The Young Languageof Stephen Dedalus

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

" . . . the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Today, I'm picking up where I left off last time with yet another look at the young Stephen Dedalus and these observations which appeared previously inNotes on Modern Irish Literature:
Volume 7 Number 2
Fall 1995

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man opens with an exploration of how Stephen, from infancy to youth has learned to make sense of language and how this sense is made. He wonders about homonyms: "That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt." He wonders about syntax and dialogue: "What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and Wells laughed." Stephen's search for meaning is evident in his consternation over Wells' question about kissing and his deliberation over God's name: "God's real name was God." Names, nicknames, euphemisms, graffiti -- these are just a few of the many examples of the evolution of Stephen's thought and language.

French literary critic Michael Riffaterre (1924 - 2006) was well - known for insisting on a "theory of literariness rather than of literature," stressing that the role of the reader is crucial if the text is to be considered poetic or literary (Interview in Diacritics, Winter 1981, 13). He explains that "the reader's perception of what is poetic is based wholly upon reference to texts." These previous texts signify the literary or poetic value of the text at hand by providing the reader with poetic signs which Riffaterre calls hypograms. Hypogrammatic derivation is the process by which a word or phrase is poeticized when it refers to (and, if a phrase, patterns itself upon) a pre-existent word group" (Semiotics of Poetry, 22 - 23). Riffaterre focuses primarily on reading, on what conventions govern the reception of the text, and on exactly how readers comprehend the linguistic signs of the poetic text, including cultural or mythological codifications "ranging from lexical items through cliches, quotations, and sound combinations to syntactic structures" (Diacritics Interview 12).

Riffaterre observes various types of hypogrammatic derivation, one of which -- the neologism -- is particularly applicable to the opening chapter of Joyce's Portrait, which captures and delineates Stephen's early attempts to understand how language works. The young language of Stephen Dedalus is filled with neologisms, not so much because the words themselves are newly coined but because they are entirely new to Stephen -- or nearly so. In his description of Stephen's language, Joyce portrays a number of ways in which speakers or listeners make sense of and assign meaning to the neologisms they encounter. For the boy Stephen, all words are neologisms because they are all new to him, and he has as yet only a limited frame of reference in which to place them.. In fact, what the reader witnesses in the opening chapters of Portrait is the formation of such a frame in Stephen's mind.

Stephen derives semantic meaning from newly encountered words and phrases much the same way that Riffaterre's model of hypogammatic derivation yields poetic meaning -- placing them as signs in the context of his semiotic and literary practice and looking for their reference to pre - existent word groups. In fact Stephen does search for literariness in his spelling sentences, which seem like poetry to him: "Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey / Where the abbots buried him. / Canker is a disease of plants, / Cancer one of animals." He daydreams about how pleasurable it would be to lie before the fire at home and "think on those sentences" (10), even though they are simply exercises from a work book. Perhaps it is the repeated initial sounds of the first two sentences (Wolsey / Where) and the juxtaposition of the minimal pair (Canker / Cancer) in the next two lines that are signs to Stephen of poeticity. And, of course, the rhythm. Then there is the verse which Fleming has written in Stephen's geography book:

"Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation,
Clongowes is my dwellingplace,
And heaven my expectation."
What signifies poetry in this case is the rhyme; for Stephen observes that the verse read backwards is no longer "poetry" (16). In these verses, the hypogram is not a single word but a combination of conventional associations. Stephen's perception of what is poetic, like that of Riffaterre's reader, is based "wholly upon reference to texts." Stephen has in his frame of reference such texts as "Pull out his eyes / Apologise" which predicate the identification of the spelling sentences and Flemings's jingle as poetic (8).

Before long, Stephen is outgrowing nursery rhymes and jingles. He yearns to move beyond the readily perceptible metrical and phonological patterns which govern the "poetry" of his early childhood. He is impatient to "be like the [big] fellows in Poetry and Rhetoric," whose knowledge seems to give them so much strength and power. "It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak" (17).

Stephen has already begun, however, to understand the complexities of the universe -- a word at a time. For example, when he stands on the playground with "his hands in the side pockets of his belted gray suit," he thinks, "That was a belt round his pocket And belt was also to give a fellow a belt." He places the two homonyms in context, first feeling the belt around his coat and then remembering an exchange between two of the other boys: "-- I'd give you a belt in a second. . . . -- Go and fight your match. Give Cecil thunder a belt. I'd like to see you. He'd give you a toe in the rump for yourself." It crosses Stephen's mind that rump is "not a nice expression," and he remembers his mother's admonition that he not "speak with the rough boys in the college" (9). Stephen calls up all the representations of the word that he knows, saturating himself momentarily with the idea of belt. In addition to identifying the two denotations of the word, he decodes a negative connotation as well, remember his mother's warning against rough speech.

Clongowes Wood College
Vintage Class Picture ~ No Names Given
Surrounded as he is by boys on the playground, he soon overhears another expression, similar in its negative connotation: "You are McGlade's suck." Stephen thinks upon hearing this that "Suck was a queer word. . . . the sound was ugly" (11). He appeals to the sensory impressions which survive from past experiences in his frame of reference. It is not that he has heard this word spoken before, but that the nature of the word itself -- its sound and its various connotations -- remind him of past events. First he describes the behavior which provokes the other boys to call Simon a suck, then he recalls the sucking sound made when his father pulled the lavatory plug:

"Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

"To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing." (11 - 12)

The memory of the water in the sink reminds him further of the white enamel, and he feels first cold then hot as he pictures the two small words written on the water spouts. The damp feeling this memory evokes does not leave him, and when he sits at the table for tea, the damp white bread, the damp white table cloth, and the white apron of the kitchen-help make him wonder "whether all white things are cold and damp" ( 13). This entire chain of thought is initiated and governed by Stephen's attempt to confirm the meaning of the word suck.

Stephen lends an "avid ear" to the conversation of his elders, in hopes of mastering their vocabulary and assimilating as many new words as possible into his own:

"Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended." (62)

For Stephen, words such as belt and suck are neologisms, relationships between the familiar and the unfamiliar. With both of these words, and others such as heartburn, kiss, Athy, smugging, wine, and order, Stephen is indeed compelled to decode consciously and deliberately.

He does so with phrases as well as with single words, striving to understand the cultural context of the hypogram. For example, when Wells begs, "don't spy on us," fearful that Stephen will tell on him for the skirmish which has placed Stephen in the infirmary Stephen realizes the meaning of his father's parting advice "never to peach on a fellow (22). Later when he is home for the holidays he thinks of something white that is not cold and damp and negative in connotation -- he things of ivory and of the long, white, thin, cool, soft hand of his friend Eileen. Eileen is someone else with whom he is not supposed to play -- not because she is rough but because she is a Protestant. Stephen questions the judgment of his Catholic governess: "She did not like him to play with Eileen because she was a protestant and when she was young she knew children that used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then?" (36). But when Eileen touches his eyes and his hand with hers, he makes his own connections; he thinks that ivory is a "cold white thing" and that Eileen's hands are "like ivory, only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. . . . Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold. By thinking of things you could understand them" (36, 43; emphasis added).

Stephen's conclusion here is strikingly similar to Riffaterre's certainty that one can understand even the puzzling signs and hypograms of a text or culture if one tries hard enough: "Finding the hypogram is a matter of perception: the reader simply cannot identify it unless it has already become part and parcel of his culture, unless he already knows the other text wherein it is contained. If it is part of his heritage, the reader will sooner or later catch the connection" (Interview in Diacritics 14, emphasis added). Stephen's thought pattern follows this model as he decodes the hypograms, Tower of Ivory and House of Gold. He is a perceptive person, and he knows that the pre - existent text to which these hypograms refer is the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. Even though the use of such phrases as metaphors is not, for him, an immediately accessible part of his culture, it is in a larger sense part of his heritage; thus he does -- as Riffaterre suggests one will -- "eventually catch the connection." For now, it is enough that he can interpret the phrases as descriptive of the beauty that he admires in his friend Eileen.

How a speaker or a reader derives meaning from words is a central concern of Portrait, the story of a child, who "frees himself with the words he makes his own" ("Out of Mere Words,"James Klein, 299). Stephen wants to somehow ground language, to find in it an absolute meaning to stand him in good stead in that future which he dimly apprehends. Joyce shows us how young Stephen Dedalus puzzles over words and phrases and bits of conversation and processes them as neologisms, gradually incorporating them into his own idiolect, and depositing them into his ever - growing frame of textual reference. We want to understand Stephen's continuous effort to control his universe through language -- because it is our own. And we, like Stephen, can understand things by thinking of them.

*******************

I searched and searched for an illustration of a young boy,
the age of little Stephen Dedalus, daydreaming before the fireside,
an Irish boy if possible, but I would have settled for any nationality.
Even so, the best I could find were some British pets . . .
from this favorite artist ~ another Stephen D.!

In Front of the Fire ~ by Stephen Darbishire
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

His Little Snuff Box

A GAME WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Conkers ~ by Margaret Clarkson

Conkers, also called Hacking Chesnuts: "A formerly common boy's game. A chestnut was tied to a string, and a boy would compete to shatter another boy's chestnut by swinging / hacking his own chestnut at it. Wells's chestnut was a veteran - it had beaten 40 others."

With Bloomsday coming up on Tuesday ~ June 16th ~ I thought I'd take the opportunity to review some of my archived Joyce material from my semester as a student assistant on the James Joyce Quarterly. In Ulysses, Stephan Dedalus in 22 years old, but it is always good to take a look back at his childhood in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. When cataloging JJQ articles one afternoon back in the day, I came across a mis - reading of one of Stephen's schoolboy conflicts and wrote the following editorial correction of the discrepancy, which appeared previously in

The Explicator:
Volume 42, Number 4
(Summer 1984)

In her article "'Do You Kiss Your Mother?': Stephen Dedalus' Sovreignity of Ireland," Janet Grayson refers to "the cold, slimy ordeal he [Stephen] has endured for refusing to give up his hacking chestnut." In fact, this skirmish between Stephen and Wells derives from Stephen's refusal to accept the hacking chestnut which belongs not to Stephen but to Wells.

What Stephen won't part with is a little snuffbox. Wells is trying to persuade Stephen to trade the snuff box for Well's own hacking chestnut. Stephen recollects:

That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Well's seasoned hacking chestnut, conqueror of forty.

In his notes to A Portrait, Chester G. Anderson includes the significant biographical information that "when Joyce was at Clongowes he had a tiny snuff box in the form of a little black coffin" (p 488).

Because of the emphasis placed upon the hacking chestnut in Joyce criticism, it is important to establish that the chestnut belongs to Wells rather than to Stephen. The conflict caused by the chestnut clearly illuminates Stephen's personality, but owning a hacking chestnut would be incongruous with his character. Any material possession may reflect the character of it's owner, and it would be quite unlike Stephen, who stands on the side - lines of the football game, feeling himself small and weak and "thinking it would be better to be in studyhall" (10), to own a hacking chestnut, conqueror of forty. Stephen is not interested in physically competing with or conquering his school fellows. It is, however, quite in keeping with his artistic sensibility that he would possess a little snuffbox (perhaps coffin - shaped) and prize it enough to suffer the "slimy ordeal" for the sake of keeping it in his possession., Stephen, who is curious about such things as green roses,* is the kind of boy likely to be charmed by the quaintness of a tiny snuffbox and cherish it because of its cunning craftsmanship and the personal or sentimental value it may hold for him.

His Little Snuffbox:
Even more accustomed & ceremonious!

Five years or so ago, my friend Jill wrote: ". . . my grandpa always carried a buckeye in his pocket, one that was perfectly shaped for rubbing his thumb against. Somewhere I have his old buckeye, though I don't generally carry it my pocket. . ." [see comments]

READ MORE! PREVIOUS POSTS
ON BLOOMSDAY & JAMES JOYCE

The Fortnightly: Parallax & Snow Was General

Kitti's List: Book Haven

The Quotidian: 2010: Bloomsday

2011: Happy Bloomsday!

2012: Happy Bloomsday to All!

2013: Bloom's Day and Father's Day

2015: Stephen's Dilemma

**********

2009: Never Fear!

2012: Asked and Answered: What Do I Fear?

* "White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. . . . Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could."
~ Portrait, 12 - 13

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post ~ "The Young Language of Stephen Dedalus"
Sunday, June 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Women's Room

A ROOM WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Caution: Women!
A post to coincide with
Menstrual Hygiene Day ~ 28 May

“We don’t look into menstruation as a man or a woman issue . . .
both have equal roles to play in changing the overall perception.”
~ Dhirendra Pratap Singh ~
helping the Indian government build schools
that have adequate infrastructure for women,
including separate toilets

"We see a world where no woman is held back by her body.
We will work proudly and tirelessly until every single girl
has an equal opportunity for the brighter future she deserves.
By reimagining feminine hygiene products to provide support,
comfort, confidence, and peace of mind,
we aim to eliminate shame,
empowering women and girls around the world."
~ Miki Agrawal, Radha Agrawal, Antonia Dunbar ~
Co - founders of THINX

"Once I had a dream. In the dream I was to receive a diploma
as a spiritual teacher or guide of some sort. There were two of us
being presented with such a certificate at the time. The other was a man -- Swamibabaguruishiroshirabbaisoandso.
He wore long colorful robes and had a fist full of degrees and papers.
To receive his diploma he only had to step forward and present himself
with his long titles, flowing robes, and abundant credentials.
But before me there stood an enormous mountain of laundry.
To receive my diploma
I would first have to climb over this huge heap of laundry."
~ Polly Berrien Berends ~
from Whole Child / Whole Parent

Perhaps nightmares in this vein constitute one of the hidden narratives of the feminine consciousness, an experience that is shared by many but rarely written into the script. American novelist, Marilyn French (1929 - 2009) includes a similar narrative in her 1977 novel, The Women's Room, which follows the progress of a group of friends -- Mira, Martha, Val, Isolde, Clarissa, and Kyla -- through the graduate program in English Literature at Harvard. They struggle against the innate superiority which they sense in their male colleagues and professors. Their submerged feelings of inadequacy are illustrated in a dream that haunts Kyla shortly before her orals. As a prospective graduate student, she is forced to confront a sexist legacy and a pile of laundry similar to that described above by Polly Berrien Berends. In the Women's Room nightmare, Kyla has just entered the exam room, "when she spied the pile in the corner. Instantly she knew what it was, but she was incredulous, she was so ashamed. . . . She was horrified. Those stained sanitary napkins, those bloody underpants were hers, she knew they were hers, and she knew the men would know it too . . . but there was no way she could conceal them" (561 - 562).

The events of these nightmares suggest the ever - present tension between mind and body which informs the female students' educational pursuits. In these dreams, the women feel defined first by their physicality, second by their intellectual activity. When Kyla's test day arrives, the corner of the room is empty; nervously she endures the next two hours, and at last "the judgment having been whispered in her ear by the director, she trembled down the wooden stairs." Willing back the tears, she makes her way, gripping the banister, to her friends who wait below, asking "'How did you do?'" When she answers them, "the words gurgled out of her wet throat, 'I passed,' and they cheered, but they must have seen, must have been able to know" (562 - 563).

Jane Gallop, in her recollection of graduate school, remembers "trying to imagine my future place. How would I pass? In 1977, having 'passed,' I was trying to imagine being an academic speaker as a woman" (71). She places the word passed in quotation marks, giving it the connotation of passed as Blacks once passed for white (Imitation of Life), or Jews for Gentiles (Miss Rose White) in search of social acceptance, trying to surmount the labels of difference and the stigma of otherness. Kyla strives in frustration to battle both the imagined and the real blockades of sexual difference and to maintain a sense of legitimacy in the face of the patriarchy, embodied as it is for her in the three male professors who intimidate her at the exam table. Kyla's wary response to the all - male committee is typical.

In an intriguing essay, "Out of Mere Words," James Klein, says that it is symptomatic of our profession's emphasis on the spoken word "that most horror stories about Ph.D. - getting concern the oral examination." But Kyla's anxiety is informed by more than a fear of verbal articulation; it derives primarily -- as she herself points out -- from apprehensions concerning her gender; she feels invalidated by her own menses and confides in her best friend: " 'I really failed. . . . That's the truth. . . . They said I passed. . . . But I really failed. . . . They demoralized me, they had that kind of power, I gave them that kind of power. And you can tell from the dream what the grounds were. I can't feel legitimate in the face of them' " (563 - 564).

Kyla realizes that the structure threatens somehow to exclude her, sensing what philosophical critic Iris Marion Young (1949 - 2006) would call a threat to her basic security system (and perhaps her presence threatens her patriarchal professors at this same level). Drawing on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens (b. 1938), Young describes three frontiers of subjectivity where prejudice can be found: the discursive consciousness (e.g., it is no longer socially acceptable to say that a woman using a library calls to mind a dog dancing on its hind legs); the practical consciousness (e.g., women can no longer be denied access to campus buildings, yet having gained entry, their presence can still be dismissed by those around them); and the basic security system, i.e., "the subject's ontological integrity" and "basic sense of competence and autonomy." Young explains that "In everyday action and interaction, the subject reacts, introjects, and reorients itself in order to maintain or reinstate its basic security system" (Justice and the Politics of Difference, 131 - 132).

The basic security system is the point at which "bodily integrity" is threatened and "the subject must keep herself together." Prejudice at the second and third level is more insidious than at the first because it consists of unspoken "fears, aversions, avoidances, symbolic forms and association, abjection and border anxiety": "There are material implications (e.g., who sits behind what desk) to making judgments based on the feelings lodged at these two levels. Rationalization is very common among the empowered." Prejudice, Young suggests, is receding from the discursive level of consciousness and being internalized in the practical consciousness and the basic security system. What can no longer be said can still be done, can still be thought. Nor do these thoughts go unperceived by the subject at whom they are directed, even though the "dominant social etiquette" may find it "indecorous" or "tactless" to acknowledge these perceptions at the discursive level. Because our culture tends to "separate reason from the body and affectivity," it is difficult for characters like Kyla to trust or express what might be called their gut reactions. Groups or individuals "oppressed by structures of cultural imperialism . . . not only suffer the humiliation of aversion, avoiding, or condescending behavior, but must usually experience that behavior in silence" (comments noted when Young spoke at the "Colloquium on Cultural Narratives," Purdue University, April 1989; see also Justice and the Politics of Difference, 134).

Kyla confronts not only the verbal challenge of the oral exam but a tradition that for centuries cast women as the silent sex. She speaks not only as a student but as a woman; she will be evaluated not only as a Ph.D. candidate but as a woman, making her way in a world where "the feminine alone must bear the burden of sexual difference." Young, in her summary of Simone de Beauvoir, says that "Whatever might be her position in the world and whatever her individual accomplishments, a woman is appraised first as a woman, and only afterward for her position or accomplishments" (Throwing Like a Girl, 75).

The task of making herself heard is one which, by the end of The Women's Room, Kyla has begun to feel herself unequal too. Yes, she has made it into the room, no embarrassing feminine debris is cluttering the floor, and no one is giggling -- but is anyone listening? She may enter the library at will, may cross the quadrangle at leisure yet still feel invalidated, not to mention "slightly crazy": "The courage to bring to discursive consciousness behavior and reactions occurring at the level of practical consciousness is met with denial and powerful gestures of silencing, which can make oppressed people feel slightly crazy" (Young, 134).

Virginia Woolf likewise believes that "even when the path is nominally open -- when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, lawyer, a civil servant -- there are many phantoms and obstacles . . . looming in her way ("Professions for Women," 241). If Young's model is applied to Woolf's image, then these phantoms are lurking in the practical consciousness and haunting the basic security system. In A Room of One's Own [see last week's Fortnightly post: "Room, Board, and Body"], Woolf refers to such obstacles as the structure of traditions, laws, and social policies which have consistently disregarded women; yet, concerning the ambiguous position and the dubious "tradition manque" which women have inherited, she says that "it was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control" (38); that is, they are driven by the need to maintain their basic security systems. One of the obstacles for Kyla, internalized in the practical consciousness and the basic security system is structural exclusion; and she intuits that there is more at stake for her than a pass / fail grade.

In 1977, Marilyn French's fictional students embodied Virginia Woolf's even earlier (1929) insistence upon higher education for girls. With the admission of women, even peripherally, to the academy, changes were required, difference had to be accommodated, and the presence of the Other acknowledged. At the most basic level, the tradition of critical thought intersected with the inevitability of "our bodily givens" and campus buildings began, however slowly, to feature doors which read "Ladies" or "Women." The body of the female student makes her way through the hallways of academia, where she strives to determine her own fate; and through novels like The Women's Room that explore the realm of academic experience from the perspective of a female narrator. In the late 1970s and early 80s, reading and re - reading this "profoundly influential novel" was a consciousness - raising rite of passage -- opening doors, discussions, and minds. Thanks to Marilyn French for re - thinking gender equity, popularizing feminism, and confirming our intellectual and physical experience.

P.S.

1. Fun Fact: Marilyn French is mentioned in ABBA's 1982 song "The Day Before You Came":
"I must have read a while,
the latest one by Marilyn French
or something in that style."
2. I've been trying to track down a poem that I've misplaced and thought I'd mention here in case anyone out there recognizes the reference. I'm almost certain that the title is "Feast Day." The narrator is a woman who is feeling sad on the first day of her period, and the concluding line is "languorous blood." Does that happen to ring any bells? I remember reading it back in the late 1970s, early 80s, but can't remember where. I've looked through all my old anthologies and notebooks but can't find it; and I've tried numerous google searches with no luck. I can't remember the poet, but vaguely thought that it might be Joyce Carol Oates. It seems to me that in the middle of the poem, she is looking out of a large window, watching children ice - skating on a pond and feeling fearful of their safety, but it could also be that I've borrowed that skating image from another forgotten poem -- that I also need to find -- and merged it with the "Feast Day" poem in my mind. [gmail, October 15, 2013]

3. June 14, 2015: It's tempting to think of Kyla's anxiety as obsolete in this, the enlightened 21st Century -- yet even here and now, a male recipient of the Nobel prize calls into the question the presence of "female students" in his science laboratories. Really?

4. Related posts:

FORTNIGHTLY
Room, Board, and Body

QUOTIDIAN
Throwback Letter to Editor
Too Beautiful to Go on a Diet
Weighing In
The Student Body in the Text
The Fire Was Hot Within Her

KITTI'S LIST
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 1
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 2
A Girl and Her Book

Room, Board, and Body

A ROOM WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

A Room of One's Own?
Photo essay from Victoria Magazine ~ April 1992
Looking through an old notebook, I came across the above article from twenty - some years ago, which I saved apparently in sheer dismay at its blatant misuse of Virginia Woolf. Usually I found the literary passages accompanying Victoria's visuals to be strikingly appropriate; yet in this instance, the editors were quoting from A Room of One's Own (1928) with little respect to the original context.

When Woolf thought "of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space" she was writing not of London but of Oxford. Nor was she praising the town's charm and elegance; rather, she was describing rooms from which, sadly, the women of her time were categorically excluded (emphasis added).

She concludes this observation from the opening chapter of A Room of One's Own with the lament that "Certainly our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable to all this -- our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds. . . . To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do (24, 23).

But Woolf's perceptions, however poetic, constitute a severe criticism of the structural exclusion of female students from the traditional institutions of higher education. For Victoria -- itself a celebration of the "luxury and privacy and space" now available to many women -- to suggest otherwise is a grave disservice to both Virginia Woolf and the readers of Victoria.

I suppose the Woolf passage in Victoria Magazine jumped right out at me because I myself had included it in an article that I was working on at the time -- "The Student Body in the Text" -- for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies ~ 14.3). The narrator of A Room of One's Own is an imaginary and imaginative student, thrown into distress because of her gender, an outsider looking in, a character who is chastised for wandering into territory traditionally open only to men. The harsh reality for Woolf's female scholar is not only to be wished from the room by the social structure but to be physically denied entry in the first place. On her way to the library, "walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot," she is intercepted by a Beadle whose face "expressed horror and indignation. . . . I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here." Regaining her composure, she arrives at the library and is met by "a kindly gentleman who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied a Fellow of the College" (5 - 8).

Being denied access causes her to challenge the privilege of those who were admitted and those whose books lined the shelves: "young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree . . . Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women." She concludes that "The most transient visitor to this planet . . . who picked up [the evening] paper could not fail to be aware . . . that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence" (27 - 28, 33).

What accounts for the power gap between the diffidence of the female students and the confidence of the male students? One elusive element which may account for the discrepancy is the self - confidence that Woolf describes as that "imponderable quality, which is yet so valuable": "Life for both sexes . . . is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps . . . it calls for confidence in oneself." She further suggests that if there exists any short - cut to developing or appropriating this invaluable attribute it is "By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority . . . over other people." To precisely such ill - gotten gains does she attribute the "enormous importance: and power of the patriarchy -- not to mention the tomes of misogynist scholarship which she has encountered in the library. She puzzles over the refrain of misogynist anger which runs through text after text, the fear of losing power, the perceived threat to the homosocial contract: "Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting . . . because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price." As for the male students who are groomed professionally to inherit this rarest of jewels, their birthright is the conviction of saying "to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self - confidence, that self - assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind" (34 - 37).

Looking at additional discrepancies, Woolf raises bodily functions to the level of theory, particularly in her comparison of an exquisite luncheon at the men's college to a humble dinner at the women's college. She writes against the time - honored division between mind and body: "The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments . . . a good dinner is of great importance." The vast difference between the two meals brings to her mind images of fat cows and lean cows, bold rats and timid rats: "I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A upon the body of a rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard." For surely, "The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes" (18, 54 - 55).

Woolf addresses here not only the division between mind and body but the distinction between educational opportunities for the two sexes: "Why did men drink wine and women water?" Why did the women's college lack and ample endowments and trust funds which provided the men's schools with "the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space." Why indeed had it been so difficult to raise the modest sum required to found the women's college at all when, on the other hand, immense sums for boys' schools could be raised with considerable ease? "Why," she asks, "are women poor?" (24 - 28, emphasis added).

Although Woolf heroically curses the discriminatory practices of the academy " . . . turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind," (78 - 79), she also points out that the freedom of the mind can indeed be hampered -- by deprivation and discouragement, by the lack of a tradition, "by all the power of law and custom," by not being heard (24, 50, 54). She sought to rectify this inequity by urging women to forge their own educational, professional,and literary traditions. There is a subtle connection between participating in a dialogue, forging a tradition, and gaining self - esteem:

" . . . if we face the fact . . . that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality [i.e., "the universal human, beyond gender"] and not only to the word of men and women [the world of "sexual difference"], then . . . the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born" (118).

Woolf describes a place for the female body in our culture and gives that body a voice in the text. When women participate in this discourse, they can formulate the images that escape the bemused and frustrated student in A Room of One's Own; they can envision with confidence their place in the academy, gaining entry to the library and putting pen to paper; they can live at ease within their bodies; they can articulate the truth of their own experience.

Also,
check out these beautiful illustrations
. . . and more!
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, May 28th

Between now and then,
read related posts on
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
Throwback Letter to Editor
Too Beautiful to Go on a Diet
Weighing In
The Student Body in the Text
The Fire Was Hot Within Her

And on
KITTI'S LIST
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 1
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 2
A Girl and Her Book

I Changed My Mind

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, Scene 3
by Thomas Stothard, 1755 - 1834

"Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths"

from Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

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Couriers

“They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”

from On Parables
by Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
I changed my mind ~ apparently easier done than said. At the very beginning of their careers, Kafka's couriers have the free will to make a choice, and the choice they make out of this free will is to be couriers instead of kings. Now they are locked into that choice, no matter what. Kafka reveals the meaninglessness of the messages they relay and he blames their meaningless lives on the fact that they adhere to a truth in the spoken word which, in fact, does not reside there.

The couriers initially made this choice as children would, referring perhaps to the excitement that seems inherent in travelling to and for with messages, the action and movement, and the nature of the responsibility such a position entails -- the satisfaction of a mission accomplished rather than that of executive decision making. Unfortunately, everyone has chosen the role of delivering the truth rather than the office of determining what the truth is or just what truth it is that needs to be pronounced. Now they experience the discouragement of carrying messages with no content and to no purpose.

They are like Stephen Crane's "ship of the world" which slipped away at a fateful moment before God adjusted the rudder:

"So that, forever rudderless, it went upon the seas
Going ridiculous voyages,
Making quaint progress
Turning as with serious purpose
Before stupid winds."

But the couriers do not have even the saving delusion of naive or wrongful belief that their purpose is serious. Not only does the reader know that their progress is quaint and ridiculous and stupid -- they know it as well; yet they persist in shouting their messages to the "stupid winds."

The couriers, unfortunately, have no auditor. They suffer from a disjunction of form and content in their profession. Surely, in their cases, silence is preferable to their hopeless and meaningless shouting. Yet they feel compelled to continue their "work." The last sentence of the parable suggests that the compulsion derives from a seriouis misunderstanding of the power of language. The couriers mistakenly believe that words are real, more real even than actions. Their miserabale lives belie the truth of their oaths of service but they hold fast, somehow convinced of the authenticity of the oath. They honor a commitment to the spoken word, even though they have been more or less betrayed by the profession they feel committed to. Keeping an oath is undoubtedly honorable, but the fact that the couriers lead a miserable existence suggests that greater truth and greater honor, as well as greater happiness, might be found in breaking or modifying or redefining the oath if the couriers had the strength of mind to do so.

They need to learn the lesson of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's play about "the sweet smoke of rhetoric." The four main characters have taken an oath "Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep" (I, i, 48). They swear to lead this ascetic life of contemplation for three years' time in order that they might become "heirs of all eternity" (I, i, 7). It seems a small price for such a reward, and the final bond of the oath is "That his own hand may strike his honor down / That violates the smallest branch herein" (I, i, 20 - 21). But contrary to finding that a violation of the oath is a violation of honor, they learn just the opposite. By the end of the play, Longaville questions, " . . . what fool is not so wise / To lose an oath to win a paradise" (IV, iii, 270 - 71) and Berowne proclaims: "Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths" (IV, iii, 359 - 60).

They are calling into question, as Kafka's couriers should have the sense to do, the power and value of the word, written and spoken. Is breaking an oath to gain what at least appears to be a paradise a wise choice? Of course, the decision must always be relative to the weight of the oath and possibility of paradise. The line between "losing our oaths to find ourselves" and "losing ourselves to keep our oaths" is not always as clear as it is for the lords in Love's Labour's Lost, whose oaths were perhaps not very weighty ones in the fist place.

However, since the couriers in the parable have been reduced to living meaningless, frustrating lives, it is time, Kafka suggests, that they examine the validity of their oaths of service. Initially weighty though it may have been, it should be reconsidered in light of prevailing situations and conditions. Instead of taking this initiative, though, the couriers continue acting against their better judgment because they said they would. Clearly they are losing their lives to keep their oaths. Language has failed them, leaving them unable to discern when it may be right action, right behavior, to throw over a commitment they have made, a commitment not to another person so much as to the words they heard themselves say.

John the Baptist Reproving Herod, 1848
by John Rogers Herbert, 1810–1890
I draw a similar conclusion whenever I hear the story of the beheading of John the Baptist. As you may recall, Herod offers his daughter "whatever you wish . . . Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom," as a reward for her performance of a pleasing dance for the the guests at a banquet. The girl confers with her mother and requests John's head on a platter. Although Herod is "deeply grieved" (is he really?) at this morbid request, he proceeds to grant it. Why? "Out of regard for his oaths and for the guests" (Mark 6: 22 - 26). What? This story never sounds right to me. Herod has all the power in the situation, including the power to renege on his oath and the power to save a man's life, should he so choose. He has the power to change his mind.

We've heard it all our lives: you must be as good as your word. Perhaps the real challenge is to be better than our word.

Three Conspirators Swear an Oath, 1779
Henry Fuseli, 1741 - 1825

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MORE ON KAFKA

1. Parables on Parables:

"They were offered the choice between
CHOICE and NO - CHOICE."

2. Previous Blog Posts:
Little Door
Take Up Your Cross
Sancho Panza
Celtic Blessing
Imperial Messenger
Suffering
Go Over

3. Fascinating Artwork:
Illustrations for Kafka's Parables by Aimee Pong

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, May 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Causality: King Then Queen

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"The king died and then the queen died" is a story.
"The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot.
~ E. M. Forster ~

Forster "also points out that the difference between the two is causality. Theorists have debated the validity of the distinction since Forster proposed it in the 1927, arguing, for example, that the very temporality of "and then" entails causality (or at least invites the reader to supply it) so that the only difference between the two versions is the explicit naming of the cause in the second. The debate also includes objections to defining plot solely in terms of causality, since many narrative artists build plots on other principles. Nevertheless the debate itself shows that Forster identified four elements of narrative—character (or agent), event, temporality, and causality . . . . Because narrative spells out the specific relations among agents, events, time, and causality, it is capable of explaining phenomena that escape more abstract analyses such as those based on science-oriented ideas of general laws."

from
"Narrative - E. M. Forster's King And Queen
And Narrative Across The Disciplines"
What always strikes me about the "grief" in Forster's second sentence is not only that it introduces causality but that it reveals the queen's emotional state. Narrative requires conflict, and the queen is a conflicted character. She is grieving; and we know what that means: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. She is in conflict with herself, and with forces larger than herself, such as Nature, God and Death. Now we have a plot.

Forster's brief analysis of royal death and grief always makes me think of that classic exercise in cause - effect analysis: the Drawbridge Problem:

As he left for a visit to his outlying district, the jealous Baron warned his pretty wife: "Do not leave the castle while I am gone, or I will punish you severely when I return!"

But as the hours passed, the young Baroness grew lonely, and despite her husband's warning, decided to visit her lover who lived in the countryside nearby. The castle was located on an island in a wide fast flowing river with a drawbridge linking the island and the land at the narrowest point in the river. "Surely my husband will not return before dawn," she thought, and ordered her servants to lower the drawbridge and leave it down until she returned.

After spending several pleasant hours with her lover, the Baroness returned to the drawbridge, only to be blocked by a gateman wildly waving a long, cruel knife. "Do not attempt to cross this bridge, Baroness, or I will kill you," he raved. Fearing for her life, the Baroness returned to her lover and asked him to help. "Our relationship is only a romantic one," he said, "I will not help."

The Baroness then sought out a boatman on the river, explained her plight to him, and asked him to take her across the river in his boat. "I will do it, but only if you pay me my fee of five Marks." "But I have no money with me!" the Baroness protested. "That is too bad. No money, no ride," the boatman said flatly.

Her fear growing, the Baroness ran crying to the home of a friend, and after again explaining the situation, begged for enough money to pay the boatman his fee. If you had not disobeyed your husband, this would not have happened," the friend said. "I will give you no money."

With dawn approaching and her last resource exhausted, the Baroness returned to the bridge in desperation, attempted to cross to the castle, and was slain by the gateman.

Drawbridge from the Liebig Collection
A variety of discussion guides are available for studying the motivation behind each character's behavior. Years ago, when teaching "The Drawbridge" as part of a unit on the short story, I asked the class to consider why the Baroness would have risked a visit to this unfeeling lover. One of my students, who was having a tough semester and dealing with a death in the family, shook his head in resignation and answered, "Maybe she thought he loved her." I continue to value his conclusion as one of the best commentaries of all on these conflicted characters. Looking for love in all the wrong places -- sigh -- as is so often the case.

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Speaking of causal analysis, a few weeks ago, my older son Ben, wrote to recommend a "decent John Green video on who started World War I, because it reminded me that I was going to talk to you guys about causality!"

My younger son Sam added: "Good video. I could go check more primary sources and learn more about WWI, but I'm chill with just blaming Russia," inspiring me to suggest that we could blame Queen Victoria.

See:
The Roots of World War I,
Tangled in the Web of Queen Victoria's Royal Offspring

and

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm:
Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I
by Miranda Carter

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But back to the Drawbridge. Ben was ready to present us with some philosophically challenging material -- no glib conclusions! So here goes! Interestingly enough, Ben's narrative begins with a somewhat modified version of the problematic Drawbridge Exercise:

Intro
Trying to disentangle correlation from causation is what econ has been all about for the last twenty or so years (formally, this is called identification). It's been dying a little bit recently. People became increasingly focused on super small but well identified problems. The pendulum is swinging back to tackling and thinking about much bigger, but trickier problems. Either way, though, it's good to have a nice framework for thinking about causality. Without understanding what causes what and the mechanisms through which it causes it, we can't hope to design decent policies.

The setting: king says if princess runs away to be with peasant, he'll have her executed. peasant asks her to run away, she does, guy at moat lets down moat. King sends knight to retrieve princess. King tells executioner to cut off her head. He does. Princess dies.

The identification question: what/who killed the princess? For example, did the princess running away from the castle cause her to have her head chopped off?

The policy question: how to save the princess?

Necessary and Sufficient
To say that A is necessary for B means that A must be in order for B to be. Or that B cannot be unless A also is. Or that if A is not, then B is not. Or that whenever B is, A must also be.

Examples:
(a) A necessary condition for getting a good grade is handing in a term paper.
(b) A necessary condition for being a bachelor is being unmarried.
(c) A necessary condition for thunder is lightning.

To say that A is sufficient for B means that if A is, then B definitely is.

Examples:
(a) A sufficient condition for getting an A is getting an A on every assignment.
(b) A sufficient condition for being male is being a bachelor.
(c) A sufficient condition for thunder is lightning.

More colloquially, necessity means it can't happen without it, and sufficiency means that with it, we're definitely doing to have it.

Causality
We think of an order of causality. We'll start with the strongest form of A causes B. That is, A causes B if:

(1) A is necessary and sufficient for B.
(2) A is non-redundant and sufficient for B.
(3) A is a non-redundant part of a sufficient chain of events for B.
(4) A is an insufficient but non-redundant part of a necessary chain of events for B.
(5) A is an insufficient but non-redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient chain of events for B.

We call condition (5) the INUS condition, and it's where much of social science is concerned. There aren't a lot of necessary and sufficient causal factors for being employed, or having a successful IPO, or getting a line of credit extension, or graduating from college.

An Example
A good way to become familiar with this is to think through some examples. Did the princess running away from the castle cause her death?

Is the princess running away from the castle necessary for her head being chopped off? No. The King is obviously crazy; he might have had her executed when he found out that she wasn't his daughter because the queen had been sleeping with one of the minstrels because she thought the King was a prick and didn't want to marry him in the first place.

Is the princess running away from the castle sufficient for her death? No,the knight could have refused to go get her and bring her back to the castle. The executioner might have refused to kill her.

So, the princess running away from the castle didn't cause her execution? Well that's not quite right. It doesn't cause it according to the definition of causality.

Is her running away non-redundant? Yeah, see previous example of queenly infidelity.

We might actually say that her running away did cause her execution according to the third definition. Actually, yes. I'm going to say that that's where we get to. Turns out the princess running away did cause her death.

We leave the causal nature of the other story's actors as exercises for the reader.

Designing policy, though, is very tricky. First, it involves figuring out how much each actor caused her death. Something made very, very tricky without huge sample sizes. In this case, there's only one occurrence, so we can, empirically, say very little. Then there's all the logistics of the policy and its unintended consequences. And of those predictable consequences some valuation of their effects has to be made. Also often impossible to do satisfactorily.

New York Times
Kevin Mumford, and many professors since, have recommended going to nyt.com at any time and picking an article. True story.

Here's one about "Refugees in Afghanistan": "Such experiences have become increasingly common for Afghans living in Pakistan after the terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar in December. Though the attack was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan refugees say it fueled a new wave of resentment against them."

Did the attack on the school cause increased resentment towards the Afghan refugees? It's not immediately clear this is the case. Which kind of causality is it, if it is indeed causal? It's clearly not sufficient. The school being blown up by a terrorist group is not definitely correlated with resentment against refugees. What non-redundant link does it serve in the chain? It could be that the refugees have come, consumed resources previously going to Pakistanis, and this hit a threshold that fueled a new wave of resentment. The school attack is redundant in this case. Is the chain of events necessary? As before, nope.

We could precisely identify the causal effects of the attack on the school by comparing the levels of resentment faced by the refugees in the event there is an attack, and again in the event that there's not an attack (this is called the counterfactual). We often estimate the counterfactual by looking at a control group -- we can identify the effects of the drug by comparing what happens to the cholesterol of the treated group as compared to the control group. We can't do this with school attacks for quite a few reasons - expensive, unethical. And even if we could, it wouldn't be a perfect experiment, because it would happen on a different day and the circumstances wouldn't be identical. This is why economics is tricky snacks. Ultimately, we can't prove the attack at the school caused increased levels of resentment.

But we can use a smell test: would the levels of resentment been higher, the same, or lower if the school had not been attacked. That will shed some light on its causal nature.
Thanks to Guest Blogger Ben McCartney!

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SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, April 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

P.S.
My friend Diane always sends the best Valentines!
The King & Queen of Hearts above is from Pier 1 Imports (2006)