Spread the Wealth (in a non-Communist way)

In class on Friday, I asked the class whether they thought Death of a Salesman had feminist undertones at all. I posed the question because I thought at the time that Linda Loman was a far stronger personality than all the men, including Willy, Happy, Biff, and Howard. When she pushes the flowers out of Happy’s hands and calls her own two sons “a pair of animals,” the viewer wants to applaud her for standing up for what she believes in. Yet when I thought about this scene more, I realized that her seemingly bold, self-confident action was in fact the best manifestation of her hopelessness pitiful position in the family. She continues to defend her husband and remains loyal to the end, even though he lost his loyalty to her eighteen years ago. He continues to keep secrets from her, yet she continues to trust him. Out of frustration and anger she yells at Biff and Happy, saying “You and your lousy rotten whores!” yet if she were truly self-aware, self-assertive, and an independent feminist spirit, she would be saying this to her husband. When I first read Death of a Salesman, I thought that Linda was being a hero by standing up for Willy and staying by his side at a time when he seems like the loneliest man in the world. Yet she is little more than the stereotypical suburban 1950s wife, since she believes that what her husband thinks is automatically what is righteous. She adds further to the pain of both Happy and Biff by telling them to “get out of here, both of you, and don’t come back!” Willy always had a place in his home for his sons, yet Linda now does not. Immediately after she unleashes her hopeless verbal tirade on her sons, Biff says, “Now you hit it on the nose! The scum of the earth, and you’re looking at him!” The stage direction even says that Biff is “on the floor…with self-loathing.” It is easy for critics to look at Death of a Salesman and point to Willy’s negligence and poor paternal instincts as the reason for Biff’s “failure,” yet Linda clearly has not helped the situation. She is the one who has been at home all these years, while Willy has been on the road. Sure, Biff saw Willy having an affair and blames this event for his entire future, but Happy who knows nothing of the affair, has led a similarly unsuccessful life. And Linda must share part of the blame. There certainly is enough to go around.

Victim or Failure?

In what ways do you find Nora a victim? In what ways at fault?

Upon reviewing the first two acts of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, I have come to the conclusion that Nora is primarily a victim of a series of circumstances outside of her control. She does what she thinks is right. Her poor judgment of what is righteous and appropriate—not any evil intention—is her primary character flaw. When she asks Krogstad, “Isn’t a daughter entitled to try and save her father from worry and anxiety on his deathbed? Isn’t a wife entitled to save her husband’s life?” she seems to be asking two completely sincere, rational questions. She steps out of the boundaries drawn for her as a woman by society. But she also crosses another boundary; she seems to have no sense of guilt at the time that she forges her own father’s name to receive the money that she is not allowed to receive. In these ways, she is at fault. Yet she reacts sensibly and in a way that anybody can relate to. She is facing extraordinary circumstances—a dying father and an ill husband, both of whom she at least thinks she loves very much—and she reacts with extraordinary, but in her mind necessary, measures. Nora is in many ways a victim of society. The measures she takes would have been unnecessary if she were a man in the same time and place, because women were not allowed to sign the document that Nora needed signed. Her dishonesty is of course less than admirable, but I believe that it is the price she had to pay to save at least her husband. Her behavior would certainly have been hard to understand in that time period, but that is precisely Ibsen’s point. He resents the extreme actions a woman like Nora would have to make to accomplish the same thing that a man could accomplish very easily. To interpret Nora as a villain who did an evil thing is to miss Ibsen’s primary message of A Doll’s House. Sure, she was dishonest, and maybe she should have felt more guilt at the time. But she was a victim more of society than of her own personal flaws.

Ophelia Song

***To be sung to the tune of Cecilia by Simon and Garfunkel***
***Note: if you are unfamiliar with the original song, do yourself the favor of going to www.seeqpod.com, typing in "Cecilia Simon and Garfunkel," and listening to the first result before reading this post.***

Ophelia, it’s breaking my heart
To have to pretend that I’m crazy
But Ophelia, you’ve got to believe
That I saw my dead father’s ghost

Ophelia, the ghost told Ham the truth
That Claudius killed him for his wife
Oh Ophelia, Hamlet can’t tell you this
‘Cuz he must avenge his dad’s ghost
(His dad’s ghost…)

Well your dad is Polonius
And Ophelia, he is quite a wuss (Quite a Wuss!)
He makes you Claudius’s pawn
And when Hamlet comes back with a clean face, you’re gone.

Ophelia, your boyfriend’s gone mad
He must kill Claude for killing his dad
Oh Ophelia, it’s still not act four,
And Hamlet stares you down as he walks out the door.

Ophelia, when will it all end?
When will he come home to caress you?
Oh Ophelia, it might take the whole play.
Cuz this is one of Shakespeare’s trage-days.

Ophelia, Hamlet’s killed your old dad,
And that must make you really mad
Ophelia, now you sing and you dance
And you want to send Hamlet to France.
(To-oo France)

But Ophelia, to Britain he’s sent.
To keep him away from his own two parents
And Ophelia, I haven’t read Act Five yet
So I don’t know what becomes of young Hamlet

Jubilation! I still have Act Five!
And I still don’t know what happens.
Jubilation! I can’t wait till Act Five!
To see if Ophelia comes out dead or alive.

I am posting this early, so the commenters don't kill me.

Oh Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus Rex
Fated to kill his father, and with his mother have sex
And now his sister is also his daughter
What that is like, I cannot even guess.

The young man became king after solving a riddle
Given by the Sphinx: he knew adulthood came in the middle
He succeeded Laius, who was in fact his father,
And he led the Thebeians both with strength and with valor

Until a plague struck the city of Thebes,
And our hero, with hubris, said he’d end the disease
He sent his brother-in-law Creon, who was also his uncle
To travel to Delphi, and discover the source of the junk-le

So Uncle Creon talked to the god Apollo,
Whose advice Oedipus knew he surely should follow
Until he found out Apollo called him a killer
Which is when Sophocles turns it into a thriller.

Oedipus, disbelieving, demanded the truth
So he could clear his own name and stop saying “forsooth!”
He sent Uncle Creon, apparently a slave
To send for Tereisias, whose vision was grave

Indeed the prophet was blind, whereas Oedipus saw
But on his side most surely wasn’t the law
At first the blind man refused to say what he knew,
But Oedipus insisted to hear what was true

Though the prophet insisted the truth would hurt,
He had to follow the orders of his king, who was becoming quite curt.
So he told him the truth: what the oracle said,
Yet Oedipus was left there just scratching his head

At what it could mean, at all of these lies
So he called in Jocasta, his mother and wife
And he asked her to tell him all that she knew
About the day his father had been beaten in two

She knew that it happened where three roads converged
And it was here that her story and Oedipus’s did merge
For he too had been there, one night years ago,
And there he had taken others’ lives, to protect his own.

Once he conquered the Sphinx and became Thebes’s king,
He did what was right and gave Jocasta a ring,
Yet it was not right, for she was his mother
And with her he did give birth to his own sisters and brothers.

What lessons can be learned from Oedipus’s tragic tale?
When one tries to avoid fate, one often fails
Yet the choices one makes will affect his whole life
Just make better choices than choosing your mom to be your wife.

Will you scratch by back? I think I have an Ilych!

Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an unusual piece of literature in many ways. It begins with the ending; over half the novel is about the protagonists death, not his life; only one of the characters, Gerasim, is an exemplary person; and universal themes such as love and happiness are virtually absent. Yet my favorite part of the novella is the mastery with which Tolstoy depicts one’s life as foreshadowing one’s death. The protagonist and title character, Ivan Ilych, leads a shallow, artificial life. When he gets married, the speaker points out, “Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he hoped, would have an equal income” (70). Ilych’s marriage is based on little more than money, and his wife demonstrates this too at his funeral when Peter Ivanovich realizes that “her chief concern with him—namely, to question him as to how she could obtain a grant of money from the government on the occasion of her husband’s death” (47). Ilych gets as little enjoyment out of his job as he does from his marriage, and each has the same motivation for him: money. When he gets promoted to examining magistrate, he feels that “everyone without exception, even the most important and self-satisfied, was in his power…” (65). When he is promoted again to Assistant Public Prosecutor, “His new duties, their importance, the possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the publicity his speeches received, and the success he had in all these things, made his work still more attractive” (79). Yet never does he take a job for the joy that it gives him, nor does he often show compassion towards his wife and his seldom-mentioned children. He has no “friends,” only “acquaintances.” And all of this is reflected in his death: just as monotonous, lonely, and tragic as his life. As he is dying, “He began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had seemed…all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty” (301). He realizes that his death is monotonous: the doctor comes, Ilych refuses to take the medication, his wife comes in to visit, Ilych kicks her out, Gerasim lends his body to rest Ilych’s legs, and Ilych finally realizes what kindness and happiness is, as it is reflected in Gerasim. He realizes, “’Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse’” (313). Indeed, his life and death followed similar trajectories, both ending in much pain and sorrow.

A Comparison: Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad discusses the nature of colonialism and imperialism and the relationship between the protagonist, Marlow, and one such imperialist, Kurtz. In Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee, through his first-person narrator, explores the nature of empire and the necessity of an enemy to keep Empire alive. Thus, both novels have themes of forced submission, unexplainable racism, and a dichotomy of good vs. evil that is not as clear as it may first appear.

The Africans in Heart of Darkness and the barbarians in Waiting for the Barbarians serve as contrived foils to the “superior” race in each novel: Europeans in Heart of Darkness and the Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians. As Chinua Achebe points out in his article “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad perpetuates the European desire and necessity to set up Africa as a complete foil to Europe. Coetzee builds on this in Waiting for the Barbarians, and he points out the obvious flaw in Conrad’s argument. He discusses the need of an enemy—even an artificial one—to keep an empire alive. The magistrate in the novel says, “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies” (131). Thus, Coetzee recognizes what Conrad fails to: that the reason the barbarians—or the Africans in the case of Heart of Darkness—are the enemy is not because they are inferior in any way to the race of the empire, but rather that they must be the enemy to keep the empire in each case alive.

In both Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, there is certainly a dichotomy of good and evil. However, the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians realizes that he is not all that different from Colonel Joll, and the distinction between Marlow and Kurtz by the end of Heart of Darkness is even less clear. When the magistrate says that he could have tied the barbarian to a chair and beat her, and it would have been just as romantic and personal, he is clearly recognizing that he really is similar to Joll, who literally does beat the barbarians. Similarly, when Marlow visits Kurtz’s Intended, he lies to her about Kurtz’s final words. Thus, as in Waiting for the Barbarians, the line between good and evil is very vague. Marlow does little to stop the racism, and though the magistrate houses a barbarian and tries to stop Colonel Joll at the end from beating them more, he is largely unsuccessful.

Philip Glass Half Full

Dear Mr. Coetzee,

You probably know by now that the great American composer Philip Glass has written an opera based on your novel Waiting for the Barbarians. And perhaps you find this as ironically appropriate as I do. After all, Glass is known for his minimalist compositions, characterized by often-repeating structures. And Waiting for the Barbarians, while focusing on a fundamental change in the “Empire” which the magistrate has not seen in his decades of serving, offers a much broader allegorical statement concerning the repetition of history. Glass saw the story of Waiting for the Barbarians in Iraq today, and perhaps he also recognized that his music would fit the story perfectly for this reason. As Glass says in his notes about his opera of the same name, “To reduce the opera to a single historical circumstance or a particular political regime misses the point. That the opera can become an occasion for dialogue about political crisis illustrates the power of art to turn our attention toward the human dimension of history.”

Indeed, Mr. Coetzee, I presume that this was your original intention in writing Waiting for the Barbarians. The facts that all of your characters—with the exception of the brutal Colonel Joll—remain nameless, and that the time and place remain ambiguous lead me to believe that you had something larger in mind than a story that occurred in a vacuum, in one time, and one place. I love what Glass says about the power of art, and I presume you would too. It may be overstated, but what other medium can “turn our attention toward the human dimension of history” besides art, whether a novel or an opera? I think the “human dimension” can be found in particular in the narrator’s physical yet sexless relationship with one of the barbarians. Whereas the harsh military officer (Joll) and the hopeless government aide (the magistrate) are stock character in nearly every historical story about the oppressor and the oppressed, the barbarian woman provides a deeply personal aspect to this story that Glass and I both apparently love. So thank you, Mr. Coetzee, for adding not one, but two works of art exploring the timeless themes of war and love.

Your fan,
Jack

PS. Just because I presume you have a fondness for works by Philip Glass and for saxophone quartet, please visit the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI1iQfQT9K4