Issuu

Criterion

Dear Reader, Welcome to the 35th edition of Criterion, Loyola Marymount University’s literary criticism journal. This edition comprises topics ranging from our contribution to the ever-changing climate, to the reality of fairytales, to the colorful and occasionally painful history of America; within it is a prodigious exploration of conquering the madness within, the behemoth question of identity, and the endless struggle for power within, without, and over others. This journal hopefully provides a wider insight of how literary criticism can be applied to our social and political climates today. Before diving headfirst into these, our exploits, there are many people to thank for this incredible feat. First and foremost, to our remarkable faculty advisor, Dr. Aimee Ross-Kilroy, for her enduring support and patience throughout this tumultuous process. Her optimism made it all the more rewarding. To Maria Jackson and the English Department, without whom this journal would not exist. To our prodigious editorial staff, for dedicating their time, effort, and acumen even in the face of scheduling challenges. To Chloe Cunningham, our graphic designer, for creating a totally unique journal. And last, but surely not least, to you, our reader, for choosing Criterion. Whether it was for light reading, lifelong journey, or otherwise, hopefully it is a lasting experience.

Jo Aquino Senior Editor

Criterion, a journal of literary criticism by students, is published each year by the Loyola Marymount English Department through the support of the Denise L. Scott Memorial Fund. Edited by undergraduates, Criterion seeks contributions representative of undergraduate and graduate writing within the department. Submissions are preferably within five and fifteen double-spaced pages, and can be submitted to criterionlmu@gmail.com. No material may be reproduced in any form, except by the author, without written consent of the editor(s).

Please address correspondence to: Criterion Loyola Marymount University Department of English 1 LMU Drive, Suite 3800 Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659 Senior Editor Jo Ann Aquino Editors Rachel Mullens Mat Levitt James Heissner Eva Enriquez Graphic Designer Chloe Cunningham Faculty Advisor Aimee Ross-Kilroy Department of English Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts

Table of Contents The Café: A Catalyst for Change

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change Knowledge Over Time

Chop it Off: “Rapunzel” and the Pubertal Child’s Search for Identity

Huck Finn and Black English

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy Tales

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

Visions of Myth and Childhood: Cynthia Cruz’s Construction of the Sacred

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism

About the Authors

The Café: A Catalyst for Change | 1

The Café: A Catalyst for Change | By: Allie Heck There is, of course, Les Deux Magots in Paris—now decorated with its boastful plaques that list the infamous regulars of the past—and, notably, Caffe Greco, comfortably nestled into the aging cobblestone of Rome at the foot of the Spanish Steps. And who could forget about Café du Monde in the French Quarter of New Orleans, or Le Dome - 108 Boulevard du Monteparnasse - that coined its own term, Domiers, for the ground-breaking literary doyens of its time? And the list continues: café after café that housed the renowned artists of the past, the intellectuals and the freedom fighters, the Hemingways and the Toulouse-Lautrecs, the philosophers and the visualizers. While the infamous inhabitants of the old cafés often come to mind, one must wonder what exactly goes on in these hubs of cultural and philosophical exchange? And what goes on at the lesser-known cafes with the lesser-known people? What about the secret touches passed under table between lovers? The untimely fights? The indecipherable conversations? Surely, the café culture is not limited to the highbrows; it must cater to the usual and the everyday, with its possibly more peculiar and divulging reality. Through the use of style, tone, and dialogue, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Strindberg’s “The Stronger,” and David St. John’s poem “XXVII,” from The Face illuminate this notion of the familiar café setting as both a fusion of the private and public spheres and a catalyst for confrontation, change, and understanding—or a lack thereof. Hemingway himself was no stranger to the café scene, frequenting countless cafés throughout Paris that offered an odd balance of exchange and reprieve; in his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” he uses a cryptic conversation between lovers within the realm of a train station café to elucidate this idea of this public and private intersection. His choice of a short story style establishes the essential pace for this narrative, offering a brief description of the café setting from the perspective of an objective third person narrator with no exposition: “The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes” (Hemingway 273). And just like that, the brevity of the story is matched by their time in the café; forty minutes is all they have, and four pages is all we have. The characters begin dialogue almost immediately, requiring the reader to draw solely on the verbal exchange between the two. As Ann and Samuel Charters suggest in Literature and Its Writers, the effectiveness of this story can be attributed to “Hemingway’s concise way of developing a plot through dialogue” (Charter 273). And while the story begins as one would expect—short, meaningless interaction with the waitress followed by seemingly benign conversation—the dialogue quickly turns into something much more: a glimpse into

2 | Criterion 2017 an unknown but undoubtedly complicated situation. After a brief but tense back-and-forth, the man says, “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” vaguely alluding to something that feels strangely less simple than he seems to think (Hemingway 274). And there the couple sits—in the public arena amidst their personal chaos—discussing, however vaguely, an impending surgical procedure, likely an abortion. Their confrontation is tame, almost understated, save for one moment towards the end. The woman’s aggravation comes to a head when she asks the man to “please please please please please please please stop talking,” later threatening to scream when he opens his mouth (Hemingway 276). But despite this one moment, the otherwise oddly calm discussion leaves the reader feeling confined within the open-air café, wondering what would be said behind closed doors and also maybe why this very conversation was not held there. While the conversation ends with the resolve of the woman deciding go through with the procedure, as she looks towards the hills and lusts for a past happiness, the reader is left with an unsettling feeling of misunderstanding and things gone unsaid. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which also begins in a café, leaves the audience with a similar feeling of misunderstanding; however, this feeling is lightened by the hyperbolic interplay of each person at the café. Certain conversations shine through, while other single lines nearly slip under the radar. But ultimately, the dramatic format of Rhinoceros allows for a simultaneous form of dialogue that would be entirely impossible in any other format. Hemingway’s piece has incredibly limited interaction with the outside environment, but Ionesco takes full advantage of the public realm, staging hilariously congruent conversations in an ironically dismembered way. “‘You contradict yourself,’ Bérenger says to Jean. ‘What oppresses you—solitude, or the company of others? You consider yourself a thinker, yet you’re devoid of logic.’ Meanwhile, the old gentleman to the logician states that ‘logic is a very beautiful thing’” (Ionesco 488). This moment is one of many that depict Ionesco’s use of concurrent conversations made possible by dramatic format and the setting of the café. While Hemingway’s work emphasizes concise and vague dialogue exchange, the characters in Rhinoceros, especially Bérenger and Jean, get straight to the point. Bérenger is talking about how he “just can’t get used to life” in the midst of Jean essentially tearing him and his lifestyle apart, without mincing words in process (Ionesco 476). In this way, Hemingway’s use of minimal, nebulous dialogue is in stark contrast to Ionesco’s verbal inundation; not only is there an incredible amount of matter-of-fact dialogue, but according to stage direction, it’s meant to be rapidly fired. No single line or moment takes precedent, and hilariously poignant one-liners are simply tucked into the verbal flood. Jean’s proclamations that “life is a struggle” and that “it’s cowardly not to put up a fight” are burrowed into other side conversations, serving as examples of Ionesco requiring the audience to pay close attention (Ionesco 489).

The Café: A Catalyst for Change | 3 Ionesco’s stylistic choices, which add a ridiculous and hyperbolic tone to the play, leave the audience immersed in the comedy of the entire situation, laughing at the selfinvolved characters focused on their own issues and conversations despite a rhinoceros romping through town. The characters — the hapless, apathetic drunk Bérenger, and the dramatic and high-strung logician Jean — are simultaneously aggravating and endearing, consistently lending themselves to the charismatic atmosphere of the café that is steeped in insular exchanges. Once again, Ionesco’s café embodies the union of the private and the public within which the characters grapple with concepts such as apathy, loneliness, logic, societal expectation, and many other different facets of their own human experience. The overarching tone of the play is ultimately achieved through the dialogue made possible by the setting of the café. Conversely, Strindberg’s “The Stronger” hones in on a single, incredibly onesided conversation that takes place between a married Mrs. X and an unmarried Miss Y. The portrayal of this conversation through dramatic format is crucial to its understanding, considering that save for a few intermittent laughs from Miss Y, it could be read almost completely as a monologue. The conversation comes to life, though, when staged within dramatic format, causing the audience to bare witness to an everyday conversation gone wrong. Mrs. X begins the dialogue: “‘It’s the day before Christmas and you’re sitting here all alone, like a poor old bachelor’” (Strindberg 1096). This first line of dialogue is both commonplace and a bit off-putting; it could be read innocently enough, but it could also be wrought with feigned pity and underlying indignation. In this way, the café serves as the initiator of an already potentially uncomfortable conversation masked in social niceties, and this feeling is furthered when Miss Y, replying with only a simple nod, seems to pay little attention to Mrs. X or any contrived social interaction that might follow. Mrs. X continues to comment on everything from Miss Y’s loneliness to her failed relationship, saying forthrightly, “‘I really think you’d have been better off if you’d kept him!’” (Strindberg 1097). As Mrs. X unremittingly blabbers on without input or affirmation from Miss Y, it begins to feel a bit like Ionesco’s dialogue pace but sans any and all interference. It is just Mrs. X, unraveling her insecurities piece by piece as the audience sits in silence—much like Miss Y—waiting to see what will fall out of Mrs. X’s mouth next. For the most part, it seems like innocuous, and at times underhanded, conversation up until Mrs. X, a victim of her own verbal revelation, realizes that Miss Y and her husband may have had a relationship in the past. Just when it seems as though a defensive Miss Y will finally interrupt the never-ending monologue, Mrs. X curtails it, saying, “‘Quiet! You don’t need to say anything because I understand it all now!’” (Strindberg 1099). The preliminary conversation, which seems appropriate for a public space like the café, devolves into a tirade. “‘Ugh, how I hate

4 | Criterion 2017 you, hate you!‟‘ Mrs. X says. “‘But you just sit there, silent, calm, removed from it all not caring if it’s up or down, Christmas or New Year, or if others are happy or sad’” (Strindberg 1099). What began as a normal enough conversation disintegrated into an invective that even the public setting of the café couldn’t prevent; in fact, if it weren’t for the public nature of the café and Mrs. X having run into Miss Y, this conversation would probably have never taken place. Which begs the question: Is the café, in fact, the ideal space for this exchange, and does it ultimately catalyze this confrontation instead of stifle it? Without question, what the café did for Mrs. X and Miss Y, the restaurant did for the coupled depicted in “XXVII” by David St. John. His poem begins—and includes, in total—a single piece of dialogue: “You self-absorbed prick!” (St. John 33). There’s no exposition, no fleshing of the situation or lengthy description of the restaurant where this aggressive exchange takes place—just that one piece of dialogue that works so effectively within the format of his short poem to take the reader into that moment. The reader is thrown into the situation as the narrator continues: “Every man in the place looks up, assuming in a heartbeat, & probably not/Without reason, that he’s the one—& I include myself here— that this bullet/Is clearly meant for” (St. John 33). At once, the reader is the victim of this targeted insult as well as the innocent bystander listening on. As the poem continues, the tone and content of the narration really brings the reader into the physical space of the restaurant, describing the woman’s actions and the silent, understood conclusions reached by the entire restaurant. Even in the midst of the woman’s outburst and ensuing violence— involving the woman stabbing her steak knife through her beau’s hand—the narrator depicts the restaurant goers gifting her the ultimate pardon and recognizing the complexity of the situation. Without the public realm of the café, the confrontation would have been isolated and likely misunderstood. A simple, moment-by-moment description wouldn’t do it justice. It takes the entire restaurant’s uncommunicative input and the narrator’s compassionate consideration to help the reader feel confident in the conclusion that, “they must be in love./I mean, really really in love” (St. John 33). As the man looks to the perpetrating woman “with what/Seems enormous tenderness,” the narrator admits that maybe, after all, they “got it/All wrong” (St. John 33). It’s as if the reader is not singularly looking on, but is taking part in a collective consciousness, judging the situation from outside with full appreciation of love’s innate complexity. The narrator is neither insular nor distracted, but allows for a sense of understanding that is made possible only through the setting of the restaurant itself. From undeniable love to inescapable apathy, final understanding to utter confusion, and unfaithful husbands to weary abortions, the conversation topics covered in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Strindberg’s “The Stronger,” and David St. John’s poem “XXVII” from The Face run the gamut. They vary in length and detail, but they are brought together under the commonality of the café, or in St. John’s case,

The Café: A Catalyst for Change | 5 the restaurant, in which these conversations begin, bloom, and face an often untimely finish. These works irrefutably speak to the power of the public eatery as a bringing together of sorts, even when lives and decisions seem to fall apart. But more impressively, these works speak volumes on the human condition with its inescapable setbacks. So yes, the cafés of Paris are fondly regarded as the nesting ground for some of the great artists of the past—in fact, there’s a likely chance that Hemingway wrote this piece in one of those very cafes. But it must be the daily occurrences—the tense conversations, avoided eye contacts, warm greetings—not simply the renowned artistes, that give these catalyzing communal spaces their loved and unforgotten reputation.

6 | Criterion 2017 Bibliography Charters, Ann and Samuel, editors. Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Beford/St. Martin’s, 2004. Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Beford/St. Martin’s, 2004, pp. 273-277. Ionesco, Eugene. Rhinoceros. Nine Plays of the Modern Theatre, edited by Harold Clurman, Grove Press, Inc., 1981, pp. 472-506 St. John, David. “XXVII.” The Face. Strindberg, August. “The Stronger.” Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters, Beford/St. Martin’s, 2004, pp. 1096-1100.

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change | 7

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change Knowledge Over Time | By: Chase Speicher Humanity is responsible for the acceleration of climate change, and that knowledge is well-known to the majority of the world, yet despite being aware of the ensuing destruction we are causing, little is being done to prevent it. Some don’t even believe it is real. Though knowledge typically translates to power, and monetary gain accentuates this power, it doesn’t in the case of global warming. Even with the understanding of the effects of our carbon footprints per nation, eyes continue to be set primarily on profit and only occasionally on the environment. Over the course of the next few generations, our intentional ignorance will lead to inevitable physical changes on Earth. Time will prove our lack of discretion to be detrimental to our future selves, but mostly to the people whom we will leave earth to after we all die. The wealthy individuals in nations with stable weather patterns will also be affected far less than those underprivileged individuals living in areas with unstable weather. The wealthy create the problem, yet the poor suffer the most from it. Sympathy is the only emotional connection possible between these two levels of privilege, but empathy is the emotion needed the most, because only then will we care enough about the damage our actions are having on people incapable of protecting themselves, including future generations. The habits we are most comfortable with are the ones that need to be changed first, such as mass meat production and the methane from cows, personal transportation and individual carbon footprints. Accepting the knowledge of the climate change problem is crucial for obtaining enough power to prevent foreseen changes in the environment capable of killing millions, starting with the poor. To discuss global warming through a temporal lens, a foundation of evidence for the topic’s validity must first be established. Solar irradiation plays a large role in the natural heating of the earth. It is responsible for the ice ages of the past, but “several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the sun” (Shaftel, NASA). The rate at which earth is heating could be attributed to the sun if all areas of the atmosphere were heating up the same. NASA has noted that due to trapped greenhouse gases the temperature of the upper atmosphere is actually cooling, while the lower atmosphere continues to heat up (Shaftel, NASA). The sun is not responsible for the level of heating our planet is feeling, and the Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change, which consists of 1,300 individual climate scientists, conclude there is more than a 90% probability increasing global temperatures is due to human activity (Shaftel, NASA). Heating

8 | Criterion 2017 on a global scale has happened since earth gained an atmosphere millions of years ago, and it is a natural cycle on earth that creates and destroys life. It’s the nature of balance (or balance of nature) that leads to these cycles of ice ages and heating disruptions. But since the Industrial Revolution began, factual evidence of spiked carbon emissions has been recorded. NASA projects that prior to the age in which humans developed much of our modern technologies and methods of living, the earth saw carbon dioxide levels rise from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million in the past 150 years. One deceiving nature of human induced warming is that “some crops and other plants may respond favorably to increased atmospheric CO2, growing more vigorously and using water more efficiently” (Shaftel, NASA). On the flip side though, areas with prosperous agriculture may see lower crop yield results. Arguments can be made for the positive changes occurring and neglect to observe the negative. With every increase, a balancing decrease can be seen as well. The effects of our industrial ambitions can be felt around the world, but those same causes are acting as shields to our recognition. “Increasingly urban lifestyles mean we are distanced from gradual shifts in seasonal cycles” (Pahl). Cities act as shields to the ways in which we perceive nature because they are built around human needs and largely ignore the reactions of nature. Many areas, such as LMU’s campus, regulate the trees, plants, grass, and flowers to appear as fertile as their potential beauty can allow. Yet, the ignorance lies in the undesirability of allowing it to all grow normally. This is a flaw in the human mind, since “humans are geared to prioritize short-term consequences of behavior and immediate futures” (Pahl). Such traits derive from evolution, since the human brain developed to respond to the immediate environment around us rather than for future health. The battle for personal gain, also evolutionary, such as competitiveness for food and territory, has led to placing mostly immediate gains for ourselves over future gains for ourselves and others. From “Perceptions of Time in Relation to Climate Change,” Sabine Pahl, a Psychologist, refers to “Tonn et al”, which found in their surveys that people on average thought about the future about 15 years out, with very limited ability to imagine the future beyond 10–20 years” (Pahl). The climatic predictions for distant years, multiple decades or centuries away, are meaningless to many. Dr. Pahl jibes at how our “ancient brains” are lagging behind the increasingly complex global climate challenges. This incites an inherent problem with solving an issue which will inevitably lead to the end of human prosperity because, “while impacts are already happening, the most significant and far-reaching impacts of climate change lie in the future... Even if we stopped all additional carbon emissions today, the carbon already in the atmosphere will continue to have impacts for centuries” (Pahl). Even though many recognize global warming as an issue, our minds are evolved to respond to

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change | 9 immediate desires. We are largely inept with the concept of acting for the greater future. As alluded to before, social and political constructs play a huge role in accepting and solving the global warming crisis. Cities mask the true identity of earth’s micro transformations and positive results of higher crop yields misguide perspectives on the negative effects of heating. To add to these social delusions, “the ethical frameworks used in thinking about the impacts of our actions have typically been geared to situations of immediate face-to-face relationships and where chains of responsibility can be easily established” (Pahl). Pleasing those amongst one’s social circle, or those who fall within range of one’s social ranking, takes priority over issues in which that individual may not find personal fault or have to take personal responsibility. Everyone contributes in some way to the increase in greenhouse gases trapped within our lower atmosphere, yet no responsibility is taken on the individual level. Should a limit or fine be placed per household, per vehicle owner, or per meat-eater, for their contributions to carbon dioxide growths, perhaps then the issue would then come down to a social level where members of a social group can hold each other accountable. This would be especially useful if monetary values per person relied on the doings of those within a common group of people. Knowledge of other people’s mistakes becomes power on a more attributable level, rather than claiming the issue to be a global one. As time progresses, cultures around the world become more interconnected, share resources and experiences, learn from each other’s values, acquire knowledge through language, and much more. Globalization has allowed for exceptional adaptation, and it has also given us insight into how the habits of one nation affect the lives of people in other nations. Attributing an issue to a nation is simpler, but such knowledge only shows the lack of power we have over controlling or convincing those people of the effects of their poor habits. Here, knowledge is not power, and money does too little to persuade change. In the case of global warming, we are the wealthy nation living in good weather, and the future generations are the powerless poor who must suffer from our inconsideration. Another dominating opposition to climate change is the economic repercussions of finding a solution. Climate scientists lead the discussion but that hasn’t always been true, “over time, economic and political specialists have edged out scientific experts as the dominant source” (McCright, 500). Large corporations who benefit from a lack of global warming initiatives, such as oil companies, push efforts to diminish the danger so as to maximize profits. Their immediate desires for financial growth clouds their own and others’ vision of distant problems. As we will not feel the effects of global warming on the scale future generations will, those who seek profit over safety will continue to hone their evolutionary trait of personal gain until the “sponge has been squeezed dry” and all success

10 | Criterion 2017 has peaked. In this case for those who wish to remain in the dark about climate change, knowledge is power, and those who have the money to use that knowledge to create collective negligence also have the power to control how the future is handled. “The social construction of the non-problematicity of global warming limits our sociological understanding of the role of power in struggles to place global warming on the policy agenda” (McCright, 501). Nonproblematicity is beneficial to few, yet those are the ones with enough face to attack the truth that the majority profess. Global warming is a societal problem at its heart, created by the needs of those who live within it. Over the years, as technology has gained traction and allowed for quicker access to information and communication, patience levels have dropped drastically. As Jodie Nicotra says in “Temporal Rhetoric in Global Warming Discourse,” we live in the culture of immediacy, social acceleration, hurry sickness” (Nicotra, 215). Our brains are exposed to more in less time, which makes it possible to process information at a quicker rate. This also creates the desire to obtain information at a quicker rate, so as to accomplish more in less amount of time, as is extremely common in contemporary society. “The ‘reduction of the present’ has affected nearly everything, from thinking, eating, dating, and working” (Nicotra, 215-216). With the desire to achieve higher speeds comes a certain level of oversight for necessary problems associated with those speeds. Food is mass-produced because it can reach households in an amount of time short enough to prevent spoiling. This subsequently creates a culture reliant on huge slaughterhouses that result in massive amounts of methane gas added to the atmosphere. Also, personalized vehicles are mass produced, which reduces more environmentally friendly public transportation needs and adds enormous amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The culture of immediacy reduces our line of sight that directs us toward understanding the consequences of our actions before we act upon them. It’s the nature of taking precautions for mistakes that have not yet been made. The future won’t protect itself, meaning the present must take active measures to save ourselves and prevent the disasters we cannot feel. “We’re currently reacting to climate change already in progress, not deploying precautions against warming that might or might not happen in the future” (Conway, 75). Erik Conway remarks on the “precautionary principle” being a false attribution by stating San Andreas as an example of proper precautionary steps. Evidence suggests the fault line creates disastrous earthquakes capable of destroying homes, sparking the need for laws to build stronger structures. “Most of us don’t really want our buildings falling down on us in the name of protecting “free markets,” (Conway, 76) which leads to the question of why free markets are favored over employing

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change | 11 precautionary laws to protect against further climate disasters. 2012 was the year without a winter, when fires broke out around the globe that destroyed thousands of homes and killed thousands of people. Tangible and experienced effects of global warming are felt and failed to be properly dealt with in the same way homes are built to properly withstand earthquakes. Interestingly enough, laws have been placed in response to climate change, except in a negative way. In 2012 North Carolina passed the House Bill 819 in response to the Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) which said the sea would rise 39 inches in the next century, “prompting fears of costlier home insurance and accusations of anti-development alarmism among residents and developers in the state’s coastal Outer Banks region” (Harish, ABC News). The fear of negative economic impacts due to climate shift probabilities lawfully halted the ability for further scientific research. North Carolina intentionally included ignorance over knowledge of the future in their laws to reduce fear and save money. They chose to reduce their intellectual power in exchange for temporary comfort. Money took priority over the future. At the same time though, as we trust scientists to provide correct answers, who fact checks the scientists? Oreskes and Conway (O&C) raise the possibility that scientists embellish their reports to get people to understand the importance of action, but “by exaggerating the threat, scientists were preventing the economic development essential for coping with climate change” (O&C, 12). Change is crucial, and it must be assumed it’ll come or else assume the death of human life, but that’s an option evolution has restricted our psychology from allowing. It’s a collaborative effort of billions of people, and it can’t happen all at once. Although much is known to many that this change is necessary, humans are unable to simply discontinue with such destructive actions, such as driving vehicles, household carbon footprints, oil-based lighting, etc, because these actions keep our current society functioning. Even global recognition of imminent climate disaster could not lead to immediate change, because the technology to transition away from current methods of living do not yet exist in the capacity to replace lifestyles that damage the environment. Humanity is killing the environment, which will eventually kill humanity, yet ceasing our destructive actions would kill humanity anyway. It’s a paradox, which can only be solved by slowly improving our ways of life and hope that it is done in time. Efforts have been made to begin the process of protecting the earth, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (O&C, 4). These organizations are supported by groups of scientists who work together to share the knowledge of their discoveries with the world. Their efforts result in people creating electric cars, wind-turbines for energy, solar panels to capture energy from the sun, and much more. It’s economically prosperous for those getting on board and selling progressive

12 | Criterion 2017 products to people who accept global warming as an enormous issue, but still there are plenty others who economically fail as a result of positive change. Efforts to discredit the scientists responsible for the research are done by these types of people. For instance, “Patrick Michaels, a climatologist who writes skeptical books about global warming, is a visiting scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute, a nonprofit organization sustained in part by oil and gas companies” (Schmidt, 538). Also, in 2009, a report published by the U.S Senate Environment & Public Works committee listed nearly 700 science skeptics, only 15% of which actually published reports relating to climate change. “James Inhofe, a ranking member of the committee that produced the report, has received nearly a million dollars from oil and coal companies since 2000” (Schmidt, 538). The profits of some of these oil and/ or coal companies who benefit from climate change denial sometimes exceed the GDP’s of small countries. Those who have a great deal of money do not want to lose it, and the biggest losers of positive climate change practices are the ones with a great deal of money; enough money to dismantle claims of science. If the greed of these companies win over the power of knowledge, then there is no chance of recovery, as “the fossil fuel era could potentially last until about the year 2300, when coal begins to run out” (Archer, 45). At that time the earth will be far over the maximum warming allowed until it’s too late for any beneficial efforts to be made. The power of our own minds decreases the amount of power we have over our minds, power necessary to create change big enough to treat our climate problems adequately. Humans are aware of the ensuing destruction caused by intentional ignorance and fear of economic degradation, yet prioritize current greed over environmental prosperity. Much of the world is suffering and will continue to suffer even worse as a result of fossil fuel combustion and other greenhouse gases. Climatologists actively research methods to solve this problem, and have found tangible solutions that can guide the way for positive change, but wealthy individuals afflicted by nearsighted greed actively pursue the opposite for the purpose of maintaining their wealth. Humans are psychologically inept with empathizing with the future beyond 20 years, reducing the speed necessary to create change before climate change is unstoppable. The Collapse of Western Civilization sums up the frustration of climate change well, saying, “the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power” (O&C, 2). Power is most prevalent in the form of knowledge and money, which combat each other for dominance over the direction with which global warming will be handled. To prevent the predictions of Oreskes and Conway from coming true, knowledge must assume power over greed.

The Power-(lessness) of Climate Change | 13 Works Cited Archer, David. “The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate.” Princeton University Press, 2009. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7s0gb. Harish, Alon. “New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea Level Rise.” ABCNews. 2012. Web. Shaftel, Holly; Tanenbaum, Laura. “Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet.” NASA. California Institute of Technology. 2016. Web. McCright, Aaron M., and Dunlap, Riley E. “Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement’s Counter-Claims.” Social Problems, vol. 47, no. 4, 2000, pp. 499–522. www.jstor.org/stable/3097132. Nicotra, Jodie, and Parrish, Judith Totman. “Rushing the Cure: Temporal Rhetorics in Global Warming Discourse.” JAC, vol. 30, no. 1/2, 2010, pp. 215–237. www.jstor.org/ stable/20866943. Oreskes, Naomi, and Conway, Erik. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future.” Columbia University Press. New York. 2014. Print. Pahl, Sabine, Stephen Sheppard, Christine Boomsma, and Christopher Groves. “Perceptions of Time in Relation to Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change. Journal, Vol 5 (2014): 37585. Web Schmidt, Charles W. “A Closer Look at Climate Change Skepticism.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 118, no. 12, 2010, pp. A536–A540. www.jstor.org/stable/40963909.

14 | Criterion 2017

Chop it Off: “Rapunzel” and the Pubertal Child’s Search for Identity By: Mary Grace Costa The question of identity is one that children consider often, but perhaps with increasingly more seriousness and urgency when they approach the crossroads between childhood and adolescence. In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s rendition of “Rapunzel,” a young girl lives contentedly with her witch-mother in a remote tower until she reaches the age of twelve, at which point Rapunzel chances to meet and fall in love with a young prince. When the witch discovers the young couple’s deception, both Rapunzel and her prince become mutilated, aimless wanderers in a desolate wasteland, but their struggle ultimately prepares them to live happily ever after together. In The Uses of Enchantment, twentieth century child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggests that children find comfort in the tale of Rapunzel because the heroine’s mode of delivery comes from within herself. Thus, the Grimm’s “Rapunzel” provides an answer to the anxious question of identity that plagues the new adolescent because the tale mirrors the psychological journey that a growing child must undertake. The “Rapunzel” tale suggests that although the journey to find oneself can be daunting and grueling, it is not impossible because the key to self-actualization already resides within the child and needs only to be drawn, or grown, out. Just as children undergo significant psychological and physical changes once they reach pubertal age, the Grimm tale parallels the child’s journey of development when Rapunzel’s contented life with her witch-mother changes when she reaches a certain age. In the Grimms’ tale, Rapunzel grows to be the “most beautiful child under the sun,” but “when she was twelve years old, the sorceress locked her in a tower located in a forest” (Grimm 490). According to Bettelheim, Rapunzel’s age at the time the sorceress locks her away signifies “the age of sexual maturity” (Bettelheim 148). This suggests that Rapunzel’s beauty was never a problem for the sorceress until young Rapunzel’s beauty changed from that of a child to that of a budding young woman. For many children approaching pubertal age, bodily changes that take place during this time of their lives can be a source of anxiety. Just as the witch takes Rapunzel away from the comfort of familiar surroundings and brings her somewhere new, the bodily changes that the pubertal child goes through resembles a similar departure from the familiar into the unknown. Because the pubertal child straddles the line between full adolescence and childhood, her uncertainty leaves her questioning her identity: does she belong to the world of childhood or the world of adolescence? She may feel like a child inside, but her body is changing into that of an adult, and anxieties about bodily changes feed into anxieties about possible changes in her identity. The “Rapunzel” tale teaches anxious children that their body, though different in appearance, remains their own, and it encourages children to embrace the change in self.

Chop it Off: “Rapunzel” and the Pubertal Child’s Search for Identity | 15 Indeed, twelve is the age at which many children renew their efforts to answer the question of who they are. Because they are transitioning from childhood to adolescence, the things that informed their identities as children may no longer suffice to inform their identities as adolescents. In the Grimms’ fairy tale, Rapunzel’s sorceress-mother defines the child’s role and rules over Rapunzel’s actions; when she says “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,/let down your hair for me,” Rapunzel does her mother’s bidding without question, suggesting that at this point in the story, Rapunzel’s identity and role as the dutiful daughter remains bound to her mother (Grimm 490). However, when Rapunzel first meets the prince, she does his bidding and lets her hair down to let him climb up. Later, when the prince asks her to marry him, Rapunzel muses to herself: “He’ll certainly love me better than old Mother Gothel” (Grimm 491). This thought reveals that Rapunzel feels her mother’s love inadequate, and she no longer sees their mother-daughter relationship as a relevant informant of her identity; she would rather have the role of “wife” over “daughter.” Similarly, psychologists state that young adolescents in search of their own identities may enter into romantic relationships in hopes that the relationship will imbue them with a stronger sense of self-worth, much in the same way their relationships with their parents informed their sense of self as children. The Grimms’ tale helps pubertal children work through the anxieties of growing up because it teaches them that while their identities can grow and develop, they do not change as their roles and relationships change. Adolescents who struggle to leave the world of childhood behind often need a “wake up call” to force them to embark upon the grueling journey of self discovery. In the Grimms’ tale, Rapunzel’s Freudian slip betrays her secret love affair to the sorceress, and the witch, in her anger, “[seizes] Rapunzel’s beautiful hair…[grabs] a pair of scissors with her right hand, and snip, snap the hair was cut off” (Grimm 491). After the witch snips away Rapunzel’s hair, the witch then “took Rapunzel to a desolate land where she had to live in great misery and grief” (Grimm 491). Later, the witch lures the prince to the tower, and when he jumps from the window, the thorns at the bottom of the tower blind him. Before it was cut, Rapunzel’s long, beautiful hair symbolized her childish identity because it acted as the connection between her and her mother, who was the chief informant of her childish identity. Her hair also acted as a physical connection between her and the prince as it allowed him to enter her tower. However, as long and beautiful as Rapunzel’s hair was, her childish sense of self remained insufficient to carry her into adolescence. When the witch cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, the action becomes symbolic of Rapunzel being forced to let go of her childlike, dependent identity and find her own self by enduring “great misery and grief.” Similarly, children must eventually let go of their childhood-conceived ideas of self in order to make room for the self that will be discovered through great struggle and adversity.

16 | Criterion 2017 While wandering the desolate land, Rapunzel undergoes another transformation in her character and her role changes again, signaling her attainment of full maturity. While aimlessly wandering, she gives birth to twins and, after reuniting with and restoring sight to her princely husband, the family returns to the prince’s kingdom to live happily (Grimm 491). In the first part of the story, Rapunzel’s role was that of “daughter,” and her identity was tied to that role, but because this role remains relevant only as long as she has a mother, this identity proved inadequate. Rapunzel then took the role of “wife,” but in the desolate lands, where she roams without a husband, this role, too, becomes irrelevant. After enduring misery and grief in a desolate land, however, Rapunzel gives birth to twins, and her role changes to that of “mother.” Bettelheim points out that because the tale makes no mention of sexual relations between Rapunzel and the prince, children who hear the tale are allowed to assume that “children can be gotten without sex, just as a result of love” (Bettelheim 114). Accepting that the Grimms’ Rapunzel had the children without the help of her husband, Rapunzel’s realization of identity again comes from within her own self. Just as her hair’s length allowed her to be a dutiful daughter and her beautiful voice caused the prince to fall in love with her, the twins that come from within her own body bring a shift in her role: Rapunzel goes from “daughter” to “wife” to “mother,” and she achieves full maturity because years of wandering and struggling not only teach her to survive alone, but also to sustain her two children. No longer dependent on a mother or husband to inform her identity, a mature Rapunzel becomes the informer of identity rather than the one informed. Only then can she reunite with her prince, ready to embark upon the next big journey of love and intimacy. Rapunzel’s story teaches children that their true identity lies within, but it must be drawn out after much laboring. Leaving childhood means leaving behind the comforts of the familiar and plunging into the scary, uncertain future. Children undergoing puberty may feel that because their body changes, their identity changes, too. They may feel anxious about the new person they appear to be changing into. As children grow up and outgrow their childish identities, it becomes increasingly imperative to think about and answer the question of “Who am I?” Bruno Bettelheim claims that fairy tales are the best types of stories to help children work through the anxieties that accompany growing up. In the Grimm Brothers’ “Rapunzel,” the eponymous character lives in peace with her mother until she reaches pubertal age, at which point her identity begins to transform. Throughout the story, Rapunzel’s identity depends upon her ability to connect with others through her hair, but it is only after her hair is cut and she is forced to wander in misery for many years that Rapunzel finds her happy ending. The “Rapunzel” tale offers some solace to anxious children pondering the question of “Who am I?” because the tale teaches that identity and deliverance come from within. It comforts the

Chop it Off: “Rapunzel” and the Pubertal Child’s Search for Identity | 17 child who may be scared of the adolescent they are turning into by teaching the child that this new identity is not really new at all because it comes from within and is their means to a happily ever after.

18 | Criterion 2017 Works Cited Zipes, Jack, ed. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Bettelehim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Chop it Off: “Rapunzel” and the Pubertal Child’s Search for Identity | 19

Huck Finn and Black English | By: Neyah Barbee When I first read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I was outraged by the depiction of the only black main character, Jim, as he seems to be an ignorant, one dimensional example of nearly every negative stereotype of blacks in America. How could this novel, which has been exalted as an American classic, get away with so callously perpetuating the marginalization of the Black voice? This wonder and others like it negatively prefaced my reading until, by looking more closely at the history of black language in the United States, I was able to put his depiction into context both culturally and historically and see that it is not a derogatory jab at black culture, but instead an appreciative nod to it. Blacks learned to take language, which had been used as a means of subjugation and turn it into a tool for covert communication in the face of systematic censorship. Adventures of Huck Finn by Mark Twain is testament to the phenomenon of black English because, in the novel, Twain appropriates their linguistic strategy as a means of hiding controversial critiques of the American system within a character who is hiding within language. To appreciate Twain’s linguistic appropriation seen in Adventures of Huck Finn, one must first look at the evolution of black language in America that he is emulating. Black language began as an imposed hindrance but evolved into a powerful coping mechanism. The divergence of black English from white English originated from a purposeful neglect by slave handlers; according to Language of Class and Nation, an article by Eugene D. Genovese, an American historian specializing in the South and Slavery, “slave traders wanted to reduce communication between their human cargo”, because if you can take language from a group of people, you can essentially take away their voice, culture, and sense of belonging to a community (Genovese 39). The system of slavery relied heavily on the dehumanization of black people and language was a powerful tool in doing so; taking away their ability to communicate and express themselves made it much easier to pretend that they were nothing more than animals being moved from one place to another. This tactic did not work for long. Slaves, needing to communicate with one another in order to find solace from the abuse of their captors, began to piece together their own language made up of those that they encountered on their journey to America. It is a testament to the resilience of the black spirit that when robbed of their culture, they were able to linguistically build a new one. However, even when slaves were able to reclaim their voices and place within a community, their oppressors found another way to linguistically subjugate them: by associating their distinct language with the lesser. Their dialect was notably different and white people of the time took measures to assure that the linguistic system of oppression was still intact. Negative connotations were placed on the black dialect

20 | Criterion 2017 and, according to Language of Class and Nation, “masters punished their slaves for trying to speak ‘good English’ instead of black dialect”(40). In this way, those in power perpetuated the subjugation of blacks by using the difference in language that their original neglect made necessary. Though language was intended to be a hindrance to the formation and development of black culture in America, it had the opposite effect. Instead, blacks used whites’ own preconceptions against them to survive in an oppressive society. When hearing blacks communicate, many whites of the time would have believed that they were just speaking gibberish and accepted their own misunderstanding as ignorance on the part of the slaves. This misconception by whites would have been actively exploited by blacks. Because of their subjugation in the power structure, any sentiment that could be perceived as dissenting of the status quo would have made them seem threatening, and being recognized as more trouble than you are worth is a very dangerous impression when you are not perceived to be worth much in the first place. Therefore, speaking in a way that seemed to be nothing more than nonsense allowed slaves to hide within others’ expectations of them and avoid calling negative attention to themselves (Genovese 40). It is important to note that while their language may have been foreign, it was not necessarily wrong. In the article, Illiteracy in the Ghetto, by Dr. Jane W. Torrey, a professor at Connecticut College, the author notes that what may be perceived as “so called errors *in the language+ actually conform to discernable grammatical rules, different from those of the standard language, but no less systematic”(Torrey 254). The black language became integral to the emerging black identity in America and is reflective of the sense of community that grew as a result of a shared experience of oppression and otherness. Torrey touches upon this idea in the article, when she says that, “ the evolution of an elaborate secret language has been essential to the survival [of blacks]—that the highly symbolic, metaphorical references used by blacks constitute a defense against the alien culture”(258). One such example of this hiding can be seen in the widespread use of ambiguity in the black language. In The Language of Class and Nation, Genovese gives an illuminating example of said ambiguity that can still be seen today; according to him, the need for and use of ambiguity can be traced back to the time of slavery when slaves needed to rely heavily on obscurity as a source of linguistic protection (Genovese 41). He gives an example of a slave informant listening in on the sermon of a slave preacher, noting that if the informant heard the preacher praise the runaway slave by calling him “baaad”, he would have no incriminating evidence to tell the master, with the exception that he suspected that the slave meant something other than what he had said (42). This interesting use of the negative has carried on throughout the history of black culture, most notably in the description of a

Huck Finn and Black English

| 21

desirable woman in saying, “ she bad” . The fact that this use of ambiguity still carries on to the present day suggests that the duality of the black experience reflected in language is one that has survived throughout American history. The power of linguistic hiding that was done by blacks was culturally appropriated by Twain when he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By hiding in plain sight in the seemingly convoluted dialogue of Jim, Twain makes a social commentary on the way that the black population’s ideas are overlooked because of linguistic differences, and also takes advantage of this passive ignorance to sneak dissenting ideas about America into his classic American novel. In this way, he is appropriating linguistic culture in order to smuggle ideas past his audience much in the same way that blacks would have done. He is hiding in Jim, and Jim, speaking a form of black English, is hiding in language. The article Jim’s Discourse by Aileen Chris Schafer, which analyzes the way that Jim is portrayed both culturally and linguistically, notes that “Jim signifies throughout the novel, a technique that allows him to appear to keep within cultural expectations”(Schafer 151). The author then suggests that Huck serves as a sort of stand in for white America, and that when Jim speaks too directly and shows his intelligence, something not associated with slaves, “his discourse astonishes, frightens, and disconcerts Huck- responses that Twain satirizes”(152). Throughout the novel, Jim covertly implies that he not only understands the system that subjugates him, but also that he finds it fundamentally flawed. On more than one occasion, Jim uses Huck’s, whom we have already noted as a representative of white America, ideas against him. Huck repeatedly brushes him off, at one point going so far as to say that he need not listen to Jim because, “you can’t teach a nigger to argue” (Twain 154). This sentiment demonstrates that his status as a slave is doubly helpful; not only is Twain able to sneak ideas into the novel in Jim’s dialogue, but the fact that he can sneak these ideas in is, itself, a testament to the active ignorance of white America toward the ideas of blacks based solely on the way that they speak. It also shows the duality of language and class and how it affects Huck and Jim differently, especially since they are on opposite ends of the linguistic power spectrum. Instead of considering that Jim may have an opinion that he has never considered and engaging in a dialogue in order to better understand said sentiment, Huck instead opts to brush him off, as is shown by his earlier line of dialogue (154). While Jim must mask his own intelligence in his imposed position of inferiority, Huck is able to hide in his position of superiority to obscure his own inability to understand Jim’s differing opinion. Huck relies on his white linguistic privilege in this scene and scenes like it to uphold his place in the power dynamic both in society and in his own mind. One example of Twain’s hidden commentary can be seen in the exchange between

22 | Criterion 2017 Huck and Jim regarding the King Solomon story. In this conversation, Jim argues that King Solomon is not the wise king that he is made out to be. When Huck tries to discredit him, saying that Jim has, “missed the point”, Jim counters that the “real pint is down furder-its down deeper”, and that Huck could see it if he would just be willing to step away from what he has been taught to look at the story objectively (Twain 178). He goes on to elaborate that the real problem with Solomon is in the “way that he was raised” and that because Solomon had so many children, he didn’t care about the one that he threatened to kill to find the right mother (179). Considering Jim’s experience as a black slave in America, it is easy to see why he would be discontent with the portrayed morality of King Solomon. One reading of the Solomon dialogue suggests that though Jim stays relatively within the confines of his linguistic bounds by framing his argument in the story of King Solomon, he is not talking about Solomon at all, but rather about the illusion of American morality. He criticizes Solomon’s disregard for life, saying, that any decent person faced with the dilemma of the child in the Solomon story “would shin aroun’ mongs’ the neighbors en fine out which *woman+ the chile b’long to, en han’ it over to de right one, all safe and sound”(178). Instead, Solomon treats the child like property when he suggests cutting it in half. In this reading, the slaves are to the United States as the children are to Solomon; the United States is willing to sacrifice the lives of slaves in the name of morality because they have so many of them that they are seen as disposable. This theory is reinforced when it is again noted that language has long been a tool for both the infantilizing and dehumanization of slaves. Language makes them into children and the accepted morality of Solomon insinuates that because of their child status, they can be treated as property. Preconceived notions about the morality of King Solomon parallel accepted ideas about American values; both are ingrained and accepted, even when the actions of King Solomon towards the baby and America towards its slaves do not correlate with their projected and widely accepted morality. While I do believe that Twain is utilizing Solomon’s story to critique Jim’s infantilized slave status, I understand that this reading of the text is very conceptual and therefore some would argue that it is too much of a leap. If that is the case, let us also look at the concrete details of Jim’s situation in relation to his reaction to the Solomon story. Jim’s family is torn apart by the system of slavery when his wife and children are taken from him and sold to different masters. In the novel, he toils tirelessly and subjects himself to humiliating treatment by Huck, the duke, and the king to secure his freedom so that he may someday be reunited with the family that was so callously taken from him. When telling Huck about what he plans to do once he is free, he reveals, “ how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife…and then they would both work to buy the

Huck Finn and Black English

| 23

two children, and if their masters wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them” (Twain 184). King Solomon’s disregard of the life of the child is the antithesis to Jim’s drive to be reunited with his own children. To Solomon, it means nothing to cut someone else’s child in half because he, secure in both the quantity of his children and the knowledge that they will never be taken away from him, has no empathy for someone that is not as lucky. Jim resents King Solomon’s inherent privilege because he is one of the less fortunate that Solomon has no empathy for. A similar interaction plays out shortly after this exchange in which Jim argues with Huck about the validation of humanity by language. Again, he knows better than to outright critique the system that oppresses him and instead masks his dissent in another seemingly innocent topic. He and Huck argue in this section about why a Frenchman does not speak in the same way as he and Huck do. Huck’s argument illuminates his own preconceptions about the importance of language as a signifier of humanity when he argues that it makes sense for a Frenchman to speak differently in the same way that it makes sense for cats and dogs and cows to speak differently from both us and each other (Twain 179) . In this discussion, his immediate comparison of the difference between an American and a Frenchman to the difference between a dog and cow demonstrates that he views language as a way to divide people into different groups in the same way that animals are divided into species. Jim counters this argument by saying that while Huck’s logic applies for the different animals, it does not translate to the Frenchman because the Frenchman is a man just as he and Huck are (Twain 179). Jim then asks, if a Frenchman is a man, “why doan’ he talk like a man?” (179). His apparent exasperation with the conversation can be seen as a result of his overall selfawareness of his predicament. He is not talking so much about the Frenchman as he is signifying about his own experience with language and the divides that it perpetuates. Jim is a man, isn’t he? Well, why can’t he talk like a man? If animals of different species speak differently, does his imposed dialect signify that he is a different species from those that speak ‘proper English’? When reading this at first, I was baffled by Jim’s argument because it seems incongruent with his own position in the novel. He, himself, speaks differently. If anything, his argument should have been more like Huck’s: that while it is acceptable for people to speak differently, the difference in language should not affect the way that a person’s argument is viewed. However, his argument seems to paradoxically condemn linguistic differences and it was not until I researched the complex relationship between blacks and their dialogue that I understood why. Jim is frustrated because he, like many blacks of the time, can probably speak proper English if he wanted to. However, the power dynamic in the United States prohibits him from doing

24 | Criterion 2017 so. As I have noted before, many masters punished their slaves for trying to speak “good English” (Genovese 40). In Jim’s Discourse, Schafer elaborates on this theory by noting that Jim’s rhetorical question “takes on an ironic significance since Jim is not permitted to speak like a man”(Schafer 155). Jim’s direct discourse about language and the connotations that it holds illuminates his sense of duality as a black character; while he needs the safety that it provides, he is cognizant and resentful of the limitations that his language imposes. While Jim may at first seem to be nothing more than an insensitive joke, reading between the lines, it becomes clear that the joke is not on him but instead on those that choose to overlook his ideas because of his speech. In Huck Finn, a great American novel, Twain uses the same linguistic phenomenon that grew out of systematic censorship to be a voice for those not allowed to speak up. He uses Jim as a vehicle for dissenting ideas because he knows that those that would protest against the inclusion of such ideas in the novel would be the same ones that skim over his dialogue because it seems like nothing more than gibberish. Not only does Twain’s technique allow him to smuggle ideological contraband past those that would object, it also calls to attention the unfairness of Jim’ s linguistic confines. Jim understands the power of language to validate or invalidate one’s ideas, arguments, and overall humanity yet he is trapped in linguistic shackles as restrictive as his real ones.

Huck Finn and Black English

| 25

Works Cited Baym, Nina, and Mary Loeffelholz. Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print. Jane Torrey (1970) Illiteracy in the Ghetto. Harvard Educational Review: July 1970, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 253-259. Genovese, Eugene D. “The Language of Class and Nation.” Urban Review 8.1(1975):39-47. America: History &Life. Web. 17 Nov. 2016. Shafer, Aileen Chris (06/01/1990). “Jim’s Discourses in Huckleberry Finn”. Southern studies (0735-8342), 1 (2), p. 149.

26 | Criterion 2017

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy Tales | By: Katie Murphy “Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest possesses the power to change lives and alter destinies.” — Jack Zipes1 Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1987 musical Into the Woods is not your average fairy tale. It may appear deceptively like one at first, but its second act is more reminiscent of Hamlet2 than “Sleeping Beauty.” Since its first run on Broadway, it has been celebrated and condemned by both critics and laymen alike for its subversion of the fairy-tale genre, but I would argue that ‘subversion’ is not the most befitting word. The act of subverting implies an overthrow, a coup d’état, and what Woods does is much more nuanced. Underneath the clever wordplay and catchy musical numbers is a carefully orchestrated deconstruction and reimagining of classic fairy tales with an end result that is certainly new and different, but not inherently other. Rather than subvert the traditional fairy tale, Into the Woods simply uproots it from the literary tradition in which it has landed, replants it in the realm of theatre, and allows it room to grow. What Sondheim and Lapine have done with this musical is to create a new sub-genre of fairy tales, one that is specifically geared towards adults. Fairy tales have been constantly growing and changing ever since they were just oral folktales told at the spindle, and for them to continue to grow and change in a new medium is perfectly normal, even healthy. The fact that we are still pushing the boundaries of fairy tales means that we are still interested in them as a culture — that they are not only surviving, but thriving. While most of us have an understanding of what a fairy tale is, the fairy-tale genre is notoriously difficult to pin down. J.R.R. Tolkien, the mind behind the expansive Lord of the Rings series, dedicates nearly five pages of his essay “On Fairy Stories” to attempting to define fairy tales and succeeds only in giving rough guidelines (1-6). If I were to try to provide a better definition than he, this essay would surely consist of nothing else. As such, I rely on that nebulous, intuitive idea of the fairy-tale genre that we all possess as a sort of working Opening lines from “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” 2 In which every major character except Horatio dies — 9 in total. 1

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy | 27 definition. The primary tales that I refer to in this paper are common ones — “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Rapunzel” — that I believe we can all agree live within the realm of fairy tales, and so the genre as I refer to it is the one that encapsulates those stories. A fairy tale, to forego all attempts at a formal definition, is a promise. It begins with Once Upon a Time, and it ends with Happily Ever After. Whatever wonderful or, more commonly, horrible things should happen in-between are made palatable by the promise of a happy ending, an assurance to the child that come what may, everything will be alright in the end. The promise goes deeper than just the story, however. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote an entire book about the emotional importance of fairy tales for children entitled The Uses of Enchantment, in which he proposes that fairy tales are an effective means for children to grapple with their natural fears and anxieties about life and the world around them. So, “Hansel and Gretel” might address a fear of abandonment, and “Beauty and the Beast” may symbolize a fear of sexual intimacy. Of course, a child hearing the tale will not be not aware of its psychological importance, but in theory, she now has a subconscious weapon against these anxieties, should they arise. Since the release of Into the Woods, there has been a great deal of speculation3 that James Lapine, who wrote the book, used The Uses of Enchantment as source material, or at the very least was influenced by it. Still, even if Bettelheim’s work served as inspiration, Woods is by no means a representation of Bettelheim’s theories. “Bettelheim’s insistent point was that children would find fairy tales useful in part because the young protagonists’ tribulations always resulted in triumph, the happily ever after,” Sondheim writes in his annotated book of lyrics, Look, I Made a Hat. “What interested James was the little dishonesties that enabled the characters to reach their happy endings” (58). Lapine may have used Bettelheim’s work to inform his understanding of fairy tales and their significance, but his curiosities about the stories themselves are unbridled by and even contrary to Bettelheim’s reverence towards them. In what almost seems like defiance of the careful analyses in Uses of Enchantment, Lapine and Sondheim take their story in the opposite direction. Rather than explain why fairy tales are important, Into the Woods demonstrates how they are insufficient — and how they can be improved upon. Woods are a commonly recurring motif within traditional fairy tales, often used to represent such themes as internal or external transformation and the loss of innocence. In fairytale scholar Jack Zipes’s article “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” he begins by quoting examples from ten Beginning with a 1987 New York Times article, which states, in part: “Mr. Lapine not only drew on his own knowledge of Freud and Jung . . . he also read studies by such authors as the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim.”

28 | Criterion 2017 different Grimm tales in which the hero must enter the woods, each of them emerging irrevocably changed (1). It seems fitting, then, that Sondheim and Lapine should title their musical Into the Woods. Like their literary predecessors, the characters in the musical undergo changes in the woods, and thescript contains scattered references throughout of the enchanted or mysterious nature of the woods . However, when viewed through the lenses 4 of genre and medium, the title takes on an even deeper meaning. Into the Woods brings the fairy-tale genre itself, as well as the audience, out of the Grimms’ enchanted forest and into the metaphorical ‘woods’ of the theatre. Not so much subversive as transformative, Sondheim and Lapine’s musical challenges and redefinesfairy tales as we know them. When the final curtain falls and you leave the woods at last, you may well find yourself — as well as your perspective on fairy tales — changed. The plot follows a cast of characters borrowed from traditional tales — Cinderella5, Little Red Riding Hood6, Jack and the Beanstalk7, and Rapunzel8 — as well as three original characters who link the tales together — the Baker, his Wife, and the Witch9. According to Lapine in his interview with The New York Times, the Baker and his Wife represent humanity interacting with the realm of magic (Holden), serving as a proxy for the audience to immerse themselves in the fairy-tale world. Their inclusion is a warning from the very beginning: this is not your mother’s fairy tale. By bringing the human world into the magical one, Sondheim and Lapine also achieve the reverse — this story takes place outside of the unspoken rules of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. And just like that, Happily Ever After is no longer guaranteed. Each character has one overarching desire (“Prologue: Into the Woods”10) that propels them ‘into the woods’, and Act I tells the story of their intertwining journeys to grant their respective wishes. Insofar as the borrowed characters are concerned, Act I holds almost entirely true to the original tales, concluding with the ‘Happily Ever Afters’ we are familiar with (“Act I Finale: Ever After”11). By the end of Act I, virtually everything is resolved Cinderella and Rapunzel marry their Princes, Jack and his mother become rich from the gold Jack stole from the Giant, and Little Red is rescued from the Wolf. If Into the Woods were a “You’re different in the woods.” (“It Takes Two”); “Anything can happen in the woods,” “Foolishness can happen in the woods,” “Right and wrong don’t matter in the woods” (“Moments In The Woods”).

Based on “Cinderella” by the Brothers Grimm (The Classic Fairy Tales, p. 117-22).

Loosely based on “Little Red Cap” by the Brothers Grimm (The Classic Fairy Tales, p. 13-16).

Based on “Jack and the Beanstalk” by Joseph Jacobs (English Fairy Tales, p. 59-67).

Based on “Rapunzel” by Friedrich Schulz (The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, p. 484-89).

The Witch, while technically an original character, very closely resembles the fairy character in Schulz’s “Rapunzel” insofar as her involvement in Rapunzel’s storyline. Otherwise, her story is original.

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy | 29 typical fairy story, it would likely end there — and in fact, Into the Woods Jr., the edited version of the show for children, does. If its removal from the family-friendly script indicates anything, the content of the second act is not meant for children. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, both of whom have taught children’s literature and fairy tales at Vanier University, briefly address this in their anthology, Fairy Tales in Popular Culture, concluding that “this may be a musical about fairy tales, but its content and design as an art form are clearly directed at adults” (Hallett and Karasek 113). We are no longer dealing with childhood anxieties; rather, we are thrust unwittingly into the harsh reality of adulthood. Perhaps, then, Into the Woods does for adults what Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales do for children. It seems, after all, that Sondheim would agree with some of Bettelheim’s claims — whether or not he is aware of it. He is quoted in an interview by The New York Times as saying that ‘’all fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity” (Holden), which seems to echo in a broad sense Bettelheim’s assertions that children subconsciously interpret fairy tales in order to understand the world around them. If Sondheim and Lapine’s alleged subversion of the genre serves the same function as the genre itself, it may be more aptly described as an expansion. Act II of Into the Woods shifts the tone of the show a full 180 degrees and barrels full steam ahead. It opens with a musical number that parallels the prologue to Act I (“Act II Prologue: So Happy” ) — our heroes seem happy, but 12 they all find themselves wishing for something more. “What unbearable bliss!” lament the two Princes, already unsatisfied with their fledgling marriages (Act II Scene 2). Just as the characters begin to grow accustomed to their new lives, the other shoe drops, and it all begins to crumble. Even after conquering their fears and completing their quests, the characters are not quite ‘out of the woods’, either literally or metaphorically. Their actions in Act I have devastating consequences in Act II, and the characters are forced back into the woods once more. By the end of the act, every character save for Cinderella, Jack, Little Red, and the Baker is either dead or absent. At minimum, the death toll reaches fourteen. No one is left untouched. Once all is said and done, Little Red’s line in the Act I Prologue suddenly carries a great irony: “The woods are just trees/The trees are just wood/I have no fear, nor no one should” (Act I Scene 1). While other fairy tales serve to address and ease childhood fears, Act II of Into the Woods reinforces them; the characters have every reason to be afraid of the woods. Act I, Scene 1 of Into the Woods. “I wish to go to the festival” (Cinderella), “I wish we had a child” (Baker/ Wife), “I wish my cow would give us some milk” (Jack), “I wish… /A loaf of bread, please/ To bring my poor old hungry granny in the woods” (Little Red). 10

Act I, Scene 5. “And it came to pass, all that seemed wrong/Was now right, and those who deserved to/Were certain to live a long and happy life.”

30 | Criterion 2017

From a literary standpoint, a key difference to note between Into the Woods and the average fairy tale is in the simultaneous existence of multiple tales — the application of intertextuality in a genre where intertextuality is not present. Within the fairy-tale canon, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood could never interact. Each story exists in a vacuum, outside and unaware of any other stories. Cinderella has never met Rapunzel, and that is simply the way things are. In Into the Woods, however, everyone’s story exists at the same time, and their fates are hopelessly intertwined: Rapunzel is the Baker’s sister, the Witch is Rapunzel’s adoptive mother, the Baker needs the Witch to break the curse, the Baker’s Wife needs Cinderella’s shoe to give to the Witch, and so on. With their three original characters functioning as the connective tissue, Sondheim and Lapine force a non-realistic world into a realistic space. Real life does not have neat, tidy endings once we reach our goals, and there are consequences for the things that we do to get there — not so in fairy tales. Into the Woods imposes these rules on the fairy-tale world, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the tales do not fare well. In his essay “On Fairy Tales,” French writer Michel Butor gives the following explanation of the way that fairy tales interact with reality: “A world inverted, an exemplary world, fairyland is a criticism of ossified reality. It does not remain side by side with the latter; it reacts upon it; it suggests that we transform it, that we reinstate what is out of place”(352). If we reverse the roles of ‘fairyland’ and reality in Butor’s description, we are left with a concise and eloquent explanation of the way that Into the Woods works. It criticizes fairy tales; it reacts to these stories that our culture accepts at face value and suggests that something is wrong with them, that they ought to change. Woods does to fairy tales what fairy tales do to reality; it holds up a mirror to its shortcomings. If a fairy tale is a promise, then Into the Woods is the breaking of that promise. Act I, using the original fairy tale endings, delivers the promise as we are used to seeing it, but the Witch’s words warn us that there is more to the story. “Don’t you know what’s out there in the world?” she sings to Rapunzel (“Stay With Me”13). “Someone has to shield you from the world.” The Witch desperately wants to preserve the promise for Rapunzel — the idea that there is always a Happily Ever After, represented in this case by the safety of Rapunzel’s tower. The Witch tries to protect Rapunzel as long as possible from the ugly truths of the world, just as we use fairy tales to protect our children from the harsh realities of adulthood. Her motivation for locking Rapunzel in that tower is not a far cry from our motivation for cutting Act II from Into the Woods Jr. “Stay a child while you can be a Act II, Scene 1. “Wishes may brings problems/Such that you regret them/Better that, though/Than never to get them.” 12

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy | 31 child,” she implores Rapunzel14. But even the Witch cannot stop a child from growing older; despite her best efforts, Rapunzel seals her own fate when she steps out, unprepared, into the real world. Rapunzel’s demise serves as a warning to the show’s audience: promising a happy ending does not guarantee one, and doing so may cause more harm than good. One of the most significant events of Act II is actually a fairly brief exchange. Throughout the show up to this point, we have had a character known only as Narrator filling us in on the story. He gives extra information and comments on things as they happen, just as a narrator would in any story — just as the narrators of the original tales do. But at this moment in Act II, the story’s characters become aware of his presence, and they are anything but grateful. It is a break of the fourth-wall unlike anything we see in literary fairy tales: the characters of the story interacting with the storyteller. “You need an objective observer to pass the story along,” he tells them. “Some of us don’t like the way you’ve been telling it,” replies the Witch. This is especially poignant when considering writer biases — Perrault’s tales tend to be misogynistic, the Grimms’ tales tend to involve religious imagery, and so on. Fairy tale authors nearly always alter the tales to suit their culture or belief system, and this time, the tales decide they have had enough. “If you drag me into this mess, you’ll never know how your story ends. . . . You don’t want to live in a world of chaos,” the Narrator warns them. Despite his words, the Witch sacrifices him to the Giant, and he is killed. The death of the Narrator is no accident — Lapine wanted to put the power in the hands of the characters themselves, to eliminate that ultimate authority (PAJ 55). Sondheim and Lapine literally kill the storyteller, officially taking the story out of the realm of literature and planting it wholly within the realm of the theatre. This moment changes everything. The story is no longer bound by fairy-tale conventions. From here on, all bets are off, and our main characters, our classic fairy-tale heroes, start to die. The changes made to the tales in Act II — the consequences that the characters must face— are vital in understanding the musical’s purpose, as they reveal the underlying problems that Lapine identifies with the tales themselves. “You can read someone like Bettelheim who will give you psychological justifications for the moral transgressions presented in these stories,” Lapine tells The Performing Arts Journal. “But I started to wonder if there really was any justification” (54). No justification forthcoming, Lapine doles out punishments for the characters’ crimes in varying degrees of severity. Little Red, who was misled by the Wolf into disobeying her mother’s instructions “not to delay or be misled” Act I, Scene 4. Despite the way that the Witch refers to her, Rapunzel is clearly an adult. She is the Baker’s older sister (his mother’s firstborn), and the actor who originated the role of the Baker was 40 years old at the time of production. In all Broadway productions of the show, the Baker has been played by an adult actor. 13 14

32 | Criterion 2017 is left orphaned after her mother and grandmother are killed by the Giant (“Hello Little Girl” 15). Cinderella, who married a man she hardly knew so that she could become a princess, learns that her new husband is unfaithful. Rapunzel, who disobeyed the Witch and was subsequently banished to the desert, goes mad and is crushed by the Giant. Last but certainly not least, Jack is punished for stealing from (and killing) the Giant by the Giant’s wife, who is out for Jack’s blood. No one is completely innocent as far as Lapine is concerned, and so no one escapes unscathed. Although the Baker is an original character, he does represent a fairy tale archetype: the absent or irresponsible father. Traditionally, most fairy-tale characters either have no father or have a father that is dangerously inept16 (or, in some cases, just plain dangerous17). In Lapine’s own words, the Baker is designed “to break that behavioral pattern, to recognize that he was doing what his father had done before him and say, ‘No, I don’t have to live like that’” (PAJ 55). Instead of abandoning his child after his Wife’s death, the Baker accepts responsibility and vows to be a better father to his child than his father was to him. This deliberate defiance of convention is a perfect example of what Lapine and Sondheim are doing in this musical. They acknowledge the original tales and their shortcomings, and then they show us that there is another way. Another way that Into the Woods breaks from tradition is in blurring the line between childhood and adulthood. This is not a children’s story; it is a fairy tale for an adult audience, disillusioned with the realities of growing older in a world that is nothing like the one promised to them in their childhood storybooks. Towards the end of Act II, the Baker shares a song with the spirit of his father (“No More”). “Can’t we just pursue our lives/With our children and our wives?” he asks, overwhelmed by the tragedies heaped upon him. “How do you ignore/All the witches/All the curses/All the wolves/All the lies?” His questions about wolves and witches ring oddly true even in the real world, harkening back to the idea of fairy tales as manifestations of childhood and adolescent anxieties. Fairy tales are supposed to help us overcome these anxieties, but the Baker, an adult with a child of his own, makes the point that those fears are still very much there. Into the Woods recognizes that it would be irresponsible to continue to act like every threat can be vanquished and every wrong can be righted. Just like our fairy tales, we are not the same people when we come through the ‘woods’ of troubled times. We change, we adapt, and like the heroes of our story, we survive. At the end of Act II, even though they’ve lost so much, the four remaining characters cobble together their own little family out of the wreckage18. Act I, Scene 2. “Hello Little Girl.” See “Beauty and the Beast” by Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, p. 806-15). 17 See Straparola’s “Tebaldo” or the Grimms’ “All Fur” (The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, p. 27-33 and 47-50). 15 16

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy | 33 Their lives are going to look vastly different than the way they had imagined them, but they find a way to carry on. They find their own version of Happily Ever After — one that is much more realistic to a grown audience. In “No One Is Alone,” the penultimate song of Act II, Cinderella sings, “Witches can be right/Giants can be good/You decide what’s right/ You decide what’s good.” In these lines, Sondheim calls attention to the black-and-white, often outdated morals typically ascribed to traditional fairy tales: do not judge a book by its cover (“Beauty and the Beast”), wives should not intrude upon their husbands’ private lives (“Bluebeard”), and so forth. Literary fairy-tale authors tend to attach very specific, deliberate morals to their tales (no doubt influenced by their aforementioned biases), but that does not necessarily make them right. Cinderella — a fairy-tale character who has, by this point in the story, sloughed off the confines of her own archetype — does not tell the children what is right or what is good; she tells them that they must decide for themselves. In this way, Sondheim encourages a little bit of healthy skepticism in his audience— that is not to say that fairy tales are inherently wrong, only that they are not inherently right, either. Witches, in fairy tales, are not normally depicted as being right, and giants are almost never good, but Sondheim urges us to take those presumptions with a grain of salt. Just as Lapine aimed to do in killing the Narrator, here Sondheim questions the absolute authority of the tales and invites the audience to join him. The reimagining of the fairy tales in Into the Woods makes them greater, not lesser. These tales, in this form, can serve an even wider audience and ease fears and anxieties that the tales, on their own, would never be able to broach. Accessibility and growth are never bad things, and that is precisely what Woods adds to “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Rapunzel.” In questioning the validity and function of these tales, it does not subvert the fairy-tale genre; it expands and develops it. It guides fairy tales from the realm of children’s literature comfortably into both the theatrical sphere and the sphere of adulthood. It preserves the life of fairy tales within our culture, but at the same time reminds us not to take their word as law. Lapine and Sondheim have pulled back the curtain of the fairy-tale genre and allowed us to look at them in entirely new ways. If they have subverted anything in doing so, it is not the fairy tale, but our antiquated expectations of what a fairy tale should be.

“Finale: Into the Woods & Children Will Listen.” Act II, Scene 2. “The way is dark/The light is dim/But now there’s you, me, her, and him.” 18

34 | Criterion 2017

Works Cited Berland, David I. “Disney and Freud: Walt Meets the Id.” The Journal of Popular Culture 15.4 (1982): 93-104. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Ed. Alfred A. Knopf. New York: Random House, 1976. Butor, Michel. “On Fairy Tales.” European Literary Theory and Practice, ed. Vernon W. Gras. New York, 1973. Hallet, Martin and Barbara Karasek. Fairy Tales in Popular Culture. Broadview Press, 2014. Holden, Stephen. “A Fairy-Tale Musical Grows Up.” New York Times (1987). Jacobs, Joseph. English Fairy Tales. London: David Nutt, 1890. Kakutani, Michiko. “Theater; Beyond Happily Ever After.” New York Times (1987). Mankin, N., Lapine J., Straiges, T., Hould-Ward, A., Sondheim, A., Zien, C., Peters, B. “The PAJ Casebook #2: Into the Woods”. Performing Arts Journal Vol. 11, No. 1. (1988): 46-66. Sondheim, Stephen. Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany. Knopf, 2011. Sondheim, Stephen and James Lapine. Into the Woods. Theatre Communications Group, 1987. Sondheim, Stephen and James Lapine. Into the Woods Jr. Music Theatre International, 1989. Tatar, Maria. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton, 1999. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Zipes, Jack. “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 62.2 (1987): 66-74. Zipes, Jack. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001.

Out of the Forest and Into the Woods: How a Broadway Musical Changed the Face of Fairy | 35

Zipes, Jack. “Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Grimm?: Socialization and Politization through Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn 3.2 (1979): 4-41.

36 | Criterion 2017

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness By: Jeffrey Boatwright If one were to say, as Harold Bloom does, that Emerson created us, one is implying several things (502). The first thing is that we were something different before Emerson’s writings. And the second would be that what we now are is something solely of Emerson’s creation, something that could come from no one else. In a sense, we are Emerson’s great unfinished work. The frequently opaque style of writing Emerson produced left much to be discovered. There have been writers since Emerson who have attempted to complete the project of the American mind. The country has seen writers such as John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and David Mamet, all of whom have produced writing to expand and explain Emersonian, and ultimately American, consciousness. Bloom, to a large extent, is correct in stating that Emerson created us. We, as Americans, are all children of Emerson. Our national aesthetic comes from Emerson, as does our national ethic, our sense of individual power. These are all things that have their beginning in Emerson. His ideas can be seen to run throughout American culture and American literature; in his later work The Conduct of Life (1876) he writes of a will to power: “Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated, - there is no chink or crevice in which is it not lodged, - that no honest seeking goes unrewarded” (“Power” 971). The search for power is a human endeavor. It is not simply American; what makes the American variety so unique is the elevation of power to the status of virtue. The American consciousness is so divided, so full of conflicting ideas, that each virtue contains within itself a vice. There are no cut and dried virtues in the American consciousness. Everything is twosided. Therefore, the American virtue of power also contains within itself the vice of denial. The American consciousness is built on conflicting ideas; the American essence is divided. Emerson’s works have the same sense of conflict running through them: “I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (“Experience” 480). In Emerson, the conflicting ideas of power and fate collide. Denial and fate for Emerson are opaque terms. They stand for the way of being required to find oneself. In its proper state this way of being is called fate; in its improper state it is called denial. Emerson gives an example of the proper way in his essay “Nature”: “Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all: the current of the Universal Being circulates through me; I am part or particle of God” (“Nature” 10). This is Emersonian power and fate at its truest. Here Emerson takes himself

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 37

away from the world of society, he rejects the outer world of materiality. And the result is possibly the most iconic moment in all of Emerson’s writings, the transparent eyeball. He rejects all of the outer things that make up Christian, American society, but in doing so there is a moment of self-assertion; he finds himself, as Wallace Stevens would say, “more truly and more strange” (51). He places himself into the natural world; he submits himself to the ways of the natural world. It becomes a limiting force, an act of Emersonian fate. The “I” that Emerson posits here is the most authentic “I” in all of his writing. He holds within him at this moment all the power he is capable of accessing. He is removed from all vice in this formulation; he has submitted himself to his fate. Power and fate are natural things, naturally human things. Emerson shows just that; but they are things that are for the most part set aside from easy gain or social position. What Emerson means by power has nothing to do with social position; it has everything to do with true self-assertion, an act of will, or a movement toward freedom. This is a tricky thing. How does one determine what is true self-assertion from false self-assertion? It’s a very similar question to how does one tell a vice from a virtue. The Emersonian prescription, which will also become the prescription of later writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, is to remove yourself from the distraction of your society. Being a part of a society requires, by definition, a denial of self. Most societies are created on social contracts. These are, for the most part, necessary to live among other people; but for Emerson this doesn’t mean losing the part of you that remains most important, that fact that you are an “I” to be expressed, to be asserted. But this “I” will never be found in the company of society; this doesn’t mean that the self is an entirely non-social thing. What it means is the relation to nature is more complicated than many people want to acknowledge. Jonathan Levin, a professor of English at Columbia University, writes in his 1999 book, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, “Since every individual achieves meaning or purpose only within this complex web, every individual has a responsibility to the life of the whole” (22). Finding oneself in a society and never questioning one’s place or never escaping for moments of solitude leaves one in the vice of denial, the improper state of being; such are denying themselves as powerful individuals. Submitting to the Emersonian idea of fate is a way to find the self within the clutter of a human being; this could be called an Emersonian virtue. Denial is the opposite side of the coin; it’s the vice contained within the virtue. To deny oneself as a powerful individual, to submit oneself to the customs of a society, is not a movement toward power, but is a denial of the power contained within the individual. Power is pure self-assertion: “Emerson isolates the self as the authentic source of Being, but at the same time insists that the self is nothing in isolation” (Levin 23). Levin is

38 | Criterion 2017 really attuned to the complicated nature of Emerson’s formulation of self. He rightfully states that every individual is responsible for the whole, but that the true state of being is in isolation. Emerson seems to be contradicting himself, but Emerson has never shied away from a contradiction or a conflict in his thought. Emerson is an American thinker through and through. He’s as conflicted and contradictory as the American self. This causes a challenge for people trying to dissect Emerson’s thought; his contradictory nature is almost an invitation to leave him alone as a thinker. Emerson’s mode of thought, the mode of conflict, is the great insight into the American mind at its flourishing. Americans like to think of themselves as people without a past: “No facts to me a sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back” (“Circles” 412). Emerson can be seen to be the originator of this idea. He wants to use the idea of being without a past as a way to allow for freedom of thought. However, he is wrong to think this way. Many American thinkers have adopted this idea. One imagines that is because the American past is a particularly painful one, one full of slavery, oppression of women, and a British-like imperialism, these are reasons why one may want to reject the past; but one can never be rid of the past they are born into. Emerson, at the same time, rejects and accepts ideas from the past. He never explicitly accepts these ideas, except in the case of very select men, but he is a man with a past, both culturally and intellectually. One can find the beginnings of Emerson in the works of French essayist Michel De Montaigne and Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle. Emerson finds himself somewhat aligned with the past with his idea of virtue. The conception of virtue in Emerson is not far removed from the classical Greek idea of virtue, but at the same time it is removed from the Greek idea. Once again one is confronted with the contradictory nature of the American mind. He accepts the Greek idea that virtue is a matter of character and habit, but at the same time rejects the idea that there is something we are meant to become. The classical idea is that we are meant to strive for happiness; all of our actions are for the sake of happiness. We want a good job to earn money; we want money to have leisure time; we want leisure time because it makes us happy. This is the classical Greek structure of the human conscious. Emerson’s view of human consciousness is certainly one affected by the coming ideas of modernity. He writes, somewhat ruefully, in an 1842 journal entry, “You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both” (Journals 188). The Emersonian idea of consciousness is one concerned with self-assertion, with constant acts of the will. The Greek ideas of habit and virtue Emerson accepts, but the idea of a determined end is constantly rejected throughout Emerson’s work. His later writing on fate shows a reader that, for all the self-power that an individual contains, there are still those things that will forever remain out of their power. Everything

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 39

with Emerson is “to a certain extent;” there are no absolutes in his ontology or logic. This does mean that to a certain extent human beings have a telos. Cornel West defines: This telos is not simply a strategy to deny time, reject history, and usurp authority. More important, it is a symptomatic of a deep desire to conceive of time, history, and authority as commensurate with and parallel to the vast open spaces of untouched woods, virgin lands, and haunting wilderness. (19) Nature is the telos of the human being. Nature is also the limiting force of the human being. Emerson writes in his essay “Fate,” “The circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do, there is much you may not. We have two things, - the circumstance, and the life” (“Fate” 949). The circumstance is our fate. We are constantly placed and submit ourselves to situations that limit us and defines our possibility to act. And the life is power; what can be called a life for Emerson are the actions of the will, the movements toward freedom. One never finds life outside of the circumstance; rather, life is always found within the circumstance. Seeded in this is also a rejection of the Greek idea that the telos of a human being is happiness. Emerson says no. That’s not it at all. Happiness may find its way into anyone’s consciousness, but this is not his concern. Happiness for Emerson is nothing more than a side effect of an act of power or submitting to fate. One can experience joy or happiness, but it will always be a fleeting experience for Emerson. What our telos is resembles the aligning of oneself with nature; this is where true power is found. The self that asserts itself as a part or particle of the universal nature is powerful. This is accessed in accordance with fate, not against it: “All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of the events, and strong with their strength” (“Power” 972). Power is both an individual and communal act. It’s individual in that it is an act of self-assertion, and it is communal as it’s aligning oneself with the laws of nature, the laws that govern each individual. It’s very similar to the two-sided nature of Emerson’s rejection of the Greek idea of a telos. We do not have the telos to be happy, but he says we have a natural predilection to align ourselves with nature. The American form of a telos is to form a kind of harmony between the two factors of the American consciousness: If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last

40 | Criterion 2017 its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. (“Fate” 943) Emerson here shows himself to be a very romantic thinker. He’s more than willing to admit that there are conflicting aspects of our psyche; but he is just as willing, and hopeful, that they can be reconciled into some kind of organic whole. The pieces when put together will build a complete being. Nature always rights itself for Emerson. It’s a living example of the organic whole, or a unity. Emerson belongs to the tradition preceding him, the romantic tradition, as much as he blazes the way for a new way of looking at the world and being in nature. The Wordsworthian way of “wandering” is no longer good enough for Emerson. He demands the same sentiment in a new environment, a new interpretation. Here, again, Emerson is pushing the boundaries of certain ideas. He’s putting forth a method for the later pragmatist thinkers. Jonathan Levin defines them as “strong believers in the human impulse to transcend limits” (14). Things in the classical and medieval sense are very stable; they’re built on certainty and constant form. American thought could never function under those constraints. For there to be a new American way of thinking there had to be a pushing of boundaries, a transcending of limits. This is the part of pragmatism that is most often misread; it’s also why Emerson can be thought to be the founder of American pragmatism. What American pragmatists are looking to place into the minds of their readers is the sense of change, rather than the sense of pure practical application. Of course, practical application is important to the pragmatists, but they are children of Emerson in the sense that they are foremost writers of change. This vein of change runs through the ideas of William James, as well as being a massive part of John Dewey’s ideas of education and democracy. Change, like most of the ideals of the American mind, presents a problem. While there is a freedom that one must have to allow oneself to be open to the natural flux of the universe, there is also a loss of freedom by submitting oneself to this way of being. Where does freewill fit into a life of universal flux? This is a problem. Change also reasserts the idea of fate into the discussion of the American way of being. If Emerson is portraying the unique nature of the American mind, which he is, he’s also suggesting that the American mind is in a way submissive to certain natural ideals. There are things that one must deny in oneself, must limit oneself to “the elements running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate” (“Fate” 952). This is where Emerson offers as explicit a definition as he is capable of giving. He says that fate is not an unchangeable, predestined force, but it’s whatever limits us. Americans are not as boundless as they would like to consider themselves. There are limitations everywhere. Nature, as

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 41

Emerson shows, is the ultimate limiting force. To align oneself with nature is to discover what one really capable of being. Power, in many ways, is just as much an act of conformity as denial. For all of Emerson’s writing about non-conformity, power is an alignment with nature, your own and the nature of the ever-flowing world. It now comes down to intelligence. What will people align themselves with? For the most part people choose to align themselves with the customs and ways of the society in which they live, but for Emerson this is the wrong choice. And people do have a choice. The things we are fated to experience do not leave out the possibility of choice in Emerson’s world view. This is one of the ways in which Emerson’s respect for the individual is seen. He more than allows for the individual person to make the wrong decision. While it remains true that the fundamental way of being in the world operates under constant flux, it doesn’t fully remove humanity from the possibility of freewill. He finds his way around the issue of freewill by defining it away. He says fate is not predetermination, but limitation. He does seem to accept a soft determinism, but at the same time rejects the idea of determinism fully. Emerson is too elusive to pin down to a single idea. His idea of a self is also too elusive to pin down to a single idea. In Emerson there isn’t much room for such a thing as a self. Since we are beings that are constantly a part of the ever continuous flux of nature and time, we are always changing. There seems to be no continuous self in Emerson. John Dewey recognizes the same kind of discontinuity in his work A Common Faith (1934): And it is pertinent to note that the unification of the self throughout the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers, and achieves, cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe. (18) Dewey sees the self as a collection of pieces that are imaginatively brought together. The way the self is brought together is not by nature but by the act of imaginative will. The bringing together of the self is itself an act of power. It is an act of power, as Dewey points out, that is directed toward some other goal, toward something beyond itself. The act of selfcompletion becomes secondary to the act or movement of power. The idea of power, in the Emersonian sense, requires freewill. Emerson clearly thinks that we have freewill; this can be seen in his rejection of any kind of predestination. But the Emersonian idea that the world exists in constant flux, that it’s ever-changing, causes a conundrum when it comes to the question of freewill. The problem is where does freedom exist if there is no continuous self? Freedom does seem to presume that there is some

42 | Criterion 2017 continuous, responsible being making decisions. No person makes a choice to be a part of the continuous flux of time; we’re just thrown into it. On the surface it looks as if there is no room for freewill in Emerson’s ontology. Emerson presents a problem French philosopher Henri Bergson will address in his 1907 work Creative Evolution. Emerson doesn’t recognize freewill as a problem; for him it’s just the way of the world. But Bergson sees more of an issue: “We are seeking only the precise meaning that our consciousness gives to this word ‘exist,’ and we find that, for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” (7). Bergson’s idea of existence is very much in line with Emerson’s. The difference is Bergson is far more philosophically rigorous than Emerson. So the problem of freewill is recognized in Bergson; it’s merely defined away in Emerson as nothing more than limitation. In much of Bergson’s work he is wrestling with the ideas of Immanuel Kant, but in another sense Bergson can be thought to be making arguments in favor of Emerson. He’s interested in time and consciousness, much like Emerson. And he’s interested in the way we experience things over the way we can measure things, which is also a very Emersonian way of approaching things. Bergson’s word for the experience of time is duration: For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. (10) This is the way we experience time; it’s the way we experience most things in our lives, but it’s not the way we measure things. Things are measured as if they were entirely static. Here Emerson and Bergson depart from the common view of scientific analysis. Time is always treated as if it were one step removed from us, as if we were in some way not confined to it. This is the Kantian idea of time and freewill that Bergson, and one has to extrapolate, Emerson as well, rejects. For Kant we are free in what is ultimately a practical sense. There is no way to know if we are free. Therefore, it’s better to act as if we were free. If we act as if we were free, then the ideas of accountability and responsibility can be in place. To say we are fully determined is to say that we are not accountable or responsible for our actions. It’s practically more effective to view human beings are free than determined. The reason Kant wants us to consider ourselves free, and the reason Bergson wants to shows that we are free, is so we can be responsible for our actions and our environment. It becomes a matter of ethics. Bergson shows that we are free by showing that freedom isn’t a matter of removal but

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 43

a matter of insertion. Freedom is a facet of duration. We are not free beings passively effected by time; we are one with duration. It’s a part of our mode of being. Bergson writes, “It is no use trying to approach duration: we must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the intellect generally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the moving by means of the unmovable” (299). Our experience and our intelligence tell us conflicting things. Bergson sees time as a continuously moving and changing force; it’s always moving. The way that he sees the scientific view, the way time is measured, is a static, unmoving piece of information. Time is not merely a piece of information, it’s not some measurable mathematical function; time is a lived experience. It’s not a matter of measurement, which is how the intelligence tries to frame it. Rather, time is lived duration, which is what experience knows it to be. Bergson, like Emerson, places intellect against experience. For both thinkers, experience is the supreme path to anything that can be called knowledge. But our minds don’t work in the mode of experience. Our minds work in modes of the “unmovable.” They look for patterns and decide to call that “being” or “truth.” Time becomes a static object of measurement, not a lived experience of change. This is not the way people experience themselves. They are invested, both imaginatively and biologically. And they are invested because they are free beings installed into duration, into a mode of time, not a function of measurement. The Emersonian expression of power can only be expressed through a freedom like Bergson’s. The ever changing self needs a system to allow it to be itself, which means to mature and to change, never to remain the same from day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Bergson allows us to see ourselves as changing, free-willed beings, but that forces us to look at ourselves as ethically responsible beings. This is an area where Emerson has almost nothing to say. He is so reluctant to make any sort of ethical judgement that he refuses to make them at all. There is a right and wrong in Emerson, but they’re more a matter of the individual than of some kind of established rule. The writers of Emerson’s time were aware of this; some of them even took him to task for it. The most famous antagonist of Emerson was Edgar Allen Poe. Poe composed most of his stories to explore the darker and lower side of man’s consciousness. Emerson’s idea of self seems to be the exact idea being explored in a story like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The story is very simple; there are two men, an old man and a young man. The young man, for no other reason than the old man’s cloudy, “vulture-eye,” decides to kill the old man (715). Poe is exploring the ethics of the American self. This is what happens when you allow for complete liberation of the self, people will become debased and violent. What turns Poe’s story from simply the story of a murderous madman to a dissection of Emerson is brought to the forefront of the story: “but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil

44 | Criterion 2017 Eye” (715). Poe doesn’t seem to want to attack Emerson as a person, though the two men would exchange jabs; he wants to attack just the idea. It’s only the “Evil Eye” that is of concern to Poe in the story. What the eye represents in Emerson is complete freedom. He’s free from the constraints of being human. Poe wants to hold fast to these constraints; these constraints keep us from becoming like the characters in Poe’s stories. Poe does something very clever in his story. He makes a movement from the “eye” to the “I.” What he does here is almost exactly what Emerson does in his “Transparent Eyeball” formulation. Emerson becomes the eye and finds himself. The young man in Poe’s story finds a form of himself, a mad form, in the action of removing the eye. After the young man has killed the old man, he speaks with a strong sense of self, a kind of defiance to the outer world: “I smiled – for what had I to fear?” (717). The “eye” leads to the “I” in both instances. This is how Poe views the conflicted nature of the American self. For him it’s less of a conflict and more of a matter of constraint. In Poe we’re nasty, violent, and evil-natured. It’s our need to be accepted and be a part of society that keeps us in line, keeps us ethical. It’s our denial of self that allows us to act in society. It’s only when the young man is giving the opportunity to show what a, to use a very Emersonian word, genius he is does he get caught. And to a certain extent he wants to get caught. Being found out leads to two things: one, he gets to expose what an act of thought and skill he enacted in killing the old man. And two, he gets to be placed back in the constraints of society; he’s back in the denial of self. For Poe the denial of self is a human necessity; it’s what allows us to live among each other. However, Poe does mix up Emerson’s idea of power as power over others rather than power as an act of transition: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (“Self-Reliance” 271). Here is the power of the American consciousness, the power to remain in the change, to shoot the gulf. Poe also misses the appeal to higher consciousness that Emerson is making. He is making arguments to the best parts of us. It becomes a matter of with what part of oneself does one listen. If one listens with the lowest part of oneself then one will be driven to act in low, potentially violent ways, the ways people act in Poe’s stories. The best criticism of Emersonian ethics isn’t found in Poe, but, rather, is found roughly 150 years later in the work of David Mamet. The plays of Mamet are plays concerned with power. They’re concerned with a lower form of power, the kind of power that is disguised as self-reliance. In a play like Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), the men are not only fighting to get ahead of each other, they are pitted against each other by the higher ups of the company they work for. This is a business driven world, a money driven world. It’s the kind of nation Emerson warns about in “The American Scholar” (1837): “The mind of this

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 45

country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself” (70). When a character like Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross says, “You get befuddled by a middle-class morality. . . Get shut of it. Shut it out,” Mamet is writing the most Emersonian of pieces, because his piece rejects and accepts at the same time (47), just as Emerson’s does. His piece is equally a piece about the American consciousness as it is about salesmen. Mamet explores how people actually act; he’s very pragmatic in this sense. Poe’s stories are full of madmen, violence, and grotesque imagery, but they’re not seated in reality the way Mamet and Emerson are. The ways the salesmen reason and rationalize their actions are deep- seated in the way modern Americans think. Emerson can be thought to be removed from modern Americans because of his place in time, but Mamet’s writings show how relevant Emerson is to today’s world. People today are concerned with power in the way Mamet portrays them, power as a means of social gain. This is not Emersonian power. Mamet’s work shows how continuously empty power as means of social gain really is. He shows exactly the kind of actions that feed on themselves, the ones Emerson warned about in “The American Scholar.” The most striking thing in Mamet’s work is the way people justify the way they act. Roma remains the best example of this type of action in all of Mamet’s work. He nearly preaches the words of Emerson in Glengarry Glen Ross: “What I’m saying, what is our life? It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?” (48). Emerson says nearly the exact same thing in “Self-Reliance” (1841): “But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present” (270). Mamet understands Bergson and Emerson’s idea of time; he’s very aware of Emerson’s impact on American culture. Roma says later, “I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today. I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself” (49). One should hear the voice of Emerson in the background of all this: “What I must do is all that concerns me” or “Trust thyself” (“Self-Reliance” 262, 260). Mamet’s Roma is using Emersonian ideals to project his own agenda. He’s just as wrapped up in denial and power as is the writing of Emerson. He’s denying the needs of the self for the power of social and financial gain. But that power is very fleeting power; it is not a lasting power. The power that will last has to align itself with a kind of truth. Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, “The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power” (290). Power and truth are related things. The truth is that everything is changing, Bergson has shown that. And power exists in the time, in the moment of transition. Power is not being a form. As Bergson writes, Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable

46 | Criterion 2017 view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. (302) So there is no such thing as form. Forms are static, they are seemingly unchangeable. Power does not exist in moments of static; it “resides in the moment of transition.” One finds it in the act of allowing oneself to be open to becoming; do not get stuck in the static view that all is unchanging, all is unmoving. This is Emersonian sin. To see the world as static and not flowing, to see all as separate and not one, is outside of Emerson’s thought. He writes, “This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside” (“Self-Reliance” 271). This is Emerson’s rejection of all past, but it’s also his rejection of Christian morality. He rejects Christian harmony in favor of conflict. We are made of conflict; we possess the ability to mold ourselves into a unity, but we are not made of unity; our unity is always secondary to our conflict. Christianity is an already established tradition. Emerson has no use for what is already established. He writes, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it” (“Self-Reliance” 262). There is nothing pre-established in the world of Emerson. All is forever changing and forever new. This seemingly allows for the sacredness of nothing. Jonathan Levin describes it: “The sacred for Emerson, is always a function of how human lives are inspired and provoked. Nothing is, in itself, so sacred that it can outlive this function” (25). The sacred is a matter of conflict, as the basis of the American consciousness is conflict. It’s a matter of provoking and action, of moving something from one state to the next; it returns to transition, returns to power. Power is entirely removed from the Christian way of life, a way of life that requires one to give oneself over to tradition and custom of the old rules and ideas put into place thousands of years ago. Emerson’s ideas, John Dewey says, “are not fixed upon any Reality that is beyond or behind or in any way apart. . . They are versions of the Here and Now” (qtd. in Lopez 255). Emerson is always a thinker of the now. He’s not concerned with the past or the future, the things remembered or postponed, but solely here. He is concerned with where we are. Too many thinkers want to turn around and look to the past, or miss the here to peek at what’s next. Christianity is a doctrine of peeking into what is to come next, and completely

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 47

forgetting the here and now. This is why Emerson rejects it, in the name of power, the power of freedom and self-assertion. Emerson may be rejecting Christianity, but he is not rejecting the idea of divinity. To find divinity in Emerson one has to return to the “Transparent Eyeball” formulation. His formulation is also a matter of rejection and power, or fate and power. By rejecting the outer world, and now rejecting Christianity as a moral doctrine, he finds the divinity within himself. He calls the mind in this state “simple”: “Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, - means teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour” (“Self-Reliance” 270). By rejecting the past, and allowing nature to pass natural structures, he finds himself with a “simple” mind. He has put himself in a place where he can receive the divine. The divine or the transcendent in Emerson is always something a person taps into; it’s always there just flowing in its continuous ways, waiting for the person to let all the distractions of what has now become everyday life slip away and see things as they are meant to be seen. They are meant to be seen through the transparent, simple eye, not the cluttered, material one. Power here is an assertion of the will as much as it’s a rejection. Emersonian power and fate find a place where they can meet and form a kind of harmony. The idea of power in Emerson is not one that is entirely opposed to fate; in fact it’s one in continuous relation to fate. Emerson becomes very eastern in his conception of unity. Unity is not simply the meeting of all pieces into one single piece, but it’s the relation of conflicting forces. It’s the meeting of opposites. In a later piece in The Conduct of Life, a chapter called “Considerations By The Way,” he writes, nature is upheld by antagonism. . . without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero. The sun were [sic] insipid, if the universe were not opaque. And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity, to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. (1083) Conflict is everything in Emerson, it’s where we find the American consciousness. It’s a rejection of the past, while at the same time trying to come to terms with the best ideas of the past in some way. Americans want to consider themselves without a past, with no history, but there is, of course, an American history. And it’s full of things to learn from and things to reject. Learning to know what to reject and what to accept, what to take in and allow to become a part of our limiting nature, is equally a movement toward power. Truth and power are very much compatible with each other. Michel Foucault writes in his examination of power, Discipline and Punish, “Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge.

48 | Criterion 2017 We should admit rather that power produces knowledge” (27). Emerson is truly a writer concerned with power. He’s romantic by nature, but his concern is not the passions and nature, but one passion and one nature, namely, power and the American nature. He concerns himself with the very way we live our lives, not the way we simply measure our lives. We are not made of the amount of years we live, but are made of what we do with those years. Here Emerson is very much under the influence of Michel De Montaigne, his philosophical precursor and model for intellectual output. Montaigne’s last essay was a piece called “On Experience.” In that piece Montaigne is concerned with the very things Emerson spends his career writing about: Power. Montaigne writes, It is only our individual weakness which makes us satisfied with what has been discovered by others or by ourselves in this hunt for knowledge: an abler man will not be satisfied with it. There is always room for a successor – yes, even for ourselves – and a different way to proceed. There is no end to our inquiries: our end is in the next world. (1211) Emerson is the “abler” man; he’s the successor to Montaigne: “No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities” (1211). Emerson is the most powerful American mind, one not afraid of contrary tendencies, not afraid of the conflict, but one willing to tap into these things, to install them within himself. The American mind is conflicted, and Emerson both cleaves and mends us.

Emerson, Bergson, Mamet, and the American Consciousness

| 49

Works Cited Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Dover, 1998. Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language. Harper, 2004. Dewey, John. A Common Faith. Yale U.P., 2013. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 51-72. --- “Circles.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 401-414. --- “Considerations By The Way.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983.1077-1096. --- “Experience.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 469-492. --- “Fate.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 941-968. --- The Heart of Emerson’s Journals. Ed. Bliss Perry. Dover, 1995. --- “Nature.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 5-50. --- “Power.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 969-988. --- “Self-Reliance.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. Library of America, 1983. 257-282. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1995. Lopez, Michael. “The Conduct of Life: Emerson’s Anatomy of Power.” The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. Cambridge U.P., 1999. 243-266. Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition. Duke U.P., 1999. Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross. Grove Press, 1984. De Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays. “On Experience.” Trans. M.A. Screech. Penguin, 2003. 1207-1270. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage, 1968. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Eighth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. Norton, 2013. 714-718. Stevens, Wallace. “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. Library of America, 1997. 51. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Wisconsin U.P., 1989.

50 | Criterion 2017

Visions of Myth and Childhood: Cynthia Cruz’s Construction of the Sacred | By: Alexander Dulak In one of his meditative essays, J.T. Fraser recalls the noble English art of “change ringing” which involves the sounding of a set of bells of different pitches, following a clear mathematical pattern. A change is a set of rings ordered according to this rule, with the maximum number of changes achievable with a given set of bells being called a peal. If the change was to use five bells, a peal would consist of 120 rings. At twelve bells, it would be 79,001,600. With 15 bells, it would go up to an unimaginable 1,307,674,368,000 (Fraser 1). Experiencing Cynthia Cruz’s poetry is not unlike listening to a deeply lyrical “change ringing” in which themes, phrases, sentences, and words keep returning with an obsessive familiarity. The set of elements used remains stable, but the meanings produced are surprisingly new and infinitely varied with each revolution. How the End Begins, Cruz’s fourth published collection, is powerfully imaginative, dancing amidst emptiness and saturation, death and being, darkness and glimmering. At the heart of this poetic Mobius strip of music and meaning lies Cruz’s construction, destruction and re-construction of themes of childhood, myth and the sacred. Looking at three of her poems (Weltschmerz, The Billowing, and The Flooding Subject) we can examine how Cruz uses a unique language and the arrangement of her poems to lead the speaker and reader into a realm of sacrum. From the first lines of each poem, the reader is transported into a state of deep wonder, in which the most usual and quotidian things becomes unusual and extraordinary. In the opening of The Billowing, we are called upon alongside the speaker to enter a mysterious new realm, one in which we will have to re-learn what we know about the world, since the lyrical reality of these poems is ruled by different laws: “God is taking me now / Into his blonde forest of music. / If I follow, I will vanish (…)” (1-3). This uncanny feeling is further reinforced in The Flooding Subject, whose setting and actors seem well known to us, yet their stark juxtaposition yanks the reader into a realm of dream logic and surreal imagery: “All night the foxes / Creep out from the river/ Their mouths bearded in silver / Streams of wonder (…)” (1-4). Throughout these poems, the language Cruz uses often gives pedestrian imagery a strikingly profound and religious depth, quickly blurring the boundaries between what is considered boring and sacred. Cruz constantly returns to this collection of words, repeating them throughout various poems in a never-ending litany, ultimately giving the entirety of the collection an almost pantoum-like form. Different similes of childhood, a red door, the boat and its river - these are just a few of the mentioned phrases, anchoring the reader in Cruz’s meditations like the beads in a rosary. Their color palette is equally focused, with the poems being predominantly painted along a translucent, monochromatic scale of

Visions of Myth and Childhood: Cynthia Cruz’s Construction of the Sacred | 51 black and white: “Inside the warm, white hive of your childhood / It is freezing black ice and shattering” (…) “The white ash of what’s left (…)” (Weltschmerz 1-2;26); “The white winter / With a beautiful animal / Dead in it” (The Billowing 21-23). Only occasionally do we witness a vague splash of color, one that rarely heralds any enthusiasm or vividness: whether it’s the always-red door of childhood in front of which a black hearse stops (Weltschmerz), a terrible, blue river (Weltschmerz) or a blonde forest filled with music and tombs (The Billowing). Within this contemplative focus, Cruz somehow manages to simultaneously work on two separate levels and timelines. She constantly returns to past memories and past words, but at the same time induces a sense of amazement and prayerfulness in the present. She mythologizes her childhood, but also deconstructs it with all its softness, harshness, and idiosyncrasy. It is a mixed blessing: a “soft hillside” (The Flooding Subject 27), but also a home with a red door in front of which “a shiny black hearse appears” (The Billowing 4). This is a deliberate and procedural process, as Cruz herself says: My work creates myth (I don’t use old myths)–the myth of childhood, for example, and deconstructs that very myth. In this case, in this poem, this is precisely what occurs. Childhood is held up as myth then destroyed. Everything takes place in the mind–all of our mythmaking–and so none of it is real. (Waldrep, G.C. “Cynthia Cruz”) The speaker is therefore engulfed in these memories from a time filled with the pure wonder of “A child-princess / In your German bedroom” (Weltschmerz 20-21) but is acutely aware of all the darkness, pain and damage skulking in its shadows — a constant dread that “history wants to hurt you. / Its ink-like poison, its factory of sorrow” (10-11). As in this case, this procession into the past often brings about ideas of death and fear, having Cruz reimagining her own deaths and funerals, even when talking about themes of life: The song it wants Is the song of birth. The one that comes Right after death (14-17) Circling back to the present, however, these morbid self-examinations open up towards a new light, the austere light of eternity and divinity. These poems exhibit a movement along the blurred lines separating the mundane and the religious, but always leaning towards the sacred, pulled by some centripetal force produced through their obsessive spirals, to a place where angels, children, monks and family members slowly merge together. Starting with the visible, distracting and tiresome world of humdrum things and trifle objects and realigning the speaker towards the ethereal world beyond. In this sense, the heroes of her poems are all

52 | Criterion 2017 pilgrims on a journey towards enlightenment, albeit it is one that they are afraid might ultimately be empty and hollow: “I am afraid to enter it — / The white winter / With a beautiful animal / Dead in it” (The Billowing 20-23); “It rocks back / The white ash of what’s left / Of the holy, bleak story (…)” (Weltschmerz 25-27) God is always in the background, in hiding, calling your name but never fully present or knowable, leaving only an uncertain promise of reunion should you take the leap of faith. Cynthia Cruz, herself admits to an obsession with Desert Fathers, the “first Christians who fled civilization to the desert where they believed they could be alone in silence with God” (Cruz,”Notes Toward a New Language: Into the Desert”). The same fascination is present in the speaker of her poems as they journey through the strange topology of Cruz’s poetic landscapes, filled with rivers, mountains, and hillsides. In The Billowing, after an alluring call from God, there’s an unpredictably ekphrastic move back into the past, in which the pedestrian and the religious collide once more: “In the Estonian film, Saint / Tony is lost in a bog of cypress, / no God in sight” (7-9), a reference to a Veiko Ounpuu film that Cruz had once seen. Further down the road, “A boat passes. / Inside, three Russian monks / Are wrapped in their glowing / White ribbons of silence (…)” (12-15) and the speaker follows them “down the holy mountain” (17). We are constantly being pulled, called beyond our doorstep and beyond new thresholds. It’s a marvelous new Divine Comedy, in which strange Russian monks, foxes, and forgotten saints takes Virgil’s place as guides through the under- and overworlds of the speaker’s personal experience and drama: Silent children, secret Carriers of the invisible Kingdom. They are not my Sisters. They share the same soul. But it is not mine. I follow their breath Into the wooded thicket (5-12) Cruz never fully reveals the goal of this journey to us, always keeping it beyond the next turn in the river; yet the poems usually end up in a quiet stillness, a state reminiscent of the Desert Fathers. At the same time, there’s something viscerally human and familiar in all their piousness, as when the speaker’s brother surfaces from the blackness of the night and stands “Reading the Gospel of Mark / From inside the bare palm of his hand.” (The Flooding Subject 32-33). Upon witnessing a moment like this or the vision of “The white winter / With a beautiful animal / Dead in it” (20-23) at the close of The Billowing, we are struck dumb alongside the speaker, with silence being the only possible response, having realized that we really do know only a precious little. “I am often made mute” — Cruz says — “I look dumb.

Visions of Myth and Childhood: Cynthia Cruz’s Construction of the Sacred | 53 Stumm, the German word for mute or silent, sounds also like dumm, the German word for dumb. But the word sounds also like what happens to us when we are struck dumb: stumm, dumm, dumb” (Cruz,”Notes Toward a New Language”). The strange beauty and distinctiveness of Cruz’s language ultimately lead to its self-effacement, leaving us in a deep silence in which the shapeless music still lingers. The language with which Cruz operates houses a remarkable achievement: it uses a simple, direct vocabulary while remaining entirely her own and marking a reality that only she can see and describe. The book opens with an epigraph taken from the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann: “Keine neue Welt ohne Neue Sprache”(no new world without a new language), befitting of the way in which Cruz unlocks new viewpoints and keyholes peering into the world that had remained locked inside her mind up until now. She herself admits that the topics of language and silence are close to her heart, having haunted her since childhood (Cruz, “Notes Toward a New Language”). The daughter of a Mexican-American father and German-Jewish Ukranian mother, she recounts her earliest years in Germany: When I attended kindergarten, I was mute. Or, I should say, I rarely spoke. Instead, I sat on the rug on the classroom floor and read from third-grade readers while my classmates played outside during recess. When I wasn’t reading, I was coloring the rugs with crayons. (…) We spoke ―funny,‖ with idiosyncrasies, the result of growing up in a household of immigrants whose first language was not English. (Cruz, “Notes Toward a New Language”) By the time of high school, however, she had managed to “vanish completely”, becoming a “wall flower”. “What I imagine” — she says — “is that we spoke ‘funny’, with idiosyncrasies, the result of growing up in a household of immigrants whose first language was not English” (Ibidem). It is in poetry that this movement was reversed and the language of Cruz’s singularly unique Umwelt was embraced and developed in its potential: My coming to poetry, years later, began my return back to the original self and my original language of that self: the scaffolding I tried my entire life to obliterate. The stutter, the hesitation, the murmur, the embrace of another world–these are what I was when I began and the syntax and grammar of what I was made of. (Ibidem) The result of this linguistic process is Cruz’s concise and forceful verse, intrepid in its short and frequently end-stopped lines, its couplet stanzas. The brevity of the lines, stanzas, and entire poems gives an equal amount of space to sound and to silence, refusing language its power as much as it affirms it. In this aspect, it is the verse of the Desert Fathers: Simple. Stark. Reflecting their asceticism. “They all went into the desert to escape civilization” — Cruz points out — “and once in the desert, lived an ascetic life as hermits and monks,

54 | Criterion 2017 focused solely on worshipping God”(Cruz, “Notes Toward a New Language: Into the Desert”). Her lyric tries to leave enough space for a quietness in which something might unfold or a divine voice could echo out. When the poems do speak, however, their voice is that of a glittering kaleidoscope, a quality that Cruz herself calls a “jeweled” lyric poem, which is characterized by its way of “beading a series of words, each word a symbol or bead” (Cruz, “Notes Toward a New Language: Collage”). In a similar fashion, Cruz’s language is filled with words that are ripe with meaning: hive, holy, God, blonde, angel. Extremely concrete and grounded, they are beaded together to produce a purposeful mosaic. Cruz gives the collages of German artist Hannah Höch as an example: “Each item, cut out, then affixed to the artwork becomes one more word, one more symbol. Höch’s collages aren’t ‘telling’ us anything nor are they explaining. Instead, they enact and convey. The ‘telling,’ is in the details” (Cruz, “Notes Toward a New Language: Collage”). This gives room to multiple interpretations due to its complex and elliptical structure, further fragmenting and deconstructing the mythic visions of childhood that Cruz is working with. Furthermore, it calls attention to the language itself, allowing its musicality to sound out in full. Cruz’s use of alliteration and consonance give the laconic couplets a beautiful ring that lasts long after we’ve moved into the next stanza: “Inside the warm, white hive of your childhood” (Weltschmerz 1); “Silent children, secret / Carriers of the invisible” (The Flooding Subject 5-6). Cruz builds the meaning of her verse around its sound, modulating it like a musical composition. In an interview for the Kenyon Review she discusses her lyrical choices in length: The more I write, the less interested I am in the subject and the more interested I am in music. I begin a poem with a sound. A phrase or a word and that leads me to the next word or sound. With the first two collections, though I was threading the poems along sound wise, the poems were still constructed along a story line. With the third collection, this begins to fray and music, sound become more important. Where I am now, the poems I am writing now, are based in sound (Waldrep, G.C “Cynthia Cruz”). Both on the micro scale — that which shapes the sounds of words across lines and stanza — and the macro scale — which determines the forms’ overall lyrical composition — Cruz’s poems bring to mind the music of a concertina: constantly compacting, compressing, its bellows narrowing and expanding all at once, wrapping back around themselves, the peculiar notes leaking out of the instrument’s interior sounding familiar yet completely new. It is upon this scaffolding that she builds a swirling vision of deeply personal poems, intimate through the very language she constructs and uses to express the necessary images, thoughts and moments of silence. A dream vision of myth, childhood, sacred space and sacred time

Visions of Myth and Childhood: Cynthia Cruz’s Construction of the Sacred | 55 that blurs the boundaries we use to orient ourselves and our sanity in the everyday world. “To begin with: we are all mad,” Cynthia Cruz says. “It’s simply a matter of where we are on that continuum” (Cruz, “The Rumpus Interview with Cynthia Cruz.”).

56 | Criterion 2017 Works Cited Cruz, Cynthia. “Notes Toward a New Language.” Blog post. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 8 Apr. 2015. Web. 16 Dec. 2016. Cruz, Cynthia. “Notes Toward a New Language: Collage.” Blog post. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 8 Apr. 2015. Web. 16 Dec. 2016. Cruz, Cynthia. “Notes Toward a New Language: Into the Desert.” Blog post. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 8 Apr. 2015. Web. 16 Dec. 2016. Cruz, Cynthia. “The Billowing.” How the End Begins. Tribeca: Four Way, 2016. 34-35. Cruz, Cynthia. “The Flooding Subject.” How the End Begins. Tribeca: Four Way, 2016. 4-5. Cruz, Cynthia. “The Rumpus Interview with Cynthia Cruz.” Interview by Lisa Wells. The Rumpus.net. 21 Aug. 2012. Web. 16 Dec. 2016. Cruz, Cynthia. “Weltschmerz.” How the End Begins. Tribeca: Four Way, 2016. 36-37. Fraser, J. T. “The Change Ringing Cosmos.” Time and Time Again: Reports from a Boundary of the Universe. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 1-3. Print. Waldrep, G.C. “Cynthia Cruz.” Cynthia Cruz | Kenyon Review Conversations. The Kenyon Review. Web. 16 Dec. 2016.

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism

| 57

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism By: Michael Toma Many of Hemingway‟s writings have been read as works of Cubist literature, most notably In Our Time and its fractured narrative. However, what has not been formally discussed as of yet are the implications of the Cubist aesthetic on A Moveable Feast, which Hemingway built upon original writings from his years in Paris, during which he learned and grew as a writer amongst the Cubist artistic movement. Some consideration has been given to Hemingway‟s description of landscape in works such as The Sun Also Rises and “Big Two Hearted River” and their correlation to Cezanne‟s paintings, but none has been given to the content of A Moveable Feast. It is clear from close inspection of the novel‟s language as well as overall construction and structure that it is a Cubist text in the same vein as the others. More specifically, A Moveable Feast is a Cubist narrative that chronicles Hemingway‟s growth as a writer within the Cubist movement as well as imitates the Cubist aesthetic. Though much of the literary criticism surrounding A Moveable Feast is aimed at its editing and assembly throughout its publication history, I will anchor my analysis within the context of its artistic integrity and status as an autonomous work of art by the artist, insofar as what was printed is how Hemingway wished it to be, in its format and content. The only caveat regarding the issue of posthumous publishing is that I will regard the 1964 version‟s ending with the chapter “There Is Never Any End to Paris”, which was retitled “Winter in Schruns” in the 2009 edition, as the intended ending for it exquisitely follows the Cubist pattern. It is apparent from research that Hemingway was deeply influenced by observing Cezanne‟s paintings and the way in which color was used to portray landscapes. In his book on Hemingway‟s time in Paris, Reynolds tells us that “Hemingway listened and looked and went to the Luxembourg Musee to see more Cezannes… Two years later, his Nick Adams would say he ‘wanted to write like Cezanne painted’,” (Reynold 40). This is all taking place in the spring of 1922, during which time Hemingway begins to write pieces of what would later be compiled into Feast. Learning the techniques of Post-Impressionist and Cubist painters would influence his writing of short stories such as “Big Two Hearted River”. It is only natural, then, to infer that such techniques would be used in the creation of those pieces that would also become Feast. Further research, such as in Johnston‟s Iceberg, suggests that this also led to Hemingway‟s theory of omission: his Iceberg theory. It is without a doubt then that Hemingway learned much of his aesthetics from the influential Cubist painters of his generation, most notably Cezanne and Picasso, the latter whom Gertrude Stein wrote about and Hemingway conversed with (Feast 92). Hemingway learned many Cubist

58 | Criterion 2017 techniques from Cezanne that he employed in his writings. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, dated August 15, 1924, Hemingway says, “I have finished two long short stories, one of them not much good, and the other very good and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I‟m trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit” (Letters 141). Gaillard notes in his analysis, “Hemingway‟s Debt to Cezanne: New Perspectives”, the different tools Hemingway borrowed from the paintings. Specifically mentioned are the use of omission, focus, and repetition. The Cubist technique of repetition could also be borrowed and learned in part from his instruction from Stein. Hemingway recounts in the chapter “Miss Stein Instructs” that of Stein‟s published stories, “ “Melanctha,‟ was very good and good samples of her experimental writing had been published in book form and had been well praised by critics…” (27). “Melanctha” uses a style of repetition of words and phrases to elicit a Cubist form, where such repetitions become facets of the whole. It can be seen through the course of the novel that Hemingway is consciously learning such a technique, and it is employed throughout Feast. Repetition of words and phrases are found throughout A Moveable Feast and are telling of its Cubist nature. Like Cezanne, who used repeating blocks of color to infer form, so does Hemingway use language. Even Picasso used repeating geometric forms to convey meaning in his paintings. The use of repetition allows for simultaneity in perspective so that meaning or truth is found in the whole of the parts rather than the individual. Words become independent from their contextual meaning, so that “no single word or phrase can be extracted from the text to communicate the truth by itself” (Vaughn 5). The repeating words and phrases become symbolically (insofar as they are mentally perceived) and visually (upon the page) like the geometric forms in the background of works such as Picasso‟s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. For instance, at the end of “A False Spring,” Hemingway uses repetition of several words that together reveal Hemingway‟s anxiety and passion as a young and developing artist; his hunger for detail, and the one true sentence: It was a wonderful meal at Michaud‟s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face… But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism

| 59

there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. (49) We more easily understand then what he means by “nothing was simple there” once we see the pattern of detail about the moonlight. Form is emphasized over content and through its repetition the essence of the scene is revealed. Rather than giving one point of view, we are given simultaneous views of the moonlight and his wife in the bed. In the chapter “Hunger Was Good Discipline”, Hemingway repeats the word “true” to give us multiple facets of his inner thoughts and the essence of his frustration: “It was true all right and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true… I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it… I knew that it was true” (70). Truth must be found by the understanding of the whole and its pattern, rather than the singular insofar as truth denotes a singular acceptance of a fact, and this is why the character of Hemingway is struggling with the concept. Repeating the word, and creating a multidimensional representation of it allows Hemingway to grapple with the ideal of truth and writing “one true sentence”. In Cubism, the true essence of something can only be displayed by showing the multiplicity of all angles and viewpoints of the subject. In addition to repetition, manipulation of focus is also used. As used with great effect within In Our Time, Hemingway learned from Picasso the use of fractured, or faceted, images to create simultaneous viewpoints(Vaughn 8). In Our Time made use of block chapters and vignettes to likewise create these facets. In much the same fashion in Feast, Hemingway‟s memories of Paris materialized into a multitude of chapters, vignettes, that do not conform to exact chronology, and memories and places are often picked up in medias res, “It was a lovely evening and I had worked hard all day and left the flat where we lived…” (82) and “[t]hen there was the bad weather” (15). The shifting from this style of beginning to a journal type entry beginning, “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest” (41), creates a fracture of focal planes that blends into a single narrative when placed to together in a chapter by chapter sequence. As pointed out by Sypher, in his chapter on the Cubist novel, “It has been said that the great Cubist achievement was camouflage. In Cubist painting and Gibe‟s stories the relations between the painted object and the object, between plot and autobiography, are unresolved and reciprocating” (299). We move from setting to setting and memory to memory. Much like Picasso‟s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the women‟s bodies, which themselves are formed from shapes, blend into the color and lines of the background and surrounding figures. This camouflage, the transition of the formed to unformed, creates a resistance to closure through a shifting of focus. Outside of the arrangement of chapters, structure (or the construction of the novel) and form perform another important role in the creation of a Cubist narrative.

60 | Criterion 2017 Within chapters, the very placement of sentences, paragraphs, and ideas continue the pattern of shifting focus. Often Hemingway will, while also using repetition in many cases, shift from abstract concepts or ideas to minute detail. A sequence of abstract quality is then followed or preceded by a long passage of detail. For instance, in the first chapter, “A Good Café‟ on the Place St.-Michel,” Hemingway shifts from abstract thought to exhausting description: I‟ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.. . .Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in i…After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day. As I ate the oysters withtheir strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. (18) Abstract ideas such as his metaphysical role as author and the concepts of love, happiness, and sadness, are like bocks of color, ambiguous only until defined by clear and sharp lines and angles represented by the minutia of his description of the oysters. This play in language allows each to become mental facets, blending together. Form and perception are fluid, and focus is shifted. In chapter 4, “People of the Seine,” we see focus shift from a line of dialogue to a large block of detail. The last line the stall-keeper says, “Now a book like that would have value” (37), positions our focus onto its self-referential allusion and we are dissociated from focusing on the narrative. Immediately following, Hemingway gives us this block of great detail: …At the head of the Île de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water‟s edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading… The good spots to fish changed with the height of the river and the fishermen used long, jointed, cane poles but fished with very fine leaders and light gear and quill floats and expertly baited the piece of water that they fished. They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called goujon. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism

| 61

with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all. (37) This immediately shifts focus back to Hemingway‟s point of view. Similarly, in “A False Spring”, a line by Hemingway‟s wife is bookended by long descriptive passages. She says, “Who are we anyway?”(43). The question is rhetorical, and begs the question to the reader. Again, we are thrown from and dissociated from Hemingway‟s focus to our own. With no response to the question, Hemingway moves into a detailed passaged, describing things like, “…and looked at the old grandstand, the brown wooden betting booths, the green of the track, the darker green of the hurdles, and the brown shine of the water jumps and the whitewashed stone walls and white posts and rails, the paddock under the new leafed trees and the first horses being walked to the paddock” (43-44). Also note that the character remains unnamed, only referred to as wife. The abstraction of individual characters in In Our Time has been noted to be reminiscent of Picasso‟s tendency to do the same in his paintings (Vaughn 7). In the beginning of the same chapter, Hemingway explains, “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest” (41). This is succeeded by a large section of description beginning with, “In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept,” and ending with, “She was the only customer for goat milk in our building” (41). This eighteen-line bock of description repeats words like “window”, “goat” (used eight times), and “milk” while describing the scene with great detail and refusing to name the woman. This technique is similar to that used in In Our Time, also described by Vaughn as the arrangement of interchapters, which creates a visual effect reminiscent of Picasso‟s use of geometric forms (Vaughn 5). Perhaps the greatest example of this technique is found in the chapter “Scott Fitzgerald.” It begins simply enough with the declaration that “a very strange thing happened” (17). Continuing, he paints an abstract picture of the interior, stating, “He had come into the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters” (17). What follows are descriptions of Fitzgerald‟s appearance using many shapes to define his features, “wavy hair”, “high forehead”, “long-lipped Irish mouth”, and “unmarked nose” (125). Soon, after Fitzgerald appears to transmogrify before Hemingway‟s, we see that, “This was not my imagination, nore have I exaggerated in describing it. His face became a true death‟s head, or death mask, in front of your eyes” (128). This “death” mask is reminiscent of the African face masks which influenced Pablo Picasso and can be seen in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The transformation from the recognizable to the unrecognizable, or other, mirrors the shift in focus within the narrative. A jump in time occurs and Hemingway and Fitzgerald discuss the incident. We get a few short sentences of dialogue, latent with abstract concepts and ambiguous references:

62 | Criterion 2017 “Don‟t try to make a mystery of it. You know the ones I mean.” “Oh,” I said. He had gone back to the Dingo later. Or he‟d gone there another time. No, I remembered, there had been two British there. It was true. I remembered who they were. They had been there all right. (129) The highly descriptive sentences about the way Fitzgerald appeared are bookended by abstraction. Similarly, on page 139, there is one single striking sentence standing indented alone, “Scott then asked me if I were afraid to die and I said more at some times than at others.” The very next line leads into two paragraphs describing the scene at a hotel: “It now began to rain really heavily and we took refuge in the next village at a café‟… We had sent our clothes to be dried and were in our pajamas. It was still raining outside but it was cheerful in the room with the electric light on” (140). In this sequence of text, we move focus from the abstract to the concrete world of description. This structure allows prose to do what the Cubists did with art—create simultaneity and deny closure. The last element of form to be touched upon is A Moveable Feast’s ending as it appears in the 1964 publication. The last chapter, titled “There Is Never Any End to Paris”, employs a very interesting cyclical narrative pattern that conforms to the Cubist tradition of denying closure and resisting traditional framing methods. The very last paragraph concludes with, “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other… But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy” (211). Besides inferring an infinity within the sentence itself, it is of note to compare the first sentence of the novel and the beginning of the chapter, “A Good Café’ on the Place St.-Michel”, which reads, “Then there was the bad weather” (3). In a fashion akin to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the narrative returns again to the beginning. The fact that the sentence begins with an adverb, in the middle of the action, begs such compatibility. Put together, it reads: “But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. Then there was the bad weather.” The first sentence shifts the setting of the narrative back to the beginning of his stay in Paris, and the second continues it along the cycle. In doing so, it is freed from the traditional kind of narrative frame. Such a manipulation of narrative sequence is well within the realm of possibility as Hemingway has utilized the technique to varying degrees in other works. Notably pointed out by Schedler in Border Modernism, the journey of Hemingway’s heroes often follows a “cyclical homing” pattern. He goes on to state, “A similar cyclical or homing pattern is evident in both individual stories, such as ‘Indian Camp,’ ‘Ten Indians,’ and ‘Fathers and Sons,’ as well as the collection of stories In Our Time. One of the collection’s unifying structures, suggested by Paul Smith but not given a name, is Nick’s cyclical journey: ‘Indian Camp’ begins In Our

A Portrait of the Artist: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Cubism

| 63

Hearted River’ ends it, and both are set in the same locale, a morning’s train ride west from St. Ignace in Michigan’ Feast not only strengthens its Cubist features but also may support the reinvestigation of the novels re-edit and 2009 publication, though the latter requires a separate analysis. It is clear that Hemingway learned much not only from mentor Gertrude Stein, but also from the modern painters of his era. His fascination with their techniques and the intricacies of Cubism bled into his literary aesthetic and shaped his growth as a young writer. A Moveable Feast, being a snapshot of that time, demonstrates a Cubist understanding and perspective that has also been found in works such as In Our Time. The novel also clearly implements a Cubist philosophy of representation into its narrative through the use of repetition, focus, and denial of closure. It is through the manipulation of language that Hemingway was able to paint in words. s Upper Peninsula” (72). The cycling of the two chapters in

64 | Criterion 2017 Works Cited Gaillard, Theodore L., Jr. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly And Critical Journal 45.1 (1999): 65-78. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 24 Nov. 2016. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Scribner, 2009. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. Scribner, 1964. Hemingway, Ernest. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Johnston, Kenneth G. The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story. The Penkeville Publishing Company, 1987. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway, The Paris Years. Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989. Schedler, Christopher. Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings In American Literary Modernism. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 2 Dec. 2016. Sypher, Wylie. Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature, Random House, 1960. Vaughn, Elizabeth D. “In Our Time and Picasso.” Hemingway Repossessed, edited by Kenneth Rosen, Praeger Publishers, 1994, pp. 3-8.

| 65

66 | Criterion 2017

About the Authors Katie Murphy is a senior at LMU and will graduate with a double degree in English and Screenwriting. She is currently is a development intern at Team Downey Productions, where she is learning more every day about storytelling. Katie will be attending graduate school in the Fall at the University of Georgia, where she intends to earn her MA in English before applying to doctoral programs. Her passions are reading and writing, and she hopes to pursue a career as a playwright and professor after finishing school. She wrote “Out of the Forest and Into the Woods,” for Dr. Kelly Younger’s Fairy Tales class as a final project, and she would like to thank him for all of his guidance and inspiration during her time at LMU. Jeff Boatwright was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is currently a third year English student. He is pursuing in interest in Emerson and 19th century American literature. When the “ineluctable modality of the visible” becomes too much, he turns to books. The essay “Emerson, Mamet, Bergson and the American Consciousness” has been on Jeff’s mind for quite some time. It was several conversations with Professor John Reilly that made him finally sit down and write it. Allie Heck is a senior Environmental Science major with a passion for putting her world into words. “The Café: A Catalyst for Change” was written for Sarah Maclay’s Creative Writing for Non-Majors class. Chase Speicher is a senior English major and Physics minor. He also has interests in theater, Mandarin Chinese, the environment, and of course, writing. He wrote this essay for a class last semester called “The Values of Time,” a Bellarmine Forum course that combines Philosophy and English. He chose this topic because he finds that climate change is an urgent problem that requires discourse in order to find solutions and people must understand the seriousness of it. This is largely the focus of his paper, to show the importance of learning about climate change and the difficulties that will arise with using such knowledge to create change. Neyah Barbee is a double major in Animation and English from Long Beach, California. In her studies, she is passionate about the interdisciplinary nature of communication and storytelling. She thinks, if communication were to be represented visually, it would be a giant, intricate Venn diagram and she strives to find her place where the written and visual intersect. Her essay, “Huck Finn and Black English” was written for Dr. K.J. Peters’ “Literature of the Frontier” course.

| 67

About the Authors Mary Grace Costa is a senior English major with a minor in Asian and Pacific Islander Studies. Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA she is also the managing editor of Asia Media International, a student-run online publication headquartered at LMU that spotlights Asia in its contemporary relevance. Mary Grace is currently a journalism intern for the Borgen Project, a non-profit organization that combats global poverty by influencing politics and through education and mobilization. After graduation, she will be taking on an internship with KORE Asian Media, a magazine and activism organization focusing on Asian American issues. This paper was written for Dr. Kelly Younger’s Fairy Tales course in the Fall 2016 semester. Michael Toma is currently a senior pursuing a double degree in English and Screenwriting. In addition to creative writing, Michael is also interested in telling stories through music, having over ten years of guitar playing experience. For him, pursuit of the aesthetic is chief among all endeavors. Michael’s essay, “A Portrait of the Artist”, was written for Dr. Peters’ authors class on Hemingway. As an aspiring writer, Michael used the opportunity to analyze Hemingway’s contribution to the craft of writing and, in doing so, uncovered a link between two artistic mediums. Alexander Dulak is a Junior Film and TV Production major with a Philosophy and English double minor. Hailing from a distant Poland, he’s an intellectual vagabond with interests ranging from postmodernist philosophy, through cinema’s poetics, to sculpting in time and stacking stones. Academically he is most comfortable in the space between literature and philosophy and finds that it is at the seam where they meet that language flourishes. Excited by these glimpses of languages being created and fading away, he hopes to continue his studies in critical theory, hermeneutics, visual media, philosophy and comparative literature. “Visions of Myth and Childhood” was originally written for prof. Sarah Maclay’s ENGL 2201 course. Looking at three distinct poems from Cynthia Cruz’s collection “How the End Begins”, it examines the author’s intricate treatment and construction of themes of childhood, myth, and the sacred.