James Joyce “Clay”. Critical analysis.

The life of this world is but comfort of illusion.

Koran 3: 185

In the fifteen Dubliners stories, city life, religion, friends and family bring hope to individuals discovering what it means to be human. “Dubliners” is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. The story “Clay” takes place in late autumn on Hallow Eve, which is the Celtic New Year’s Eve and Feast of the Dead. 

The theme of the story is that one can live a long life but never actually realize that the whole was nothing but an illusion. We can also trace several ideas that run all through the story: humble folk and the society, the senility and loneliness, relationships between the generations. 

In “Clay,” the protagonist, Maria is a patient, old woman and a former maid for rival brothers Joe and Alphy Donnelly. Now that they’re all grown up, she seems to be “lost” in her life, childless and unmarried, and is now an employee at a laundry. At first sight she seems to be a very balanced and flat character, but at the end of the story we have some doubts about it. We do not know much about her life, why she does not have a husband and children, we know only that Maria is a very appealing character, very kind-hearted and tolerant, “a veritable peace-maker” and “every one was…fond of” her. The implicit details presented in elements of speech mannerism (“nice”, “good”, “lovely”) help to understand the reader the kindness and sincerity of her nature. J. Joyce describes Maria as “a very, very small person” with “a very long nose and a very long chin”, she has tine dressboots , “diminutive body”, “tiny head” and “a tiny quavering voice”. Here the epithet “tiny” is emotionally-essential detail which discloses the character as a very lonely person and small, insignificant in comparison with the world and the crowd. We can find certain oppositions between Maria and the crowd (“The tram was full and she had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people”; “ferreted her way quickly among the crowds”, “the shop was…full of people…”, etc). 

She was not only lonely but also an elderly person, we can trace oppositions between the protagonist and young people, which show that the society doesn’t need her and doesn’t understand her, that she is just useless and irritating old woman. For example, the “stylish young lady” in the shop, who was very rude and “evidently annoyed” by Maria; or young men in the tram, who “simply stared straight before” Maria and an elderly gentleman, “none of  the young men seemed to notice her”.

But still Maria is very kind to people (she blushes and smiles at young lady in the shop), she accepts life as it is and goes with the stream (“but such was life”), and that is the main mistake of her life. Maria missed all the opportunities in her life, she is kind, nice, loving and sacrificing to all the people but to herself. She dedicated her life to the others and had to create the world of illusions to fill the void in her although she regrets having wasted her life (“Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness”). The author foregrounds this idea in the end of the story when Maria sings the same verse twice (“…But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,/That you loved me still the same.”) She is a very interesting demanding our emotional involvement character, we feel pity for her. Thus we can say that there is an explicit, but minor conflict between the person and the society, and the main internal conflict within the protagonist presented through the implicit details. 

The title is suggestive and is of great importance to understand the whole story. During the celebration of the Hallow Eve they played a game when a blindfolded person seats in front of a table on which several saucers are placed. The saucers are shuffled, and the person then chooses one by touch; the contents of the saucer determine the person's life during the following year. Clay is object Maria chooses during the divination game (“soft wet substance”). Traditionally, this object was the omen of approaching death. That’s why everybody paused and then began scuffling and whispering. “Nobody took off her bandage” as if wanted to protect her. Joe who used to say that “mamma is mamma, but Maria is my proper mother”, had never been so nice to her “as he was that night”. Nobody wanted to ruin her world of illusions. 

The tone of much of the story is poignant, sweet and sad at once. This story is yet another tale dealing with relationships between generations, and Joe may be weeping after the song because his beloved Maria is not long for this world. A huge world, full of illusions and unrealized dreams, in a “tiny person, and a “tiny person” in a huge world, where hardly a person would notice her death that is the story is about.

David Herbert Lawrence “The Prussian officer”. Critical analysis.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

”Ichabod” by John Greenleaf Whittier

In the story “The Prussian officer” by David Herbert Lawrence the subconscious becomes a realm of repressed passions. It results in uncontrollable forces that lead to the severe conflict between the two main characters: the aristocratic Captain and his simple orderly. Lawrence weaves these forces together throughout the story. The forces unfold in a logical progression of events. First, the class separation and military rank division provide the necessary conditions for the perverse conflict to develop between the Captain and his orderly. His position of military and social dominance makes possible the manifestation of the Captain's passion for his orderly. Finally, the orderly's repressed feelings, which result from his continued and inevitable subjugation from the Captain, lead to the revolt and ultimate destruction of the being.

The theme of the story is that inability to control one’s feelings and emotions, even in very stressful situations, may cause a real tragedy.

We can find all forms of discourse in the story – narration is represented in actions, description of nature or characters’ feelings, character drawing in dialogs. The story falls into 4 parts. The first one is an introductory one and it stands for the exposition and rising action. This part has a framing composition; it is both the beginning and the end of the chapter. The second one is the climax of the story, where the orderly commits a murder. The third one is falling action, the orderly’s throes of conscience, agony and death. In the forth part, which is the dénouement, we see the funeral of both main characters, death soothed their suffering and united them.

The whole story is based on oppositions. The one that runs all through the story is the opposition between man and nature. The poetic description on p. 82 gives us the idea of it, underlines the certain hierarchy, that nature is eternal, closer to heaven, the man is transient. In the exposition we find lots of epithets that help to describe the nature. They are full of subjective connotation (glistening sky implies the “suffocating” heat, “pale blue” and “very still” mountains have an implication of comfort and contrast to the fuss of people).  In the end we can find lots of repetitions (gold, golden p. , pure, pure out) and words of the one semantic field (glisten, radiant, lustrous gleaming) that show the divinity of nature, multicoloured and bright description, its purity is opposed to the real dark bottoms of human soul (“golden light behind golden-green glitterings…”; “snow…like pure, soft gold”). 

Another very important opposition is the one between the protagonist (the orderly) and the antagonist (the officer).  The captain is “a tall man about forty” with a “handsome, finely knit figure”, “reddish brown, stiff hair”, “full brutal mouth”, “light blue eyes…flashing with cold fire”. From the explicit and implicit details in this description we can conclude that the officer is a hot-tempered (reddish, brutal), but disciplined (stiff) man. The oxymoron “cold fire” foregrounds that he is a very controversial character. Such implicit details as “deep lines in his face”, “irritable tension of his brow” hint at the concealing and suppression of the feelings, struggle within oneself. But unlike the officer, the orderly had “dark, expressionless eyes, that seemed never to have thought”, he “received life direct through the senses, and acted straight from instinct.” The author dwells upon the idea of the naturalness and freedom of the servant using the metaphoric repetition “movements of an unhampered animal”. The author foregrounds the idea of body and especially the young body of the orderly throughout the narration (“fine figure”, “handsome figure”, “the movement of his strong young shoulders”, “fine fingers crisped”) that may be the originated from homosexual attraction firstly in the officer and then in the orderly. Something undiscovered in the Captain's subconscious makes him aware of his orderly as “free and self-contained”, and this “irritated the Prussian.” We can find many times throughout the text, words that belong to the semantic field of irritation and anger of the officer (“irritated the officer”, “grew madly irritable”, “going irritably insane”, etc) that show the intensification of feelings. The Captain was almost dead, “unliving” , “he didn’t choose to be touched into life” and that caused his annoyance. 

The tension is growing as the narration proceeds. The “could not rest when the soldier was away, and when he was present, he glared at him with tormented eyes”. As the result of incessant psychological attacks, bulling and humiliation the orderly looses his freedom and naturalness (“like a wild thing caught” , he feels like “put out of existence”, while the officer becomes “firmer and prouder with life” . Thus the main conflict of the story is based on nullification of a man. 

But the more the orderly is abased the more dependent he becomes, the more he adores his torturer and at the same time he wanted to swap places with him, to be dominant. But because of the difference in social status there was only one way out – a murder. Note, the foregrounded repetition when the officer looked at his soldiers (“It pleased him”, “the command pleased him”). When the orderly is killing his captain we find “it was pleasant…to have that chin”, “it pleased…to repress”, “it pleased to keep his hands pressing…” . That is satisfaction of the desire to be dominant, but just a momentary satisfaction (“It was a pity it was broken”) and relief (“His heart was satisfied”, “It was extinguished now”). We find an oxymoron “heavy relief” that denotes a mixture of feelings. But then the torments of conscience, remorse come. We see nullification, exhaustion, he wants only “to lie down and not to be disturbed”. The author uses lots of parallel constructions (“he was sick with pain”,“he was sick”), hyperbole, metaphors (“a big pulse of sickness beat in him as if it throbbed through the whole earth”) to show the destruction of his being, moral and physical decomposition. His life ends with the death of the Captain, he becomes a “ghostly shadow”, that can’t come back to the real world. And when he dies in agony both moral and physical pain tortures him.

In the very end we cannot find the contrast between the protagonist and the antagonist, they merged into each other and only opposition to the nature remained (“The mountains…seemed to have it, that which was lost in him”). The loss of honour, of faith, of purity and of soul means death of a human being.

Hemingway “The cat in the rain”. Critical analysis.

Hemingway was one of the leaders of the modernist literary movement, which took place after World War I, a master of implicit detail. He experimented with language by trimming the often excessive language of the nineteenth century into a spare, hard-edged prose. Hemingway manages to catch the post-war mood of disillusionment and dissatisfaction by forging an enormous impression through the economy of his style and the "toughness" of attitude of mind.

Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Cat in the Rain" is, on the surface, a simple tale of an American couple in Italy. However, the reader soon realizes that this uncomplicated tale illuminates much deeper meanings. The main idea of this story is the idea of family routine and loneliness which we can define even from the very beginning. A lot of poetic details such as “the war monument”, “empty square”, words with the semantic field of rain and water (water, pools, sea, dripped, glisten, slipped back) imply loneliness. The author uses the foregrounded repetitions that enforce this feeling of abandonment, oppressiveness and inevitability. For example, we can see the word combination “the war monument”, which implies the idea of destruction, grief and loneliness itself, three times in one paragraph. The theme of the story is one can have illusions of a happy family being misunderstood and lonely in fact.

The action starts to develop when the wife who is the protagonist notices a cat in the rain that is a parallel character. The cat “crouched under one of the dripping green tables...trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on". The situation implies that the cat feels far from convenient and so does the wife in her family life. The word “kitty” is the symbol of loneliness, which helps to reveal the nature of the protagonist, her desire to care and to be cared. This desire is the foundation of the main conflict of the story which is the inner conflict within the wife. Hemingway gives names neither to the wife nor to the cat generalizing women in American families, difficulties in marital relations. There is also the contrast between the notion of the united and extended Italian family and the American family where 2 people just live together.

The husband, George, is the antagonist in the story. From the very beginning he doesn’t seem to care of his wife, his speech is very laconic while his wife is explicit in the expression of her feelings (dialog p. 126). But in the end we understand, that he is not indifferent, he loves her. Foe example, George starts the conversation in the dialog on p. 127. Some elements of the text make us understand that not everything is so bad, namely George changes his position and seems to demonstrate his interest. But the American wife wants the demonstration of love, she is tired of routine, she needs a lot, but at the same time she cannot get what she wants even her little poor kitty that shows the repetition of the words “want”, “like”and “new”. The only way that the woman finds in relieving herself from this situation is through making reveries or complaining. The reveries are those of possessing a child. She wants to be a woman (“I get so tired of looking like a boy”).

The opposing character to the husband is the hotel owner. The author describes the relation between the wife and the hotel-keeper as an indication of her relations with the husband. The poetic details “old heavy face” and “big hands” are full of situational connotation and imply the lack of protection, support, tenderness and care. The syntactical parallel structures which are reinforced by the anaphoric repetition of the verb “like” and show the qualities she lacks in her husband. She feels inconvenient, no umbrella in the rain, no care, just the wall of misunderstanding, and the hotel owner provides her with that protection and attention, she feels “very small and at the same time very important”. This unusual opposition of the epithets “small” and “important” helps to understand the needs of this particular woman and women in general.

Another secondary character who is parallel to the wife is the maid. Her actions (“umbrella opened”, “holding the umbrella”) and speech mannerisms (“you must not get wet”)  make the contrast between the wife and her husband evident. And that gives us the idea of the conflict between them, which is the minor, external conflict of the story.

The dénouement takes place, when the maid brings “a big tortoise-shell cat” when “the light comes on in the square”(the implication of hope). Symbolically the hotel keeper fulfills the woman’s dream and gives her what she hoped to have. The woman's agitation and perplexity are calmed down but still the problem remains unsolved.

Virginia Woolf “Russian Point Of View”. Critical analysis.

 

"A great literature is chiefly the product of 

inquiring minds in revolt against the 

immovable certainties of the nation."

H. L. Mencken

It’s common truth that every culture is unique.

It’s common truth that this uniqueness finds its expression in mentality, in point of view and without any doubts in literature.

And it’s common truth that people are never able to understand foreign literature to the full. But still we are persistently trying to explore another world through fiction.

Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘The Russian Point of View’ reasons upon why it is so difficult for the foreigners to understand Russian literature, what difference lies in literature of our countries and what makes them so different? She creates a profound meditation on issues of cultural relativity, the necessary opacities of translation, and the distinctive concerns of the Russian writers she found so influential for her own writing.

‘The Russian Point of View’ is a philosophical essay with elements of criticism. The author reasons about such philosophical notions as soul, truth, disparity in nature between peoples and at the same time dwells upon literary criticism of works by Russian writers. In this literary work we can distinguish certain characteristic features of the essay: the use of connectives to grasp the correlation of ideas (then, and, but, for, as, thus, moreover); emotive words (terrible catastrophe, desire, nauseating, depths of misfortune, raging fevers); similes (“Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake”, “like transparences with a light behind them”, “life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky”) and metaphors (“the vessel of this perplexed liquid” , “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts…” , “flies off at a tangent far from the truth”).  The personal pronoun “we” involves the reader into communication (“we ask” , “we have to cast about…”, we open the door ) and shows, that Woolf does not separate herself from foreigners (“Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature” , “We become awkward and self-conscious” ).

Woolf opens her essay by foregrounding the problem of intercultural relations, understanding. The inversion in the very first sentence serves a perfect attention grabber (“Doubtful as we frequently are…”). The greatest and the most obvious “barrier” for understanding is the difference in language.  The whole literature is “stripped of its style”  when we read it in translation. The words with negative connotations “crude”, “coarsened”, “mutilations”, “false” show the author’s disapproval of the distortions of the translation. We feel the author’s rejection through the simile “the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident” and the metaphor “they have lost their clothes <…> in some terrible catastrophe”. These stylistic devices emphasize that the translation involves loss in such important and subtle details, as manners or certain characteristic features of the protagonist. But the difficulty in understanding Russian literature, according to Woolf, also lies in cultural difference. There is something that the foreigner lacks: the “absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse”. Polysyndenton (the repetition of the conjunction “and”) produces a certain rhythm and makes the reader concentrate on the qualities that separate foreigners and the Russians. But what creates Russian literature is the “deep sadness”, the “common suffering, <…> effort, <…> desire that produces the sense of brotherhood”.

As V. Woolf puts it the major subject, the chief character in Russian fiction is soul, and this is the theme of the essay. In her work she gives the evaluation of three Russian authors, the three titans of world literature: Tchekov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Each of these writers resorts to different methods in describing a soul.

Woolf talks about Tchekov as “the most subtle and delicate analyst of human relations”  that’s why his soul is also “delicate and subtle” . And “we have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these strange stories rightly comes” . The anaphoric repetition in syntactically identical structures and the lexical repetition of the word “soul” foreground the idea of the soul as the main subject of interest in Tchekov’s works (“the soul’s relation with other souls… the soul’s relation to health… the soul’s relation to goodness”, “the soul is ill; the soul is cured; the soul is not cured”).

In Dostoyevsky’s works the soul is “formless”, “confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable…” . This string of epithets and the sustained metaphor “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in”  refer to the notion of contradictory and unrestrained turbulent soul that Dostoyevsky depicts. It “mingles with the souls of others”  and create the feeling of brotherhood of the Russians.

Tolstoy is “the greatest of all novelists” for Woolf. The idea of his all-embracing vision, the global perception of the world is emphasized by the convergence of stylistic devices – the hyperbole (“From his first words we can be sure…”), the parallel constructions reinforced by the anaphoric repetition (“here is a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards. Here is a world <…> here is a man…”). This makes us feel that Tolstoy’s perception of life is similar to Woolf’s and even coincides with it.

To conclude, Russian soul is unique because of its versatility and contradictions, Russian authors depict it because the soul is the endless source for inspiration, the most gripping and the most mysterious subject for description. But for people with different mentality, language, for people of different culture and sensation of the world it is almost impossible to understand another culture, another world. But V. Woolf is one of those foreigners who approached to “the alien culture” and revealed its secrets. 

Mikhaylishina E.