismantled: putting it back together in the right way. It was a pivotal moment in history to see Andrea Bocelli standing in an empty piazza in front of the Duomo di Milano singing "Amazing Grace". As sad as these days are, they do bring me hope and the feeling that things will change. 

Finally.

"It is only after have lost everything that we're free to do anything." Chuck Palahniuk.

The Interesting Narrative and Plato.

I would like to address the idea of “improvement” as it applies to Olaudah Equiano’s work and as it applies to his focus on religion at the end of Interesting Narrative. It was pretty apparent to me that this entire narrative was focused on the path to self-betterment. His narrative structure reminded me of the structure of Plato’s Symposium in that it was a ladder towards the higher ways of thought, giving importance to faith and the belief in a higher purpose to life. We can see how he traces each chapter from enslaved person to preferred and highly valued slave to overseer and then to a struggling freeman.

              I would argue, however, that his path is following the prescribed path given by the convention of the time i.e. the structure that was already in place, rather than a personal journey away from societal obligations. Nussbaum focuses on this Dubois’ concept of the double consciousness ("merge his double self into a better and truer self”), and I would argue that we can see evidence in this narrative that Equiano struggles with this within himself and trying to better himself as a person. Who is this “better person”? What standards are we using to decide what is improvement and what is not? The most valuable part of this work is his admittance to the feeling he was experiencing each step of the way: we as readers can see first hand that he did struggle with his position even as he rose further towards gaining some traction. He was asked to whip the slaves as overseer. He was asked to hold a position of authority many times and what this could mean not only by what actions he needed to take, but whether these actions were in fact justified or simply a product of the flawed system. We can see what he is feeling, but where does he derive his standard of comparison? Would he take the lives of the slaves as the standards by which he should strive? No, they are underprivileged. So, he derives his standards by observing the successful white men. Did he have a choice though? Probably not, but it is important to address this first off before we can trace and understand why this is a narrative of improvement and the implications. The idea of a double consciousness is the problem that Equiano struggles with and it is a problem throughout the narrative. Could his own improvement narrative and movement towards faith and religion have been his way out of the double bind and into reconciling the two sides of his consciousness?

              If we step off the path of empirical knowledge (i.e. observation and experiment in the world around us) in order to escape the prevailing standards and societal narrative, the world of ideas and higher knowledge would be a place to turn, just as Plato traces love to the platonic ideal, away from the physical and away from possession and romantic love/lust. Would this be the ideal way to “improve” when other methods fail? If Equiano could not get out from his position of the ever guilty, ever black freeman, improvement could be undertaken through his thoughts, philosophy, and mind. No one could control that for him. He can escape the double bind. Question is: does he? If he is taking on the Protestant faith, isn’t he being plunged right back into the life he is attempting to escape from? Same standards, but the only difference being he is choosing to do it. Can we say confidently that this choice was through his own free will? Apparently not, but there is an escape hatch, I think.

              In the end, this idea of improvement was present in this text, and it most certainly aligned with the concept of improvement in England at the time, but, can we not see it as a form of recycling old ideas and not really escaping the mold? Not if we take Plato as an example of how the ladder of thought could hold as truth in Equiano’s life. Religion or spirituality, in general, could then be seen as the ultimate form of improvement and the true goal of Enlightenment values. And, really, when we truly understand that no person can truly escape from his circumstances, shouldn’t he have embraced the truth of his life regardless? It was his life, and he lived it, after all.

             

Loss, Rupture, and Displacement

Why did Mohsin Hamid choose to place his narrative within the fictional realm of magical realism in the novel Exit West and not within a creative non-fiction piece?

First off, I think the reason why Hamid may have chosen magical realism and a fictional narrative is due to the idea called the curse of knowledge. Curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand. So, by creating a fictional and magical realm where the story takes place, he allows every reader to start out on the same page without bias. This way, even if we see similarities to factual events, we can never be quite sure which events he is referring to. So, this allows every reader to feel what Hamid presents us with in his fictional narration. It is common empathic grounding. If he had placed it into a singular real event, then we all would use what we already know as a background to the narrative, potentially missing any point by Hamid as author. He not only offers those with no knowledge a leg up, he also cuts down the knowledge of those readers who know quite a bit about the subjects he is conveying.

The second question I would like to address is: Why did Nadia and Saeed separate, eventually after journeying through the portal? I think the clue is in the birth scene as Nadia enters the portal. They both need to leave their old lives behind as they enter the new worlds. I think Hamid's message is pointed. We need to live the experience with the characters, in order to understand what they go through and how that affects them in the end. Moving to new places and entirely different environments unlike home is bound to change a person in many ways. Can a relationship survive this? Maybe. But if the bond between the individuals is dependent upon prior conditions and for these to still be in existence, then the grounding that relationship has gained would fall away. The Novel The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton comes to mind.  The last chapter (ch.12) deals with their reuniting "half a century later" (pg. 229). They returned to the place of their birth, the city where they came from. I do think it is telling that this reuniting occurs here in this place. The novel is left uncertain, and I believe this was purposeful, because it gives the reader hope and possibility that they will embrace their lives anew in this old place called home:
"He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this life, and she shut her eyes and she said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted, and did not know if that evening would ever come." (pg. 231)

They both had been changed by their journey away and the return home. Can they reconcile the changes now in the aftermath? I think the rekindling of their love may be the answer to the question of : Can they recover the home that they had lost a long time ago, or is it gone forever?

Hamid wants the reader to answer this question, and I do think he purposely created this narrative in order for the reader to ultimately decide the answer to this question.

In times like these where our future is uncertain and we wonder how we will survive some very profound changes to our ways of life, reading a narrative of migration enables us to place ourselves within a fictional world of displacement. There is a rupturing that occurs each time we move and we change. Like a birth, we are asked to enter (in many ways only with our souls to guide us) into the unknown. What happens and how we survive is the real story. Who falls away and who is regained is the important question that should ultimately be adressed? Can our relationships survive this rupture? There is a Pablo Neruda poem that is called to mind as I write this:

It is called The Dream.

The Dream

Walking on the sands

I decided to leave you.

I was treading a dark clay
that trembled
and I, sinking and coming out,’
decided that you should come out
of me, that you were weighing me down
like a cutting stone,
and I worked out your loss
step by step:
to cut off your roots,
to release you alone into the wind.

Ah in that minute,
my dear, a dream
with its terrible wings
was covering you.

You felt yourself swallowed by the clay,
and you called to me and I did not come,
you were going, motionless,
without defending yourself
until you were smothered in the quicksand.

Afterwards
my decision encountered your dream,
and from the rupture
that was breaking our hearts
we came forth clean again, naked,
loving each other,
without dream, without sand,
complete and radiant,
sealed by fire.

And I have also written a poem about change and loss.

Troy Burns



The pretty picture

In our shaded thoughts becomes

Vapid and empty

As the flames take it over

And burn it to the core.



Well, what for?

No reason

Just the season of war.



More more more

Now this is history

There was no before

Only the hunter and his lithesome companion

So true

As they walk through the ruins

And dust of yore

Soaked through.


conclusion: What is left after everything has been destroyed?

Answer:  A Sea of  Possibility.