So What Actually is up with _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_?

I have to admit, I wasn't super moved by Romantic poetry when we first started reading it. I can appreciate that at the time it was kind of revolutionary to write in common language, to revere nature and "simple people" as subject matters, to give so much importance to the experience of the individual, but I honestly didn't really get any real sense of passion from the earlier poems we read. From what I have learned about the Romantic movement from past history and music classes I've taken, this sense of passion, whether positive or negative, created from the experience of man in nature, is one of the most important aspects of the movement, but I was starting to doubt that that applied really to Romantic poetry, until, however, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner completely proved me wrong. In this poem nature is constantly inspiring profound emotions, in both the Ancient Mariner, and the experience of the reader - it struck me as a truly Romantic piece, at least by my perception of Romanticism, and so for this week's post I wanted to look at how this poem embodied Romantic ideas.

Going off of what I've studied about Romantic music, the Romantic movement in the arts originated as kind of a reaction to the preceding Classical movement. The Classical movement was largely defined by strict adherence to standard forms - a piece of music or other form of art was considered aesthetically pleasing and beautiful if it achieved a sense of balance and resolution, it was very much guided by logic and order. Early Romantics however started to veer away from this definition of beauty toward an idea of beauty as reflecting the individual's true experience, which was often too complicated to be balanced and where neat resolution wasn't always realistic, and as a result, started to veer away from tho strict forms. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in 1798 as part of the Lyrical Ballads collection of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and is thus considered to be the earliest true Romantic work - so it was at the point where older forms hadn't been completely abandoned, but instead were used in more non-traditional ways, which definitely applies to the form of this poem. This poem is considered to be in the form of a ballad. According to traditional form, the ballad is composed of quatrains, four-line stanzas, that rhyme the second and fourth lines (abcb rhyme scheme), with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (four iambs) and iambic trimeter (three iambs) ("Ballad"). The poem starts out adhering pretty strictly to this form - the entire Part I is composed of these quatrains, and an example of the scansion would be:
  x     /      x     /    x  /   x     /
The sun came up upon the left,            (a)
  x    /   x     /     x     /
Out of the sea came he!                        (b)
  x     /      x         /     x    /   x     /
And he shone bright and on the right   (c)
    x      /      x /   x    /
Went down into the sea                        (b)  (Coleridge 1.28-32)

However, as the poem progresses, the poem starts to stick to this form less and less, with stanzas of five or six lines, and rhyme schemes that didn't always rhyme alternating lines, and then in Part VI the poem even takes on a form of dialogue between the First and Second Voices. It is interesting though because toward the end of the poem, as the Mariner gradually makes it back to land and receives his penance, the form starts to go back to following the standard form, which suggests maybe some sort of resolution after all.

Here's an illustration that I thought really embodied this
personification of nature: "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Plate 6: The Ice Was All Around"
By Gustav Doré

Even though the poem follows a traditional form for the most part, the way the subject matter is portrayed within this form is strikingly new and Romantic. A large part of this is the way nature is personified in many ways throughout the poem. The stanza in the example above portrays the sun as masculine, giving a sense of brightness and power and order. However, later on in Part I, forces of nature start to be portrayed as more monstrous: "The ice was all around:/ It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,/ Like noises in a swound!" (Coleridge Part I, 379)). After the Mariner kills the Albatross and the ensuing curse sets in, nature is described as rather hellish and uncompromising: "All in a hot and copper sky, the bloody Sun..." and "Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink" (Coleridge Part II, 381). It's also interesting because the forces of nature in the movement of the sun and the moon are what provide a sense of order to the poem by giving a sense of the time passing. In Part VI, the surroundings are described in relation to the moon - the bright eye of the ocean is cast toward the moon, the eyes of the dead men are described as glittering in the moon, the moonlight and shadow of the moon is reflected on the harbor - the moon seems to be a source of vision.

Another notably Romantic aspect of the subject matter is the overwhelming sense of fantasy. In this poem, fantasy arises in the form of surreal, almost nightmarish visions. We see first the vision of the skeleton ship with the Life-in-Death spectre-woman and her mate Death: "The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,/Who ticks man's blood with cold" (Coleridge 383). In Part V, the ship starts moving because of the force of a spirit: "From the land of mist and snow,/ The Spirit slid: and it was he/ That made the ship to go" (389). The voices that appear in the end of Part V through Part VI, according to the annotation, are "The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons" provide the verdict on the Mariner's penance. And then the mysterious figure of the Hermit in the Woods guides the Pilot and Mariner to land and frees the Mariner from the burden of his guilt by commencing his penance sentence.

The deviance from standard form, the strong emotional imagery created with nature, and the use of elements of the fantastical as the driving forces behind the plot and development of the poem are all big examples of Romanticism at work in this poem. The poem is also Romantic overall in its general lack of resolution - while the Mariner sins and is punished for his sins, it is never made clear his motives for killing the Albatross, and so it is hard to glean a clear moral-of-the-story from the poem (except maybe to not kill good omens - but why, why??). I think this might be intentionally vague, to suggest that human nature isn't always rational, that maybe the experience of the individual during their personal journey is maybe more important than the outcome of this journey, that instead of striving to achieve perfect harmony and establishment of the "good" and the "right", this uncertainty and wildness of emotion, though often terrifying, are more representative of true beauty.

Works Cited

"Ballad". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 14 Nov 2013. 22 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad#Ballad_form>.

Coleridge, Samuel. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Six Centuries of Great Poetry. Erskine, Albert and Robert Penn Warren. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992. 377-397. Print.

Is John the Savage Jesus?

I just finished Brave New World, and I gotta admit, I didn't think it could give a more cynical view of society, couldn't see how more twisted it could get, but these last couple of chapters totally blew the rest of it out of the water. I was impressed, really impressed, by just how crazy that perfectly content, completely boring society managed to get. John the Savage's ending didn't surprise me a whole lot though, honestly you could kind of see it coming, there was no way he was ever going to be able to escape civilization. I was interested in thinking about what his death might have represented though, especially in the context of the final "orgy-porgy" that took place.

I wouldn't proclaim myself an archetypal critic by any means, but I've studied archetypes in literature a little bit before and I think it's an incredibly interesting concept. Archetypes are basically categories of characters, each of them serve a specific function in the context of the text, and undergo the same sorts of transformations or journeys that have been found in many types of literature across cultures and history. This commonality is often used to make an argument for the existence of a collective unconscious, suggesting that these characters and what they go through represent something fundamental about the human experience, that we have these innate aspirations and history that we are born with, that get projected into the stories we tell. I don't know if I think that's all true necessarily, but I think it can be pretty cool to look for these different archetypes in novels.

So looking back on Brave New World, especially after that final chapter, the first archetype that popped out to me was the sacrificial archetype, which John seemed like he might fit. There are two kinds of sacrificial archetypes, at least that I know of, the sacrificial redeemer, and the scapegoat. The sacrificial redeemer comes bearing some knowledge, with the intention of enlightening a society (or even just a group of characters) with this knowledge, but in order to truly redeem the society, must die (or sacrifice something else major besides life) for their beliefs. This figure is similar to Jesus in the biblical story. The scapegoat, however, is a character that gets singled out and blamed for something negative about society, often unjustly, and is eventually killed to remove this negative aspect of society.

Here's an artistic representation of John on the mesa that
I really liked: "John ''The Savage'" by Rachel Davey

From when we first meet John, the things we find out about him and the way he is described make him out to maybe be a prophetic character of sorts. He describes the realization he had when he spent the night alone on the mesa, thinking about how easy it would be for him to kill himself but deciding not to: "He had discovered Time and Death and God" (Huxley 127). When John travels to London, his intention isn't necessarily to "save" them - at first he's excited to see this "brave new world" with people as perfectly beautiful as Lenina in it. After Lenina throws herself sexually at John, and after the children at the Hospital for the Dying show such disrespect (as John sees it) when Linda dies, the evils of the civilized world become increasingly unacceptable to him. It is finally at the soma distribution scene that we first see John become motivated to try to make a change in the society: "Linda had died; others should live in freedom and the world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do..." (191). John tries, though in vain, to reveal to the masses how enslaved they are to soma, how it is being used to control their lives, but their conditioning is so deeply ingrained that John has catastrophic results with "those he had come to save" (192).

John still holds fast to his view of morality however, and we see this put to the test in his discussion about God with Mustapha Mond. While Mond is arguing the necessity of sacrificing the individual for the sake of society, of the need to abolish strong emotions to endue stability, John sticks to his justification of his beliefs (though these beliefs were fed to him by Shakespeare): "it is natural to belief in God" (211), "If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices" (212), "God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic" (213), "tears are necessary" (213", and ultimately, "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin" (215). Essentially what John is arguing for is the right to be fully human, the view that, in his eyes, the freedom to be an individual is more important than the stability of society.

But John gets banished. Granted, he wants to be banished, but regardless, he fails to save civilization. Instead he eats it (whatever that means, I'm still not clear about that part). At the lighthouse, we start to see signs that John is going to be a sacrificial character or sorts. In attempt to purify himself, he holds his arms out "as though he were on a Cross", in a sort of "voluntary crucifixion" (218). He is trying to get himself back grounded to his original purpose, to remember Linda and what her death represented, "to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life" (221). Yet he can't escape civilized life - the reporters swarm, his every action is recorded and broadcasted by cameras wiring the surroundings - civilization is quite literally infesting his life, and eventually he kills himself in order to free himself. John gave the ultimate sacrifice in order to stay true to his beliefs.

But the nature of John's death and its function in the novel makes his character deviate from the sacrificial redeemer archetype. It isn't made totally clear, because the novel ends with his death, what impact his death had - does it allow society to realize their flaws and save themselves from the evils John saw in them, or does his death allow society to overcome the last negative obstacle in achieving stability? The latter is more probable, but we never do find out. However, the "orgy of atonement" (230) as it is referred to when the hordes that came to see the Savage all start whipping themselves, could provide an argument for redemption. It is suggested that perhaps the crowds were ready to be saved through John's means: "Drawn by the fascination of the horror and pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement"(230). And, they do ultimately experience true pain and suffering (presumably), which is a large part of what John was arguing for. But then all that we are told about the outcome of this mass atonement is that it was all over the papers the next day - we don't know how, or if even, this event changes society, so you can't ever really tell whether John was successful in saving civilization with his ideals as a sacrificial redeemer, or if he was a scapegoat and the the removal of his ideals from civilization is what saved it. But I think this intentionally left unclear. John isn't portrayed as a true prophet, all of his ideas are just Shakespeare quotes, and as Mustapha says, "One believes in things because one has been conditioned to believe them" (211). In the end we are not left with a clear idea of what is right and what is wrong, who the good guys and bad guys are, instead the greater idea that we are left with is that morality is subjective.

So this kind of shows the limitations of archetypal criticism - they don't always hold true. It would be interesting to see how modern and post-modern literature adheres to archetypes, if they're even still prominent. But I do still like to believe in the idea of a collective unconscious, as that could be one of our biggest tools to keep our society from going down the path we saw in Brave New World.

Mother (*gasp!*) Nature in _Brave New World_

I've never really been the type of person that is in to futuristic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-themed stuff - I wasn't into sci-fi books growing up, never got the whole zombie craze, apocalyptic blockbusters never appealed to me. I don't really know why, call me old-fashioned, but the idea of a techno-future is just not that interesting to me. So I've kind of had mixed feelings about Brave New World. I'm impressed by how convincing the utopian dystopia Huxley created is - it really does seem like a pretty feasible society, one that I probably wouldn't mind living in if I had been born into it. But it seems a little bit too false - the characters are mostly robotic, but they're pretty harmless, really, so while I think that Bernard's rebellion is noble, he doesn't strike me as some grand hero. I guess Huxley makes his point pretty well, that freedom is better than stability, that pain and agony is necessary to ever feel true happiness, but it just hasn't really moved me. Maybe it's because I'm too much of an optimist, and the society in Brave New World doesn't really seem to me like anything that could ever possibly exist, but I do understand how at the time it was published this sort of reality could have seemed fathomable. So I guess it's a good thing that it doesn't seem like we'll end up in this brave new world after all, maybe that's progress?

What had really struck me though reading this so far is the way aspects of our current life are seen in this future world - Jesus, marriage, families, love - they're usually seen as disgusting and backward, something this new civilization has triumphed over. However, there is still one thing that this world can't seem to completely rob of its power, the same force that is one of the only forces still posing a major threat to our society today, and that is nature.

At first we are led to believe that nature has been conquered, that it is some old nuisance that human advancement has gotten the better of. We first see nature in the first paragraph in the form of a "harsh thin light", "hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose flesh". Nature is looking for something organic, something to feed on, to decay, but instead it only finds "the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of the laboratory" - though the light still gets in, it is easily deflected by the technology of the lab - "wintriness responded to wintriness" (Huxley 15). We see nature portrayed as distracting, peoples' enjoyment of it keeping them from fulfilling their maximum productivity, their maximum consumption - but this is easily overcome by conditioning, by shocking babies when they see roses, because "a love of nature keeps no factories busy" (Huxley 31).  We even see nature portrayed as boring, something that used to limit us, but now is pathetic in comparison to our science: while once people used to breed like animals, the pleasure of sex led to birth and babies and other unthinkable things, now they can be guaranteed sterile, and people can have as much sex as they want with none (for the most part) of the unpleasant consequences. After all, "fertility is a nuisance", and science has brought humanity, at last, "out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention" (Huxley 23).

Davidson, Daniel.
Brave New World Ocean Scene. 2012.

But nature is still there, no matter how tall buildings are built, no matter how many helicopters fill the sky, there is still a natural environment that can't be entirely avoided, and this starts to pop up more and more as the novel progresses.

Nature first starts to present itself as a disturbing force when Bernard takes Lenina to look at the ocean. Lenina is deeply troubled by the power of the ocean and the night, seeing is as almost monstrous, with the "rushing emptiness of the night", "the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them", "the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracting among the hastening clouds" (Huxley 89). Bernard came to look at the sea to feel peaceful, and indeed most of us would see the moon behind clouds over the ocean at night as calm, beautiful, almost meditative, but Lenina's response to this scene shows the great power nature has to upset the emotional flatness that is so key to this society's stability.

This, poor Lenina soon finds, is nothing compared to the powers of the natural world at work in the savage reservation. Here Nature as a vehicle for death and decay and filth is running rampant, and Lenina witnesses for the first time what the reality is of living in Nature without modern science to protect and preserve you - she sees what old age looks like, she sees the ever-indecent spectacle of mothers nursing babies, she sees disease, she sees dead dogs and women pick lice out of their children's hair. (This part reminded me a lot of the story of Buddha and the Four Sights, when Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, first left his hyper-protective palace and along the way saw aging, disease, and death for the first time, before seeing a man who was abstaining from indulgence as a way to escape suffering, that in turn inspired his consequent spiritual journey - just a side note, which could maybe provide some interesting comparison depending how the novel progresses from here).

This almost sickening portrayal of the effects of nature provides a pretty convincing argument for the benefit of living in the cleanliness and comfort of the new world. It seems kind of impossible how one could prefer to live in this apparent squalor over it, and for a brief period of time we see how maybe nature is holding us back after all. However, we see a similar effect of the ocean scene on Lenina with John that reveals the still-persisting threat that nature can pose. This scene involves John's experience when he spent the night alone on top of the mesa. John was banished from the rest of the men and is received by Nature, and we for the first time really face death - Nature's ultimate triumph over all, even these modern super-humans. In this scene, the landscape is portrayed very much as a valley of death: "The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight", "this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight", "he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of death" (Huxley 127).

And this shows the threat nature poses to this new society that is perhaps greater than death - it is the power of nature to inspire self-reflection. It is a source of contemplation, which is why Bernard finds peace in watching the ocean - when you are in nature and nothing else is there to distract you, the only thing you have left to face is yourself, which is exactly what this society works so hard to prevent from happening - the individual in solitude. It is because John was completely alone and had nothing to turn to but nature that "he had discovered Time and Death and God" - arguably three of the most heretic concepts in the new world, which is the real reason that Nature is the ultimate enemy of this society. It will be interesting to see what role this enemy plays in the future of this novel, and I'm wondering if this enemy will be the ultimate defeater of their race after all.

Liminality and the Lighthouse

I just finished To the Lighthouse, and now that it has been wrapped up (or maybe more rounded off, since there wasn't really any clear resolution), it's interesting to look at the novel as a whole. It left a big impression on me, and no matter what people thought of the novel, I think everyone can agree that it was nothing like the novels we're used to. A big part of what struck me about it was the heavily visual style of it - it felt almost like reading a painting more than a story, if that makes sense. When we talked in class about the concept of liminality, I starting noticing more and more how space is used to describe characters and images in the novel. The term liminality refers to the period of being at a threshold, of being neither here nor there - emphasizing the blurred  in-between space instead of a clear location. This idea helped me understand the characters in a new way, and got me thinking that maybe one of the points of this novel (if there are any clear points), is the emphasis of the characters being in this liminal state - not entirely sure how to define where they are in life, they always seem to be searching but not quite getting there.

One way the idea of liminality appears in the novel is the emphasis on distance between objects or people. This comes up a lot in the scene at the dinner table, where the space between people sitting is mentioned frequently. Sometimes the space between people is portrayed positively, as a means of connection. When Mrs. Ramsay first walks into the room, she notices, "Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her" (Woolf 126). There is a tension at dinner for a while, everyone feels something is lacking, there is an inability to connect. When the fruit plate is brought out however, and the candles are lit, everyone is brought together by the space between them being filled: "Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table" (Woolf 146). In this case the space between characters needs to be turned into a threshold, a channel through which people across distances can feel like they can reach each other. The creation of this in-between force in turn established boundaries, provided comfort in making clear what is "here" and what is "there": "inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily" (Woolf 147).

Along with being portrayed as a uniting force, liminality is also portrayed as a source of vitality - the uncertainty of being in an in-between state creates a sort of freedom, a potential for make things happen, to decide how and what will be reached on the other side. This appears at the dinner as well, when everyone is waiting for Paul and Minta to come in: "Lily Briscoe, trying to analyze the cause of the sudden exhiliration, compared it with that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly vanished, and such vast spaces lay between them; and now the same effect was got by the many candles in the sparsely furnished room" (Woolf 147). In the final scene when Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James are on the boat, Cam experiences this sense of excitement in being on the sea, in between the home island and the lighthouse: "What then came next? Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there)" (Woolf 280). Cam seems to be tired of her father and James worrying so much about destinations - Mr. Ramsay worrying over compass points, James determined to prove a point to his father - Cam seems to want to be free from this worry and relish in the possibilities that lie in being in an in-between state. To Cam, being on the boat, in between, makes her realize the value of that space: "The sea was now more important than the shore" (Woolf 284).

Here is a photograph of the lighthouse from Upton Towans Beach that is said to have been the inspiration for
Woolf's novel - apparently a small stretch of it was auctioned off for $129,336 back in 2009.

Cam serves as a contrast to most of the other characters though in how they feel about being in this in-between space - for most of them are consumed by how to get from one place to another. Mr. Ramsay is stuck between Q and R, and sees himself as on a heroic expedition to make it through the in-between space to reach R and maybe one day Z. Lily's search throughout the whole novel is to find a way in her painting to connect the masses on the left with the masses on the right. The ultimate destination however, is the lighthouse. There is a great build-up around reaching the lighthouse, but once the lighthouse is reached, it doesn't seem to live up to its anticipation: "So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock" (Woolf 301). The relief of simply reaching the destination seems to overshadow the destination itself: "For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of [Mr. Ramsay] landing there which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost" (Woolf 308). Ultimately, Lily's vision leads her to drawing a line in the center of the painting in order to finish it.

And this is what I think maybe the overarching point of the novel is - the realization of the importance of the space in between instead of simply the destination. What the Lighthouse represents is another investigation entirely, but I do think that the Lighthouse might represent more a general meaning that the characters are searching for in their lives - they are searching for a way to reach the state of having meaning, to find meaning, to understand it, but maybe the search itself is what is more important than whether or not the destination is ever reached - that may be why the novel is entitled to the lighthouse. The passage I found that sums this up the most is when Lily is talking about how life is like a work of art:

"What is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark" (Woolf 240).
The novel seems to be arguing that maybe life shouldn't be seen as revolving around getting from here to there, but instead relishing in the threshold, in the liminality, and what we can create from this space.