Broken Hallelujahs

Well, as we all work (post-academic year) towards returning to the ranks of living, I find myself wondering if any of you ENLT 325ers are still stopping by this locale for an occasional visit. A couple of you have asked how one might have responded to the "broken hallelujah" phrase on the take-home final exam. It's a phrase that popped up on multiple occasions in class discussions, and I also wrote about it briefly (I think) on the blog. In any event, if you merely contemplate the possible connotations of the phrase, I think you might realize that pretty much everything we read this past semester contained some manner of broken hallelujah. In Leonard Cohen's song, the phrase distils the speaker's sense of love as he considers his fading relationship with his lover. You might also think, though, of Keats's speaker disconsolately trying to recover the glories of the nightingale's song; or of the concertgoer in Woolf's "The String Quartet," who is returned to the mundane, banal everyday world when the last note disappears into the air; or of Mrs. Ramsay, who laments the disintegration of the perfect moment (a hallelujah by candlelight) of the dinner party; or of the male speaker in Springsteen's "The River," who mourns the untarnished beauty of his young romance, which now haunts him "like a curse"; or of Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," who returns to the Wye as an older, more subdued, more weighted human being; or of the hopeful idyll and harmony that is momentarily created between the terrorists and the hostages in Bel Canto. So many of the writers (and musicians, too, I guess) we experienced this past semester were in their various ways trying to bridge the gulf between the holy and the broken hallelujah. And all of this ties in with the point we frequently made that some of the most exquisite music and beauty is intertwined with sorrow and sadness (perhaps because we know the moment is time-saturated, and must always pass).

Better yet, here is how one of your classmates explored the phrase on the final exam: "A 'broken hallelujah' is a bittersweet feeling, or a sense of triumph or love accompanied by an equal sense of loss or pain. This idea is expressed in Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" (covered by Jeff Buckley) in which he sings, 'love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.' He feels love, and as a result he becomes vulnerable to the pain of its loss. In the song, the speaker of the lyrics loves the woman at whom the lyrics are directed, but that love is a sad, broken love. In U2's song 'Sunday Bloody Sunday,' Bono asks the question, 'There's many lost, but tell me who has won?' This is also a kind of broken hallelujah in that the triumph of winning is colored with irony, sadness, and a sense of loss. 'Laughter [...] is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude' (Kundera 199). The idea of the 'singing pain' (Morrison 158) Golden Gray feels in Toni Morrison's Jazz is another example of the broken hallelujah. Golden thinks to himself that only once he knows he has a father does Gray 'feel his absence' (158). He both rejoices at the thought of knowing a father and feels the pain of this father's absence in his life. Ann Patchett's Bel Canto also has a broken hallelujah at the end of the novel. At the very beginning of the novel, the hostages all want to return to their homes and not be held hostage in the vice-president's mansion, but after a while they realize that they are happier with this disparate group of people, hostages and terrorists alike. When the government finally intervenes and the terrorists are all shot and killed the public would probably not understand the bittersweet feelings of the survivors as they return to their families and their homes. This ending seems to evoke the same question asked in 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' -- 'There's many lost, but tell me who has won?'"