Plum Painting

by RCremins

Remarks by Profs Estess and Maya today in lecture reminded me of a painting I saw this weekend at the wonderful Impressionist exhibition at the MFAH. We heard about Whitman's "exuberant urbanism" and Baudelaire's observation of "the lonely crowd" (with Dr. Estess reminding us that Whitman too has his dark side).

The young woman in Manet's Plum Brandy is surely part of that lonely urban army. She is too plainly dressed to be the "woman passed" in the Baudelaire poem Dr. Maya talked about, but she could be the woman from the "populous city" that Whitman left behind...

There she is with her cigarette and her aperitif (two of the "discreet pleasures," to quote Dr. Morrisson, that the "present age" spends so much time consuming), but it looks as if neither of them are giving her much satisfaction, or will give her much satisfaction. Is the drink even touched? Is the cigarette even lit?

And what about the blank expression of her face? Is this one of Kierkegaard's drained selves? Is this the face of the leveling process? Is she tired of "flirtation," tired of "talkativeness"?

Please note, students, that there is a price reduction for this special exhibition if you have valid student ID, and a further reduction on Thursdays (exhibition ends May 23):

Admission A timed-entry ticket, which includes general museum admission, is required. MFAH Members receive complimentary admissions based on their level of membership. For the general public, admission is $20 (adults) and $15 (children, students, senior adults). Admission is free for children 5 and under, but they do need a ticket to enter the exhibition. On Thursday, tickets are available at a lower price ($15 adults; $10 children, students, senior adults) because general admission is free on Thursday, courtesy of the Shell Oil Company Foundation. In addition to their complimentary admissions, MFAH Members may buy additional tickets for $10. These reduced-rate tickets may be purchased only by MFAH Members. All visitors may purchase a premium untimed ticket that allows one admission to the exhibition at the time/day of their choice during museum hours throughout the run of the show. Premium tickets are $12.50 (MFAH Members) and $25 (general public) and are not eligible for child/student/senior discounts.

Brilliant Mistake

by RCremins

Let's take a second look at that Keats poem in the packet: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Did you spot the mistake? The Conquistador who first "star'd at the Pacific" was Balboa, not Cortez. When he drafted the poem in 1816, Keats had just read a book on the Conquistadors, and blended together in his imagination two separate but related events: Cortez's "discovery" of the Valley of Mexico and Balboa's sighting of the Pacific from "a peak in Darien" (modern-day Panama). In fact, a friend of Keats immediately spotted the mistake when he saw the poem in manuscript; interestingly, Keats decided to leave the line as it was. For one thing, "Balboa" would have disrupted the sonnet's iambic pentameter beat by adding an extra syllable. Perhaps Keats really like the phrase "stout Cortez" (so much better than, say, "rocky Balboa"). What matters here is that poetic truth trumped historical truth--a deeply Romantic gesture: the triumph, you could say, of the imagination over the "mind-forg'd manacles" (Blake) of the merely factual.

It's appropriate then that this creative "mistake" occurs in the midst of a brilliant comparison (what literary critics would call a conceit) that "illumine[s]" (Shelley) in our minds this moment of discovery through the efforts of an artist (in this case, Chapman the translator) of a new world, the world of Homer. It's a world of the imagination (Homer's), for the imagination (Keats the reader), and--communicated--by the imagination (Chapman). In other words, imagination is sovereign. Indeed, the imaginative intelligence is the sovereign ("That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne").

Now, I don't think that the Romantics believed that a poet should rule over a literal kingdom. They were children of the Enlightenment (though some members of that first generation I mentioned outlived the fiery second generation and become rather reactionary old men). They would have applauded Madison assertion in Federalist # 49 that "the people are the only legitimate fountain of power" (Kammen 198). But the Romantics believed they had a mission to help get the people, in whom sovereignty resides, to a better place, a better world. That task, for them, was part of the vocation of being a poet. As Shelley say in The Defence of Poetry: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." They are part politician, part priest. Their job is, oracle-like, to "apprehend" new oceans of possibility, a "new planet" (Keats) fit for human living, a New Jerusalem, in which "midnight streets" (Blake), "muddy spring[s]," (Shelley), and "dark Satanic Mills" (Blake) will be seen no more.

Where, you might ask, does this audacious plan, in the preface to Milton, come from, this extraordinary ambition to not just improve society and liberate those "charter'd street[s] and hemmed-in river, but also to "build Jerusalem, / In Englands green & pleasant land"? Well, keen students of last semester's reading will pick up on the imagery and the energy of the Book of Revelation. But Blake was also inspired by a non-Scriptual source. There is a story, long cherished in England, that in the missing years of Christ (between twelve and about twenty-eight, of which the Gospels say nothing--what Dr. Estess would call a notable "narrative silence"), the boy Jesus was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea, a merchant who went to Cornwall to buy tin, as the Phoenicians did. Hence the prospect, in Blake's poem, of "the Countenance Divine, / Shin[ing] forth upon [England's] clouded hills" long, long before the Industrial Revolution had blighted the landscape. A far-fetched notion, you might say, mere wishful thinking. But also, perhaps, another brilliant mistake.

An Image of the Island

In Act I, Scene ii of The Tempest, there's a speech by Miranda, which, as a footnote on page 20 of our edition tells us, "early editors often gave ... to Prospero." I agree with Dr. Maya that it makes more sense dramatically that those lines are indeed spoken by him. Hence we have the deposed Duke of Milan claiming that he "[t]ook pains to make [Caliban] speak" (I. ii. 354), replacing his "gabble" with proper "words." Caliban agrees with him--with a twist: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse" (363-64).

However, does that necessarily mean that Caliban did not have a language before Prospero arrived? Has he perhaps internalized Prospero's (implicit) opinion that such "gabble" is not worthy of the name language? If--and I must thank Prof. Little from Team Omega for this example--he had no "words," then how does he know the name of Setebos, his "dam's god" (374)?

For me, this connects with Montaigne's thinking on barbarism: "every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to" (Essays 82). One explanation I have heard of the etymology of the word "barbarous" is that the Greeks heard foreign languages as mere "bar-bar-bar"--gabble, in other words. One man's eloquence can be another man's nonsense. One people's poetry can be another people's gibberish. In Ireland I have heard--now, these are not typical opinions, mind--English denigrated as "trash" and Irish (Gaelic) dismissed as a "bog language." In his memoir of the Irish War of Independence, On Another Man's Wound, Ernie O' Malley recalls that in the small country town he was born in at the turn of the 20th century, "use of Irish [was] fit only for the uneducated." Let's be clear about that: this was Irish people who had that attitude towards their own ancient language. Such people, who repudiated their native culture and embraced (with perhaps some cursing) the culture of England, the colonizing culture, were known as Shoneens, or "Little Johns." (Having gone to Trinity College, Dublin, founded by Queen Elizabeth I, I'm a bit of a Shoneen myself.)

So, one the one side, we have the native who takes up, with a considerable degree of ambivalence, the language of the newcomer (can we call Prospero a colonizer?), and on the other side, the newcomer who does not recognize or acknowledge the culture, the human artifice, of what's there already (remember, that the "[s]cene" of the play is described--see page 2--as "[a]n uninhabited island"). This brings to mind a well-known and thought-provoking essay by Chinua Achebe about another significant "colonial" text: "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad'sHeart of Darkness." I don't entirely agree with Achebe's argument, but I think it's an important piece of criticism:

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"

[RCremins]