BLACKOUT POETRY _ FAULKNER

 BLACKOUT POETRY. INSPIRED BY 

SECTION 4 FROM "THE BEAR"  in FAULKNER'S

 "GO DOWN, MOSES"

Consider the passage below from “The Bear” by William Faulkner (“Go Down, Moses). Delete all the words you consider necessary to make your own poem. This poem will distill the essence of the short story as you perceive it. Number of words : maximum 45

Source text for the poetry:

 “not against the wilderness but against the land, not in pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, and in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ‘65 or no placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and slaves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free.......himself and his cousin amid the old smells of cheese and salt meat and kerosene and harness, the ranked shelves of tobacco and overalls and bottled medicine and thread and plow-bolts, the barrels and the kegs of flour and meal and molasses and nails, the wall pegs dependant with plowlines and plowcollars and harnes and trace-chains, and the desk and the shelf above it on which rested the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on), and the older ledgers clumsy and archaic in size and shape, on the yellowed pages of which were recorded in the faded hand of his father Theophilus and his uncle Amodeus during the two decades before the Civil War, the manumission in title at least of Carothers McCaslin’s slaves--did own it. And not the first. Not alone and not the first since, as your Authority states, man was dispossessed of Eden. Not yet the second and still not alone, on down thorugh the tedious and shabby chronicle of His chosen sprung from Abraham, and of the sons of them who dispossessed Abraham, and of the five hundred years during which half the known world and all it contained was chattel to this plantation and all the life it contained was chattel and revokeless thrall to hi s commissary store and those ledgers yonder .....There are somethings He said in the Book, and some things reported of Him that He did not say. And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows."  ("The Bear" (section 4), Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner)

This is how we see it:

BLACKOUT POETRY: INSPIRED BY SECTION 4 FROM FAULKNER'S "THE BEAR" de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Bear" by William Faulkner.

 

“The Bear,” a review by Begoña Rodríguez Varela

“Into the wind” By Marion Rose (Pic chosen by Begoña Rodríguez Varela). Click here for source

“Only the heart knows , only the heart sees”

True. It is through Ike´s eyes that we get absorbed in the story of The Bear, of his own self and the South. This is a physical, spiritual and intellectual journey. But….Is the heart always infallible?

Initially, after some trial - and - error experiences, Ike, alone, meets old Ben, without any modern devices. It is only then, when He turns around and looks at Ike in the eyes, mirror-reflection like, there it is…..the Bear, his alma mater, a creature in Nature.

Then, the frantic chasing of old Ben, amidst suspense, takes place and the narrative runs attuned with the chase, keeping the pace. It all ends up with the epic combat between Lion, savage-childlike Boon and the Bear. Death ensues.

Lion and Sam are buried under the Gum tree, a holy tree, whereas the immortal Bear is somewhere in the Woods, where nothing ever dies, but transforms into a myriad of forms, shapes, scents and colours; a swerve that goes from the local to the universal and back. Superb.

Immediately, thereafter , in a vivid powerful conversation with “clever” Cass (without verba dicendi), Ike concludes that he cannot own the land after learning about his past. In a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, we are told about the rape of the land, slavery, miscegenation and…about how his uncles tried to redeem the sins by giving the land in manumission. Not enough for him.

Finally, we are flooded with Ike´s emotions and memories through sheer interior monologue technique. In an unstoppable stream of thoughts and unending sentences, we know about his opinions on God, the Civil War and the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, the Emancipation of slaves, the North and the South and landowners as well as carpetbaggers,the Ku Klux Klan ….in short, perpetuated sins.

So, Ike has no choice but to repudiate the land. He can´t shoulder the burden and ”Several generations will pass before the right thing is done”. He chooses freedom. He “will laugh.”

Ironically, his Idealism, his high values take him to evasion and self-immolation….But after all, endurance and resilience is what he learnt there, in the timeless Wilderness, from old Ben, the Bear.

"The Old People" by William Faulkner

“The Old People” (Go Down, Moses. Chapter 4) 

by William Faulkner 

Source for photograph: click here

 “At first there was nothing”

 With this almost messianic and forceful genesis – like phrase, we are introduced into the chapter of “The Old People” in Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses” The pristine nature of the land and its spiritual meaning are already captured in this sentencious bang. The chapter revolves around young Isaac McCaslin’s rite of passage led by the hand of Sam Fathers who will initiate him into adulthood by the hunting of deer and the subsequent anointment with its blood. This is a coming-of-age ritual that will presuppose not only a physical journey but also a spiritual one.

Whereas Cass McCaslin, cousin to Isaac, 16 years his older, more a brother than a cousin, and more a cousin than a brother, is in charge of the material legacy, Sam Fathers blazes the trail for spiritual values. Sam Fathers  will indeed pass onto Isaac the legacy of a land that needs healing and redeeming from the destructive, plundering and dehumanizing action of the past forbearers. Sam Fathers represents "the Old People."  Isaac remains forefront, carefully watched by Sam Fathers.

Sam Fathers has been fathered biologically by Ikkemotube, a Chickasaw Indian Chief, nicknamed “The Man” / “Du Homme” / “Doom” and , by Carothers McCaslin, surrogate father,  to whom his own father has sold: “two years later sold the man and woman and the child who was his own son to his white neighbor, Carothers McCaslin” (158)

Sam Fathers gets precisely sold at the age  (10 years old ) that Isaac McCaslin gets initiated into this passage from childhood to manhood: “That was seventy years ago. The Sam Fathers whom the boy knew was already sixty” (page 158). Isaac is the beacon bearer of the foreknowledge that Sam, embodiment of all the races, will pass onto him. 

“with hair like a horse’s mane which even at seventy showed no trace of white and a face which showed no age until he smiled, whose only visible trace of negro blood was a slight dullness of gthe hair and the finger nails…”

Indeed, from this chapter, onto the next, the racial conflict almost remains on the background to give way to a primeval sense of belonging, when “man” was “man,” nor “white” nor“black”: the individual alone will face the impenetrable mysteries of the land in its most fierce and ominous aspects.

After the first anointment and the rite of passage, Sam and Isaac encounter a second deer, a 14 spike antlered buck, which Walter, Boon and Major de Spain miss and to whom Sam refers to  as “grandfather” (175). The spikes in its horns indicate its times- of- lore vagrancy in the wilderness: “the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire” (172) . Tone-deaf and in the wilderness, young Isaac only hears his own blood, fear, and breathing. Something overpowering and ominous preceeds them:

“Then it saw them. And still it did not begin to run. It just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at them; then its muscles suplpled, gathered. It did not even alter its course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of them, its head high and the eye not proud nor haughty but just full and wild and unafraid” (175)

Both Sam and Isaac spare the buck: unearthly, immortal, defiant.

“And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it; it refuses too, seethes, and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still” (McCaslin to Isaac, page 177)

"Pantaloon in Black" by William Faulkner

 

PANTALOON IN BLACK YOUR THOUGHTS de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Fire and the Hearth" / "Go Down, Moses" by William Faulkner

"THE FIRE AND THE HEARTH" (chapter 2)

Source for painting: click here

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ”

―T.S. Eliot,The Waste Land

Reading the second chapter of “Go Down, Moses,” T.S Eliot’s apocalyptic landscape of the “The Waste Land” resonates: ” the roots that clutch.” What is most buried and concealed surges through pain and trauma, and spring, and when the snow melts, and the lilacs grow out of the dead land, stirring memory and desire, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s lines. It is necessary to grasp the past to understand the present, therein, the necessity to uproot, to dig, to bring to surface in order to understand. This is how “Go Down, Moses” feels.

In the opening lines of “The Fire and the Hearth,” digging metaphors ensue. We find Lucas Beauchamp digging, finding, concealing, rambling in the night, moaning about his loneliness, about his working single-handed...exposed to the elements, far from his hearth and fire, but rather a sinister angry man who stirs the land. This land, he says, has belonged to and expropriated from the Indians. He remembers in a time where men were men, nor white nor black.

Whereas “Was,” the first story of the collection renders, in David Walker’s words,“a nostalgic tale of the Old South”which serves as a backdrop on which the grim dramas of the rest of the book are projected”, “a momentary ruffling of the surface” (click here for source); “The Fire and the Hearth” bespeaks of rage, revenge, usurpation, frustration. These profoundly retorting emotions sting the Lucas Beauchamp of the beginning of the narrative and prod him into action and revolt,  in deep contrast with a a more appeased Lucas Beauchamp at the end of the story.

The opening strife revolves around hectic action in connection with the primary character of the narrative, Lucas Beauchamp attempts at hiding his illegal business; he tries to incriminate George Wilkins so he might not marry his daughter; he abandons his wife Molly to trace the land with his divining machine to find a treasure hidden in bygone times; he faces Roth Edmonds and challenges him from a position of pride.

Lucas claims not to need money but he requests Roth’s help to engage him in his pursuit of treasure finding. The story does not give an account, at this stage, of why Lucas, who hoards money in the bank, requests Roth’s purchasing power. Stung by pride, but tied-handed, the narrative conceals Lucas' deprivation. At the times, Jim Crow laws (click on) backlashed against Afro-American population through discriminatory laws that undermined basic human rights.

Lucas’ deep anger anchors back in 1898 when Henry, his son, and Roth Edmonds, Zack’s child, were born. Zack’s wife dies in childbirth and requests Molly, Lucas’ wife, to nurse the newly-born, Roth. Molly abandons her own hearth and fire for the sake of breastfeeding and nursing Roth and moves to the “white man’s house.” She turns to be a surrogate mother for Roth Edmonds who seems to be specially attached to her.

Through Lucas’ conscience, we have access to this moment that is described in apocalyptic terms:

“He would never forget it—that night of early spring following ten days of such rain that even the old people remembered nothing to compare it with, and the white man’s wife time upon her and the creek out of banks until the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber and drowned livestock until not even a horse could have crossed it in the darkness to reach a telephone and fetch the doctor back. And Molly, a young woman then and nursing their own first child, wakened at midnight by the white man himself and they followed then the white man through the streaming darkness to his house and Lucas waited in the kitchen, keeping the fire going in the stove….to find the white man’s wife dead and his own wife already established in the white man’s house. It was as though on that louring and driving day he had crossed and then recrossed a kind of Lethe, emerging, being permitted to escape, buying as the price of life a world outwardly the same yet subtly and irrevocably altered” (pages 45-46).

This “pathetic fallacy” (literary device in which the landscape and surroundings reflect how the character feels inside) bespeaks of the inner turmoil Lucas feels when forsaken by his wife, and his loneliness to keep the fire of his own hearth alive. This event lies at the core of this short story, “a world that seemed to be the same but altered with no remedy."

Similarly to “Was,”: “Damn the fox,” Uncle Buck said. “Go on and start breakfast. It seems to me I’ve been away from home a whole damn month,” which takes us to the beginning of the narrative where it all started,  Lucas’ energy subsides to a resigned acceptance of the unchangeable drive of history and family bonds. Roth escorts Molly to court so she can obtain a divorce from her “decentered” husband, but Lucas reclaims her back and yields to an irrevocable fate:

“I reckon to find that money ain’t for me”

 

"Was" - Go down, Moses by William Faulkner

 

"Was" Go down, Moses by William Faulkner de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

"The Displaced Person" by Flannery O'Connor

 

"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor

 GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE

Try your knowledge of the events in the short story

with this Jeopardy Quiz 

exclusively elaborated for our reading club

JeopardyLabs

The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O'Connor

 

The Artificial Nigger by Flannery O’Connor.

Deriding Burlesque ...

The title of this short story refers to statues popular in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States (click here for further information), depicting grotesque minstrelsy characters (thanks Marián Machado for bringing up this reference).

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, is an American theatrical form, popular from the early 19th to the early 20th century, that was founded on the comic enactment of racial, stereotypes. The tradition reached its zenith between 1850 and 1870. Although the form gradually disappeared from the professional theatres and became purely a vehicle for amateurs, its influence endured—in vaudeville, radio, and television as well as in the motion-picture and world-music industries of the 20th and 21st centuries. The earliest minstrel shows were staged by white male minstrels (traveling musicians) who, with their faces painted black, caricature the singing and dancing of slaves.Source: https://www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show

The word “caricature” immediately takes us to Flannery’s world. “The Artificial Nigger” opens up with Mr Head, ready to embark on a trip to show Nelson, his grandson, the ways of the world.  Initially portrayed with a questionable flair of superior moral guidance, he is launched center stage within the narrowing focus of the moonlight and, mockingly, compared with the great guides of men, “Dante, or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light”(250).  We will later find that Mr Head’s name does not live up to the expectations of his assumed moral guidance due to an inherently flawed nature.

The narrator’s use of “as if” implies detachment from an omniscient role and a failure to acutely depict reality. This detachment undermines Mr Nelson’s perfunctory role as a man that “has entered into that calming understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young” (249). His suit lying on a chair has a more noble air than he does. Old age does not pair up with wisdom. Many narrative moments will amalgamate the two characters in indistinct borderlines until an almost chiastic exchange takes place towards the end of the short story. Their ghost-like reflection on the window of the train indicates their unformed and unshaped existence:

"Mr Head looked like an ancient child and 

Nelson like a miniature old man." (269)

Before this moment, confrontation ensues as they contest for knowledge about the world, the city, about what a “nigger” looks like – Mr Head’s intent lesson--a concept Nelson fails to understand as the incipient tabula rasa he seems to be, and, therefore,  impervious to prejudice.

Both characters constantly appear at junctions, crossways, intersections, in an oneiric landscape in which a train glides phantasmagorically to lead them in a trip of “discovery,” a seemingly rite of passage for Nelson. However, rather than expertise, the trip is intended to function as a deterrent for Nelson’s inquisitive nature, and a lesson he will never forget as Mr Nelson puts it.

They wander in circles, shadows, tunnels, darkness, sewers, the bowels of the earth… They stroll through a black neighbourhood where Nelson feels drawn to “a large coloured woman leaning in a doorway”, a surrogate mother figure? (suggested by Begoña Rodríguez ) for the bereft child, a search for protection? (Xoel González), or even a concupiscent entrance in the ways of the world? (Marián Machado)

After the practical joke that Mr Head plays on Nelson in which he denies his grandson, (Biblical overtones) denial, expiation, guilt and remorse ensue. Nelson is emotionally void after being rejected, and the way in which he is described leads us to draw connections with some crafty fabrication:

“The child was standing about ten feet away, his face bloodless under the gray hat. His eyes were triumphantly cold. There was no light in them, no feeling, no interest. He was merely there, a small figure, waiting.”

Could Nelson be possibly “The Artificial Nigger”? Marcial suggested that the opening of the story had echoes of Nelson being a puppet and Mr Head a puppeteer: the boy sleeps in an obscure part of the room, on a pallet, in foetal position, still as the night and about to be relivened and string-pulled into a journey of non-discovery.

Is there any grace, mercy, expiation for Mr Head? The two characters are drawn together by the recognition of an artificial nigger in a white neighbourhood of iceberg-like houses. The characters vanish in the sunset which still holds traces of the night, get on a train in the suburbs and are dropped in another non - official stop at another junction.

Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction / "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

 

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: AN INTRODUCTION

"A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND"

MEMORABLE OPENINGS

 

MEMORABLE OPENINGS

THE SHORT STORY: AN INTRODUCTION

“I don’t know when I died” (Samuel Beckett, “The Calmative”)

“Unfortunately, things did not turn out well …” (D.H. Lawrence, “The Fox”)

“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke” (James Joyce, “The Sisters”)

These words constitute one of those master effect openings that make of the short story an elevated art and craft. The curtain raises and the miniature world of plot twists, viewpoints, framing devices, enticing and playful effects give rise to a narrative form whose defining criterion goes beyond length. Intensity and unity will mark the path.

In Joyce’s “There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke,” Kahn points that “a character´s fate is revealed even before ‘he’ has been described.

Andrew Kahn’s “The Short Story. A very Short Introduction” (chapters 1-3 for this section) can be used as a point of departure that will aid to understand the dawning of the short story as a genre. From its first appearance in magazines and newspapers --slicker magazines for quality stories, pulp magazines for other thrills -- hand in hand with the development of the printed press, the Industrial Age, the increase in readership, short story writing became an outlet for amateurish as well as professional writers. These are some of the platitudes that pepper the dawning of the genre.

Whereas the big openings of literature such as Tolstoy’s “All happy families are happy in the same way but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina) raises a world of expectations that will spin throughout the novel, in short stories, opening lines constitute a first act. Kahn compares Tolstoy’s opening with Joy Williams’ “Hammer”

“Angela had only one child, a daughter who abhorred her” (p.16)

“like Anna Karenina, this start is also about family relations, but concerns one famly and one relationship rather than bourgeois families in the abstract. Yet, as Frank O’Connor notes in The Lonely Voice, every significant literary story has an initial thesis, covert or declared, beyond the development of the plot.”

The short story has been grounds to explore the rural, the national, the small and has shaped later into the perfect terrain to explore those edgy subjects of a globalized world.

Frank O’Connor, V.S.Pritchett, Ray Bradbury, Alice Munro, V.S.Pritchett, Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, a chapter entirely devoted to Chekhov and its heirs, take over as the stronghold of short story writing among many others...which we will sinfully forget in this inaugural season post. One particular statement should be cited to capture the spirit of short story writing, and that is, the allusion to Katherine Mansfield that “dates back as early as 1923,” Andrew Kahn says, “when a critic of The Observer proclaimed that the short story is bound to begin with her name,”

“whose (Katherine Mansfield's) ability to crystallize ‘ in a cry, a phrase, a gesture, a moment of feeling or vision’ captures what was best about the genre that also set it apart from the novel.” (page 12)

READING WORKSHOP PROGRAMME 2022-23

 READING WORKSHOP PROGRAMME 2022-2023

Mainly Short Stories

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what

I choose it to mean—neither more nor less’ ”

(Source: “Poststructuralism. A very Short Introduction” by Catherine Belsey)

GENERAL OBJECTIVES

The focus of the programme for the academic course 2022-2023 will mainly embrace short fiction with a couple of exceptions that have sprung from former interests of attending members such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, among others. Some of the short stories are part of the tapestry of a novel such as Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, or Alice Munroe’s Too Much Happiness, so, in these cases, rather than unstrung pieces, the short stories constitute the tiles that will conform the whole mosaic of the narrative. The programme divides in three different sections that encompass writers from different geographical locations: American, Irish, British and Canadian.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Philip K. Dick, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maggie O’Farrell and Alice Munroe conform the constellation of authors which will be part of the 2022-23 programme.

HAMLET IN A NUTSHELL

 

 

'Doubt thou the stars are fire;

 Doubt that the sun doth move;

 Doubt truth to be a liar;

 But never doubt I love. 

'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers;

 I have not art to reckon my groans: but that I love thee best, 

O most best, believe it. 

Adieu. ("Hamlet" Act II)

 

A Nunnery or a Brothel?

 

Ophelia in "Hamlet"

Source for image: John William Waterhouse

“Get thee to a nunnery” (Act 3, scene 1, line 121) tells Hamlet to Ophelia.

a) Nunnery: a convent (to protect her chastity)

b) Brothel (slang)

This dichotomy belongs to a context of opposites in Western tradition in which women have come to be judged by double standards: either as the idealized Petarchan object of the artist musings, the Virgin Mary of religious imagery, the Victorian Angel of the Hearth as depicted in Coventry Patmore’s, “The Angel in the House” (1854), or John Ruskin’s lecture “Lilies. Of Queens’ Gardens” (1886); or quite the contrary, the Magdalene of the bible or the unchaste Fallen Woman of many writings.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

“Something Smells Rotten in Denmark”

Act 1 and 2 in "Hamlet"

 Oxford School Shakespeare’s edition of “Hamlet” (2007), a highly recommendable edition to approach the play, ushers the drama with the word “revenge,” an ancestral immemorial impulse to get your own back.

The entourage of sprawling words follows: Tit for tat, reprisal, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life (Exodus, chapter 21),  retaliation, vindictiveness …

Like in a room of mirrors, revenge spawns and hatches through venomous words poured into the ears of audience and characters. In many Shakesperean plays, words infect minds and ears literally and metaphorically. King Hamlet is thought to have been stung by a snake: “”A serpent stung me—so the whole ear of Denmark /Is by a forged process of my death /Rankly abus’d” (Act 1, scene 5, lines 35-36) but, actually, an unidentified poison, hebanon has been poured into his ear; Lady Macbeth poisons Macbeth’s ear, questioning his “manhood,” and insuflates his thirst for blood.

The King of Norway and Fortinbras

Retaliation starts even before the play commences: old grudges from Norway weigh heavily upon the plotting king. Claudius mentions that the king of Norway has taken the throne from his brother Fortinbras.

“To Norway; uncle of young Fortinbras--

Who, impotent and bedrid, scacerly hears

of this his nephew’s purpose—to suppress

His further gait herein, in that the levies,

the lists, and full proportions are all made

Out of this subject…”

(Act 1, scene 2, lines 28 and following)

King Hamlet and Claudius

Claudius himself has usurped the throne of King Hamlet and married his belated brother’s wife, leaving Prince Hamlet bereft of father, mother and kindgom. Prince Hamlet forced, as Gielgud says, into an impossible predicament, is inexorably dragged by his father’s ghost to get tit for tat:

“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouslel’d, disappointed, unanel’d…

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

But howsomever thou pursuest this act,

….

(Act 1, scene 5, lines 76 and following)

Hamlet’s father has died deprived of communion, unsolved of his sins, and not anointed with holy oil (see notes for the Oxford edition, page 31). He, therefore, moans from a beyond of anguish and instances Hamlet, his son, to avenge “the incestuous, adulterate” deed that has deprived him of wife and kingdom. Conjugal treason metonymically spreads to country’s treason as it can be seen in the allusion to the “royal bed of Denmark,” also indicating the usurpation not only of the bridal thalamus but also of his  throne. Yet, his feeling of revenge spares his wife whom she acquits with the following lines:

“Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge

To prick and sting her”

(Act 1, scene 5, lines 85 and following)

Pyrrhus and Achiles

A metaliterary reenactment of “revenge” can also be distilled from the presence of the players in Act, scene 2. Hamlet remembers the players who have been summoned to entertain the king and queen in their convivial nuptials from a previous performance in Venice: Pyrrhus revenge on his father’s death. Hamlet himself recites the lines of “Aeneas tale to Dido” (Act 2, scene 2, lines 434 and following) in which Pyrrhus, son of the Greek hero Achilles,  led the final attack on Troy in revenge for the death of his father” (Notes to Oxford edition, page 58):

“The rugged Phyrrus, like th’ Hyrcanian beast--

‘Tis not so. It begins with Phyrrhus--

The rugged Phyrrus, he whose sable arms,

Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

When he lay couched in the ominous horse….”

(Act 2, scene 2, lines 438 and following)

Prince Hamlet asks one of the players to perfom “the Murder of Gonzago”, a play of revenge within a play of revenge.

 Written on the stars, imprisoned in the words, cosmic forces have aligned to snowball the tragedy of a deranged Hamlet, equivocally ensnared by love as interpreted by Polonius, but , really, with heart and entrails incensed to avenge the smeared father.

"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare

John Gielgud

Hamlet: an Actor's view

 “Hamlet” is described as a play of shocks and surprises, packed with incident, poetry and character. Hamlet, Gielgud adduces, is put in an impossible predicament and heads this way to an appointed fate. To many, Hamlet is an undecisive character crippled with grief, but, to Gielgud, he is a forlorn figure, shaken to the core, abandoned by and surrounded by false friends as well as chased by a constant longing for being emotionally corresponded. Horatio, always a good friend, does not offer him much support and Hamlet only succeeds in his reaching out with the gravedigger and the player King. He moves from misery to horror.

Gretrude, Hamlet’s mother, is portrayed as a shallow woman that must have some good in her but who is weak and has gone wrong...

To listen to this and more...do not miss out Gielgud’s views on Hamlet....

 

"Invisible Ink"

 

Invisible Ink: The Untold Stories of

"The Heart of the Matter"

by Graham Greene

The Heart of the Matter spins off a factual thread of suppressed interlocutions that might have ensued in dramatic outcomes, but, which are, conversely, banished in the interstices of the novel following the pattern of Scobie’s diary factual account. Using Aimee Liu’s phrase “invisible ink,” the following creative writing pieces constitute those untold stories that might have confronted characters in unrepressed emotional strain. Marián Machado has recreated an invisible and inexistent- in -the -novel conversation between the two women: Louise and Helen, wife and mistress; Begoña Rodríguez overtly exposes the undercurrent of the word “adultery” that ricochets the novel but always dodges articulation between Louise and Scobie; Cándido Pintos vents the voicing of Ali’s death thawing Scobie’s phlegmatic distancing with Yusef; and, finally, Margarida Pereira tempts Helen through Scobie’s voice to abandon Sierra Leone. Helen’s resistance is crafted in an articulated speech of love.

VISUAL POETRY INSPIRED BY "The Heart of the Matter" (Graham Greene)

 

Source for photo: Drawing by María Ángeles Machado Panete

Graham Greene and the Spies (Richard Greene)

 

“A splinter of Ice in the Heart of a writer” (Graham Greene)

To understand Greene’s liasons with espionage, watch the following video by Canadian Professor Richard Greene on “Graham Greene and the spies”.

“Greene was a contrarian with a taste of paradox and a sympathy for outsiders. He was never finished fighting the demons of his childhood” (Richard Greene).

Mentioned; Anthony Burgess ( writer)

Philip Kilby (Soviet spy)

 See article in The Guardian about a play on friendship and betrayal between Graham Greene and Kim Philby

Emotional Warfare in Graham Greene`s "The Heart of the Matter"

 

Emotional Warfare: the Torn Self in Graham Greene' s 

“The Heart of the Matter” (1948)

"No Man is an Island" by John Donne, Methaphysical Poet (1624)

The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene

 

Women's Day: Aphra Behn

 Homage to Aphra Behn on Women's Day, 8th of March 2022

Virginia Woolf said of her in a Room of  One's Own: 

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,  for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."                                                               

Revelations 2 (Creative Writing )

 

Source for image: Click here

"Now, here in back, like I said, is DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS or maybe ILLUMINATIONS,that's a swell word, or INTUITIONS okay? In other words   you do an old familiar thing, like bottling dandelion wine, and you put that under RITES AND CEREMONIES.  And then you think about it, and what you think, crazy or not, you put under DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS. Here's what I got on the wine: Every time you bottle it, you got a whole chunk of 1928 put away, safe. How you like that, Tom?"

 "Dandelion Wine" by Ray Bradbury