Under Milk Wood

Dylan Thomas's final and finest work, Under Milk Wood made a huge impression on its first arrival into the world.  A "play for voices," its staging involved a large cast, originally drawn from the National Theatre of Wales, with Thomas as narrator. It was commissioned by the BBC, but by the time they made their recording (the one with Richard Burton as narrator, which I've linked on the sidebar), Thomas was already ill; he died in the fall of 1954.

It's set in a mythical Welsh town -- Thomas's original name for it was Llarregub (a name that looks like that of a Welsh down, but it actually "bugger all" backwards). People have argued about which actual town it was meant to represent, but that's beside the point -- it is at once any town and no town, a place that exists only so far as its voices describe it, and just as they describe it.

We begin at night, with the dreams of the residents, wake up and wander through their mornings, and eventually reach the point just before the next night -- twenty-four hours of internal and external thoughts, monologues, and dialogues. Besides the narrator, a few figures seem most prominent, particularly "Captain Cat," who opens the night sequence with a dialogue with his sailors who have drowned, his "dead dears," rings the morning "wake up bell," and climbs back into his bunk near the end. But there are others -- very many others -- who endear themselves to our ears -- Organ Morgan whose thoughts return ever to his organ and the works of Bach; Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard who sleeps with one dead husband's ghost on either side, nagging them both; Lily Smalls, a housemaid in a "small" house with outsized dreams; Sinbad Sailors the barman, who has named his pillow after the girl he can't marry; and Mr. Mog Edwards whose love for Myfawny Price is known only through his letters, which are surreptitiously steamed open by Willy Nilly the postman and his wife.

Throughout, Thomas's poetic language juggles the senses, turning nouns into verbs and adjectives, playing with sound and sense, and heaving the whole dollop of humanity that is Milk Wood into his catch-net of wild words. So have at a few -- pick a character, a phrase, a moment -- and give us your thoughts below:

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Joan Didion was a remarkable writer and personality -- a chronicler of the counterculture who remained oddly apart from it, a sort of "participant observer" in a world so keenly observed and coolly described that more than fifty years after it appeared, Slouching Towards Bethlehem reads as though it was written just now.

Its 'chapters' were originally medium- to long-format essays that appeared in the pages of Vogue and other magazines. As Didion herself notes in her Preface, the essays don't all necessarily speak to the central theme, but that what she writes reflects what she feels. Now, in retrospect, they also seem a sort of time capsule of the moment; some subjects glitter like coins or gemstones, while others, like the small slips of paper and notes that are also often parts of such capsules, testify only to a minor moment or a single individual.

For our purposes, we'll want to start with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" -- it's classic Didion, a tale of love and death and dentistry among Seventh-Day Adventists living in the San Bernardino Valley of California. Next, we'll pause at the title essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which explicitly addresses its theme as it takes us to the famed Haight & Ashbury district of San Francisco at the moment of the so-called "Summer of Love." Finally, we'll touch on some of the shorter thematic essays at the end of the volume: "One Keeping a Notebook," "On Self-Respect," "On Morality," and "On Going Home." 

In your responses, choose just one of these essays, and think of it not simply in terms of its subject, but its style. What sense do you get of its writer? Does the essay have a certain shape or feel? And how does Didion get the effects she does? Take a close look at her language, and include a short quote in your comments as well.

Yeats

He was one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- English-language poets of the twentieth century. And, perhaps, he was a man for all time: while his roots ran deep into the misty nineteenth-century romanticism of the "Celtic Revival," the implications of his poems -- particularly his last ones -- runs through the twentieth century to the present moment, and beyond. For those who see chaos overcoming, uncertainty prevailing, and the old order fragmenting, his visions offer both a sort of lyrical desperation -- and yet also a form of hope.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a study in contradictions: the quintessential Irish poet, he spent the bulk of his career in England; the arch-druid of sublime desire, the love of his life -- Maud Gonne -- never returned his feelings; a fierce and unbending critic of British colonial rule over Ireland, his political persuasions late in life drew him close to neo-Fascist elements such as the Irish "Blueshirts." He was also, in the midst of his poetic career, a dedicated Occultist and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a mystical brotherhood unrelated to the modern far-right organization of that name). In that guise, he rubbed shoulders with acolytes of the arcane such as Aleister Crowley, S.L. MacGregor-Mathers, and Evelyn Underhill. As required of all initiates of that order, he designed and drew his own Tarot deck, the manuscript of which was preserved in his papers.

All of which seems more than a little odd with a poet whose voice and tone were, in his final decade, unmistakably modern. The 1930's, in addition to being a time of worldwide economic depression, were an era in which the returning shadow of war -- thought banished after the "Great War" -- gave rise to what became World War II. And Yeats's poetry both foreshadowed and embodied this growing sense of doom, never more eloquently than in "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The sense is clear: this is an apocalypse of human, not divine, making -- the blood-dimed tide is us. And yet, at the same time, Yeats celebrated his own humanity, age, and fragility, with more than a little dash of humor:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress

So many memorable phrases can be traced to him, and continue to resonate today: The Golden Apples of the Sun, No Country for old Men, Things Fall Apart, and many more. And among them, the title of Joan Didion's remarkable book of essays, which we'll soon be reading: Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

So read Yeats. Read him aloud, if you can, and dare! Here are direct links to his poems:

Sailing to Byzantium

The Circus Animals' Desertion

The Second Coming

In your responses below, see if you can make connections to the present moment, to where Yeats's words suddenly come back into relevance, and seem to speak to our present time:

Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead is a writer whose fictions have always traversed reality in strange ways. From his début novel, The Inuitionist, which is set in an imaginary conflict between two different schools of elevator inspection, through to Apex Hides the Hurt, a novel about an advertising writer whose specialty is giving new names and tagline to old products -- including towns and cities -- Whitehead has followed his own particular muse. Some of his novels, such as The Colossus of New York and John Henry Days, are apparently so offbeat that their current Wikipedia entries are nearly blank! 

His previous novel, The Underground Railroad, delved deep -- metaphorically and literally -- into its subject, with its central proposition: what if the "Underground Railroad" were actually a railroad that ran under the ground? Here, with Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead returns to a less surrealistic conceit, that of a man  -- Ray Carney -- whose central conundrum is whether to listen to his better or worser angels -- and the worser ones are by far the most talkative. In some ways, it's a classic heist novel, following the usual array of 'best-laid schemes' up to the point of their execution, and of (of course) nothing quite going as expected. All this is set within a lovingly-crafted portrait of Harlem in the 1960's a time when its former glories, in the swing time of the Harlem Renaissance and the club scene, are long behind it, and its eventual gentrification -- underway as we speak -- was unforeseen and unforeseeable.

The Greeks had a word for this kind of battle within and for the soul -- a psychomachia, a war within one's head -- and Ray's is a lively and convoluted one. On the one hand, he's a used furniture dealer with an eye for a good bargain, a family to feed, a business to keep up (and keep the appearance of up) -- on the other hand, he's a low-key "fence" for stolen goods, one of those "businesses on the side" that sometimes usurp the one in the center.

So follow his story, enjoy its twists and turns. Is there a moral to it? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it's not a heck of a lot of fun.

The Jungle

 For those who believe that literature can have a powerful, positive, effect on society, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is both a heartening and a disheartening example. Sinclair's portrait of the horrific living conditions of recent immigrants to the United States, and his specific portrait of the horrors of employment in the meat-packing industry, had a powerful effect beyond the one it had on its immediate readers. It led, dramatically and directly, to the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which greatly improved conditions at these plants -- for the meat, at any rate. The situation of the workers, and of immigrant families generally, did not improve, leading Sinclair to comment, with some bitterness, that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's embrace of the worker's cause, and of the promise of organizing trade unions, was prescient -- but in his day, he was more often hated than praised for it, and it's quite possible that, were a similar such story to appear today, it might re-ignite some of these same debates, which perhaps have never really gone away -- for some, "socialist" is still as dirty a word as it was in 1906.

The Jungle has been adapted in many forms, the first being a silent film made in 1914. Sinclair admired the film so much that he appeared in person in it as a sort of prologue and epilogue; once its first commercial run was completed, he bought the rights to the original negative with the hope of having it screened to wider audience. Unfortunately, as with many films of this era, no print of this version survives, though one can get something of a sense of it from the movie posters and publicity materials. A new film version was planned in 2011 by David Schwimmer (There Will Be Blood), but it was never made. And, a few years earlier. Peter Kuper also did a version for the re-booted "Classics Illustrated" series; Kuper's adaptation drew from the visual vocabulary of modernist art, making it in some ways feel closer to the period, though some readers found his version a bit too grotesque for their tastes.

Kristina Gehrmann is a graphic novelist and artist from Germany with quite a few major works to her credit, although her version of The Jungle is the first to appear in print in English. In 2015, her most substantial work -- Im Eisland ("In the Land of Ice") was published in Germany; it has since appeared in English as a webcomic, which you can read here. Filling three volumes, it undertakes to retell the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, a voyage that began with optimism and cheers and ended with cannibalism and despair. As she did with Im Eisland, Gehrmann combines meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds, clothing, and historical perspective with a facial style that is somewhat more like that of Japanese manga than of strict realism. Within that style, though, Gehrmann conveys emotion with masterful simplicity, leading a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books to remark that “In many ways, Gehrmann achieves what Upton Sinclair never quite did: She makes the characters real and complex, and she makes the political story a movingly human one.” As with Kuper's Heart of Darkness, Gehrmann's Jungle is mainly monochrome -- except for the visitations of red -- as meat, as blood, as human blushes and fury -- which haunts these pages to wonderful effect.

So read the first half of The Jungle -- and post your thoughts about it here. And, if you like, you can phrase your comment as a question for the author; with her permission, I'll be passing along some of these questions to her, and we can have the rare experience of getting answers directly from the artist/adapter herself!

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

In the realm of semi-autobiographical first novels, stands out from the crowd -- its story might seem implausible in any other guise, and indeed when in 2013 Winterson published a nonfiction account of her childhood and youth -- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? -- it almost paled by comparison. In both books, not unexpectedly, it's the main character's mother who stands out, not simply for her inflexible views on every detail of the proper conduct of life, but for the wry and often quite funny ways her daughter finds to resist them.

The setting is England, but not the Mary Poppins version that many Americans have in their minds -- rather, it's the dreary, drafty, drab working-class town of Accrington, whose principal claim to fame is the loss of a great swathe of its young men -- known as the Accrington Pals -- in World War I. In this world drained of color, the initially dutiful daughter Jeanette eventually grows in directions that place her increasingly at odds with her mother, and eventually, as she begins to identify as a lesbian, into outright violation of the core tenets of her mother's religious faith. The efforts that her mother and her fellow Pentacostals make to exorcise Jeanette's sexuality are disturbing and strange, but as readers we also sense from the start that they're likely to be futile.

Ultimately, it's a coming-of-age tale, and also a tale of a young woman coming into further self-awareness as a literary creator, an artist. You can read about Winterson's actual life on her website -- but don't read it until you're well along in the novel -- in her case, it's a bit difficult to say which is stranger, the 'truth' or the fiction. Winterson is also adamant that she does not want the book to be seen as a "lesbian novel" -- any more than a book about anyone should be limited in its audience to those who share the identity of its main character -- and its enduring popularity is testimony to the wide range of readers it has found.

So how does the story speak to you? Are there elements of the world it discloses, the characters, the situations, that evoke aspects of your own life? And what about the role of religion which, as we've discussed in class, seems just as often to stir rebellion as it is to reproduce faith? Your thoughts below.

Eggshells

When she heard that her first novel, Eggshells, had won the prestigious 2018 Rooney Prize, bestowed by Ireland's Trinity College, she might be forgiven her initial shock -- since, at that very moment, she was still employed by that same Trinity College -- as a janitor.

She was also a graduate of the college, and like many in her situation, needed a "day job" to pay the bills while she labored on her book. At the time she won the Rooney prize, she'd moved on to her second novel, but was beginning to despair of ever having a literary career. For, it must be admitted, it's no easy path becoming a writer -- if by "writer" you mean being able to earn a living at it. As of this writing, she still works at Trinity.

Central Dublin (click to enlarge)

The story of Eggshells is a strange one -- in some ways paralleling the Palm-Wine Drinkard. Where the drinkard explored "bushes," the narrator of Eggshells explores Dublin, not in the usual way of someone needing to get to work or run errands, but with a kind of deliberate randomness, designed to eventually cover the city mile by crooked mile. She's fortunate in that she has a home and money, but otherwise is quite alone in the world, at least until "Penelope" answers her advertisement for a friend. She, like the Drinkard, also has extraordinary powers, and is able to read the tea leaves of city streets and sights as well as any fortune teller. And yet, at the same time, she seems not to have a very good grasp of how to behave in a conventional manner -- perhaps just what one would expect were one a changeling, a child from the fairy land of Tir naNóg substituted in the cradle for a human infant. But how to get "back"?

I've provided a map of central Dublin that you can refer to as you read of her peregrinations; you should also feel very free to Google any unfamiliar landmarks or features that you hear about. I've often wondered whether, in reading this novel, it's better to know Dublin a bit -- but I think that, either way, the landscape here is not so much the "dear dirty Dublin" of everyday reality, but more like one of the Drinkard's "bushes" -- a jigsaw puzzle of fantastical pieces, a canvas for the imagination, a great wandering -- one in which the imagination is needed even if reality is at hand. So read -- and choose an episode, a sight, a moment that stirred your imagination -- and post about it below:

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

This week, we move to consider Amos Tutuola's weird yet groundbreaking novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. When it first appeared in 1952, the reviews were a mixture of astonishment and admiration; Dylan Thomas famously proclaimed it a "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story," and other reviews were also quite positive; others called it a "strange, eerie, poetic novel" and praised it as the embodiment of an African perspective of Africa. And yet, today, modern African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have tended to disparage Tutuola, accusing him of being too eager -- even if unconsciously -- ready to write just the sort of exotic, juju-filled story that Western readers expected from a "dark continent."

Forty years after its publication, in 1992, I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Tutuola, and to receive a contribution from him for a book I had proposed at the time: Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the book proposal never found a home, and when Mr. Tutuola passed on in 1997, I found myself with his contribution still unpublished. I had asked contributors to reflect on what they considered their "vernacular":

Although I wrote (and still do) in English, my writings, looking back now, are still in Yoruba, my mother tongue ... The medium in which my ideas are expressed is English, but when I write, the ideas I express, the atmosphere I create, and as reviewers of my works (perhaps rightly) maintain, the gestures readers encounter on the pages of the books I write are Yorubaish. Thus I think it can be said that beyond being a Yoruba writing in English, my works are African in conception.

The full essay has since been published in the journal Transition. I think that Mr. Tutuola's comments here give us a remarkable account of the unexpected combinations, conflicts, and sometimes fortuitous collisions of language and consciousness that are a powerful feature of postcolonial writings. Should a writer seeking to resist colonization be obliged to write in the colonizer's tongue? And if she or he chooses it despite its histories, can it be shaped, as Tutuola suggests, back into a "native" language?

Two years after The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was later the inspiration for a groundbreaking electronic album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, pioneering recordings of its kind. I urge everyone to read -- and listen to -- all of these remarkable works.

The Shadow

We've probably all experienced the sensation: somewhere, somehow, we saw a new possibility open up before us, or felt a strange impulse to follow a desire that we could hardly name. We were wise, or so we thought, to resist the temptation, to stay on the path of our sober-minded, plan-in-advance selves. And then, perhaps years later, we wondered why, and what things might have been like if we hadn't.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" takes up this question -- decidedly one that haunts adults rather than children -- in a strange allegory that reads like a fairy tale but burns at the soul like some mad tale of Poe. And like Poe (and Shelley, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and many others), Andersen hit upon the folk legend of a double, or doppelgänger, as a metaphor for this desire deferred. With roots deep in popular folklore, these tales of someone with an uncanny resemblance to one's self are chilling enough as far as they go -- for it seems that there's only room in the universe for one of them: either the double or the self must die.

In Andersen's tale, the "learned man" (perhaps "scholar" would be a more apt English translation) permits his shadow to do pursue a course of action he himself was too timid to attempt, and initially counts himself fortunate. The lack of a shadow, after all, was but a minor inconvenience -- what of it? The twist here is that this decision precipitates the birth of a separate entity, one that eventually comes to possess all of the boldness and sense of purpose that the student lacked. The student, gradually and inexorably, is fated to become the shadow's shadow, and eventually even less than that.

Many people assume that fairy tales ought to teach some moral lesson. They forget that, in their original forms, most folktales had no such lesson; it was moralizers such as Perrault (who published the most popular versions of "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood") who attached morals to them, in part to make them safe for family reading, to harness their wild imaginings in the name of civilizing influence.

But although "The Shadow," like many of Andersen's tales, has a sort of moral in it, there's also a strong contravening force: if we are to avoid the fate of the unfortunate scholar, we must in fact act on our desires, must sometimes step outside the moral and personal codes that bind us. And indeed, anyone who creates -- whether a writer of fictions, a visual artist, or a filmmaker -- is already engaged in the shadow business.

The poet William Blake, in his diabolical Proverbs of Hell, perhaps put it most bluntly: "Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire."

A Mermaid and a Girl

"The Little Mermaid" may be one of the best-known fairy tales of all time, but it took its time to get there. Although written in 1837, it wasn't translated into English until 1872, and although Andersen considered it one of his fairy tales "for children," there seems to have been some shyness about handing a tale to little girls that clearly seems to take as its underlying theme the subject of sexual maturity. Andersen himself sealed the ending of the story with what may be one of the most moralistic morals ever penned:

"For every day on which we find a good child who pleases his parents and deserves their love, God shortens our days of trial. The child does not know when we float through his room, but when we smile at him in approval one year is taken from our three hundred. But if we see a naughty, mischievous child we must shed tears of sorrow, and each tear adds a day to the time of our trial."

As P.L. Travers (Mary Poppins) said, "A year taken off when a child behaves and a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty? Andersen, this is blackmail. And the children know it and say nothing. There's magnanimity for you."

Disney, in converting Andersen's antique moralizing into modern family fare, actually did a remarkable job of holding on to the charged understory of a girl coming of age with desire, not just for the human world, but for a human prince. They discretely applied two scallop shells, along with water-bound as well as air-bound sidekicks, and made the sisters into the same sort of annoying wannabes as those of Cinderella. But it was with the Sea Witch that they worked the best magic; by having her, with Ariel's stolen voice (thankfully not her actual tongue) embody Ariel's rival they considerably upped the ante on the final climax. And of course, the little mermaid -- who doesn't die -- gets both legs and man. 

In contrast, "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" takes us on a moralistic tale about a very bad girl -- stepping on a loaf of bread meant for her parents is an act that loses most readers' sympathy -- though here it's once again compounded by Andersen's making the vanity of a beloved pair of shoes clean the cause -- and it seems that things must go from bad to worse to worser. The angel that visits here does not bring a sword -- but tears -- but even those fail to fully redeem the lost girl. She is only able to find salvation after being reincarnated as a bird and sharing out as much grain as it must have taken to make the loaf upon which she trod so many years before. Even then, it's not quite to heaven that Inger ascends -- though perhaps that's a more satisfying end -- at least she's alive.

Welcome!

We live in an age of categorization, one which imagines that connecting a piece of writing to its proper imagined audience is essential, whether one is an educator or a publicist. The history of literature, it seems, has always had its categories, both formal (fiction, poetry, drama) and generic (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories). And, for each of these genres, there’s a presumed audience, as the forms and subjects of written matter follow their readers from a baby’s first board-book on through every stage of life and human interests, on up to the scuffed hardcovers scattered on table-tops in an assisted-living facility.

The genres of literature often take on the added purpose both of representing these varied stages in our reading, and catering to them. Children are supposed to read fairy-tales and books of wonder; teenagers crave adventure and romance, while young adults may seek solace for their sense of alienation. In the robust middle of life, our shared social reality and the issues of the day can predominate, along with the challenges of pursuing a career and balancing a budget. In later years, reflections – both bitter and sweet – loom suddenly larger, and at the end of (or, in some writings, after) life, we go to our graves with scores unsettled.

 

This course will take us through several of these “ages” of literature: for childhood, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen; for coming-of-age, the wild adventures of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, along with the fearful fundamentalism of the mother in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In young adulthood, we’ll wander the streets of Dublin with Catriona Lally, seeking signs of entrances to the otherworld. For mid-life, we’ll explore social realism and life’s struggles with Upton Sinclair’s muckraking classic The Jungle, followed by Colson Whitehead’s vibrant Harlem Shuffle. For old age, we’ll have the good company of Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his older years, which in their turn spurred some of the wry essays of Joan Didion. In the end, we’ll join in the ghostly colloquies from a country churchyard and a sleeping populace in Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood.

 

Throughout our journey, like all good adventurers, we’ll be asking questions, beginning with the most fundamental: what is “literature,” anyway? Why is it supposed to be “good” for us? And what difference does it make when the voices who speak come from experiences and times different from our own, whether in nation (Nigeria, England, Ireland, Wales), cultural identity (gay, Black, working-class, evangelical), gender or age. Is there more strength to be gained by reading of experiences like our own, or those of others? Does identity confer authority upon the author? And are those fairy-tales really for children, after all? And what does the purported genre of a book – fantasy, folktale, semi-autobiographical novel, poem, or play – tell us about how we might read it, or (perhaps) read against its form?