My Big Fat Greek Problem

Bottom line… Creon is more right. I sympathize with Antigone (as much as I can sympathize with a character from a completely undeveloped storyline), but she is wrong. Polynieces is a traitor. I admit, the limiting factor of this story is that we have no idea how the dispute over the thrown went down. Polynieces probably was the rightful heir to the thrown, but he forfeited his justification when he lead an army on his own people. I don’t care about Eteocles or Creon. I could care less that he killed his brother, but he attacked his own people. He attacked the people that he would be charged with protecting and helping to prosper if he was king. You can’t care about them one day and not the other and be a just, responsible king. Doesn’t work like that. Even if he and Eteocles were the only ones to die, he purposefully attacked his own city and put an entire army of his fellow countrymen at the mercy of a bunch of Argive mercenaries. Mercs are not always the nicest guys on the block. The Argives could of turned out to be the Blackwater of Greece. Oh wait, that comparison can’t be right. They are security contractors not hired guns, right. (Hey you hippie, left-wing, vegetarian, tree-hugger. Hybrid-driving, pot-head liberals…this doesn’t mean I’m on your side. I just hate useless, poorly trained idiots with guns. I still love guns.)

How can Polynieces care for his people when he attacks them just to reclaim the thrown so he can protect them from attack as king. “ Ok, I will attack and possibly kill thousands of my people so I can help them live better lives in the future (as widows and orphans of course).” Maybe Eteocles deposed Polynieces because he was a selfish jerk. Polynieces didn’t deserve to be king. Neither does Creon, so Polynieces only removed a potentially bad king (I say potentially bad because we just don’t know. He could be a great king too.) to instate a suredly bad one. Polynieces was selfish. He valued himself over his people (and most certainly his family).

Creon is also obsessed with power.His edict is a bad law. Not because it is fundamentally wrong, but because it goes too far. King of the state is not enough for him. He wants to extend his powers beyond the worldly (he wants to be god-like, and we all know that he couldn't even multi-kill). He is obsessed with controlling the afterlife of Polynieces. He shows little concern for the higher law of the gods,but Creon is focused upon preventing Polynieces his nectar and ambrosia. In this way Creon both levels himself with the gods and shows his lack of faith in the gods (big mistake for a character in a Greek myth. Just say no to hubris). If he did have faith in them, he would let them take care of the punishment. Ironically, Creon should be thanking Polynieces. He just wouldn’t be king if Polynieces hadn’t knocked off his own brother. Creon doesn’t even listen too his people regarding Antigone’s actions. He is too busy playing God. Creon needs to pay attention to his own zoo (meaning the state).

Antigone is also selfish. Yeah, I think she’s selfish. Like Creon, she goes nuts with her cause. Like most martyr, she is too wrapped up in her cause to step back and solve the problem. I like the Hollywood version too, but dying for the dead doesn’t do a thing (other than reduce my morning traffic). Ironically, Creon is just as much a martyr (and killing for the dead doesn’t make much sense either). These Greeks can not possibly stand for the reason that they hold so dear. The world has too many martyrs. It is way too fashionable to “die” for your cause. And you don’t have to be burned at the stake or blow yourself up to follow in Antigone’s footsteps. While everyone is glorifying themselves by defying the whole world, the problems are just growing. We should all just lift our fingers off the triggers and put down our explosive vests and try to talk to each other a little. I promise, I won’t make you eat meat if you don’t make me grind with a redwood.

My advice? Antigone, think about how much it’s going to hurt before you nail yourself to the cross (and by the way, Jesus had a good reason…you, not so much). You can’t help anyone from the inside of a crypt. Creon, if you can’t get off your pedestal, I’ll get you a ladder. Go ahead and kill’em all, but let God sort’em out. You two could be a great team. You stab’em, she’ll slab’em.

By the way, Mr. Coon, 24 isn’t on this season. The writers ruined it. I can never forgive them for denying me my Jack fix. WWJBD? Take them out, just for the inconvenience.

Shock Value

Kafka’s metamorphosis is one of the most confusing stories I have ever read or seen… or even heard about. To some degree, I believe the story’s outrageous plot prevents the reader from uncovering the true message of the text. I also believe that this effect may be somewhat by design and may reinforce the message of the text. Gregor’s absurd transformation renders the reader helpless. The reader can no longer view the story seriously. The story’s removal from the realistic prevents the reader from uncovering the true nature of the text… initially at least. The eight hundred pound gorilla that is the storyline blocks us from truly seeing the meaning of the situation. We cannot get past the plot. The insane events that befall Gregor Samsa overwhelm our critical mindsets and force us to react to the circumstances. In this respect, we the readers are much like Gregor’s family in that we are distracted by the shock of Gregor’s transformation and condition. Gregor’s family is shocked by the transformation of their son into such a horrid, unacceptable thing, and we are shocked by the transformation of the text into a wildly unrealistic and insensible thing. We, as readers, are not prepared for this development and are therefore disarmed and transformed ourselves. We are blinded by the shock value of the story and are rendered unable to analyze the story past the transformation of Gregor into an insect. Gregor’s family is likewise unable see past Gregor’s transformation. They are rendered incapable of recognizing their own son for who he is because his transformation has shocked them into a state of petrified vulnerability. Gregor’s transformation has blinded them to Gregor’s true nature and left them unable to see their son as anything other than a monster. It is this blindness that connects the reader and the story. We are distracted by the overwhelming situation at hand, and this strips us of our insight.

Ignorance is Bliss

Ivan Ilych suffers incredible anguish because he can’t come to grips with the meaning of his life. It is not impossible to imagine. We spend most our lives achieving success based on society’s standards. The worst realization would be that most of our lives are spent achieving society’s standards of success. Most of our time on earth will be spent working towards a set of standards created by the successful and proper society that we are trying to join. They are not even our own goals. And if we convince ourselves that they are our own goals, they just happen to fit right in with the man’s expectations and everything is just great. You know who I envy? The ski bum. There is a person who has their priorities straight. Is the ski bum’s life meaningful? Maybe not to you, but your considerations mean nothing to him. Your approval doesn’t add meaning to his existence, so he does not seek it. The real twisted thing about the realization that your life is meaningless if its meaning is influenced by others’ standards is that even though I have just written it down in words, I am going to continue to let society determine at least a significant part of my worth. I am in too deep. I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine to expect reconciliation or rectification or enlightenment of Ivan Ilych’s kind on my deathbed. Instead, if I look at the odds, I choose ignorant bliss. I think I just might choose to remain behind under the illusion of what my life meant. If it really is a meaningful life, then I win. If it isn’t, and I don’t know that it isn’t, I still win. Then again, maybe my life was meaningful and my standards of meaning are wrong, and I lose.

Loves...in the Time of Cholera

I’m not used to writing about or concerning myself with love, but this entire book is nothing but a love story. Not a romantic love story but an objective situational report on the status love in the lives of the main characters. It is a story about love but it is not a sentimental story about love. I suppose this is why I like the story…or can at least stand it. It’s not about idealized sentimental love. Instead, Love in the Time of Cholera shows us several different types of love and contrasts them to each other.

Like we talked about in class, there are two main types of love in the story. Florentino represents an intensely passionate, fast-paced love. He loves on sight with no hesitation. He is relentless in his pursuits…at first, but most of his flings end unceremoniously with a general loss of interest. He continually replaces his faded glories with a new short-term passion. Florentino’s love is something like a bottle rocket. Starts out big but doesn’t last long.

However, Florentino has this perpetual obsession with Fermina Daza also. Fermina is his emotional passion and obsession and his numerous mistresses are his physical passion in her absence. His affairs combined with his emotional obsession for Fermina make one whole love for Florentino.

He needs both loves to feel whole but he consciously tries to keep them separate in an effort to be faithful to Fermina. There are only two explanations for this behavior. One, Florentino has no true emotional connection to his mistresses and considers them only as purely physical and sexual relationships. Therefore, he must not consider his flings as substantial relationships and feels that they are not comparable to his love for Fermina. Two, he is a lying, deceitful fraud who is totally uncommitted to Fermina. I have no problem with his being a player but his mental disassociation of his love affairs and his love for Fermina even though he wishes to appear faithful is both interesting and startling. Through Florentino, Marquez presents physical love and unattainable love-from-a-distance.

Of course, Urbino and Fermina represent the other type of love. Their type is not passionate. It is not immediate. It can only be described as an acquired taste. They slowly come to depend on each other physically and emotionally but their relationship is almost devoid of physical passion. Yet, it can be considered no less true than any other type of love. Indeed, in many ways it is more real than Florentino’s type of love simply because it has lasted through the years. Urbino and Fermina’s love is the exact opposite of Florentino’s. Their love is slow, emotional and stable. More like a diesel engine--slow to start up but long running. However, neither type of love can be considered inferior.

This is Gary’s special edition Thanksgiving blog!

Note: For this this blog entry, I will speak…sorry…Gary will speak of himself in the third person.

Note (again): Addressing myself in third person was extremely tiresome, so I gave up. Just wanted you to know that I was going to do it.

Love in the time of Cholera is an uplifting, wonderful story about the delights of first and true love…not. It’s depressing and frightening…and quite dark. It appears to be about the neverending hope and eternal happiness supplied by true love, but in reality we soon discover that it faithfully describes neverending hope… and the subsequent neverending hopelessness. Instead of filling our hearts with hope of a chance for true and unimaginable, unrealistic love, it smashes our dreams and tears our hope into shreds with it’s sudden shift to the stereotype of realistic love and marriage. Never has the void in me that I sometimes pretend holds emotion and sentimentality been torn as it was by Fermina’s rejection of Florentino.

It’s not so much that I felt for Florentino as I felt for myself. I had committed hours of my time to reading the hundred or so pages that led up to this event. I had invested my time, which could have been spent playing FIFA or Guitar Hero, in this book believing that I was working toward a final solution to this fifty page obsession that was Florentino and Fermina’s verbal fling, but I was wrong. Dead wrong. Or very seriously wrong, at least.

I know that the book started at the end of Urbino’s life and that we knew that Fermina and the doctor get together but I didn’t know it happened like this. When so many tragic stories end with forced marriage breaking up a physical connection but leaving an eternal love intact, I didn’t expect this one to break apart in a sudden change of heart on the behalf of the hot girl. That’s not uplifting. That is devastating. Yes, devastating (and I mean the total destruction, nothing left, nuclear winter, Sherman’s march to the sea devastating). Who cares if the star-crossed lover is devastated. I am devastated. All of my attention and effort was wasted on an ending that I would have guessed from the get go. My outlook on life was not changed by Fermina’s rejection. It was sadly confirmed. If every story ended like this one, glasses would always be served half empty and the terrorists would probably be waiting for me at home.

I mean the happy ending is an archetype for a reason. Real life ends like this book does. And real life sucks. Why would I waste my actual life reading about a realistic ending. I could just watch the news. Go on, call it great literature. I call a perversion of the human spirit.

La Familia

The Compson family disintegrates because of one reason. Every single member of the family fails to live up to the expectations of their role within the family setting. Every single member fails to do their duty and sacrifice for the survival of the family. They are all too selfish, in their own particular ways, to give up their pride and beliefs and be what the family needs them to be.

I’ll start with the parents. Mother is terrible. She does not at all resemble her namesake and does not fulfill any of her position’s requirements. It’s ridiculous. I do not feel that I even have to state any evidence to support the fact that she is selfish and does not sacrifice anything for well-being of her children or her family. She treats Benjy as an embarrassment and a trouble. We could not expect a stranger to show less compassion than Mother shows towards Benjy. She had no business becoming a mother and would be a far more suitable candidate for a high-class call girl than a home-maker or a family woman.

Her favoritism towards Jason is also beyond reason and propriety. Parents are not supposed to pick favorites. That’s a given, but it’s the real world and I can’t expect every action of every parent to be unbiased. Mother’s preferential treatment of Jason is so blatant that it has become a weapon that mother uses against her family and her husband. Her favoritism for Jason also displays her lack of judgement as Jason is nothing but a bitter little stool-pidgeon anyway. Mother’s support of this cowardly, base behavior does not help the situation either.

Father is also flawed. He is detached and aloof from the needs of his children. When his children need guidance and personal reassurance—as in the case of Quentin—he offers only his often pessimistic or fatalistic opinion. Sometimes, his children need to hear a certain thing, and he offers them only an extremely limited and in some cases harsh point of view. However, he is not harsh in the discipline of his children. In fact, his forgiveness of Caddy is admirable and very compassionate but he seems out of touch with the emotional needs of all his children—Quentin in particular. He forgoes his responsibility to console all of his children and instead sticks to his logic and pessimistic disposition when confronting his family. He also fails to take control of the situation—in this case the Caddy predicament--and be strong for his family. Instead, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey and abandons his responsibility as leader of the household. He forgets the problems of the family and, in a selfish way, concerns himself only with his grievances and turmoils.

The children also contribute to the family’s demise. Each child acts selfish in his or her own way. Caddy’s initial affair with Dalton Ames, although not evil, still begins the selfish trend. She, whether consciously or not, rejects her role in the family and focuses on her own life and passions. It may not be a malicious decision but in a family environment as fragile as the Compson’s, it was a tragic choice with dire consequences. She is then forced to abandon the family when she marries. Quentin, in his own way, also decides not to sacrifice his concept of honor for the good of the family and in turns runs away from his problems, whether real or imaginary, by killing himself. He also abandons the family in this way. Jason, on the other hand, does not physically abandon the family. His providing for the family after the death of Quentin and Father are to be commended, but he has long abandoned the family in an emotional sense. He does not make any effort to emotionally rebuild the shattered lives of his brother, sister or her daughter.(648)

Stream of Consciousness in ohh look a bird the Sound and the Fury-ous monster truck

In the first section of The Sound and The Fury, we see the world through the memories of Benjy. Throughout the section, Benjy recounts his memories by stream of consciousness instead of chronological order. Faulkner’s choice of stream of consciousness writing allows for interesting psychological associations to take place within Benjy’s mind. Many of Benjy’s memories are triggered by associations within the memories themselves. Most of these memories are triggered by similarities in events or locations or emotions felt by Benjy.

A good percentage of his memories are triggered by similarities in a central focal point of the memory. In the text, a single significant object or word can be found in both the previous and triggered memory. For example, when T.P. tells Benjy that he “can’t do no good moaning and slobbering through the fence”, it triggers Benjy’s memories of Father interrogating Jason to the cause of the fence being open when Benjy escaped. Benjy’s memory is then turned to the night that he escaped through the gate, another memory association by event.

Benjy also associates certain events with each other. In his mind, certain events and impressions are combined and blurred into a single memory. The most specific blurring of two separate events in Benjy’s mind is his association of grabbing the schoolgirls and struggling to communicate with his memories of his subsequent surgical castration.

He combines the physical and emotional feelings of struggle and helplessness of both events. In both events, Benjy feels as if he cannot speak and he struggles to exhale and cry. In the escape incident, he feels as if he cannot force out the words that he wants to say to the girls. During the surgery, Benjy also struggles to cry out and breathe because of the constricting ether mask on his face. The feeling of helplessness is the common factor of these memories, so the recollection of one memory triggers the other to be recalled and merged with the other.

Benjy also recalls a part of this mixed memory at the end of the section. He mentions the bright shapes while he is going to sleep. In this instance, Benjy is associating his memory of being anesthetized during his operation with the act of falling to sleep.

Stream of consciousness writing is also extensively used in the Quentin section. Faulkner uses in an extreme manner though, intertwining memories and thoughts. The ridiculous lack of punctuation also emphasizes the chaotic nature of the human stream of consciousness. When reading, thoughts may seem completely jumbled and random, yet the content of these memories are related.

Faulkner uses the stream of consciousness method to compare each character’s interpretations and connotations of each specific event brought up in the text. Faulkner uses the same events in both sections of the text to present each character’s differing opinions and interpretations of the events by his or her stream of consciousness. Faulkner also uses many different types of mental associations to present his character’s personality by stressing their values and preferences as presented in their memories. (508)