Literatura y crítica

Capturing the Real Thing

viernes, 7 de diciembre de 2012

Capturing the Real Thing

A chapter on American realism and Henry James, from A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray: 
 

Howells never gravitated from realism to naturalism, with its emphasis on the determining influence of heredity and environment and its harrowing depiction of landscapes, social and natural, that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to humankind. There is a fundamental benevolence, a belief in human worth and social betterment, that is caught in one of his most famous remarks in Criticism and Fiction: "our novelists concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American." That remark would have elicited sardonic laughter from Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), who was known as "bitter Bierce" and "the wickedest man in San Francisco" among his contemporaries, and seemed to revel in both titles. Born in Ohio, Bierce participated in the Civil War. The war disgusted him, prompting him to see soldiers as little more than paid assassins and, when it ended, he moved to California, where he established a reputation as a brilliant and caustic journalism. Living in England for four years from 1872, he returned to California. He then published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, retitled In the Midst of Life in England and in the 1898 American edition. Another collection of stories, Can Such Things Be?, followed in 1893. More than half the stories in the first collection, and many in the second, deal with the Civil War; they reflect their author's feelings of revulsion for military life, and his bleak, bitterly comic view of existence in general. Some of these stories capture the vicious confusion of battle, just as, say Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) by John William De Forest (1826-1906) does. In "A Horseman in the Sky," a young Union soldier is forced by circumstances to kill a Confederate officer who happens to be his father. Others use stream-of-consciousness and suspense endings to explore the subjectivity of time. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," for example, presents the fantasy experienced by a man who is being hanged, in the final seconds of his life. And still others deploy a fluid, almost surrealistic prose style and black humor to dramatize physical and emotional violence. So, in "Chickamanga," we see a battleground strewn with corpses through the eyes of a child. The child sees but does not understand—althoguh, thanks to an ironic narrator, the reader does—until the end, when he comes across the ruin of his home and the dead body of his mother, "the greater part of the forehead ... torn away." A deaf mute, he then utters "a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a starting, soulless, unholy sound." It is the wreckage of a language, used in rsponse to the "wreck" he sees around him; he has awoken, hopelessly and helplessly, to the horror of life. The same dark light that simultaneously illuminates and shadows these stories also informs Bierce's poems, and the ironic series of definitions—such as the definition of realism quoted earlier—collected in The Devil's Dictionary. [Realism was described by Ambrose Bierce as "The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads" and having "the charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring worm"]. In 1913 Bierce traveled into war-tron Mexico to escape American civilization and to seek, he said, "the good, kind darkness." He must have found it, for he disappeared. To this day, it is not know hen, how, or exactly where he died.

At first sight, there are few connections between William Dean Howells and Henry James (1843-1916). Both saw writing as a serious vocation, and the writing of fiction as a form of artistic endeavor equal to any other. Both were influential, Howells exerting a powerful influence on his contemporaries and James mostly on his successors. Both addressed their work to what they saw as "the real thing," to use James's phrase: to the strenuous realities of material, mental, and moral existence. But the differnces between them are clear. Howells, in his very emphasis on the "commonplace," tended to concentrate on human likeness, typicality, and give priority, if not a monopoly, to the social context. James, on the other hand, was intensely interested in what he called "the special case"; that is, he chose to focus on how common moral conflicts and shared social concerns were realized in the complexities of individual experience and encountered by the individual consciousness. Howells used a variety of fictional techniques, but all of them were characterized by the directness of the journalist or historian. James, on the contrary, was what Joseph Conrad famously called him, "the historian of fine consciences." And to write this history, thoroughly and accurately, he devoted a lifetime to finding and developing the right fictional tools. "There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth," James wrote in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881), "... than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it." To create that "felt life," an imaginative experience for the reader, James expermineted with narrative structure and texture, developing patterns of character or imagery and moments of epiphany—and, above all, with point of view. "The house of fiction," James insisted, "has ... not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows ... every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable ... by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will." It mattered hugely, James knew, which window or windows the novelist chose to tell his tale because, in a variation of the theory of relativity or the indeterminacy or uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg (both of which were becoming current at the time James was still writing), what you saw depended on where you stood. James was not a moral relativist, by any means, but he became increasingly a psychological one. His constant experiments with narraive viewpoint, which were perhaps to be his major contribution to the developing aesthetics of the novel, sprang ultimately from the sense he shared with many of his contemporaries in science as well as art that our knowledge of reality is contingent on perspective.

Howells might have been more interested in social justice and the simplicities of realism than James; James might have been more concerned with a kind of secular mysticism of consciousness and the indeterminate, contingent character of the real. But it is to Howells's credit that, as critic and editor, he was among the first to recognize James's talent. "You showed me the way and opened me the door," James wrote to Howells in gratitude in 1912; "you wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me—I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of that." Credit is due to Howells all the more, perhaps, because as they knew, the two men came from very different backgrounds. James was born in New York City to a wealthy, patrician family, the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had amassed a large fortune. His father, Henry James, Sr. (1811-1882), acquired a reputation as a moral and social philosopher, developing his own form of liberal Christianity and ideas for social reform in books like Christianity the Logic of Creation (1857) and Substance and Shadow; or Morality and Religion in Their Relation to Life (1863). Henry James, Sr. encouraged intellectual experiment in his sons and gave them the freedom to develop their own systems of morality adn discipline. The results were positive. While Henry was to grow up and into a dedication to literature, the eldest son William James (1842-1910) was to become the foremost American philosopher of his day, developing his ideas about psychology and religion and his view that an idea has meaning only in relation to its consequences in feeling and in action in, respectively, The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907). These enlightened principles did not extend to women, however. On the contrary, Henry James, Sr. argued taht "Woman" was not truly a person but "a form of personal affection," whose mission it was to redeem man from his natural egotism and brutality. Such views, not untypical for the time, meant that Alice James (1848-1892), the youngest child and only daughter, was denied the formal education given to her brothers. Her family, while respecting her abilities—she was, among other things, an astute critic of both her famous brothers—coddled and, arguably, stifled her. She had several breakdowns during her relatively short life; and her daily journal, which she seems to have intended for publication, only appeared in 1964 as The Diary of Alice James.

After being educated by private tutors until the age of 12, Henry James went to schools in Europe and the United States. Entering Harvard Law School in 1862, he withdrew after a year. Then, with the encouragement of Howells and Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), a Harvard professor and translator of Dante, he began to concentrate on writing. Reviews and essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. In 1869 he returned to Europe, his first visit as an adult, first to England and then to Italy, which made a deep impression on him. It was while he was in Europe that his beloved cousin mary Temple died. How exactly this affected his later fiction is open to debate, although the situation of an attractive, lively but doomed or even fatally sick young girl certainly recurs in such novels as The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove (1902) and in the novella Daisy Miller (1878). In any event, james's first novel, Watch and Ward, apperared serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1871 (and in volume form in 1878). This was followed by his first collection, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) and Transatlantic Sketches (1875), and his first novels of real consequence, Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), and The Europeans (1878). The story "A Passionate Pilgrim" deals with the reactions of an eater American "pilgrim" when confronted with the fascinations of the complex European world of art and affairs. And James himself during this period was something of a pilgrim in Europe, which he cvame to regard as his spiritual fatherland, moving there permanently in 1875. During a year in Paris, he associated with such masters of the art of fiction as Flaubert and Turgenev, who encouraged his interest in what Flaubert called "le mot juste": the right word, the careful planning of the language and structure of the novel so as to make it an accurate register of reality. After 1876, however, he made his home mainly in London, although he maintained an American home in Massachusetts and, much later, moved to the small town of Rye in Sussex.

James was developing his ideas about his craft, and expressing them in, for instance, his well-known essay on "The Art of Fiction" (1884). He was also exploring what were to be the dominant themes of this the first stage of his career as a novelist, which lasted from roughly 1870 until 1890. There is James's interest in the mired complexities of fate and freedom, the possibly determining influences of environment and the possible power, the capacities of the human will: "don't talk about the will being 'destined'," declares a character in Roderick Hudson as a contribution to the debate, "The will is destiny itself. That's the way to look at it." There is his concern for the individual consciousness and the terms it must negotiate with society, how it maneuvers its way through moral and mental complexities. Above all, there is "the international theme," the series of contrasts James draws between Europe and America. In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879) James urged that "the good American" of his own time would be a more complicated, "more critical person" than the one of the time of his subject. He was thinking, among other things, of his own difference from the author of The Scarlet Letter, which was due, he thought, not only to the eruptions of civil conflict but to his exemplary encounter with European culture. There is a residue of "American" romanticism, as James would see it, in these novels of the first period: stories of young American pilgrims, dark family secrets, oppressive villains. But this is overlaid by habits of realism, empirical rigor, and attention to mannerly detail that James, at least, felt he owed to his European masters: to Flaubert or Turgenev, say, rather than to Hawthorne. More seriously and centrally, James was of the passionate belief that, as he puts it in his account of Hawthorne, "it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature"—and that, despite the Civil War, history "had left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature." What America lacked was what, precisely, Europe had: "an accumulation of history and custom," "a complexity of manners and types," all that could form a fund of suggestion for a novelist." James even went so far as to enumerate "the absent things in American life," the "items of high civilisation" which, he felt, were nowhere to be found in his place of birth. He was less specific about what was present, apart form insisting that "a good deal remains." What was clear, however, and could be succintly stated is that he felt compelled, as a novelist, to live in Europe and, as an American novelist, to dwell on this contrast. As a result, he offered a series of increasingly sophisticated fictional negotiations between European culture and American nature, European society and the American individual, European experience and American innocence. To an extent, he was transplanting a contrast embedded in American thought, and especially that of the nineteenth century, to the international arena: a contrast articulated in the fundamental divisions of the clearing and the wilderness. But what distinguished this fiction was not merely the transplantation of content but also the transformation of form. "A novel is a living thing," James insisted in "The Art of Fiction", "all one and continuous, like any other organism and in proportion as it lives will it be found ... that in each of its parts there is something of each of the other parts." That belief vividly informed his own practice as a novelist. It stimulatied fictions in which, at best, the medium is the message, the "moral of the narrative springs from a "doing" that is subtly intricate and mutually restrained, balanced and brilliantly nuanced.

In The American, James explores the contrast between Europe and America through the story of a protagonist whose name betrays his origins and missions. Christopher Newman is an American cho reverses the voyage of his namesake Christopher Columbus and travels from his own, New World to the Old World of France during the Bourbon period. There, he finds his love fro a Frenchwoman of the nobility frustrated by her family. Jemes draws a series of sly contrasts between Newman's innocence, candor, and ignorance (especially about matters of art and social convention) and the sophistication and cunning of his European hosts. The Europeans reverses this voyage, in turn, by bringing Europeans to New England. The transatlantic contrasts multiply and are more complex here, but the fundamental distinctions remain the same. In response to the news, for instance, that one of the European visitors is "the wife of a Prince," an older American character simply responds, "We are all princes here." Daisy Miller focuses the international contrast via the story of a charming but ingenous American girl who is destroyed, first socially and then literally, by her lack of understanding of her new European surroundings. Part of the exemplary subtlety of the story comes from a symbolic pattern it shares with The American and The Europeans: contrasting American "brightness," starkness, and simplicity with European shadows, secrets, and complexities. Part of it comes from the adept use of a narrator, an obsrver whose developing interest in Daisy, mingled sympathy and criticism, affection and astonishment, and developing feelings and opinions enable the narrative to maintain a delicate balance. Typically, the story offers not so much a judgment of Daisy and all she comes to represent, as a series of essays toward a critical understanding of both, a knowledge felt along the pulses. It nicely illustrates the remark of T. S. Eliot, meant as a compliment although it hardly sounds like it, that James had a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it.

That is even more finaly illustrated by the major work of the first period, and arguably James's greatest novel, The Portrait of a Lady. It is, as James put it, the sstory of "a certain young woman affronting her destiny." Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan living in Albany, New York, is taken up by her Aunt, Lydia Touchett. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle and their tubercular son, Ralph. There, she declines the proposals of both Caspar Goodwood, a rich American, and Lord Warborton, an English aristocrat. Wealthy now, thanks to an inheritance from mr. Touchett arranged for her by Ralph, she then accepts the proposal of an American expatriate, a widower and dilettante living in Florence, Gilbert Osmond. She is introduced to Osmond by another expatriate, Madame Merle, and is impressed by his taste and refinement. Soon after the marriage, however, she discovers him to be selfish, sterile and oppressive. She also finds that Osmond's young daughter, Pansy, is actually the daughter of Madame Merle and that this was the reason for the woman's introducing her to Osmond and promoting the marriage. Despite Osmond forbidding her, Isabel leaves for England when she hears Ralph is dying, and is at his side when he dies. Despite a last attempt from Caspar Goodwood to persuade Isabel to go away with him, though, Isabel determines to return to Osmond. And the novel closes with her accepting her destiny, or perhaps more accurately the consequences of her choices, and preparing to go back to a home that is more like a prison. Stated baldly, the story has strong elements of romance of fairytale, just like The Scarlet Letter: the awakening of a sleeping beauty, the three suitors, a villain whose "egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers," a heroine held captive in  "the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation." the sick young cousin who observes and admires her from afar before dying, the voyage of an American Adam—or, rather, Eve—and their exile from Paradise. But what distinghishes it, in the reading, is its adherence to the substantial realities of the social life and the subtle realities of the life of the consciousness. Isabel Archer is as much like the heroines of, say, Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda by George Eliot as she is like Hester Prynne: the imaginative maneuvers of the book represent as much an encounter between the American and the European as its story does. It is both of and about a collision of cultures.

One reason for the subtle but substantial reality of Isabel herself is that James focuses on her. "Place the center of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness," James tells us, in the preface, he told himself when he was writing the book. "Stick to that—for the center." As for the other characters, he explains, his aim was to "press least hard" on "the consciousness" of his "heroine's satellites, especially the male," so as to "make it an interest contributive only to the greater one. James wanted to reveal the ful implications of the developing consciousness of his protagonist. So the reader experiences a lot through her, and shares the lively animations of her mind on the move but, in addition, sees her from the outside, through the comments and often critical commentary of the narrator—and through the observations of characters like Ralph Touchett. We understand her sense of herself, her moods and changes, but we also take the measure of "the whole envelope of circumstances" in which she is implicated. Characteristically of James, the strategy is part of the debate. That phrase "the whole envelope of circumstances" is used by Madame Merle, who has adapted to a European vision sufficiently to believe that self and circumstance, the human being and his shell, are indivisible. "One's self—for other people—is one's expression of one's self," she insists. Isabel disagrees. Subscribing to the American romance of the self, she believes in freedom as an absolute and the individual as somehow separable from conditions and circumstances. "Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me," she insists; "everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one." James wryly complicates this debate by intimating that his heroine's profound belief in herself, her "fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion," may itself spring from circumstance. She has grown up in a world, the new world of America, where there have been few forms of authorities, no rigorous or rigidly enforced social practices, to challenge that belief. But that complication is further complicated by the clear admiration that Isabel's "flame-like spirit" inspires in the narrator, observers such as Ralph Touchett, and the reader. There is candor and honesty here, a fundamental integrity and capacity for wonder as well as innocence, an openness that leaves her vulnerable—and, by some measures ast least, humanly incomplete.

With the characters surrounding Isabel, some are quietly developed, the reader comes to know them gradually—sometimes for good, as with Ralph Touchett, and sometimes as with Osmond and Madame Merle, for ill. Others, like Lydia Touchett, are flatter and deftly summarized when they are introduced. All, however, contribute to our understanding of the heroine and the representative character of her transatlantic encounter. A minor character such as Henrietta Stackpole, for instance, another young American woman abroad, helps the character place Isabel further; so do the sisters of Lord Warburton, "the Misses Molyneaux." Henrietta is self-confidence and independence to the point of bluster: "Henrietta ... does smell of the future," Ralph observes, "—it almost knocks one down!" The Misses Molyneaux are compliant and decorous to the point of vanishing into their surroundings. The character of Isabel is mapped out using such minor characters as coordinates, in a manner James had learned from another novelist he admired, Jane Austen. And it is mapped out, too, in Isabel's perilous voyage between the possibilities represented by her first two suitors and the alternatives they vigorously embody: America, with its devotion to individual initiative, enterprise, and possibility, and Europe, with its adherence to mannerliness, custom, and tradition, the rich fabric woven out of the past. Isabel's voyage is a literal one, to begin with, when she leaves New York for England: landscapes that here, as throughout James's fiction, have a symbolic as well as a literal application, with the starkness and simplicity of the one contrasting with the opulence and grandeur of the other. But it becomes an intensely symbolic one when Ralph Touchett tries, as he puts it, to put some "wind in her sails" by arranging for her to receive a bequest from his father.

Isabel, too, tires to put wind in the sails of someone else. She is drawn to Gilbert Osmond precisely because she believes she can help him fulfill the requirements of his imagination. With Goodword or Warurton, she would, in a sense, be embarking on a ship that has already set sail; comitting her destiny to one that had achieved full definition beforeshe appeared; she would, perhaps, be resigning herself to the authority or at least ambience of another. But with Osmond, she believes, it would be she herself who would enable the voyage, create the destiny. "He was like a skeptical voyager strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea," Isabel observes of the man she eventually marries. "She would launch his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be a good thing to love him." In fact, it is not "a good thing" at all. Osmond, as it turns out, had just as firm a notion that he would be her providence, when he married Isabel. "Her mind was to be his," Isabel bitterly reflects after she has come to know her husband. "—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer park." What all this adumbrates is a theme interwoven with the contrast between Europe and America, and dear to the heart of Hawthorne as much as James: the human use of human beings. The complex interplay of character focused in the figures of voyaing reminds us that to declare oneself may be to deny another.To enable is also to authorize, to will the fate of someone else; the re is only a thin membrane separating freedom from power and power from what hawthorne called the unpardonable sin.

James's response to the problem he opens up, as he examines his characters' attempts to negotiate their freedom, is a dual one, and is typical in thesense that it involves what happens in The Portrait of a Lady and how it is written .What happens is that Isabel decides to go back to Gilbert Osmond. To run away with Goodwood would suggest that Madame Merle had been right after all, and admission from Isabel that the "envelope" of her unfortunate circumstances was influential enought to make her evade the consequences of her own actions with a man she never loved. To return involves an acceptance of those consequences, and a fulfillment of a promise made earlier to Pansy, Osmond's daughter, that she would come back. It maks her victory over circumstance and over the naive ideal of freedom she had brought with her from America. That ideal had identified freedom with limitless power, the boundless pursuit of her own needs. Pursuing it, she married a man who has sought to extinguish her. Abandonind, or rather refining, it, she now sets freedom as conditional on knowledge: being clearsighted enough to choose the right course with reference to all responsibilities and probable consequences. In choosing to go back, Isabel transcends her circumstances by accepting them, keeps her word and keeps faith with herself—acceptingher responsibility for her past and future. The choice on which the novel ends depends on a subtle balance between self and circumstance, in that it involves the recognition that expression of the one properly depends on awarness of the other: that freedom is a matter of responsible, realistic self-determination. And that same balance is at work with its narrative texture. James, as he maeant to, does not yield to the determining nature of circumstance here, although he admits its irreducible reality. Nor, while emphasizing the power of consciousness, does he present that power as separate and inviolable, somehow superior to the circumstance it encounters. What he does, in his fictional practice, is what he preached in his criticism. He enters into a complex series of negotiations betwen the "moral" and the "felt life," the meaningful structures organizing experience and the contingencies, the fluid processes in which tose structures are embedded. He assets the authority of authorship, the strength of his own individual will as writer, but he also accepts tha authority, the reality of the "living thing," the imaginative experience that constitutes the story. Not only that, he shows that assertion of the one depends precisely on acceptance of the other: that, like any other living organism, the meaning of the novel is its being.

James returned to America in 1882, shortly before the death of his mother. His father died in the same year, and then in 1883 his younger brother, Wilky. his sense of attachment to his place of birth was drastically reduced by these deaths. And the second period of his writing career, broadly from the middle of the 1880s to 1900, was marked by an attachment to English settings in much of his fiction. The Princess Cassamassima (1886), for instance, is set in London and deals with all social classes, exploring the tension between private sensibility and political belief. Other works of the period include The Bostonians (1886), a satirical study of the movement for female emancipation in New England ("the situation of women," James explained, "the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf" was the most striking aspect of American life of the time); The Aspern Papers (1888), a collection of stories, and The Spoils of Poynton (1897). James made a venture into writing plays at this time, which proved disastrous. It came to a humiliating end when his play Guy Domville was given a riotous reception on its first night in 1895. The venture did, however, encourage him to develop dramatic techniques for his fiction. If the first period of James's career could be described in terms of moral realism, and the third in terms of psychological realism—although these are, necessarily, labels that do less than full justice to the sophistication of his art—then the second could be called a period of dramatic realism. James used careful manipulation of point of view, elaborate patterning of contrasting episodes and characters, and a focus on dialogue and dramatic scene to achieve here what he always sought: "the maximum of intensity," to use his own words, "with the minimum of strain." The results are powerfully evident in a novel like What Maisie Knew (1897) that explores adultery, infidelity, and betrayal. The entire story, although written in the third person, is told from the point of view of the perceptive but naive young girl Maisie, who is just 6 years old when her parents are divorced. The strategy enables James to achieve economy, intensity, and irony as he combines and implicitly compares what Maisie sees with what the narrative voice intimates.

Toward the end of his second period, James confirmed his reputation as a writer of short stories with tales many of which were about writers and writing. Like "The Lesson fo the Master" (1888), "The Middle Years" (1893), and "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896). Again, many of these tales are fitted into life by James's ingenious, inspired use of narrative viewpoint. In "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), for example, the entire narrative depends for its intensity of terror on the fact that everything occurs in the mind of a governess, who desperately needs corroboration that she is not mad in attributing supernatural experiences to her young charges and seeing dead people. The reader is left in doubt, thanks to the possible unreliability of the narrator, as to whether or not she sees ghosts or hallucinations—and as to whether this is a Gothic story of evil or a psychological tale about repression and projection. In tis own modest fashion, "The Turn of the Screw" prepares the way for the emotional and pychological subtleties, the sense the reader has of wandering through the labyrinth of the human mind, that characterize the three major novels of the third and final period of James's career: The Ambassadors, written in 1901 and published in 1903, The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In all three, James returns to the international theme. In The Ambassadors, for instance, Lambert Strether is sent by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Newsome, to persuade her son Chad to return to Massachusetts. Gradually, however, he grows less enthusiastic about his mission, as he becomes more and more receptive to the charms of England and France. Abandoning his aims, and with them the prospect of an advantageous marriage to Mrs. Newsome—which is his promised reward, if he fulfills them—he even encourages the liaison between Chad and a charming Frenchwoman, Madame de Vionnet. It would be "the last infamy," he tells Chad, if he forsook her. "Live all you can," Strether declares to another character, when he is provoked by a sense of his own tentative life, "it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" Nevertheles, Strether remains detached, conent to observe rather than participate, eventually returning to his inconsequential life as a widower in Massachusetts. As he searches fro the reality of Chad's motives, and the truth of hiw own relationship to life, living, and the conflicting cultures of America and England, there is speculation, mediatation, but fundamental irresolution. Europe has its own secrecies—the liaison of Chad and Madame de Vionnet, he eventually discovers, has been an intimate one—just as America has its absuridites. Life is for living, it may be, but not for him. This story of transatlantic encounters acquires some clarity by an elaborate balancing of scene and character: there are four major scenes set in a plainly allegorical garden, for instance, in which knowledge is slowly acquired and, in the course of the action, Chad and Strether change moral places. But it also acquires a certain mystery, even opacity from James's determination to follow the smallest refinement of emotional detail, the slightest nuance of social gesture—and from a style that, in the service of this pursuit, often becomes formidably, impenetrably intricate.

In the last few decades of his life, James devoted much of his time to preparing the New York edition of his novels. He made revisions that often reflectd his later dedication to a more allusive style. A reference, in the original version of The Portrait of a Lady, to the fact that Ralph Touchett had "simply accepted the situation" of invalid was altered, for instance, to this: "His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin." He also wrote eighteen new prefaces for his novels. He traveled widely, and wrote about his travels in The American Scene (1907) and Italian Hours (1909). He published two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914); and a third volume, The Middle Years appeared posthumously in 19197. Angered by American reluctance to become involved in World War I, he became a British citizen in 1913. But, in a sense, as T. S. Eliot was later to put it, it was not the condition of being English to which he—or, at least, part of him—aspired bu the condition of being European, "something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become." James anticipated the direction in which many American writers were to move in the twentieth century: in his concern with the complex fate of being an American in an international culture, his concern with the possibly limited terms of American culture and the fragments that could perhaps be rescued from the ruins of European tradition, in his growing concern with the romance and mystery of the consciousness. He assimilated the romantic tendencies that were part of the pressure of the age into which he was born, the moral rigor that was a continuing characteristic of his part of the nation; he also moved, especially in his later work, toward the modernist conviction that the truth of art and the truth of life are one and the same. A summative and seminal writer, James stands at the juncture between two centuries, and different moments in Americal writing. He was also, complexly, his own man. There is no more satisfactory way of summing up that complexity than the one James himself was probably alluding to when he called his last fragment of autobiography "The Middle Years." The title is alsothat of an earlier story, published in 1895, in which a dying writer makes a statement of faith that his creator might well have made for himself. "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have," the writer declares. "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Narrative perspective and psychological realism: On Henry James's theory of the novel
 

Narrative Perspective and Psychological Realism: On Henry James's Theory of the Novel

viernes, 7 de diciembre de 2012

Narrative Perspective and Psychological Realism: On Henry James's theory of the novel

Only in the second half of the 19th century do we find a purposive aesthetic theory of the novel. Flaubert, Maupassant, Henry James and Zola put forward the view that the novel is a serious form of art, emphasizing formal construction rather than simple imitation of reality. Henry James has been called "the best reader of Henry James." A great deal of his best criticism is found in the prefaces to his novels, in which he comments on the works and the technique of the novel.

James' main statement on this subject is his essay "The Art of Fiction" (1884).  He knows that he opens a new era in the English novel: the novel in the earlier 19th century, he says, was "unselfconscious," "pre-theoretical," "naïve." Accordingly, its claims were modest, and it did not set itself any purposive ideals. It was assumed to be a "make-believe," a fiction unable to represent the complexity of life. But this must not be so.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. (662).
 

In order to do this, the novel must above all change its tone. The recognition of fictionality, the intrusiveness of 19th century authors must disappear. There the Victorian novelists gave themselves away:

Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Antony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside he concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only "making believe". He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime. ("The Art of Fiction," in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, 662)
 

James does not want to give himself away. The novelist must speak with the assurance of a historian. To do otherwise is a "betrayal of a sacred office"—a religious metaphor which is often used by the aestheticist propounders of art for art's sake.

As a critic, James discusses above all this sacred office, the activity of the novelist, but incidentally he develops a formalist theory of the novel seen as a completed aesthetic object (as the aim of the novelist). The artist is a central presence in all of James' criticism, sharply contrasting with his assertion that this presence must not be felt.

James opposes abstract theoretical analysis of the elements in the novel. He sees the novel as an organic whole: for him there is no sense in dividing action from character, or description from dialogue, etc.: they are all fused as the flesh and the blood in a living being; they melt into each other:

A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic who over the closed texture of a finished work shall pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. . . . (666)
 

You cannot divide, as other critics were doing, a novel of characters from a novel of incidents. In all good novels, character and incident define one another. As James says in one of the famous prefaces he wrote for a later edition of his works,

I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it.
 

And in "The Art of Fiction":

There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meanin, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? (665)

James opposes Walter Besant's reductive definition of the novel as something ultimately concerned with telling a good story full of action, as well as Trollope's idea that character is all in the novel, that the plot is something unimportant, and something which is not necessarily linked with character. The psychological analysis of the character and the formal structure of the novel coincide in James: his novels are at the same time psychological studies and formal experiments, and the revelation of the character's self is dealt with through an original formal organization, a careful distribution of the perception of the action and judgment about the action. The relationship between action and character is defined as an organic one, but perhaps it could best be defined as a relation of organic subordination of action to character. Here James is arguing not only for an adequate description of the unity of a novel, but also for the novel of character and psychology against a narrow notion of the novel of action (vs. Besant's concern with plot):

There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art . . . . The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. (668)

The novel (unlike drama) can reveal to us the inner life of characters, and this is the essence of the genre, which otherwise must follow, in James' opinion, a dramatic ideal of concentration (cf. Aristotle on tragedy). But the novel is a free form, he says. It has no grammar which can be defined, no rules that can be taught.

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life. ("Art" 664).

The intensity of the impression and the execution are the grounds of its value, and they cannot be defined. They stem directly from the personal way each novelist sees life. This in some contrast with all we have said of his criticism of the Victorian novels. His own novels are thoughtful, concentrated, calculated works of art, while Victorian novels are "loose, baggy monsters" without technique or design. James thinks there are no rules, but he also thinks his own way is superior, his own technique more refined, his own vision more adequate. Still, we have here a profession of tolerance and catholicity.

It is an irony of fate that the theory of the novel should have profited so much from James' own analyses of his novels, given the little faith he has in theoretical definitions and analysis. In his prefaces, we find some of the most clear and influential statements of the nineteenth century on point of view and narrative voice, as well as on action and character.

James makes a distinction between voice and point of view in his novelistic practice as well as in his theoretical statements. This distinction comes from his concern with the ability of the novel to depict experience and psychological life. First-person novel will not do for this, because James is not looking for a conscious revelation of the person, or for a kind of novel based on recollection of past experience, which is what 1st person narrative implies. His novels are usually written in the 3rd person, which is less "intrusive," more "dramatic." Where James does otherwise, he makes sure that the result will be equally dramatic—for instance, using an unreliable narrator in the main narrative of The Turn of the Screw. The action should in any case unfold in a transparent way, without the writer stepping in to make his own comments. We are shown its development through significant scenes, we are not simply told. Percy Lubbock will develop in his book The Craft of Fiction (1922) some of James' insights in this particular.

And there is an ideal way of "showing" in third person narration which is at once dramatic and psychologically immediate. This is what James usually calls narration through "centers of consciousness" (preface to The Portrait of a Lady ), "vessels of sensibility" or "reflectors" (preface to The Wings of the Dove), and which we now usually call focalizer characters. The scenes usually act on a perceiving character, an reflector or focalizer, whose psychological reaction, the development of his understanding of the action, helps give the plot an organic unity. This is the role of Strether in The Ambassadors, of Maisie in What Maisie Knew. James does not require, as some of his followers, that there be no changes of perspective during the narrative; but he does seek to cut the story into perspectival blocks that are internally coherent. For instance, in The Wings of the Dove, the story of Milly Theale is seen mainly through the eyes of two characters, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as well as her own. Every change or apparent incoherence of point of view, James says, has its aesthetic justification, its dramatic coherence:

    There was the "fun", to begin with, of establishing one's succesive centres- of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them as from happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty....
    Do I sometimes in fact forfeit the advantage of that distinctness? Do I ever abandon one center for another after the former has been postulated? From the moment we proceed by "centres"—and I have never, I confess, embraced the logic of any superior process—they must be, each as a basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the high interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and though I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a represented community of vision between several parties to the action when it makes for concentration, I understand no breaking-up of the register, no sacrifice of the recording consistency, that doesn't scatter and weaken.

Just as in Aristotle we found that an action or praxis had to be treated artistically before it became the plot or mythos, we find in James a distinction between the "subject" and the "wrought material" or novel, and in the Formalists we shall find a related opposition between fabula and siuzhet. A series of rules on the use of point of view define what is the relationship between the material and the finished novel. Form and psychology converge: the dramatic form gives us a new insight into the characters' perception and interiority. We see that James conceives of these "rules" he formulates on the use of point of view as organic, internal rules, which spring from the very nature of the psychological material of the novel. They will be transformed by many critics in the 20th century into external, a priori rules to decide on the quality of any novel, irrespective of its internal economy.

 The influence of James's ideas is readily apparent in most important twentieth-century writers on fictional technique and point of view : Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction, 1921), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (Understanding Fiction, 1943), Jean Pouillon (Temps et roman, 1947), F. K. Stanzel (Typische Erzählsituationen, 1954), Norman Friedman ("Point of View in Fiction," 1955); W. C. Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), Gérard Genette ("Discours du récit", 1972), Mieke Bal (Narratologie, 1977).

 James also opposes external rules as to which is to be the aim of literature:

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting" ("Art" 663)

His ideas about the relationship between the work and the world are of little consequence, contrasting with the heavily moral interest of the novels themselves. In his theory he does not seem to go beyond a vague belief in realism and morality. A novel is an impression of life, and the quality and vividness of this impression is more valuable than the moral purpose of the novel. James seems to have seen the moral element in the novels as something which is fused in the total whole, an artistic ingredient. That is why we may dare to include him among the believers of Art for Art's sake. The novel is a self-enclosed whole, isolated from the world of continuous relations; a perfectly finished object, an autonomous world.

Author, Author

Mark Twain

jueves, 6 de diciembre de 2012

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (1835-1910), born in Florida, Mo., was the son of a Virginian imbued with the frontier spirit and grandiose dreams of easy wealth, who had married in Kentucky and spent the rest of his life in a restless watch for profits from land speculation. The family settled in Hannibal, Mo. (1839), where Samuel grew up under the influence of this attitude, and passsed the adventurous boyhood and youth that he recalls in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After his father's death (1847), he left school to be apprenticed to a printer, and was soon writing for his brother Orion's newspaper. He was a journeyman printer in the East and Middle West (1853-54), and in 1856 planned to seek his fortune in South America, but gave up this idea to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, a position that he considered the most important discipline of his life. When the Civil War began, the riverboats ceased operation, and, after a brief trial of soldiering with a group of Confederate volunteers, Clemens went to Nevada with his brother, who had been appointed secretary to the governor. In Roughing It he describes the trip west and his subsequent adventures as a miner and journalist. After he joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (1862) he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, by which he was thereafter known, and began his career as a journalistic humorist in the frontier tradition. His articles of the time are collected in Mark Twain of the Enterprise (1957).

During this period he met Artemus Ward and others who encouraged his work, collaborated with Bret Harte in San Francisco, and wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog" sketch (1865) which won him immediate recognition. He increased his popularity with letters and lectures about his trip to the Sandwich Islands, went east to lecture, published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), and made the tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land that he describes in The Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous narrative that assured his position as a leading author and shows his typical American irreverence for the classic and the antique. In 1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon, with whom he settled in Hartford, Conn. The effect of this marriage upon his career has been responsible for two divergent interpretations of his work. Mrs. Clemens belonged to a genteel, conservative society, and it has been claimed (mainly by Van Wyck Brooks) that the puritanical and materialistic surroundings into which Clemens was thrust frustrated his potential creative force for fierce revolt and satire. Others (principally Bernard De Voto) posit the idea that Clemens began as a frontier humorist and storyteller, and that his later work shows the unthwarted development of these essential talents.

ln Roughing It (1872) he continues the method of The Innocents Abroad, seasoning the realistic account of adventure with humorous exaggerations in his highly personal idiom. Next he collaborated with C.D. Warner in The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel of post-Civil War boom times that gave a name to the era. A Tramp Abroad (1880) is another travel narrative, this time of a walking trip through the Black Forest and the Alps. England during the reign of Edward VI is the scene of The Prince and the Pauper (1882), while A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is a realistic-satirical fantasy of Arthurian England. During this period, however, Clemens was dealing with the background of his own early life in what are generally considered the most significant of his characteristically American works. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) he presents a nostalgic tale of boyish adventure in a Mississippi town and the Valley, and in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) he celebrates the flowering of Mississippi Valley frontier civilization, in terms of its own pungent tall talk and picaresque adventure.

External events soon interfered with the even flow of Clemens's creative activity. During his residence in Hartford, he had been a partner in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company, which reaped a fortune through the sale of Grant's Memoirs and Clemens's own writings, but bad publishing ventures and the investment of $200,000 in an unperfected typesetting machine drove him into bankruptcy (1894). To discharge his debts he made a lecturing tour of the world, although he had come to dislike lecturing, and the record of this tour, Following the Equator (1897) has an undercurrent of bitterness not found in his earlier travel books. During this decade, although he wrote The Tragedy of Puddn'nhead Wilson (1894) and the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), most of his work is uneven in quality, and The American Claimant (1892), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) are feeble echoes of earlier work. In 1898 he finished paying off his debts, but his writings whow that the strain of pessimism he formerly repressed was now dominating his mind. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), What Is Man?  (1906) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916) demonstrate this attitude. He continued to travel widely, lectured and wrote articles on contemporary events and such controversial works as Christian Science (1906) and Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), but his bitterness was deepened by the loss of his wife and two daughters. His pessimism was perhaps no more profound than the opitimism of his own Colonel Sellers, but his feeling that it was too mordant for publication caused him to instruct that certain of his works be published posthumously.

Since 1906 he had been engaged in dictating his autobiography to his secretary, A. B. Paine, who later became the first Literary Editor of the Mark Twain Estate, and issued a collection of Letters (1917), the authorized biography (3 vols., 1912), and the Autobiography (1924). The second editor, Bernard De Voto, edited volumes of materials from the papers left by Clemens, including Letters from the Earth (1963). Drawing on the same sources, the third editor, Dixon Wecter, collected The Love Letters of Mark Twain (1949); and the fourth editor, Henry Nash Smith, edited with William M. Gibson, Mark Twain-Howells Letters (2 vols., 1960). A scholarly edition of his Works began publication by the University of California Press in 1972, which also began issuing (1967) a scholarly edition of his previously unpublished Papers, most of whose originals are in the University's Bancroft Library.

An important early estimate of his work is My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (1910), by his friend and adviser Howells. The prevalent critical attitude has come to consider Clemens's most distinctive work as summing up the tradition of Western humor and frontier realism. Beginning as a journalist, he assumed the method and point of view of popular literature in the U.S., maintaining the personal anecdotal style that he used also in his capacity of comic lecturer. In travel books, he digresses easily from factual narrative to humorous exaggeration and burlesque. The novels are episodic or autobiographical, and not formed by any larger structural concepts. He wrote in the authentic native idiom, exuberantly and irreverently, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude. The romantic idealism of Joan of Arc, the bitter satire of feudal tyranny in A Connecticut Yankee, the appreciation of human values in Huckleberry Finn, and the sense of epic sweep in Life on the Mississippi establish Clemens's place in American letters as an artist of broad understanding and vital, although uneven and sometimes misdirected, achievement.

Works

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, sketch by Clemens written under his pseudonym Mark Twain, was published in the New York  Saturday Press (1865) and reprinted as the title piece of a series of sketches that formed his first book (1867). Although his source was an old folk tale that had been in print in California as early as 1853, Clemens was catapulted into fame by his version, which tells of the jumping frog Dan'l Webster, pet of gambling Jim Smiley, which is defeated when a stranger fills its gullet with quail shot while Smiley's attention is distracted.

The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, travel narrative by Clemens, published in 1869 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. It is based on letters written during 1867 to the San Francisco Alta California and the NewYork Tribune and Herald, describing the tour of the steamship Quaker City to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. In this autobiographical account, Clemens has an opportunity to ridicule foreign sights and manners from the point of view of the American democrat, who scorns the sophisticated, revels in his own national peculiarities and advantages, and is contemptuously amused by anithing with which he is unacquainted. Characteristic passages are concerned with the comical difficulties of "innocent" tourists, their adventures among deceptive guides, inefficient hotels, and misunderstood customs; a comparison of Lake Como with Lake Tahoe, to the general advantage of the latter; a burlesque account of the ascent of Vesuvius; experiences of various Turkish "frauds"; an awestruck meeting with the Russian royal family; and a naïvely sentimental description of Biblical scenes in Palestine.

Roughing It, autobiographical narrative by Clemens, published in 1872 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. He records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. The book is based on Clemens's own experiences during the 1860s, but but facts are left far behind in his creation of a picture of the frontier spirit and its lusty humor. The entire work is unified by the character of the author and the ways in shich his experiences changed him into a representative of the Far West, but seemingly little attempt is made to integrate the tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure, and character sketches, except in so far as all of them constitute a vigorous, many-sided portrait of the Western frontier.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day, novel by Clemens and CD. Warner, published in 1873 but dated 1874. It was dramatized by G.S. Densmore (1874), and Clemens revised the play the same year. The theme is that of unscrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and the title has become a popular name for the era depicted in the book, the boom times of post-Civil War Years, when unbridled acquisitiveness dominated the national life.

"Squire" Si Hawkins moves, with his wife and family, from Tennessee to a primitive Missouri settlement, the current speculative project of his visionary friend, Colonel Beriah Sellers. During the journey, Hawkins adopts two unrelated orphans, Clay and Laura. Ten years pass, Sellers's optimism cost Hawkins several fortunes, and the children grow in constant expectation of great walth. When the Squire dies, his family moves to Sellers's new promotion center, Hawkeye, where Laura is attracted by a philanderer, Colonel Selby, who abandons her after a mock-marriage. Hary Brierly, a New York engineer, collaborates with Sellers in a railroad land speculation scheme, which fails, bankrupting them. Brierly falls in love with Laura at this time, but Larua, hardened by her experience, considers her a mere tool for her advancement. Her beauty impresses Senator Dilworthy, who invites her and her foster brother to Washington, and there they and Sellers are involved in the intrigues and financial deals of the unscrupulous senator. When Selby reappears, Laura resumes her liaison with him, later murdering him when he attempts to desert her again. She is acquitted after a spectacular court trial, but dies of a heart attack when her career as a lecturer is a failure. A subplot is concerned with the love affair fo Philip Sterling, a friend of Brierly, with Ruth Bolton, a Quaker girl, who takes up a medical career but finally marries him after he successfully exploits her father's coal-mining enterprise.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, novel by Clemens, publised in 1876 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. Its classic sequel, Huckleberry Finn, was followed by the relatively unimportant Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective.

In the drowsy Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Mo., Tom Sawyer, imaginative and mischievous, and his priggish brother Sid live with their simple, kind-hearted aunt Polly. Sid "peaches" on Tom for playing hooky, and Tom is punished by making to whitewash a fence, but ingeniously leads his friends to do this job for him by pretending it is a privilege. When his sweenheart, Becky Thatcher, is angered because Tom reveals that he has previously been in love, he forsakes a temporary effort at virtue, plays hooky, and decides to become a pirate or a Robin Hood. With his boon companion, Huck Finn, a good-natured, irresponsible river rat, Tom goes to a graveyard at midnight to swing a dead cat, an act advised by Huck as a cure for warts. They watch Injun Joe, a half-breed criminal, stab the town doctor to death and place the knife in the hands of drunken Muff Potter. After being further scolded by Aunt Polly, and further spurned by Becky, Tom, with Huck and Joe Harper, another good friend, hides on nearby Jackson's Island. Their friends believe them drowned, but their funeral service is interrpted by the discovery of the "corpses," who are listening from the church gallery. Tom returns to school, is reconciled with Becky and his aunt, and becomes a hero at the trial of Muff Potter, when he reveals Injun Joe's guilt. Tom and Becky attend a school picnic, and are lost for several days in a cave, where Tom spies Injun Joe. Later the half-breed is found dead, and his treasure is divided between Tom and Huck, after which the latter is adopted by the Widow Douglas. His only consolation, since he has surrendered his state of unwashed happiness, lies in Tom's promise to admit him to his robber gant on the strength of his social standing.

A Tramp Abroad, travel narrative by Clemens, published in 1880 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. It is a record of his European tour (1878) with Joseph H. Twichell, whom he calls "Harris," and describes their adventures in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, chiefly during a walking tour through the Black Forest and the Alps. Besides the serious, journalistic account of European natural beauties, society, folklore, and history, including enthusiastic descriptions of Alpine scenery that do not fail to praise comparable descriptions in the US., there are passages ranging from crude face to tall tales and typical satire. Thus a retelling of Whymper's conquest of the Matterhorn is complemented by the author's "ascent of Mont Blanc by telescope," and a description of ravens in the Black Forest prompts him to recount "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn," concerned with the sense of humour of California jays. Characteristic humor also appears in Clemns's inept drawings, purportedly the work of an art studient, and the satirical passages on subjets alien to the average American, such as "the awful German language," Wagnerian opra, and "The Great French Duel."

The Prince and the Pauper, novel by Clemens, published in 1882 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. Designed to be a children's book, it shows an essentially adult point of view in its attacks on the social evils of Tudor England.

Prince Edward (later Edward VI) discovers Tom Canty, pauper boy, to be his exact twin in appearance. When they exchange clothes, the prince is by error driven from the court, and the pauper is forced to act the part of royalty. Edward finds Tom's family, is mistreated, and runs away with Sir Miles Hendon, a disinherited knight, who takes pity on him, thinking his assertions of royal birth a sign of madness. In their wanderings, the prince sees the cruelty of church and court towards the poor, and learns the suffering of his people through such dramatic incidents as the burning of two women whose only crime is that of being Baptists. Tom meanwhile is also thought unbalanced because of his peculiar behavior; becoming accustomed to his situation, however, he attempts to act the part of the real prince. On the morning of his coronation, Edward gets to Westminster Abbey and proves his idenitity by revealing the hiding place of the Great Seal, which Tom did not recognize after having taken it to crack some nuts. During his brief reign, Edward tempers the harshness of the law with a sense of justice, learned during his contact with the common people.

Life on the Mississippi, autobiographical narrative by Clemens, published under his pseudonym Mark Twain (1883). The book opens with a brief history of the Mississippi river since its discovery, and Chapters 4 to 22 deal with Clemens's life as a boy on the river. These chapters, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, give a vivid account of his participation in the steamboat age, the science of steamboat piloting, and the life of the river as seen by the pilot. Chapter 3 also contains a lively passage written for Huckleberry Finn but never used in the novel. The second part of the book, written some seven years after the first, is an account of Clemens's return to the river as a traveler, 21 years after he had been a pilot. During his trip from St. Louis to New Orleans, he finds that the glamour of the river has been destroyed by railroad competition. Interspersed with his description of the river, his accounts of meeting Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and Horace Bixby, who first taught him piloting, are anecdotes of the past, and a vigorous attack on Scott's romanticism and its effect on Southern thought. The second part of the book lacks the unity of the first, has none of its verve and gusto, and is more descriptive and reminiscent.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, novel by Clemens, written under his pseudonym Mark Twain. A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it was begun in 1876 and published in 1884, omitting the chapter included in Life on the Mississippi. Although it carries on the picaresque story of the characters in Tom Sawyer, the sequel is a more accomplished and a more serious work of art as well as a keener realistic portrayal of regional character and frontier experience on the Mississippi.

Narrated by Huck, the sequel begins with its unschooled hero under the motherly protection of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. When his blackguard father appears to demand the boy's fortune, Huck tricks him by transferring the money to Judge Thatcher, but his father kidnaps him and imprisons him in a lonely cabin During one of the old man's drunken spells, Huck escapes to Jackson's Isalnd, where he meets Miss Watson's runaway slave, Jim. They start down the river in a raft, but, after several adventures, the raft is hit by a steamboat and the two are separated. Huck swims ashore, and is sheltered by the Grangerford family, whose feud with the Shepherdsons causes bloodshed. The boy discovers Jim, and they set out again on the raft, giving refuge to the "Duke of Bridgewater," itinerant printer and fraud, and the "Dauphin," "Louis XVIII of France," actor, evangelist, and temperance faker. At stopping places, the "King" lectures as a reformed pirate, and they present, as "Kean" and "Garrick," dramatic performances culminating in the fraudulent exhibition of the "Royal Nonesuch." Huck witnesses the murder of a harmless drunkard by an Arkansas aristocrat, whose contempt discourages a mob of would-be lynchers. The rogues learn of the death of Peter Wilks and claim legacies as his brothers. Huck interferes in behalf of the three daughters, and the scheme is foiled by the arrival of the real brothers. Then he discovers that the "King" has sold Jim to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally, and at the Phelps farm he impersonates Tom in an attempt to rescue Jim. When Tom arrives, he masqureades as his brother Sid, and concocts a fantastic scheme to free Jim. In the "mixed-up and splendid rescue," Tom is accidentally shot, and the slave is recaptured. While Tom is recuperating he reveals that Miss Watson has died, setting Jim free in her will, and that the rescue was necessary because he "wanted the adventure of it." It is also disclosed that Huck's fortune is safe, since his father is dead, but he concludes: "I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me, and sivilize me, and I can't standi it. I been there before."

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), realistic-satirical fantasy of Arthurian England by Clemens under his pseudonym Mark Twain.

An ingenious Yankee mechanic, knocked unconscious in a fight, awakens to find himself at Camelot in A.D. 528. Imprisoned by Sir Kay the Seneschal and exhibited before the knights of the Roud Table, he is condemned to death, but saves himself by posing as a magician like Merlin, correctly predicting an eclipse, and becoming minister to King Arthur. He increases his power by applying 19th-century knowledge of gun-powder, electricity, and industrial methods; but when he attempts to better the condition of the peasantry he meets opposition from the church, the knights, Merlin, and the sorceress Morgan le Fay. He accompanies the king in disguise on an expedition among the common people, and when they are captured, they are rescued by the Yankee's trained troop of 500 knights on bicycles. His daughter Hello-Central becomes ill, and with his wife Alisande (Sandy) he takes her to France. Back in England, he finds his work undone, Arthur killed, the land in civil war. Gathrring friends in a cave with modern armed defenses, he declares a republic, fights off an attack, but is wounded. Merlin, pretending to nurse him, puts him asleep until the 19th century.

Tom Sawyer Abroad, short novel by Clemens, published in 1894 under his pseudonym Mark Twain.

As a sequel to "all them adventures" in the book bearing his name, Huck Finn tells of further exploits with Tom Sawyer and Jim, the former slave, in a story that concerns a balloon voyage to the Sahara and Near East, involving a mid-Atlantic storm, encounters with Bedouins and wild lions, and a final takeoff for the return home from Mt. Sinai. Tom's romancing and knowlede, Huck's common sense, and Jim's superstitions are revealed by various incidents.

Tom Sawyer, Detective, story by Clemens, published in 1896 under his pseudonym Mark Twain.

As a final sequel to previous adventures, Huck Finn tells of the remarkable way in which Tom Saywer solves an intricate mystery involving a diamond robbery and a false accusation of murder made against his uncle Silas, as well as a case of mistaken identity between a real and a supposed corpse.

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, novel by Clemens, published in 1894 under the pseudonym Mark Twain. It was dramatized by Frank Mayo (1895).

On the Mississippi during the 1830s, at Dawson's Landing, Mo., lives Percy Driscoll, a prosperous slave owner. On the day his son Tom is born, his nearly white slave Roxy gives birth to a son, Chambers, whose father is a Virginia gentleman. Since Tom's mother dies when he is only a week old, he is raised by Roxy along with Chambers, whose twin he is in appearance. Roxy, fearful that hr son may some day be sold down the river, changes the two children, and upon the death of Percy, his brother Judge Driscoll adopts Chambers, believing him to be Tom. The boy grows up a coward, a snob, and a gambler. Even though Roxy tells him that she is his mother, he sells her to pay his gambling debts. On escaping, she blackmails him. To obtain money he robs the judge and murders him with a knife stolen from Luigi, one of a pair of Italian twins with whom the judge once fought a duel. The evidence is against the twins, who are defended by David Wilson, an unsuccessful lawyer, whose "tragedy" consists in the ridicule that has resulted from his eccentric originality and iconoclasm; his humor and his interest in palmistry and fingerprints cause the people of Dawson's Landing to call him "Pudd'nhead." Wilson feels secure in his case for the twins, since the fingerprints on the knife are not those of the accused. One day he acquires the fingerprints of the spurious Tom, and with this evidence he is able to vindicate his methods, and to win at last the admiration of his fellow townsmen, by saving the twins and convicting Chambers, who is sold down the river while the real Tom is restored to his rightful position.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, fictional biography by Clemens, published in 1896. To conceal his authorhsp, so that the book might be received without bias, Clemens invented "The Sieur Louis de Conte," Joan's supposed "page and secretary," whose work is "freely translated by Jean-François Alden." The biography follows the known facts in the life of the 15th-century French heroine but amplifies them with several fictional characters and interprets such documents as those relating to the ecclesiastical trial at Rouen in the light of Clemens's lifelong idealistic reverence for "the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced." Her traits have been said to resemble those of women in the author's family. Other figures, like the comically boastful Paladin and laughing Noël Rainguesson, are related to characters in his earlier fiction. In general, the mood is that of serious, although romanticized, history, but there are characteristic Clemens touches in the use of European folklore, humor, and American tall talk.

Following the Equator, autobiographical narrative by Clemens, published in 1897 under his pseudonym Mak Twain. Describing the Australian section of his lecture tour around the world (1895) he works up, in a rather pedestrian way, second-hand materials concerning the aborigines, early settlers, and local animals. Although there are witty interludes, vivid accounts such as the one of the Sepoy Mutiny, and satirical disquisitions on the Boer War and imperialistic morality, the book ahs little of the inspiration that distinguishes Clemens's other travel accounts. In India, he is oppressed by the overpopulation, superstition, plagues, famines, and disasters, and by the disillusioned society resigned to the constant repetition of barren and meaningless processes, which foreshadoews the pessimism of the books he wroter in 1898.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, story by Clemens, published under his pseudonym Mark Twain as the title piece of a collection of essays and fiction (1900).

Hadleyburg is proud of its disctinction as "the most honest and upright town in the region round about." A stranger, offended in some way by its people, decides to ruin its reputation. He leaves a sack with bank cashier Edward Richards that he says contains a fortune in coins, and a note announcing that the money is to go to a townsman who once befriended him, and who can be identified by a remark he made, which is written on an enclosed paper. Nineteen of Hadleyburg's leading men then receive notes pretending to divulge the remark. Scruples dissolve under this temptation, and even the hitherto honest Ricaahrds begins to think he may have made the remark. At a town meeting, 18 of the citizens are exposed to ridicule, when the Rev. Mr. Burgess reads the note setting forth their claimes to the remark. Burgess has lost Richard's note, and the cashier becomes a hero. The victims pay an enormous sum to avoid having their names recorded on the lead slugs that prove to be the sole contents of the sack, and this amount is given to Richards as a reward for his supposed identity. Conscience destroys the health of the old man and his wife, who in their dying delirium expose their guilt; thus "the town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory."

What Is Man?, essay by Clemens based on his paper, "What Is Happiness?," delivered before the Monday Evening Club of Hartford (Feb. 1883), rewritten (1898), privately published without the author's name (1906), and posthumously collected in What Is Man? And Other Essays (1917).

In this Platonic dialogue between a Young Man and a disillusioned Old Man, the mouthpiece of the author's pessimistic view of mankind, the Old Man considers human beings to be merely mechanisms, lacking free will, motivated selfishly by a need for self-approval, and completely the products of their environment. In an "Admonition to the Human Race," he pleads for the rising of ideals of conduct to a point where the individual's satisfaction will coincide with the best interests of the community.

The Mysterious Stranger, story by Clemens, posthumously published in 1916. It was edited from various manuscripts by A.B.  Paine. A new edition (1969) based on a final manuscript and titled No.44, The Mysterious Stranger, shows that Paine had silently deleted about one-quarter of Mark Twain's text, created a new character (The Astrologer), alterd the names of other characters, and conflated three manuscript drafts to create his own version.

The Paine version is set in the medieval Austrian village of Eseldorf, where a mysterious stranger visits young Theodor Fischer and his friends Nikolaus and Seppi. He is discovered to be Satan, and sshows his power by building a miniature castle that he peoples with clay creatures, destroying them almost as soon as he brings them to life. He then exerts his power on the villagers, and, when Father Peter is falsely accused of theft by the Astrologer and Father Adolf, he confounds the evil and makes the innocent crazy, since he says earthly happiness is restricted to the mad. Other "kindness" includes the drowning of Nikoaus, who would otherwise live as a cripple. His total indifference to mankind and its conceptions of good and evil shocks the boys' natural moral sense, yet Satan shows that from this moral sense came wars, tortures, and inequalities. Finally he departs, and Theodor realizes that this was a dream, as false as a morality, and as illogical as a God who tortured men yet commanded them to worship Him.

The version first published in 1969 is also set in Eseldorf. To it in 1490, not long after the invention of moveable type, comes a likable young printer's devil, called only No. 44, who is actually possessed of satanic powers that allow him to master the craft of printing in a few hours. Single-handedly he speedily produces a Bible and magically summons up phantasmagoric people to print inumerable copies. He enjoys playing tricks on the town's magician and on the cruel, hypocritical Father Adolf, while he also travels back and forth in space and time between 19th-century U.S. and medieval Europe. The story of his activities, both diabolical and whimsical, is told by his 17th-year-old friend August Feldner, a curious person with a split personality. August's doppelgänger or "Dream-Self," named Emil Schwarz, has powers like those of No. 44, and is caught up in similar adventures and activities. The fanciful tale compunded of burlesque and satire concludes with the revelation of No. 44 to August that "Life itself is only a vision, a dream . . . ," the creation of  "a God .  . who moulds morals . . . and has none himself . . . who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones."

Mark Twain: What Is Man? (Audiobook)

Bloom and Others on Shakespeare

Bloom on Shakespeare (Yale University, 20 April 2012): 


 

Shakespeare: The Man behind the Plays. Panel discussion at the Philoctetes Center:




Hamlet: The Royal Shakespeare Company

Ackroyd's Shakespeare

El blog de Mark Twain

What Is Man?

Emily Dickinson

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:

Emily [Elizabeth] Dickinson (1830-86), the daughter of Edward Dickinson, a prominent lawyer of Amherst, Mass., was educated at Amherst Academy and for one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, under mary Lyon. Her life was outwardly eventless, for she lived quietly at home and for the last 25 years secluded herself from all but the most intimate friends. Though never married, she cultivated intense intellectual companionships with several men in succession whom she quaintly called her tutors. The first was Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father's office, who introduced her to stimulating books and urged her to take seriously her vocation as poet. Religious questionings prompted by his early death led to the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, whom she met in 1854. She soon came to regard him as her "dearest earthly friend," and for purposes of poetry created in his image the "lover" whom she was never to know except in imagination. From the time of wadsworth's removal to San Francisco, in the spring of 1862, may be dated her withdrawal from village society and her increasing preoccupation with poetry. She initiated a literary correspondence with T. W. Higginson, whom she knew only through his papers in the Atlantic Monthly, and his kindly encouragement was a support to her through years of loneliness. Besides Higginson, the circle of friends to whom she occasionally showed a few of her poems included Samuel Bowles, Dr. J.G. Holland, and Helen Hunt Jackson. For the most part, however, she wrote in secret and guarded her poems even from her family.

Before her death, she had composed well over 1000 brief lyrics, her "letter to the world," records of the life about her, of tiny ecstasies set in motion by mutations of the seasons or by home and garden incidents, of candid insights into her own states of consciousness, and of speculations on the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind was charged with paradox, as though her vision, like the eyes of birds, was focused in opposite directions on the two worlds of material and immaterial values. She could express feelings of deepest poignancy in terms of wit. Like Emerson, her preference for the intrinsic and the essential led her often to a gnomic concision of phrase, but her artistry in the modulation of simple meters and the delicate management of imperfect rhymes was greater than his. Her daringly precise metaphors made her seem to Amy Lowell a precursor of the Imagist school.

Publication, in Emily Dickinson's unworldly view, formed no part of a poet's business. Only six of her poems, not counting an early verse valentine, were printed during her lifetime, and none with her consent. From the chaotic mass of manuscripts found after her death, some carefully revised, other carelessly jotted down on odd scrapts of paper, six volumes have been selected: Poems (1890) and Poems: Second Series (1891), edited by Mabel L. Todd and T. W. Higginson; Poems: Third Series (1896), edited by Mrs. Todd; The Single Hound (1914), edited by Emily's niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi; Further Poems (1929) and Unpublished Poems (1936), edited by Mrs. Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. A collection was issued as Poems: Centenary Edition (1930). Posthumous publication kept the poems from being presented in any effective order. Trifling pieces and fragments were included with major lyrics and the text was often inaccurate, badly punctuated, or poorly displayed on the page. However, Bolts of Melody (1945), poems long suppressed because of a family feud, was carefully edited by Mabel L. Todd and Millicent Bingham, and a complete The Poems of Emily Dickinson was issued in a scholarly edition (3 vols., 1955), including variant readings by Thomas H. Johnson, who, in addition to this definitive work, edited the poet's Letters (3 vols., 1958). The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1982) reproduces in facsimile the manuscripts of the canon of 1147 poems in the fascicles into which the author gathered them.

Emily Dickinson is considered the prototype of Alison Stanhope in Susan Glaspell's Alison's House and the heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876).



The Single Hound, 146 brief poems by Emily Dickinson, posthumously edited and published by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1914). The selection consists largely of verses sent with flowers or messages to "Sister Sue," Emily's sister-in-law and next-door neighbor, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Besides several poems expressing her warm feelings of friendship for her sister-in-law, there is a lyric on the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The title of the volume is derived from the first poem:

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be,
Attended by a Single Hound—
Its own Identity.

Many of the verses are metaphysical or religious meditations, concerned with ecstatic personal concepts of the Deity and natural phenomena. Others combine fantasy with a transcendental attitude toward Biblical subjects, birds, flowers, the seasons, all in her delicate, elliptical, metaphoric manner.



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"Our Life in Poetry: Emily Dickinson." Panel discussion at the Philoctetes Center. YouTube (Philoctetes Center)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhwUc5BAN3E
    2012

Poems by Emily Dickinson at the University of Maryland

Walt Whitman

miércoles, 5 de diciembre de 2012

Walt Whitman

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, ed. Hart and Leininger:
 

Whitman, Walt[er] (1819-92), was born on Long Island, of English, Dutch, and Welsh stock. His family lived in Brooklyn (c. 1823-33), where Walt was educated, and he later served as printer's devil, journeyman compositor, and itinerant schoolteacher, besides editing the Long Islander (1838-39). Meanwhile he was reading the Bible, Shakespeare, Ossian, Scott, Homer, and something of the Greek and Hindu poets, the Nibelungenlied, and Dante, all of which, either in rhythm or in thought, influenced his later writing. He entered politics as a Democrat, and after 1841 was  actively associated with at least ten newspapers and magazines in New York and Brooklyn. Such poems as he published were conventional and mediocre, and to the Democratic Review (1841-45) he contributed many thin, sentimental, melancholy stories. These early writings were gathered in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (2 vols., 1921) and The Half-Breed and Other Stories (1927). At this time he also wrote a temperance tract, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842). He became editor of The Brooklyn Eagle (1846), a Democratic party paper in which he denounced the "mad fanaticism" of the Abolitionists, but so obviously favored the Free-Soil party that he was discharged (1848). His writings for this paper have been collected as The Gathering of the Forces (2 vols., 1920). In February 1848 he went on to New Orleans with his brother Jeff, who with George was the most intimate with him among his nine brothers and sisters. He was an editor of the New Orleans Crescent for five months, during which many biographers have contended he had a love affair with an octoroon, which was the chief force in altering his character. Such assertions are primarily based on interpretations of "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City," which is probably more literary than biographical. Whitman's later statement to J. A. Symonds and others that he was the father of illegitimate children is probably one of the legends with which he liked to endow himself.

Returning to Brooklyn, he came by way of St. Louis, Chicago, and Upstate New York, for the first time seeing something of the frontier that so strongly affected his philosophy, as in such poems as "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" and "The Song of the Broad Axe." He edited various papers including the Brooklyn Times, from which his contributions have been collected in I Sit and Look Out (1932). Meanwhile, as before, he was acquainted with the varying aspects of the metropolis, listening to the oratory of the time, becoming intimate with omnibus drivers and ferryboat pilots, joining the crowds at bathing beaches, and hearing Shakespeare and Italian opera, all of which had an effect on the themes and manner of his poetry. Although he had earlier affected the mien of a dandy, he now dressed as a "rough", and his actions and ideas were leading toward the climax of  1855. Just as it has been supposed that he underwent a transformation in New Orleans, it is thought that he passed through some mystical experience at this time. It is probably more realistic to suppose that Leaves of Grass grew out of a slow and conscious effort to employ his experiences and his own maturity. Although he consistently celebrated himself as an average man, he was probably feeling his unique qualities more definitely than ever. Divided between faith in democratic equality and belief in the individual rebel against society's restrictions, he combined the figure of the average man and the superman in his conception of himself. He certainly differed in the hypersensitivity that made him as zealous in pursuing emotional freedom through love as he had been in pursuing social freedom through democracy. He differed also in his frequent, forceful declarations of his democratic love for man, and he has been considered a homosexual.

Such abnormal sensitivity and extreme sensousness appear to be primary forces in his poetry. Other influences included Goethe's autobiography, which showed him a man surveying the universe in terms of himself; Hegel's philosophy, which supplied the idea of a cosmic consciousness evolving through conflict and contradiction toward a definite objective; and Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, which suggested that a superior individual is a power above man-made laws. Above all literary influence was that of the Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, from whom he learned that the individual was not merely an eccentric but an impersonal seer at one with Nature, perceiving what is permanent in flux and revealing its development. He was affected by the typical interest of his period in science, although he considered it cold and intellectual as compared with faith in a divine purpose. He was also concerned with such pseudoscience as phrenology, adopting its specialized terms for his poetry, through his unique use of words comes from sources as widely separated as George Sand and the American Indian.

The first 12 poems written under these many influences were collected, with a critical preface, as Leaves of Grass (1855). Although Whitman uncritically accepted many divergent philosophies and seems at first to have been unconscious of any unifying purpose in Leaves, he eventually worked out the belief that it was to show how man might achieve for himself the greatest possible freedom within the limits of natural law, for the mind and body through democracy, for the heart through love, and for the soul through religion. Although his ideas of prosody were also refined later, he  already illustrated his belief in a simple style devoid of the ordinary usages of rhyme, meter, or ornament, and distinguished by a natural organic growth, with each part in proportion with the whole. He himself compared his poetry with the "liquid, billowy waves," and some of its most distinctive features are the use of repetition, parallelism, rhetorical mannerisms, and the employment of the phrase instead of the foot as a unit of rhythm, to create forms later called free verse.

Except for his own anonymous and enthusiastic reviews, Leaves received comparatively little attention, though Emerson wrote a letter of high praise. Whitman published an enlarged second edition (1856) and during the following years, continuing his writing, became prominenta mong the bohemian frequenters of Pfaff's Cellar. The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for the first time found a regular publisher, and was greatly enlarged, containing two new sections, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus."

The poet was not intimately affected by the Civil War until late in 1862, when he went to Virginia to see his wounded brother George, and then to Washington to become an unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers in the army hospitals. He left a record of this period in his prose Memoranda During the War (1875) reprinted in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), and in the poems published in Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-66), contaning his dirges for Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!" Nominally a Republican at this time, he became a clerk in the Indian bureau of the Department of the Interior, but was shortly dismissed by the Secretary, on the ground that Leaves of Grass was an immoral book. Whitman was defended by his friends, William O'Connor, who wrote The Good Gray Poet (1866) , and John Burroughs, who with Whitman's assistance published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867). During these years, Whitman issued two new editions of Leaves of Grass (1867, 1871); Democratic Vistas (1871), a prose work; and Passage to India (1871), embodying the concept of the regeneration of the human race through uniting the spiritual wisdom of the East with the materialism of the West.

His Washington residence ended (1873) when he suffered a paralytic stroke, possibly induced by an infection during his hospital work. From this time his writing shows a change of thought. His realistic style becomes one of indirection and suggestion, his materialistic pantheism a more spiritualized idealism, his political views change from individualism to nationalism, and even internationalism, and in general he is less interested in freedom than in regulation. During his last 19 years he lived at Camden, N.J., continuing to revise Leaves of Grass and to publish new editions. Two Rivulets (1876) incorporated Democratic Vistas and some new poems. His newspaper poems were collected as November Boughs (1889), and contain the preface "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads." Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891) is a final collection of poems and prose.

Although not previously neglected, he was particularly in the public eye during the 1870s, when such English writers as William Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds, Anne Gilchrist, and Stevenson contended that Americans did not fully appreciate him. He also had a circle of immediate disciples, including the Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke, whose official biography (1883) was partly written by Whitman, and Horace Traubel, an enthusiastic young Boswell who preserved every scrap of the poet's conversation in his book With Walt Whitman in Camden (3 vols., 1906-14; 3 vols., 1953, 1963, 1982).

During the final years, the poet mellowed, and was content to live quietly at Camden, except for a brief trip to Colorado (1879) for his health, to Canada (1880) to visit Dr. Bucke, and to Boston (1881), where he visited Emerson, for whom he still felt a strong sympathy, although he had long since set himself up as an original genius owing no debt to his onetime master. His executors published a standard edition of his Complete Writings (10 vols., 1902) , but a scholarly edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, begun in 1961 and projected for 18 volumes, is more complete, including correspondence and all minor writing.


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Leaves of Grass, poems by Whitman, the first edition of which (1855) contained 12 poems, including those later entitled "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There Was a Child Went Forth." The first edition was anonymous and had a preface, later omitted, in which the author declares that the ideal poet must be a complete lover of the universe, draw his materials from nature, as a sear reveal the cosmic plan which harmoniously unites past, present and future, be commensurate with his nation, and in America serve as representative of the common people, differing from them only in his superior vision. He is to discover what is permanent in flux, explain its development, and be a realist in his art. His style is to be simple and natural, without such ornaments as conventional rhyme or meter, since it must have an organic growth like that of a perfect animal or tree, in which each part is in proportion and harmonious with the whole.

The second edition (1856) contained 33 poems, including "Salut au Monde," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Spontaneous Me," and "Song of the Broad-Axe," as well as a fulsome reply to the author's "dear Friend and Master," Emerson, in acknowledgement of a laudatory letter which is reprinted.

The third edition (1860) was enlarged to 469 pages, including "Starting from Paumanok" and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and two new sections, "Calamus" and "Children of Adam." The later contains "Facing West from California's Shores" and "Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City."

The fourth edition (1867) reprints, in the copies that came last from the press, those poems published as Drum-Taps (1865), and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-66), including the poems on the death of Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!"; the statement of religion, "Chanting the Square Deific"; and "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" and "One's-Self I Sing."



Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand 

Henry David Thoreau

lunes, 3 de diciembre de 2012

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), born in Concord of a family whose French, Scottish, Quaker, and Puritan stock helps to account for his temper of mind. Just as his heritage was mixed, so his philosophy of life combined diverse strains, and he called himself "a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot." At heart, he was predominantly individualistic, and his great interest was "to observe what transpires, not in the street, but in the mind and heart of me!" Although his reading carried him far afield, he could truthfully say "I have travelled a good deal in Concord." in addition to his natural education in the woods near Concord, and the ordinary preparatory schooling, he graduated from Harvard (1817), where he was primarily influenced by E[dward] T[yrrell] Channing's teaching of composition, and the knowledge of Greek and the metaphysical poets that he derived from Jones Very. His temporary residence in the home of Orestes Brownson, from whom he learned German, was also influential. Above all he fell under the sway of Emerson, and it has been frequently said that he was the answer to Emerson's plea for an "American Scholar."

After graduation he taught school in his native town, for a time in collaboration with his brother John, following the principles of Bronson Alcott. With his brother he also made a trip to the Concord and Merrimack rivers (1839), of which he wrote during his residence at Walden in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). After closing his school, he lived with Emerson (1841-43), serving him as a general handyman, although their relation was also one of master and disciple. At this time he became an intimate of the members of the Transcendental Club and a contributor to The Dial and other magazines. During 1843 he was a tutor in the Staten Island home of William Emerson where he made the acquaintance of Horace Greeley, Lucretia Mott, and the elder Henry James.

After his return to Concord, Thoreau built himself a hut at nearby Walden Pond, where he lived from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847, a period of which he wrote in his most famous book, Walden (1854). While other Transcendentalists sought a retreat at Brook Farm, Thoreau, ever an individualist, having no use for cooperative plans, found his solution at Walden. He wanted to go back to the naked simplicity of life, where he might "subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh," chew the cud of his thoughts, and get to the very core of the universe, by living deep and sucking out all the "marrow of life." His desire was "so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust . . . to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." He wanted neither to be interfered with nor to interfere with others, and he declared, "I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living, each should find out his own way, not his neighbor's or his parents'."

His residence at the Pond was interrupted by a day's imprisonment for refusal to pay a poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War, a war he considered merely a land-grabbing scheme of the Southern slaveholders. This action was in accord with his belief in passive resistance, a means of protest he explained in his essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849). It was a means of accentuating his belief, expressed in Walden, that each man should save himself and all would be saved. He not only believed with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least, but he also contended that "they are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it." His belief in the individual and in a moral law superior to statutes and constitutions was also expressed in "Life Without Principle" (1863).

After his return to Concord, he lived for a year in Emerson's home while the essayist was abroad, and during this period formed his close friendship with the younger W. E. Channing, who in writing the first biography of Thoreau aptly called him "the poet-naturalist." His observation of nature were distinguished not merely by his scientific knowledge, which was occasionally erroneous, but by his all-inclusive love of life, expressed now in an earthly manner with a Yankee twang, now with a sweet, pure English, having, as Lowell said, "an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age." Though he enjoyed the scientific view of nature, he was also a Transcendentalist, defining his attitude when he said he wanted more the wideness of heaven than the limit of the microscope. His statement that he liked "better the surliness with which the wood chopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature" shows him as an observer who wanted his answers concerning nature not only in facts but in terms of faith.

He made several brief trips (1849-53) which supplied the material for his posthumously published books Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864) Cape Cod (1865) and A Yankee in Canada (1866). Meanwhile he continued his outwardly parochial life in Concord, where he wrote his journals, containing some two million words, the basis of all his books. During these years he became increasingly involved in the antislavery movement and deliverd such speeches as "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854). He was profoundly stirred by his meeting with John Brown at Emerson's home (1857) and praised Brown's actions at Harpers Ferry, for here was a man who was carrying out the principles that he himself championed. He eulogized him in three lectures, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859), "The Last Days of John Brown" (1860), and "After the Death of John Brown" (1860). During his last years, Thoreau made further trips to Cape Cod and Maine, and to New York City, where he met Whitman, but he was a victim of tuberculosis, which gradually weakened him and finally caused his death. He worked indefatigably, in spite of this handicap, on a long, unpublished ethnological study of the Indians and continued to make scientific observations and to carry on his own way of life both privately and as lyceum lecturer. An invalid, he made an attempt to recapture health by journeying to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi (1861), but returned home, knowing that he was shortly to die, to engage in a last attempt to edit his journals for publication. He published two books and a few articles and speeches during his lifetime, but it was not until after his death that selections from his journals were edited by his friend Harrison G.O. Blake as Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888) and Autumn (1892). The complete Journal was issued (14 vols.) in 1906 and the text of a lost journal (1840-41) was edited by Perry Miller as Consciousness in Concord (1958). Other miscellaneous work was published in his collected Writings (20 vols., 1906), and Emerson's edition of the Letters (1865) was enlarged (1894) and further amplified and edited as Correspondence (1958). His Poems of Nature appeared in 1895 and Carl Bode edited the Collected Poems in 1943. A scholarly edition of his Writings, which will supersede that of 1906, began publication in 1971. In 1993 appeared Faith in a Seed: "The Dispersion of Seeds" and Other Late Natural History Writings, edited by Bradley Dean, proto-chapters from the journals, not shaped by Thoreau for publication, but pioneering notes on processes of plant succession and dispersal in the Concord environs.

Walden, or Life in the Woods, narrative by Thoreau, published in 1854. Between the end of March 1845 and July 4, when he began occupation, the author constructed a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord. There he lived alone until September 1847, supplying his needs by his own labor and developing and testing his transcendental philosophy of individualism, self-reliance, and material economy for the sake of spiritual wealth. He sought to reduce his physical needs to a minimum, in order to free himself for study, thought, and observation of nature and himself; therefore his cabin was a simple room and he wore the cheapest essential clothing and restricted his diet to what he found growing wild and the beans and vegetables he himself raised. Whan not engaged in domestic and agricultural labors, or in fishing, swimming, and rowing, Thoreau devoted himself enthusiastically to careful observation and recording of the flora and fauna of the locality, to writing his voluminous journals, and to reading ancient and modern poetry and philosophy. His thought about this experience was developed in the journals over a period of years, and the result is Walden, a series of 18 essays describing Thoreau's idealistic creed as affected by and expressed in his life at the Pond. The chapter on "Economy" asserts that the only standard of value is in vital experience, and that the complexities of civilization stand in the way of significant living. To escape the demands of society and to realize the best powers of mind and body, Thoreau decides for an ascetic withdrawal from organized society, since in his desire "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," he found that the essential necessity was to "simplify, simplify." Among the matters described in subsequent chapters are the practical operation of this economy; Thoreau's intimacy with such different neighbors as the moles in his cellar, an educated Canadian woodcutter, and the pickerel in Walden Pond; his temporary imprisonmente for refusing to pay a poll tax because he would not support a state that returned fugitive slaves to the South; the music of the wind in the telegraph wires, and the distant railroad whistle; the varied seasonal aspects of the woods, and the joys of outdoor labor and solitary study. From this many-sided discussion, expressed in an agile, compact, lucid, and often poetic style, emerges Thoreau's philosophy of individualism brought almost to the point of anarchy, and his idealistic exaltation of art and ideas balanced by a vital appreciation of the life of the senses.

Emerson and Transcendentalist Religion