Sunday, June 27, 2010

Comment on the mingling of genres in Pygmalion by GB Shaw

Shaw’s masterpiece, Pygmalion is a quaint amalgamation of myth, legend and fairy-tale. In addition the element of romanticism disguised as anti-romanticism serves well through the wraps of plot, characters and theme.
In the first place, Shaw applied the Pygmalion-Galatea legend perfected by the Roman poet, Ovid in Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion having successfully translated his ultimate concept of beauty into a form falls in love with it and later marries it, by virtue of Aphrodite’s blessing. There is an apparent metaphor at work in this union of creator and his creation:
The consummation of creation and creator; or more precisely on the metaphoric level the thirst for perfection and its subsequent fulfillment in creation that is both ecstatic and cathartic.
Theologically however this applies even to the relation of God with the church or more directly with His people.
Shaw however deviating from this line provided a vein of comic element into the whole affair. The orchestration of natural phenomenon like rain, thunder etc coupled with coincidence running parallel to that of Cinderella’s fairy tale gives the play a rich staple of romance and comedy, which not only includes verbal but also situational. Also there is a streak of Shavian comic inversion in which the outcome is the reverse of what is expected.
The play does not end as did Pygmalion legend or Cinderella’s fairy tale, but ironically opposite that is mundane and down to earth. At the end the inclusion of a long epilogue takes it characteristically closer to a part of a novel than to a play.
Thus Pygmalion is not a play that has the symmetry and convention of a pure genre but a culmination of eclectic influences.

Analysis at least two Monologues from Hamlet to highlight his mental state.

Hamlet being a melancholy character and given to obsessive brooding tends to analyse the ramification of his action that outweighs the action while making reflection the action itself.
Following two monologues would put this into perspective:
a) O what a rogue and peasant slave am I........
(--Act II, Scene II; 553-585)
Here Hamlet is embittered for being an inactive dreamer in executing what he thought his duty. He looks upon himself as a coward.
Hamlet reveals through these lines his mental make up: a person not born with the spirit of vengeance and ferocity of anger. His is an intellectual bent of mind that is susceptible to reason and evidence—even in the face of near conviction—rather than the fury of a savage mind.
So he stages a play to rouse his soul from the scruples of feeble irresolution hiding behind morality into passionate commitment to avenging his father’s murder.
He seems always at loggerheads with reason, indecision and sense of duty.
Thus in the words of Coleridge, ‘It is this tragic flaw of inaction that makes Hamlet both a tragedy of reflection and a tragedy of moral idealism.
b) Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying......
(--Act III, Scene III; 73-95)
Here is another classical example of Hamlet’s irresolute mind.
Hamlet gets a chance to kill Claudius who was on his kneels praying to give up evil deeds or to fight till to the end. Again Hamlet’s Christian mind reasons against killing Claudius in his prayer as not to let him go straight to heaven as this wouldn’t fit to be a just revenge but a reward. He wants to ensure that Claudius go to hell, a place he thinks more commensurate with the person and his evil deeds. But in hindsight Hamlet lost yet another moment to kill his uncle.
Thus we get a feel of a mind that is caught in the whirl of self-torture and multiple volitions.

Why is ‘Murder in the Cathedral’-- by T.S. Eliot called a poetic play?

A close reading of Eliot’s treatise on drama and poetry from ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942), Poetry and Drama ((1951) and the Need for Poetic Drama (Listeners 16-411, Nov1936) will surely underline his aim as a dramatist.
Commending Shakespeare’s use of blank verse to accommodate colloquial speech of the age, he pointed out how reality was not compromised but enriched with verse rhythms.
To Eliot only poetic drama has the ability to lay forth the dramatic action of the world expressed in music, because it is music that connects the ultimate reaches of our feelings and with the reality of the mundane world and its chaos.
Eliot being a writer of ‘Classical’ disposition couldn’t concede anything that was superfluous or irrelevant. So tracing the roots of ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ one may go as back as to Classical Greek drama influenced by Aeschylus incorporating the very element of dramatic imagination—religion, ritual, purgation and renewal—though it is also a Christian Play.
It is seemingly tough to achieve a complete segregation of one aspect from another as the versification and the style are as inextricably linked with the theme as with the force of a particular situation within the play, quite significantly with the technique of alteration similar to that of ‘Stichomythia’ in Greek tragedy, evident in the speech alternately spoken by the chorus, Priests and the tempters, which resembles the Liturgy during a Christian mass.
Undeniably the plot, theme, characters and verse are but indispensable parts of one integrated whole. The dexterous use of ritualised form, the verbal imagery, the varying flow of metrical rhythm provides the play with its very spirit essentially poetic that concentrates upon theme seen in singleness.

Discuss Alchemist--By Ben Jonson as a comedy.

In the prologue to the Alchemist, Jonson voices how the contemporary time was dominated by manners what is now commonly regarded as Humours. Thee is a mention of the whore,, the bawd, the pimp, and the imposter as persons that represent some of the humours. It is the humours that supposedly determined the disposition of a man, viz—choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic or sanguine. To what was humours to Jonson is now man’s obsession or complex.
Alchemist makes an elaborate survey of man’s gullibility, the humour thereby represents is the master passion of greed that manipulates each of the dupes in the play. Pointed out in the prologue Jonson represents such humours to comic effect to make people realize the absurdity of their situation in face of foibles and follies.
As in Volpone, Jonson focuses on one humour that is Avarice in Alchemist. It is nothing but greed for money and gain and the way it dominates all the characters subtly or blatantly.
It is noteworthy that the characters do not show any inclination to hoard money; on the contrary they are guided by ulterior aims or motives in which money becomes a necessity. In this way Jonson etches distinctive qualities in the characters.
Mammon the sensualist is also a philanthropist; Anabaptists want money as a means to power, Kastril and Dapper are social climbers while Drugger the meanest of all tradesmen is averse to water-bills and his empty house. However, Subtle, Face and Dol are contrasted from the dupes by their skill, wit and glib talk. They are cheaters who are even ready to cheat one another.

About The Pedestrian | The Pedestrian

About The Pedestrian | The Pedestrian

Friday, June 25, 2010

A Japanese-doll went a-reading


A Japanese-doll went a-reading
and a flower followed her
She put the flower back on the bough
and made a bee the keeper.

A Japanese-doll went a-reading
but the books ran out to play
She set a mouse loose on them
and made them wail and pray.

A Japanese-doll went a-reading  
and the sun would block her way
She then called a gypsy cloud
and drenched the sun away.

But how long can it go as such?
How long can she fight?
All would she make her friends
She thought-
and turn their colours bright!


                                                                               2nd April, 05.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Monday, June 21, 2010

Rain


Lighted whips lashing the sky,
the stars shedding tears;
the pain pronounce a roaring cry
kids huddle with fear...

                                            18th, July 2001 

Face

Crinkles can speak a thousand words
of fleeting joys and lasting pain
in which the eyes, the lone mirror
show the rush of time.

No coy in bloom, no hard
a trap to fledgling men
her eyes paint an ocean floor
where waves surge sublime.

12th Oct. 2005

Leaf


                                        

A leaf
I once had plucked
and left forgotten
in a spree,
years later, a book fell open—

                      a faint, forgotten memory...


                                   
                                             7th, June 2001

              

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Churning

Once my brother fell ill
two and half year old
ceased to toddle one evening;
They took him to a doctor
with a beautiful wife
a mermaid among men
for elves of the playground...

He wrote many cures
of them a bottle
stood out among
the rest—
a small pint of
sweet smelling emulsion
strong and chalky—
coated the tongue
and its colour
faint purple-pink
doused the eyes
and filled the hollows
and we would feel
like puking...

Been so many years now
well above two score and ten
a wet afternoon of purple-pink
and feeling nausea again...

An Artist in a Gallery

As if
I’ve not come to see the pictures,
it’s the pictures
looking at me—
stuck transfixed
in four cornered crypts
like famished eye-holes
crying hoarse to grab
a passing glimpse.

Sept’ 2006

Ageing

Moments are like leaves
they unfold and fade out
and one day the wind
gives them little wings
and they fly away
as yellow butterflies

What remains is the tree
and a thousand years of lassitude...


                                                                                               Jan, 2009

Friday, June 18, 2010

Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by Emile Bronte'

Heathcliff as a realistic character or more of a symbolic representation.

Heathcliff is an enigmatic character and over 150 years he has been the centre of much debates and dissertation, however, none has come forward with a complete satisfactory explanation of his representation as a persona. This inadequacy though does not mar his immortality but strengthen his position for many interpretation and perspectives.
Is Heathcliff a character with sinister overtones or a symbolic representation? The answer is both.
Without Heathcliff we cannot think of Wuthering Heights more because he is the life and the centre of all that happen there and in the lives of the characters involved. But given his disposition and deeds he more of a character than a vehicle, unreal and non-human, who on the surface bears a form that is seemingly impossible on the reality scale of everyday life and thus he is more of a symbolic representation of the elements that is essentially evil.
In the words of G.K. Chesterton, ‘Heathcliff fails as a man as catastrophically as he succeeds as a demon.’ So in a way his characterization takes the path of being labelled as a Satanic Hero bearing shades of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.
Heathcliff finds being addressed in a variety of ways by the other characters, mostly derogatory attributing him to being uncivilized and socially unacceptable at one hand while censoring him from the point of view of Christian faith on the other.
The very basis of Christian prejudice stems from the mythography of Beast and fiend, of the Devil and Judas. His christening in fact gives a premonition of the character he is destined to be. The name Heathcliff evokes ‘heath’ meaning barren and desolate that has something uncannily sinister about it; and the word ‘heathen’, which means primitive and pagan. It is interesting to note that both his name and surname is Heathcliff, which re-enforces the idea of pagan savagery.
He is dark-coloured, which raises the question of his parentage and nationality. He can well be contrasted to the white supremacy of colonial expansion and oppression; some sort of a rebel who by dint of unrelenting bitterness and mysterious powers is out to wreck the colonialists. He brings s to mind another dark character: Othello who is as obsessive as revengeful only because he thinks he is being deceived; and so is Heathcliff who was really wronged and betrayed.
There are others who portray him as a Byronic hero or a romantic rebel who is endearing, constantly brooding and on the path of self destruction lacking masochism of a typical Byronic hero but full of sadistic overtones.
On a deeper level Heathcliff remains the child Mr. Earnshaw brought in. He is traumatised, neglected, frustrated in love and betrayed on account of being a social pariah, thus his fight reaction takes him on the brink of self destruction as he goes on disrupting the lives of all who were connected to him. The more he succeeds the more perverse he becomes.
Heathcliff is thus a sort of ‘demolition man’ against the Victorian society rife with economic disparity and class conflict.

The character of ' Doctor Faustus ' by Christopher Marlow

Discuss the characters of Doctor Faustus.
The character of Dr. Faustus conceptualises the Aristotelian parameters of a tragic hero that embodies a ‘tragic flaw’ within a frame that is dazzling to such proportion as to pale other characters into insignificance.
Faustus is a man of great scholarship and vast knowledge but with an intrinsic quality—an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that is beyond human whatever he has mastered seems pitifully inadequate:
“Yet art thou still but Faustus and a Man.”
His soul cries out for supreme sensuous pleasure and super human powers, and he walks into a doomed pact with the Devil. However, as a character Dr. Faustus deserves both our respect and sympathy.
With Mephistopheles at his command, Faustus surfeits his sense with carnal pleasure and not coarse delights. He asks for things that qualify only as the superlative and for the superlative, thus setting himself on the path of sensuous discovery of Evil.
Here lies the greatest truth of his character. He never ceases to be a scholar, he is always a student and a thinker, wanting all ambiguities, all mysteries resolved and explained to him even if it costs him the hope for eternal life in Christ; even if it condemns him into the nagging world of excruciating mental conflict known to man.
Dr. Faustus is a true hero, who is has all those great qualities that mankind deems sublime: sense of dignity, tenacity of purpose, perseverance, profundity and element of unquestioned humanity and tenderness.
He is an epitome of quest for truth, of a spirit of boundless adventure and of unbridled confidence of will and vision.
Dr. Faustus sets the sky as limit, put himself on wings as Icarus and carves out his horrible downfall. He is the master of his destiny and albeit his eternal damnation into an appalling waste, he is a very strong and admirable character.

The Title 'Look Back In Anger' by John Osborne.

Justify the title Look Back in Anger by John Osborne

The title Look Back in Anger predicates a definite touch of ambiguity. The title may be taken as an imperative on the part of the speaker (author), the audience or purposely among the characters set in the framework of a play, which could be nothing but a miniature for the world against the age in question.

Whatever be the intent, the play demands a looking glass analysis of the circumstances and the characters vis-à-vis a charged currents and under-currents of conflicts that seem to run through the socio- economic, socio-psychological and historical swathes criss-crossed by political discontent of the times.

A closer look at the title would elicit an objective division of two themes embodied in it—‘to look back’ and ‘anger’. It is very likely that Osborne is of the view that to put an age in retrospect needs an emotion and there can be simply nothing more appropriate than ‘Anger’, when things come to rest on history of an age that governs the lot of an ill fated generation.
Despite its intellectual inconsistencies, the myth of anger helped place all who believed in it as it gives them a better reach into numerous areas of personal and public life hitherto inexplicable but stand accessible to emotion.

As Jeff Nuttall puts it, ‘Not one of us had any serious political preoccupation, but all had a crackling certainty of now.’ In the aftermath of post war austerity, the idea of anger came with the excitement of risk encompassing the new heaven of consumer pleasure and the looming paranoia of atomic warfare. English angst envisaged both fear and anger. Of the two, anger helped established identity—it made people take sides.
Anger thus was not only directed towards class resentment but also towards its ‘phoney’ values.
Writing for the New Statesman, T.C. Worsely commended the play for its ‘authentic new tone of the Nineteen Fifties....’ Though he acknowledged many of its weaknesses, he went on to urge the readers not to miss the play, ‘If you are young, it will speak for you. If you are middle aged, it will tell you, what the young are feeling.’

Jimmy’s anger: the fundamental character of a generation.
The cause why Jimmy is angry is to a great extent rooted in his background. The character Jimmy runs a close analogy with, ‘Lucky Jim’ a novel by Kingsley Amis published in 1954 spearheading a mocking, irreverent view of the social pretensions, cultural snobbery and authoritarianism of middle-class academics. The educated, working-class protagonist (Hero), Jim Dixon, instantly became a cult figure in the make of an aggressive, young rebel.
But why is Jimmy angry? Embittered at the betrayal of the promise of the Brave New World, Jimmy fights a lone battle against the sham and hypocrisy of the world around him. But why does he fight albeit a losing battle?

Jimmy Porter is a character who doesn’t have much of a future and he is aware of that. From his attic room Jimmy can only fulminate against the outside world that he looks upon as responsible for his present situation. On a deeper level his lot is in a constant state of dilemma regarding the voice they are to support—the voice of the political icons and that of the glaring reality; for they too need the assurance of a future, an upward mobility. But they cannot make up to be in league with either and thus begins the contours of an uncertain and bleak world ahead, wrought in fear and insecurity with no place for respite. His attitudes and behaviour strongly reflect the social conflict of the working class.

Another aspect of his persona reveals a track that demands a ‘look back’ into his childhood.
Jimmy was sympathetic to his dying father, a character that exercised great influence on the emotional patterns of Jimmy as a child. In his words—
“But you see, I was the only one who cared. His family was embarrassed by the whole business. Embarrassed and irritated...we all waited him to die................You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about—love...betrayal...and death........................................”
Thus the suffering of his father warped the fine balance between his juvenile idealism and the way he looked upon the world, i.e. perception and acceptance of reality.

Thus his past experience and inability to reconcile with the rest, especially his mother, in regard to his father engendered deep rooted mistrust aimed especially at his mother and inadvertently at the entire womankind. This psychological conflict of gender of childhood forms the basis of misogyny in his persona. It won’t be wrong to say that in his predicament the character of his dying father super-imposed on him and roused in him an indomitable urge for justice. Failing it quickly morphed into wrath which he couldn’t direct at anyone in particular and so consequently it developed inferiority complex and schizophrenic disposition with which he threads through kindness, cruelty, praise and attack.
Unable to resolve his tension and contradiction with the larger social world, his anger turns against the others, who are also, like himself—victims of their environment. So what begins as a drama of social criticism comes across as a drama of social despair, and even as many critics have pointed out, an apology for cruelty and misogyny.
Thus it is the duality of an inconsistent mind which seems to seek space for the manifestation of all the desires, fears or memories which the conscious mind suppresses when awake.
Jimmy as an antagonist to himself or Jimmy’s anger towards to himself.
Jimmy’s anger may also be directed towards his persona though he may not be aware of it.
In the words of George Wellwarth—‘It is the psychological paradox caused by Jimmy’s need for unquestioning love on the one hand, and his inability to get along with anyone, on the other, that cause him to inflict pain on others and thereby on himself.’
M.D. Faber bases his analysis on the Freudian concept of ‘orality’ which leads to ‘sadistic and cannibalistic tendencies and a compulsive need for ingestion of food’. Faber further argues that on close reading one can find that Jimmy is an orally fixated neurotic who projects his own psychological shortcomings onto the external environment.
The helpless, hopeless, ignominy and death of his father act as slew of triggers that jabbed his paranoid mind rousing fear of the uncertainty around. His failure on the social platform and his position among the hopeless rung of the society make up his outwardly grotesque behaviour.
On a subtle level the anger is also towards his persona because Jimmy is also a part of the social decadence and he even embodies it. The pain is that he can’t stand up to it.
Jimmy’s marriage with Alison.
The portrayal of Jimmy and Alison in wedlock represents the zenith of class-conflict at one end and the culmination of love-hate relationship men have with their mother figure encompassing dependence and resentment of such dependence and a desire to destroy, on the other.
Jimmy’s anguish is expressed through the secondary castigation of a ruling class which has left him nothing to fight for, and a woman is a threat and has to be destroyed metaphorically.
Presence of Alison is somewhat cathartic to Jimmy’s enormous anguish. For Alison there are only two ways open –continuous victimisation or walk out on Jimmy as their conflict is not only theirs, it is a metaphor for social and personal conflict that has no easy solutions.
Institution of marriage is both a trap and a refuge for Jimmy and Alison, both being more or less necessary evil to one another.
Sex is no solution.
True there is a strong factor of sex that works between them but is not a solution. Sex binds them together for mutual coexistence and catharsis, above which the game of bear and squirrel that is the victor and the vanquished underplays. It is another matter that the victor may himself be the vanquished at some other plane of reality.
Look back in Anger is thus a painful portrayal of suffering and survival in a world that offers no hope; in a world that plays on through the cycles of remembering and forgetting.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Read Original Criticism on Contemporary and Classical Literary works of Great Authors by Diptesh Augustine Sarkar.

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