Literary Criticism the 2020-2021 Reading List

University Interscholastic League Student Activities Conference Literary Criticism The 2020-2021 Reading List Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ǀ Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman ǀ William Wordsworth: selected poems ❖ "I was on the threshold of great things." ~ Kurtz "Dad is never so happy as when he's looking forward to something!" ~ Happy "Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? / Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye / Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?" ~ Wordsworth ❖ Marlow, Loman, Wordsworth, and the "august light of abiding memories" Conrad's Heart of Darkness In his Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad offers a framework-story, the central narrative of which is spoken by one of five men who share the "bond of the sea." The framing narrative's unnamed narrator does little more than raise and lower the curtain on the young—now experienced—Charles Marlow, who shares his own story while the five sit on the Nellie, a cruising yawl, on the ebbing Thames in the darkness that hangs at the edge of "the lurid glare" of civilization's principal city, the commercial center of a vast colonial empire. The sharing, a story-telling concept foundational to many of Conrad's stories (as is Charlie Marlow himself), necessarily in- cludes a larger audience, the readers—you and me. The unnamed narrator recounts Marlow's beginning the telling of his story: "'I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,' he beg[ins], showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; 'yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the furthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me— and into my thoughts.'" Marlow's telling is a chronological complexity whose temporal connections stretch across the backstories of empire, ancient and current. His story is, indeed, not simply a story of "what happened to [him] personally"; his recounting is an accounting of the effects of colonialization; it is a reflective assessment of what happens to both the subjugated and the subjugators—a present-time assessment by someone whose encounter with the dirtiness and, especially, the inefficacy of empire's work recognizes an invitation to understand, a quality not afforded him during his prior open-sea experiences. Marlow recounts a French man-of-war's firing of fusillades into the coastal reaches of the jungle. His critical assessment, which is essentially a condemnation of the ineffectual, contrasts with his very personal experience on the river just below the Interior Station. This experience is first- hand and inarguably existential. His presence represents the empire's commercial reach, and the arrows and spears—the fusillade from within the dense jungle—confirms his participation in empire's work. That his understanding never fully ensues contributes to the inherent twentieth-century-ness of the story-telling. And his 1 final two sharings, the first with The Intended and the second with us, the readers, via the unnamed framing- story's narrator, both fail to suggest a full understanding. The concluding acquiescence to the ineffable is of- fered by the framing-story's narrator, whose description of the immediate setting—"the tranquil waterway lead- ing to the uttermost ends of the earth flow[ing] somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" parallels the yawl's tenuous mooring there in the river's tidal variance. The light of truth and the light of civilization (never conjoined in Marlow's estimation) to which Marlow often refers is not in ascendency. Communication (including its failures: the crippled steamship as the only connection between the stations and the lie that Marlow proffers The Intended) is at the core of Conrad's tale. Silence is often at the margins. Charles Marlow's commission rests on his fluency in French; his control of the march to the Central Station de- pends on his addressing the caravan of sixty carriers "in English with gestures, not one of which [is] lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before [him]." The drumming that echoes across the river and through the forests, the note- book's Russian "cypher," the screeching of the steamer's whistle, and the fact that Marlow can speak with Kurtz, who "had been educated partly in England" serve to bring the events—the plotline—forward; however, it is in the aggregate—in Marlow's telling and our listening—that even as the darkness deepens, he can propose that the "most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable re- grets," which he sees as, perhaps, the "form of ultimate wisdom." Marlow speaks of the "original Kurtz," the dying Kurtz, and Kurtz's shade—the Kurtz to whose creation all of Europe had contributed. It is Kurtz, and his treasure trove of ivory, around which Conrad's tale revolves. Marlow, as he approaches the door of the house in which waited The Intended, envisions "a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence." Both Kurtz and Marlow had gone upriver; thresholds had been crossed and memories cataloged; however, it is only Marlow burdened by an active memory of Kurtz who returns, beating those long odds in- ferred by the old physician in the sepulchral city. It is the old physician whose observation "changes take place inside" sets up our recognition that Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness has little to do with the physical journey up that great unnamed river; it is in experiencing life's journey that we recognize our propensity for that which civilization hopes to restrain. The barbarity that characterizes both the jungle and Kurtz's unrestrained actions and words is inseparable from the descriptions of the Africans who populate both the jungle and the story-told. Conrad's characterization of Africa and its people has been subject to not-so-indiscriminate fusillades, the seminal attack being Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (1975). Imaginative fiction lives both in the contemporary stream and in tomorrow's archives. Cancel culture is very much a part of our present moment, and discussions along these lines can be productive. That Conrad's novella is an indictment of empire should not be forgotten. That Conrad's original audience lived in a different world is no small thing. Perhaps a very close look at ourselves here in the twenty-first century, here in what has been called The Shining City on the Hill will allow us to get past the things that, in theory at least, most of us have, in our day-to-day interactions, moved beyond. Perhaps a very close look at ourselves will remind us that we still have a long way to go. Perhaps our journey will bring a bit more certainty than does listening to Marlow's. Perhaps. 2 Miller's Death of a Salesman One of the world's most produced dramas, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman encompasses in its two acts roughly twenty-four hours of the drummer Willy Lowman's life—his final twenty-four hours; however, the telling of the story masterfully renders the difficulties of a lifetime. The memories that comprise the fullness of Willy's story are not handled with flashbacks; the time-structure of the play, in Miller's own words, is like "a road [cut] through a mountain revealing its geological layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding another, [the play] display[s] past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop." Willy's question is essentially American: "Where's my place?" and Willy challenges Howard: "There were promises made across this [Howard's father's] desk!" While the search for certainty, specifically a company position that takes Willy off the road, the playscript's timeline—on paper—can produce a degree of uncertainty that can be reckoned with only through performance. The play is not for the reader; it is for an audience that finds direction through the performance itself, and the performance invites the audience through the fourth wall into the time-structure of Willy's meandering through the currency of his past-present. Character development can be discerned and followed through a careful reading; indeed, the time-slippage that is the concurrency of Willy's past and present is easily discoverable in the sudden shifts in Willy's focus— his conversation, and it is in the explanatory nature of casual sequencing's taking precedence over the temporal sequencing that both the reader and the performance's audience begins to understand the dynamics that define the characters' relationships, especially the play's own defining relationship, the one between father and son, between Willy and Biff. Reality, which is framed by the foils in the Lomans' lives, not least of whom are Ben and Bernard, and some of whom inhabit the abiding, if not august, memories that are comprised of the family's illusions, their expectations, and their dreams often rudely crowds out those illusions and dreams. The patient Linda, who, as his "foundation and support" is tethered to the shifting mooring that is Willy's intermittent presence in her life, is central to the audience's recognizing the differential that measures the distance between Willy's living the illusions and Biff's seeing through the illusions, Willy's and Linda's--Linda who, "at all costs," as Miller reminds us, must "shield [Willy] from the truth." The characters and the themes are masterfully intertwined, and in the concision that is the play's observation of the American as salesman of himself we might break through the illusions to see our collective selves in our twenty-first century service economy—with its 24/7 branding, rebranding, and algorithm-directed drumming.

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