Friday, March 22, 2013

The Rise of English



“The Rise of English”- by Terry Eagleton

In eighteenth-century England, literature was considered to be that which conformed to the standards of ‘polite letters’, meaning that which embodied the values and tastes of the upper classes (usually).  After the bloody civil war of the previous century, literature became even more important in bringing the middle classes into unity with the upper classes.

Literature, in the modern sense, really emerged around the nineteenth century during the Romantic period; the idea that literature is something imaginative or inventive while prosaic writing is dull or uninspiring is a relatively new concept in history.

During the Romantic period, types of literature like poetry no longer were simply a technical way of writing, they had significant social, political, and philosophical implications (many major Romantic poets were political activists themselves).  The stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination was another emphasis finding its way into the concept of literature.  The rise of the ‘symbol’ also came towards the end of the eighteenth century; with it, various contradictory concepts could finally be captured together.

Literature, as defined by Eagleton earlier, IS an ideology.  Eagleton suggests that the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century was caused by the failure of religion, something he believes was a very simple yet powerful form of ideology that was above all else a pacifying influence.  Apparently, English literature worked as a suitable replacement.  English became a subject used to cultivate the middle class and infuse them with some values of the leftover aristocracy; thus English literature became the new way to pacify the working and middle classes.  Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the masses from their present commitments and c0nditions; it was also a way to experience things or events that were not possible to experience in a person’s life.  English as an academic subject was nothing more than the poor man’s Classics.  In addition, English became the new vehicle for transferring the moral law, which was no longer taken from religion.

Because English was not exactly considered a ‘real’ subject, it was often given to the ladies of higher learning institutions when were now grudgingly admitting women; however, as the century drew on, English took on more of a masculine aspect.  It still took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally English literature came into power, mostly because of wartime nationalism.  The new subject was created by the offspring of the bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.

Now the study of English was ‘in’, and people may have wondered how it had ever been otherwise.  Deep and intense questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny.  Literature was also perhaps the only place where creative language was allowed to flourish.  In addition, those studying felt that they were a part of a larger movement that was moving civilization back to the way it should have been, as in the seventeenth century.

“Scrutiny” didn’t seek to change society in any way; rather, their goal was to withstand it.  Teaching children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of making them memorize pointless passages of literature.  Eagleton said that the Scrutiny project was “hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd.”  In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of the elitists.  The ‘organic’ society desired by Scrutiny was unobtainable, nothing more than a lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of the past.

Some types of English were considered more English than others, which ironically reminds one of the types of arguments given by the upper class before.  When T.S. Eliot came to England, he upgraded the status of the poets and dramatists while toppling Milton and the Romantics.  Literature becomes that which has the Tradition flowing through it; all poetry may be literature, but not all poetry may be Literature.  Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in light of the war, and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in poetry that would speak to a person’s senses rather than their intellect.  Many contradictions began showing up in the ideas that the ‘big wigs’ of Literature of that day came up with.

Practical criticism meant a method that was unafraid to take a text apart, but also assumed that you could judge literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from their cultural contexts.  Close reading also mean detailed analytic interpretation, but also seemed to imply that former methods of criticism read only three words per line.  Also assumed that any literary work could be understood in isolation from its context.

Richards, an advocate of modern science, felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such pseudo-questions, society would fall apart.  Poetry’s role is to supply such answers.

American New Criticism was deeply marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human impulses more effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too dissimilar from the old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will ensure the survival of the upper ones).  New Criticism was not too different from Scrutiny: it reinvented in literature what it couldn’t find in reality.  They came up with something called the Great Man theory of literature, which says that even if the author’s intentions in writing were recovered, they were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text.  At the same time, neither could the emotional responses of readers be confused with the poem’s true meaning.  Ultimately, reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing, a rejection of anything in particular.



Special Note: “The Rise of English” is an outstanding essay where Eagleton surveys how the concept of literature as we understand today has developed, how its studies have begun academically and how literary criticism in English has evolved. He discloses the capitalist motif behind using English as an academic discipline in British colonies. As a post-modern theorist, Eagleton elaborately discusses the drawbacks of New Criticism and paves the way forward to look at the literary texts with newer insight. However, in the essay “The Rise of English” he criticises the theoretical development in the English up to the New Criticism phase.

Md. Saiful Alam
B. A. Honours and M. A. in English
Lecturer of English
Queen’s College, Dhaka
My affectionate Readers,
Please, never hesitate to comment and any correction or suggestion regarding my writings will be largely appreciated and valued and you can ask me any grammatical questions regarding English. I promise I would try my level best to assist you, all. Thank you very much.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Robinson Crusoe as a religious or spiritual allegory



Question: 1. Robinson Crusoe is a religious or spiritual allegory - justify your answer.

Answer: Apart from being an exciting account of a man’s adventures on an uninhabited island, the book, “Robinson Crusoe” has been found to possess a profound allegorical significance. For many, Crusoe's many references to God, to Providence, to sin are extraneous to the real interest of the novel. Readers through the 19th century read “Robinson Crusoe” in the light of religion. For example, a reviewer for the Dublin University Magazine called the book a great religious poem, showing that God is found where men are absent. In deciding whether or to what extent Robinson Crusoe is a spiritual autobiography and a great religious poem, one might consider the following:

In the "Preface," Defoe announces that his intention is to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances.
Moreover, Robinson Crusoe can be viewed from theological and practical levels. If we see from the theological level, we will find that man's extreme aspiration is the cause of sin. As we see in “Paradise Lost” by John Milton that Adam and Eve are banished from the Heaven because of their aspirations and disobedience to God, here in the same was Crusoe is thrown on an uninhabited island because of disobedience towards his father.

Crusoe receives warnings against the rashness of going to sea from his father and from the captain of the first ship he sails on. Both are figures of authority and can be seen as proxies for God. In ignoring their warnings, he is also denying God's providential social order in the world. God's providential social order in the world means that God arranged the world hierarchically, endowing the king with authority in the political realm and the father with authority in the family.

Crusoe's conversation with his father about leaving home can be interpreted from a religious perspective. Crusoe repeatedly refers to leaving home without his father's permission as his "original sin"; he not only associates God and his father but regards his sin against his father as a sin against God also. Remembering his first voyage,

Crusoe comments:
"...my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to which it has been since, reproached me with the contempt of advice and the breach of my duty to God and my Father" (5).

 In the Puritan family structure, the father was regarded as God's deputy; in rejecting his father's advice, Crusoe is committing Adam and Eve's sin of disobedience. For Crusoe, as for Adam, and Eve, disobedience grows out of restlessness and discontent with the station God assigned.

When Crusoe is cast ashore on a deserted island, he sees his situation as the fulfillment of his father's prediction that if Crusoe disregarded his advice, Crusoe would find himself alone with no source of help. As his father said with a little sigh,

“That boy might be happy if he would stay at home; but if he goes abroad,
he will be the most miserable wretch that ever was born”.Alone on the island, Crusoe is Everyman, alienated from God because of sin.

One way of reading Robinson Crusoe is as a spiritual autobiography. The spiritual autobiography portrays the Puritan drama of the soul. Concerned about being saved, having a profound sense of God's presence, seeing His will manifest everywhere and aware of the unceasing conflict between good and evil, Puritans constantly scrutinized their lives to determine the state of their souls and looked for signs of the nature of their relationship with God. The spiritual autobiography usually follows a common pattern: the narrator sins, ignores God's warnings, hardens his heart to God, repents as a result of God's grace and mercy, experiences a soul-wrenching conversion, and achieves salvation. The writer emphasizes his former sinfulness as a way of glorifying God; the deeper his sinfulness, the greater God's grace and mercy in electing to save him. He reviews his life from the new perspective his conversion has given him and writes of the present and the future with a deep sense of God's presence in his life and in the world. Here we also find the touch of spiritual autobiography.

Crusoe throughout uses religious language, imagery, and Biblical references. Crusoe narrates his life story long afterward, and from the beginning of his tale, Crusoe presents events not only from his point of view as a youth but also from a Christian perspective; he looks at his past through the eyes of the convert who now constantly sees the working of Providence. He tells of his first shipwreck and of his then ignoring what he now perceives as God's warning, "... Providence, as in such cases generally it does, resolved to leave me entirely without excuse. For if I would not take this for a deliverance, the next was to be such a one as the worst and most hardened wretch among us would confess both the danger and the mercy" (7). And he found “the secret hints and notices of danger" (244)

After his dream and the beginning of his regeneration, Defoe reviews his life and his understanding and sense of God deepen. But reason alone is not sufficient to result in conversion and Crusoe turns to the Bible; studying it reveals God's word and will to him, and he finds comfort, guidance, and instruction in it. For the first time in many years he prays, and he prays, not for rescue from the island, but for God's help,

"Lord be my help, for I am in great distress" (88).

 After thinking about his life, he kneels to God for the first time in his life and prays to God to fulfill his promise "that if I called upon Him in the day of trouble, He would deliver me" (91). His next step toward conversion is asking for God's grace, "Jesus, Thou Son of David, Jesus, Thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me repentance!" (93). He comes to realize that spiritual deliverance from sin is more important than physical deliverance from the island. A little later, when he is about to thank God for bringing him to the island and so saving him, he stops, shocked at himself and the hypocrisy of such a statement. Then he "sincerely gave thanks to God for opening my eyes, by whatever afflicting Providences, to see the former condition of my life, and to mourn for my wickedness, and repent" (110). This incident indicates that Crusoe's faith is fervent and honest.

In short we can say that Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” is a great religious allegory. This shows the inner conflict of Crusoe and portrays the Puritan drama of the soul. This follows the pattern of “Sin → Punishment → Realization → Redeem → Salvation”.

The Hairy Ape as a modern tragedy



Question: 1. The Hairy Ape” as a modern tragedy – justify your answer.

Answer: The representation of tragedy today has adapted itself to more humanistic, base and symbolic concerns. Often, they are commentaries on society just as much as they are on the nature of man. Eugene O'Neill's greatest creation “The Hairy Ape” dramatises the vision of the tragic and alienated condition of men in the modern complex social system. The play symbolises the struggle of modern men within industrial society following an individual's (Yank) baffled search for identity, to recover his sense of belongingness by overcoming his sense of isolation or alienation from society. The play concludes with resignation at the tragic end of that quest.

The Hairy Ape” is a tragedy of modern times, having no conventional hero of the classical or Aristotelian tradition. The play presents an antihero, possessing no extraordinary quality or tragic flaw. The protagonist, Yank (Real name Bob Smith) is not a man of high position like Oedipus of Sophocles; rather he is an everyman character. He is a humble stoker in a ship whose duty is to shove fuel into the furnace of ship's engine. He works long hours in the ship’s low roofed stokehole.

He is beastly, filthy, and coarse. He is a burly, sometimes menacing figure who has difficulty with thought. He is potent, proud and dominating, and considers physical strength as the lifeblood of his universe. He feels proud being an integral and vital part of the ship's motion and loves his work and the ship more than the others. He is the dominating figure among the stokers by virtue of his superior physical power. He is complacent, happy and satisfied with his present condition as a stoker with a sense that he belonged to the ship, he is something, and his co-workers were his social mates.

He does not have any tragic flaw, but he suffers and faces demise because he is in conflict with his environment, with certain social forces that are much stronger than him. He struggled hard against the forces but he cannot win. Mildred Douglas's reaction to Yank is the catalyst which makes Yank come to class awareness. Yank is especially affected by Mildred because she presents a world and class which he cannot belong to. Her remark shakes the very foundation of his sense of well being, his feeling that he was the necessary and vital part of a social system. He feels very much insulted because Mildred does not respect or even value the essentiality of his role in a small world of stokehole. Like Adam he is aware of his own nakedness and must leave the garden. The illusion of belonging drops away and he becomes aware that he is fatally caught between earth and heaven. He feels utterly alianated from society and identifies himself as an outsider who does not deserve to belong here.

Obsessed by excessive anger Yank decides to avenge the rich girl by killing her. He visits the Fifth Avenue to fulfill his resolution. He attacks people there and is put into prison, where he comes to feel that he is a hairy ape. After his release from the prison he visits a zoo where tries to befriend a gorilla whom he addresses as ‘brother’ and tries to embrace him. The gorilla crushes him and throws him into the cage. Yanks dies there miserably like an animal. After his demise the writer comments that at last he found his identity and knows where he belongs.

Throughout this struggle Yank defines ‘belonging’ as power. When he thinks he ‘belongs’ to something he gains strength, when Yank is rejected by a group, he is terribly weak. However, Yank is rejected by all facets of society: his fellow firemen/stokers, Mildred, the street goers of Fifth Avenue, the I.W.W., and finally the ape in the zoo. Yank symbolises the struggle of modern man within industrial society—he cannot break class or ideological barriers, nor create new ones.

“The Hairy Ape” is a penetrating and concentrating tragedy on human predicament in the modern age. The subtitle ‘A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life’ is merely ironical. It points the satirical intent of the playwright. The rich class might look at it as comedy because a beastly man dies. But the playwright’s intent is that we should think over the question, why such a powerful man belonging to the working class dies. He is a victim of the mechanical social system. His death should arouse pity and sorrow for a human being though ordinary.



Md. Saiful Alam
B. A. Honours and M. A. in English
Lecturer of English
Queen’s College, Dhaka
My affectionate Readers,
Please, never hesitate to comment and any correction or suggestion regarding my writings will be largely appreciated and valued and you can ask me any grammatical questions regarding English. I promise I would try my level best to assist you, all. Thank you very much.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth VIII, 2024

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