The God of Small Things I

It has been noted frequently in this blog that there are two broad ways to read literature (and many sub-divisions of both): historical and universal.  Debates abound on their relative validity, but I prefer the both-and approach rather than the either-or dilemma.

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel offers an excellent opportunity to compare the two ways of reading and hopefully appreciate both.

The God of Small Things can be read as a post-colonial Indian novel that reflects the blending of cultures (Indian, British, American) and religions (Hinduism, Christianity), the corruption of India’s natural environment by capitalistic ventures, the historical conflict between capitalism and Marxism as it has played out in India and the persistence of ancient Indian traditions in a global environment.

None of these “big things” (culture, history, politics, religion) come off well in the novel, which portrays a world grown putrid with exploitation, oppression, dislocation, and corruption.  Even, especially, the family unit has deteriorated into a hotbed of physical and psychological trauma.  At best the novel can be read as a protest against patriarchy, class and caste,  divisions based on skin color, family “honor,” environmental destruction, the raw exercise of power through social structures, and the corruption even of those (Marxists) who would reverse the power structures and deliver the oppressed from suffering.

Above all, it interrogates the “Love Laws” that determine “Who should be loved.   And how.   And how much.”  The novel demonstrates the destructive effects of both violating the love laws (pedophilia) and of following them (religious restrictions).  In some cases it registers a silent protest against the love laws, as when class, caste, and color forbid the relationship between Ammu and Velutha and the breaking of the taboo leads to violence, deceit, and the exploitation of children in the name of family honor.  In other cases, as when Estha is molested, the love laws are affirmed.  Adultery and divorce seem to pass unjudged. 

The most ambiguous act is the incest between Rahel and Estha, shared not out of “happiness, but hideous grief.”  Whatever aftereffects they might experience are left to our imaginations.  They are not shown to suffer from the act, nor are they shown to benefit, though one can infer they experienced some short term comfort.

Anthropologists have identified incest as an almost universal taboo, though it has been practiced historically in some cultures and has been defined differently in different cultures.  While it occurs in nature, there is evidence that more highly evolved species prefer to mate outside their biological family.

To the close-knit twins the act might feel like an entirely natural coupling (though they had been separated from an early age).  Yet, one wonders to what extent their intimacy may result in yet more guilt and trauma.  Or, perhaps it is their shared childhood guilt and trauma that lead them to turn to each other for comfort.  What is ambiguous is whether that mutual comfort is part of their healing or part of their psychic damage.

For whatever reason, incest is a recurring literary theme, often associated with the tragic fall of a family, whether it be in Greek drama (Oedipus the King), Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet), gothic fiction (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), or the modern novel (The Sound and the Fury).  In its prime the Ipe family was highly educated, well-respected, and accomplished.  When the patriarch of the family Pappachi fails to get credit for the discovery of a new species of moth, the decline begins, as the family loses its chance for lasting fame.  Pappachi’s bitterness leads him to abuse his family.  Mammachi bears the scars of Pappahi’s beatings and their daughter Ammu enters into a bad marriage to escape the harsh family environment.  Although the family pickle factory is successful, the marriages of both Ammu and her brother Chacko fail, and their aunt, called Baby, who never marries, becomes as bitter and spiteful as Pappachi, grieving over her unrequited love for a priest.

Ammu’s affair with the Untouchable Velutha; the accidental drowning of Chacko’s daughter, Sophie Mol; Baby’s false accusation of rape and kidnapping against Velutha; Estha’s near-coerced betrayal of his beloved Velutha and the latter’s death at the hands of the police; Chacko’s beating of Ammu; the separaton of the twins; and the subsequent failure of the pickle factory leave the family in shambles.  Chacko emigrates to Canada, Ammu dies at age 32, Estha becomes mute, Rahel becomes “empty,” and Baby neglects her ornamental garden as she and Mammachi live out their days watching American television and allowing the house, as well as themselves, to deteriorate.

 In such a context, Estha and Rahel’s act of incest suggests that the family has reached its nadir and that the only hope of a new generation is utterly blighted. 

 As long as we are examining the novel from a historical perspective, we must take note of the History House.  Chacko speaks of the family history as “a long line of Anglophiles,” who have become “trapped outside their own history” by the history of colonialism.  Their true history is found in a metaphorical “History House,” from which they have become alienated. 

The young twins think Chacko is talking about the abandoned house across the river, said to have been the home of an Englishman who had “gone native,” speaking the local language and wearing Indian clothing. Explicit references to “the heart of darkness” refer to both Conrad’s novel (see blog post April, 2010) and the darkness to be found in colonialism.  Ironically, it is not only the colonized who become alienated from their own history and culture, but the colonizers as well.

And the literal History House across the river becomes the site for the secret meetings between Ammu and Velutha, the hiding place of the twins after Sophie Mol drowns, and for the brutal beating of Velutha by the local police.  “Darkness” takes on the meanings of forbidden love, secrecy, tragic loss, and savage violence.  The big things (culture, history, politics, religion, the Love Laws) and the small things of individuals, their private feelings, and their human experience all intersect in the History House, both Chacko’s metaphorical one and the twins’ literal one.  And that intersection takes place in “the heart of darkness.”

Is the Ipe family a microcosm of the Indian nation?  In its larger historical context the novel can perhaps be read as a lament for modern India, an indictment of the colonial legacy, or even as a grotesque warning about the coming global catastrophe. The prospect of globalism and a cross-cultural world community offers no solace.  It is difficult to find any promising or redemptive message unless the writing of the novel itself implies some hope that its dystopian vision might be reversed.

In the next post the case for a more optimistic conclusion will be considered in more depth, but a historical reading yields little to be hopeful about.

"Too Much Happiness"

Not only does Alice Munro write short stories as complicated as novels (see blog post May 18, 2012), she wrote a “short story” based on the actual biography of Sophia Kovalevsky, the first woman in Europe to receive a Ph.D. (in mathematics), the first woman to be “appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe” and “one of the first females to work for a scientific journal as an editor” (Wikipedia).  It would take considerable research to decide to what extent “Too Much Happiness” is really fiction and to what extent it might be classified as “creative non-fiction.” 

Regardless, Sophia Kovalevsky makes a fascinating study.  Not only was she a brilliant mathematician, she was also a novelist, and she co-wrote a play called The Struggle for Happiness, a title which better fits her life than does the title of Alice Munro’s story.  However, “Too much happiness” is said to have been the actual last words of Sophia Kovalevsky.

The phrase is cryptic.  Can there be too much happiness?  Is the tone sincere? Ironic? Is it part of her drug-induced, deathbed delirium?  The story (and the biography) seems to be more about a woman whose pursuit of happiness is repeatedly being derailed.  Denied a university education as a woman in her home country of Russia, she engaged in a marriage of convenience in order to get the required husband’s (or father’s) signature to study abroad.  Though she achieves academic success, as a woman, she is denied employment as a professor until later in life, when she receives a visiting professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden.

After she falls in love with her husband and bears their child, he later commits suicide.  After caring for their daughter for a year, she puts the child in the care of her sister in order to pursue her career in mathematics. 

In middle age she falls in love again, but the relationship is rocky, and though they vow to marry “in the spring” (of 1891), she contracts pneumonia on her train trip back to Stockholm and dies shortly thereafter. 

Her life represents the classic woman’s conflict between professional career and personal relationships.  From a Freudian perspective it is the conflict of ego and power vs. love and pleasure.  Only society seems to be set up so that men can reasonably expect to achieve both, whereas women are expected to choose.  Sophia tries to achieve both, only to be thwarted by social convention, circumstance, and time.

Based on the biographical accounts, it is fair to say that “Too Much Happiness” is factually accurate.  However, Munro gives the story her own shape.  Sophia’s last words have been documented, but the prediction of her own death, however playful, that occurs at the beginning of the story may be fictional.  Strolling through a Paris cemetery with her mid-life lover, Sophia recalls the superstition that visiting a cemetery on New Year’s Day presages one’s death before the end of that year.  “One of us will die this year,"Sophia pronounces, and the story ends with her death on February 10, 1891. 

During her train trip back to Stockholm, she visits her late sister’s husband and son and her academic mentor and his two sisters, all the while flashing back to her first discovery of trigonometry, her efforts to educate herself in mathematics, her marriage, her professional achievements, her family relationships, motherhood, the loss of her husband and sister, and her mid-life affair with Maksim.  Thus her life is presented as a retrospective as she travels from her long-distance lover back to her home and place of work.

The word “happiness” appears four times in the story, once at the end in her deathbed last words and  three times on one page when she writes her friend and former classmate of her impending marriage to Maksim: “…it is to be happiness after all.  Happiness after all.  Happiness.”

The word “happy” appears four times:  On an occasion when Maksim rejects her saying she “should make her way back to Sweden…she should be happy where her friends were waiting for her,” ending with a “jab” that her “little daughter” would have need of her.  On another when her teenage nephew expresses no more ambition in life than to “be an omnibus boy and call out the stations,” and Sophia replies, “Perhaps you would not always be happy calling out the stations.”  Again, when telling her former mentor of her upcoming marriage, she says, “Meine Liebe, I order you, order you to be happy for me.”  And finally, in a flashback to her first discovery of trigonometry when she recalls, “She was not surprised then, though intensely happy.”

Two of the four uses of “happy” refer to her personal life and two to the happiness found in work, as if true happiness is found in balancing both.  The repetition of “happiness” when writing to her friend about marrying Maksim seems to tip the scale in favor of the personal. Had she found “too much happiness” in her work to the detriment of her personal life?  Was the hope of finding happiness in both “too much” to wish for? We can speculate on the meaning of her last words, but the title of Munro’s story seems ironic, for, more often than not, Sophia seems to fall far short of “too much happiness.”

And there is always the possibility that the drug a doctor gives her on the train, a drug which “brought solace…when necessary, to him,” might have elevated her mood to a state of euphoria, such that, indeed, just before her death, it felt like “too much happiness.”

Her final delirium also included references to her “husband,” confused with Bothwell, who had been accused but acquitted of murdering the consort of Mary Queen of Scots before marrying her himself, possibly by force and subterfuge.  Is this an association of marriage with the deception, violence, and distrust that had accompanied her own actual and hoped for marriages?

She also talked about her novel and a “new story,” in which she hoped to “discover what went on” under the “pulse in life,” something “Invented, but not.”  She found herself “overflowing with ideas…of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.”  The language suggests, not only the euphoria of literary creation, but also, perhaps, that “intense” happiness she associated with mathematical discovery.

Kovalevsky had made the connection between art and science in a quote which Alice Munro uses as a headnote to her story:  “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science.  Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Is there any wonder that the literary Alice Munro would find fodder for fiction in the actual biography of a mathematician who, not only linked fantasy and science, but was also a novelist and playwright? Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction become truth.

Walt Whitman

Along with Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19^th century (see blog post Sept. 20, 2009).  While Dickinson disrupted conventional metrics, rhyme, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar, Whitman basically threw conventional poetic meter out the window and invented a whole new form—free verse.

Many readers think free verse is verse that doesn’t rhyme, or they get it confused with “blank verse.”  Blank verse is actually unrhymed iambic pentameter.  Shakespeare used it a lot.  Free verse may or may not rhyme, but it is completely free of meter that can be scanned, counted, and labeled as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic.  Whitman created a completely new way of achieving rhythmic effects in poetry.  He actually used grammar instead of the stressed and unstressed syllable patterns used in the conventional poetry of his time.

In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass and revolutionized the writing of poetry, dispensing with rhyme, as well as meter and regular verse forms.  Yet his poetry still had rhythm, as well as other sound effects, such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration.  What was revolutionary was his use of parallelism or repetition of grammatical structures to create rhythm.

It sounds so tame, but readers and critics alike were shocked, saying that his sprawling lines bore no resemblance to anything recognizable as poetry.  Ironically, later critics have traced Whitman’s use of parallelism to the Bible, a text that those shocked readers would probably have been very familiar with.  But in those days Biblical “prose,” no matter how rhythmic, was not considered to be in the same category as “poetry.”

Lest anyone think Whitman’s innovation was a matter of chance or accident, the opening poem in Leaves of Grass reveals Whitman’s consciousness, whether his use of parallelism was Biblically-based or not, that he was doing something different, new, and “modern.”

One’s-Self I Sing

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

The kernel structure of the poem is the inverted sentence “_________I sing,” which is repeated four times, establishing a pattern, not of meter, but of grammar.  Each separate sentence features its own extension or modification, thus creating grammatical variety, as well as repetition. 

The content of the poem asserts the modern ideas of individualism and democracy and expands those ideas to include the equality of body and “brain” and of male and female.  While individualism and democracy were well established values in 1855, the elevation of the body and of women was highly controversial, even more so when associated with “laws divine.”  Whitman uses a revolutionary poetic form to reinforce revolutionary ideas.  And he reveals his conscious intention in his final line, “The Modern Man I sing.”

If Dickinson challenged conventional views of reality (see blog post Sept. 19, 2009), Whitman challenged conventional values, especially when it came to gender and sexuality.  Not only did he assert the equality of the sexes, he celebrated the human body as much as he did nature and openly expressed both heterosexual and homosexual attraction, attachment, and desire.

While Dickinson could barely get published, Whitman’s published poems were reviled, not only as unpoetic but as obscene.  Both were too far ahead of their time to be fully appreciated in their lifetimes, but, together, they have exerted more influence on modern poetry than any other pair, and they did it by writing poetry as it had never been written before.

"Fiction"

Someone once said that an Alice Munro short story is as complicated as any novel.  This 2009 story is proof positive.  O. Henry could have learned a lot from her (see http://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-magi.html). 

 “Fiction” can be read  as the tragic story of a woman on a constant quest for ego-enhancement, for whom relationships are a means to the end of her own fulfillment, or it can be read as a comic story of a woman who repeatedly makes herself look ridiculous by her own self-importance.

 It can be read as a realistic representation of human experience as a maze of coincidences and intersections, a tangle of relationships, of memories, of forgetting, of recognition and non-recognition, of curiosity of story-telling, of manipulation, of complex motives, of self-creation and re-creation.

 It can be read as an ironic statement on the complexity of human experience, the mixed messages, the missed messages, the strange combination of false successes and real failures, of the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality.

 It can be read as a social commentary on the modern state of relationship roulette, of marriage, adultery, divorce, blended families, same-sex relationships; of individualism, the serial making, breaking and remaking of social ties; of the fragmentation in our social fabric and the fragility of social bonds; of the strange web of interconnectedness with its brokenness, and its mendedness.

 It can be read as the carefully crafted juxtaposition of a story within a story and the asymmetry of two different memories of the same episode from two different perspectives, in which what is marginal in one memory is central in the other.

 It can be read as the universal story of a failed quest for redemption, in which we humans are doomed to a cycle of continual compensation for our imperfections, like Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down once we get it to the top.

 But the story is called “Fiction,” and in the last line the main character imagines turning her disappointing experience into a “funny story.”  Thus the story “Fiction” is framed by references to story-telling, and at the center of the story is another “fictional” story.  Our attention is thus drawn to the relationship between fiction and truth, unreality and reality, to the significance of writing, reading, and the experience of textuality.

 The poet Donald Murray has said that “All writing is autobiography,” and there is a school of literary criticism that seems to say, by turns, that all reading is autobiography and/or that all writing is about writing and/or about reading.  This self-reflexive approach to fiction can begin to feel like a hall of mirrors, which is somewhat how the story “Fiction” feels.

 Alice Munro, who was divorced and remarried, became a writer and book-seller (a somewhat self-reflexive situation in its own right).  Her story “Fiction” is about Joyce, a music teacher, whose husband rejects her for the mother of one of her students.  Later, after Joyce has become the third wife of a college professor and left teaching to become a professional cellist, she crosses paths again with that former student, Christie, who has married the friend of Joyce’s second husband’s son by his first wife.

 As if this tangled maze of relationships were not enough, Christie has just published a book of short stories, one of which, “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), recounts the story of a child whose mother moves in with her music teacher’s husband.  (The title suggests a coming of age story.)

 To the extent that Christie’s story is based on her own experience, her memory of it is very different from Joyce’s memory of the same episode.  Joyce barely remembers the details of Christie’s account (if they actually happened) and certainly had no knowledge, much less memory, of the events from Christie’s perspective.  She had no idea that Christie had been so lovingly attached to her as her music teacher and she has no awareness of having manipulated Christie in order to gain access to details of the relationship between her husband and Christie’s mother, at least as Christie tells it.  The layers of complexity continue to mount.  The hall of mirrors makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between the flesh and blood of reality and the reflections distorted in the mirrors of memory and of fiction.

 We read Alice Munro’s story about Joyce, who reads Christie’s story about the memory of her relationship with Joyce, which Joyce compares with her own memory of Christie.  If all reading (and writing) is autobiography, then all writing (and reading) is memory, and all memory is a distorted mirror image of the reality that actually took place.  Thus all fiction is memory and all memory is fiction.

 In Joyce’s memory Christie is a minor character, whose name Joyce can barely recall.  In Christie’s memory Joyce is a central character, the adored teacher.  Even when, as an adult, Christie realizes how Joyce had “used” her, she is able to forgive because of the beauty of the music and the “love” of the teacher, however false.  “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come of the great unhappiness of another.”

 Joyce is so moved by the story and its conveniently self-justifying (for Joyce) moral that she takes her copy of Christie’s book back to the bookstore (Alice Munro was a book-seller) to have it signed by the author (Alice Munro was a published author).  Despite Joyce’s attempt to draw attention to herself, Christie is utterly oblivious as to who she is.  Memory, it seems, is one thing; recognition is another.

 In the end Joyce is as unimportant to Christie as Christie once was to Joyce.  Just as Christie salvaged her disappointment through fiction, so Joyce attempts to salvage hers by imagining that “This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell someday.”

 Just as Joyce has used Christie to construct a mental “story” of the life her husband was living with Christie’s mother, so Christie uses the memory of Joyce to create her work of fiction, and perhaps Joyce will again use Christie, this time to create her own “funny story.”

 Not only are we all figments of our own imaginations, but we are figments of others’ imaginations, as they are figments of ours.  Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction, the story we tell ourselves and others, become truth.

The Awakening

It makes sense to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) as a feminist novel of female emancipation, both sexual and spiritual, especially given its biographical and social context.  Yet it also fits into the 19^th century tradition of the novel of adultery and its predecessor, the seduction narrative, in which the female transgressor must, of course, be punished in the end, whether it be by abandonment, disgrace, death, or all of the above.

The novel of adultery could, perhaps, be traced back to the “courtly love” tradition of the European Middle Ages, but Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1870s) established the 19^th century tradition.  The Awakening, however, is the only one that was effectively removed from public circulation because of its negative reviews as an immoral book, perhaps because it is more open in its depiction of a female character who enjoys sex or perhaps because it was written by a woman or both.

 Hawthorne’s novel begins after the fact and focuses on Hester Prynne’s transformation from “sinner” to “saint,” but like Flaubert’s and Tolstoy’s heroines, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening commits suicide in the end.

 It might have been possible to read Chopin’s novel as a cautionary tale, relating the sad fate of a sinful woman, but no one did, again perhaps because Edna’s sensuality is too openly represented.  Though the price of pleasure is suicide, she indeed seems to experience pleasure in her forbidden affair and admits to herself that she would, no doubt, seek out more such affairs once the current one ends.

 It didn’t seem to matter to reviewers at the time that a primary motive for the suicide is concern for her children.  Edna seems to foresee how her transgressions would harm her children.  Neither Chopin nor the reviewers lived in a time when the harmful effects of a parent’s suicide on the children were well understood.

 Since the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s Chopin’s novel has been received as a feminist classic, portraying a heroine who defies the restrictive Victorian conventions of the 19^th century and pursues her own emancipation, not only from an unhappy marriage, but from an oppressive society.

 Perhaps the conflicting attitudes toward the book rest on the same textual characteristic, namely that Edna is largely presented sympathetically and the reader is invited to identify with her.  The strict sexual moralists of the 19^th century were, no doubt, more shocked by the sympathetic portrayal of an adulteress than they were mollified by her suicide at the end.  Feminists of the 20^th century, however, did identify with Edna’s oppression and her quest for emancipation.  For them, her suicide merely underscors the injustice of a society in which a liberated woman cannot survive.

 From a more universal perspective, the novel could also be viewed in conflicting ways: either as a cautionary tale of crime and punishment or as a tragic quest for freedom and fulfillment.  The key seems to be whether readers identify with Edna as a sympathetic heroine or whether they view her as a selfish narcissist, who is a dangerous threat to marriage, motherhood, and social stability.

 Who is the enemy: the repressive society or the rebellious individual seeking liberation?

 One is tempted to dismiss the conflict as an anachronism in the 21^st century.  Surely most readers today would be most likely to view Edna as a victim of sexist oppression who struggles heroically against social injustice.  But consider the debate that can still get quite heated over stay-at-home moms vs. working moms who put their children in day care.  While contemporary readers may be more willing to forgive Edna’s adultery, they may not be so willing to forgive her neglect of her children.

 The conflict between motherhood and women’s emancipation may be as universal as any story of crime and punishment or tragic quest.

Samson Occom (Mohegan)

Thinking about that Arizona curriculum law (see Jan. 27 post), I wonder if I would have been able to teach the works of Samson Occom, a Mohegan American Indian (not Mohican or Mahican), in Arizona public school American literature classes.  Occom’s “A Short Narrative of My Life” might be construed as promoting “resentment” toward both white people and native people, while his sermon at the execution of Moses Paul most certainly can be read as reinforcing the inferiority of his own ethnic group.  “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to” control!

Just as Shakespeare’s The Tempest is full of political ambiguity (see previous posts), so also may be the works of history’s victims.  So-called “oppression” studies may be more complicated than simple-minded legislators think.

The personal narrative convention was well-established in 1768, when Occom wrote his.  The spiritual autobiography, or conversion narrative, was a staple of the New England Puritans, and the captivity narrative became a popular form during the Indian Wars of the 17^th century (see Feb. 12, 2010, post).

Given the familiarity of the captivity narrative, in which Indians were represented as savages, the penning of a personal narrative by a native person could be viewed as an inherent rebuttal of the “barbaric” Indian stereotype, especially since it begins as a spiritual autobiography, recounting his upbringing as a “heathen,” his conversion to Christianity, and his licensing as a missionary to his own people.  As Occom relates his advancement as a teacher and preacher to native folk, his narrative begins to anticipate the success story, made famous by Benjamin Franklin (see Mar. 12, 2010, post).  However, Occom turns the conventionally affirmative personal narrative into a form of protest literature, noting how much less he is paid compared to his white counterparts.

“So I am ready to Say, they have used me thus, because I Can’t Influence the Indians so well as other missionaries; but I can assure them I have endeavored to teach them as well as I know how;--but I must Say, ‘I believe it is because I am a poor Indian.” I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so.__” (original caps & spelling)

Note how his indictment of his white employers is accompanied by an apology for his ethnicity.  Thus, while his narrative might be construed as promoting “resentment” against white people and as a refutation of the “savage” image of Indians, its apologetic tone could be read as reinforcement of native peoples’ inferiority and of white supremacy.  Does the ambiguity make it acceptable to teach under Arizona law or does it expose the inadequacy and ignorance of that law?

 Occom’s execution sermon was so well received by his white audience that he was urged to publish it, which he did in 1772.  Both whites and native people flocked to hear a famous Indian preacher deliver the sermon at the hanging of his fellow tribesman Moses Paul on Sept. 2, 1771.  Angry at being thrown out of a tavern for drunkenness, Paul had laid in wait and murdered the next person to leave, who turned out to be a prominent white citizen.

Occom’s sermon conforms to the standard pattern of text-propositions-application.  What is unusual is that when he gets to the application, he speaks separately to his different audiences—to “My poor unhappy Brother Moses”; to his white superiors, “reverend gentlemen and fathers of Israel”; and to his native listeners, “My poor Kindred.”  His sermon thus becomes a rhetorical case study as he adjusts his message and his style to each audience, acting as a minister to Moses, calling on him to repent and save his soul; as humble servant to the white clergy, calling on them to bring the full force of their authority and power to fight sin and evil; and as temperance reformer to his native “brethren,” calling on them to give up the sin of drunkenness that they may be saved. 

His deference to his white superiors is noticeable in comparison to his authoritative tone toward native people.  He thereby reinforces white supremacy, and, no doubt, by perpetuating the stereotype of the “drunken Indian,” promotes “resentment” toward that race.

One of the effects of oppression is the internalization of inferiority on the part of the oppressed.  Thus their writings may reinforce their own oppression, even sometimes in the same text in which they protest it.

Arizona’s short-sighted curriculum law does not even begin to appreciate the complexities and ambiguities of what they seek to prohibit.

The Tempest II (Beyond Time)

Historio/political interpretations of The Tempest (see previous post) are completely valid ways of reading the play, but not the only valid ways.

 There are those who reject “universal” or “timeless” ways of reading any literature, but The Tempest invites such a reading by signaling its setting as beyond time.  The Latin word “tempestus” for “storm” or “weather” is similar to the word “tempus” for “time.”  Just as the action of the play takes place post-tempest, so it could be read as post-time or outside of time.

 While Prospero explicitly sets the action between 2 and 6 p.m., multiple references in the text suggest a timeless, supernatural realm.  Miranda invokes “the heavens” and Prospero, “Providence divine” to explain their previous delivery from death (Act I, scene ii).  Ariel invokes “Destiny” and “Fate” to explain the survival of Alonso and his companions after the storm that Prospero has conjured (Act III, scene iii).  Similarly, Ariel’s otherworldly music is barely heard by the earth-bound characters throughout the play.  Prospero’s magic creates a sense of wonder and strangeness.  There are references to visions, miracles, amazement, and mythical creatures.  The magic island suggests a new creation, resurrection, or afterlife.

 As the text itself suggests a timeless realm, so are we invited to consider a universal or transcendent significance to the play.

 The Tempest begins with disorder (the storm), destruction (the shipwreck), and an encounter with death, as the crew and passengers tumble into the sea.  This apocalyptic scene is followed by Prospero’s reassurance of Miranda that all is well and his recounting of their own exile, shipwreck, and survival on the island where Miranda has grown up, knowing only her father Prospero and his two slaves, Caliban and Ariel.  Thus is the theme of symbolic death and resurrection established at the start.

 Prospero then puts Miranda to sleep, introducing a motif of sleeping and waking that parallels the theme of death and rebirth.

 His conversation with Ariel and Caliban introduces a theme of captivity and freedom and the need to earn one’s freedom.  The appearance of Ferdinand confirms Prospero’s assurances and introduces the love theme as Ferdinand immediately falls in love with Miranda, who also falls under his spell.  Just as freedom must be earned, so must love and happiness.  Prospero pretends to believe Ferdinand is a spy with designs on the island and takes him prisoner, “lest too light winning/Make the prize light” (Act I, scene ii).

 The island is beginning to emerge as an ambiguous world: rebirth and renewal, on one hand, and trial and ordeal, on the other; airy spirit and brute nature; union and exile.

 Act II begins with Alonso, the King of Naples, fearing for his son Ferdinand’s life, as Ferdinand had feared for his father, Gonzalo imagining himself transforming the island into a new “golden age,” and Antonio (the Duke of Milan who had usurped his brother Prospero’s throne and cast him and Miranda away on the sea to die) conspiring with Alonso’s brother Sebastian to assassinate Alonso and Gonzalo so that Sebastian can assume the throne of Naples.  Ariel intervenes, like a providential angel, to disrupt the plot and the group moves on in search of Ferdinand.  Again the ambiguous island harbors both treachery and beneficence.

 Brute nature asserts itself in the next scene as Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano succumb to the power of wine.  Under the influence, Caliban bows in worship to Stephano, who supplied the wine.

The next scene (Act III, scene i) is the textual center of the five-act play.  Ferdinand and Miranda, unknowingly observed by Prospero, work together in mutual labor, declare their love for each other and exchange betrothal vows.  Beneficence breaks out in this scene as new love and the promise of new life triumph over the darkness of previous scenes.

 Treachery, however, reasserts itself in the next scene as Caliban, Stephano, and Trinkulo, in a drunken state, plot to murder Prospero.  Meanwhile, Ariel confronts Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian with their own treachery against Prospero, warning them of continuing punishment if they fail to repent and reform.  Their ordeal of guilt begins.

 At this point, the plot turns, as Prospero, in quick succession, blesses the union of Ferdinand and Miranda; with Ariel’s help disrupts the murder plot against him by the drunken trio; calls his enemies to account in his presence and pardons them; frees Ariel; and bids farewell to his magical arts before departing with the court to Naples.

 Repeatedly, as the plot veers toward death and destruction, separation and division, or brutality and guile, tragedy is averted by rebirth and renewal, convergence and union, or providence and beneficence.  It is a timeless mythic tale of suffering and redemption, in which new life, restoration, deliverance, and freedom must be earned by trial and ordeal.

 At the center of the play is the young couple, representing innocence, love, fertility, and hope for the future.  No doubt they will suffer yet more tempests, but the play is primarily affirmative, offering the promise of continual renewal for both the individual and humanity in general.