Final Paper Proposal

        For my final paper, I plan to look at the city as an organism and examine how it functions as a character, not just setting, in some of the pieces we’ve read this year. I want to talk about Jean Rhys’s  Good Morning Midnight as well as Mieville’s City and the City.

      For our first essay I wrote about how the city was a character in the Rhys piece but I do not think that I went in-depth enough, nor did I explain my evidence sufficiently. I want to go back try to expand on that idea. I would particularly like to integrate the quote where the narrator speaks directly to Paris as a character, saying “You are looking very nice tonight, my beautiful, my darling and oh what a bitch you can be!” (Rhys 16). In Rhy’s piece, the city is a character that the narrator understands and is able to manipulate, while in Mieville’s book the characters are affected by the cities because they do not understand them.

     I plan to discuss Breach and how it is a force that no one is able to control, but are kind of able to predict. Although there are two cities, Breach unites them and it does not seem as though anyone can manipulate Breach.

      The cities in both books are “alive” so to speak but in very different ways. Rhys’s narrator is able to control the city so that it does not hurt her while Mieville’s characters are not able to control the city, but are subject to its whims, particularly those of Breach. 

OED: Concatenate

“From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that”(Mieville 73).

Definition:  Chained together (obs.); linked together; concatenated.  Rows of processes connected by ridges, or the like.

This word comes from the Latin concatēnāre, which means “to link together.”

The word’s function in the novel is to describe the terminal of Ul Qoma’s airports.The terminals are made of pieces of crescent shaped glass connected to each other. “Concatenate” is used to describe the fact that the glass was connected.

“The Brothers” in Dostoyevsky

 

Many Russian novels depict a cold country, full of poor, downtrodden, drunken citizens. In many ways Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels (and life for that matter) mirror this common conception of Russia, but his reflections on moral issues and human interaction sharply distinguish him from stereotypes. According to the DLB database, Dostoyevsky’s father was a doctor and although letters reveal that Dostoyevsky was fairly close to his mother there is very little communication between Dostoyevsky and his father and he is reported to have said that his childhood was rather harsh. Freud diagnosed Dostoyevsky with “hystero-epilepsy” saying that his fits were brought about by guilt over wishing his father dead. Whether or not this diagnosis is accurate,  (some reports say that Dostoyevsky’s father died under suspicious circumstances, others that he just died from a stroke) Dostoyevsky’s complicated feelings towards his father almost certainly provided much of the inspiration for  The Brothers Karamazov, which depicts four vastly different brothers, one of whom murdered his father.

In my paper, I plan to argue that the four brothers are all manifestations of Dostoyevsky himself. Alyosha, an apprentice at a monastery who always sees (and represents) the good in humanity, is the religious facet of Dostoyevsky’s personality; Ivan is the cynical, intellectual part of his brain that wrestles with God and aggressively questions the state of affairs in the world; Dimitri is less complex, a rash and masculine soldier caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, embroiled in woman troubles; Finally, Smerdyakov is the opposite of Alyosha, a kind of devil on Dostoyevsky’s shoulder who wants  his father dead and most likely killed him and also suffers from debilitating epileptic fits. I think there is enough information about Dostoyevsky’s life to find evidence for each of these facets of his personality. Any ideas or suggestions on how to make my argument more complex would be greatly appreciated!

Post #5

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” (Isherwood 1). Christopher of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin views the city passively, as through a camera while Doris of Irmgard Keun’s  Artificial Silk Girl sees the city as though she is a character in a movie, saying “But my life is like a movie and I want to write like that and it’s going to become even more so” (Keun 3). Isherwood looks at Berlin passively, his words suggesting that he will hesitate to engage with the city, while Doris sees life as movie, Berlin as the set and herself the star of the show.

            However, with Christopher’s passivity also comes a deeper understanding of the situation. When he says that the “[images] will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” he is not talking exclusively about photography. The images need to be “fixed” in the common sense—something is wrong with them, with society, that needs to be altered. While Christopher observes and records society through the lens of his camera, Doris acts in the movie that is Berlin—she is part of the problem. Perhaps that is too strong to say; she is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. She did not cause society to degenerate, but her actions (particularly sleeping with so many men because they buy her things, specifically food and other necessities) contribute to the degeneration even as she is swept along its current. In spite of the fact that she is intimately involved in the goings-on of Berlin, she does not call for reform. Christopher, as a foreigner on the periphery is able to see the problem and call for a solution. 

Essay 2 Idea

For my essay I am going to compare Steinbeck’s “Making of a New Yorker” and Djuna Barnes’s “The Hem of Manhattan”.  The main points I plan to focus on are how Barnes’s attitude towards the city and its inhabitants is extremely stand-offish and the contrast of Steinbeck’s accepting view of the city- he gets hurt by it but still tries to work with it so to speak. Both of their perspectives are reflected in the settings of the pieces. Steinbeck walks throughout the city and experiences affluent areas, construction crews, etc and he finally feels accepted by the city in a less affluent area. While he loves and actively engages the city, Barnes looks at the city from the outside. She views it from the perspective of a tourist and although she looks at many of the same things as Steinbeck, she views it with detachment and more derision.

I would like to perhaps discuss how gender and background changes the way they write, especially because they are both writing about the same city in the same time period. I think that I need help narrowing down my topic because gender and background are very broad ideas and mean different things to different people. However, I think that I could do quite  a bit of “light research” on these topics. I think I need to narrow it down to one aspect of gender or background though and then compare that to their settings and attitudes.

On the hem of my comfort zone

The first thing that hit me when I walked in was the smell of Axe body spray, faintly masking…something. Then the television on the wall opposite me, the focus of the entire room, almost like an altar in a church, blaring a car commercial. I see more of the room when I awkwardly sidle through the doorway and an angrier, younger Brad Pitt glares at me from the Fight Club poster on the otherwise bare wall.

“Eeemiillly!!” Dylan greets me exuberantly from his seemingly permanent seat on the left corner of the couch.

“Hey Dylan, I just came over to see if Jesse would let me use his printer.”

“No problem!” Jesse calls from the other corner of the room. “It’s right over here.”  I clumsily step over several empty Gatorade bottles, trying and failing not to block the television. The boys’ dorm room is completely different from my own, in spite of the fact we have the same suite-style layout. My roommates and I covered our walls with pictures we took of each other and posters of the Eiffel Tower, while one of their bedrooms proudly displays a poster of scantily-clad models climbing on cars (who says college boys aren’t classy?) and the other boasts an intensely creepy black and white picture of Heath Ledger as the Joker. Our T.V. is rarely on, theirs could probably turn on the X-box and play Madden all by itself at this point.  These people are my friends, and when we go to dinner or meet in some other neutral location, I am completely at ease but when I’m in their territory, I always feel somewhat uncomfortable. I clam up a little, don’t quite know where I fit in or exactly how the rules of etiquette have changed.

This is quite the opposite of how F. Scott Fitzgerald felt when he arrived in New York City for the first time. He falls in love with complete abandon, adoring  the “one lovely entity, the girl. She was my second symbol of New York” (Fitzgerald 569). I am not the romantic idealist Fitzgerald is because this could not be farther from how I feel about these boys. They are fun to go to hockey games or watch movies with and they are nice enough to let me use their printer, but I in no way see them as some sort of mythic symbol of college—or anything really. They are simply my friends. I am more like Djuna Barnes who says, “Here one looks upon things because one has eyes. There one looks upon things that one may contemplate” (Barnes 71). I am content merely to observe. Even though it is only a floor away, their room feels alien, much the same say Kansas would appear to someone who has never been there (Barnes 71) . I am able to look at it through the eyes of tourist, the same way Barnes would likely view Kansas, as someone who is interested, but uncomfortable when faced with the unfamiliar.

The City as a Character

The narrator in Jean Rhys’s  Good Morning Midnight has an interesting relationship with the city. As Sasha walks through Paris, she carefully avoids certain cafes  and streets so they don’t evoke memories that will upset her precarious mental stability, carefully constructed of avoidance, excessive sleep  and sedatives (Rhys 15). The city contains memories that upset her and yet she consents to come back. In a way, she sees the city in the same way one would see a lover one is immensely attracted to, even thought the relationship is obviously unhealthy. Sasha addresses the city saying,  “Paris is looking very nice tonight… You are looking very nice tonight my beautiful, my darling, and oh what a bitch you can be! But you didn’t kill me after all did you?” (Rhys 16).  The city has the power to drag her even more deeply into her depression, but at the same time she feels compelled to return perhaps because it also has the power to liberate her.

Were-“Woolfs” of London

At the beginning of this passage, the narrator has such a strong emotional reaction to a bowl and a stain on her carpet, two relatively mundane aspects of her house, that she dubs all her possessions, “the shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others…” The bowl and the stain take her back to an exact moment in time, and elicit emotions comparable to the way she felt at that time. I find it strange then that at the end of the passage, when she has left her house and is wandering the streets of London, when she encounters a familiar place, she cannot be as she was a mere six months before: “For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then– calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered…” Despite the ease with which she remembered the events connected to the bowl and the stain, on the dock she is unable to feel like her previous self.

Perhaps this happens because her memories of the possessions in her house center around other people: Mr. Lloyd, the “melancholy Englishman” and Mr. Cummings, but when she is on the street, she is alone with all the manifestations of herself her mind conjures up at the slightest stimulation from the street. By the time she reaches the dock, “soon it becomes apparent that [the person we are searching for] is ourselves.” Even though she has been looking at other people, such as the dwarf, she has really been searching for herself. Her memories of the other people are free to remain stagnant, but she constantly experiences the changes of her own mind as she thinks different thoughts and imagines herself to be different people. Due to this state of constant flux in her own mind, it is impossible for her to be the same person she was six months before.

(Also, I hope my title makes sense… I know there weren’t any werewolves or anything in the piece, but I thought it was a funny pun because of the song “Werewolves of London.” I hope people got that!)