Class Notes 9/14

My notes from 9/14.....

-Discussed All Souls Day (A sister holiday of Halloween) where people are brought back from the dead and the living are responsible for feeding them.
-Discussed Creation Myths and the tragic hero leaving the perfect home, have his world be split in two (like an egg) and then return to the home or a fragmented/new version of home.

-Defined a creation myth as a symbolic narrative of a cultural tradition or people that describes their earliest beginnings.

5 Basic creation Myths:

-creation ex nihilo: through thought word, dream, or bodily secretions of a divine being
(ex nihilo means out of nothing)
-Earth diver: a bird or amphibian plunges to the seabed to gather mud. It then creates a terrestrial world with the mud.
-Emergence myths: progenitors or earliest ancestors pass through a series of worlds until they reach the present world.
- Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being
- Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as cracking a cosmic egg or a bringing to form from the chaos

-Discussed Tiamat, monster of chaos and how Marduke kills her with the arrow, splits her in two and creates the sky and earth

-Mentioned the Kaaba stone, the holy rock of Islam located in Mecca.
-Gnosticism is the belief within Christianity that God is actually imperfect.
- Discussed the character Mnemosyne which means memory

Dreams, Reality, and Actuality

The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually to visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams. For example, when an Indian of Brazil or Guiana wakes up from a sound sleep, he is firmly convinced that his soul has really been away hunting, fishing, felling trees, or whatever else he has dreamed of doing, while all the time his body has been lying motionless in his hammock. A whole Bororo village has been thrown into a panic and nearly deserted because somebody had dreamed that he saw enemies stealthily approaching it. A Macusi Indian in weak health, who dreamed that his employer had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult cataracts, bitterly reproached his master next morning for his want of consideration in thus making a poor invalid go out and toil during the night. The Indians of the Gran Chaco are often heard to relate the most incredible stories as things which they have themselves seen and heard; hence strangers who do not know them intimately say in their haste that these Indians are liars. In point of fact the Indians are firmly convinced of the truth of what they relate; for these wonderful adventures are simply their dreams, which they do not distinguish from waking realities.

---The Golden Bough, Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul

I have yet to have my soul venture off into interesting venues recently. I dream, but they are mundane, consisting of my Dad making me breakfast, or of myself arguing with a friend over meaningless topics. For those who have seen Inception, the dreams within the film are way cooler.

SPOILER ALERT:

The movie, Inception, is about people who go into other people's minds via their dreams through a special device. They then can steal an idea from that person's dreams or they can proceed further into the subconscious by entering into another dream while in the first person's dream. Some characters go down so many levels of dreaming that they eventually reach a stage called limbo; a dream so complex that the dreamer believes he or she is actually in reality.

This touches closely to what Professor Sexson was saying about what is real and what is imaginary. If we think it's real then to us, it's real. If we think it's imaginary, than we have already set a limit on that situation and it can not jump to the level of reality. What about deja vu? Wouldn't that feeling of a situation being eerily familiar only belong in a dream? Pay attention to what we conceive as reality. You may be dreaming sooner than you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sd0ff1sbJU&feature=channel

Long Thoughts and Short Decisions

A Golden Bough quote: (Somewhere in Chapter 28):

Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or dying vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide into a notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in general from the village or district. The view that in these spring ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest, which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is called “the Dead One”: children are warned against entering the corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a game played by Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest, Death is represented by a child completely covered with maize leaves.

I can already tell that I will have trouble quoting the Golden Bough simply because all of the text ties into one another and each sentence is just as important as the next. It's a text that has stories within stories, just like the movie, Inception. And just like Inception, the explanation to what is real and what is important may be long and confusing. I'll save my Inception rants for another post though. Back to the top quote.....

If you read the whole quote you may reach the conclusion that much of our language is inadequate. Or, more specifically, the fewer the words we try to use, the more nebulous our meaning comes across to the reader. Does corn signify birth, rebirth, death, or all three? It depends on who you ask. I'm not writing this post to deconstruct this passage, however. I believe Professor Sexson has taught too many decades of English classes for him to care THAT much about an undergraduate Literature Major perform close readings of The Golden Bough. I think instead he wants us to inject our personal lives into the readings and class. Our professor is serious when he wants us to eavesdrop on the conversations scattered throughout campus and report back to him. It's how he stays young. He gets a kick out of one of his mythology students producing a phobia with cornfields because of the discussion of Saxon children in Transylvania impersonating dead corn.

Having this knowledge given to us by The Golden Bough is useless if we don't use it. At the very least we should see corn now as "Old Men".

Making Your Writing Stick

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's essay A Thousand Plateaus, the authors describe a root system that weaves together a seemingly unitary structure that can unfold into multiplicity. The normal thesis is replaced with references and regimes of signs.  The entire framework is compared to a botany framework.  The "root" represents symbols found in various settings that imitate the world. A "radicle" represents the seedling or meaning from a root.  Finally, the radicles and roots conglomerate into a system known as a "rhizome".  An example of hidden multiplicity can be seen in the Harry Potter series. One of the secondary characters is named "Dobbie", an elf that plays the trickster archetype to the main character, Harry Potter.  What many American readers fail to notice is that "dobbie" is a British term for an imbecile. Suddenly a character is interpreted differently based on the audience's knowledge of British slang. The most straight-forward children's fantasy becomes a complex web of inside jokes, cryptic symbols, and befuddling conclusions. Rhizomes act as both barriers and rewards for the reader to extract from the text. This cat and mouse game between the reader and the author
serves as a larger analogy to real life settings.  True rhizomes exist without footnotes because in real life symbols that are not yet defined to people remain meaningless until that person researches that symbol more. In the case of the "dobbie" interpretations, the reader isn't given a footnote to its double- meaning. Instead the reader might not discover the meaning until a
few years later while reading a British anthology text. Each time a new discovery of a text meaning takes place, connections within the rhizome are unearthed, but new radicles can form to expand the rhizome. Hence, a well-designed rhizome should have roots that can form more than one radicle and radicles that make the rhizome bigger.  
  
               In terms of timeless literature, the author must essentially make up as much words and concepts possible in order to have a timeless rhizome. Samuel Colridge made his works stand out because he used words and phrases such as "desynonymize", "esemplastic", and "willful suspension of disbelief". Some of his terms have been understood and used in the 21st century while others are so obscure they remain out of the mainstream lexicon yet still studied with each new generation of English Majors. If an author like Coleridge can add new words to the reader's lexicon over multiple generations, than the rhizome that he created was a success. The root becomes the term "esemplastic", the radicle becomes the meaning that is given to a generation of students, and the rhizome becomes their interpretations and roots that they impose within their own rhizome. In that sense, an author's final contribution from their rhizome is that it becomes the root of a new rhizome to continue the cycle.

Telling Stories

I listened to a podcast last night that talked about a pair of teenage siblings who invented a family to get out of their strict curfew. They would be constantly babysitting for this fictional family. In order to avoid suspicion, the kids crafted the dad as an F.B.I. Agent who could not reveal the details of the family to the the teenagers family. This provided a perfect cover for the siblings to peruse around town late into the night without having to worry.

I brought this up because it goes back to telling stories and how the imagination can help people in more ways than imagined. It's strikingly similar to the Scheherazade story of how she had to craft stories to stay alive. In the case of the lying baby sitters, they had to continually make up more elaborate tales about this fictional family. This family had a summer house so that they could hang out the lake all summer. The lie went on for so long that the mother gradually came to believe the lie out of comfort. In a sense, the mother wanted the kids to have this freedom and yet not under her direct blessing. It parallels the Scheherazade story where the king knew that he could kill the storyteller at any minute, but because he was so entertained and so interested he overlooked his original convictions.

Ultimately Professor Sexson is entertained by our stories and blogs because they are stories within stories. We are all Scheherazade's making up stories to pass the time and be interesting. Although we won't die if we stop telling stories, we might die a bit inside. Deep down we want to be interesting; we want to have an audience for our stories. If we're not telling our stories, than we might as well be dead. There will certainly be more interesting people that will step in to tell their story. Are we really living if we don't tell our story? There are dead people more interesting than living people because the dead people have enough stories to propel their legacy. If we only tell people our stories, then our legacy only lasts a generation, at best. I know I can be more interesting than a dead person. It won't be easy, but all I have to do is accumulate enough stories in writing to build up an interesting repertoire.

The moral of this story is tell stories or die. I just lived to see another day just by writing this blog.

Not the final post

This isn't my last post because there is a good chance I will want to see what I think in the near future.

One of the biggest principles I've learned from this class is the notion that in order to be a good writer, one must practice. A lot. If you're not writing on a regular basis, you forget how to formulate ideas and become a sub-par writer. I have yet to taken another class that has demanded as much scheduled writing as Professor Sexon's class. I've had classes with copius amounts of writing, but writing on a regular basis is much different than writing in chunks.

So on that note I will be chunking off my final post into segments as the year winds down.
This is part 1 of 5.

Final Paper

Seth Grossman

Professor Sexson

Lit 110 Paper

4/28/10

Taking responsibility implies being able to respond to change. It requires the ability to switch behavior when the opportunity arises. It is an important principle to practice in every-day life, whether it’s about responsibility towards our friends or responsibility towards scholarly pursuits. In stories, characters face the same tasks and those with the most burdens, those who act the most, are the heroes. In the song “Change” by Tracy Chapman, she sings about the hypothetical situations in which someone finally makes that change. In Hamlet's case he makes his change only after a series of very grim sufferings take place. In the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan never makes this change; he simply becomes paralyzed by indecision and goes insane.

In Chapman's song, her central thesis is, "if you knew that you would die today and saw the face of god and love, would you change?" In many ways, she's asking both Hamlet and every other character based off of him (including Ivan) what they would do in the waning moments of their lives. Would they change to the persons they try to portray? Would they finally fall into the archetype of the hero instead of bounce vaguely between several inferior ones? Ultimately that's the goal of both Hamlet and Ivan; they want to be the hero and only one succeeds. Chapman also attempts to uncover the tipping point for someone on the brink of change: “How bad, how good does it need to get? / How many losses? How much regret? / What chain reaction would cause an effect? / Makes you turn around, / Makes you try to explain, / Makes you forgive and forget, / Makes you change?” Hamlet’s tipping point is the death of his mother. For Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri, there seems to be no tipping point in which they will change their behavior. After years of hostility towards Fyodor, there resentment builds sharply, but they choose not to resolve the conflict. The role of the hero appears empty, but another brother faintly steps in.

Hamlet actually fulfills the role of the hero because he responds; he changes his behavior in the face of God. Hamlet laments over his problems, but by the end of the play he faces them and takes action. Ivan, however, is essentially only a fourth of Hamlet's entire character. The closest hero in the Brothers Karamazov is Smerdyakov because he's the character that responded the most! It would seem that only three brothers would be modeled after the character of Hamlet, but Smerdyakov is the actual action-based hero component of the character. The other brothers basically tip-toed around the situation and left it up to the "lesser known" Karamazov to act. In order for a character to fit the hero archetype, they must overcome the conflict, not assign it to their younger brother. If Hamlet had assigned the killing of his father to Guildenstern, then

Guildenstern would be the hero. A closer look at the details of Smerdyakov’s life reveals a mirror image of a hero’s story arc.

The first part of a typical hero’s life involves the death of one or more parents followed by departure from the home. Smerdyakov’s mother dies in childbirth and is shortly dispatched to culinary school away from the home. He returns as a servant, but nevertheless, he resolves the one of the major conflicts of the novel. Smerdyakov even commits suicide, a reflection of the demise of Hamlet. None of the other brothers commit suicide because they don’t feel nearly as guilty because they didn’t actually commit the crime. In a tragic sense of life contest, Smerdyakov wins because he is the servant of his despicable father and as a result he is given no distinct identity that each of his brothers seem to radiate. He is the “illegitimate brother” who hung cats as a child. He is the Cinderella of the family, but instead of marrying a prince, he kills his father. His brother’s lives don’t seem tragic at all in comparison. They each have mentors or people they share affection with. Smerdyakov is the true tragic hero because his life is brutally tragic and responds like a hero should.

The central plot of the Brothers Karamazov is the killing of Fyodor Karamazov. Several characters had an indirect role in the murder, but Smerdyakov had the most direct role, so technically he can only claim the title. Without his contribution, Fyodor would have lived and the central plot would have been far more disjointed. The three brothers would have been seen as more boring people because it would seem that they had done less. The same can be said if Hamlet never killed his father and the play simply stopped at Act V, scene i. Hamlet would be responsible for the deaths of a lot of other people, but not the one in which the reader truly wants dead. The plot of the play is centered on the atrocity that has taken place at the throne and Hamlet must respond and rectify the conflict to be seen as a true hero. Would he still be a hero if the play ended where he didn't kill King Claudius? I'm not convinced he would be and that is essentially Ivan's role in the Brothers Karamazov. He talks about how his father's death would make the world a better place and yet he doesn't actually murder him. Actions speak louder than words especially in the case of the hero archetype; one must act and not plan on becoming the tragic hero.

In both Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov the pressure on the hero increases as more responsibility is shifted on his shoulders. Hamlet eventually takes this responsibility and turns it in to action, while Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri end up deflecting it on each other. The brothers grow and learn about responsibility throughout the story, but the looming responsibility of their father’s death does not transfer over as much as it does to Smerdyakov Karamazov. Only Smerdyakov is able to kill Fyodor Karamozov because he has the most resentment built up towards his father. Only he was able to turn off his brain and respond in a way his brothers could not. He followed Hamlet’s example of finally not thinking so much about a certain problem and instead acted upon his emotions to formulate an action.

Works Cited

Chapman, Tracy. "Tracy Chapman: Change Lyrics."MetroLyrics. MetroLyrics, 20 Feb 2004. Web. 28 Apr 2010.

tracy-chapman.html>.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Retellings: A Thematic Literature Analogy. Ed. M. B. Clarke and A. G. Clarke. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2004. 1215-1317.