Interplay of dialect and descriptive prose

Posted on by

As I read Hurston for this time, as with the short story of hers that we read, the novel’s parallel regional dialect and more formal descriptive prose struck me. It occurred to me that reading these two tones of language alongside each other is like listening to a symphony: first, you might hear the more expressive, upbeat, jolty part of the music, and then it slows to a flowing, more pensive section that somehow seems to explain or contextualize the first. For example, Janie’s utterance to her grandmother that “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…'” is very evocative of her sense of mourning in and of itself (24). However, this feeling of mourning and disappointment is enriched by the text that follows shortly after, which I find absolutely transcendent:

“She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind….She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making….She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25).

Janie “knew” all of the above, but she couldn’t say it all to her grandmother; neither would her grandmother want to hear it, nor might Janie be able to communicate this newly acquired wisdom to anyone other than herself. I love the way Hurston lets us into Janie’s conscience here, without necessarily breaking down that divide that still exists for her between her inner self and the characters around her.

Becoming a Woman

Posted on by

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston embodies the modernist idea of the “new woman” in the character of Janie Crawford. Even in the first few chapters, we sense that Janie is a woman who is inclined to do what she wants and for her own pleasure. Although her two marriages in the first six chapters are ultimately failures, they act more as stepping-stones for Janie to discover herself: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25). Hurston suggests that Janie is learning about herself, learning what she does and does not like, and in that process, she is becoming an independent woman.

Nonetheless, Janie struggles between what she wants and what society expects from a woman. She hates when Joe Starks bosses her around, but she also feels the need to please him and obey him because that is what is expected of a wife:

“Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn’t too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, but didn’t know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold.” (43)

Janie’s struggle is reminiscent of Larsen’s Helga in Quicksand: both characters desire something, whether it is sex or independence, but the internalized rules of society prevent either from immediately achieving it. However, Janie’s internal monologue is much more reflective than Helga’s, and we sense that she has the potential to truly become that “new woman.”

Parallel Worlds in Isherwood

Posted on by

One of the most noticeable things in Berlin Stories to me was the idea of side-by-side metropolitan worlds. In the scene in which Frl. Schroeder and Frl. Mayr are eavesdropping on their Jewish downstairs neighbor, around pg. 216, the scene—thin boundaries around personal, urban lives—became especially conspicuous to me. One of the things I remember hearing about frequently while studying abroad was the many, side-by-side worlds coexisting in an old college town, all the conglomerated stories and histories divided by a door or a hallway. That’s where all the fantasy stories of parallel worlds and mystic passages just around the next corner come from, says popular university legend.

 

That romanticized view of many lives and histories is portrayed in a much less fluffed and idealized rendition in this scene. An “ardent Nazi” revels in overhearing the suffering of a neighbor; that neighbor has eliminated personal boundaries in her life by “advertising for a husband” in the paper. The publicity of the neighbor’s private pain—the gleeful public entertainment of her pain being accessible—was a different kind of “parallel world,” but one in which the word parallel is misleading. A parallel world wouldn’t intersect with its parallel, wouldn’t connect or have an effect on. The tragedy in Isherwood—and the unreality he describes near the end of Goodbye to Berlin—is that these separate lives, jammed up against one another, are not parallel, but have a real and frightening impact on one another, that real moment of personal pain by a neighbor expanding and intensifying on a terrifying scale.

From Walter Benjamin’s “Theses On the Concept of History”: Theses V and IX

Posted on by

Question for the Class:

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?

Thesis V:

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

 

Thesis IX:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

 

Coll IMJ, photo (c) IMJ

Why do these parables/ideas about the meaning of History relate to Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin?

Narrator or Author

Posted on by

In our last class we discussed the line that exists between the author and the narrator. The narrator of a story is just another character of the novel. All the opinions and thoughts expressed by the narrator do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author. This was one of the critics expressed by Du Bois for Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Thurman’s narrator would both criticize Emma Lou, while at the same time express her thoughts, almost always self-hating, as his/her own opinions.  In these instances it can be difficult to distinguish the author from the narrator. Had the novel been in the first person point of view, from Emma Lou’s perspective, there would not have been any accusations towards Thurman. Another example provided in class was Nabokov’s famous work, Lolita. In this case as well, the narrator, who also happens to be the main character, is often confused for the author. This caused Nabokov a lot of problems as well as creating a lot of controversy.

This brings me to The Berlin Stories. In this case the author and the narrator both share the same name and a lot of other similarities, including the experiences mentioned in the novel. Since the work is fiction, are we as the readers supposed to separate the author or from the narrator? This is made very difficult with the fact that they both share a name.

Something else I found very interesting was the fact that this is the first piece or writing that has the average man as the storyteller. Stories such as The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men have this same man. In The Great Gatsby the main character is Gatsby, but the narrator, who is also a character in the story, is Nick Carraway and in All the King’s Men, the story is about Willie Stark but the story is told by Jack Burden. Up until now, we have only had an unknown, invisible character as the narrator. This is the first instance of a character being a vessel to tell the stories of other people, such as Sally Bowles. The Berlin Stories, were published in 1945, maybe this technique is a more recent development.

Staring

Posted on by

Deemed a “monstrosity” (192) by his own mother, Alva Junior is an unfortunate, misshapen creature, with “a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot.” (192). Even the narrator refers to Alva Junior as an “it” (192), rather than using the more humanizing pronoun “he.” Alva Junior is presented as an object, a product of the shallow, loveless union between Alva and Geraldine. To further develop Alva Junior’s role as an object, the child is completely static and lifeless, for “it neither talked or walked.” He is both figuratively and literally a burden and for people who place such a premium on physical appearance, Alva Junior  is a cruel and ironic existence– a bad joke with “thick grinning lips” (192). If Alva Junior has inherited anything from his parents, its is  perhaps his “insanely large and vacant eyes” (192), for that empty gaze is reminiscent of how Alva, Geraldine (and perhaps their peers) live: forever fixated on someone’s appearance and the color of the color of his or her skin.

Let us now turn to Alva Junior and Emma Lou. As readers, we can’t help but shake our heads in disapproval when she decides to return to Alva Senior. She takes responsibility of Alva Junior, and under her care, manages “to make little Alva Junior take on some of the physical aspects of a normal child” (208). At first glance, he seems to be getting better, yet the one thing that doesn’t change is “his abnormally large eyes” which “still retained their insane stare” and “appeared frozen and terrified as if their owner was gazing upon some horrible yet fascinating object or occurrence” (208). What is the “horrible yet fascinating object” that the child is looking at? Emma Lou? His father? The society that he will have to grow up in? If children are the future, than the future seems to be portrayed as horribly grotesque.

We can explore another dimension to Alva Jr’s symbolism if we agree that Alva Junior is a caricature of Black society and its obsession with skin tone (as discussed in the first paragraph). If this true, then can’t we also say that his relationship with Emma Lou is metaphorical of her relationship with the rest of society? Her decision to stay with Alava Junior is in a way self destructive because although she “loved to fondle [Alva Junior’s] warm, mellow-colored body, loved to caress his little crooked limbs” (211),  her actions and affections place her in the stereotypical role of “a black mammy,” something that she even admits to on page 218. This is perhaps analogous to the catch 22 of wanting to be part of a system that will only spurn and marginalize you in the end.

New Women

Posted on by

The character of Sally in The Berlin Stories helped me to gain a better understanding of Modernism’s New Woman. As I was reading I began to see the essence of Sally in several of the female characters in modernist literature. I thought of Sally Seton from Mrs. Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan from the The Great Gatsby, Kitty Baldry from The Return of the Soldier, Lily from The House of Mirth, Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun also Rises, Petronella from “Till September Petronella.” (Although not within the modernist time frame, I also thought of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s because of the parallels in the relationship between Holly and the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the relationship between Sally and Chris.)

Notwithstanding the individuality of these women, to varying degrees they share very similar characteristics and personality traits. They are sexaully liberated and are very aware of the power of their bodies to their male counterparts and even to themselves. They are explicit in their desires. They are outspoken. They are at times selfish. Their personalities are sometimes dramatic and purposely exaggerated as if they constantly have to perform to an audience. They are also clever and skilled at manipulation if not checked by other characters. One thing that is important to note is that they are also all seemingly white.

Is Emma Lou a New Woman? Are there Black female characters in modernist literature that are New Women? We have discussed in class the supposed responsibility put upon Black writers to be representative of their race. There were damaging stereotypes that plagued Black women at the time. These writers must “uplift” the race. Does that mean not including women characters that share the characteristics of New Woman? I think Emma Lou is a type of New Woman.

 

Goodbye to Berlin: A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930), Fraulein Schroeder

Posted on by

In the first “A Berlin Diary”, the reader meets Isherwood’s fictitious version of himself and his initial experience of Berlin before the political changes that Nazism brings to Germany, which grows more apparent in the environment and the text itself as the story continues. One of the first characters the readers meet is Frl. Schroeder, a kind and caring landlady. She is endearing in the fact that she acts like a motherly figure to Isherwood after he moves into the boarding house.

Her dialogue with Isherwood is not only intimate and personal, but shows a bit of how she and the city have changed. She is not just a character meant to introduce the scene before Nazi Germany, but introduce the history and how things have initially started changing. However, she in no way is a negative figure or cast in a negative life; it is as if she is meant to reflect his initial view of Berlin and Germany and its peoples, that originally the citizens were just like citizens of any other learned European country. Frl. Schroeder reflects that in being a kind, caring, older feminine figure that everyone can relate to; a sort of maternal figure. The dialogue that they share, whether it be her telling him something about herself or their being a conversation together, that though culturally Germany and England are different (he tells Frl. Hippi he finds that German and English girls are “very different” (222)), the people are relatable to and are not inherently different. Frl. Schroeder, though later shows a jealous and angry side of herself, is meant to set the stage for the story and how Isherwood’s experience in Berlin shifts from “home life” to war.

Redemption

Posted on by

Strangely enough (or at least strange for me) neither ending of “Quicksand” nor that of The Blacker the Berry provided the full redemption for our protagonist. I found myself disappointed as Emma Lou became determined to return with Alva (“You mean you’re going over there to live with that man?” “Why not? I love him.” (207)). For Helga, in “Quicksand”, it was a logical move that her ultimate fall from grace – as she found her sexuality – would lead her to her ultimate demise. For Emma Lou though, her experiences with Campbell Kitchen and Gwendolyn seemed to ultimately offer her some insight into her behavior, “It was clear to her at last that she had exercised the same discrimination against her man and the people she wished for friends that they had exercised against her – and with less reason” (218). Even after coming to this realization, though, Emma Lou decides to return to Alva and only does the scene at the door change her decision. As she spots the drunken men around her, “She suddenly felt an immense compassion for him and had difficulty in stifling an unwelcome urge to take him in her arms” (220) after she is already determined to leave Alva. The constant debate in her mind show that her realizations could also be short lived.
There is no sense of redemption as Emma Lou exits and leaves Alva. She confesses to herself that she must accept her Black skin (“What she needed to do now was to accept her black skin as being real and unchangeable…” (217)); however this realization comes rather hurried in the novel, making this ending uneasy. When Emma Lou exits, it seems as she ultimately has not changed. When the “tears in her eyes receded…she felt herself hardening inside” (221). This “hardening” protects Emma Lou for the hurt that will result from leaving the person who she loves, but it does not signal to a beginning where she will accept her skin and change her behavior.