Literary Canon

Origin:

“The origin of the term ‘canon’ are in authority and control…it has to be noted that the initial meaning carried by the Greek word ‘kanon’ was a ‘right measure’(standard unit in architecture). Over time, the term canon developed to encompass ethics and justice, expanding the application of standardization to a metaphysical domain. This historical use of canon has created the framework in which the modern literary canon exists: it is an authoritative mechanism that places value upon literature; however there is significant dispute over the teleology of the canon and its contents.” – Joseph Kronick.

The term ’canon’ was originally applied to those books of the Bible deemed to be both genuine and authoritative. The religious terminology of the word was later extended to secular works; canonical status was afforded to a number of books from the classical to the modern period. Canon is also defined as “the books of the Bible officially recognized by the church”, and the idea of a literary canon also implies some such official status.

Just how far back the literary canon can be traced is a matter of some debate. Richard Jerry dates the canon back to the late sixteenth century, while Dean Kolbas maintains that the English literary canon actually began to unite during the seventeenth century. Certainly, the canon achieved its definitive shape in the mid eighteenth century when we see more evidence of it in the form of literary history – for instance, Thomas Warton’s ‘History of English Poetry’(1774-81) and Samuel Johnson’s ‘Lives of the English Poets’ (1779-81).

Definition:

“The term ‘literary canon’ refers to a classification of literature. It is a term used widely to refer to a group of literary works that are considered the most important of a particular time period or place.”

One popular definition of a literary canon refers to religious validity, implying that the canonized works are officially recognized by a church, and are considered religiously appropriate. Within this definition, however, the canon remains a basis for judgement, a standard that must be met for canonization of a literary work to be considered. In this way, regardless of the exact definition of a literary canon, or the works of which it is comprised, the canon still implies an ‘otherness’ to works it excludes, and an authority to works it includes. One must not overemphasis the rigidity of canon, since works included in canon constantly changes.

Canon-Formation:

(i)                 Subjectivity:  Ofcourse, there are many ways in which literary works can be classified, but the literary canon seems to apply a certain validity or authority to a work of literature. When a work is entered into the canon, thus canonized, it gains status as an official inclusion into a group of literary works that are widely studied and respected. Those who decided whether a work will be canonized include influential literary critics, scholars, teachers and anyone whose opinions and judgements regarding a literary work are also widely respected.

For this reason, there is no rigid qualifications for canonization, and whether a work will  be canonized remains a subjective decision. Literary canon, like the works that comprise them and the judgements of those who create them, are constantly changing.

(ii)               Reflection of the Age- Form and Content:

Literature, therefore, changes in the context of changing experience and thought. This context is important to the make-up of a literary canon. More often than not, it is those works that are considered contextually relevant hat gain entry into the canon. This means that the literary canon is relevant to ongoing trends or movements in thought and art or address historical or contemporary events, etc.,

Often, the popularity of a literary work is based not only on the quality, but the relevance of its subject matter to historical, social and artistic context. A popular or respected literary work usually deals with what people are most interested in, and this interest weighs in on whether or not the work is conanoized.

The literary canon of a country or a group of people is comprised of a body of works that are highly valued by scholars and others because of their aesthetic value and because they embody the cultural and political values of that society. The process of canon formation and evolution is influenced by cultural and historical changes, for an instance in the 1960’s when sweeping cultural change brought the concerns of women, minorities, gays and Marxist liberals to the forefront of literary study.

(iii)             Extrapolation of Meaning:

While the text of a literary work does not change over time, the meaning extrapolated from it by readers, and thus the attention paid to a literary work may change. As people’s thoughts and experiences change, a literary work may move in and out of interest and contextual relevance. Over time, literary canon will reflect these changes, and works may be added or subtracted from the canon. The changing inclusions of literary canons, can be credited to subjectivity.

(iv)             Cultural\literary hegemony:

Until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare and the great novels. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourses. An understanding of the canon is necessary to understand society because it has organically come to represent the society’s values. This shared intelligence is now being destroyed by multiculturalism and technology leading to ‘canon anxiety’.

Literary histories enable us to forge a fundamental link between the twin concepts of ‘canon’ and ‘nation’. This is because they respond to an explicitly nationalistic desire to ‘fix’ of ‘formalise’ a literary heritage – to “invent a tradition”, as Eric Hobsbawn puts it, a tradition with enormous political ramifications. Indeed, the invention of a British literary tradition enables Britain to become, to use Benedict Anderson’s words, “an imagined political community”, able to establish boundaries between itself and other nations. A ‘nationalistic’ impulse was certainly the driving force behind the publication of Johnson’s ‘Lives’, Shakespeare’s History Plays, etc.,

In ‘Literary Theory’, Eagleton suggests that the “great literature” of the “national literature” has to be recognized as a construct.” Any canon has deliberately crafted to serve the hegemonic interests of its creator, and it is therefore unreasonable to ascribe timelessness to an intrinsically arbitrary entity.

The differing perspectives on the nature of the canon provide a general image of the controversy: either one accepts the innate worth of the existing canon or one views the canon as a social construction.

FEMINST THEORY- ELAINE SHOWALTER

Feminism is more to do with the history of ideas about gender. Historically, thinking about gender happens in cultures where gender configurations--the social meaning systems that encode sexual difference--undergo changes or shifts. The same is true with thinking about race (that race as a construct becomes apparent when ideas of race are shifting) or economics, or politics, etc.: all of these concepts are reevaluated when social practice (i.e. what people do) shifts. So gender, or masculine and feminine qualities, or male/female social roles, comes up as area for analysis whenever gender roles are shifting. One can trace this back to medieval times (Chaucer's Wife of Bath is certainly an example of questioning gender configurations--note too that questions of gender roles not limited solely to women thinkers and writers). And because gender roles seem to shift in just about every time period, in relation to all kinds of factors (war, for instance, or economics, or notions of morality), gender is often a major focus of thought and writing, in popular culture and in theory.

Certainly in the nineteenth century, in Britain and the United States, gender was a matter for much public discussion and debate. "The Woman Question," as it was called, focused on whether gender should be a factor in granting or limiting rights, like voting rights; it also focused attention on men and male social roles, asking questions about the nature and function of gender. Is gender innate and biological? Is it the product of socialization and environment? Is the family structure (one father, one mother, and kids) eternal, universal, divinely-ordained, natural--or socially constructed and thus variable? These were--and are--central questions, not only for politics and economics, but for anthropology, psychology, and all of what we now call the social sciences. So. Why is gender important? The simplest answer is because it's there. "Gender," meaning the differentiation, usually on the basis of sex, between social roles and functions labeled as "masculine" and "feminine," is universal: all societies known to us in all time periods make some sort of gender distinctions. As a central feature of all cultures, gender seems worth some attention.

Gender is so ubiquitous as a topic of study in part because of our capacity, in the twentieth century, to "deconstruct" gender categories, to defamiliarize what has previously been seen as natural (men are naturally masculine, women are naturally feminine). At some point (or at several points) what Derrida would call a "rupture" occurred: a moment (or moments) when it became possible to think about gender as a construct, not as a natural or eternal category. Thus our thought systems, philosophies, and world views had to think of gender as a variable system, as something created and alterable, not as a given. And, as Derrida tells us, when our culture is able to think of constructs, to foreground as construction what previously was kept in the background as "natural", as assumed--we do.

Definition of feminism would be in three parts.

1). A "feminist" is someone who is interested in studying and understanding gender as a system of cultural signs or meanings assigned (by various social mechanisms) to sexually-dimorphic bodies, and who sees these cultural signs which constitute gender as having a direct effect on how we live our individual lives and how our social institutions operate.

2). Secondly, a "feminist" is someone who sees the gender systems currently in operation (in our culture and in other cultures) as structured by a basic binary opposition--masculine/feminine--in which one term, masculine, is always privileged over the other term, and that this privileging has had the direct effect of enabling men to occupy positions of social power more often than women.

3). A "feminist" thinks this (points 1 & 2) is wrong, and should be changed.

This definition makes feminism into a kind of academic pursuit, where feminists just sit around studying gender relations. And this is an important part of feminism, the idea that one CAN study gender relations that gender exists as a signifying system, as sets of cultural signs that can be, and are, manipulated just as any set of signs is. So, what one calls "politics" is the understanding of how cultural texts--be they literary, philosophical, or physical (in the sense that gender codes are "texts" written on our bodies and in our psyches)--shape our everyday lives. And an understanding of how reading texts, and writing texts, and interpreting texts, can be a means of changing (or reaffirming) the ways in which we understand our world and make decisions about our lives.

Elaine Showalter’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ does a survey of the history of feminist tradition within the ‘wilderness’ of literary theory and criticism. This essay is one of the most useful summaries of trends in feminist criticism. Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having a number of phases: (i) the feminist critique: where the feminist reader examines the ideologies behind literary phenomena (women as mere readers); (ii) gynocritic :  where the’ woman is the producer of textual meaning’ including the ‘psychodynamics of female creativity, linguisitics and the problem of female language, the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and literary history’; (iii) gender theory: where the ideological inscription and the literary effects fo the sex/gender are explored.

To Showalter, the feminist writer exists as two separate entities: as reader and as author; however, the male reader and male author of course taint this division. There are two modes of feminist reading:

(i) the feminist as ‘readers’  - offer feminist readings of texts which studies the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omission and misconceptions about women in criticism and woman as sin in semiotic systems  - feminist reading\critique of the representation of women in literature – Revisionary Reader :  the reader as a female or a female reading of the text concerned with discovering the suppressed patriarchal voices presented in the text. How does the reader respond to the text which inscribes the subjugation and subordination of women – the image of women, the canon formation of literary text ;

(ii) Feminist Criticism has gradually shifted its center from ‘revisionary reading’ to a sustained investigation of literature by women – the study of women as writers. The aim of gynocritics is to read the lot written by women to show what characterizes the literature of women as woman. One of the major assumption if gynocritics is that writing by women is always dominated by a gender consciousness. The subjects of gynocritics is but “the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity, linguistics and the problem of female language, the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and literary history.

Feminine critical discourse employs the concept of 'gynocritics': what is the difference of women's writings? – 'ecriture feminine'(they argued that the female has particular style of writing not merely a feminine consciousness) – the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text; a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism (how the literature is characteristically female and how it is different from characteristically male writing). Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of differences: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural. This discussion by Showalter examines timeless questions about the differences between men and women and the obvious resulting competition and argument. Showalter quotes Woolf "A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine". This quote begs the answer, which came first, the discourse on feminist literature of the creation of feminist literature?

Biological\Organic criticism is based on: 'anatomy is textuality'. In 'The Madwoman in the Attic', Gilbert and Gubar structure their analysis of women's writing around metaphors of literary paternity, - the texts author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic, patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. Lacking phallic authority, women's writing is profoundly masked by the anxieties of this difference: 'if the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can female generate texts?  Feminist criticism in the biological perspective generally stresses the importance of the body as a source of imagery. The difference of women's literary practice must be sought as in Millet's words in 'the body of her writing and not the writing of her body'.

Linguistic and textual theories of women's writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology, socialization or culture; whether women can create new language of their own; and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender-marked.

The women's use of language is an exciting area in gynocriticism, as it is through the medium of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allows us to comprehend the world around us. The appropriate task for feminist critics is to concentrate on women's access to language; on the available lexical range from which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression. The problem is not that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been forced into silence, euphemism or circumlocution. Women's literature is still haunted by the ghosts of repressed language and until we have exorcised those ghosts, it ought not to be in language that we base our theory of difference. ( the feminine style of writing is different from man. They said that chronology and orderliness are there in male, but the linearity is not there with female. The female writing is open-ended, non-linear and associative in style. In female writing there is lapses and gaps, breaks and broken syntaxes. So the female practice of ecriture feminine paves the way for the development of definite female consciousness.

Psychoanalytically oriented feminist criticism locates the difference of women's writing in the author, psyche and in the relation of gender to the creative process; and it incorporates biological and linguistic models. Showalter's essay calls into question theories on biological differences between men and women that have effects on writing. In reality, however, it is the very discourse of the relationship between males and females that creates gender roles(pseudo-patriarchy) and forces them apart. According to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, two theorists of the psychological movement, these gender roles obligingly compel the male and female – their action, their work, their behaviour and their relationship - towards blatantly different ends of the gender spectrum. Women become defined by their relationship with other women and men are defined by what women are not.

Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space". According to the discourse, this is unsurprising as women are inextricably linked through their sameness, emotional continuity, social responsibilities, bodies and thought; through the lenses of the 'gynocritics': of the biological, the cultural, the psychoanalytic and the linguistic. Most notably, we gain further awareness of gender roles – omnipresent in every facet of life from household duties to the employment industry, from general behaviour and beyond – and we are privy to the essential difficulties of women throughout history to conform or defy these functions, attitude and responsibilities. In the end, we still remain in the 'wilderness', without clear definition or absolute insight into the spilt, between males and females, and its effects on women's writing.

 SUPPLEMENTARY STUDY MATERIAL: LYOTARD’S ‘THE POSTMODERN CONDITION – A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE’

                                                                                                                       

Towards the end of the 1970s, Lyotard was commissioned to write a report by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada. The subject of this report was the state of knowledge in the world’s most highly developed societies (i.e., the First World countries) at the end of the twentieth century. In other words, what Lyotard was asked to report on was the ways in which different ways of knowing about and dealing with the world – science, technology, law, the university system, etc. - are understood and valued in contemporary society. The book is referred mainly for its definition of postmodernity, along with the descriptions of contemporary culture and politics. While Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives and the proposed switch to language games has characterized the postmodern debate, his ambiguity about the development of science and the university under the condition of neoliberalism(open gates of universities for all) appears to have been given much less consideration by his followers.

A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE:

Probably the best place to begin trying to discover what ‘The Postmodern Condition’ is about is by looking closely at its subtitle: ‘A Report on Knowledge’. As with all of Lyotard’s work, it is just as important to pay attention to the ‘way’ in which he writes, as it is to understand what is written ‘about’, and the subtitle of the book immediately gives crucial clues about both its form and content. First, it is described as a ‘report’. Generally, a report is a formal statement of the results of an investigation into a specific subject, usually undertaken by experts, that draws together the range of available evidence in order to set out specific conclusions. The Postmodern Condition’s status as a report is evident in the way it is written. One of the several things that are noticeable on reading the text is the amount of evidence that is presented in the footnotes, of which there are over 200 referring to an even larger number of other books, essays, lecturers and government documents from many European and American countries. The Postmodern Condition provides a summary account of documents mentioned in its notes. Its aim is to discover underlying trends and relationships between the different sources, and to trace out as clearly as possible the development of knowledge in contemporary western societies. The other key term in the subtitle is ‘knowledge’. Lyotard states that he is studying the ‘condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies’. But, what does it mean to report on the ‘condition of knowledge?’ It is not summary of recent developments in fields but its sake is much more fundamental, and much more important. According to Lyotard, the focus is the ‘nature’ and ‘status’ of knowledge: what knowledge is, and how it is generated, organized and employed in contemporary societies. In other words, ‘The Postmodern Condition’ is a report about the ways in which advanced societies treat education, science, technology, research and development. Lyotard investigates which sorts of knowledge count as valuable, how that knowledge is communicated, who has access to it and what it is used for, who determines and controls the flow of knowledge, and how it shapes our lives and experiences of the world.

The central question of The Postmodern Condition’s ‘report on knowledge’ is thus, how are the lives and identities of people constructed by contemporary structures of knowing? According to Lyotard, this is fundamental question because ‘the status of knowledge is altered as our societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age’.

THE POSTMODERN KNOWLEDGE:

Lyotard argues that the advances in communications that have taken place since the Second World War have affected not just how knowledge is transmitted but also the status of knowledge itself. It is not just that we can store more information on computers, and send messages across the world quickly by post, telephone and now email. It is also that these changes in storage and communication are transforming how we can use and value knowledge: ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited’. In other words, in what Lyotard calls the ‘postmodern condition’, knowledge itself has changed.

Lyotard demonstrates that knowledge has  become a commodity that is bought and sold on the market, and is also the basis of power in society: ‘knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major-stake in the worldwide competition for power’.(Knowledge is Power)

After a quick view of those theories and areas of knowledge, Lyotard arrives at some pretty strong conclusions. “It (knowledge) can fit into the new channels and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information.” Lyotard ‘predicts’ that “anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way (digitalization) will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer languages.”  - i.e. the computerization of society will have inevitable consequences on the world of ideas – “along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statement are accepted as ‘knowledge statements’. While this may or may not be true, or at least an interesting question to be thought about in all its consequences, sometimes Lyotard appears to fall victim of narratives about technoscientific progress, for instance when he writes that “research on translating machines is already well advanced” – thereby implying that machine intelligence will soon be able to replace human intelligence in certain areas. Such an “exteriorization of knowledge”, Lyotard claims, renders obsolete “the old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of the minds”. Knowledge will not only increasingly become a commodity, which loses its use-value. “Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power”, Lyotard observes, would be the major stake in the world wide competition for power. The author even predicts that nation states might one day fight for the control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory.

TWO MAJOR TYPES OF DISCOURSES:

In Postmodern Condition, Lyotard differentiates between two major types of discourse: scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge. He argues that ‘scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to … narrative’. For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell themselves to explain their present existence, their history and ambitions for the future. Although the term ‘narrative’ is commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourse employ narratives to present their ideas.  Examples of this might include History that constructs narratives of the past, Psychology that tells stories about the self, or Sociology that depicts different social formations and their effects on individuals. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through types of narratives that describe the physical world. In order to explain and justify their discoveries, even mathematical sciences are forced to turn their equations into narratives that explain the implications of their findings. In this way, narrative stands at the basis of human experience and society: it tells us who we are, and allows us to express what we believe and aspire to.

LANGUAGE GAMES AND LEGITIMATION STATEMENTS:

Of course, the different types of narrative used in different discourses follow different rules. The different discourses that make up a society’s knowledge – be the physics, chemistry, literature, laws, customs, or even gossip – all have different sets of rules for what count as legitimate statements. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard refers to these different discourses as ‘language games’, a term he draws from the highly influential Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Drawing this notion of language games from Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Lyotard makes three observations about them. First, that the rules of a language game are ‘the object of a contract, explicit or not, between the players’.  This means that the rules of a particular language game like poetry or biology are not natural but determined by a community. Second, that ‘every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game’. And third, that ‘if there are no rules there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game’. In other words, that all language ‘moves’ obey rules, but the game of which they are a part are open to change and influence by other games or even as the result of the moves themselves.

Lyotard argues that the outcome of these three observations is that the ‘social bond is composed of language ‘moves’’. The very structure of society is made up of the statements made in it and the rules it develops to decide whether particular moves are legitimate or illegitimate.

The organization of knowledge in society thereby determines the identity – the self-image, the ideas and aspirations – of the people that make it up. A question immediately arises: how do we understand this ‘organisation of knowledge’? How are the different language games related to each other in society? How is their importance to that society decided? And why do different societies have different ways of organizing the language games that make them up? For Lyotard, the organization of the narratives and language games is performed by metanarratives.

METANARRATIVES:

As the term implies(the prefix, ‘meta’, denotes something of higher order – so, for example, in linguistics a metalanguage is a language used to describe the workings of another language), a metanarrative sets out the rules of narratives and language games. This means that the metanarrative organizes language games, and determines the success or failure of each statement or language ‘move’ that takes place in them. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard presents a number of metanarratives, and describes the different ways in which they organize knowledge. The basis of modernity is, for Lyotard, a certain type of metanarrative organization. In order to understand why he defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, then, it is useful to come to terms with what these metanarratives are and how they work.

Lyotard argues that from the earliest human societies right up until the present, narrative has continued to be the ‘quintessential form of customary knowledge’. As an example of the most traditional form of narrative organization, Lyotard introduces the Cashinahua, a tribe from the upper reaches of the Amazon in South America. The stories of this tribe follow a fixed formula for narrating the adventures of their people. They begin with the phrase, ‘Here is the story of-, as I have always heard it told. I will tell it to you in my turn. Listen.’ In this way, the story is always one handed down from the past, and is passed on in the present to the community. At the end of the story comes another formulaic statement: ‘Here ends the story of-. The man who has told it to you is – (Cashinahua name), or to the whites- (Spanish or Portuguese name)’. With this statement, the story teller links himself with the ancestral here: the two names appear together as a bond between past and present.

This form of storytelling organizes the rituals and structure of the Cashinahua society. They share their historical knowledge through the tales, construct their identity as a group, and order their society through the rules about who is allowed to tell and listen to be the stories. According to Lyotard, ‘The knowledge transmitted by these narrations…determines in a single stroke what one must say in order to be heard, what one must listen to in order to speak, and what role one must play…to be the object of a narrative’. Each member of the community is given a place in the system as speaker, audience or hero of the tales, and their identity and desires are shaped by it.

According to Lyotard, this is the sort of metanarrative organization that is common in pre-modern cultures. In contrast to this form, which is based on the relationship between past (the stories themselves) and present (their narration), Lyotard describes another form of metanarrative: the grand narratives of modernity. For Lyotard, modernity is defined by its reliance upon grand narratives that depict human progress. Their difference from traditional metanarratives is that they point towards a future in which the problems facing a society (which is most often thought of as all of humanity) will be resolved. He identifies two key types of modern metanarrative in The Postmodern Condition: the speculative grand narrative (refer Hegel’s works) and the grand narrative of emancipation (or freedom).

In Hegel’s writing , modernity finds its clearest and most powerful formulation. For Hegel, the world is capable of being comprehended by philosophical thought. This thought, called by Hegel the ‘speculative dialectic’, presents reality and history as rationally explicable through a system of ideas. Hegel’s dialectic process describes a process of constantly overturning the relations between ideas and material reality.

Think Globally and Act Locally:

Lyotard believes that cybernetics has come to dominate society and economics since World War II. He believes that the status of knowledge has changed profoundly in this period. The major question that interests him is how knowledge gets legitimated in cybernetic society, and the nature of the legitimation itself. Lyotard maintains that whatever principles society uses to legitimate knowledge must also be the principle that is uses to legitimate decision-making in society, and consequently government, law, education, and many other basic elements of society. Legitmation in the Enlightenment was tied to what Lyotard calls metanarratives, or grand narratives. Metanarratives are total philosophies of history, which make ethical and political prescriptions for society, and generally regulate decision-making and the adjudication of what is considered truth. Metanarratives roughly equate to the everyday notion of what principles a society is founded on. They form the basis of the social bond. The metanarratives of the Enlightenment were about grand quests. The progressive liberation of humanity through science is metanarrative. The quest for a universally valid philosophy for humanity is an example of a metanarrative. The problem is that when metanarratives are concretely formulated and implemented, they seem to go disastrously awry. Marxism is the classic case of metanarrative based on principles of emancipation and egalitarianism which, when implemented, becomes perverted to totalitarianism under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in metanarratives, (no longer one could make generalized statements) that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legtimation in society if there is no overarching metanarrative. For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which analyses the way sub-groups regulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct. If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallen back on are little narratives. Little narratives are Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We are employees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledge and courses of action in their limited contexts.(Think Globally and Act Locally). By fragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each with their particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge, we avoid the need for metanarratives. This is the nature of the modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in the context of how well we perform in each of these many limited roles. We may be a good employee but a poor driver, etc. Therefore, what legitimates knowledge in the postmodern condition is how well it performs, or enables a person to perform, in particular roles. This criterion forms the basis of Lyotard’s ‘performativity’ legitimation of knowledge and action. In a cybernetic society, knowledge is legitimated by how perfomative it is, if it is, if it effectively minimizes the various required inputs for the task and maximizes the desired outputs. This is an intuitively compelling notion of our current society. Knowledge and decision making is for the most part no longer based on abstract principles, but on how effective it is at achieving desired outcomes.

PARALOGY:

Lyotard develops a concept by first reviewing a variety of non-traditional scientific areas which have proved fruitful in recent years, including chaos theory, fractal mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The key feature of these areas of research which Lyotard believes provides their special strength is that, unlike the incremental and theory-bound work of most areas of the sciences, they actively and imaginatively seek out instabilities and anomalies in current theories. This search for anomalies and paradoxes echoes the type of move that Lyotard previously identified as compelling in language games generally, and he seizes on the concept to form the basis of his legitimation grail. Since the most effective(performative) strategy for achieving advances in both scientifically based and narratively based fields of research is the search for imaginative new insights into existing theories by noting anomalies and paradoxes, he coins a neologistic term: paralogy. Paralogy here does not have the dictionary meaning of ‘false reasoning’. But captures the elements of this individualistic search for new meaning in old language games.

Bibliography:

Simon Malpas. ‘Jean-Francis Lyotard’.2005.Routeledge.London 

SUMMARY OF CLEANTH BROOKS’ ‘IRONY AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE’

EXPLANATION OF THE TITLE: In the essay ‘Irony as a Principle of Structure’, Cleanth Brooks argues that meanings of universal significance which literature encodes in texts are suggested through the device of irony which the poet shows in the structure of a poem.

This emphasis on structure as a device to convey meaning is important. In the ancient classical criticism Aristotle placed a great deal of importance on the structure of plot. It is through the element of structure that unity is created in a work of art through which ideas are expressed. The text as an ‘autotelic’(autonomous) artifact, something complete within in itself, written for its own sake, unified  in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author’s life or  intent, history, or anything else. The formal and technical properties of work of art matter most.

Brooks therefore argues that the overall unity of parts creates ironic tensions. This underlying structure is invisible but is the actual structure of the poem and not the divisions of stanza.

PLANT ANALOGY TO EXPLAIN ORGANIC QUALITY OFPOETRY:

Brooks states that poetry has an organic quality which produces ironies and explains this by means of an analogy. He suggests poetry is like a plant, with a fixed and definite organization(like roots, stalk, leaf), a structure which is complete and useful.

(Semantic Value of each word in the poem): A poem, like a plant, relies on all its component parts for life; there is a fundamental arrangement within a poetic creation which depends upon interrelationships. Words are the individual building blocks of a poem, and like the cells of a plant, each must be considered individually as being important to the structure.

(The Context out of which meaning evolves): Each word is understood according to the words which surround it. It is the relationship between each of these words which creates a context out of which meaning evolves. Brooks terms the relationship between the component parts of a poem as the pressures of context.  Just as the cells of a plant rely on adjoining cells for water, nutrients and energy, so in poems, words rely on surrounding words for their meaning. It is the structural, organic unity of the parts which allows for the production of meaning. This is brought about through the pressures of context.

(Elements of Plot Vs Words): The significance of words to the structure of poetry in Brooks’ essay finds a counterpart – the importance of the elements of the plot. In order to be significant, a work must be a whole, that is, it must have a beginning, middle and an end, according to Aristotle. These parts are akin to the words in a poem in Brooks’ theory because in a likewise manner they display a unity. For example right from the beginning of the poem the meaning of the whole depends on the deliberate placement of each of the elements of poem and the organic relationship between those parts.

Contextual Ironies(tension) a key to Meaning?

Brooks claims irony is produced by the pressure of context and proceeds to explain these pressures in a poem. These pressures define the relationship between the components of a poem which are the words that produce meaning.

Irony is the tension between multiple meanings of a word(ambiguity in meaning caused by connotative aspect of language), meanings which are pressured by the presence of surrounding words and the situation in which they are said.

Brooks compares poetry to drama in order to describe how pressures of context produce irony: i.e., what is said is said in a particular situation and by a particular dramatic character. Because there is always a speaker who narrates a poem, and in a setting for that narration, words will never exist in isolation, and must be considered in relation to, as affected by, their context. For Brooks, context forces ironies, which are the key to meaning. A successful poem has its structure dependent on the tensions produced by context. It is in these fusions that harmony exists and it is in the tensions that meaning exists.

CONTEXT AND PLANT ANALOGY:

Therefore meaning is the product of contextual pressures in Brooks’ view. Context which is really the relationship between the parts of the poem creates the unity of the poem through its pressures. The end(blossoms) of the action should grow naturally out of the beginning(roots) and middle (stalk) if we continue to understand the argument in terms of Brooks’ plant metaphor that affirms the organic nature of poetry.

METAPHOR VS IRONY:

Brooks finds specific, concrete particulars a must for the form of a poem. The particular become the units or metaphors and references. Brooks claims that metaphors, even as they risk obscuring larger themes, are absolutely necessary because direct statement lends to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether whereas indirect statements appeal in a poem. Brooks finds poetry an effective vehicle for conveying meaning instead of concrete language the poetry creates metaphors which instead of giving us abstract thoughts leads us to ideas in an indirect manner. Poetry takes human beings as its subject (if for no other reason than because language which is its structural element is a human device. It attempts to make explanation of the human condition in terms of causes and effects of human actions.

Thus the elements of structure are metaphors and symbols which make the meaning in a poem according to Brooks. Irony and plot function similarly to create meaning through indirection; both refuse direct statement of abstract ideas. Both rely on an organic unity of parts to produce universal truths. So meaning is inherent to the structure of the artifact.

Brooks begins the essay by stating that the modern poetic technique is a rediscovery of the metaphor. The metaphor is so extensively used by the poet that it is the particular through which he steps into the universal. The poet uses particular details to arrive at general meanings. But these particulars must not be chosen arbitrarily. This establishes the importance of our conventional habits of language.

Now the question that can be raised is that the poet does not say things directly. It is as if he is taking a risk by not saying things directly but only through metaphoric language, indirectly.

Direct statements take the reader out of the zone of poetry. A metaphor says things partially and obscurely, yet it makes the text poetic rather than a direct statement which makes the text unpoetic.

Therefore, metaphor means indirection, an principle. It is a principle of poetic writing, there is a vital relationship between, an organic relationship between particular images and statements.

This kind of a relationship between the idea and the metaphor is described by Cleanth Brooks as an ‘organic relationship’. That is to say the poem is not a collection of poetic images and beautiful passages, but a meaningful relationship between object and idea. So by merely arranging many poetic images one after another do not result in a poem. Brooks says that all the elements of a poem are related to each other, not as blossoms lying next to each other in a banquet, but as blossoms related to other parts of a growing plant. The wholeness of the poem through its details is the flowering of the whole plant.

Giving another example, Brooks says that a poem is like a drama. The total effect proceeds from all the elements in the drama. So also in a good poem the total effect proceeds from all the elements of the poem. There are no superfluous parts in a good poem.

Therefore the parts of the poem are related to each other organically and related to the total theme indirectly. From this we can conclude that context is very important. So it is not just the idea and the metaphor being related organically and the whole poem linked internally through all its elements, but the context in which the connection between the idea and the metaphor or analogy is made. What is said in a play, as in a poem, is said in a particular context and it is this context that gives the words their particular meaning. Here Brooks takes the example of two sentences from Shakespeare’s ‘ King Lear’. The first line that he quotes is “Ripeness is all”. Brooks says such a philosophical statement gathers import because of particular context in which the dramatist places it. So also when Lear repeats the world “Never” again and again five times, the same word said over and over again, having the same meaning, nevertheless becomes especially significant because the playwright places them in a context where the words gather richness of meaning. The context endows the particular word or image or statement with significance. Statements which are so charged with meaning become dramatic utterances. Images charged with incoming become symbols. This is how context makes an impact upon the meaning of words. In other words, the part or particular element of a poem is modified by the pressure of the context. For example, if you meet friend who has won a lottery prize and say “What a rain of fortune!” in the particular context of the situation, the words have a specific meaning. For example, when everything in a situation has gone wrong and the person says, “This is a fine state of affairs!” What he really means is quite the opposite of what is being said. The actual state of affairs is very bad. But by sarcastically saying, “This is a fine state of affairs!” and perhaps with the use of a particular tone of vice a ironic statement is uttered. Even if the tone is not changed in any particular way, the mere words “This is a fine state of affairs!” when everything is at its worst, results in heavy irony.

A DISCUSSION OF THE CONCEPT OF IRONY IN THE ESSAY:

Irony takes many forms. In irony of situation, the result of an action is the reverse of what the actor expected. Macbeth murders his king hoping that in becoming king he will achieve great happiness. Actually, Macbeth never knows another moment of peace, and finally is beheaded for his murderous act. In dramatic irony, the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not. For example, the identity of the murderer in a crime thriller may be known to the audience long before the mystery is solved. In verbal irony, the contrast is between the literal meaning of what is said and what is meant. A character may refer to a plan as brilliant, while actually meaning that the person thinks the plan is foolish. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony.

Irony is of many kinds: tragic-irony, self-irony, playful, mocking as gentle irony. Irony may be defined as the conflict of two meanings which has a dramatic structure peculiar to itself: initially, one meaning, the appearance, presents itself as the obvious truth, but when the context of this meaning unfolds, in depth or in time, it surprisingly discloses a conflicting meaning, the reality, measured against which the first meaning now seems false or limited. By encompassing this conflict in a single structure, irony resolves it into harmony or unity.

There are other statements which hold their meaning as it is, inspite of the context in which they occur. For example, “Two plus two is four”. In any situation this statement would mean the same. The sentence denotes a meaning; it has denotative value.

On the other hand, can notations are important in poetry, even philosophical generalizations bear the pressure of the context. Their relevance, their rhetorical force and meaning cannot be divorced from the context in which they are embedded. This is the reason, why according to Brooks, modern critics tend to use the term irony so much when they discuss poetry. To Brooks irony is an important structuring principle which holds the meaning of the poem together. Reading a line in a poem in its proper context gives it its particular meaning, its ironic content. Again Brooks underlines the importance of the pressure exerted by context. To make the point, he gives one more example. The critic takes a line from Mathew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The speaker says that the world “Which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams….hath really neither joy nor love nor light.” Now this may seem a statement of truth for many readers and they would have no difficulty in grapping its meaning as they see it.

Brooks says that the most straightforward irony amounts to the obvious warping of a statement by the context. But since it is a principle of structure that makes poetic coherence possible, it must be capable of somewhat more subtlety. The pressures of the context may not always be obvious or crude, but still, says Brooks, we are dealing with the informing principle of irony.

In sum, ‘irony’ in the sense of “pressures of the context” is for Brooks the main way in which a literary object dynamically develops its own structure, its own “meaning, evaluations, and interpretations” without the need for aid from ordinary or ‘denotative’ language, history, biography, or other outside sources of meaning.

However some other readers may consider it false. If we try to prove it we will only end up rising very perplexing philosophical questions. This will lead us away from the poem. For, the lines are justified in the poem in terms of its context. The speaker is standing with his beloved and looking out of the window at the sea. The moonlight has thrown a deceptively white sheet of colour over everything. Listening to the roar of the waves as they ebb and flow the speaker makes this philosophical observation. This is the only way that the statement can be validated. The brunt of the statement cannot be validated by a committee of experts in sociology as physical scientists or philosophers.

Brooks raises the question how the statement can be validated. He answers it in the following way. He suggests that the reader remember the advice of T.S. Eliot who says that we should assume the question whether the statement seems to be that which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature and founded on the experience outlined within the poem. In other words, we have to raise the question if the statement grows properly out of the context which it is said, whether it is ironical and loaded with contextual meaning or whether it is merely sentimental, affected and shallow. Brooks says that Eliot’s text is what I.A. Richards describes as ‘Poetry of Synthesis’ this kind of a synthesis shows a stable context on which meaning plays in many ways. Irony and possibilities of meaning depend on context. Context does not grow out of irony.

Brooks lists out a number of reasons for the use of irony in modern poetry:

·        There is a general breakdown in belief and to the modern mind does not accept universal statements of truth.

·        There is a depletion and corruption of language itself.

·        The growing consumption of popular arts has corrupted both belief and taste.

·        The modern poet is burdened with the task of rehabilitating a drained and tired language.

·        The task of qualifying and modifying a language is burdened upon the poet.

Brooks contains the critic to remember that the modern poet is addressing a public who have already developed a taste for popular and commercial art. So by using irony the modern poet succeeds in bringing both clarity and passion into his evoke of art or the poem. Here Brooks gives the example of Randall Jarell’s poem ‘English Air Force’ as an example of success of this sort. This poem is full of many possible meanings. Each meaning is voted and no one meaning cancels out another meaning. This poem which is about the Air Force men holds apposing meanings in the context of the poem. On the one hand the poet talks about the essential justness of man and on the other he uses the image of Pontius Pilate who washes hands in blood:

“…Shall I say that man \ Is not as men he said a wolf to man?\ Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: \ I find no fault in this just man.”  The poem dramatizes the situation of the fighters during the ever so accurately, both as puppies and woolens as stanza show that the poem goes behind the eloquent presentation by the poet to the very matrix or source from where all our understanding and beliefs begin. This function is in Brooks opinion, what good poetry does.

Finding its proper symbol, defined and redefined by the participating metaphors, the theme becomes a part of the reality in which we live, an insight growing out of a concrete experience. Without making any abstract generalization the poem makes a statement of truth.

So we may conclude that statements in poetry qualified by the context in which they occur. In poetry, therefore statements get their viable by virtue of their context.

SUMMARY OF F.R.LEAVIS’S ‘POETRY AND THE MODERN WORLD’

TITLE:   Strictly speaking ‘bearings’ is a nautical term and F.R. Leavis’s ‘New Bearings in Modern Poetry’ is the treatment of the making of poetry.

REASONS FOR DECLINE OF POETRY IN MODERN WORLD:                                                                                                     F.R. Leavis feels that today’s modern world does not understand art. Since very little of ‘contemporary intelligence’ concerns itself with poetry, Leavis says poetry matters little to the world. People are fooled to believe that there is a great deal of interest and talent by the colossal anthologies. Leavis sarcastically rebuffs that anthologists are no better than the layman. Leavis does not agree to the view that what is floated as anthologies is nothing but the contemporary understanding of poetry. He reasons out that (i) there are no serious standards and (ii) no loose tradition is alive (iii) the publisher’s lack of critical temperament, and very importantly the writers are never more than superficially interested in writing poetry therein making the present Age unfavourable for the growth of poets.

Leavis rebuffs the assumption such as these anthologies about good and bad poetry as ridiculous. Setting loose his sarcasm, he says for most part the poetry is not bad, but beyond it, it is dead, as it is barren and in the first place was never alive. Here the writers claim to have been writing good poetry, when in reality they are producing artificial flowers.

TRADITION AND POETICALITY:                                                                                                                                               The number of potential poets born varies from Age to Age as literary history might lead one to suppose. Leavis is against such compartmentalization of poets and lays emphasis on the ‘talent’ of the poet. Though anything can become material for poetry, every Age has its own preoccupations and assumptions regarding ‘the poetical’.

Leavis placed the poets on an entirely new pedestal. What varies is not who is born? Or the mood of the given Age, but the use made of talent. A genuine poet is a man who possesses a sense of adequate mind – a kind of prophet with unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and more himself than the ordinary man can be: capacity for experiencing and communicate. Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is (i) is more alive than other people (ii) more alive in his own Age and becomes as I.A. Richards says “He is the point at which the growth of mind shows itself”.

Leavis attacks the Victorian poetical ideal which suggests that the nineteenth century poetry rejected the ‘poetical’ and instead showed a separation of thought and feeling and a divorce from the real world.

Leavis never believed that judgement and evaluation are mechanical procedures, a matter of bringing up an array of fixed rules to the literary text. In practice, however, he had an idiosyncratic liking for a set of measures.

F.R.LEAVIS’S CONCEPTION OF INTELLIGENCE:

The connotative associations of the term ‘intelligence’ are much harder to delineate , even with the aid of contexts and demonstrations. Indeed, the term ‘intelligence’ runs althrough the works of Leavis. The problem is that Leavis’s paradigmatic terms are so thickly interrelated that they don’t exist in isolation and a priori.

The conception of intelligence on many occasions is conjoined to ‘sensibility’. What Leavis intimated by ‘intelligence’ here was confirmed by his description of certain features of metaphysical poetry. In the tradition founded by Donne, it was assumed that a poet should be a man of distinguished intelligence and that he should bring into his poetry the varied interest of his life “What is that distinguished intelligence\varied interest?” Placed in sharp contrast to the nineteenth century preoccupation with the creation of a fanciful dream, it is ‘wit, play of intellect, stress of cerebral muscle.”

Intelligence then is characterized by a heightened sense of consciousness. It is not only the application of rigorous thinking to the text itself, but also an ardour effort of our conscious mind to note and register what is going on in our response to literary texts.

Intelligence did not debar intuition; it actually covered all varieties of the act of knowing; intelligence is the genius, intuition and discourse – there is no need then to demand another irrational faculty ‘intuition’ value would turn to reason and intelligence for guidance.

Leavis conception of ‘intelligence’ does include an admiration of Arnold’s Hellenic ‘authority of reason’, and an effort to transcend immobilized personal preferences. Leavis then asserts that when one is in the grip of the poem “one’s whole being, including one’s basic attitudes and habits of thought and valuation is involved.

SUPPLEMENTARY STUDY MATERIAL                                                                         SAMUEL JOHNSON’S ‘PREFACE TO SHAKESPEARE’

                                                                                                        Prof. Dinesh Kumar

Objectives:

-          To summarize the major arguments of Dr. Johnson.

-          To introduce to the student, Dr. Johnson’s comparative method of criticism.

Merits of Shakespearean Plays

Introduction:

     The Preface is a classic of criticism, written with a pen of fire. Dr. Johnson has traced many merits as well as demerits of Shakespeare in his plays. He does not believe in conventional view of Shakespeare’s acclaim. At the very outset, he has rejected the very common notion that we judge living poets, “by his worst performance and when he is dead we rate them by his best.” This conventional pattern of criticism, Johnson does not like at all. For this he has advocated the comparative method of criticism. By adopting his comparative method he has found many faults and merits in Shakespearean plays.

Freedom from Classical Dogma:

1) The Unities:

     In his criticism of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson breaks entirely free from the shackles of classical dogma and tradition. In an age of classicism, when everything was judged by certain set rules derived from the ancients, he dismisses the claims of the classical unities of Time and Place as being necessary to create dramatic illusion on grounds of nearness to life and nature and this violation often resulted in variety and instruction.

Shakespeare’s Histories do not come under the purview of the law of the unities because of the very nature of change of time, place and events.

The observance of the unity of time and place is considered necessary in the interest of the credibility of the drama. It is said that fiction should be as near to reality as possible. But Johnson defends on the grounds of realism that it is wrong to suppose that any dramatic performance is credited with reality, as the audience never accepts the performance on a stage to be absolutely true, but as a picture of reality. (When they see the actors on the stage in a miserable state, they imagine themselves to be miserable for the moment. They knew well that they are witnessing a fiction and the events on the stage produce pain or pleasure not because the audience believes them to be true, but because they bring realities to mind.)

“Drama moves us not because it is credited, but because it makes us feel that the evils which are represented may happen to ourselves” otherwise “Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”

A spectator who thinks that by entering a theatre he has moved from the London of his times to Alexandria and imagine the actors to be Antony and Cleopatra can surely imagine much more. A drama is a delusion and delusion has no limits. The spectators do not count the clock or look at the calendar. They are all in their sense, they know the stage is a stage and the actors are actors. Therefore there is no absurdity in showing different actions at different places in different periods as long as the represented events are connected with each other with nothing but time intervening between them.    He finds the unities of time and place as sheer imposters for he writes, “the truth is that the spectators are always in their sense, and know, from the first Act to the last, that the stage is only a stage and the players only players”.

Shakespeare has wrote two plays- the comedy of errors and Tempest following the three unities and in other plays unity of action with his plots having a beginning, a middle and a an end  with one event logically connected with another moving towards the denouncement.

Johnson’s perception a model of logical demonstration is ahead of contemporary criticism and is a fore-runner of romantic criticism with its advocacy of an artist’s freedom from the tyranny of rules.

2) Justification of Tragi-Comedy:

     Johnson points out that Shakespeare’s plays are not in a ‘rigorous sense’, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind, on contrary to ‘the rules of criticism’, but Johnson appeals from books to nature and says “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” as in real life also there is a mingling of the good and evil, joy and sorrow, tears and smiles mingled in various degrees and endless combinations  and so in mixing tragedy and comedy  Shakespeare merely holds a mirror to nature “he is true to nature”.

Tragi-comedy is nearer to life than either tragedy or comedy, as “it combines within itself the pleasure as well as the instruction of both.” These are Johnsonian use of the “escape clause”.

The interchange of the serious and the gay does not interrupt the progress of the passions i.e. it does not result in any weakening of effect and that tragedy becomes all the more grim by a touch of the comic. “Shakespeare can always move either to tears or to laughter.” Moreover, “pleasure consists in variety” and tragic-comedy can satisfy a greater variety of tastes and melancholy is often not pleasing. There are many people who welcome comic relief after a scene producing the feeling of melancholy. Furthermore, variety on the whole contributes pleasure.

In the twentieth century T.S. Eliot also said that the desire for comic relief springs from a lack of the capacity for concentration. If it is a question of concentration, an audience may concentrate better on a crisis if it has relaxed before that. Nature’s way is: ”strain-rest-strain-rest”.

Once we understand Shakespeare’s plan, most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire lose their validity. Mercutio and Thersites, Pandarus and Polonius, the Grave-diggers and the Porter and Cleopatra’s Clown are certainly not out of place in the plays.

Raleigh praising Johnson in this connection writes “he passes over to the side of the enemy and almost becomes a romantic.”

Appreciation of Shakespeare – their secret:

1) Poet of Nature:

    “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representation of general nature.”     

A just representation of general nature seems to be the only permanent source of appreciation. Immortality cannot be conferred upon a work of art by representation of particular manners or the irregular combinations of fanciful invention. Such works can only give rise to a sense of pleasure or wonder which is soon satiated. It is only truth which can provide a stable place for the mind to rest upon. Shakespeare excels other writers in being the poet of nature. He shows an encyclopedic knowledge of human nature not as it is observed in particular countries and climes but as it is met all over the world. The excellencies in his works result not from a study of books, but from his keen observation of life and nature, so much that his plays can increase our knowledge of human nature. Maxims of much practical wisdom are scattered all over his works. Dr. Johnson quotes Dryden with approval that he was “naturally learned”.

Johnson also has the discernment to know that ‘all pleasure consists in variety’, and points out that the appeal of Shakespeare is so universal because his themes and characters are so varied. Characters and dialogue were not known in the age; he introduced them both and in some of his happiest scenes carried them to perfection. In his age, the study of mankind was superficial. Only actions were studied and causes were omitted. Shakespeare studies those causes.

2) Theme of Love:

     Love Motif predominates in the works of other contemporary dramatists, but it “has little operation in the drama of a poet (Shakespeare) who caught his idea from the living world.” Love is not all in his plays. Love is only one of the many passions and as his plays mirror life, they represent other passions as well. Undue importance is not attached to any one passion, while others misrepresented life by portraying love as a universal agent.

3) Characterization:

     “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”

His characters are the faithful representations of humanity. His ‘characters are universal but they are individual also. They are also true to the age, sex or profession to which they belong. They are also true to type. The speech of one cannot be placed in the mouth of another, and they can easily be differentiated from each other by their species.

“He has no heroes but only human beings.”

His characters are not exaggerated; they have the common feelings and virtues of humanity. They all act and think in the way in which the reader himself would act and think under the circumstances.

 “Shakespeare approximates the remote and familiarizes the wonderful.”

His adherence to general nature has exposed him to some criticism, for his Romans or kings are human beings first and kings and Romans afterwards. They are true to human nature, though in petty matters they may not agree with our conception of kings and Romans. In ‘Hamlet’ he depicts the Danish Usurper as a drunkard for the truth is kings are not immune to the temptation or influence of wine.

4) Dialogue and Diction:

  The diction of his dialogues are that of the conversation of the common people, as Shakespeare adopts, “it is above grossness and below refinement” and so his dialogues are always more pleasing to hear than other author who is equally remote in terms of time. The familiar dialogue in Shakespeare has been acknowledged to be smooth and clear, although it is sometimes rugged. This may be compared with a country which is very fruitful on the whole, though it has spots which are barren. He perfected the English verse, imparted to it diversity and flexibility and brought it nearer to the language of prose or to that of everyday conversation.

Faults of Shakespeare:

Johnson gives us a long list of the faults of Shakespeare. This list exposes some of the limitations of Johnson’s criticism. Johnson’s error here is two-fold. Firstly, he attaches too much importance to the didactic element in literature by complaining that Shakespeare sacrifices virtue to convenience, and that he seems to write without any moral purpose. We cannot agree with Johnson that “it is always a writer’s duty to make the world better”. The business of an artist is to represent or exhibit life as he sees it and not to inculcate virtue. Secondly, he fails to recognize Shakespeare’s greatness as a writer of tragedies. In this connection, Johnson thinks that “in tragedy, his performance seems constantly to be worse as his labour is more” “In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.” It has been said that Johnson’s preference for Shakespeare’s comedies might have been a result of his own temperament. But Johnson was a pessimist by nature, and his failure therefore to appreciate the depth and profundity of Shakespeare’s tragic plays shows a strange contradiction. Johnson shows an incapacity to appreciate the sublime aspects of Shakespeare’s work. This is a serious deficiency in Johnson’s criticism.

Shakespeare has serious faults, serious enough to obscure his many excellencies:

Lack of Poetic Justice:

He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose. There is no poetic justice in his plays. This fault cannot be excused by the barbarity of his age, for justice is a virtue independent of time and place. It is the duty of a writer to make the world better.

Loose Plots:

His plots are loosely formed. A very little thought would have improved them. He follows the easiest path and neglects the opportunities of instruction which his plots offer him.

The later parts of his plays are often neglected, as if he shortened the labour to snath the profits. His catastrophies often seem forced and improbable.

Anachronisms:

There are many faults of chronology and many anachronisms in his plays. However, in this respect Shakespeare alone was not at fault, it was a fault common to the age; Sidney in his Arcadia is also guilty of such faults.

4) Often his jokes are gross and licentious. This might have been a fault of age, but there must have been other forms of gaiety as well, and it is a writer’s duty to represent the best.

5) In his narration there is much pomp of diction and circumlocution. Narration in drama is always tedious, and so it should be brief, rapid and to the point. His set speeches are cold and weak. They are often verbose, being too large for the thought. Trivial ideas are clothed in sonorous epithets. There is disproportionate pomps of diction and bombast.

6) What he does best, he soon ceases to do. The readers are disappointed to find him falling down at moments of highest excellence. Some contemptible conceit spoils the effect of his pathetic and tragic scenes.

7) He is too fond of puns and quibbles which frequently engulf him in the mire. For a pun he sacrifices reason, propriety and truth.

8) Shakespeare’s Comic Genius – Faults of his tragedies:

Comedy came natural to him, and not tragedy. In tragedy he writes with great appearance of toil and study what is written at last with little felicity; but in comic scenes he seems to produce without labour what no labour can improve. In his tragic scenes, there is something always wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. “His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.”

His comic scenes are natural and, therefore, durable; hence this popularity has not suffered with the passing of time.

The language of his comic scenes is the language of real life neither gross nor over-refinement, and hence it has not grown obsolete. His language is nearer to us than that of any other poet of his age. He is one of the great original masters of the language.

Conclusion:

The object of all criticism is to make the obscure and the confused, clear and understood and it is this service which Johnson has performed to Shakespeare.

“Johnson’s strong gasp of the main thread of the discourse, his sound sense, and his wide knowledge of humanity, enable him, in a hundred passages, to go straight to Shakespeare’s meanings.” – Raleigh He was the first to emphasize the historical and comparative point of view in criticism. He says in his Preface, “everyman’s performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived and with his own particular opportunities.”

 W.H. AUDEN’S ‘MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS’

Robert Frost has made an observation: “In three words I can sum up everything I have learnt in life: It goes on “, and the central idea of the poem is ‘response to tragedy’, or as a song goes “Obla Di, Obla Da, Life Goes On”. Generalizing at first, and then going into specifics, this poem’s theme is the apathy(indifference) with which humans view individual suffering. Auden wrote that “In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate”. The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and extraordinary ones, although extraordinary events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his descriptions(therein a sense of commonness envelopes miraculous situations). Life goes on while a ‘miraculous birth occurs’, but also while ‘the disaster’ of Icarus’s death happens.

Auden describes two important observations – human life is more episodic with no relation between one part and another, and that the human being himself is self-centered with no compassion or pity for his fellow sufferers. The human being may witness suffering but he continues in his way unmoved, turning a deaf ear to the cries of human agony.

Further Auden has succeeded in disenchanting us by opening our eyes to the reality around us. What might have been a ‘miraculous birth’ to many may also would have been a ‘dreadful martyrdom’ to some. Auden seems to suggest that there is always a new perception, a novel response to any given situation. In this sense, the poem also depicts the multiplicity of responses to certain events in life.

The poem can be studied by dividing it into two significant parts. The first part depicts Auden’s own standpoint – wherein, he subtly juxtaposes the so called great events, as imagined by the human mind with the ordinary and trivial incidents of life. The second part depicts Breughel’s Icarus and makes us understand how the painter himself viewed human suffering. The obvious apathy of the ploughman, the shepherd who is driving home his sheep and the crew in the ship to the macabre experience of the drowning boy, precisely captures the intended effect, the gruesome reality of life: life goes on inspite of Icarus’s enormous disappointment. The ploughman has his work to tend to and so does the shepherd, the ship has to reach its destination whether Icarus lives or dies.

The opening lines of the poem is a deliberate inversion of syntax: “About suffering they were never wrong \ The old masters” for “The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering”, it is imperative to understand the ‘form’ of his poems to comprehend the ‘content’. Here this deliberate inversion is an outright attack on the philosophies of Wordsworth and Browning regarding life. Wordsworth viewed human life as having it’s origin somewhere in the vast eternity and then comes our birth in this world and with death we return back to the same eternity. Browning believed in the concept of life after death. He believed in the other world and this life is a mere preparation for the unknown realms of the other world for which one has to struggle to achieve perfection fighting against worldly pleasure. ‘Our times are in His hand’ shows how this world and the other world are connected logically.

Auden opposes this view of Wordsworth and Browning and asserts that instead of a logical, sequential pattern life follows a disconnected series in which one event is unrelated to the other.

This poem is almost a verbal equivalent of Breughel’s concern in ‘The Fall of Icarus’. The ‘Old Masters’ are the great Renaissance painters of Europe who have understood perfectly the workings of man’s mind. Man by nature is self-centered and is indifferent to the misery of fellow human beings. A scene of distressing misery takes place infront of his eyes but he simply ignores it. What is more, suffering takes place while “someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”. The fourth line is the longest line in the poem and Auden makes it so to suggest the procession of life’s events. Life is one long period filled with events and they may be as serious as a human being subjected to torture and agony, or as trivial as a man having his meal or casually opening the window and looking out or just walking on the street.

Auden passes onto describe the raised responses to the ‘miraculous birth’ of Christ. For the three wise men of the East, it was the most wonderful and sacred event; and guided by the star and God’s mysterious voice from the sky they reached the place with joy and jubilance, and waited passionately and with deep respect anticipating the event. Auden says that this is not the only response to the event as “there always must be/ children who did not specially want it to happen” – those children who were mercilessly murdered under the cruel orders of Herod, would not await the birth with joyful and passionate reverence. A beautiful life of skating on the pond at the edge of the wood had been plucked before bloom because of this ‘miraculous birth’. Auden uses an uncomplimentary adjective to describe their unfortunate martyrdom. Martyrdom which is always positive is collocated with ‘dreadful’ – to reveal the fact that the massacred children wanted to live. Auden’s wonderful collocation brings out the intended effect – there are multiple responses to the same situation.

Auden goes onto juxtapose with this great event with what one might call a disgusting event: the sexual intercourse between two dogs, followed by yet another trivial incident of a ‘horse scratching its innocent behind a tree’. Just like men proceed with their mundane chores on an event of a great tragedy, quite indifferent to it, life proceeds in its normal pace in the animal world as during the ‘miraculous birth’.

In all the events referred to in the first part of the poem, the happenings which we think of as extraordinary – birth, massacre, martyrdom, death – are placed in a context of ordinariness (commonness), so as to make the viewers break down his customary distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The unity of the poem lies in the fact that Auden’s own views expressed in the first part perfectly blend with the idea expressed by Breughel which is dealt with in the second part of the poem.

What seem to have struck Auden about Breughel’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” are the multiple incongruities of style and subject and the ways in which these are focused to present a scheme of values. All that is seen of Icarus in the painting is a faint leg disappearing into the water, and dominating the painting are a ploughman and his horse, a shepherd and his sheep, a large ship all painted with minutest detail. Except for that scarcely visible leg, it is a contemporary landscape, painted with all the homely realism that we expect of Brueghel. However, it should also be remembered that Auden too juxtaposes contemporary lifestyle with a historical event. Children skating by the side of a pond cannot be imagined during the time of Herod. By bringing together historical and contemporary events both Auden and Breughel seem to say that whether it was ancient time or contemporary time human suffering was viewed with the same apathy and also that things always fell into place whether they were serious or trivial.

In Breughel’s painting “everything turns away \ Quite leisurely from the disaster”. The ploughman must have heard the splash but for him it was not a serious failure. Bur for Icarus, who was the first person to fly it was a great irretrievable failure. The sun shone equally over the white legs disappearing into the water and the expensive delicate ship. There is a hint that the ship is expensive, but delicate, which might mean that the same expensive ship might also crash somewhere. If that happens, there would still be no one to bother except the occupants of the ship who suffers.

Auden says the people in the ship must have witnessed an amazing sight – a young boy falling out of the sky and crashing into the water. The ship sails calmly as, there is “miles to go and promises to keep” as Frost puts it in his ‘Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening’.

The poet drowns the importance of the miracle by placing it next to commonplace events. Breughel undermines the importance of his title by placing the protagonist at a corner as a mere detail. The multiple and shifting perspectives are not only a technique but also a way of involving the reader’s reactions so that they become a part of the poem’s being. Moving the reader about by shifting perspectives is a way of making him aware of his ‘human position’. The poem may also be read as a bitterly ironic condemnation of human’s absolute indifference to suffering of others, and Breughel too does this – condemning those who go on with their business while ‘real’ suffering occurs about them.

Annotation Aids:

-          Icarus, son of Daedalus, both he and his father were imprisoned in Crete. Daedalus made some wings of wax and gave his son instruction on how to fly – not to close to the water, as the water may soak the wings and not too close to the sun, as the heat may melt it. Icarus however was too ambitious that he flew too near the sun, which caused the waxen wings to melt followed by a terrible crash to ground.

-          The poem also has an autobiographical note. At the time the poem was written Auden was beginning to turn to Christianity and we find here a sensitive yet unflinching acceptance of the truths of human misery and response. Christ’s birth and martyrdom is only suggested and not labeled.

-          Title:  Auden gives this title deliberately to take his eyes of the important event. Because this is what happens in real life. We always take our eyes of the tragedy that befalls the other person.

 Analysis of the Structure of 'Passage to India'

             'A Passage to India' is a liberal classic as well as the subtlest effort in the whole range of modern fiction to render into an artistic and aesthetic form the dialectical pattern of novel of ideas. 'A Passage to India' is a beautiful triology conceived on a grand scale, which brings out the finest qualities of E.M. Forster as a novelist.  Mosque - the first section opens out the possibilities of personal relationships. Mosque is the symbol of Islamic brotherhood and oneness of God, creates an atmosphere in which human bonds of affection and personal relations can flourish. But still, 'Mosque'  only poses the problem.   In the second section - 'Caves' - the answer to the question posed is negativity and chaos. It also poses the issue of finding a solution to the spiritual problem of life. Inspite of the positive meaning and content of the mosque symbol, at the end of the section, we find that 'God refuses to come'. The Caves symbolise a primeval universe of evil, chaos and annihilaiton. Thus, the hopes of union raised in the first section are totally frustrated as the echo spells great disaster.   In the third section - 'Temple' - symbolising Prof. Godbole's view of life indicates the final solution to the problem presented. The essence of the ultimate meaning of the novel seems to be that Love - Chrisitian Love as shown in Mrs. Moore - unadided by the kind of Brahman mysticism represented by Prof. Godbole is unequal to the task of resolving the moral and spiritual dilemmas of 'A Passage to India'.

To the Mosque:

        The first section of the novel is the Mosque, which begins with the possibilities of personal relationships which constitue its principal theme. The title 'Mosque' is symbolic of universal brotherhood and oneness of God, an atmosphere in which human beings develop affection and personal relationships. At the very outset, the question 'Can Indians be friends with English men?' is posed and thereby the 'Mosque' becomes the prologue to the novel. The season prevailing in this section is 'temperate' an ideal season for building relationships. In the series of scenes which come to be juxtaposed in this section, it exhibits its centrality not only in the relationship of an
Englishman and an Indian but also between members of the same race. The question of the friendship of the Englishmen with the Indians and vice versa is still open, but the relationship between Aziz and Fielding inspite of the fact that they desire to become friends, shows that their desire may not be fulfilled.

This section gives a clue to its nature in the phrase "the secret understanding of the heart". The meeting betwen Aziz and Mrs.Moore is the most important scene of Part I of the novel. The scene brings them together and they establish a friendship through the secret understanding of the heart which lasts long enough as an ideal friendship for others to follow. The discussion which Aziz has with some of his other Moslem friends in Hamidullah's house regarding the possibility of friendship betwen an Indian and an Englishmen leads them to the conclusion that it is not possible in India. Soon after it is corroborated by the behaviour of two English women who snub him rudely at the bungalow of his boss Major Callendar, Civil Surgeon, by taking away the tonga and not even glancing at him. The sensitive Aziz deeply wounded in feelings goes to the Mosque to "shake the dust of Anglo-Inidan off his feet" and to get peace and happiness there. He finds an English Woman who too has escaped to the Mosque from the heat and sultry atmosphere of the British Club to seek relief. She removes her shoes in the mosque and acknowledges that "god is here". It is thus that she wins Aziz's confidence.

The scene is full of symbolic implications which relate the other scenes following it as well with the overall thematic structure of the novel. The title stands for a passage and this scene is one of the many passages undertaken by Mrs. Moore to understand the reality of Indian. Mrs. Moore is a sympathetic Westerner who has undertaken 'A Passage to India' in quest of a transcendent principle of unifying love which can connect her with the unvierse and she finds it in the Mosque. "A sudden sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies, passed unto the old woman and out, like water, through a tank, leaving a strange freshness behind."

The mosque is the title of the first part and it defines the symbolic significance of the entire first section. The understanding between Aziz and Mrs. Moore symbolises the possibility of communication between any two persons. The mosque scene stands above all other scenes on this type and it anticipates the other successful relationship achieved - that between Aziz and Fielding which too demonstrates how the barriers between an Englishman and an Indian are broken by understanding born of an instinctive appreciation of each other's nature.These two relationships reinforce the possibility of human affection and establishes "the secret understanding of the heart" as one of the positive themes in the complex symphony of Affirmation, Negation and Reaffirmation which we find in the novel.

Caves:

         The experience of the two English women, Mrs.Moore and Miss Adela Quested in the Caves at Marabar constitutes the central episode of 'A Passage Inida' and symbolically and realistically may be considered as the heart of this novel. The experience is none too happy; it is positively nerve-wrecking.

The scene of the visit to the Caves is preceded in the novel by a descriptive chapter which gives a highly suggestive account of the origin and nature of the Marabar Caves. The Marabar hills containing the Caves, belong to a very ancient India "older than all spirit" and as ageless as the sun and the earth. "Nothing attaches to them" says Forster, "for they belong to a universe which was just a void", without form or shape or meaning or any quality". Man before it is like a speck on the ageless earth. The caves are so "extraordinary", because they are all similar and so indistinguishable from one another. They are all of a uniform pattern - shapeless outside and dark and void inside. They carry the impression of "infinity of nothing", as they are endlessly monotonous and hollow.

By the time the two women reach the Caves they are caught as it were by a sense of apathy which makes them feel that nothing is real, nothing has meaning, there is only silence, failure and non-fulfilment. They go for sight-seeing in such a state of mind with Aziz.     Before her experience in the Cave Mrs.Moore was a religious mystic who had faith in a god whose love embraces all creatures, high and low as he is a unity which includes everything. The echo in the cave also spoke to her of a universe which is unity, but this unity signifies total negation in which good and evil, beauty and ugliness are all one and the same thing.

What has happened in the Marabar Caves is no more than an echo. The two British women unknowingly and inspite of their best intentions, have unleashed the forces of evil which no spread everywhere and affect everyone in the novel. "Evil was loose ... she could even heat it entering the lives of other". Consequently Aziz is arrested adn his career is ruined.

The two women who had undertaken a passage to see the real India are brought face to face with an India which is more real and "fundamental" than they had expected; it is a passage that does not succeed. The incident undoubtedly is of great importance, but its meaning and nature are not fully explained. The journey to the Caves, the Caves themselves and Mrs. Moore's experience are all reated in a manner which serves to heighten the mystery of the whole thing and he does nto clearly explain what really happened in the Caves.

The second section contains the answer to the question put in the first section. The answer given is negativity and chaos. The solution sought in Godbole's song to the spiritual problems of life is answered by a suggestion that God refuses to come. The Marabar Caves give a negative answer to the questions posed by India to Mrs.Moore and Adela. The hopes of union raised in the first section are set at knot in this section, as echo spells disaster. Attitudes are put to the test and appear in a different perspective. The mystery which begins in the first chapter gets deeper and anything and everything connected with men and things express negation, chaos and purposelessness.

Temple:

The last section of the novel -'Temple' - comprises five chapters. On the face of it, it appears to be irrelevant. it seems as if by a happy ending Forster suggests that when the major problems raised in the first two sections of the novel - Mrs. Moore's passage and Aziz Fielding friendship, cannot be solved on the level of the plot, the only alternative left is their solution on a symbolic level.   In order to find out the connection between the plot of the novel and its ending, we should examine the nature and function of the temple scene.

This section begins with Godbole presiding over a festival in which amid all the nose and confusion of the celebration of Lord Krishna is born, which symbolises that God, the universal lover and friend is after all a presence to be felt. He here doesnot refuse to appear, as in the song of Godbole earlier, but he comes to one and all. The Hindu worshippers try to immitate the infinite love of Lord Krishna. Everyone in the company puts himself in the position of God and tires to love others equally. Forster says "Religion is a living force to the Hindus and can at certain moments filling down everything that is petty and temporary in nature." In the words of Trilling, " the vision in which the artbitrary human barriers sink before the extinction of all things."

This section is a kind of reconcillation between the enemies and it is a reconciliation of the effects of the Marabar Caves. The Marabar Caves represent a reality which the major characters in the novel must face. Likewise the Hindu festival represents a final image of an all-inclusive reality whereby some of the characters must pass before the novel comes to a close.  The festival brings together the former friends in a sort of temporary reconcilation if not a permanent union. The muddle and panic dominated the Marabar Caves, unity and peace are brought in by the festival, ofcourse through a muddle, but it is the muddle of love and not of negation. The forces of disunion and lack of harmony are still dominant, and stand as a barrier in the way of lasting friendship between Aziz and Fielding. The festival brings about a reassertion of the possibility of personal relations which is an affirmative answer to the negating echo of the Marabar Caves.

Conclusion:    The structure of 'A Passage to India' has a "rhythmic rise-fall-rise" as was found by Forster in Tolstoy's War and Peace. In the first of the three blocks, evil creeps feebly and what dominates it is the secret understanding of the heart. The second block is not only large, but it is dark also which gives birth to evil in the Caves, which destroys everything that comes in its way, but which faces an opposition, is indecisive and unyielding in the contemplative insight of Prof. Godbole and the intuitive delight of Mrs. Moore. The final conclusion arrived at is that just as good obliges evil to recede, similarly evil has made good to recede.

Conclusion:    The structure of 'A Passage to India' has a "rhythmic rise-fall-rise" as was found by Forster in Tolstoy's War and Peace. In the first of the three blocks, evil creeps feebly and what dominates it is the secret understanding of the heart. The second block is not only large, but it is dark also which gives birth to evil in the Caves, which destroys everything that comes in its way, but which faces an opposition, is indecisive and unyielding in the contemplative insight of Prof. Godbole and the intuitive delight of Mrs. Moore. The final conclusion arrived at is that just as good obliges evil to recede, similarly evil has made good to recede.

The Dual Aspect of  Blake's Tiger

The poem dramatises the terrors of a shocked doubter. It moves with assurance to an assertion of faith. The tiger raises with the subject and wears a robe of grandeur. The idea of creation emerges and communicates the mind of the higher order. The poet discusses a comic crises, wherein the images are so compelling and so effective that they pierce the heart of life.Tiger is needed to restore the world to its peaceful state. The power and energy at work cannot be scorned but revered, and a novel method to control evil is presented before us.

      The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?

      The tiger initally appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and come to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions.

The simplicity and neat proportion of the poem's form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.

  Herein, the poem becomes a successful exaggeration of the two aspects of the mystic poet's symbolic tiger's nature.

'The Tiger' is an undeviating expansion of meaning and increase in poetic effectiveness. It would be more accurate to regard it as a kind of dialectical struggle in which Blake strives to bring his emblematic tiger's two 'contraries' - its 'deadly terrors' and the 'divinity' in which it participates by having been created by an "immortal hand or eye" into the 'fearful symmetry' symbolised by the animal's natural symmetry of ferocity and beauty.

The Poet has very dextrously balanced between the two contrary aspects of the tiger, and it is important for the total poetic effect. The poet cannot entirely describe it as an mechanical monster, then the readers cannot identify the tiger with the divine will; further the poet cannot entirely describe it as a divinely figure then the very idea of God's cleansing wrath to redeem mankind loses substance. The poet considering these concerns, has evolved the tiger's symmetry in three stages:

(i) In the first stage, he emphasizes the tiger's dreadfulness by portraying the beast as a cruel and bloodly horror by asking pointed questions concerning its origin.

"What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

(ii) In the second stage, he swings to the opposite pole, shifting his emphasis to the tiger's divine origin,

"..what dread gasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

(iii) in the third stage,

- he restores some of the dreadfulness of the first stanza, though none of its horrors.

- further, he retains the positive elements of the second stage, using the suggestion that both the tiger and the lamb have a common creator; herein, the weighed synthesis of the two earlier stages makes essentially a positive statement affirming the dread tiger's divinity and not a probing of good and evil as it is sometimes interpreted.

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Blake advances both forms of the symmetry at the same time. In the first stanza, he in a evocative form suggests the immorality and in the following two stanzas, a spacious context for the dreadfulness; but the images built becomes awesome and not merely dreadful. In this context, the third and fourth stanza brings out the tiger's dreadfulness by showing its 'deadly terrors' to be the work of a dread hand twisting and forging; but at the same time, paradoxically they make the tiger seem actually less dreadful, because it becomes more and more awesome, as they build the total image. As a result, the fifth stanza no longer shifts the reader arbitrarily to the tiger's positive side, but culminates the characterization of the preceding stanzas, forming a kind of climatic modulation to a major key which clearly and triumphantly provides a final resolution to the progression that had been moving towards resolution all along.

The real climax resolves everything in the word 'Dare' that is substituted for 'Could' in the closing return to the strophic stanza.

Coming after the image of the tiger is completed, the last two lines are not a question, not even a rhetorical one, but a cry of wonder.

Thus the final poem is essentially positive.

The dread it expresses, though real and deplorable apart from its role in melting starry repression has been assimilated to the larger imaginative vision of the poet prophet. It expresses the general idea that the ultimate Edenic Innocence is to be attained only through the bitterness of Experience. But it also goes beyond this conception of the 'two contrary states of the human soul', to show that Innocence, when it is in danger of being destroyed by the repression of a fallen Angel, may even temporarily take on some of the characteristics of its contrary state, becoming transformed into a wrathful energy which may itself occasion bitterness. The lamb as Schorer observes, 'turns into something else, indeed into the tiger.' To attain the dawn, man may have to act in 'the forest of the night'.

Blake does probe the meaning of the tiger as a symbol of 'evil' - in his ironic sense of the words - as a symbol of that creative cosmic energy so feared by the orthodox 'angels' in all its manifestations. The introduction of stars and heavens into the poem marks a turning point. In Blake's works in general, stars and heaven symbolise the rigidly categorical restricitons imposed upon man by laws derived from abstract reason, and the weeping of stars symbolizes at the cosmic level an apocalyptic melting or breaking down of these barriers separating man from his own humanity, a return of man from the 'forests of night'.

Blake shifts away from the tiger, to introduce the results of its creation, in the symbolism of stars and heaven; this victory is a result of the creation of the dread tiger, so the dread tiger is not only a divine creation but also despite its dreadfulness, an aspect of the divine will.

  The tiger is dreadful, but its dreadfulness is an 'accident' and not its 'substance' to use one of Blake's favourite philosophical distincitons; its substance is power, the power of that energy which will return man to Eden.

  

The images are so compelling that for most purposes they explain themselves and we have an immediate, overwhelming impression of an awful power lurking in the darkness of being and forcing on us questions which piece to the heart of life.

Blake sets his poem about the tiger with its more frightening and more frigthened question "Did he who made the lamb made thee?" The Lamb and the Tiger are symbols for two different states of the human soul. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world.                 

It is consistent with Blake's intention in the poem as a whole that dreadfulness should not be too horrible and that the questions asked about the tiger should be rhetorically general enough, as they here are not to demand answers other than those supplied by the image of the tiger itself, therein he employs evocative form of stanza. Evidently, the rather generalized questions in the poem however appropriate to his purpose in the poem, are not sharp enough to express his real attitude towards the tiger's dreadful aspect. For an example, He more pointedly asks 'whether' he got the light for the tiger's eyes from the 'distant deep or skies', furthermore the fire now becomes 'cruel' calling attention to the transcendent qualities of the tiger's eyes.

"What dread hand and what dread feet?" is a mere suggestion of dreadfulness, for he has removed the verb needed to complete the question - they are truncated question without verbs.

Placing the lines about stars and heavens first qualifies the question concerning the creator's response to his dread creation in such a way that the answer is obvious : "Did he smile his work to see" no longer asks simply whether the creator was in general pleased with his tiger, but asks more specifically whether he was pleased with it 'when' it caused the stars to throw down their spears and weep; put this way, the question becomes obviously rhetorical. And the line ending the stanza "Did he who made the lamb made thee" becomes a positive rhetorical climax which sums up the whole poem.

Critical Appreciation of ‘The Sunne Rising’

(It’s Dramatic Nature):

The Sunne Rising is a dramatic lyric (dramatic monologue uttered in a mood of passionate apprehensions) in the form of a dialogue between the poet, the sun and the poet’s beloved a silent listener present in the background throughout. Boys going to school, apprentices unwilling to work, busy farmers, flattering courtiers, kings and princes, are some other characters introduced from the outside world. The time is early in the morning when the sun is rising in the east and the setting is provided by the sunlit bedroom where the poet lies with his beloved. In choosing the images, the characters are particularized (exclusive); the presence of the sun to them is an indication of their parting and guilt feeling as they are yet to get married. Poets chide the early rising of the sun but here Donne has done with the sun and so to eliminate the existence of the sun is not an easy job so dramatic force in the poem is necessary.

(Donne’s Metaphysical wit):

The poet is notable for the blatant egotism (deliberate self-centeredness) which it manifests. Beginning with contemptuous references to the sun’s unruly untimely intrusion, Donne goes on to belittle its strength and finally even to have pity on it for its old age which asks for ease. His mistress’s eyes have greater radiance than the sun. He himself is capable of darkening its ray with a wink. The notions of the entire world contracting into the space of a single room, where lovers are concerned, is not novel, but the logical argument that this will ease the aged sun’s task certainly is. This is another fine example of Donne’s metaphysical wit-an essentially emotional perception is carried to its logical conclusion.

(The Unconventional Opening):

The poem is characteristic of Donne’s colloquial manner. Convention is broken. Conventionally the sun has been glorified as a God, Petrarch calls it ‘life giving sun’; but to Donne he is a “busy old fool”. Challenging Antagonism (opposition) is seen right from the beginning and ends with element of mock sympathy and with heaps of abuses the sun’s glory is demolished. Percy Marshall refers to the unpoetic phrases used in the poem, more especially, “foole, pedantique, offices, rags”. Coleridge regards this poem as one characterized by “true, vigorous exultation, both soul and body in full puissance.”

(Glorification of Love):

On the whole, ‘The Sun Rising’ is a love poem. The belittling of the sun begins in the first stanza and is carried over to the next. The poet tells the sun that brightness of his beloved’s eyes has blinded the sun’s eyes. The world of love and the external world are then juxtaposed (put together) and the little world of the lovers is said to be a microcosm of the outside world. Donne’s wit is seen in the way in which the East and West Indies and the kings of the world are all yoked together to illustrate the all sufficient nature of love and the worthlessness of the world and when the sun is discarded the beloved is raised. Timelessness and eternity which is above the worldly time can be identified. Hours, months, seasons are treated a worthless refuge. Physical sun can have power over the physical world, but the union of the souls is eternal and they cannot be restricted and is beyond time.

(Variety of Tone):

According to Joan Bennett, from the gay impertinence of its opening, we pass onto the full notes of satisfied love:

“She is all States, and all Princes I, 

  Nothing else is…”

She rightly calls the poem a successful fusion of wit and passion, with the enjoyment of love as theme. The situation becomes zestful (dynamic), brightly live and innovative as he chases the sun and then readmits it as the ill-mannered intrusion of the sun is dismissed by being sarcastic at the humble duties of the sun. The sleepy reluctance is found towards the end. Donne’s poetic strength is without inventing help from romantic terms he can make such simple colloquial language carry a portent emotional charge. The emphatic tone of the statement and the uncompromising bareness of its language reaffirm the speaker’s absolute assurance not merely as a lover but as an aggressive individualist who has challenged a greater force by sheer energy and determination bent the sun to his wit. Donne rescued English love poetry from the monotony which was threatening to engulf it at the end of the sixteenth century.

Donne as a Love Poet

Introduction:

Donne’s reputation as a love poet rests on his 55 lyrics which were written at different periods of his life, but were published for the first time in 1633 in one volume called ‘Songs and Sonets’. A few of them can be linked to actual persons and events of his life, but the majority are expressions of intense emotional activity in the poet’s mind. They are literary experiments, explorations of love-relationship from a man’s point of view.

Their emotional range and variety:

Donne’s love poems cover a wide range of feeling from extreme physical passion to spiritual love, and expresses varied moods ranging from a mood of cynicism and contempt to one of faith and acceptance; and then it is not bookish but is rooted in his personal experience. His love experiences were wide and varied and so is the emotions range of his poetry. He had love affairs with a number of women, some of them lasting and permanent others only for a short duration.

(The 3 strains):

Grieson distinguishes three distinct strains,

The cynical strain – his attitude towards women and constancy of love

The strain of conjugal love – which gave him spiritual peace and serenity

Platonic strain – love treated as holy passion, not different from the love of a devotee for his Maker.

More often he mixes a number of strains and moods within the same poem. This makes Donne as a love poet singularly original(Flea). Unconventional (Sun Rising) and realistic. His poems are about the difference between lust and love.

Love Situation: Their intellectual analysis:

Whatever may be the tone or mood of a particular poem, it is always an expression of some personal experience and is, therefore presented with remarkable force, sincerity and seriousness. Each poem deals with a love-situation which is intellectually analysed with the skill of an experienced lawyer.

 In ‘The Flea’ he breaks the Petrarchan convention of physical love before marriage as he makes his beloved to yield to his desires. But then he is not brutal though his motive is wrong, he gives time and space to his beloved to justify the natural thought of natural love

The love-lyrics has an intensity and immediacy of emotions – the use of conceits

Philosophy of love- Realism:

Donne’s treatment of love is sensuous and realistic. For Donne, love merely of the body is not love but lust; but he is realistic enough to realize that it cannot also be of the soul alone; it must partake both of the soul and the body. It is the body which brings the souls together, and so the claims of the body must not be ignored. If the souls are one, what do the bodies matter? The beloved must not hesistate to give herself body and soul to her lover even though they are not married.

The poet does not consider physical contact a necessary for the continuation of spiritual love, and in poems highly spiritual he advocates it – Donne there is an antithesis between the opposite claims of the body and the soul, and that this antithesis is never satisfactorily resolved No Description of Female Beauty:

Donne tells us very little about the beauty of the women he loves. He writes exclusively about the emotion of love and not about its cause. He describes and analyses the experience of being in love and the charm of his mistress are either not mentioned at all or can only be guessed from the stray hints that he happens to drop. Even in ‘The Sun Rising’ he devoted only one line to description, but even then he does not really describe; he merely gives an account of the delight of the eye at the charms of his mistress. In this respect, he is different from other love-poets of his times in whose poems we get detailed catalogues of the physical charms of their objects of love.

Attitude towards womanhood:

Donne has often been called a cynic in his attitude towards love and woman. There is no doubt that his attitude towards woman in his early poems is one of contempt. “Goe, and catche a Falling stare’ he emphasizes the impossibility of finding a faithful woman. But then he finds a woman really worthy of his love, he calls her an angel and rises to the height of true spiritual passion and almost petrarchan adoration.

Conclusion:

Donne’s love metaphysics is really valid and complete relationship between a man and woman fuses their soul into a complete whole, and that they become a microcosm of the world. This very attitude is expressed in a number of other poems. For the lovers the entire world is contracted into the eyes of each other and this world is better because it is not subject to decay and dissolution. Had he kept his wit and fancy a little more under control, Donne would have been one of the greatest love poet all times.

( Pride is the enemy of love in his poems and hence divergent elements are brought together. The disappointed lover is not upset but attackes so the poem are very joyful. The finest note in the Donne’s poetry is the note of joy of mutual and contented passion. He doesnot use words for their own sake ‘poetical phrases’. The love poems becomes a sportive woman hunt. He has domesticated love and humanized it. It is when lovers truly possess each other in love that they come to possess one world or represent the entire riches of the physical world.

Religious Poetry:

Begins with a note of restlessness, fear, anxiety and stress (others idea of contenment unusual to this genre).

His soul riddled with suspicion (lot of questions) gives expression to his turbulence of his soul.

Has a deeper human appeal – A person need not be pious to understand it. A layman could very easily related the poems to their life. He talks about the problem between the spirit and flesh. (Human dilemma between the eternal and the temporal). The problem to identify and relate between man and god, the vision of hell and heaven, the triumph of good over evil.

His religious poems doesnot talk of God’s immortality. The themes are very strangely about hesitation, fear, doubt, pentcles, uncertainty, ganwang at the poet’s heart.

Donne is Human touchingly human – expresses the joy of the soul in terms of the joy of the body.

The real subject matter of poetry is Donne himself – the self relation to the women, self relation to God – Donne is primarily preoccupied with the self he explores it, he analyses it, he dissects it, he is obessed with it. This attitude is his limitation as well as his excellence as a religious poet.

Like Donne’s love poetry, his religious poetry also bears an unmistakable stamp of his personality. It is not written in a conventional, didactic style bringing home to the readers certain religious doctrines. On the other hand, it is highly individualistic and personal as all Donne’s poetry is, and it gives expression to his highly complex personality.

The religion which gives such passions to his poems is religion in its most primary and fundamental sense; what Donne asks for is purgation, purification, illumination –n a directing of heart.

Donne’s divine poems are the product of conflict between his will and his temperament. In his love poetry, he is not concerned with what he ought to or ought not to feel, but with the expression of feeling itself. Passion is there its own justification. In his divine poetry feeling and thought are judged by the standard of what a Christian should feel or think. As a love poet, he seems to owe nothing to what any other man in love had ever felt or said before him in a language of his own. As a divine poet he cannot use the language of the bible, and of hymns and prayers or remembering the words of Christian writers.

The truth of his love poetry are truths of the imagination, which freely transmutes personal experience. They are his own discoveries. The truths of relevation are the accepted basis of his religious poetry and imagination has here another task. It is to some extent fettered.

John Donne is one of the greatest English religious poets of the 17^th century. The best of Donne’s religious poetry was written only during the last phase of his career after a period of ordination, gloom, despair and frustration which resulted from the death of his wife, poverty and ill-health; but the nature of his imagery, even the early one, clearly indicated that his genius was religious and he was bound to take to religious poetry and so his temperament was essentially religious.

The 17th century opened with a generation of great social change which culminated in the eventual execution of King Charles I in 1649. This created an atmosphere of conflict that permeates much of the literature of the period. The writings of John Donne are rife with this conflict, reflecting in their content a view of love and women radically and cynically altered from that which preceding generations of poets had handed down.
     John Donne's view of love deviated greatly from the Medieval philosophy of courtly love, which had been expressed in poetry handed down from the sonnets of such poetic giants as Sidney and Petrarch. The general verse until then had focused greatly on the unrivalled importance of love in the context of the life of the poet (or his creation's voice). Until then, "love" had consisted mostly of an obsession with one woman, and an exploration of the feelings and situations that this caused in the narrator.
     Donne's reversal of that introversion came in the form of an intellectual exploration of the nature of his relationships themselves.  His poetic conceit (conception) is an explication of the emotional conceit (vanity) underlying love. A clearer example of the universalization of love is seen in "The Sun Rising" with the lines "She is all states, and all princes I,/Nothing else is." (ll. 21-22) With the equal weight of both his mistress and Donne's part, we see a much more balanced relationship than we ever read evidence of between, for instance, Astrophil and Stella.

     The emotions of Petrarchan sonneteers were often described (as they suffered their melancholy tears and sighs) using seasonal imagery, with frequent contrasts between heat and cold. By intentionally manipulating the common poetic instruments employed by the classics, Donne creates a very ironic tone in which he twists and breaks apart those ideals. This poem begins with, "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love," launching an apostrophe attacking the Petrarchan custom. In this manner, he not only assaults that style by demonstrating a twisted mastery of it, but also the attitudes which come with it. This conflict and resulting breakdown of former ideals illustrates the larger conflict seen in the era which Donne survived.

     Another belief which Donne addressed was the perspective with which women were viewed in the poetry of the time. He rarely, however, places the object of his affection on a pedestal.
     Where the ideals of courtly love held the woman to be unreachable,  Her seeming unimportance undercuts traditional (poetic) gender roles established centuries earlier. This demystification continues in Donne's "Song," a poem explaining how there is not anywhere in existence a beautiful woman who will remain faithful.  This inconsistent nature attributed to females is hardly complimentary, but it is certainly a vast change from the cold indifference of Petrarch's idyllic mistress., Petrarchan sonneteers never seemed to consider the possibility of relationship rooted in equality. This would be utterly shattering to the framework in which those poets wrote.
     These social norms had been established in poetry for several hundreds of years when Donne began his work breaking them down. Working against such conventions in the perception of love and women, Donne radically altered his poetry to accommodate both a more human and more equal view of both. In the end, the effect of these changes may have been lost for a few centuries, as his poetry was swept aside and not embraced until the onset of Modernism, but perhaps, given the underlying misogyny of his poetry, this was for the best. Going from the diminutive extreme to the entirely distrusted extreme may have been a more frightening alternative for women's history than the more gradual climb from silence we now conceive of.

 Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’ as a Mock-heroic poem

A ‘Mock epic’ or a ‘mock-heroic’ poem imitates the elaborate form and ceremonious style of the epic genre, and applies it to a commonplace or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece of this form, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Pope views through the grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the ‘belles’ and ‘elegants’ of his day over the theft of a lady’s curl. The story includes such elements of epic protocol as supernatural ‘machinery’, a voyage on board ship, a visit to the underworld, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes-although with metaphors, hatpins and snuff for weapons. Pope’s mock-epic is the most brilliant contribution to a long series of games that was being played with the tone and structure of epic.     

The eighteenth century in English poetry was peculiarly fitted for the burlesquing of set literary forms. Each one of these forms had a series of conventions, and the writers and readers could appreciate it when a literary form was burlesqued. As Cazamian shrewdly observes, the spirit of the time finds a subterfuge in imitating antiquity in a vein of mockery. Pope has called the poem ‘heroi-comical’, and no poet has ever succeeded so well in “using a vast force to lift a feather”.

The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of 18th-century high society. Pope here describes an epic choice in the world he actually inhabitated, yet it is not just only his eighteenth-century epic: miniaturized, inverted, but still the profoundest of mediations on what it means to be humans. The customary reading of the poem is of a brilliant bit of nothing, and if substance is granted then it is identified with ‘social satire’. Pope’s satirical adaptation of the epic mode itself possesses epic qualities, as he balances between the assumed gravity and the concealed irony.

The epic had long been considered one of the most serious of literary forms; it had been applied in the classical period, to the lofty subject matter of love and war, and more recently by Milton, to the intricacies of the Christian faith. The strategy of Pope's mock-epic is not to mock the form itself, but to mock his society in its very failure to rise to epic standards, exposing its pettiness by casting it against the grandeur of the traditional epic subjects and the bravery and fortitude of epic heroes: Pope's mock-heroic treatment in The Rape of the Lock underscores the ridiculousness of a society in which values have lost all proportion, and the trivial is handled with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be accorded to truly important issues. The society on display in this poem is one that fails to distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks the men it portrays by showing them as unworthy of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic resembles the epic in that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but the fact that the approach must now be satirical rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen.                                                                      Pope's use of the mock-epic genre is intricate and exhaustive. In the poem every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, and the pieces are wrought together with a cleverness and expertise that makes the poem surprising and delightful. Pope's transformations are numerous, striking, and loaded with moral implications. The great battles of epic become bouts of gambling and flirtatious tiffs. The great, if capricious, Greek and Roman gods are converted into a relatively undifferentiated army of basically ineffectual sprites. Cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry substitute for armor and weapons, and the rituals of religious sacrifice are transplanted to the dressing room and the altar of love.

The theme of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ is the cutting off of a lock of a lady’s hair. This obviously is something which is very trivial and does not at all deserve the dignity and exaltation of epic treatment. Yet out of this trivial theme, Pope spins out in true epic fashion a poem which Hazlitt called ‘the perfection of the mock-heroic’. This has been made possible by the epic dignity that Pope has given to the trivial theme. In accordance with epic conventions, he invokes the Muse, and proposes his theme –                                “What dire offence from amorous causes springs,

What mighty contests rise from trivial things?”

Beginning with ‘slight is the subject’, it is an amorous prank with extravagant seriousness.

Every epic must open with an invocation; and Pope invokes the Muse, but dedicates the poem to his friend Caryll; then moves straight into his heroine’s inner-most sanctuary. Behind white curtains, drawn to exclude the Sun God, who glimmers through them with a wavering and timorous ray, Belinda is discovered still safely asleep; while her guardian Sylph, present in a morning dream, breathes out his supernatural message. The poem is built up of five main dramatic episodes – Belinda’s vision and her abrupt awakening, which takes place near the stroke of noon; the afternoon water party, followed by the card party at Hampton Court: Belinda’s despair and recovery; the Homeric conflict, which becomes a Battle of Sexes; and the last scene where the stars have assembled to witness the apotheosis of the Lock. But Pope attaches three subsidiary scenes – the Baron’s sacrifice, celebrated before the sun has quite risen, Umbriel’s descent into the underworld, and Sir Plume’s confrontation of the outrageous ravisher. With all these incorporated Pope becomes the one who achieved has artistic deftness and unity of purpose.

Belinda’s toilet preparations are invested with all the mock solemnity of the epic hero going to worship before arming for battle. What Pope is presenting in this passage is an inverted Mass, the ritual ceremony for the worship of God is used instead to worship social and personal appearance. The parody of religious worship is a way of ridiculing female vanity, not religion itself, just as the use of mock-epic is not to make fun of epic poetry. Betty is the ‘inferior Priestess’ presenting the sacrificial oblations to the Goddess (Belinda)’glittering spoil’, as like arming of the epic hero for battle. Belinda’s beauty depends on imported luxuries pillaged from India and Arabia. The touch here is more jocular and typified by the comic unification of the small and the great as the shell of the tortoise and the ivory of the elephant are converted into combs for a lady’s dressing table. Such distortions in scale are intrinsically funny. The mundane materials receive dignified treatment, as the mock epic laments over human impermanence. The military allusion of arming for battle continues with ‘files of pins’ extending their ‘shining rows’ like columns of soldiers lined up in polished armour.

An epic contains the vows of heroes. The Baron’s propitiating the spirit of Love on the fateful day is described in real mock-epic fashion. An epic must contain many battles, with many single combats between the various protagonists. The battle in the final canto is a very lively instance and it is peculiarly appropriate that Belinda meets the Baron in single combat and overwhelms him by throwing a pinch of snuff at his nostrils.

As an epic must contain many episodes, Pope has introduced into his poem the episode of the game of Ombre, which is the prelude to the central action, which is described in terms of a mighty and thrilling battle. The rendering of the card game as a battle constitutes an amusing and deft narrative feat. By parodying the battle scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended on such insignificant trials as games and gambling.

The structure of “the three attempts” by which the lock is cut is a convention of heroic challenges. The melodrama of Belinda’s screams is complemented by the ironic comparison of the Baron’s feat to the conquest of nations.

The final battle is the culmination of the long sequence of mock-heroic military actions. Pope invokes by name the Roman gods who were most active in warfare, and he alludes as well to the Aeneid comparing the stoic Baron to Aeneas”Trojan”. Belinda’s tossing of the snuff makes a perfect turning point, ideally suited to the scale of this trivial battle. The snuff causes Baron to sneeze, a comic and decidedly unheroic thing for a hero to do. The bodkin too serves nicely, and Pope gives the pin an elaborate history in accordance with the conventions of the epic.

The mock heroic conclusion of the poem is designed to compliment the lady it alludes to while also giving the credit for being the instrument of her immortality.

God is pushed to periphery and new magnificent inventive stroke dispatches the Pagan Gods to virtual oblivion and we find instead the mock epic substitute the machinery. Pope’s object in introducing this machinery into his poem is for one thing, and epic poem without machinery is an inconceivable thing and Pope was anxious that his poem must be regarded as a mock epic. With Belinda’s dream, Pope introduces the ‘machinery’ of the poem – the supernatural powers that influence the action from behind the scenes. Here, the sprites that watch over Belinda are meant to mimic the gods of Greek and Roman traditions, who are sometimes benevolent and sometimes malicious, but always intimately involved in earthly events. Machinery is the term invented by the critics to signify the part which the Deities, Angels or Demons are made to act in a poem. Here “the light militia of the air” is of the Rosicrucian system. It is common in epics for a character to visit the subterranean region. In this mock-epic, Umbriel goes on a visit to the Cave of Spleen. His journey to that place is described like Satan’s journey in Paradise Lost from the depths of Hell to the newly created world.

The mock-epic effect is heightened by Pope’s use of epigram, anti-climax and delightful irony. The death of lap-dogs is kept at the same level as the death of husbands. The breaking of the vow of chastity is placed on the same level as the breaking of a favourite china jar. Zeugma, a figure of speech is used to describe the Queen Anne at Hampton Court as sometimes taking counsel and sometimes tea. The irony comes in the description of the beaux with their wide-skirted coats and high-heeled shoes, their snuffboxes and Malacca canes.

There are many parallels between the poem and great epics. His purpose was merely to expose the life of the nobility of his time. While Milton chose blank verse to express the immensity of the landscape of his epic, Pope chose to utilize the heroic couplet to trivialize this grandeur. Pope’s quick wit bounces the reader by his detailed description of his parlour-room epic. His content is purposefully trivial; his scope purposefully thin, his style purposefully light-heated and therefore his choice of form is purposefully geared toward the smooth, natural rhythm of the heroic couplet. The caesura, the end-stopped lines, and the perfect rhymes lend the exact amount of manners and gaiety to his work.

Mariana

     In ‘Mariana’ Keats uses a desolate landscape as an appropriate setting for woe and made it his poem’s central feature. Music, melancholy and landscape were all blend and fused to bring out the listless despair and terrible hopelessness of Mariana. ‘Mariana’ is the finest example of inner landscape painting and has enriched English Literature and has extended its possibilities.

From the very opening lines suggestive details are piled up, so that the setting in which Mariana lives and moves becomes a perfect symbol of her soul. Images of gloom and desolation pervade(spread throughout) : the broken sheds look ‘sad and strange’, the only waters are blackened and seemingly threatened by creeping moss, even the lone tree in the landscape becomes mysteriously sinister. These grey visual scenes in succession elevate the elegiac mood. The settings are real and ordinary and in this context its disturbing. Mariana suffers from sleeplessness and is in constant tears ‘ere the dews were dried’. Mariana knows that her former lover will never come, that she must go on existing without hope of change which the dawn gives others. There is a passionate outcry against such a fate and the suffering and weariness finds only partial expression in the four line refrain.

The poet is more concerned with the evocation of a dreamy half-super natural atmosphere rather than with the telling of story and so there is no account for Mariana’s loneliness.

The only way to express emotion in the form of art in the words of Eliot “is by finding an ‘Objective Correlative’, in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that these external facts shall immediately evoke our emotion.”

     The setting in which Mariana moves around is a broken shed ‘sad and strange’. The flower pots which ought to bloom remains thickly crusted with blackest moss. The rusted nails that which holds the pear to the fable wall had lost its grip. The shed is deserted and is covered by overgrown weeds. Like the moated grange(farmhouse) Mariana’s life is dreary and she welcomes death.

     Out of listless despair she suffers from sleeplessness and is in constant tears as even the dew drops had dried. She could not pray to the sweet heaven either at morning or at evening. With the flitting(flying) of bats, the darkness spreads over the sky and Mariana glances outside her casement only to find the dreary night very much like her life.

     Mariana spends sleepless night and in the middle of the night, she hears the owl crow. She takes a lonely walk till the cold winds woke the grey-eyed morn. The Dawn at which the cock sings and oxen lows came to her without ‘hope of change’, as the dawn is not going to get her lover back.

     At about a stone’s throw there stagnates water from a sluice and the only waters are blackened and seemingly threatened by creeping moss, and even the lone poplar tree in the landscape becomes mysteriously sinister. This lone tree is a symbol of Mariana herself.

     When the moon was low, the wind blows with a shrill sound. The curtains oscillated in the gust of winds and swaying shadows are formed. And when the moon goes further down, there is no wind and in that calm atmosphere the shadow of the lone poplar tree falls upon her bed. The night is calm and still and so is the hopelessness of Mariana.

     The ‘Dreamy House’ of Mariana seems to sleep as it is calm and quiet without activity of life. At the window the blue fly sings, the mouse shrieks behind the wainscot. Mariana in her hallucination, she seemed to see old faces and hear old voices calling her from outside in that virtually deserted house.

     On the roof of this dreamy house, the sparrows chirrup and the slow ticking of the clock is heard and the sound which was made by the wind passing through the lone poplar tree baffles and frightens. The sun was about to set in the west with its slanting rays falling on the chambers of the dreamy house.

Mariana at the lyric end in a whimper(moan,cry) of futility(uselessness) uses both ‘dreary’ and ‘aweary’ intensifying the impression of unchanging enervation of spirit, its dullness, hypnotic repetition being varied only at the end of the lyric.

Lady of Shalott – an appreciation

Source:

The poem is a pure fantasy, entirely the result of the poet’s imagination working on a legend which fascinated him at the time.

Word Pictures:

The narrative is swift and straight-forward with no digressions. The poem is to be enjoyed for its beautiful and vivid pictures which pass before the mind’s eye in quick succession.

There are a number of pictures : the river and the highroad and the fields, the castle on the island, and the room with the lady weaving her magic web, and the moving scene outside reflected in the mirror; Sir Lancelot riding by and the lady leaving her room to look after him for the window; the broken web and the cracked mirror; the lady of Shalott “robed in snowy white” floating down the stream in her boat and singing her last song and then gliding “dead pale” between the houses of Camelot, while “knight and burgher, lord and dame’ come out upon the wharfs to look at her and Sir Lancelot is stricken with wondering pity. There are a number of interesting similes and metaphors, the best is the Sir Lancelot likened to a meteor shooting across the sky.

Critical Summary:

Symbolic Significance:

Hopkins praises the poem as “pure, sensuous poetry” to be enjoyed in its romance, in its pictures and four its music and also for its hidden allegory.

“I am half-sick of shadows’, said the Lady of Shalott”

The story shows that a life of isolation cut off from reality, is bound to result in frustration and tragedy. The day dreams of an artist are shattered as soon as they come in contact with the outside reality.

The lady symbolizes the poet living in his ivory tower, her web of that of the work of art on which he works, the curse is that of the contact with harsh reality and the mirror symbolizes the mere shadows(other works of art) and not real and that it cannot last long.

Nature Background:

Throughout, as the narration proceeds, Nature is shown in sympathy with the human actors. It changes in harmony with human moods and emotions. Thus in the beginning, before the curse befalls the lady, nature is bright and beautiful. The lady is peaceful and happy, and so in harmony with her nature too is gay and well lit. But when the curse befalls her and she is to die, nature too changes and becomes dark and gloomy. The tragedy of the Lady of Shalott is thus reflected in nature.

A Medieval Romance:

The Middle Ages were times of chivalry, knight-errantry, woman worship and magic and witchcraft. The setting is medieval, King Arthur and his knights living in Camelot have been brought in. Sir Lancelot wears a blazoned baldric with the figure of a Knight kneeling before his lady, and the Lady of Shalott regrets that she has no Knight true and loyal. The supernatural element has also been brought in through the mysterious curse on the lady, the magic web which she weaves and the way in which the curse befalls her and she dies.

Music and Melody:

The poem is to be enjoyed for its story, for its vivid pictures and for its music. The language is simple as well as musical. There is artistic use of alliteration in “Four gray walls, and four gray towers” and liquid consonants like ‘l,m,n…’ are dexterously manipulated.

Description:

The island of Shalott

The island of Shalott lies in a pleasant river which flows down to the City of Camelot, the Capital of King Arthur. On both sides of the river are spread fields of barley and of rye. Beautiful lily flowers grow there.

The scenes on the magic mirror

The highway road winds down to Camelot, the little whirlpools of the river, the Surly rustics, the red cloaks of market girls, a troop of damsels glad, curly haired shepherd-lad dressed in crimson red, knights and the lately wed young lovers.

The word picture of Sir Lancelot

“All in the blue unclouded weather

Thick jewell’d shown the saddle leather,

The helmet and the helmet feather

Burn’d like one burning flame together,

As he rode down to Camelot,

As often throu’ the purple night,

Below the starry clusters bright

Some Bearded meteor, trailing light”

The Bridle studded with gems, of his horse glitters like cluster of stars in the galaxy. The Helmet shines brightly like a flame of fire, under the sunlight. Sir Lancelot riding by Shalott with his armour shining under the sun, is being likened to a meteor with a trail of bright light shooting across the sky. This is one of the finest word picture in the poem.

Nature’s reaction to her death

“In the stormy east-wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining.

Heavily the low sky raining.”

Shallot gliding through the houses of Camelot

The lady of Shalott “robed in snowy white” floating down the stream in her boat and singing her last song and then gliding “dead pale” between the houses of Camelot, while “knight and burgher, lord and dame” come out upon the wharfs to look at her and Sir Lancelot is stricken with wondering pity.

Bacon as an essayist. Chief qualities of Bacon’s essays.

Essay Definition:

We usually think today of the essay as one of the latest dishes in the banquet(feast) of literature. It calls for a class of readers who possess economic and social security and who have time and the talent to appreciate rational reflections on civilized customs, manners and morals. The term essay is late but the thing is ancient, the essay as it grew  absorbed like a river a number of tributaries. Owing to a vast proportion of essays there is no rigid working definition. In a word, the essay became a genre for the natural expression that heightened self-consciousness; a short piece of expositive prose, which attempts to shed light on a restricted subject of discussion. However, with regard to Bacon, an essay is a short, incomplete, informal, light, subjective literary composition in prose.

Bacon’s Conception:

The essay was, in the words of Douglas Bush, “one of the late courses in the banquet of literature”. Bacon ‘the father of English Prose’, took the form from the French master Montaigne, a recluse and manipulated it to suit his high seriousness and stately manner. Bacon wrote his essays in the form of mere “fragments of his conceit” or “dispersed meditations”. He jotted down any brilliant or suggestive ideas he heard or illuminating ideas that struck him. He gradually retouched and enlarged them into the form that we have at present. He thought of them simply as “certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient”. Bacon uses the word ‘essay’ in its original etymological sense, now almost lost, and as equivalent to ‘assay’ – a trial or attempt.

Montaigne and Bacon:

Bacon took the form of the essay from the French master and manipulated it to suit his high seriousness and stately manner. He used it not as a vehicle of self-revelations as Montaigne did, but as a repository(store house) of “dispersed meditations”. While the French man is preeminently personal and discursive, Bacon is impersonal and aphoristic. Bacon does not possess the lively humour or charming informality of Montaigne. So Bacon and Montaigne were far apart in their temperament and outlook and they had nothing in common except the term essay by which they were called.

Qualities:

     Bacon’s essays are short comments on subjects such as ‘of truth, of friendship, of great place…’ The very glance at the titles of Bacon’s essays reveals that he wrote not for the general readers but for kings, princes, courtiers and men placed in high places like him. He wrote on familiar subjects of popular interest. Essays of this category certainly ‘come home to men’s business and bosoms’. Bacon can come down to the level of the common man and take the common man’s point of view even when he has kings and princes in mind as his audience. But when he tackles grave subjects he cannot afford to be anything but impersonal, formal and stately.

     Bacon described his essays as “counsels, civil and moral”. The civil essays are those in which he sets his thoughts on political and administrative questions. His moral essays are concerned with private and personal questions like love, marriage and so on. Some essays are on topics, which we call aesthetic. Indeed it is the great variety of Bacon’s essays which makes them so interesting and impressive. He wrote, ”I have taken all knowledge to be my province”.

Bacon frequently speaks in his essays as a moralist. Although people do not generally like too much of sermonizing and preaching, yet judicious doses of morality are not willingly accepted by readers but are positively welcome to them. Moral percepts and maxims embodying wisdom give the readers a feeling that they are becoming wiser and morally nobler. They man not act upon the ethical principles which Bacon enunciates in his essays, but they derive a certain moral satisfaction by reading them and by appreciating their soundness. While perusing the essays we must remember that Bacon’s words of advice are meant not for anybody who cares to listen but to the chosen great ones of the world, who will attend only to words of becoming weight and dignity.

      Bacon a man of ripe wisdom and vast experience of the world, illustrates and reinforces his ideas and arguments with appropriate similes, metaphors and quotations. He supplies short dissertations which are highly sententious in form. He quotes extensively from the ancients, but he always relates them to his own direct observations. Even when he quotes from the bible, the quotations is meant to reinforce the point he is making and not what the bible intends.

“Like a good lawyer Bacon with an air of complete impartiality, balances opposing arguments before he draws his conclusions.” The essential merit lies in the density of thought and expression, the frequent brilliancy of the poetic images, inserted never as ornaments but always to emphaise ideas and the impressive loftiness of a oracular tone”.

No doubt, other contemporaries of Bacon excelled him in rhetorical power and musicial cadence(rhythm) but no one equals him in clarity, terseness and succinct lucidity of prose. His command of phrase is extraordinary and startles and arrests the reader by its neatness and pregnancy. His essays are full of quotable quotes.

Consider the practical wisdom closely packed in the following epigrams:

“He that hath wife and children has given hostages to fortune.”

“All rising to a great place is by a winding stair.”

“Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.”

Conclusion:

His essays must surely be numbered among the few books that deserve to be chewed and digested. Rarely do we find so much meat, so admirable dressed and flavoured, in so small a dish. Bacon hates padding(stuffing) and never wastes words. He offers us infinite riches in a little phrase. Each of his essays gives us in a page or two the condensed subtlety of a master-mind on a major issue of life. The sturdy style is as supreme prose as Shakespeare’s verse. No doubt, the endless metaphors and allegories he uses and the allusions he provides sometimes tires us out. Indeed, the essays are like rich and heavy food which cannot be digested in large quantity at one go. But then taken three or four at a time they are the finest intellectual nourishment in English.

Bacon’s style

Introduction:

Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse – it is how a speaker or writer says whatever he says. The characteristic style of a work of a writer may be analysed in terms of his diction, or characteristic choice of words; its sentence structure and syntax; the density and types of its figurative language; the patterns of its rhythms and of its component sounds; and its rhetorical aims and devices.

Bacon the ‘Father of English Essay’ wrote in a kind of style never written before and perhaps never written thereafter. Bacon’s style can be listed as – terse, epigrammatic, aphoristic, lucid, pithy, anecdotes and brevity.

Much of Bacon’s greatness as an essayist depends on his style. Till his time the great defect of English prose had been its prolixity and diffuseness. Bacon put an end to this. His scientific training enabled him to express himself with clarity and precision(conciseness). He employed a style at once clear, simple, effective and flexible enough to deal with profound as well as ordinary thoughts. The basis of Bacon’s style remains aphoristic, epigrammatic; his utterances are terse, pithy and sententious. His ability to express thoughts in brief, condensed sentences with a proverbial ring is rarely surpassed. Bacon uses balance and anti-thesis to give a pleasing cumulative effect to his utterances. He had the unrivalled power of packing his thoughts into the smallest possible space and his essays may be described as “infinite riches in a small room”. So well did he say what he wished to say that many of his sentences have become almost a part of the daily English.

Terseness:

Terseness of expression arising from condensation of thought was a single great virtue of Bacon which he possessed it in a greater measure. This terseness is obtained by the use of the weightiest and simplest words, and a persistent avoidance of superfluous words and very often connectives. “Bacon abhors padding, and disdains to waste a word; he offers us infinite riches in a little phrase” says Will Durant. Every sentence is capable of being expanded into a pretty sizeable paragraph. Many of his sentences have passed into the language as proverbs. The excessive terseness of this passage needs no comment. “  “

Quotations:

Bacon himself one of the most quotable of prose writers, he often quotes from many books contradicting his statement “a man shall find much in experience, little in books”. He uses quotations so generously that they may be said to be quite a feature of his style. They show his range of reading. He is never exact in his quotations and he gives more the substance than the exact verbal text of the quotation, since he quotes from his memory. In his essay ‘of friendship’ he misinterprets and misrepresents Aristotle without consciously intending a parody. Another peculiarity is that Bacon does not quote any English poet, not even Chaucer and Shakespeare, and even of all the Latin poets he quotes from only three- Virgil, Ovid and Lucretius. He does not quote Horace at all even when this Latin poet is decidedly superior to both Ovid and Lucretius.

Anti-Ciceronianism:

The terseness, simplicity and straightforward nature of Bacon’s prose are evidence of his anti-ciceronianism. Bacon revolted against the highly organized, ornate, verbose and Latinised style of most of his contemporaries. Ciceronian style is hypotactical rather than paratactical. In the paratactical style there is much less of organization and more of conversational ease.

Bacon’s Wit, Imaginative Insight and Poetry:

The emphasis on the simplicity of Bacon’s prose should not be taken to mean that his prose is bald and barren. His style is also coloured by wit, imaginative insight and a poetry of his own. In wit, that is, in perceiving similarities in apparently dissimilar objects, he is unrivalled. His power of giving analogies, the aptness of similes and metaphors, and his capability of referring to the ancient history for illustrating his ideas are indeed remarkable. The openings of his essays are very often striking for the use of analogy, metaphor, and simile. These fortify and clarify his observations and sometimes seem to clinch the issue. Consider an instance;

‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark .”

Aphoristic style:

An aphoristic style means a compact, condensed and epigrammatic style of writing. An aphorism is a short sentence expressing a truth in the fewest possible words. An aphorism is like a proverb which has a quotable quality. Bacon excels in this kind of writing.

His aphoristic style makes Bacon an essayist of high distinction. Aphorisms give to his essays singular force and weight. No one has ever produced a greater number of closely packed and striking formulas, loaded with practical wisdom. Many of them have become current as proverbs. Bacon’s essays constitute a handbook of practical wisdom, enclosing in their shortest maxims, an astonishing treasure of insight. The essay ‘of marriage and single life” shows the aphoristic quality of Bacon’s style in a more striking manner. Here are some of the sentences that are eminently quotable: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”(the idea here has been expressed most effectively and memorably), ”Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects.” (this is an excellent summing up of the case), “ Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age and old men’s nurses”(here is an aphorism combining wisdom with wit).

It may, however be pointed that, on account of extreme condensation, Bacon’s aphorism occasionally become obscure. For instance, it would be difficult to get the meaning of the following pithy sentence from the essay ‘of truth’ “Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief.”

Drawbacks of his Prose:

Two drawbacks of Bacon’s prose have been often pointed out. They are its occasional obscurity and its high intellectualism with a corresponding lack of emotional intensity. Its occasional obscurity is due to the frequent employment of Latinisms, obsolete(out dated) and archaic(ancient) words and of words of Latin root in their original etymological sense and his tendency to economise on words, resulting in excessive condensation of meaning sometimes incommensurate with easy comprehension. As he writes form his head and not from his heart his writing lacks even the least tincture of emotion or sentiment.

Conclusion:

But such exceptions apart, Bacon’s genius for compression lends much to his style. Every aphorism that we come across startles us by its novelty. Every epigram arrests us. Every pithy sentence holds our attention. And they all charm, delight and thrill us because they all of the valuable ideas, suggestions, lessons and so on. And what adds to their appeal is the fact that Bacon does not seem to have made conscious efforts to produce them. They are not laboured but spontaneous.

JOHN OSBOURNE’S ‘LOOK BACK IN ANGER’

                                                                                                   

     The Class Change is present in almost every country that ever existed. In its essence, it represents a logical continuation of the existence of the state under altered circumstances. And when new conditions are established, logically, new moral values are set, thus changing the priorities of the society. In the play of John Osbourne,’ Look Back in Anger’, one can sense this social change that originated from the aftermath of the Second World War – it reflects for the first time, the real issues of the real people who suffered the consequences of the war and the immediate ‘class change’ of the society that followed. The drama is a form of literature into which are moulded the thoughts and spirits of the times. Twentieth century has produced a great deal of war literature, bringing out the spirit of the times viz., the scientific advances, the destruction caused by the wars, the resultant collapse of the moral values, and the breaking up of the social set up that were cherished in the earlier Victorian times. The play itself represents a turn point of the modern british drama – ‘Angry Young Men’.

‘Look Back in Anger’ has its unique importance, as the beginning of a revolution in the British Theatre. The play was an immediate success with the youth, as it strongly expresses the mood of the times – the mood of the angry young men. Earlier the post-war generation had hoped to see the dawn of the brave new world with the end of the war. But the brave new world was nowhere in sight. The youngest generation was frustrated with the lack of opportunities for meaningful achievements. Osborne’s anti-hero Jimmy represents the angry young men of England when he says: “There is no new brave world. Only a-brave-new-nothing-thank-you”.

‘Angry Young Men’s is a journalistic catch phrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950’s. Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes even anarchic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society as a whole, criticizing certain behaviours or groups in different ways.

Here Osborne is not just telling the story of Jimmy Port6er and his wife Alison. He is using the stage as a platform and the character Jimmy as a mouth-piece for expressing his strong views on many aspects. Jimmy Porter pours his anger into the attacks he launches on everything – Alison, Cliff, Helena, the Sunday papers, the class differences of the social system, conservative members of Parliament, the establishment of the church, the phoney politeness of the upper class and their nostalgia for the past. He would like to see things changed, but cannot offer any positive solutions or reforms. This combination of awareness of problems and a helpless inaction makes him a highly successful hero, the typical of the youth of the times. The hero Jimmy Porter belongs to the ‘scum’ of the society. The ‘scum’ of the British society were generally young, left-wing, state-educated individuals, who wanted their rights recognized. They were critical of many subjects like royalty, politics, religion, class and marriage. They could not give solutions to the problems, but were angry at the ills of the olden times. Alison says to her father, “You are hurt because things have changed, Jimmy is hurt because things have not changed”. Jimmy and the youth of the times wanted a healthy change from the old established order.

He is conscious of class distinctions in the English society and the gap between the rich and the poor. So he has a great grudge against the upper and the middle classes and their class values. Unfortunately, Alison who is above him in the social ladder marries him. Alison is a gentle and well-bred girl and Jimmy is crude and loud-mouthed; the result is conflict. Jimmy finds Alison as a convenient target fro venting his anger, at the slightest pretext. He hurls abuses at her and her family for their superior airs, as if she were the representative of the ruling order. His anger is only against the ruling order, the upper classes and the class values of his times and not against Alison as a person. He only makes her a scapegoat and a target of his anger as if she symbolically represented all that he is angry about. Jimmy’s dilemma is perfectly presented in Alison’s description of his reaction to her virginity: he taunted Alison’s description of his reaction to her virginity: he taunted Alsion about her virginity and was quite angry about it, “he seemed to think that an untouched women would defile him”. By being a virgin, she is pulling him down into an observance of social conventions – she is what her middle class society expected her to be.

Each character represents a particular ill of the society: Alison –middle class reticence, the Colonel – nostalgia for the bygone age of glory(‘Edwardian Plant’), Alison’s brother – corrupt politicians, Alison’s mother – superior and snobbish airs of the upper class. Jimmy combines one’s awareness of what was wrong and his helplessness against correcting them. The Characters in the play personifies post-war Britain’s condition. Jimmy is an idealist, if we use the formula “anger-care-love”. He cares for humanity and refuses to accept the conditions of life as they are presented to him. Hence, the anger and dissatisfaction of Osborne’s hero Jimmy is not mere neurosis, but in his anger we find a plea for more rights, a healthy religion, clean politics, equal and more opportunities for meaningful achievements and true values in life instead of middle class morals.

The play was a tremendous success as it happened to be the right play in the right place and at the right time. It became an expression of the life and feelings of the age from which it grew. The opening scene set in a small flatlet housing three people, vividly portrays the problem of the working class realistically, problems like housing shortage, scarcity of essential items, unemployment and under-employment (Jimmy Porter a Univeristy Gradudate running a sweet shop), the social barriers, the problem of loneliness and isolation (Hugh’s mother dying uncared and unmourned).

The one and all powerful theme and mood of the play is ‘anger’ – Jimmy’s anger against the upper and middle classes, against the lack of opportunities, the futility of modern living, the lack of vitality in life, the still existing social and class difference. Osborne’s realism portrays the disillusionment, anger and the despair of the young. Tormenting his wife is only an external symbol of his internal turmoil and his scathing and helpless anger against each and everything and nothing in particular.

In content, Osborne says no soft-stuff, but says with force what he wants to say, further his content is different from that of the earlier playwrights. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Osborne’s Jimmy is a great hero of a particular mood. His natural anger is the anger of a new-educated working class which felt it was denied the opportunities and privileges of the earlier generation. Earlier the working class woes had not been treated seriously, but Osborne is successful in achieving a humane inward treatment of people who were till now submerged, but in post-war climate were slowly becoming conscious of their rights and privileges.

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‘Angry-Young Men’ is a journalistic catch phrase applied to a number of British Playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950’s. Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes even anarchic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society as a whole, critizing certain behaviours or groups in different ways.

Title : It has two parts: ‘Look Back’ and ‘in Anger’. Certainly there is enough of anger in the play. Its hero, Jimmy Porter is an angry young man. As one critic puts it, he is furious with life.

He addresses his nice little wife, between spasms of rather rancid baby talky in terms one would hesitate to use to the lowest drab of the street. He bespatters his friend with backwash from the jargon of scruffy left-wing pseudo-intellectuals and then taunts him because he is fortunate enough not to understand it. After four years of marriage he hasn’t yet wearied of fuming class-consciously against his mother-in-law and gloating over the indigestible feast the worms will have of her. He spits venom against everything and everybody and is apparently convinced that for the youth of today the world is an utterly putrid place.

The real cause of Jimmy’s anger is that he constantly looks back at the past with nostalgic( a sense of emotional loss) and the consequent frustrations are expressed in angry vituperations aimed at his wife, at all her friends and relatives, and at all the values represented by the class to which she belongs. The bears and squirrels game is a sort of enacted nostalgia, a brave attempt at compensation for those pleasures of youth which both Jimmy and Alison have missed, and at which both husband and wife “look back”, the former with anger and the latter with wistful yearning.

Jimmy was thought to symbolize the fury of the young post-war generation that felt itself betrayed and ruined by its elders. The older generation has made a thorough mess of things, and there was nothing the new generation could do except find refugee in the occupation of nursing its resentment. Jimmy Porter, a cultured university graduate, supports himself by selling a candy at a stall. Thus society is so rotten that they is no loner any point in trying to be useful. Ofcourse, Jimmy is not content to stagnate, but he feels that he has no chance. His withdrawal from society is not one of choice. He feels himself to be unjustly crushed down with no hope of ever getting up. Jimmy’s defeatism was looked upon as a symbol of the numb quiescence of post-war youth.

The post-war youth railed at the establishment and longed for a better and more just social order. A number of educational institution including the so-called ‘RedBricks’ universities, were founded to cater to the needs of the weaker section of society. From these institutions came out educated youngmen from the working classes who wasted to more up in the social scale but found that the doors were closed against them. The British class system was as rigid as the Indian caste system, and it denied entry to aspiring and educated youngmen like Jimmy, who railed at the established order with frustration and anger in their hearts. They could not find suitable jobs, and many were forced to accept occupation much below them. Thus Jimmy a university graduate is forced to run a sweet stall for his living. He lives in a shabby attic with his upper class wife and angrily denounces the whole social order as unjust, immoral and corrupt with hot anger burning within his heart, he rails at everything and everybody in the course of a single evening.

    From Jimmy’s first appearance his anger is no less ambiguous than he himself. Anger can be a virtue and it can be a dangerous vice. A moralist will say that anger is good when it is selfless, compassionate and allied to positive action; and that it is evil when it is selfish and tainted with frustration, malice and the desire to destroy. A creative artist depicting this emotion is more likely to be aware of the ways in which anger hovers between these two poles in most men and situations. The play is a moral exploration in precisely this field. In Jimmy we are confronted with a man whose anger undoubtedly starts in human idealism and the desire that men should be more honest, more alive more human than they normally are.

Certainly Jimmy Porter makes many cutting remarks about contemporary society, but he only makes them as a result of his peculiar personality problems. There is no definite indication in the play that Osborne ever intended Jimmy’s remarks to be taken as a general condemnation of society. Jimmy is an extremely unusual young man and not at all representative of the young men of his time. Osborne has ‘not’ put his tirades against society in Jimmy’s mouth in order to make speeches in the manner of a public orator. Instead, Jimmy’s tirades are always the natural outcome of his psychotic state: they are a defence-mechanism which he uses to hurt his wife whom he suspects of not being fully devoted to him, and to avoid facing the problem of his own helpless character. Granted that a representative of the generation which reached adulthood in the early 50’s would condemn his elders, his anger could hardly be embodied in the kind of speeches Jimmy makes. Jimmy’s tirades are not representative of any attitude. Osborne has given Jimmy a certain facility in composing biting remarks, but there is no real sense, no mature criticism in those remarks. If we examine his remarks closely, we find them to be just trivial.

Osborne has here given us an excellent accurate dissection of a perverse marriage. Jimmy’s problem is not the vicious injustice and hypocrisy of the social order;it is his suppressed awareness of the insoluble psychological paradox caused by his desperate, overriding need to posses a woman’s complete unquestioning love and his simultaneous constitutional inability to get along with anyone. His outbursts are the overflow of his bitterness whenever his wife fails to rise to the standards of devotion that he expects from her, at the same time that he knows them to be impossible. His biting sarcasms are in a sense, really directed inwardly against himself by torturing others. His real purpose, as he deliberately tries to destroy his wife’s love for him because it is not the love he had imagined, is self-torment. He is the sort of man who needs absolute devotion, but who is too-proud to ask for it. He needs it all the more from his wife because she comes from the sort of upper class family which he, as a good socialist, despises as useless and out-of-date and which at the same time he envies and resents because he knows that it looks down on him. In order to possess her, he had to marry her and submit to the conventionality that he hates. His dilemma is perfectly presented in Alison’s description of his reaction to her virginity.: he taunted Alison with her virginity and was quite angry about it, “he seemed to think that an untouched women would defile him”. By being a virgin, she is pulling him down into an observance of social conventions. She is what her middle-circle expected her to be…