Frankenstein and Paradise Lost

Intertextuality is my joy--at least it is with these two texts. Look at the section where Frankenstein meets the monster, in Chapter 10, and compare it to the semantic field of Paradise Lost.

He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.
“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh! that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”
“I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”
“Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.”

Is't it interesting how Shelley seems to echo Milton to create her creator/rebel conflict?

A Clockwork Orange

Hello, my lovelies,and finally I have managed to get something on the blog about this novel, with the useful links, I hope. It is an amazing text, not just because of the incredibly inventive use of language, but because of the ways in which it is constructed-one of the best novels to look at in terms of overall structure, and very good for AO2 as a result...

Anyway, here's the Amazon link for copies as cheap as 1p (plus P&P which makes it more expensive) so do rememebr to get a copy (or ask for one for Christmas). Don't forget the charity shops, which often have excellent bargains--Oxfam Bookshop in St Giles is especially good, but also the Summertown ones are helpful, and often have surprising bargains.

If you are interested in the music that we were thinking about in the lesson, here are the youtube links, though of course it's probably better to buy the album, and listen peacefully to the whole thing in your own time...

Anyway, if you want to listen to Mozart's Jupiter (symphony 41) get a taste of the first part of it here conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. Wonderfully subtle. Here's the second part and you can probably find the rest yourself from that.

Other music mentioned is, of course, Beethoven's ninth symphony. The one we listened to in class (performed in front of Pope Benedict) is,. I think, the finest avilable on this medium, but please tell me if you fnd a better version. Here is the one conducted by Bernstein, which I like as well.

Here is something even rarer--A version conducted by Toscanini in 1948. Which version do you prefer, and why?

I've just had a chat with an expert on Burgess, and asked him for something to add to the blog... He commented:

'Burgess was himself a composer, and had a deep understanding of the Western musical tradition. In A Clockwork Orange he may be not only critiquing the world of Mods and Rockers, but also commenting on their musical taste...

Though Burgess's stylistic experimentation reflects his reverence for the work of James Joyce ( in particular Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) he was in many ways a conservative cultural thinker (in the best sense of conservative) hence he throws into prominence here the iconic works within the western musical tradition.

Burgess himself wrote critical works explicating the difficult works of James Joyce for the common reader. He particularly admired Joyce's love of wordplay and pun; Joyce's sense of the poetry of language and also his sense of the games that can be played with it. It is these things that we see manifest in Burgess's own games with language in A Clockwork Orange.

In some ways, some rather starkly expressed theological ideas underlie the whole drift of A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess sees it, freedom and free will are crucial to the full dignity of a human being. To be reduced to an automaton, a person automatically obedient, is to cease to be fully human. One might think of Paradise Lost here. Milton portrays Satan as a fallen angel--both the adjective and the noun needing to be given equal weight. Satan is charismatic, courageous and ingenious, all excellent qualities deriving from his status as an angelic being made by God, but he is now fallen, so that these admirable qualities are now given over to selfish and destructive ends. But Satan is vibrantly alive: he is still free (in some sense) to choose his actions.

In the same way, at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange Alex displays a certain kind of life and vitality, a quality of leadership, a certain verve, even though these things are deployed to violent and evil ends. When, however, Alex is conditioned so that he no longer has free will, his humanity is neutered, made pale and unreal: he loses the capacity for evil, but he also loses the capacity for good, and the perception of beauty. He is now shut off from the kind of transcendental uplift to which the great music of the Western tradition gave him access. As far as Burgess is concerned, Mozart and Beethoven embody the highest reaches of the human spirit. Their works point towards the transcendent dignity fon what it means to be human, the divine spark in all of us. When Alex is shut off from this it is a terrible deprivation and a terrible torture. He would, paradoxically, be more human by having the freedom to be more evil.

He makes some good points here, I think--read the novel over the break, and let me know if you agree with him or not.

Tony Harrison again

Look at this interview with Harrison on radio 3--the transcript you can find here says some interesting things about his schooldays, including a close description of the generation of 'Them and [uz]'. What do you think?

Robert Frost

Great poet; but you need some background detail. Try looking at these sites about his life and work. Poetry of Robert Frost gives you, as it suggests, texts of many of the major poems, and links to some important criticism as well. Fun stuff. There's also a concise biography at online Literature, which you might find interesting.

If you're looking for more detail in terms of biography, try the timeline I mentioned in class, which you can find here.

While you are choosing which courswework piece to do, you should really comtemplate 'The Road not Taken', don't you think? Written in 1916; still resonates today.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



Frost apparently wrote this thinking of his friend Edward Thomas; the friend who went off to war he mentions here:

"One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference August 1953

Look at Thomas's own poem 'The Signpost'. It makes a fascinating comparison!

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hill-top by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: "You would not have doubted so
At twenty." Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: "At twenty you wished you had never been born."
One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post. "You shall see,"
He laughed -and I had to join his laughter -
"You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall.
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall be freely given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, -
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, tha land and the sea,
Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring, -
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?"

Edward Thomas

Satire--how to look at background research

If you're considering writing about A Modest Proposal you do need to have some background sense of what satire is, its origins, and the context for Swift's writing. Try listening to : this programme about Roman satire from 'In Our Time'--which as a resource is invaluable. A great way to educate yourself about the arts is just to browse through these programmes where cultural issues are discussed by a team of experts.

Think also about using the BBC history site to give you some sense of historical context and background. For instance, look at this crystal-clear article on The Glorious Revolution by Dr Edward Vallance

Another extremely useful site is The Victorian Web. This invaluable resource gives reliable background information and critical reading for many key texts that we'll look at this year. Look at their take on the Glorious revolution here, for instance.

For even better detail about specific authors go to the author pages on the Victorian Web. Here, you can find all about Swift, even though strictly speaking he isn't a Victorian, with links for his biography and literary context as well.

Them and [uz]; some thoughts, now you've written your essays

The title of this poem turns round the more common saying ‘us and them’ which is often used in the context of a social divide, with the lower classes emphatically ‘them’. Here, Harrison reverses the expected order, to emphasise the word ‘us’, which he renders in the style of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so as to detail its pronunciation. This ‘us’ is spoken with a northern accent, and the difference between it and the southern pronunciation, and the status accorded to each, is the issue on which the poem turns.

The dedication to the poem reveals its split interests between the academic and the sociological. Leon Cortez was a musician of the thirties and forties who wrote popular comic songs. Richard Hoggart (left) is an academic, the author of The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, and someone who in many respects led the way for writers like Harrison to enter the formal poetic canon of literature. Harrison here accords them equal status, perhaps because they represent two different types of inspiration and example, two examples of ‘uz’ as opposed to the ‘them’ of the establishment. Hoggart is himself from Leeds, and his entry into the academic establishment, and his appreciation of D.H. Lawrence, for instance, would be something that may have inspired the young Harrison, Lawrence being, even in the 1950s and 60s, a writer whose working-class roots, and use of sexual colloquialisms had led to his exclusion from the canon.

The poem focuses throughout on the prestige accorded to Standard English, and Received Pronunciation. Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the ‘neutral’ accent of the dialect of Standard English, strongly associated with the upper register of speech. It is the dialect of Southern England, and also of upper-class speakers. At the time when Harrison wrote the poem, announcers on the BBC, for instance, would be expected to speak using Standard English and RP, and regional accents would have been seen as vulgar or comical. Northern pronunciation, like Harrison’s, would have been mocked as non-standard (in the way that an Irish or a Caribbean accent can still be mocked in certain contexts) and as a boy, Harrison would have been expected to take hold of the ‘advantages’ that his grammar-school education offered him in the way of accent modification. The expectation that he should do this is clearly the starting point for the painful memories that form the basis of this poem.

Throughout the poem, Harrison shows off his extensive knowledge of literature and culture so as to negate and exorcise the demons of self-doubt sown by his upbringing. He also demonstrates his technical skill; while apparently writing freely and colloquially, he creates a finely-wrought structure of strongly rhymed couplets—a traditional form for satiric verse.

The poem starts with a vivid rendition of Greek speech, ‘αĩ, αĩ’, which effectively isolates the reader who cannot read Greek letters. The fact that they are immediately transliterated into the English ‘ay, ay’ only emphasises the inadequacy of the monoglot reader. Harrison here aligns himself with the famous Greek orator Demosthenes, who reputedly suffered from a stammer. Demosthenes is said to have


cured himself of this affliction by walking along the beach, and practising speaking while he had sea-worn pebbles in his mouth (a modern version of this can be seen in the film My Fair Lady where Professor Higgins puts marbles into Eliza’s mouth to help her pronunciation). Using the slang word ‘gob’ faced against this classical reference demonstrates the range of Harrison’s learning and emphasises the extent to which his accent and use of dialect is a free choice, and not, as his teacher seems to have imagined, a lack of education or intelligence.


The incident recorded in ll. 3-5 is especially ironic; Harrison remembers a teacher stopping him during a recital of part of the opening words of a Keats poem, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The opening lines of the poem are: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. Harrison’s rendition of this is couched in imitative accent: ‘mi ‘art aches’, and his teacher’s reaction to this is portrayed as violent. He describes his heart as ‘broken’ by the sound of the recital, and stigmatises Harrison as a ‘barbarian’, explaining that all poetry should be in RP. This sort of moment of humiliation is something often recounted in literature; you might think of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where authority figures similarly mock the protagonist. As in these books, Harrison’s humiliation is exacerbated by the knowledge, gained in later life, but felt instinctively at this early stage, that the teacher is wrong—not just wrong to do this in a humane sense, but wrong in his assumptions about the nature of literature.

The mature Harrison gets his revenge through an interpolation in brackets ‘(even Cockney Keats?)’, which indicates his superior knowledge of poetry: unlike the teacher, he is aware that Keats himself had been mocked by the aristocratic critical establishment of his day because of his London accent. In other words, Keats had been accused of being lower-class and uncouth on the basis of his voice, in much the same way as Harrison had. Aligning himself with a powerful poet in this way, Harrison threatens all his teacher’s judgements; he establishes his superiority in the dialogue, and demonstrates his linguistic expertise by deftly rendering his teacher’s accent in the IPA as [ΛЅ].

Throughout the poem, Harrison remembers his teacher as calling him ‘T.W’. Presumably his initials were used as a means of distancing the teacher from the student. Harrison remembers the language of contempt: ‘He was nicely spoken’. The phrase has the resonance of childhood; it is the sort of comment made about well-behaved children. The teacher’s speech is described as ‘nice’ a word, in this context, meaning not just pleasant, but correct, exact, in a way which infers the manner in which the teacher himself is submissive to the establishment. The teacher describes Harrison’s attempt at reciting Keats as an attack on English itself: ‘can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ The exclamation here, and the semantic field of words such as ‘glorious’ and ‘heritage’ seek to further distance the young, Northern boy from the well-spoken southern teacher. He is relegated to ‘the drunken porter’, the role chosen for him implicitly appropriate because it is comic and vulgar.

Harrison uses here the distinction between verse and prose frequently found in Shakespeare—that verse is generally used in serious contexts, and prose frequently for comedy—to amplify his teacher’s prejudice. From his point of view, prose is a lower form of art, and the only sort of writing to which Harrison can aspire. His speech—that is, the everyday speech, ‘the language that I spoke at home’ is described as bankrupt—though Harrison wittily refers indirectly to this clichéd expression by saying, more obliquely, that it is ‘in the hands of the receivers’. The teacher’s harsh correction ‘we say’ effectively shuts Harrison out from the elite ‘we’ by virtue of his accent, and he expresses his silencing in ironic colloquialism (‘That shut my trap’) and the use of language associated with servility: ‘I doffed my flat ‘a’s’. The awkward Northern speech is imaged as unsightly, even diseased: ‘great / lumps..to hawk up and spit out’.

In section II, Harrison becomes more explicit about his anger and his revenge on his childhood experience. He decides to ‘take over’ poetry in another financial metaphor (‘We’ll occupy / your lousy leasehold’), and like some fairy-tale giant, ‘chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones’. The misspelling of ‘Literature’ here both enacts the meaning (it is litter, to be chewed up) and mocks insistence on regular spelling with its phonetic imitation. Harrison breaks the rules that he has been taught, that he has submitted to, and recovers his own voice in an entirely literal sense: ‘[uz] [uz] [uz]’. His anger is evident as the pace of the poem speeds up, the emphatic repetitions urging on the solid rhymes as he re-invents himself as ‘Tony’ and forgets his childhood initials.

In the final stanza, Harrison re-asserts his poetic authority. Wordsworth’s Westmoreland accent makes, as he points out, matter rhyme with water—exactly the flat ‘a’ sound that he has had to ‘lose’ as a child at school. He reclaims his status as a Northern speaker, discarding the rules about how to ‘aspirate’, that is, to pronounce ‘correctly’ the initial ‘h’ sound on a word like ‘heart’ in the line from Keats (to ‘drop one’s aiches’ used to be a signifier of low class). Harrison is rebelling, in this poem, against the way in which the poetic establishment had, in his childhood, claimed Keats as a poet of the upper class, and ignored his lower middle class, liberal roots. He is rebelling against a perceived ahistorical cultural rewriting of history in which ‘Standard’ English is privileged over the spoken word of the poet himself.

In a final example of how easily this prioritizing can happen Harrison recounts with wonder and amusement how when he was finally ‘successful’ as a writer, and was mentioned in The Times, presumably in a review, the paper made a hyper-correction; wrongly believing ‘Tony’ to be an abbreviation of ‘Anthony’ they ‘corrected’ it, as he says ‘automatically’. The exclamation at the end of the poem enacts his wry amusement here: the official written word is already, implicitly, smoothing over the perceived roughness of the poet.

Tony Harrison

If any of you would like to try your luck with the reading of 'National Trust', you can find it here on the poetry archive site, though I still can't get the sound to work. You can listen again to 'Them and [uz]' here if you want to, and there's also an interesting interview with Tony Harrison on The poetry channel.

If you've enjoyed looking at the Tony Harrison poems we've done in class, you might also enjoy listening to his poem 'Initial Illumination'. He is a real wordsmith, and it is enormously enlightening to hear him talking about the ways in which he composes.

A challenge--what has this picture of a cormorant got to do with Tony Harrison?