To the Lighthouse: Luminous Moments

Greetings.

Regardless of what you think of Virginia Woolf's fiction, I can't imagine that there aren't individual lines, images, passages, etc., that don't nearly take your breath away (you know, in the vein of "if I could just write one sentence like that in my lifetime, I would die happy!"). I don't know if I've ever encountered a better writer of similes. Anyway, I present you with a couple examples, and invite you to share your own.

How about that moment when Mr. Ramsay, in an endearing if ultimately unsuccessful way, tries to make amends with his son. The passage then moves into a positively stunning example of descriptive writing (amateur nature photographers like myself will appreciate the concluding image):

"Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands when charging at the head of his troops, Mr. Ramsay rather sheepishly prodded his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave for it, with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and walloping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he dived into the evening air which, already thinner, was taking the substance from leaves and hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and pinks a lustre which they had not had by day" (32-33)

Then there's the bee simile, which in many respects distills a major component of the thematic interests of this novel. We're essentially alone as individuals, it seems to say, and can only ever have access to the outer shells of others:

"How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people" (51).

Music Reconnaisance

Hey all,

I'm seeking some cds to borrow for a night or two -- "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, "Smile" by Brian Wilson, "Oh, Inverted World" by The Shins, "Our Endless Numbered Days" by Iron & Wine, "Funeral" by The Arcade Fire. I'm rather Tom Waits-ignorant, too; perhaps someone can steer me to the right cd. Anyway, is there anyone who has any of these and wouldn't mind loaning them to me for a night or two?? Many thanks ... Oh, and I'll happily return the favor with something I might have, too. I need to start making my pitch one of these days about the extraordinary Martin Sexton!

Romantic Poets: Another Postscript

I was just thinking about that first movement of the Beethoven 5th: do you remember the long, elaborate coda, and how it actually ended up being longer than the exposition segment of the movment? It's almost as if there's a hysteria to affirm something at the end, or a kind of desperation to forestall the conclusion, which perhaps helps us to think about the speaker's similar sort of desperation in "Ode to a Nightingale" ... before, finally, those crushing lines: "Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!" Being "tolled back" probably resonates (or will resonate) in terms of many our literary works this semester. And maybe this also helps illuminate the importance of the grace and acceptance at the end of "To Autumn"; it's no longer about the desperate attempt at prolongation, nor does it it suggest a simple resignation to loss. It's something far more complicated and consoling.

There's maybe a kind of overly solicitous aspect to that speaker's strategies regarding the aesthetic experience in Nightingale, too. It makes me think of the moment in Wordsworth's Prelude when he refers to vision as "the most despotic of the senses." The more feverishly Wordsworth pursues the dictates of his eyes, the more what he's hoping to achieve seems to elude him. No wonder, then, that his heightened state in "Tintern Abbey" is triggered by the sense of hearing and that "soft inland murmur"?

OK, back to Joyce and Woolf!

Of Abbeys, Nightingales, Urns, and Swallows ...

Hi again, LitMusicians (or, rather, selected LitMusicians: we have to lure more of our classmates into the club!),

Well, I guess we're leaving the exposition stage of the course, and, with the trio of weighty novels that approach (Woolf, Woolf, and Kundera), we enter the development stage. I hope some of the important questions (theoretical, structural, thematic, musiccological, etc.) are circulating productively. We will create more, I'm sure.

I hope the musical contexts informed and even enhanced your experience of Wordsworth and the Keats odes. We're realizing, I hope, that we can study the presence of music in literature, or literature in music, or, perhaps most interestingly, the seemingly shared structures of literature and music. The ode and the sonata format both provided public models/genres for artists, and to that end tended to produce similar expectations and "landmarks." Our comments in class seemed to be emphasizing the treatment of time in each genre and artistic form. Sculpture and painting, we might say, unfold meaning in the context of space, while music and literature reveal themselves as arts of time (and here I'm remembering Nancy Cluck's book, Literature and Music: Essays on Form). Reading "Tintern Abbey" and listening to Beethoven's 5th, we learn important lessons about human life and about dealing with the passage of time. It would be useful for us to map the movements in time (i.e. present time, past time, and future time) in Wordsworth's poem, and what these movements mean in the context of the overall meaning of the poem. It is no doubt a work of crisis (and here you might think of our experience listening to the Mozart and Beethoven movements, where the first theme must undergo crisis and fragmentation before "coming home again" in the recapitulation): the speaker must struggle between confidence in the truth and in the moral power of the imagination (especially in the context of the human heart's ballet with nature) on the one hand, and the ravaging effects of time on the other, the irrepressible sense of mortality. The speaker achieves an affirmation at the end, but it's not without a sense of loss and anxiety.

We didn't talk about the Preface to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and we probably should have. We might have thought about (in the context of literary and musical composition) Wordsworth's famous lines that poetry constitutes "emotions recollected in tranquility." Romanticism in some respects becomes obsessed with recovering a sense of lost wholeness.

The Keats odes trace a similar effect, I think. They reflect a kind of lost tonal stability in the midst of the anguished strivings and questions of "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," but arguably turn a corner in that stanza in "Grecian Urn" when the urn (now a funeral urn) begins to suggest not an art of escape from the conditions of mortality, but an art that can soothe and console human suffering. This leads to the deeply consoling treatment of time in "To Autumn," which, in a season-spanning day, and a life-spanning metaphorical trajectory (sunrise to sunset), finds the speaker ultimately perceiving that life means life in time, and that, contemplated properly, we can find beauty and consoling meaning even in the moment that we know must now pass The swallows are gathering to leave, but in order that they might come back. The sounds of nature and animal life in that gloriously elegant third stanza become a kind of a music in the poet's soul (John Minahan writes convincingly about this in his study, Word Like a Bell) -- music becomes a path to insight, teaching the speaker (and us) that even in passing, time leaves something of value behind. (This kind of reminds me of when we listened to Coldplay's "The Scientist," and how, as we listen to a captivating, well-constructed, emotional song, we must somehow both relish where it takes us and be prepared for that moment when it ends, and the notes vanish into the air).

I also now remember why I once, in a survey class, played that R.E.M. "Find the River" song on the same day we were to discuss "To Autumn." The song quite simply has an autumnal sensibility in its minor-key cadences and in its lyrics ("the river to the ocean goes"), but it quite brilliantly manages simultaneously to stop time and suggest time's continuance at the very end. Listen to it again, if you can. The momentum of that closing poetic verse carries us definitively (and emotionally) to an end-stop, but then the song, in its very last moments, yields to the soft and fading repetitions of the acoustic guitar (as if the notes -- and we the listeners -- are being stretched like gossamer into an unending future). It's nearly like the effect of that word "oozings" near the end of stanza 2 of "To Autumn": the word is so sticky that we're nearly held there in a frozen moment, but we know nonetheless that we'll be pushed forward into another stanza.

Well, I haven't used this posting to pose any questions for you, but it would be great, now outside of the limits of class discussions, to hear any reflective comments on this poetry. Details we missed, questions to carry with us, emotions recollected in tranquility ... that kind of thing!

Happy weekending.

Welcome!

It occurred to me that this would likely be the perfect class to have an accompanying weblog. Not only can we continue some of our unfinished discussions here (ah, yes, they're always unfinished, aren't they? Schubert would empathize), but we'll also have an outlet for some of our more campy impulses. And this should provide a useful proving grounds for your multi-genre essays. In any event, feel free to respond to postings/threads of your colleagues, or to create new threads.

I'm going to keep this first posting short, but I continue to think about our discussion of R.E.M.'s song "Find the River." The lyrics are of course not nearly as inscrutable as some early R.E.M., and surely we can puzzle out a plausible reading, but nevertheless the song also seems to "mean" something even apart from the lyrical content. You listen to it and when it's over you find yourself trying to narrate an emotion, much as you do sometimes when, after waking, you try to describe a dream. One of the common adjectives used to describe the song in class seemed to have been "melancholy" (someone also used "ruminative"). In the spirit of Nick Hornby's "Top 5" lists in High Fidelity, perhaps we can compile some of the most melancholy songs/pieces of all time (to quote the Smashing Pumpkins, these can be the "Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness" awards). I would toss out the following examples (and, as usual, I'll be all over the musical map): Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year"; The Beatles' "Yesterday"; Joni Mitchell's "River"; Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here"; Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"; Neil Diamond's "Coldwater Morning"; and maybe I'll throw in the third movement (poco allegretto) of Brahms's Third Symphony, which always moves me deeply. Whaddya think? Any others to offer?