"Howard had walked out of the churchyard, turned left and kept on walking. He had no plans--or at least, his conscious mind told him he had none. His subconscious had other ideas. He was heading for...his 'working class roots'....[He visits and argues with his father.] They didn't mean it to be like this. But it was like this. Both had other intentions. Howard...was a big malleable ball of potential change...[but] his childhood had been shot through with this meaningless noise...Half-lived life. The unexamined life is not worth living. That had been Howard's callow teenage dictum. Nobody tells you, at seventeen, that examining it will be half the trouble" (291-297).

"Considering things too much, all the time, was the definition of who [Jerome] was." (Ch. 5, p. 45)

"Poor Zora, she lived through footnotes." (Ch. 7, p. 70)

Beginning with a brief re-cap/slight elaboration (via lunch; thanks, Paul) of last week's conversations:

• Howards End (the movie) is a foil to On Beauty (the novel)-->
  I used a "faithful" filmic adaptation,
  celebrated for its "fidelity" to the original,
  to set off/explore the dimensions of
  
  
• an adaptation that CHANGES the original text,
  in response to alterations in the environment:
  
  "To simulate the stratified society of Forster's turn-of-the-century England, Smith has chosen an equally hidebound world, the knowingly archaic and insular landscape of an upscale, east coast American university [talk about relevant!?]....Wellington College, with its petty feuds, judgments, professional and sexual jousting and self-congratualting affluence, prides itself on its liberal principles but remains almost wholly estranged from a world in which prejudice, povery, crime, terror and fears are the forces that move those outside the academic bubble." ("A Thing of Beauty," The Observer 9/4/05)
  
  Elise: Smith appears to be making the...claim about intellectuals...stuck in a pretense of progression that is in reality no longer evolving....her critique of universities as institutions that espouse innovation and change, while in reality may be perpetuating the same ideas year after year.
  
  Gaby: "if you look at the kipps and belsey families, the children do not precisely correspond to those in the schlegel and wilcox families because the numbers are different"
  
  

  Howard's End	On Beauty
  Margaret	Kiki
  Mrs. Wilcox	Mrs. Kipps
  (Per Christina: "big jerks") Mr. Wilcox	Monty Howard
  Helen	Jerome Zora Levi
  Leonard	Carl Choo
  Charles Paul	Michael
  	Victoria!

  
  
  
• the still-unanswered question (which can only be answered retrospectively?) is whether, in making these adaptations, Smith has contributed to further "generation"
  
  
• two predictions:
  EB: "as she goes forth into the literary world, she too wants to be the 'fittest' author: able to leave behind her unique themes to subsequent generations....She introduces a new species of novel, and yet, the homologies between the two books are still there."
  
  Tamarinda: "If this book were an organism, adapting through time and adapting, it would die."
  
  
• one question we might answer now, though, is whether, in adapting Forster's novel, Smith reiterates or misreads his central claim
  
  
• Gaby: "the end is not at all a mimicking of forster, and is, in a sense, the opposite of his."
  
  
• Forster was writing in a time of transition:
  encountering the flux and restlessness of contemporary cosmopolitan life,
  he constructed a fiction which returns to/ends in the settled peace
  of the countryside, where "the end" can be seen...
  
  Evan: I feel Forster is anti-change.
  
  Emily: I would say that Forster...does not believe in a change of mentality.
  
  in Paul's terms, he responds to the narrative energy of historical movement
  (and to the restless, unpredictable unconscious)
  with a non-narrative, static conclusion (created by consciousness)
  
  in Anne's terms, he concludes a narrative tale with a lyric moment,
  replaces movement in space with a moment in time
  
  (An example of a contrast between the lyric and the narrative:
  "The Happiness of this World," from the French of Christophe Plantin,
  trans. Karl Kirchwey: lyric embedded in a narrative that ends with lyricism)
  
• in her homage to Forster, written in another time of transition,
  Smith similarly orchestrates a counter point for the
  historical energy of change; her lyric gesture is towards beauty
  
  
• Emily: Maybe we do not know why we desire beautiful things, but...I think Smith is telling us that...change is not an option when we cant even define why it is "we want".
  
  
• Becky: Forster...is...trying to reach an actual end in time, the permanent calm of the storm....Smith is a lyricist, capturing the staticness, fleeting momentary events and building on them.
  
  
• Howard refuses to valorize beauty as a static, unmoving, non-narrative, lyric moment
  (for which Smith demonizes him)
  
  
• Jenn: I wonder, if as Katherine said, if Smith's title "On Beauty" is some wry, sarcastic comment on academia?
  
  
• Smith's acerbic critique of academics may be a concentrated expression of her distaste for narrative, for putting "pure experience" into words, into analysis, into theory--
  and of her preference for the unchanging, unanalyzed (unanalyzable?) lyrical moment
  (yep: how ironic/paradoxical is that?!)

For example, when Kiki views Charlene's painting of

Maitresse Erzulie by Hector Hyppolite

"It was painted in a primitive, childlike style, everything flat on the canvas. No perspective, no depth....'It's lovely'....'she's my favourite. She's a great Voodoo goodess, Erzulie. She's called the Black Virgin--also, the Violent Venus....She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon....and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, and, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune....rather like all the Catholic saints rolled into one being.'

'That's interesting...' began Kiki shyly, giving herself a moment to remember a thesis of Howard's which she now wished to reproduce as her own for Carlene. 'Because...we're so binary, of course, in the way we think. We tend to think in opposites, in the Christian world. We're structured like that...'

'That's a clever way to put it. I like her parrots.'" (Pt. 2, Ch. 4, p. 175)

Kiki to Charlene, about Erzulie: "'It's lovely. I just love portrats. We don't have any paintings in our house. At least, none of human beings.' 'Oh, that's terrible,' said Carlene and looked stricken...'They're my company --they're the greater part of my joy.'" (p. 175).

Encountering a new person, Howard turns him into a painting:

Pieter Pauwel Rubens (1577-1640), Four Studies of the Head of a Negro

"'Are you at Wellington? Familiar face,' said Howard distractedly...Carl laughed, a strange artificial laugh that had more anger in it than good humour. 'Do I look like I'm at Wellington?'....'Rubens,' said Howard suddenly. 'Your face. From the four African heads. Nice to meet you, anyway.' Howard's family stared at him....Kiki tried to patch the thing up. It's remarkable what a face like Carl's makes you want to do in order to see it smile again." (Ch. 7, pp. 76-78).

"'Hendrickje Bathing, 1654'....On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves....The woman...looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective--a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath...."

"Howard made the picture larger...The woman's fleshiness fill the wall....her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety--chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come" (pp. 442-442).

"'I hold myself completely responsible for the contents of the lectures I give. But I am afraid I am quite unable to answer his frankly bizarre request for their "intention"....I had no idea...what a stickler he was for the absolute nature of the written world....Dr. Belsey, if I may refer you to one of your own liberal lodestars, Jean-Paul Sartre, "We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are--that is the fact"....How...can I possibly predict before I give my lectures how the "multivalency"...of my own text will be received in the "heterogenous consciousnesses" of my audience?'"

Safire, On Language: "Existential,"NYTimes Magazine (4/8/07):
"the cheerful philosophy of existentialism...summed up as "there is no God or we're not sure." In 1846, the Dane Soren Kierkegaard set forth Existents-Forhold, holding that the need to make painful ethical decisions was the source of mankind's dread and despair; that man was solitary, existing in isolation. The fact of being totally free - therefore, uniquely responsible - scares us in the most profound way, requiring a 'leap of faith' to find God.

Friedrich Nietzsche later worked it over into his God-is-dead nihilism. Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s retained that atheism but stressed that the sources of dread - the key word in existentialism - were our denials of personal responsibility, our failure to fight for ourselves in a hostile universe and our craven flight from 'inescapable freedom' (that last is a great oxymoron). The existential way to live was to 'stand as if on a trap door' that might spring open at any moment."

"'this very symphony that we've just been having--she won't let it alone. She labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music."

"Mozart's Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit....Your death is awaiting you in that pit....In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined...in which you were the only black woman....The job of this choir is judgement....It is surprising how dramatic the fight for your measly soul turns out to be. Also surprising are the mermaids and the apes that persist on dancing around each other and sliding down an ornate staircase...."(p. 69)

Why do we make stories out of music?
Can we stop ourselves from doing so?
Why would we want to?

What about painting?
Can you look at non-representational art
without telling a story about it?

What do you see?

Are you moved by what you see?

James Eakins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (2004), Chapter 1, "Crying at nothing but colors": "It is likely that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko's paintings...."

Liam Frankland, "Rapeseed-Rothko"

Can the written word be non-narrative?

Can fiction be non-narrative?

Consider Samuel Beckett's Lessness:
Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless.

Beckett wrote each of these sixty sentences on a separate piece of paper, mixed them all in a container, and then drew them out in random order twice....Beckett told Cohn that this aleatory method was 'the only honest thing to do'....Indeed, whether Beckett shaped the flow of the work or whether the ordering of the sentences is actually random is less significant than the appearance of randomness.... Lessness works on the nerves rather than the intellect of its readers....It is a piece that seems on many counts to fulfil Samuel Beckett's ideal of 'accommodating the chaos' of consciousness in linguistic form. (Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning)
How useful (generative?) is this story about our two interconnected stories? Unwilling to write random narrative, like Beckett, and unable to imagine a place of continued narrative, both Forster and Smith tried to shape their fiction around the possibility (in the immortal words of PG), "interconnected vastness, or i.v. or 'ivy' for short, a fundamental drive that is not...permanently achievable, in part because it conflicts with... a wish for autonomy" [and movement]?

Our immediate response to beauty is an unconscious act, one Smith wants to preserve. She distrusts the conscious (academic intellectual) analysis of that experience--because it limits the experience itself?

Cf. Denis Dutton's scathing critique
of Scarry's argumentation in On Beauty and being Just with

Dalke & Grobstein, Story-Telling in (At Least) Three Dimensions:
An Exploration of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Beyond:
"Because both of us were...convinced that the academic enterprise generally emphasizes explicit, language-based, descriptive exploration at the cost of implicit, action-based engagement, we agreed on the need to find ways of effectively blending, rather than opposing, the two activities in an introductory college-level writing-and-thinking course. The guiding concept of our planning was our awareness that understanding involves a continual cyclic interaction between knowledge acquired largely unconsciously through action, and critical synthetic processes that are mostly conscious."

Could that be why Howard "interrogates" beauty so relentlessly,
and why Smith defends it as steadfastly...?

In an essay on Forster, Smith wrote: "There is no bigger crime in the English comic novel than thinking you are right...a lesson that must also apply to the comic novelist."