Hi scholars,
Here is the PowerPoint I used for our introduction to and discussion of Octavia Butler’s “The Book of Martha”.
Best,
Mike
Hi scholars,
Here is the PowerPoint I used for our introduction to and discussion of Octavia Butler’s “The Book of Martha”.
Best,
Mike
The history of the interpretation of myth is about as varied as myth itself. As we delve into Salley Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet you may want to learn more about how myth was interpreted. After all, one of the two voices in Where Three Roads Meet is Sigmund Freud, who famously interpreted the myth of Oedipus as being about childhood sexual desires, frustrations, and jealousies.
This first link provides a brilliant and succinct overview of how myth has been interpreted in each period from ancient Greece down to the present. It includes everyone from Xenophanes of Colophon, Anaxagoras, Socrates and Plato, to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Where the first link organizes various approaches to myth chronologically from oldest to more recent, this link connects to a page that divides interpretations up according to guiding principles (i.e. “as disguised history”; “as pre-scientific explanation” etc).
Scholars,
Here are three sources that may help you with “Where Three Roads Meet”.
The first is a review written by Salley Vickers for The Guardian. You can read it by clicking here. In addition to summarizing the story of Oedipus, Vickers’ critiques Freud’s theory by suggesting that Freud emphasizes the story of the child who kills his father and beds his mother, while failing to recognize the equally important story of the parents who disastrously fail to murder their child.
This second source is from Liz Gloyn’s excellent blog, Classically Inclined. You can read her insightful, short post here.
The third source I’ve selected is a literary analysis of the role of Tireseas, the seer, in the novel. It’s a bit longer and denser than the other two pieces, but for those of you with time on your hands, you can read it here.
In preparation for reading / discussing Salley Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet, some of you may wish to listen to or read Oedipus the King. The 1986 BBC adaptation is available, streaming, through NOVA’s library. Search for it in Films on Demand. This link should get you there but you may have to logon using your NOVA ID and password to view the movie.
You can also listen to the play. Audible has an excellent full-cast production of the play as translated by Nicholas Rudall, but if you don’t have an audible account you may wish to listen to this version on Youtube:
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Youtube, 28 September 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9WOQT7qD7w
Some of you may prefer to read the play. There are numerous translations available, but here is at least one online, verse translation.
Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by Ian Johnston, 2014, http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/sophocles/oedipusthekinghtml.html. Accessed 9 Sept. 2018.
You may also want to read this interview with Salley Vickers:
Feay, Suzi. “Interview: Author Salley Vickers explains why Freud got it all wrong about Oedipus.” Independent, 4 Nov. 2007, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/interview-author-salley-vickers-explains-why-freud-got-it-all-wrong-about-oedipus-398566.html. Accessed 9 Sept. 2018.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation fifth season episode, “Darmok,” Captain Picard, played by the fabulous Patrick Stewart, summarizes The Epic of Gilgamesh for an alien commander. In Picard’s account, the focus is not on Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality, but rather on the grief Gilgamesh experiences at the loss of his friend, Enkidu. Gilgamesh’s grief foreshadows Picard’s grief when his alien friend dies. You can see Patrick Stewart telling the story here:
“Epic of Gilgamesh in two minutes by Patrick Stewart.” Youtube, uploaded by paul f, 9 Dec. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCmwClf0F8g.
Scholars,
The following excerpt from de Beauvoir’s classic, The Second Sex, provides a concise introduction to the construction of woman as Other. This text is invaluable in understanding structuralism, and will be referenced by both Rachel and myself as we end our discussion of Gilgamesh and begin our discussion of Circe.
de Beauvoir, Simone. From Second Sex. Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts, edited by Heather Masri, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009, pp. 179-185.
This handout is for students in the fall 2018 free class.
Last class we discussed at length Edna Pontellier’s final act in The Awakening. In particular the debate revolved around what options, if any, Edna had outside of suicide. Was her suicide courageous or cowardly? Could she have remained loyal to her sense of her awakening self and still be part of society? Some of us argued that there were historical precedents of women, George Eliot, for example, violating social conventions and norms while living full lives. Others of us suggested that, given Leonce Pontellier’s “ownership” of Edna, of their children and of all her property, freedom, outside of the freedom of death, was simply not an option. I argued that ultimately Kate Chopin forecloses the notion of other options by not providing (much) evidence for them in the novel. Edna chooses the only real option that Kate Chopin gives her.
While an author relinquishes control over the novel as soon as it is published, the reader’s interpretation of the motives and actions of a character are circumscribed by the words on the page. A reader may be tempted to envision changes for a favorite story, and that’s the reader’s prerogative – and one of the joys of reading – but at that point the reader is creating fan-fiction. The limitations created by the word on the page apply equally, it should be noted, to authors and readers. J. K. Rowling may tell fans that Dumbledore is gay, but in the novels he is neither gay nor straight – he’s asexual. Rowling (quite reasonably) decided to ignore the sexuality of all of her professors at Hogwarts. Readers, and perhaps Rowling herself, forget that these characters do not magically exist outside the margins of the page.
That said, there is nothing wrong with fan-fiction, and a reader’s creative collaboration with the author’s world can enrich the reader’s appreciation for the text. So permit me to invite you to speculate about how Edna’s death would be read by the surviving characters. Like readers encountering a text for the first time, Leonce, Robert, Mademoiselle Reisz and Madame Ratignolle encounter Edna’s body (or, at very least, the fact of her death) for the first time, and must interpret it. Several interpretations offer themselves:
None of these explanations exist within the story itself. After all, as far as the reader is concerned, once Edna dies, the other characters die, too. We can envision what we like for the other characters – Madame Ratignolle might murder her children and husband and run-off with Mademoiselle Reisz; in a fit of guilt Leonce might commit suicide; Robert might renounce women and go on to become a priest. All of these futures, and infinite others, are possibilities – but not possibilities in the pages of The Awakening.
This is Rachel – I still haven’t figured out how to post under my own name…that’s rather poignant within this topic. This is the second blog that I have started about The Dispossessed; however, the other post ended up being too much information for “just a blog” and will end up being a scholarly article on “Language, Masculine Discourse, and Sexual Assault in Le Guin’s Feminist Critique of Utopia.” This blog post is NOT that. But it does tie in with that overall theme. So… on to names.
Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday night. Coincidentally, we are reading and discussing The Dispossessed this week. I also always teach two of Le Guin’s short stories in my ENG111 each semester (and sometimes in my Women’s Lit and American Lit courses). I love the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, and so do many of my friends. I received not one, not two, but four separate text messages from other lovers of Le Guin grieving SF’s and feminist literature’s loss. One of those texts simply said, “Ursula.” That name alone was all that the text needed to say. I knew exactly who it meant, I knew what it was about that name that my friend was saying, and I felt the same emotions that my friend felt, simply by reading the name “Ursula.”
This set me thinking about names and the meaning/importance of names and the act of naming (or unnaming). In my literature classes, I regularly tell students that the names of characters are important, that authors intentionally choose the names of people and places (as well as titles, but we’ll talk about that in class tomorrow). In the article, “Personal Names and Identity in Literary Context,” Benedicta Windt-Val notes the “close connection between a person’s given name and their feelings of identity and self. …[P]ersonal names and place names are some of the most important tools of the author in the creation of credible characters placed in a literary universe that gives the impression of being authentic.” This highlights the significance between a name and an identity, as well as a name and credibility and being authentic. In many of Le Guin’s writings we see the connection between name and identity, including The Dispossessed, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and “She Unnames Them.” However, Le Guin isn’t simply naming or giving her characters names to signify their credibility or authenticity; rather she is leaving them nameless, “unnaming” them, or giving them computer generated, generic names, as a means to deconstruct and demonstrate the power in a name, challenging the naming power, challenging those who traditionally name.
Let’s look at The Dispossessed as our first example: the women and men of Anarres have non-gender specific names, given out by a computer, so that no two names are the same. Each name is a random assemblage of letters to create something uniquely unlike anyone else. This process is based on the teachings of Odo. In Le Guin’s precursor short story “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974), Odo says that the anarchist movement was “not strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as the need did. …But when it came to names they were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever they got called, afraid of being pinned down or penned in” (28). Out of this, the unimportance of names arises on Annares.
A name in many cultures, including many names in Latin based languages, implies gender, one aspect of identity. In the arena of gender, Annares’ computer generated names stand tall. On Urras, when discussing gender differences on Annares, the Urrasi physicists complain and/or comment on how Annaresti names are useless for telling gender, which they find troubling and a bit offensive: “‘Gvarab was a woman?’ Pae said in genuine surprise and laughed. Oiie looked unconvinced and offended, “Can’t tell from your names, of course,” he said coldly” (74). The idea of gender equality escapes the Urrasi people and the binary genders of men and women not only have distinctive, identifying names, but entirely separate spheres. The names of Annarestis deny Urrasis from easily dismissing a woman based upon her gender, as defined by her name. In this way, to this end of eliminating gender differences in names, the computer naming process on Urres works well. However, one’s name on Urres still ties closely to individual identity.
The computer generated name isn’t a name that carries with it tones or meaning from previous owners or of family heritage. The name doesn’t give the child something to live up to. For most on Annares, this naming process and their unique name appears freeing (at least that’s how Shevek seems to view it). However, we are shown that the name still ties deeply to the core of identity, as we see in the one instance, when Shevek meets someone with a too similar name. This other man insists on beating up Shevek (who tries to defend himself, but he’s still a scrawny boy). [Side bar: is it odd or coincidental that both of these characters with similar names both happen to be men? It strikes me as an odd coincidence and I believe Le Guin to be too crafty for this to merely be coincidence.] This instance demonstrates that there is ownership over the name and that ownership is worth fighting for. If their names were exactly alike, we could envision a society plagued with these sort of name squabbles. But even in this solitary instance, rather than unite people because they don’t have family ownership over the name or because the power isn’t in the hands of someone naming, the name acts as an individualizing tool. Each name carries with it the burden of being distinctly unique and is easily threatened when it is reveled to not be so unique after all. This name, albeit randomly assigned, still carries with it the weight of identity, and here that is the identity of the individual (not the collective) and the needs of the individual seem to take precedent in this example. Le Guin enforces the notion of the “close connection between a person’s given name and their feelings of identity and self.” Even within a system where a computer randomly assigns a name, the name provides a person with a strong sense of identity.
Naming also plays a key role in Le Guin’s short story “She Unnames Them.” The title tells us as much. In this short story (read it here), an unnamed narrator goes around and unnames animals, or rather she convinces them to give their names back. “Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifferences with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names.” Doesn’t this sound exactly like the words of Odo when discussing the anarchists? The unnamed narrator acknowledges that there is power in naming and in unnaming: “it was somewhat more powerful than I had anticipated.” However, she doesn’t want the power, but rather is handing the power back to the animals to decide on the names they do or do not want. She then does the same thing with her name; she gives it back. She “went to Adam, and said, “You and your father lent me this [name] – gave it to me actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit me very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.” With the reference to Adam, the animals, the father, and a later comment about the garden, as a reader we know who the narrator is and our urge is to name her. Le Guin knows this. If I ask my students who have just read this, “who is the narrator?” they immediately tell me that it is Eve. But she isn’t. That was the name that Adam and God the father gave her. They defined her, pinned her down, and penned her in with naming her what they wanted. The narrator gives that name back; she helps the animals to give their names back. She frees herself and helps the animals free themselves as well. Her identity and the identity of the animals now resides in their own hands. They define themselves, they name themselves, they create themselves, and they now control and tell their own story. In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989), Le Guin notes “[I]n its everyday uses in the service of justice and clarity, what I call the father tongue is immensely noble and indispensably useful. When it claims a privileged relationship to reality, it becomes dangerous and potentially destructive….The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard” (Dancing 14849). For Le Guin, this “language of power” privileges particular ways of theorizing and understanding the world. It is gender-biased at its core. This father tongue, THE Father’s tongue named everything and everyone in the world. It not only “claims a privileged relationship to reality,” it IS reality. All of reality. This “father-tongue” is what the unnamed narrator in “She Unnames Them” is rejecting. It isn’t a forceful rejection, but a giving the gift back, a careful, deliberate unnaming, reclaiming of her self, of her identity.
Lastly, to note the importance of names in Le Guin’s work, I direct us to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (read here). In this short story, our again unnamed narrator introduces us to Omelas. There isn’t a single singular name in the entire story. In this story, only “the people of Omelas” exist, with only one exception: the child who is not considered part of the people. “In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.” This child is kept away from the people. This child MUST be kept separate from the people. No one can talk to the child. “The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.” All of their happiness depends upon the child being kept apart and dehumanized and all the people of Omelas know this: “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” The unnamed, ungendered child is no longer human; even the pronoun “it” is used in reference. The child is without a name because it is without an identity, stripped of clothes, dignity, love, and name. The removal of the name here is used as a weapon against the child to dehumanize it, which is what needs to happen for the society to exist. The people of Omelas are also unnamed in the story though. This unnaming allows them to evade individual responsibility for the abominable misery of the child. As a whole, collective people, no one person holds any other one person responsible. No one is to blame. No name, no blame. The close link between a name and feelings of identity applies when all the people identify as one collective Omelas consciousness.
In many other of Le Guin’s works she plays with the notion of names and the naming process. She clearly links naming with power and names with identity. Logan Pearsall Smith said, “Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.” Le Guin shows names as labels to past, present, and future behavior. Her name conveys an essence of brilliance from her past behaviors and her life of writing. May we always remember her name and the power therein.