I: The Poet Of Everybody

Taking into account the constant repetitiveness of the pronoun “I” throughout the poems, we could surmise that narration is an important focus. The verses are conveyed in first person, making the narrator quite superior due to the emphasis of his point of view. Still, the narrator tries to avoid superiority in relevance of the reader by referring to him as an equal: “And I shall assume you shall assume; / For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you” (2-3). This action is as well relevant with the content of the poem, sensing that both the narrator and the reader are equally affected by the mentioned perfume, or that the point of view of the narrator is the point of view of the reader. In comparison to this we can take Dante’s Inferno opening line, “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way” (Inferno I), which shows contrast between the “I” and the “our” posed in the verse. With this, the narrator places everything under his path. Because “our” can be everybody, just as the “you” employed in Leaves Of Grass.

With the prominence of the “I” in the poem, or the “self” of the poem’s speaker, Whitman seems to be putting himself in the center, but instead he is evoking an expansive being that expands the boundaries of a person. Verses throughout the poems make it apparent that Whitman, or the narrator, does not see himself of one individual, but rather a voice speaking for all: “I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d / between my hat and boots” (125-126). Through these lines, the narrator is portrayed as being an extraordinary identity, making us believe him as an elevated hero. Yet, the verses also invoke a universal being rather than an individual one. Describing the course of birth and death, the narrator is identified as a person, but when mentioning “am not contain’d between my hat and boots”, the narrator is seen as the representation of everybody. This technique of narration embraces the message that Whitman wants to transmit to us in the end: the narrator and the poet are everybody, therefore, the poem, is what we create: America.

Grass Grows, Birds Fly, People Die

The symbolism employed with the appearance of the question “What is the grass?” comes evident with the illustration of the bunches of grass in the child’s hands. This image becomes a symbol of universal regeneration: “Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation” (98). This rebirth of nature might allude to the color of grass itself, green. Green evokes hope. The dollars are green, making the color a symbol of America itself. But what is the grass? But grass also symbolizes union: the lone material that links the people from all over America, and consequently, all over the world. Grass grows everywhere, grass grows by itself. It also evokes democracy. Grass, like democracy, is equal everywhere. Throughout the United States, grass grows equally, just as democracy. Egalitarianism rests analogous within every corner of a nation.

But grass is also the receptacle of all dead bodies of the nation, and the world. In the leaves of grass rest the common people of the world. When thinking in terms of America, when invoking death we relate to the Civil War. In the wake of the Civil War, we can relate grass to the graves of the many thousands who died in native floor: the grass feeds on the bodies of the dead. Hence, these deaths signify that, eventually, everyone must die, and so the natural roots of democracy lay in mortality itself, whether due to natural causes or warfare bloodshed. Still, grass might encompass everything, or signify nothing. Here, the narrator suggests this: “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps” (113-114). The mystery after death is what feeds democracy. And the result of these deaths, unfortunately, was the emergence of the greatest democracy of nowadays. In a leaf of grass we encounter everything. A leaf of grass is no less than the path a flap of a butterfly’s wings in Korea to set off a tornado in America.

George Orwell’s Politics And The English Language

His argument: The English language has become ugly and inactive due to the foolishness of our thoughts and our way of expressing them. This decay has further led to the decay in society.

Cases of Irony:

1. “Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.”
The essay itself can be considered satirical: satirizing the English language and its foolishness. Therefore, by employing the faults he is simultaneously criticizing, Orwell clearly is making an ironic sense out of it. To commit the same faults he is protesting against is quite ironic, but at the same time, boosts the argument of this essay by serving as a clear example of the writing he is criticizing.

2. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble.”
It’s quite ironic that Orwell is criticizing and, at the same time, recommending the reader tips to avoid bad writing, while his own essay is an example of a bad piece of writing. He is saying that careful writing is both good and bad. If you pay attention to every detail of your writing you might ruin the essence of the writing, but a careless writer might also result in a banal text.

Dying Metaphors (clichés): Worn out comparisons which have lost all evocative power, and are used for simplicity.

Meaningless Words: Words in a passage which almost completely lacking in meaning and do not point toward any object in the context of the sentence.

Pretentious Diction: Words and expressions (mostly foreign) that are used to dress up a simple statement and make it sound more scientific, and the general result is an increase in vagueness.

Ten Steps To Good Writing:

1. Avoid using complicated expressions.
2. Never use a figure of speech you are used seeing in writing.
3. Use a short word rather than a long one, if possible.
4. Avoid loquaciousness as much as possible (cut out as many words you can).
5. Never use passive when you can use active.
6. Avoid using foreign expressions, scientific terms, or other jargons. Instead, use its English equivalent.
7. Revise your writing before publishing in order to ensure best quality.
8. Avoid writing while thinking: think what you are going to write before actually writing it.
9. Evade dressing up simple statements with intricate expressions.
10. Maintain a constant style throughout your writing.

The Style Of Not Having One

I don’t have any style. Yeah, sorry. How can you have it? I can’t ask Santa to give me style for Christmas. I think I’d better ask Dante, Twain, Melville, Orwell, Hemingway, or even Flaubert how they got it. The question kept spinning in my head. I even dreamt about it.

In my dream he kept me telling, “Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work” (5). As I was about to finish the story as I read: “The beats of her heart grew fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away;--and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head”. It happened to me that I had already grown fond of Felicite by the time these words reached my mind. I questioned how I came to know her so well if the narrator was in third person? I thought about Saul Bellow’s Seize The Day, where the narrator dives into the mind of the central character, hence making the reader see Wilhelm both from the inside and outside. In this case, my fondness to Felicite came from the insights I got to her thoughts through Flaubert’s narrator.

These words I had just read, for example, illustrate both Felicite’s inside and outside. Through careful description and metaphor, Flaubert takes the reader into her heart and mind. The reader feels what he is reading, the beats growing “fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away”, making him understand both what we see of Felicite and what we feel about her. As well, both the narrator and author sympathize in the depiction of the stories central figure. The author exemplifies the character as being the leitmotif of the story by constantly evoking the story’s simplicity through the character. In other words, the story is of Felicite and Felicite is the story. A simple story. On the other hand, the narrator dives into her mind and makes the reader admire her simplicity in both thoughts and action.

It is basically the point of view of the story I was thinking about. The author, the narrator. I remembered the confusion present between these two figures while reading Slaughterhouse-Five. In A Simple Soul both figures coexist to describe, not explain. With the use of metaphors and careful description Falubert achieves this, while his narrator dives into her mind. Like here, I guess: “Her eyesight grew dim. She did not open the shutters after that. Many years passed. But the house did not sell or rent. Fearing that she would be put out, Felicite did not ask for repairs” (4). We get a glance to both her status quo and emotions, only described. Making it a quite simple story, since it only describes. But still, Flaubert’s powerful sentences and word choice make the reader disregard the story’s simplicity and instead enjoy it. His style is something…

I kept waking up tired to always dream about the text I’m reading in Pre Ap English class. Oh dear I already dreamt with Billy Pilgrim, Candide, genes, Macbeth, Oedipa Maas, and now Felicite? Give me a break. Anyways, I don’t have style I’m sorry. My bad luck was such that Tangen said next day in class, “Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work”. It made my rainy day.

Show, Not Tell, And Embrace Simplicity

One of the messages that dance through my mind while reading about Felicite is “embrace simplicity”. Since reading it from the Tao Te Ching more than a year ago, the message had stayed dormant in my thoughts. But how come it came back? Well, Felicite herself is quite a simple character, hence the title, the story, and everything in it. Still, simplicity isn’t quite adamant in every sense. “She kissed them several times and would not have been greatly astonished had Virginia opened them; to souls like this the supernatural is always quite simple. She washed her, wrapped her in a shroud, put her into the casket, laid a wreath of flowers on her head and arranged her curls” (3). The sentence evokes simplicity, but is it itself simple? It is clear how Flaubert’s use of punctuation is a very useful technique he uses to play with the story’s pace. Hence, making the how it’s told and what it’s told permanently interrelated with each other.

In the case of this sentence, we take the word simple. The word itself is describing the souls, characterizing Felicite, and narrating her life’s and the plot’s simplicity. The word, in this case, also divides two different sentences. The first one, rather two different ideas amalgamated by a semi colon, while the second one is mostly predominant of commas. We could infer that before ‘simple’, the sentence is simple, while after it becomes more elaborated. Before and after the word two different approaches to a sentence collide, one simpler than the other. But then, is the idea being transmitted simple? The idea might be simple, like the character, and the title, but thus far into the story I’ve only read the word ‘simple’ once. To show not tell. He is embracing simplicity by showing the reader Felicite’s life is simple, not telling.

Between Solitude And Loneliness

When referring to loneliness, we are referring to the pain of being alone. Pretty different from solitude, which expresses the glory of being alone. Being alone doesn’t necessarily refer to suffering, so, is Oedipa’s status quo loneliness or solitude? It is evident that throughout the story, Oedipa has become isolated from other people since the moment she left her husband to execute Pierce’s will. Oedipa’s pure image of complete isolation can be depicted when being alone at the bar: “Oedipa sat, feeling as alone as she ever had, now the only woman, she saw, in a room full of drunken male homosexuals” (94). Apart from being alone, we can notice how she is one of the only female characters mentioned in the story thus far. In her engagement of mysteries, Oedipa is surrounded by male figures, fact that leads to a resolution for the boredom and isolation that evinces her. The solution: sex. You might me thinking, “Sex, always sex, is it coincidence that’s always the solution?” The question is, is it a solution or a new problem?

In this novel in particular, sexual affairs are seen as a more common act than usually depicted nowadays. I didn’t live in the sixties but I deny the fact that a married woman would go and have sex with strangers just for the fun of it. Earlier in the book we saw how she had sex with Metzger the same day she met him. Once again in this chapter, John Nefastis invites her to have sex with him, but she denies. Hence, sex is portrayed as being a way to avoid boredom rather than to achieve sexual satisfaction. To Oedipa, her isolation leads her to sexual affairs which lead to the withdrawal from companions like her husband, physician, and God: “Story of my life, she thought, Mucho won’t talk to me, Hilarius won’t listen, Clerk Maxwell didn’t even look at me, and this group, God knows. Despair came over her” (94). We can infer that Oedipa is embracing the consequences of being alone. But it seems by her actions, and by Pynchon’s prose, that she is continuing her progression. After being overwhelmed by the prospect of so many possibilities, so many truths, she comes to an understanding that this ambiguity allows her the freedom of choice, to decide which truth will be hers to pursue. In the end she is alone, embracing loneliness or solitude?

The Paranoia Of Having All The Facts

I haven’t seen so far in my short account of reading, a story that isn’t based on the development of a main character. Maybe you might be thinking, “Oh poor guy, he doesn’t know a thing about literature” or even “Ah, this blog sounds boring, I’d better go and read Duarte’s”. You are free to do that, honestly, her blogs are much better. Anyways, let me continue with my argument. A story always bases its context on the development of a central character. We can see how Don Quixote centralizes with Don Quixote’s development, Slaughterhouse Five with Billy Pilgrim, Candide with Candide, A Clockwork Orange with Alex, Nineteen Eighty-Four with Winston Smith, MacBeth with Macbeth, etc. Even if these characters are protagonists, antagonists, or anti heroes in their respective contexts, their development alters the development of the story.

When relating it to The Crying Of Lot 49, we can surmise that Oedipa (its central character) has a vast effect on the development of the story itself. At this height of the story we can identify pure paranoia in her way of acting: “Everyting she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (64). The sentence can be interpreted as being a whole metaphor for paranoia in general. To Oedipa, every single anomaly might mean something. A fact which becomes quite ironic taking into account that she called Miles a paranoid, when she herself is ten miles past paranoia. This state of paranoia leads the construction of sentences and paragraphs to be complete strays of Oedipa’s thoughts. To the reader, it’s like being inside Oedipa’s head, where every time an event is introduced, a whole stream of thoughts follow.

For example, we can see this relationship of event/stream of thoughts when she reads bronze historical marker at Fangoso Lagoons: “…The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust… A cross? Or the initial T? The same stuttered by Niccolò in The Courier’s Tragedy” (71). These side thoughts might have an important influence in the development on the story’s outcome later on. Oedipa’s paranoia leads the reader to believe that she is starting to see things that are not there, which reminded me of Theseus’ lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact:/ One sees more devils than vast hell can hold” (V. i. 7-9). In reference to this lines, Oedipa I seeing “more devils than vast hell can hold”. To her, every single anomaly in an everyday life is part of a conspiracy. This sensation of paranoia makes the reader also believe that everything will finally come to be connected with this conspiracy. It might be true that it will in the end connect, or maybe it’s just a smokescreen created by this vast sensation.