Archive for the ‘Literary Criticism’ Category
Parting Thoughts on Jane Eyre
The detailed expedition of a strong female character’s consciousness has made readers in recent decades consider Jane Eyre as a leading feminist text; the novel works both as an absorbing story of an individual woman’s quest and as a narrative of the dilemmas that confront so many women. Its mythic and gothic qualities are enhanced by the fact that at the time of its writing, its author was, like her heroine, unmarried and unremarkable, and considered unappealing. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë created a fully imagined character defined by her strength of will. Though Jane is nothing more than an impoverished governess, she can retort to her haughty employer Rochester: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? —You think wrong!” Jane’s willfulness scandalized many contemporary critics, who called her (and the novel) “coarse” and “unfeminine.” Such criticisms were ineffective against the novel’s popularity, and Jane’s spirited voice continues to enthrall readers more than 150 years after the novel’s original publication.
The Worker and the Employer in Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Perhaps it is safe to say that Franz Kafka‘s literary uniqueness lies in the fact that he dramatizes conventional figures of speech and endows them with full and consistent detail; his tales act out the implications of metaphors buried in the text. Yet, to see nothing but an extended metaphor in Kafka’s work is not to see enough. The tale is too long, too packed with statements, too rich in meaning to be defined simply as a metaphor, no matter how extended, simply to the fact that it ignores the numerous statements in the narrative that deal with the presented conflict. These alone make for a textual and poetic complexity, which in hand eschew the overburdens of the single metaphor theory.
Unflinching Yates: The Grim Reality of the Grimes Sisters
Almost every past reviewer and book critic who had discussed Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade started the exposition with a personal preamble, generally on how daunting the first sentence of the first paragraph of the book, which goes like this:
Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.
However, as someone who got accustomed to his inexpressive tenor and his evasion to melodramatic expressions, such a lurid example of a Yatesian introduction didn’t quite catch me off guard; as a matter of fact, I was anticipating it and hungering for it the moment I picked up the book, for I sincerely find great delight in his devastating realism. There is, indeed, a poetic element in his stories. An elegy that parades the different facets of human’s futility, which not only is susceptible to any compromising opportunity, but also sordid in its own functions. The Easter Parade, just like Yates’s previous compositions, could have evaded its inextricable quagmire if the characters acted selflessly, and without a resignation or surrender to their ill-fated circumstances. But, once again, this demonstrates the paradoxical philosophy of the narrative, because The Easter Parade stands as one of those compact, quiet masterpieces that speaks volumes about the fundamental sadness at the heart of everything, and which poses that most unsettling of questions: can we ever really comprehend ourselves?
On Vanity
Perhaps the best approach to gloss over the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel is by introducing this snippet from “Fitzgerald’s Radiant World,” a critical piece written by Thomas Flanagan of The New York Reviews of Books:
This Side of Paradise had had a success, which was almost freakish, capturing the aspirations of a generation and especially of those within that generation who, like its author, aspired to be great writers. Reading it today, one blanches at its emotional and rhetorical excesses, and yet, as Matthew Bruccoli says, it was received as “an iconoclastic social document—even as a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse.” It was the autobiographical first novel of a very young writer who took himself very seriously, and who had not provided for his hero those escape hatches of irony . . . But it was not, by any stretch, the work of a man who planned a career as a writer of commercial fiction.
Even after more than ninety years of its publication, This Side of Paradise doesn’t quite exude a nostalgic archaism of narrative prose as one might generally expect, nor it purposefully exercises an ambition in creative writing or a contract to a lucrative career. While the novel might have laid the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s repute as a lyrical and clever innovator, the very stylistic elements he strings -episodic narrative, wavering point of view, stream-of-consciousness, the almost mystified mixture of prose, verse, and dramatic writings – are defiantly and consistently original for anyone who just started reading his oeuvres. His ostensibly experimental narrative, paired with a keen study of American contemporary in adolescence and young manhood, certainly cements This Side of Paradise as a perpetual classic of whenever and wherever.
Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction
- Book: Stoner by John Williams
John Williams’s Stoner is simply a novel about literature, those who love it, and those who spend most of their lifetime living on its nourishment. William Stoner, whose the book is dedicated to, had spent his childhood and few of his adult years in a most banal of bucolic lifestyles, until unexpected circumstances sought him to the University of Missouri to pursue the academics of agriculture, where he discovered the uncharted love “of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and of the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.” With a deadpan prose and a discreet evasion from sentimentality, Williams unfolds Stoner’s trials and tribulations in many arresting, though despondent, instances: his marriage miserably fails, his daughter’s life is dishearteningly sheltered, and his career as a professor is hindered and ravaged by discomfited conflict. Still, Williams makes sure to distill Stoner’s daily life with enough reciprocated love and beauty to cope with such miseries, whether through the leaves of literary books or occasional friendships and love affairs. What emerges from the novel’s unhurried chapters is a burdened college professor, whose life is dovetailed with a stern observation on humanity, and how absurd, confounding, beautiful, mundane, and poignant it can be. Stoner is both a celebration of life and an elegy of reality, told with an honest overtone, delicate structure, and profound respect to the minimalism of everyday existence.
A Year in Reading – 2009 Edition
For me, 2009 was a great year as an avid reader despite the dark times and despaired thoughts that engulfed me in the bulk of it (an experience that I rarely share with anyone). I think the reason I was able to survive my own dejections is due to the great journeys these books have embarked me along the way. It was a form of escapism that I was able to receive something out of it at the end, and it was quite profound, quite personal. Of course, not every book listed here is bound to fit your literary flavor, but I must say that I don’t regret anything I have read so far, except perhaps a book or two. For now, you’ll also have to accept two or three sentences condensing my thoughts regarding each book, as I really don’t have the time to discuss all of them in detail. I hope that I’ll continue building a better library as this year goes by and I hope that you do too.
Disturbing Providence
It would be fair to confess that my adulation for Revolutionary Road had galvanized my impulses to purchase the rest of Richard Yates’s oeuvres, possibly as a self-conceivable mean to prop up his forgotten works even by the tinniest margins. I am fixated on reading them sequentially by their years of publication, simply to get a sense of Yates’s ruminations and intents after he went through each of his stories, and to observe whether he would do anything to circumvent his myopic endeavors and low sales. After a collection of short stories and two novels later, it seems hardly the case, so far, that he lost his domestic realism in favor of maintaining a lucrative career in writing. He might have lost some of his sensibility in A Special Providence and Disturbing the Peace, his stories, however, shrewdly remain as vehement and uninhibited as they come.
Organized Chaos – The Wonderland of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
It has been almost three months since I finished Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, a modern tale of magical realism that echoes a comparable stupefaction to “Alice in the Wonderland”. Though, unlike Lewis Carroll‘s masterpiece, Chronicle evokes both delightful musings of an ordinary man and sometimes a grotesque depiction of a sympathetic nature of Japan’s involvement during World War II. What started as a mundane detective tale becomes something far extraordinary, but Murakami is by no means a sensationalist in his writing, rather a tranquil surrealist who lets his readers to freely wonder in his imagination. While the book is relatively fragmented, the chaos that engulfs Murakami’s work is orderly and constructed, and even though it leaves too many unanswered questions to ponder, Chronicle manages to linger a sense of completion and satisfaction behind.
Quickies: A Confederacy of Dunces – La Moustache
- Book: A Confederacy of Dunes by John Kennedy Toole
“A Confederacy of Dunces” is an unusual novel that follows the exploits of the rotund, indolent Ignatius J. Reilly, who lives with his indomitable mother, Mrs. Reilly, in New Orleans. For years, Ignatius has lived off of his mother and her welfare checks. Then it happened: Mrs. Reilly plowed her car into a building, and to pay for the damages, she demands that the supercilious Ignatius should get a job, several in fact. Before he knows what has happened, Ignatius finds himself at the center of a worker’s revolt and the common share of several ingenious characters. It is here that John Kennedy Toole‘s sense of humor flourishes, which is either side-splittingly funny or merely quaint, usually exhibited by his keen ability to write in various dialects and recreating witty caricatures of popular stereotypes that comprise the individuals that populate this story. Yet, it is Ignatius that proves to be the most fascinating. He lives in his own egocentrically warped world, and he constantly strives, and fails, to force those he meets to confirm to his worldview. Ignatius is not a likable character, but it is hard to ignore him. He is so obnoxious, arrogant, and self-righteous that he becomes a walking farce that it is impossible to take your eyes off of him. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is not your typical novel; what it lacks in plot is more than made up in farcical vignettes, intriguing characters, vivid imagery, and unforgettable dialog. I ardently place it as one of the most important books in Southern literature.
A Revolutionary Insanity
In the midst of egotism, self-denial, social conformism, and self-made delusions that seem to pervade a large sum of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the voice of reason seems to lose its echo among all the society’s hypocrisy. Yet, Yates’ commentary manages to be carried out by his characters, even though their selfish acts often overlap their criticism of the American’s suburbia of the 1950s. Frank and April Wheelers, the young and frustrated couple regrettably harbors little affection for each other just as much they dislike their hollowed existence in the estates of Revolution Road. They recognize that their youth is withering away on meaningless and unfulfilling prospects that rarely provide incentive to incite self-worth.
