Thursday, July 2, 2009
Principles of Biology with a Lab
So, it is one hour and twenty-three minutes into my lecture on dominant alleles and phenotypic ratios. I question the validity of a profession which I am devoting my life to. I mean I have to convince myself this is worthwhile when everything in my being says otherwise. One of the interesting things is it reminds me what a pain it is to be a student again. If you don't care, well, no depth of knowledge or range of strategies can make you care. I mean this is a good experience for that insight even though I am paying just shy of $1000 to learn the obvious. I should not be surprised, but I am. I thought I had this school thing figured out. Well, I only have 28 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes to reinforce this lesson.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Tarnished Soul
Jeremy J. Armstrong
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
The Tarnished Soul
5 May 2009
I chose prompt five to guide this term paper because I felt an affinity with the whisky priest’s struggle with faith and the modern questioning of “man’s relationship to God.” The Power and the Glory was the piece of literature I most identified with this entire semester (Sense and Sensibility notwithstanding of course). The intertextual parallels with Biblical imagery were especially appealing in such a tragically flawed and epically human priest searching for meaning essentially alone with his faith. I chose Nietzsche and the pre-Vatican teachings on grace and absolution to serve as viewpoints to which Green was responding with the whisky priest. This novel highlighted the existence of faith despite all evidence to the contrary. I also read this story as a response to the nihilistic elements of modernist thought especially prevalent in the early 20th century. The whisky priest recognized the divine in the often deformed face of the human condition. His maturation stands as a testament to the power of faith to meet the needs of the emptiness of the “reasoning human mind” which kills even hope (Greene 141).
A lost man journeys from somewhere to nowhere without a friend in the world or place to lay his head. There is no time or place to mark his passing. He is every man and no man. He walks to save the world and to damn the world. He feels the weight of his own inadequacy and the pressure of God’s immensity. He turns to unoriginal sins to make the pain go away. He turns to God to make the suffering of living meaningful. Through his abandonment and sorrows, he learns to see the face of God in humanity. This is the story of one man as far from sainthood as a man can possibly be, yet he finds the beauty in living that makes life worth enduring. The question of God’s existence may never be answered satisfactorily in our age of cynicism, but this lone man’s struggle with faith is at the heart of an authentic existence and modern literature’s relationship to man.
The lone man’s solitary struggle with the crushing forces of existence is a hallmark of modern literature. Jean Paul Sartre wrote of the “annihilating nothingness” of the modern age’s nihilism and he “argues relentlessly that we are responsible for everything we do and everything we are” (Calhoun 245). This condemnation to freedom stalks the whisky priest as he wanders about hoping God will “send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for” (Greene 135). The whisky priest is condemned not only by society’s judgment of his moral shortcomings but also the Church he serves that he can no longer approach for solace. He condemns himself to a fate that he will not confer on the mestizo who betrays him or the lieutenant who orders his execution. This exclusion from grace embodies the heart of his relationship with God and understanding of love. He would not condemn his most vicious enemies to the fate which he imposes on himself. Following the suffering servant model of Christ, the whisky priest willingly takes on the sins of the present world’s condemnation to atone for the sins of his past.
The whisky priest unquestionably accepts who and what he is when he giggles: “This was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone” as he sinks to the depths of despair and poverty (144). The whisky priest cannot comprehend Franciscan values of reverencing all of creation when he is faced with his own survival versus that of a mongrel dog. He understands that “her life had no importance beside that of a human being” (144). Through his descent into the depths of despair, the whisky priest finds the inestimable worth of the human person and the dignity of the soul often obscured by crushing poverty. This descent is crucial in framing the whisky priest’s evolving attitude towards God and faith after his smug beginnings as an ambitious social climber in a minor parish.
This scene also symbolizes the existential struggle facing humanity’s struggle against its bestial nature following the horrific catastrophe of World War I. Nietzsche wrote of the “splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory” that seemed to comprise the base of the conqueror’s morality dominating the early 20th century’s philosophy and literature (40). This victor’s right resulted in the untold loss of millions of lives in the fields of Flanders and trenches of Germany during World War I and the atrocities of genocide and total war in World War II. Conqueror’s morality helped justify the means of throwing men by the thousands into barbed wire and machine gun nests to gain a few hundred yards of emaciated mud. The lieutenant embodied this conqueror’s morality when he “was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes” (Greene 58). Philosophers and writers suffered the psychic blow of the insignificance of human life in the face of devastating military losses and totalitarian ideology. Men were discarded as so many pawns upon a chess board on a scale unknown in the history of mankind. As artists grappled with this reality, traditional faith in literature was assaulted with all the force of Panzer tanks and mustard gas on the battlefield.
The human side of faith was often ridiculed for its weakness and frailty in the face of such loss (not much different than in our day), and bad representatives of faith were often held up as examples of how God was no longer present in a world that had lost scale and meaning. The intellectual landscape had become “a vacant universe and cooling world” (Greene 58). Nietzsche’s view of the “profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty” seemed unleashed on the world while traditional religion had ceased answering the 20th century demands for meaningful answers for suffering and why these horrors were allowed to occur by a loving God (42).
In this universe of meaningless coincidence, the priest as an archetype is often portrayed as a ridiculous man, the leftover remnant of a superstitious era, an absurd lifestyle no longer practical. The priest has no place in a world run by power politics, scientific advancement, technological progress and global economic forces. The priest has no moral authority in a world that has disposed of God as inadequate to address humanity’s deepest longings. Those longings are no longer important as they are not measurable and observable. Responding to whether God was obsolete or not, Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “God is dead,” and the literature of the era took up the absence of sacred meaning as an anthem and emblem of the world having changed irrevocably (125).
With the death of God, God’s servants became tragic clowns on the heath. Priests as literary characters became caricatures of faith—exposing faith’s limitations and shortcomings instead of serving as conduits to divine grace and reconciliation with God. Priests became as obsolete as a God who would “punish the innocent with more life” (155). They became relics of a bygone era no longer of use in an enlightened state.
The whisky priest stands as the shambling wreck of the absurdity of traditional religious faith in answering modern questions. He is Nietzsche’s Madman from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He sins mortally and consistently. He mocks the very possibility of forgiveness and grace of which he is an agent. The whisky priest had even “lost the faculty” to repent of his sins by his own admission which would have prevented him from obtaining absolution under Catholic doctrine. This is also an immense sin of hubris as all sins are forgivable except sins against the Holy Spirit whose grace he was denying by this refusal (Greene 128). Despite his failings (maybe because of them), the whisky priest is able to realize the human face of God in those he is called to serve. After burying the Indian child, the whisky priest describes an authentic relationship with God as “wanting to be with Him, to be near Him … wanting to protect Him from yourself” (173). He realizes his own unworthiness to have God because he could never live up to the Christian ideal of self-surrendering love. If the whisky priest were to answer Nietzsche’s Madman, he would respond, “We must kill God because of our own unworthiness and jealousy and smallness of spirit, but we weep over His sacrifice for us in the depths of our sin and pray for His forgiveness as we have since we first crucified Him.”
At the heart of the whisky priest’s conversion is his belief in the transformative power of love. He admonishes the pious woman with the gospel of love: “They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach—well, love” (125). His belief in the power of the transformative power of life was poignantly clear in his over-riding love for his daughter despite the eternal risk to his immortal soul. According to pre-Vatican theology, remaining unrepentant for a mortal sin prevented a soul from returning to a state of grace. The whisky priest jeopardized his soul—not only through his own sins—but also through his unwillingness to seek absolution for those sins. His personal theology placed the emphasis on love—an all-conquering love that could only exist between him and his conception of a forgiving God of Love who partook of suffering willing to bring lost humanity back to a personal relationship with God and secure in a place in God’s kingdom.
The whisky priest parallels the priest that heard the nameless man’s confession in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, another modernist portrayal of the trial of faith in a “man victimized by life itself” (Camus i). Camus’s priest reflects on the nameless murderer’s plight, “These stone walls, I know it only too well, are steeped in human suffering. … I am speaking from the depths of my heart—I know that even the wretchedest amongst you have sometimes seen, taking form against that grayness, a divine face. It’s that face you are asked to see” (Camus 148-149). That face of God “taking form against that grayness” is what the whisky priest experiences in his prison experience. The whisky priest rebukes the pious, old woman’s hypocrisy, “It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty” (Greene 130). The whisky priest has moved beyond the trappings of sanctity and learned that God is real and present in the poor, suffering humanity he encounters through his lonely journey towards his fate. He has moved beyond the intellectual understanding of faith to the true inner reality of faith. He no longer can rest on his position to ensure him authority or his theological arguments to prove his intellectual superiority. The whisky priest is alone with God. In his spiritual solitary confinement, he finds the old man resting his head on his shoulder, the murderer asking for him to hear his confession without the formal Act of Reconciliation, the cleaning of the cells’ feces and vomit. He finds the sacramental power of life to answer his question of meaning and value. He sees the underlying divinity in the distressed face of God present in the exquisite suffering and indomitable beauty of the image and likeness of God on earth.
Another important evolution in the whisky priest’s relationship to God is his broken understanding of his own frailty. After the jefe and beggar finish the last of the wine, the whisky priest laments that he sees, “All the hope of the world draining away” in the last dregs swallowed with bureaucratic disregard for the spiritual aspect that was present in the wine (113). This mockery of Holy Communion highlights the unworthiness of all those who approach the altar of God with false pride in their hearts much as the whisky priest sees himself as a minister of God’s Body and Blood. Even in this sham of the Eucharistic celebration, grace is present. The jefe admits the disguised priest as “the soul of his country” which foreshadows the mysterious workings of faith and conversion present in the whisky priest as he approaches his road to perdition (113).
This draining of the cup also corresponds to the “cup of His wrath / Who drained to the dregs / the bowl of staggering” which is often used to foreshadow Christ’s suffering before being crucified on the Cross on Golgotha (Isaiah 51:17). This verse shows the visceral connection the whisky priest feels to his faith, the physical quality of Christ’s life and ministry and excruciating death that the whisky priest is now facing as a true believer in Christ’s message of all-encompassing love. Biblical allusions litter this novel. The whisky priest’s ministry to the crowds in prison and village closely resemble Jesus’ public ministry in the New Testament. The priest’s mule journey towards the capitol mirrors Jesus triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The priest’s love of the sinner in himself and his fellow man while hating the sin embodies Christ’s Golden Rule to love others as you love yourself. He is even able to love the face of his Pilate when he looks at the lieutenant and says, “You’re a good man,” after receiving the five pesos as alms that will cover the price for Mass (140). This forgiveness of the man whose sole mission in life is to eradicate the priesthood in Tabasco astonishes even the most cynical observer of Christian forgiveness.
Modernism tried to answer the absurdity and superstition of primitive religious faith in the light of scientific reason and technological advancement. The lieutenant voices the loss of the fragile faith which makes suffering worthwhile, “Life was never going to be again for them what it was for me [devoid of] the dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger” (220). The lieutenant laments the loss of the very thing he eradicated in much the same way that Judas mourned for Christ’s death before committing suicide. Life appears suddenly filled with “an appalling sense of loneliness” (217). In the midst of this desertion, the new Father appears and Luis bows to the return of heroic faith in the face of persecution regardless of how insignificant and absurd those instruments of faith appear in the light of reason. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Through the whisky priest’s sacrifice, Luis is able to see a flawed person acting heroically despite his personal failings and shortcomings. The whisky priest becomes more than he is through the faith working in him. His sacrifice saves Luis’s soul through this final act of witness to the truth which is the literal translation of martyrdom.
The whisky priest is not a hero. He begged that God would send someone more worthwhile to tend his flock. Still, God chose him for this ministry, and his faith ensured that he stayed true to his vocation despite his sins and personal weaknesses. While his life was far from saintly, his death provided a witness for the transformative power of faith in the light of a loving God who can save even the most wretched soul. This final sacrifice allows the light of the divine to shine even through the most tarnished of human souls for the greater power and glory of God.
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. Camus and Sartre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Calhoun, Cheshire and Solomon, Robert. What is an Emotion?—Classical Readings in
Philosophical Psychology. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Random House, 1946.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Good and Evil, Good and Bad.” On the Genealogy of Morals.
Translator Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translator Walter Kaufman. New York:
Random House, 1965.
New American Bible. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1991.
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
The Tarnished Soul
5 May 2009
I chose prompt five to guide this term paper because I felt an affinity with the whisky priest’s struggle with faith and the modern questioning of “man’s relationship to God.” The Power and the Glory was the piece of literature I most identified with this entire semester (Sense and Sensibility notwithstanding of course). The intertextual parallels with Biblical imagery were especially appealing in such a tragically flawed and epically human priest searching for meaning essentially alone with his faith. I chose Nietzsche and the pre-Vatican teachings on grace and absolution to serve as viewpoints to which Green was responding with the whisky priest. This novel highlighted the existence of faith despite all evidence to the contrary. I also read this story as a response to the nihilistic elements of modernist thought especially prevalent in the early 20th century. The whisky priest recognized the divine in the often deformed face of the human condition. His maturation stands as a testament to the power of faith to meet the needs of the emptiness of the “reasoning human mind” which kills even hope (Greene 141).
A lost man journeys from somewhere to nowhere without a friend in the world or place to lay his head. There is no time or place to mark his passing. He is every man and no man. He walks to save the world and to damn the world. He feels the weight of his own inadequacy and the pressure of God’s immensity. He turns to unoriginal sins to make the pain go away. He turns to God to make the suffering of living meaningful. Through his abandonment and sorrows, he learns to see the face of God in humanity. This is the story of one man as far from sainthood as a man can possibly be, yet he finds the beauty in living that makes life worth enduring. The question of God’s existence may never be answered satisfactorily in our age of cynicism, but this lone man’s struggle with faith is at the heart of an authentic existence and modern literature’s relationship to man.
The lone man’s solitary struggle with the crushing forces of existence is a hallmark of modern literature. Jean Paul Sartre wrote of the “annihilating nothingness” of the modern age’s nihilism and he “argues relentlessly that we are responsible for everything we do and everything we are” (Calhoun 245). This condemnation to freedom stalks the whisky priest as he wanders about hoping God will “send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for” (Greene 135). The whisky priest is condemned not only by society’s judgment of his moral shortcomings but also the Church he serves that he can no longer approach for solace. He condemns himself to a fate that he will not confer on the mestizo who betrays him or the lieutenant who orders his execution. This exclusion from grace embodies the heart of his relationship with God and understanding of love. He would not condemn his most vicious enemies to the fate which he imposes on himself. Following the suffering servant model of Christ, the whisky priest willingly takes on the sins of the present world’s condemnation to atone for the sins of his past.
The whisky priest unquestionably accepts who and what he is when he giggles: “This was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone” as he sinks to the depths of despair and poverty (144). The whisky priest cannot comprehend Franciscan values of reverencing all of creation when he is faced with his own survival versus that of a mongrel dog. He understands that “her life had no importance beside that of a human being” (144). Through his descent into the depths of despair, the whisky priest finds the inestimable worth of the human person and the dignity of the soul often obscured by crushing poverty. This descent is crucial in framing the whisky priest’s evolving attitude towards God and faith after his smug beginnings as an ambitious social climber in a minor parish.
This scene also symbolizes the existential struggle facing humanity’s struggle against its bestial nature following the horrific catastrophe of World War I. Nietzsche wrote of the “splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory” that seemed to comprise the base of the conqueror’s morality dominating the early 20th century’s philosophy and literature (40). This victor’s right resulted in the untold loss of millions of lives in the fields of Flanders and trenches of Germany during World War I and the atrocities of genocide and total war in World War II. Conqueror’s morality helped justify the means of throwing men by the thousands into barbed wire and machine gun nests to gain a few hundred yards of emaciated mud. The lieutenant embodied this conqueror’s morality when he “was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes” (Greene 58). Philosophers and writers suffered the psychic blow of the insignificance of human life in the face of devastating military losses and totalitarian ideology. Men were discarded as so many pawns upon a chess board on a scale unknown in the history of mankind. As artists grappled with this reality, traditional faith in literature was assaulted with all the force of Panzer tanks and mustard gas on the battlefield.
The human side of faith was often ridiculed for its weakness and frailty in the face of such loss (not much different than in our day), and bad representatives of faith were often held up as examples of how God was no longer present in a world that had lost scale and meaning. The intellectual landscape had become “a vacant universe and cooling world” (Greene 58). Nietzsche’s view of the “profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty” seemed unleashed on the world while traditional religion had ceased answering the 20th century demands for meaningful answers for suffering and why these horrors were allowed to occur by a loving God (42).
In this universe of meaningless coincidence, the priest as an archetype is often portrayed as a ridiculous man, the leftover remnant of a superstitious era, an absurd lifestyle no longer practical. The priest has no place in a world run by power politics, scientific advancement, technological progress and global economic forces. The priest has no moral authority in a world that has disposed of God as inadequate to address humanity’s deepest longings. Those longings are no longer important as they are not measurable and observable. Responding to whether God was obsolete or not, Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “God is dead,” and the literature of the era took up the absence of sacred meaning as an anthem and emblem of the world having changed irrevocably (125).
With the death of God, God’s servants became tragic clowns on the heath. Priests as literary characters became caricatures of faith—exposing faith’s limitations and shortcomings instead of serving as conduits to divine grace and reconciliation with God. Priests became as obsolete as a God who would “punish the innocent with more life” (155). They became relics of a bygone era no longer of use in an enlightened state.
The whisky priest stands as the shambling wreck of the absurdity of traditional religious faith in answering modern questions. He is Nietzsche’s Madman from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He sins mortally and consistently. He mocks the very possibility of forgiveness and grace of which he is an agent. The whisky priest had even “lost the faculty” to repent of his sins by his own admission which would have prevented him from obtaining absolution under Catholic doctrine. This is also an immense sin of hubris as all sins are forgivable except sins against the Holy Spirit whose grace he was denying by this refusal (Greene 128). Despite his failings (maybe because of them), the whisky priest is able to realize the human face of God in those he is called to serve. After burying the Indian child, the whisky priest describes an authentic relationship with God as “wanting to be with Him, to be near Him … wanting to protect Him from yourself” (173). He realizes his own unworthiness to have God because he could never live up to the Christian ideal of self-surrendering love. If the whisky priest were to answer Nietzsche’s Madman, he would respond, “We must kill God because of our own unworthiness and jealousy and smallness of spirit, but we weep over His sacrifice for us in the depths of our sin and pray for His forgiveness as we have since we first crucified Him.”
At the heart of the whisky priest’s conversion is his belief in the transformative power of love. He admonishes the pious woman with the gospel of love: “They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach—well, love” (125). His belief in the power of the transformative power of life was poignantly clear in his over-riding love for his daughter despite the eternal risk to his immortal soul. According to pre-Vatican theology, remaining unrepentant for a mortal sin prevented a soul from returning to a state of grace. The whisky priest jeopardized his soul—not only through his own sins—but also through his unwillingness to seek absolution for those sins. His personal theology placed the emphasis on love—an all-conquering love that could only exist between him and his conception of a forgiving God of Love who partook of suffering willing to bring lost humanity back to a personal relationship with God and secure in a place in God’s kingdom.
The whisky priest parallels the priest that heard the nameless man’s confession in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, another modernist portrayal of the trial of faith in a “man victimized by life itself” (Camus i). Camus’s priest reflects on the nameless murderer’s plight, “These stone walls, I know it only too well, are steeped in human suffering. … I am speaking from the depths of my heart—I know that even the wretchedest amongst you have sometimes seen, taking form against that grayness, a divine face. It’s that face you are asked to see” (Camus 148-149). That face of God “taking form against that grayness” is what the whisky priest experiences in his prison experience. The whisky priest rebukes the pious, old woman’s hypocrisy, “It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty” (Greene 130). The whisky priest has moved beyond the trappings of sanctity and learned that God is real and present in the poor, suffering humanity he encounters through his lonely journey towards his fate. He has moved beyond the intellectual understanding of faith to the true inner reality of faith. He no longer can rest on his position to ensure him authority or his theological arguments to prove his intellectual superiority. The whisky priest is alone with God. In his spiritual solitary confinement, he finds the old man resting his head on his shoulder, the murderer asking for him to hear his confession without the formal Act of Reconciliation, the cleaning of the cells’ feces and vomit. He finds the sacramental power of life to answer his question of meaning and value. He sees the underlying divinity in the distressed face of God present in the exquisite suffering and indomitable beauty of the image and likeness of God on earth.
Another important evolution in the whisky priest’s relationship to God is his broken understanding of his own frailty. After the jefe and beggar finish the last of the wine, the whisky priest laments that he sees, “All the hope of the world draining away” in the last dregs swallowed with bureaucratic disregard for the spiritual aspect that was present in the wine (113). This mockery of Holy Communion highlights the unworthiness of all those who approach the altar of God with false pride in their hearts much as the whisky priest sees himself as a minister of God’s Body and Blood. Even in this sham of the Eucharistic celebration, grace is present. The jefe admits the disguised priest as “the soul of his country” which foreshadows the mysterious workings of faith and conversion present in the whisky priest as he approaches his road to perdition (113).
This draining of the cup also corresponds to the “cup of His wrath / Who drained to the dregs / the bowl of staggering” which is often used to foreshadow Christ’s suffering before being crucified on the Cross on Golgotha (Isaiah 51:17). This verse shows the visceral connection the whisky priest feels to his faith, the physical quality of Christ’s life and ministry and excruciating death that the whisky priest is now facing as a true believer in Christ’s message of all-encompassing love. Biblical allusions litter this novel. The whisky priest’s ministry to the crowds in prison and village closely resemble Jesus’ public ministry in the New Testament. The priest’s mule journey towards the capitol mirrors Jesus triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The priest’s love of the sinner in himself and his fellow man while hating the sin embodies Christ’s Golden Rule to love others as you love yourself. He is even able to love the face of his Pilate when he looks at the lieutenant and says, “You’re a good man,” after receiving the five pesos as alms that will cover the price for Mass (140). This forgiveness of the man whose sole mission in life is to eradicate the priesthood in Tabasco astonishes even the most cynical observer of Christian forgiveness.
Modernism tried to answer the absurdity and superstition of primitive religious faith in the light of scientific reason and technological advancement. The lieutenant voices the loss of the fragile faith which makes suffering worthwhile, “Life was never going to be again for them what it was for me [devoid of] the dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger” (220). The lieutenant laments the loss of the very thing he eradicated in much the same way that Judas mourned for Christ’s death before committing suicide. Life appears suddenly filled with “an appalling sense of loneliness” (217). In the midst of this desertion, the new Father appears and Luis bows to the return of heroic faith in the face of persecution regardless of how insignificant and absurd those instruments of faith appear in the light of reason. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Through the whisky priest’s sacrifice, Luis is able to see a flawed person acting heroically despite his personal failings and shortcomings. The whisky priest becomes more than he is through the faith working in him. His sacrifice saves Luis’s soul through this final act of witness to the truth which is the literal translation of martyrdom.
The whisky priest is not a hero. He begged that God would send someone more worthwhile to tend his flock. Still, God chose him for this ministry, and his faith ensured that he stayed true to his vocation despite his sins and personal weaknesses. While his life was far from saintly, his death provided a witness for the transformative power of faith in the light of a loving God who can save even the most wretched soul. This final sacrifice allows the light of the divine to shine even through the most tarnished of human souls for the greater power and glory of God.
Works Cited
Aronson, Ronald. Camus and Sartre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Calhoun, Cheshire and Solomon, Robert. What is an Emotion?—Classical Readings in
Philosophical Psychology. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Random House, 1946.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Good and Evil, Good and Bad.” On the Genealogy of Morals.
Translator Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translator Walter Kaufman. New York:
Random House, 1965.
New American Bible. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1991.
Friday, May 1, 2009
The Power and the Glory
"... a man must retain some sentimental relics if he is to live at all" (90). With this line, the whisky priest officially takes on his Judas in the mestizo. He knows he will be betrayed eventually after tripping the mestizo up in lies and inconsistencies in his story. (I didn't realize it at first, but even the trip on the mules brings up the Biblical allusion to Jesus entering Jerusalem on a mule on Palm Sunday.) This whisky priest has been stripped of all his priestly vestments and sacramentals and holds onto to this lump of paper slowly decaying through the sweat and rain of his arduous trip. The tragic hook in all of this is he knows he cannot trust the mestizo and yet he follows him to his doomed meeting with the lieutenant, his Pontius Pilate. As a text-text correlation, this follows the Biblical Passion of Christ almost scene-by-scene. I also see the sentimentality getting stripped from him as he arrives at a true and authentic faith that he lacked most of his life. This transformation of the whisky priest is what converts Luis at the end of the novel when he opens the door to shelter the new priest (and lone representative of God) in this nihilistic world with no meaning.
Friday, April 24, 2009
The Power and the Glory
The influence of film on this novel is undeniable. As we discussed in class, Greene creates flash cuts of the Mexican countryside based on his travels through Tabasco. The audience is assaulted with the vultures roosting on tin roofs, the rats burrowing through the corn in the hut, the dirty peasants staring blankly at the ground in the face of authority, the gleaming leather of the lieutenant's boot. Each scene exists as a story in itself to highlight the destitution and loneliness of the whisky priest as he passes through unwelcomed and often despised.
The humanity of the priest is also painfully apparent. He does not want to be martyred and celebrated. He does not want to have others suffer for him. He becomes the man of sorrows and takes on the wounds and rebuffs of the Christ he is serving. I see the whisky priest as an authentic suffering servant of God despite his desire just to escape in alcohol and contemplation of suicide. The sadness inside the priest is reflected in the empty scenery and faces he encounters on his wanderings. The beauty of his sacrifice is in his willingness to continue to serve even when he does not want to.
The humanity of the priest is also painfully apparent. He does not want to be martyred and celebrated. He does not want to have others suffer for him. He becomes the man of sorrows and takes on the wounds and rebuffs of the Christ he is serving. I see the whisky priest as an authentic suffering servant of God despite his desire just to escape in alcohol and contemplation of suicide. The sadness inside the priest is reflected in the empty scenery and faces he encounters on his wanderings. The beauty of his sacrifice is in his willingness to continue to serve even when he does not want to.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The Last September
The novel and movie are radically different versions of the Bowen vision. The question each tries to answer is what happens when a society in the grey area between two opposing political forces dies. In the novel, Bowen frees Lois to break from tradition while still being shielded by tradition. In the movie, Lois is the one who has the love affair portrayed as rape by Peter. It is really confusing especially when Peter appears to force himself then she goes to see him later. The violence of the Troubles in Ireland is much more evident in the movie than the novel version as well. Most of the violence is politely avoided at the tennis parties in the novel, but there are brutal scenes depicting the animosity between native Irish inhabitants and English soldiers.
The deeper thread I see in both versions is the answer of what happens to the vanishing class that served as a bridge for hundreds of years. The movie implies they will be violently separated as the new order establishes itself. The novel leaves the more expressionistic vision of the society slowly dissolving into the last September which is almost a fairy tale ending to the novel. Lois is the key. What she decides for herself indicates which world will end and which will march bravely into the future.
The deeper thread I see in both versions is the answer of what happens to the vanishing class that served as a bridge for hundreds of years. The movie implies they will be violently separated as the new order establishes itself. The novel leaves the more expressionistic vision of the society slowly dissolving into the last September which is almost a fairy tale ending to the novel. Lois is the key. What she decides for herself indicates which world will end and which will march bravely into the future.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Blog Paper for April Fools' Day
Jeremy J. Armstrong
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
2 April 2009
The World, the Text and Me
I was looking forward to this assignment since last semester to see how far I have evolved on my literary journey. I have read a great deal both for academic reasons and personal and wanted to see if I have moved into a new stage of literacy awareness. I was mired in the text-self stage a year ago, and I feel as if I am in this stage still.
After reflection, I concluded I do not like the hierarchical nature of how these stages are framed. It seems as if #1 is for beginning readers and #3 is for master readers. If you are not on your way to Stage 3 Literary Awareness, then you are not making progress. Literary critics assure readers, “it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1470). My reading of this approach is the text must always be answered from the “I-centered” perspective before the other connections may authentically be made. The movement from stage to stage is a fluid affair of multiple stages through any reading experience—not a fixed linear progression.
While acknowledging the necessity of “the death of the author,” my first entry focused on the intertextuality I saw in the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men,” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Civil Rights’ Movement in the United States during the 1960s. “I thought of that story [To Kill a Mockingbird] from high school and how hatred and racism make usually decent people into hollow shells of themselves” (Armstrong, 1/24/2009). Viewing my world as interconnected and interdependent has been an evolution in my own literacy since entering higher education. I viewed most of what I read in isolation from what I experienced in life. As I have grown as a reader and embraced a more holistic view of culture and literature, I have noticed the connections between academic reading and writing has infiltrated my personal worldview. I now approach text in a more comprehensive way using all forms of media and experience to inform my opinions.
On 2/13/2009, I wrote of the “hypocrisy of words” and “the anguish of her generation’s forlornness” found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, 50, 115). This reflects both a text-text and a text-world approach to literacy. World War I’s impact on the literature’s content and form is undeniable. As Willa Cather mused, “The world changed.” The wholesale destruction of a World War destroyed the assumptions the Romantics had about life and the meaning of art. Those horrific reverberations were felt to the very core of the literary imagination and produced waves of cognitive dissonance which are still extending to the marginalization of art today. This entry helps illustrate the fluidity of the nature of literacy when taking into account the interconnectedness of all things. The grand explosion of popular culture has aided the impact of this dissonance by infiltrating every facet of life through the monumental technological advances of the last hundred years.
A further example of literature extending beyond the simple text-self stage to encompass the text-text and text-world stages is the profound line from “The Second Coming.” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats). I reflected on the death of the hero in the Modern Age, yet the heroic act remains as a powerful motivation in our world. Yeats embodies the stages of literacy and their fluid nature. He writes of his personal dislike for the “drunken, vainglorious louts” while simultaneously raising them to the stature of the epic heroes of Rome and Greece who will be sung of in poetry. His personal feelings are illustrated through the text-self element of literacy and personal biases towards men and women he drank with and competed with romantically. Despite his personal jealousies, Yeats’s moving words immortalize the Irish martyrs for future generations through poetry to highlight the text-text dimension of literacy. Finally, his political aims of Irish independence and spreading awareness of the Irish plight clearly motivate his art. This final dimension is encompasses a text-world reading of “The Second Coming.”
Drawing on Stephen Dedalus as an archetype of the modern artist and as a spokesman for Modernism, I draw my fluidity between the different stages of literacy. "By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Joyce, 93). Joyce implies that the interior voice of the artist must be heeded before the conventions of society or definition of “art.” Stephen is “I-centered” throughout the text; his external actions merely mirror his inner turmoil. The reader as the interpreter of literature is that “I” and must take a primary role in forming the connections between other texts and the world in which he finds himself. In other words, the “real world” is only real in relation to the reader’s “limits of reality” which may include anything and everything from that reader’s experience.
To answer the question posed by this assignment requires a hierarchy to be established as to which stage of literacy is pre-eminent. I maintain that all three stages are equally valid. Instead of placing them in a linear fashion from 1-3, I would align them in a triangular arrangement in much the same way the rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos and logos is traditional depicted. In much the same way as reason and argument fall apart when one of the legs of the triangle is removed, the stages of reading development are undermined when all three aspects are not equally respected for their validity.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. p. 1466-1470.
Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Secker & Warburg,
1992.
Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. London: Penguin, 2006.
Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” Class handout. Published 1912.
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
2 April 2009
The World, the Text and Me
I was looking forward to this assignment since last semester to see how far I have evolved on my literary journey. I have read a great deal both for academic reasons and personal and wanted to see if I have moved into a new stage of literacy awareness. I was mired in the text-self stage a year ago, and I feel as if I am in this stage still.
After reflection, I concluded I do not like the hierarchical nature of how these stages are framed. It seems as if #1 is for beginning readers and #3 is for master readers. If you are not on your way to Stage 3 Literary Awareness, then you are not making progress. Literary critics assure readers, “it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1470). My reading of this approach is the text must always be answered from the “I-centered” perspective before the other connections may authentically be made. The movement from stage to stage is a fluid affair of multiple stages through any reading experience—not a fixed linear progression.
While acknowledging the necessity of “the death of the author,” my first entry focused on the intertextuality I saw in the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men,” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Civil Rights’ Movement in the United States during the 1960s. “I thought of that story [To Kill a Mockingbird] from high school and how hatred and racism make usually decent people into hollow shells of themselves” (Armstrong, 1/24/2009). Viewing my world as interconnected and interdependent has been an evolution in my own literacy since entering higher education. I viewed most of what I read in isolation from what I experienced in life. As I have grown as a reader and embraced a more holistic view of culture and literature, I have noticed the connections between academic reading and writing has infiltrated my personal worldview. I now approach text in a more comprehensive way using all forms of media and experience to inform my opinions.
On 2/13/2009, I wrote of the “hypocrisy of words” and “the anguish of her generation’s forlornness” found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, 50, 115). This reflects both a text-text and a text-world approach to literacy. World War I’s impact on the literature’s content and form is undeniable. As Willa Cather mused, “The world changed.” The wholesale destruction of a World War destroyed the assumptions the Romantics had about life and the meaning of art. Those horrific reverberations were felt to the very core of the literary imagination and produced waves of cognitive dissonance which are still extending to the marginalization of art today. This entry helps illustrate the fluidity of the nature of literacy when taking into account the interconnectedness of all things. The grand explosion of popular culture has aided the impact of this dissonance by infiltrating every facet of life through the monumental technological advances of the last hundred years.
A further example of literature extending beyond the simple text-self stage to encompass the text-text and text-world stages is the profound line from “The Second Coming.” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats). I reflected on the death of the hero in the Modern Age, yet the heroic act remains as a powerful motivation in our world. Yeats embodies the stages of literacy and their fluid nature. He writes of his personal dislike for the “drunken, vainglorious louts” while simultaneously raising them to the stature of the epic heroes of Rome and Greece who will be sung of in poetry. His personal feelings are illustrated through the text-self element of literacy and personal biases towards men and women he drank with and competed with romantically. Despite his personal jealousies, Yeats’s moving words immortalize the Irish martyrs for future generations through poetry to highlight the text-text dimension of literacy. Finally, his political aims of Irish independence and spreading awareness of the Irish plight clearly motivate his art. This final dimension is encompasses a text-world reading of “The Second Coming.”
Drawing on Stephen Dedalus as an archetype of the modern artist and as a spokesman for Modernism, I draw my fluidity between the different stages of literacy. "By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Joyce, 93). Joyce implies that the interior voice of the artist must be heeded before the conventions of society or definition of “art.” Stephen is “I-centered” throughout the text; his external actions merely mirror his inner turmoil. The reader as the interpreter of literature is that “I” and must take a primary role in forming the connections between other texts and the world in which he finds himself. In other words, the “real world” is only real in relation to the reader’s “limits of reality” which may include anything and everything from that reader’s experience.
To answer the question posed by this assignment requires a hierarchy to be established as to which stage of literacy is pre-eminent. I maintain that all three stages are equally valid. Instead of placing them in a linear fashion from 1-3, I would align them in a triangular arrangement in much the same way the rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos and logos is traditional depicted. In much the same way as reason and argument fall apart when one of the legs of the triangle is removed, the stages of reading development are undermined when all three aspects are not equally respected for their validity.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. p. 1466-1470.
Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Secker & Warburg,
1992.
Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. London: Penguin, 2006.
Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” Class handout. Published 1912.
Monday, March 30, 2009
The Portrait of the Artist as an Insomniac
"By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Joyce, 93).
Stephen thinks this before going on the interminable retreat of words lead by Fr. Arnell. I am interested by the fact that he puts this line of raw emotion beyond words before the rambling, 20-odd page retreat on death, judgment, heaven and hell. (It is also amazing how immediate each consequence is in that logical order.) Stephen cannot articulate these dark desires that drive him towards the brothels and darky alleys of Dublin, yet he knows that he is in mortal sin and suffering under the weight of the needs of his body set against the demands of his religion. This mind/body split is a hallmark of the modernist period, and Joyce calls to mind the impossibility of reconciling the two and living a full, healthy life.
This reminds me of Lawrence's communion of the flesh to lead humanity into the future. Joyce seems to take the outcast, going-to-hell-anyway-so-might-as-well-enjoy-it aspect of this split. The tragically ironic part is that he seems to not enjoy it though compelled to do it. Stephen is unable to escape his Catholic training even if he has rejected the faith and Church teaching that brought him up.
Stephen thinks this before going on the interminable retreat of words lead by Fr. Arnell. I am interested by the fact that he puts this line of raw emotion beyond words before the rambling, 20-odd page retreat on death, judgment, heaven and hell. (It is also amazing how immediate each consequence is in that logical order.) Stephen cannot articulate these dark desires that drive him towards the brothels and darky alleys of Dublin, yet he knows that he is in mortal sin and suffering under the weight of the needs of his body set against the demands of his religion. This mind/body split is a hallmark of the modernist period, and Joyce calls to mind the impossibility of reconciling the two and living a full, healthy life.
This reminds me of Lawrence's communion of the flesh to lead humanity into the future. Joyce seems to take the outcast, going-to-hell-anyway-so-might-as-well-enjoy-it aspect of this split. The tragically ironic part is that he seems to not enjoy it though compelled to do it. Stephen is unable to escape his Catholic training even if he has rejected the faith and Church teaching that brought him up.
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