6. MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA Previous to 1916, the American experience had not found a suitable way of expression in the dramatic form. Causes: -
The Puritan antagonism to leisure and to the misinterpretation of reality
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The prevalence of European works, British patterns dominated American theaters
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Playwrights had found in cinema and TV writing a more dependable medium economically speaking
O’NEILL O’neill’s play inaugurated modern American drama. During the 20’s and 30’s O’Neill and his followers would liberated it from unwelcome European influence and from commercial impositions, and would transform Broadway in the centre of dramatic art. The 20’s witnessed a generalized psychological approach to the self and the World, while the 30’s and 40’s added to plays the social and political color of the period Modernist literature responded to the period’s concern about human consciousness and unconsciousness. The new psychological approach to the self disclosed the hidden process of the mind, and proposed our actions are mere surfaces. The dramatic genre is a form whose essence consists in offering a representation of appearances. Hence, the dramatists tried to convey those occult processes beyond usual gestures and situations on stage. O’Neill proposed the use of masks. th
The American drama of the early 20 century moved away from the romantic and melodramatic formulae. New modes of representing human experience: -
Realism, which investigated social issues, real-life conditions, ordinary people
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Symbolism, which favored suggestion over realistic detail
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Naturalism, which explored the forces that shaped and determined human behavior
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Expressionism, which sought the expression of moods and emotions by means of distortion and exaggeration.
Post-impressionists artists like Van-Gogh inspire writers with his use of non-representational techniques. Playwrights engineered diverse strategies to show the characters’ hidden conflicts and inner drives. O’Neill embraced the symbolical (or evocative) as well as the naturalist (or representational). His expressionistic plays evidence his effort to experiment with language and structure, in order to bring to life the unseen operations of human mind. Masks, spoken thoughts, asides or onstage choruses evidence such an interest. Characteristics: -
A dreamlike atmosphere
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An episodic plot consisting of a cinematic cutting of scenes
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Lyrical, often delirious monologues and dialogues
THE EXTRAORDINARY IN THE ORDINARY In addition to this new attention to the human unconscious, the pioneers of American modern drama would bring the ‘common man’ onto the stage. Drama therefore t herefore revealed the nation’s
powerful self-consciousness at the moment, in particular after the First World War and during the Depression years. O’Neill and his contemporaries c ontemporaries shaped their plays with the two main features: the exploration of the unconscious and the incorporation of the common man. The self had been
previously depicted as struggling with the gods; now the struggle was perceived to be with oneself. Playwrights conceived conflict as inherent to those who strive to belong, to be part of a social system where they play a role. They moved away from character abstractions in search of more human and recognizable figures. Innovative use of localism, and features of local-color writing (speech, customs, and realistic representations of place...) Ordinary events of everyday life in a small community… common language and simple life. REMEMBER: American drama was born in the Modernist era. Several artistic and economic reasons energized the creation and flourishing o f a national dramatic genre that surveyed national themes and characters. O’Neill: expressionistic strategies and emphasis o n common people and situations. REVIEW OF DRAMATIC ELEMENTS, HOW TO READ A PLAY Aristotle: drama is the ‘imitation of men in action’. A genre that exposes the changing nature of the inner and outer conflicts of the human being. The story of a ply is not told but represented. Plot is not the same as story: story is “what happens”, while the plot is the way the narrator presents the story to the audience. The plot is formed by: -
Dramatic action requires a conflict between opposing forces. The conflict creates complications, originates the unfolding events and the tensions in order to breed action, until the arrival of climax .
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The exposition is the introduction of the characters and setting
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The rising action presents the central conflict, complications, suspense…
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The crisis is a minor climax at the end of an act or scene
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Climax is the point of greatest dramatic tension, and when the conflict is resolved
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Denouement is the resolution.
Acts are normally intended to indicate changes of time, setting, characters onstage or mood. In fiction, characters are presented through the point of view of an observer, either the narrator or some of the other characters. Dramatic characterization employs an array of visual and verbal strategies to make the characters personalities known to the audience: -
The characters words and actions
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Other characters; comments on him or her
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Stage directions
Monologue: extended speech by one character. Soliloquy : extended speech by one character who is
alone on stage, used to express private thoughts. Aside: character’s direct address to the audience. Dramatic irony: the audience knows more about the character about a specific situation than him or
her. Anagnorisis : central discovery made by the tragic hero, particularly the discovery of this responsibility. ARTHUR MILLER; DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Miller was sympathizer of the American Communist Party; The Crucible dramatizes his persecution in a parallel historical moment. Basic preoccupation: family ties, responsibility, and t he self’s frustrations. Death of a Salesman: father-son anxieties. The story of an unsuccessful salesman who undergoes a tragic end. It stemmed from Miller’s own experiences. Miller’s artistic outcome exhibits a Realist and Naturalist approach to life: as a realist, he always revealed a concern to offer a densely populated social world. His characters are manufacturers, salesmen, lawyers… He redefined and complemented the notion of reality by exploring psychological depths and personal drives. As a Naturalist, he explored the frustrations caused by the limitations that social conditions cast upon the self. In this play, a series of allusions and foreshadowings that progressively lead to the disclosure of hidden sins. This gradual revelation contributes to the rising tension of the play until the climax certifies the horror lurking behind apparently quite domestic scenes. Memory play = dramatization of mnemonic workings.
Features: -
Realistic and expressionistic use of the stage
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Anachronies or temporal dislocations of the plot
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The use of a common man as a tragic hero
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The retelling of the American Dream from the perspective of those who fail
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The family
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The symbolic network
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The accurate vernacular speech
The formal strategies employed by Miller aimed at the exhibition of mental processes such as memory, conflict, and self-delusion. The temporal and spatial dislocations that nevertheless maintained a continuous action and tension provided an agile strategy through which to reveal the protagonist’s constant recall of the past. Memories of actual events can coexist with dreams and with present situations onstage, giving a kind of synchronicity. Light effects contribute to the hallucinatory atmosphere that surrounds Willy. Another dramatic strategy: to present a common man, and Everyday man that could represent any person, as a tragic figure. The tragedy resides in the realm of the domestic. Whether highborn or common characters, tragic heroes are flawed and therefore make errors of judgment. The Greek termed this hamartia: “missing the mark”. In other words, tragic figures set out on an enterprise that they misjudge, and therefore fail. Willy Loman’s hamartia consists of his belief in a sort of indisputable birthright to prosper, by reason of his American nationhood. Miller stated the importance of social forces such as class, family, norms and labor on the lives of characters. The idea of America as a land of opportunity is deeply rooted in the national mythology of the US. Like The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman inspects the nature of such dream, and provides adequate dramatic representation of its facts and fallacies. Unlike Gatsby, Willy Loman stands for those whose ambitions have resulted in failure, thus embodying t he falseness of the idea that success is achievable by anyone. His characterization is built upon contradictions, the first of which
emanates from the disparity between his firm belief in the American myth of success and his own actual life. The ‘jungle’ of modern urban life, imagized by the brick density of the Loman place, seems to have Darwinian implications: only the fittest will survive… Willy is represented as unfit. Willy’s hamartia or tragic flaw: distorted understanding of life divert him from the way to success, as well as wrong decisions. Overt criticism to the capitalist system. The play deals with the decay, perversion, or destruction of social relationships at family level. Revelations of deficiencies of the capitalist system run parallel to those pertaining to the personal and the familial. Willy evidences consumerist ansiety; distress at having to pay bills or clear a mortgage. Another myth that the play subverts: the open road. The image of the road has traditionally entailed a promise of escape, improvement, self-finding, and return to nature. In Death of a Salesman, the road is not an actual physical space because it is never displayed onstage. Rather, characters speak of it. The play lacks overt manifestations of the Lo man’s Jewishness –Miller had Jewish background. Two central issues at the heart of Jewish-American literature: the family as the fundamental structural and ideological element, and focus on the common man. The play makes use of the following imagery : - The Loman’s home functions as a metaphor for Willy’s ambitions, as well as for his failures. The modern appliances he wants for his house stand for Willy’s idea of success and happiness. - “Loman” evokes the family’s social cla ss. - The stage set, suffocated tall urban constructions, suggest the strain felt by the Lomans. - Willy’s car is an instrument of death and destruction, as well as an image of the reversal of the myth of the open road. - The seeds that Willy unsuccessfully plants stand for his failure in life. - Irony. Dramatic irony = the spectators know more about the action than some of the characters - A house free of mortgage seems to express the modern version of freedom.
REMEMBER: Miller was concerned with the moral condition of ordinary human beings. His plots explore family relations or life in small communities. Death of a Salesman presents a Realist account of the capitalist system and its implications.
7. POSTMODERISM. THE US AFTER WORLD WAR II. Postmodernism began as an attempt to reestablish a homogenized American identity. The end of Second World War marked the beginning of a time of stability and economic prosperity. Americans felt disturbed by the use of the atomic bomb in the name of progress and democracy, history and technology had showed their dark side. Cold War eral Communism was to be suppressed in Asia and elsewhere. Development of transport and communications. Eisenhower assumed the role of restorer of the backbone of American civilization, capitalism, and individualism. After two decades in which Americans had sacrificed for the collective benefit, the cult to the individual returned. It adopted the form of homogeneous consumerism. But economic and social progress did not reach all races –racial ghettos proliferated in the cities. American mainstream ideology was propagated by TV, radio, shows advertising, the film industry and other media: the family system, co nsumerism, prosperity, and protection. A GENERATION OF FURTIVES: THE BEATS Late forties = Beat Generation. The Beat movement rejected mainstream America, it’s a sort of furtiveness. In an effort to assert themselves as independent in every area of life, they embraced and worshipped social outcasts: from blacks to Mexican-americans to psychopaths, drugadicts, and criminals. Literary bohemians; blending of fact and legend in relation to their actual motivations and activities. They lived unorthodox lives, disregarding social and artistic establishments: they rejected white-collar work, the family system, religion. The Beats embraced 19 th century Transcendentalism; they were inheritors of the romantic spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. However, the Beats’ romantic flavor reached beyond their interest in nature as a source of inspiration. Beat writers preferred literary forms scarcely constrained by rigid structures. Subject matters / ideological features: -
Romanticism. Emerson / Thoreau. Their spontaneity and originality were put into practice mostly in painting and jazz. Kerouac and other Beats had an idealized and patronizing view th
of the black race, similar to the romantic racialism of the 19 century. -
Artistic fusion: the Beats were not only a literary movement –filmmakers, musicians, etc.
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Masculinity and youth: the beat spirit tried to recover the essence of the Frontier era: independence, mobility, closeness to nature.
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Transcendence: the Beats sought a method to reach beyond the real world of surface. They pursued altered states of consciousness with drugs and music.
ALLEN GINGSBER: HOWL The poem is a beat manifesto in praise of the American outsiders. It conveys the idea of alienation, and protested the nation’s surrender to t he current conformity and contentment. Gingsber raised scandal for his homosexuality and used of drugs.
The Beats sought spiritual liberation and their compositions echoed this quest. Beat poetry developed out of public readings; its verse is focused on orality. Modernist poetry o ften resorted to phrase and line length to replace metrical feet. Ginsberg would find in jazz a suitable rythmic pattern, he view himself as a messiah with a message to diffuse. -
Use of free verse and long line
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Mechanism to create rhythm: anaphora and parallelism
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Concern with cultural references and allusions
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Denunciation of modern life and regret for its victims
Howl is a literary denunciation of the unbalancing effects of modern c ulture and the Eisenhower period. It depicts a spiritually void America, ruined by “Moloch” –Ginsberg’s image for greed and industrialization. The poem is structured in three parts: the first one censures the lamentable damage done to the poet’s contemporaries; the second one is a poetic charge on the “pure machinery” of Moloch; and the third part extends the boundaries of Rockland –the mental asylum where Carl Solomon was voluntarily confined- to contemporary America. Ginsberg juxtaposes the spiritual poverty of modern life with mental breakdown, soul and reason being equally injured. Walt Whitman’s poetics: long lines, incantory repetitions, and syncopated rhythms. It shows and ‘in crescendo’ tone. Stylistic features: -
Breath units, a poetic and meditative system by which a line takes the linguistic space provided by one physical breath. Breath also function as a measure of life. Each line was independent and unrelated to the poem as a metric whole.
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Anaphora: the initial word or phrase is repeated along two or more lines. “Who” in the first section, “Moloch” in the second, and “I’m with you in Rockland” in the third.
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Parallelism and repetition. Reiteration of i deas and words, sounds, and syntactic structures. Alliteration: “dusks of Brooklyn ashcan rantings and kind king light”
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Juxtaposition of images: incongruous images are fused: “…the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels”.
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Allusions: reference to people or events commonly known by the audience.
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Parataxis: sentences are placed together without co nnective words.
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Paranomasia, or puns. Wall Street = Wailing Wall.
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The poem ends abruptly, unpunctuated.
REMEMBER: The Beat generation had its roots in the conformist spirit of postwar America. Beat artists subverted the homogeneous cultural panorama with works that claimed freedom of thought, speech, and form. Denunciation of modern life.
LITERARY POSTMODERNISM After Second World War; Postmodernism would be a late mode of Mo dernism. Postmodernism however shows an interest in popular art and in marginal discourses and voices. While Modernism
questions reality and one’s perception of it, Postmodernism emphasizes identity and constructions of the self. Differences between Modernist and Postmodernist texts: -
Modernist texts attempted the creation of a design to impose an aesthetic order, while Postmodern texts delight in anarchy.
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During Modernism, meaning and authority were interrelated. When Postmodern thought suspects any form of authority –political, cultural- meaning is devalued.
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While Modernist authors sought newness and uniqueness, Postmodern authors attempt creations that rely on previously created patterns.
All Postmodern texts deny the existence of a universally valid system of belief and c laim the collapse of intellectual authority. Many postmodern works will be invested with a strong epistemological component, as a detective quest. Jacques Derrida states that language itself –the bridge between the self and the world- mediates this relationship. Derrida criticizes the cult for reason or ‘logocentrism’. Language as an arbitrary and volatile system will be present in Po stmodern texts. Frederic Jameson proposes that Postmodernism is the result of late capitalist culture, dominated by corporations and mass media. In a cultural landscape where hyperreality and media eclipse reality, imitation of such reality has ceased to represent a desirable objective of artistic manifestations. The process of art is therefore more attractive than the result of art. Intellectual panorama: -
The complex nature of subjectivity and identity
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The relationship between the real and the imaginary
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Skepticism about knowledge
LITERATURE AND METANARRATIVES Postmoderint questions narrative in its broad sense. In this light history, science, philosophy, religion, etc are interrogated and contested for their claim to universality. If reason and the progress of humanity were behind the atrocities of the World Wars, they could no longer be perceived as legitimizers of other systems of thought. Postmoderism holds t hat there cannot exist one single discourse to apprehend and explain the totality of the world –and only a plurality of discourses can therefore account for a plurality of worlds. The meaning of a text cannot be said to depend on the author.P ostmodernists question the validity of language as sustainable system or as the instrument for the construction of metanarratives. Language is arbitrary, where the ‘sign’ can be attributed a variety of ‘signifieds’. A direct consequence of the growing disbelief in authority are the conspiration theories and paranoia. Metafiction = self-reflexive fiction or fiction that mirrors the process by which it is constructed and read. FRAME-BREAKING A frame is any plan, structure, or support that underlies a lit erary text. Frame-breaking attempts to lay bare these conventional frames. The author emerges as another linguistic construction. Readers
find themselves active parts of the process of m eaning. Intertextual connections. According to Roland Barth, the author becomes another creative construction. THE VOICES OF MINORITIES Despite the political measures proclaimed in the 60s to alleviate racial inequalities and intolerance, racism still haunt the diverse racial communities living in the US. A combination of demographic transformations and cultural movements have brought the voices of minorities to the forefront. Racial and ethnic questions share this space of cultural pluralism with class and gender issues. Notions of identity will play a fundamental part in the imaginative records of dominant and minority groups. From the 60s on, works by Native Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, etc and other silences authors have claimed their version of Americanness. THE IMPACT OF THE MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY If Modernism was highly influenced by contemporary studies on psychology and anthropology, Postmodernism reflects a post-Hiroshima anxiety about science and technology. Communication (highways, TV, computers) became a primary interest. Mass production has also shaped art and our perception of the artistic process. Andy Warhol’s creations were based on consumerism: multiplication of images suggested that culture was becoming a mere accumulation of copies. Intertextuality. Television was changing our modes of perception of reality. The advances in science and technology have activated the emergence of texts which denounce the perverse consequences of modern life. Toxic consciousness = the feeling of waste prevailing in some works. Toxic consciousness goes beyond the attempt to describe the cecaying health of the planet, it refers to our own awareness of environmental decadence, and to the shifting perception of the self in relation to it –environmentalist spirit. THOMAS PYNCHON’S “ENTROPY” Postmodernist literature is called the literature of entropy or chaos because it has rejected the creation of meaning as its main objective. Structurally complex, cryptic, and drawing from popular culture, this narrative mirrors Postmodern life and sensibility in the protagonist paranoiac search for certainty. Pynchon’s works communicate the idea that technological progress is behind modern distress. Contemporary scientific discourse permeates his stories and projects on them the notion of an entropic understanding of the universe. Features: -
Double setting, which entails also a double set of characters and a double perspective in the telling.
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Scientific concept structuring and informing the plot.
The story takes place in Washington DC in 1957. It reflects the Red Scare time, the years in US history when leftist ideas were considered threatening to the welfare of the nation. The characters are engaged in uncertainty and the limits of knowledge. The author stretches scientific concepts in order to apply them to a cultural condition which seems to be reaching its “heat-death” or point of exhaustion of energy.
Broadly speaking, entropy is the random but irreversible tendency of a system to lose energy and run down. But entropy belongs to both thermodynamics and communication theory. Entropy enters the story in its three main definitions: as a measure of randomness in a closed system, the measure of thermal energy not available to work, and the measure of the loss of information in the transmission of a message. Spatial disposition is highly relevant to the story. Pynchon chose a binary setting for the unfolding of events. On the one hand, Meatball’s apartment is what could be defined as a highly disordered place. In scientific terms, it is an open system that harbors diverse forms of energy. Callisto’s apartment, on the other hand, is a closed system designed to resist the heat-death that Callisto presumes outside. Both settings share the suggestion that the uniformity outside and its subsequent decline require some form of opposition, although both attempts (Meatball’s uncontrolled party and Callisto’s hothouse) prove unsuccessful. As the narrative shifts from upstairs to downstairs space, the point of view shifts as well. Ineffectual communication is neutralized by musical patterns in the story. Musical imagery is important in Entropy, for music supplies organized structures of sounds that create meaning and harmony. Characters in Entropy mirror the countercultural ambience that prevailed in the US from the late 50s through the 60s and 70s. Several forms of counterculture or subculture contested the dominant discourse: histories sought by minorities, as the emerging cyberpunk literature, and the conspirational stories that offered alternatives to the established system. Humor is ubiquitous in Pynchon’s prose. He presents absurd situations, unexpected plot turns, and provoking names. He also plays with overloading referentiality of cultural allusions. Bizarre characters and events. Many of the characters are Meatball’s wild party have responsibilities in national institutions. REMEMBER: The Postmodern period reveals an acute questioning of any kind of authority and a deconstruction of meaning. Contestation of traditional understanding of the ‘sign’. Pynchon’s Entropy displays a postmodern trait in its questioning of scientific metanarratives and reason, its defiance of binary oppositions and its challenge of readers’ expectations.
8. THE 1960’S: POETRY AND PROSE OF DISSENT. The 60s –Kennedy’s openness against the monolithic ideology o f the preceding years. Tumultuous moments with human greatness and misery coexisting on equal levels. The nation aimed at cultural homogenization after WW II, however differences emerged everywhere: Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements, Cold War, nuclear threat, space ex ploration, power of the media… and the Vietnam War added a new component of friction. When the anti-war movement exploded in protest against the Vietnam War, so did all the other movements against cold-war containment: the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear peace movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and civ il rights not only for African Americans. In this postwar context, American women saw how the end of the conflict extinguished the aspirations and careers that WW II had encourage, when veterans returned home they recuperated the jobs that women had provisionally occupied. “The Feminine Mystique” was a study of American womanhood. It reflected the frustration experienced by women in domestic roles that undervalued their actual capacities, and questioned the belief system that forced them to find reward and self-fulfillment only in the domestic sphere; a role in which they had to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. The book triggered the second wave of feminism. Despite the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1965, which disallowed racial discrimination in voting practices, racism persisted. A more radical activism emerged, and activists like Malcolm X spread the idea that the black issue should be handled by black people. Some Black Power advocates supported violence as a racial right, and discouraged integration. ADDRIENNE RICH: ‘SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW’ She was intellectually encouraged while she was taught southern manners and female passivity. She therefore felt a sense of contradiction and division: both Jewish and anti-Semitic, educated to conform to stereotypes of feminine behavior and to question, critique. She acknowledged she had been writing under the influence of male forms and themes. Hers is a political poetry. Her early poems already hinted at women’s oppression through imagery of opposing forces, in particular tho se of creativity and domesticity. The formalism she had inherited and imitated, so praised by her male contemporary critics, constricted her awakening feminism in her early stages. Increasingly alert of her complex, sometimes contradictory identity as a poet and a wife, she spend 8 years between her second and third books reflecting on the roles that society had constructed for women. Frustration and a sense of disloyalty provoked a deep feeling of guilt in Rich, who at moments perceived herself as an anti-woman woman. Rich would insistently portray rebellious women who resented their commitment to patriarchal values t hey were contributing to reproduce. A distinc postmodern aspect in Rich’s work is her robust engagement with history and identity. She aims at reviewing the western consciousness she has inherited, from which she declares herself
exclude as a woman and a Jewish. Her growing awareness of women’s historical oppression and subsequent powerlessness has shaped her poetry since the late fifties. Rich has been concerned with another distinctively Postmodern issue: that of language as a social construct, a structure that reveals itself as male-controlled as history. The struggle to find a real female language has condemned woman writers to either adaptation to male discourse or complete silence. “Snapshots of a daughter-in-law” expands the idea of the ‘two minds, two messages’. Features: -
Fragmentary form
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Use of quotation and allusion
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Imagery related to violence
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Challenge to domestic issues
The author writes taking women as the center of her compositions. Its structure, language, and theme aim at liberation from male-dominated patterns and tr aditions. This poem is an overt proclamation of women’s position in society, as each ‘snapshot’ reveals a female state of mi nd. Rich was taught that poetry should be universal, which to her meant ‘non female’. The title of the poem is significant enough for its announcement of the fragmentary contrstruction that follows, caused by an intermittent writing process. They should be viewed as a photograph, a still moment captured from life. Another issue concerning the title is the central figure in it, named after the social role she plays. Such label defines the woman in relation to a system based on heterosexual love and marriage, a conventional discourse that Rich would progressively decry both as a lesbian and as a feminist. The poem’s title suggests that only by marrying a man does the daughter in law exist. A highly literary poem, very academic in the tradition of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and imitative of their allusive style that resorted to the poetic tradition. Indeed, the poem o ffers a profusion of scholarly allusions and quotations. The poem also appropriates traditionally male elements, like the quester and the outdoor scenario. It starts with a passive southern belle and ends with an active challenger, advancing through traditionally female confined spaces of the domestic sphere. ‘Home’ as an ideal space for women is decried in the poem. Home, the national myth of the 50s, is therefore attacked as the center of a masculine system to which women are expected to keep loyalty. In fact, the Women’s Liberation Movement was sometimes associated with Communism in the 50s because they both represented a menace to the American way of life. The final section of the poem envisions the daughter-in-law as a saboteur, or at least as a disloyal interrogator of the sacred institutions of family, marriage, heterosexual romance, or the foundations of patriarchal civilization. Each of the ten ‘snapshots’ of the poem challenge and dismiss preconceptions and stereotypes; they discard those roles and attitudes socially constructed and conventionally attributed to women. For women authors, finding artistic independence requires a symbolic annihilation of patriarchal conceptions of women. Despite her focus and distinctive experiences, Rich avoided the “I” speaker in the poem. She uses a “you” that refers to the daughterin-law figure, central to the poem, as well as to those ‘darlings’ and ‘ladies’ to whom the speaker addresses. The author therefore designates a collective femaleness that finds representation in a “she” figure. The poem displays polivocality, or array of voices, by assuming the vo ices of other
silenced women. It is Rich belief that language is a male instrument, like history and time, which can only shut women down. REMEMBER: Adrienne Rich’s poetry and essays stand out as relevant contributions to the feminist movement of 60s. She became increasingly aware of the gender issues. She uses allusions and quotations to question stereotypes concerning womanhood and raise female consciousness.
LEROI JONES (AMIRI BARAKA’S): DUTCHMAN Literature absorbed and mirrored the dissenting atmosphere of the American 60s. But it was prose, narrative and drama, the mode that best reflected this context, this texture of co nditions and social circumstances from which disagreeing voices were merging. If Adrienne Rich;s work is distinguished by its activism in gender issues, Jones typifies the racial struggle for social rights. Under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra pound, was involved in the Beat movement. He developed an extremist ideology and c hanged his name. The turning point was the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, after which he decided to actively engage in Black Natio nalism. The Black Arts Movement became known as such in the mid 60s when activists of Black Nationalism started to strive for the definition of a Black Asthetic. Art and politics were thus decisively linked in this attempt to repudiate white culture and taste. Artistic expressions were conveived as political instruments. It proposed a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. Black Aestheticians dismissed the work of previous African American writers because of their unconcious ‘imitation’ of white models and values. Jones and other supporters of the Black Asesthetic proposed black music as the sole valid model at the writers’ disposal for the expression of black experience. “Pure” black art would not represent a mere celebration of black heritage, but a form of dissidence and an empowering act. Black Art employed exaggeration and imagery of violence. “Dutchman” features: -
The myths and archetypes that inform the plot and characters
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Symbolic power
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Intertwining of gender, class, and race issues.
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Themes of racial activism
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Violence in its tone and situations
‘Dutchman’ was stage in 1964 and reflects the dissenting 60s. It revealed its author’s revolutionary drive behind the text, and his deep concerns for racial matters. The play focused on and criticized the black middle-class integrationists who had embraced the white ideology and its representations. It’s been defined as a didactic fable. –the play its self is a means to a social end. Allegorical structure. Readings: -
The setting, a subway train, is an expressive strategy; it signifies the exploration of i ssues below the surface of reality.
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Jones makes archetypical patterns, like the descent into darkness, to disclose hidden anxieties.
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The apple is a recurring element. It reinforces the Eveness of the main femal character. Here as in the biblical patter, the symbolic power of the fruit includes both Lula’s body and one’s self-knowledge. Lula is a white liberal who tries to seduce Clay. She attempts to entice him into a sexual encounter that mainly involves an apprehension of his position as a black man in the US. Clay openly admits his approaches to whiteness, which he later rejects.
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Clay’s book is another reference to the Genesis. Clay’s knowledge comes from his readings, and his curse originates in his ability to use such learning in the right way.
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The knife, a phallic weapon for a symbolical sexual encounter. The knife is an instrument of execution.
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The name of the male protagonist alludes to the primary matter of which the first man was made.
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The title refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the doomed captain that perpetually wanders in search of selfless love.
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Lula is female, white, middle-class. Clay is male, black, and ‘fake’ middle class. Jones presented Clay as a man attempting invisibility as a black citizen, and that distinguishes himself with the help of garments and language.
Historical and cultural allusions permeate the play. Minor characters are nameless and mostly voiceless figures. Themes: -
Racial prejudice: racial stereotypes.
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Symbolic fall of the man: in racial as well as in mythological sense, the Dutchman is a representation of the universal theme of loss of grace and innocence. The Genesis is reenacted, portraying Adam and Eve.
9. NEW FICTIONS. POSTMODERN NARRATIVES Mainly, American new fictions have discarded t he reflection, explanation or denunciation of reality in order to reinvent their relationship with it. Both modernism and postmodernism are forms of Realism, that is, modified understandings of reality and its expression. “New fictions” embrace the different fictive responses to a series of literary historical circumstances. Fiction has seeked new ways of reinventing itself –i.e. forcing the readers’ participation in the construction of the text’s meaning. Major approaches to the relationship between reality and fiction: THE FABULATORS A parodical treatment of past literary conventions, making use of inexplicable occurances. “Magic Realism” is frequently used as well to refer to narratives that further explo re the conflicting spheres of reality and fantasy by stating that these share the same space. ‘Fabulation’ describes those narratives that depart from the faithful recreation o f actuality and rather deconstruct their own worlds, governed by their own rules, and therefore free from the restrictions imposed by tradidional narrative frameworks. The decades that followed the end of W W II witnessed a new interest in genres that previously were considered frivolous. Detective fiction, science fiction, westerns, thrillers… Metafictive fictions could enter the class of Fabulist narratives since their aim is not the accurate representation of a shared reality; they rather point inwards. Metafiction is fiction about the writing of fiction. NON-FICTION NOVELISTS In the turbulent 60s, the novel form resented the complexity of current events –Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam War, racial tumults, space t rips; the overwhelming amount of remarkable social and political events defied the imaginative outcome of fiction writers. In addition to writers, journalists encountered a similar obstacle in the task of translating life into text. Both fiction writers and journalists were forced to reconsider their methods, and they arrived to a common space. Fiction and journalisms attempt a reconciliation of categories. i.e. Truman Capote: his non-fiction novel took the form of a novel through a scene-by-scene organization of events, characterization techniques, careful handling of dialogue… This sort of creative journalism has been labeled “new journalism”, or the oxymoron “non-fiction novel”. •
The Realist novelist tries to create a parallel world and says to the reader “all this did not really happen, but it could have”.
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The Fabulator needs only to convince on the basis of the internal cohesion of his purely imaginary worlds, and claims: “All this could never happen, so do not blame me if it does not same real”.
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The New Journalist needs only to convince on the basis of verifiable sources: “All this actually did happened, so do not blame me if it does not seem real”
THE NEW REALISTS The 80s (the ‘me’ decade) had certainly witnessed the American authors’ growing preference for the realist style, particularly in the form of short-story writing. The common events of ordinary experience were placed at the center of writers. The New Realists conform to basic conventions of the Realist style and reproduction of reality. Drivers: -
Market factors that exercise pressure on literary forms –fiction as a commodity
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Class issues; fiction requires an enlarging of audiences.
URSULA LE GUIN’S: “SHE UNNAMES THEM” Author of science fiction and fantastic stories. As a feminist author, she has found in fantasy a suitable space for the reconsideration and reimagination of woman’s position in contemporary American society. Although the volume is a highly heterogeneous combination of fiction, essay and poetry, it contains the repeated idea that oneness with nature has been lost, and that such communion will remain impossible as far as the fallacy of human superiority over no nhuman life persists. Features: -
Its retelling of the myth of Adam and Eve –with a twist
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Its contestation of authority and tradition
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The combination of fantasy and closeness
Magical realism: blends the occurrences of everyday life with surrealism, and in this story animals are granted the capacity to speak, analyze and debate while in an utterly domestic, or normalized scenario. (Ref: Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945) The author subverts accepted notions of reality and offers alternative visions of it. Her interest in anthropology and mythical patterns is present throughout her work. The story also borrows from the Bildungsroman form, a narrative pattern that explores the character’s process of learning or maturity. Growing up and dismissing established values are traditional themes in American literature. This story is a form of re-writing of one of the best-known myths in the western world: the Genesis, and God’s granting Adam the power t o name animals and woman. “She unnames them” uses the original story as its starting point, in the awareness that readers will construct meaning from their knowledge of the previous version. Intertextuality enters the reading of this story because the readers instantly think of the Genesis. A good number of palimpsests attempt to offer a traditionally silenced or ignored point of view. “She unnames them” reveals in its very title those who have been overlooked by the myth. Indeed “She” (woman) and “them” (animals) were, according to the Biblical telling, the ones who received names from Adam without previous consultation. (“She” is dependent on ‘he’). Language shapes reality as much as cultural frames do. The story’s setting remains indistinct enough to recreate the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve. Characters are blurry and unsituated. “She unnames them” is a recreation because a) Its retelling of the myth b) It endorses the creatice figure on the character that has been ignored (Eve) It tells the woman’s part of the story
It’s mock telling deprives the story of its religious overtones. Mixture of surrealist elements with domestic affairs. The association of women and animals – they are grouped in the same category of creatures, with a name imposed by the male human. Western thought has traditionally coupled women and nature, and man equals reason and civilization. Besides the spatial and temporal indefinition, the narrator’s name is omitted too, but cultural background fills the gap, and readers establish the link between Adam and Eve. Le Guin’s story seems to imply the similarities between the rights of women and animals. All kinds of oppression emanate from the same sources. Ecofeminism is the critical approach that examines the relationship feminism and ecology.
RAYMOND CARVER: “CATHEDRAL” His has been termed ‘ dirty realism’ for its in-depth look at the most disagreeable aspects of American life, and for its exploration of the most disturbing side of the American promise. “Minimalist” is another frequent label employed to define Carver’s fiction. Minimalism became a fashionable and very marketable literary option in the 80s. As a literary mode it imploed the distinguishable but simplified imitation of reality, that i s to say, the world’s representation as reduced to a few recognizable segments. Minimalism features: -
Economy of words and detail
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Slight plot and compression of incident
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Openness of form and misleading conclusions
Minimalist is therefore a sort of general understatement of the essential components expected in fiction. Carver preferred the term “ precisionist ”, an artistic movement of the 20s: coldness, precise drawing of situation, stylistic economy. “Cathedral” features: -
Compactness of its style, plot and characterization
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Suffocating atmosphere
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Presentation of the darker side of t he capitalist system
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Importance of televisual culture.
“Cathedral” presents its readers with a first-person, homodiegetic narrator who tells the story in a manner that powerfully resembles oral storytelling. A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed through their actions. He also uses reported speech, to be ironic about his wife’s relationship with the blind man. Homodiegetic narration usually derives in t he reader’s empathy towards the speaker. Carver usually placed his characters in indoors settings in which a menacing atmosphere could be perceived. Carver’s minimalist-precisionist style concerned the description of his characters as well as places and situations. In “Cathedral” the narrator does not provide a description of his wife, and
the blind man is described through his size and his beard. Since the story is narrated in first person, the scarcity of detail casts an air of inarticulateness. Televisual culture: TV in Carver’s works stands as a sign of consumer and media culture, a culture where sensitivity and sensibility are dissolved by audiovisual strategies. Media culture has shaped th
contemporary literature as film techniques did the literature of the early decades of the 20 century. Oversimplification of discourse. Carver’s dirty realism is observed in the self-portrayal of the narrator. The reader progressively places him among the American pariahs, i.e. those who have been left out of the American dream of success and self-fulfillment. Moreover, Carver’s lack of interest in political agendas or social critique intensifies the numbness of his characters’ lives, further deadened by such unawareness or indifference to actual conditions around them. REMEMBER: Carver’s fiction can be defined as belonging to the New Realist, dirty Realist, Minimalist or Precisionist styles. His prose is sparse in detail, meager in character or plot development, and contained in tone.
10. FROM THE ‘MELTING POT’ TO THE ‘MARTINI COCKTAIL’: THE LITERATURES OF MULTICULTURALISM METAPHORES FOR THE ‘E PLURIBUS UNUM’: AMERICAN CULTURAL DIVERSITY “e pluribus unum” or “the one from the many” – the aphorism comprises the multicultural nature of American society. The melting pot was a metaphor which entailed the assimilation to the new territory and the eradication of anything old the newcomer may bring along. The outcome of the melting was a ‘new man’. The violence of the sixties disagreed with the melting pot. The “New American man” rejected any other form of Americanness than non-whites, non-males or non-Anglo Saxons. The liberal ideal of cultural pluralism encountered a harsh context during the Reagan and Bush administrations, when the emphasis was put on the unity of the nation rather than on its diversity. The “Martini Cocktail” refers to the relationship of the permanent presence of two basic ingredients, one of which will remain as the dominant majority. The adjective or noun “American” is one of those controversial terms –the sameness and amalgamation suggested by the term have been challenged by hyphenated constructions such as African-American, etc. Multicultural nature of contemporary American culture: -
Immigration has nurtured US with colonists, pioneers, exiles, and workers. Enslaved men and women enriched the national texture as well
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Though the early years of the 20 century witnessed a Modernist project that was fundamentally Eurocentric and male, it expressed a curiosity about other rhythms, patterns and beliefs.
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The ongoing movements for civil rights strive for the visibility and equality of those who had been previously and systematically silenced.
Assimilation and acculturation are relevant aspects to take into account when dealing with American minorities. The attachment to original roots and the preservation of a non-American identity are manifested in several ways –ghettoes, reservations, etc.. geographical evidence of the resistance to completely lose one’s origins. “American literature” has now broadened its scope to include those social segments that had remained “invisible” –native American, Chicano, French American, Jewish… The trickster figure in Native American writing: a fusion of rogue, fool, and wizard, that resists classification. Native American writers suffered the internal colonization of those who for centuries deprived them of their land and silenced them. American literature largely offered the unique perspective of the colonizers and conquerors, thus overlooking the side of the disposed. American Indian literature can be said to be based on the traditional tales of the manifold tribes that populated North America. Their rituals and their myths, sacred narratives, creation stories and trickster tales have developed into a modern Native American literature that combines tradition and modernity; i.e. the recuperation of harmonious relationship with nature, and the healing power of story telling.
1858 Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty: Arizona, New Mexico, California, Colorado. Mestizaje: fusión of differences. Illuminates the notion of a decentered identity in which its components (race, gender, nation) are in flux, in shifting relationship.
SCOTT MOMADAY: “THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN” “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in or imagination of ourselves”. Initiator of the “Native American Renaissance”; the term implies recovery, but this particular revival also calls for political restitution. Its beginnings are in the mid-60s, when American-Indian activism energized the publication of Native-American poems, stories, etc. He was raised in Indian reservations, exposed to the Pueblo, Navajo and Apache traditions, and familiar with folk-tales of his people t hat had been passed down for generations. He proposed the trope “blood memory” to define identity in imaginative terms. He employed and celebrated blood memory as recuperator of the racial, collective memory passed down through oral tradition, ‘racial memory’. Blood memory thus tropes the conflating of storytelling, imagination, memory and genealogy. The contemporary Indian writer renders himself coincident with indigenous ancestors and with indigenous history. It blends the traditional elements of oral discourse with modern tactics. “The way to rainy mountain” was initially a collection of legends, tales, and family stories. Features: -
Orality as a fundamental component in story telling and in the formation of identity
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The connection between the one and the many
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The approach to nature
“The Way to Rainy Mountain” in Momaday’s narration of an actual pilgrimage across Kiowa’s landscapes and its parallel mnemonic and historical-anthropological journeys. This work is then a gathering up of all these processes with a view to reconstruct Native American identity in an imaginative dimension. Deliberate blending of legend, personal narrative, and documentary. Exploration of identity; “autobiographical writing”. This work first strikes the reader for its surpriseing form. It shows a collage technique by which disparate texts seem to have been cut and pasted toegehter. Its innovative disposition challenges traditional conventions of storytelling and reading, since both authors and readers alike are used to one linear, sequential narrative where events are reported. Momaday bracketed the text with an opening and a closing poem. Myth, history, and personal account are displayed simultaneously. What the author hisself labeled “commentaries” –the historical and personal ftragments adjacent to the main, mythical text- “are meant to provide a context in which the elements of oral tradition might transcend the categorical limits of prehistory, anonymity, etc. As the exercise in blood memory it is, the text manifests that Native American identity has to be imagined. Quest is therefore the attire that Momaday puts on this mythical journey, a pilgrimage towards the recovery and restitution of lost harmony. The journey motif is ubiquitious in American literature. Native American tribes used to move around North America in search of food, or as a sort of collective ritual. Travel, as a result, was an important part of their storytelling.
Momaday’s work reveals the environmental mindedness of Native American people. Indian ecoliterature. Free of patterns of intellectual o r exploitative domination perceived in Euramerican writing, they respect and venerate the earth and the feminine principle associated with it. REMEMBER: Native American renaissance (1068). He uses blood memory as thematic constant in his work. Motifs in Native American literature” the mythic power of orality, the search for roots and identity, and the harmonious relationship with nature.
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER: “THE WITCH’S HUSBAND” Geographic, linguistic, religious and gender crossings have h ad an immense influence on the producti on of Latin American literature. Judith Ortiz Cofer is defined by her in-betweenness, for she does not consider herself outside the United States nor the Puerto Rican culture but in between two traditions. The reading of her work manifests her “transnational” approach to questions of identity, neither assimilationist to the dominant culture of the United States, neither oppositional. As with other ethnic writers, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s work deals with culture as handed down from woman to woman through storytelling. Her novels and stories are woman-centered, woman-fabricated, and woman-organized. Features: -
Instances of bi-culturalism
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Emphasis on oral culture and tradition
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Representation of gender types
Ortiz Cofer’s “The Witche’s Husband” discusses a family’s private history. She evidences her biculturalism in her choice of words. Uses English but raised in a Spanish-speaking household. She shows her i nterest in ‘mestizaje’, in blending assumed opposites and crossing boundaries. Her a ttention mainly focuses on the shifting and overlapping components of identity. The witch figure hints a gender-related issue. Gender and nationhood are particularly interesting in this story, for they communicate the particular understanding of feminism that a number of Puerto Rican women writers share. She is suggestively portrayed as a witch-healer with wonderful secret skills but, unlike the witch in the story –and in popular imagination- she shows a thorough dedication yto her family and her community. Attention should be paid to the remarkable physical reality that separates mainland Puerto Ricans from their homeland. The Texas-Mexican border whose circumstances configured Anzaldua’s consciousness differs from the Puerto Rican-mainland border, which is a liquid border, not a land formation. Therefore, those Puerto Ricans who live in the mainland lack the peculiar sensation of physically living on a borderland. Magic Realism = offers a new understanding of reality and the procedures to recreate it. “The Witche’s Husband” being a borderland text, fuses the tradition of South American Magic Realism with the Gothic tradition. She appropriates the Gothic themes and styles of such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry James, and transplants them into Puerto Rican folklore. The oral tradition plays in The Witch’s Husband the same significant oart as in Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. It is a tradition composed of myth, folklore, and public and private stories. Memory and cultural identity are strongly connected to femininity. Solidarity among women. Domesticity is colored with suggestive hints of witch-healing practices.
