Hypothesis Regarding Safi's Love Letters

The letters that Safie sent to Felix while the smitten young Frenchman orchestrated the prison escape of the Arabian beauty’s father are offered on two separate occasions as proof of the veracity of the concentric narratives that make up the Frankenstein.  The creature offers transcriptions of the letters as proof of his tale, and those transcriptions are then shown by Frankenstein to Walton, who accepts these letters as the ultimate proof of Frankenstein’s story. Presumably, these letters are eventually shown to Mrs. Saville, Walton’s sister, as "proof" of the entire three-tier narrative.
 
Yet these letters are notably absent from the text, leaving the reader to wonder about the content of those letters and how they could possibly establish the veracity of the creature's tale. What little information there is regarding the content of the letters is found within the creature's summary of those letters, which takes all of two paragraphs. While this information will be examined in great detail in the paper itself, for now it is sufficient to affirm that there is nothing within the letters that relates to the story of the novel.  Why then has such emphasis been provided to letters that seem inconsequential other than the fact that the three main narrators (the monster, Frankenstein, and Walton) believe the letters to be of such significance?  Or rather, what possible information could such letters offer that could be so convincing?

 The answer to this lies in another of Rousseau’s works: Julie, or the New Heloise, an epistolary novel that was originally titled Letters of Two Lovers Living in a Small Village at the Foot of the Alps. While the De Lacey cottage is located in Germany rather than the Lake Geneva area where the titular lovers in Julie live, which is also where much of Frankenstein takes place, the De Lacey’s live on the outskirts of a village in foothills of the Alps. In an introduction to Julie, Rousseau answers hypothetical objections to his work by discussing the nature of love letters:

“A letter really dictated by love, written by a lover really under the influenced by a real passion, will be tame, diffuse, prolix, unconnected, and full of repetitions: his heart, overflowing with the same sentiment, constantly returns to the same expressions, and like a natural fountain flows continuously without being exhausted. Nothing brilliant, nothing remarkable: one remembers neither the words nor phrases; there is nothing to be admired, nothing striking: yet we are moved without knowing why.  Though we are not struck with the strength of sentiment, we are touched by its truth, and our hearts, in spite of us, sympathize with the writer. “ (italics mine for emphasis)

The complaint that Rousseau is addressing in advance is that the love letters fail to meet most expectations of good writing; they are meandering, repetitious letters that make for poor reading. Rousseau’s defense, one of his favorites for any of his peculiarities, is that he is simply following the model that nature has provided him, i.e. that the letters are written in this manner because that is the nature of real love letters.

So then, Shelley playfully excluded Safie’s letters from Frankenstein because, as real love letters, they “nothing to be admired,” and aren’t really worth repeating. The creature must summarize the contents of the letters because “the sun was already far declined” and the love letters would have been “diffuse, prolix…and full of repetitions.”  In other words, the love letters were rather long-winded. This is what led the creature to helpfully condense the information verbally – but it wasn’t the information in the letters but the letters themselves that were convincing proof. This is why the creature transcribed the letters in whole, despite the poor writing style, or rather, because of the poor writing style of the letters; it was the flawed writing that affected both Frankenstein and Walton to be “touched by its truth.” Walton proclaims the letters “brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his [Frankenstein’s] narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and connected.” Contrasting the letters to Frankenstein’s “connected” stories implies that the letters having an “unconnected” line of reasoning, in line with Rousseau’s description of a real love letter.

The position of the letters at the center of the novel gives them additional importance. In concentric narratives, also known as chiastic narratives, the center of the narrative is emphasized as a key that provides an understanding to the greater work. No, I'm not going to explain that for you.

Books for Bones: The Intertextuality of Frankenstein

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley can be viewed as romanticizing the philosophical arguments of her day, translating the philosophical discourse of the Romantic era into narrative in a dialogic manner consistent with Menippean satire. More specifically, the form Shelley has structured to hold the fruit of her invention is essentially a patchwork of intertextuality, a dialogic work assembled from some of the most influential books of her time. While Frankenstein combed through graveyards to find the parts needed to form a bride for his creation, Shelley combed through the pages of several influential works of literature to provide the materials that her imagination brings to life:   Roussseau's Emile and Julie, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Bible, her father William Godwin's Political Justice and Caleb Williams (which romanticizes the philosophies Godwin puts forth in Political Justice) and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.

At the time Shelley wrote her novel, the books she used to structure her story were popular, at least within the literati. Today, they require a tour guide. This intertextuality centers on Rousseau's Emile, which valued experiential education over a classical approach to education through books and lessons and mandated that children be allowed to follow their own interests. A person familiar with Emile will recognize that Shelley is taking a cue from Rousseau's own words:

"Thus one kind of education would be practicable in Switzerland and not in France; another would be right for the middle classes but not for the nobility....Others can concern themselves if they want, each for the  country or the state they have in view."

The education of the characters in the novel - most notably that of Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, the creature, and Felix, but also of the minor characters as well - are variances of the course of education laid out in Rousseau's seminal tract. Felix,  a French member of the landed gentry, is the only character who has been educated well; Walton, left to his devices, is an idiot (perhaps this is a satire of Byron, who was also from a nautical family - but Byron was educated in the traditional manner which provided him with the ability to be a poet), Frankenstein is raised in Switzerland and something goes very wrong with his education (it was his mother's fault).

Emile is the source of several important parts of Frankenstein. For instance, consider the scene where Felix comes upon the creature kneeling before his father and throws him with “supernatural strength.” The creature is supposedly an eight-foot tall being with superhuman strength of his own, therefore a being with considerable muscle mass. Worse, the being is kneeling giving it a lower center of gravity. Yet Felix “flings” him across the room. It seems rather expedient and is sometimes thought of as one of the novel's problems.

However, this exact moment is a manifestation of a single sentence in Emile where the themes of education and creation collide (not coincidentally, this is the exact center of  Frankenstein): “The rebellious angel who fought against his own nature was weaker than the happy mortal who is living at peace according to nature.” The rebellious angel is the creature, who self-identifies with Satan, and by seeking help he is going against Satan’s prideful nature. The happy mortal is Felix, whose name means happiness. While his educational background isn’t really given, his character exhibits many traits of Emile, the titular student of Rousseau's work.

LA River News

The LA Weekly has a blog post about the opening of a section of the LA River last week.

"I feel a little itchy, I'm not going to lie." Tyler Sedustine has just emerged from the Los Angeles River, his dripping wet two-and-a-half-year-old son Elijah ensconced in his arms. That his first instinct is to hose off will likely strike few Angelenos as strange. Just twenty-four hours previous, the idea of dipping your toddler in the our eponymous waterway could have been deemed not just mildly odd and possibly toxic, but also illegal.

On May 27, however, the city threw open a 2.5-mile stretch, known as the Glendale Narrows and located between Fletcher Drive and Oros Street, for the first time since the whole river was encased in concrete and re-classified as a "flood control channel" back in the late 1930s. Suddenly on the list of approved activities are boating or fishing for the bass, tilapia and catfish who call the river home. "I've been told they're good eating," swore Fernando Gomez, Chief Ranger for the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority (MRCA), on hand for the official kickoff.

The post ends by questioning who could lose from the recovery efforts. That's actually a given - the gentrification process will kick in and we will have Chavez Ravine all over again. That's typically the result of recovery projects across the nation. 

Full story here: http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2013/05/la_river_recreation.php

Rejecting Adam's Curse: Thoreau's Call to a Better Life

 There is a popular notion, that Americans associate with our Puritan roots, that a man must work hard in order to earn their daily bread, an idea known as Adam's curse. Thoreau wholeheartedly rejects this notion in Walden when he denies the biblical curse that resulted in man's fall from grace: "It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do" (64). There is a related idea that idle hands do the devil's work, a cliche that suggests that a man with leisure time is likely to sin, so keeping busy is a way to stay on the path of righteousness.  Thoreau argues contrariwise that men should work less so that they can spend more leisure time contemplating the lessons to be found in nature, thereby improving their souls.

The problem that Thoreau finds in those that are chained to their labor is not that they labor, but that they "labor under a mistake" (7); the mistake being that men waste their efforts pursuing unnecessary material good to the neglect of their own personal inner-development. Thoreau is concerned that in a mad attempt to keep up with the Jones's, to use the parlance of our day, people are starving their souls. People are so concerned with purchasing material comforts that they forget to take care of their spiritual needs.
 
Thoreau forces readers to consider whether or not they can truly afford the material goods that they purchase. Is exotic food necessary or will simpler fare suffice? If your old coat is still intact, why do you need a new one? Most importantly, can you afford the things that you buy? Or are you living, as Thoreau puts it, on "another's brass" (8) -- living on credit and establishing debt that condemns man to toil in conditions that perhaps would be best avoided. Thoreau specifically addresses his neighbors in Concord but his message is universal and applicable to all. Furthermore, Thoreau puts his money - or lack thereof - where his mouth is by demonstrating that it was viable to work less and live more; Walden is a call for men to "live deliberately" - a call for people to contemplate life as they experience it.

The experiment of living solely by the efforts of his own hands (aside from the help he hires for farming and the occasional dinner party he attends) is the basis for Walden. Thoreau offers detailed accounting of all his expenses, crowing over how little money and time sustainability costs. He was able to purchase enough food for eight months with a mere $8.74, equivalent to $185.61 today (that's a couple of weeks for me and I know I could eat cheaper but convenience and freshness counts). He even estimates he could have lived on three dollars less if he not indulged on luxuries such as dried apples and a pumpkin. Thoreau elsewhere gives the average rate of a day laborer as one dollar per day, which means that a person could earn his food for eight months - even with the luxury items - in nine days.

The Irish laborer John Field is offered as an example of someone who's inefficient labor practices condemn his family to perpetual poverty. Field is "an honest, hard-working, but shiftless man" (184), an oxymoronic description that exemplifies Thoreau's point perfectly. Field works hard to scrape together a living for his family but is unable to get ahead, which is why he is shiftless.  Thoreau tries to teach Field about economy and suggests that the Irishman could escape the bonds of wage-slavery if he would forgo luxuries such as tea, coffee, butter, and fresh meat. Thoreau further illustrates Field's lack of economy when they go fishing . Field uses worms to catch shiners, small fish that he uses as bait to catch larger perch; Thoreau uses worms to catch perch. When the two fish together, Field "disturbed only a couple of fins while I [Thoreau] was catching a fair string" (187). The message is clear: Field works twice as hard for less reward.

John Muir: The Original Tree Hugger Reignites Class Divide

 With John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierras, the class finally turns towards the type of nature that American culture has relied upon up until just the past decade when the urban-naturalism movement began to pick up steam (ironic use of steam engine metaphor for urban-naturalism intentional). I am referring to Nature as the largely uninhabited areas where the wild things are, an unspoiled space where humanity can be reminded that we are "truly an inseparable part" of the natural beauty that resides there that was passed down through the Romantics to Transcendentalists to Muir(15). Or at least that was my first impression; upon further consideration I began to suspect that Muir was somehow undermining at least one aspect of the Romantic tradition of Nature: the lack of class distinctions.

Muir appears to call for an end to the elevation of the common man, the ordinary rural worker that Wordsworth praised as a man more in tune with Nature than his urban contemporaries. This can be seen in his inversion of the shepherd motif. While shepherds are usually a frequent component of the pastoral settings favored by Romantics, Muir's Shepherd Billy debunks the concept of the shepherd being closer to nature.

 Shepherd Billy is not the humble, hard working individualist dedicated to protecting his flock and grateful for a lifestyle that affords him so much time in nature.  Billy is an immigrant worker who is hired to tend to the flock of Delaney, and Muir is hired primarily to watch Billy - in other words, Muir is management. Billy is not dedicated to the care of his sheep, insisting that Muir and the dog go after the sheep who stray from the flock. In an interesting contrast to Muir's worshipful praise of nature, Billy regards nature as a place for bad things. His flock of sheep have "more of the evil one than any other flock" - a reference to Satan (41). Yosemite, to Billy, is a "d----d good place to stay away from." Billy certainly won't be paying to see the place - which seems to point to a possible reason for Muir's harsh depiction of the Shepherd. Muir is suggesting that nature tourism is something that can be appreciated only be those who had an educated palate - it is wasted on rustics such as Billy.

I was surprised that Muir and Billy both bemoaned the lack of variety in their diet when their beans and flour run out. More to the point, I wasn't surprised that Billy was complaining, he seems the type to be especially fond of the First Amendment, at least as it relates to the conditions of his employment, but Muir's joining in was unexpected yet hilarious. Their larder is limited to tea, sugar, and mutton (of which they have a conveniently fresh supply). Both men are entirely over mutton and seem to be close to losing their sanity due to a lack of variety in their diet. True, this matches the popular post-Thanksgiving turkey overdose where people quickly tire of turkey but it separates  Muir from the pioneers, whom he notes were surely a sturdier folk, capable of living solely on various types of game for months on time.

The portion of his diet that Muir really misses is bread. He later speaks of returning to Yosemite with enough bread to explore the canyon at his leisure. Bread was probably the first processed food, and as such, it signifies civilization. Muir's nature is not apart from man, it is a place where he visits. The day of the pioneers has gone and Muir writes from the point of view of a man who wants some to bring at least some level of civilization with him into the wilderness, a man who wants to find a piece of Eden for a weekend camping trip - preferably without the riff-raff like Billy and absolutely with a good quantity of bread.

Paragraphs: The Reader's Friend

Dear Class,

When you are posting, you might check your settings to see if you are in "Compose" or "HTML" mode. If you are in HTML mode, hitting "Enter" will not create a paragraph break. If you are in HTML mode, try </p><p> (</p> = end paragraph; <p> = paragraph)

However, if you are in Compose mode, "Enter" creates paragraphs.

Force of Nature: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

The opening paragraph of Geoffrey Hartman’s “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa” notes that Blake blamed some of Wordsworth’s poetry for an unspecified “bowel complaint” that Blake claimed almost killed him. My first thought was that any poem powerful enough to nearly kill a reader is a poem worth reading. However, after a beat or two, I began to suspect that Blake was insultingly suggesting that Wordsworth’s poetry was so toxic that it had given him dysentery or something along those lines. Naturally, at this point I was extremely interested in the reading the verses in question so I referred to the footnote that documents the source of the information.

 The source was the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, a man who made a point of becoming intimate with many of the most important English and German writers of the day. Fortunately, Robinson’s diary has been digitized and so I quickly Googled it in hopes that it would provide enough context to determine what Blake meant and also to learn what specific verse Blake found so offensive, or at any rate, so powerful. It turned out to be a few lines from “The Recluse”, one of the feeder poems that evolved into “The Prelude,” the poem our class is focusing on this week. Here’s the line’s in that Blake felt so powerfully:

                     Jehovah,—with his thunder & the choir
                     Of shouting angels, & the empyreal thrones—
                     I pass them unalarmed.
                                   - The Recluse, Part One, Book One – Home at Grasmere (lns 786-788)


 The main complaint that Blake had with these lines is that they indicate that Wordsworth, whom Blake felt was the best poet of the age, was not a Christian. Robinson reports in a private conversation with Blake about Wordsworth, Blake asked if Wordsworth thought “his mind can surpass Jehovah?” Blake then sets his mind on identifying Wordsworth as a pagan. I should add that Robinson places the lines cited above as belonging to the introduction to the “Excursion.”

 According to Robinson, Blake viewed people who believed in the “reality of the natural world” as a type of atheism. Robinson also reports that Blake identified Locke, Bacon, and Newton as the three great teachers of “Atheism and Satan’s doctrine.” I am reminded of St. Augustine’s aligning science with demons in one his works; demons are incapable of revealing Truth but they can assist man with science. This made me realize I have no understanding of Blake whatsoever – I thought he began the “sympathy for the devil” idea. Oops.

 Back to Hartman, who argues that Wordsworth held a “sense of reality in Nature” (Hartman 214). How nicely what I felt was becoming a non sequitur post has dovetailed back to the assigned readings; that is exactly the problem Blake reportedly had with Wordsworth. I wonder if Blake ever read the version of “The Prelude” that we have in our books where Wordsworth is far more explicit about his allegiance with Nature as the foundation of reality, or at least how man interprets this reality. I think Blake would have found Lns 491-502 of “The Prelude” Book First even more offensive as they are particularly aggressive about supplanting the church with Nature - attributing to Nature a “ministry” that employed the “universal earth,” a play on the Catholic church’s status as a “universal church,” as a living Bible that had the advantage of actually being alive. Blake’s poor bowels would have suffered even greater calamities, no doubt worthy of a South Park episode, over that passage.

 By the way, I am pleased to report no bowel complaints during my reading any of this week’s poems, although I agree that this was very powerful poetry, especially for the time when the Western world was still straining under the yoke of Christian religions, both Catholic and Protestant (I mean that during this time religion was still a dominant force in public life, where disagreeing with the official religion of state had very real and legal consequences as compared to our times where religious disputes seem more about the sound and the fury than anything else).

PS - I signed up as "Rabelais" for Blogger a number of years ago. It seems appropriate considering the inspiration for this post was Blake's irritable bowels - Scott Ross

The Writing on the Rock: Graffitti in Wordsworth's Nature

Submitted by Scott Ross

I find graffiti within an urban environment interesting, a colorful splash of anarchy that is good for the soul. However, in nature, or in non-urban areas that are closer to their natural state, I find graffiti becomes something almost blasphemous; people have taken great effort to find paths less traveled only to find some jerk has spray painted a shout out to their high school class in their school colors – and there appears to have been at least every high school in the state over the last fifty years if the kaleidoscope of colors that has replaced the sandstone boulder’s natural reddish-brown hue. This speaks to my own concept of nature, as an area set aside or preserved in a state that is natural as possible.

I found the graffiti in “To Joanna” problematic at first because it seemed at odds with Wordsworth’s love of nature. By chiseling Joanna’s name into the rock, the narrator spoils nature. There was no need to chisel Joanna’s name on the rock to name it after her – Emma’s Dell is known by that name years after Emma and the narrator “are gone and in our graves” without any defacing of the Dell. What advantage is gained by making the correlation between Joanna and the rock permanent?

However, I grew to realize that the graffiti was acceptable within Wordsworth’s poetry, and problem was that I have a different view of nature. Wordsworth clearly believes that nature includes man, and he frequently indicates that nature is best enjoyed by more than one person. “Tinturn Abbey” is a nature poem, although one set amongst the ruins of an abbey, which serves as the presence of man within that natural setting. In “Michael,” man’s presence in nature is found in the remains of the rocks that were to be used to build a sheep fold. Emma’s Dell is a favored natural spot that the narrator shares with shephards, the model of living economically within nature.

That nature should be shared is seen in “Tinturn Abbey,” a poem where the narrator recollects a previous trip to the abbey ruins with his sister. In “Michael,” the poems titular hero finds that “objects which the Shepard loved before// Were dearer now” that he can share them with his son Luke. However, Wordsworth would have recoiled at the multitudes that invade Yosemite every summer, especially those who stay in the hotels and bring televisions and video games along for their trip to nature. Wordsworth advocated nature over urban life in part because nature allows one to transcend. I think of transcending as allowing your mind to drift into a transcendent space where things are simpler, less cluttered. The sight of roads, telephone poles, and electric wires can diminish a person’s ability to transcend. The ruins are acceptable because they demonstrate the triumph of nature over man's machinations and spark that same aspect of the imagination that Wordsworth treasures.

Of course, the very act of naming makes a place somehow less wild. The places described are named because people enjoy these spots and they intend to return. Each time they return to a spot, they will remember the name they have given this location and the person memorialized with the naming. The graffiti in “To Joanna” is emblematic of this