Hey that's the name of the show

I don’t remember exactly which conversation it was, but at some point we were discussing Milkman’s immaturity and I sort of had a flashback to my blog post on how much an individual is responsible for overcoming their circumstances. Much  of Song of Solomon concerns the relationship between past and present. Milkman is forever branded by the name he was given at a young age, the future does not arrive the present extends itself, old incidents from their childhood define the relationship between many of the characters. Milkman is immature because he lives in a house where no one grows up and where they all live in the past. Names are a part of circumstance and Hagar's life bears certain resemblances to the biblical character who Abraham cast out, implying a certain inevitability to aspects of her life, and therefore to Milkman’s. Furthermore the whole topic of overcoming circumstance is incredibly significant when talking about African Americans. Last year we read Invisible Man and Native Son, two books which conflicted over the extent to which African Americans were products of their environments.  
     Last time I kind of felt like I was arguing in circles about exactly how much individuals are responsible for. Both answers are unsatisfying, and if we tried to find some middle ground I think that would also be unsatisfying as saying people are responsible for some aspects of their beliefs but other cultural views are totally inescapable is pointless unless we explain why certain views are inescapable and others are not. Ultimately the question is about whether or not we are able to understand moral absolutes. If they exist and we all have the tools to find these moral absolutes then we are all responsible for not finding them or not acting on them if we did find them. However much of this syllabus is about living in a world in which what has previously been conceived of as absolutes (masculinity, slavery, pre-modern values) have been shattered, creating in the characters a disillusionment. Camus writes at length about we have to cling to the value of life even though it is arbitrary and abzurd, Woolf and Baker seem to be saying the same thing. I think the question of individual responsibility is incredibly relevant to what we have read this year because the importance of being responsible for your own values and beliefs is magnified in a modern world where everything is in question and cultural values are up in the air.

Journal Reflection

I liked doing an online journal more then doing a written journal. While I didn’t keep up on it nearly as much as I should I liked the opportunity to read and comment on other peoples blogs. I also hate writing things by hand and tend to dislike writing stored physically, unless it is a professionally bound book or of similar quality words in a processor just seem much more manageable. But I’ll return to the topic at hand instead of going off on a Howie style tangent. I did find it helpful to write a journal even though I didn’t do it with the intended frequency. It probably would have been more helpful if I had used it as a way to develop ongoing ideas rather then just idea dump at the end of every half quarter. That’s not to say my ideas didn’t progress I just didn’t record that progression so I could review it later, which would have been helpful. If you have the option to keep this online I would recommend doing so, even though I don’t feel particularly qualified to give that recommendation because I didn’t use it the way it was intended to be used. 

Vague connections between the novels we read

When I like to listen to music I like to listen to full albums rather then individual songs because I like to see how the songs int he album comment on each other or gain no meanings based on the other songs around them. Similarly I like to look for the ways novels in a syllabus comment on each other, especially if they were written in a similar time period. So I’m just going to discuss some random connections I saw throughout the syllabus.
    The theme of the value, or lack thereof, of daily life was big towards the beginning of the year. Baker and Woolf are big on the importance of daily life. Baker emphasizes it by showing how the little things, when taken in isolation, are beautiful. Woolf by showing us that there is true passion and power in the most mundane parts of our lives. After that we get Hemmingway who seems to be the middle ground on the topic. His characters are going through relatively meaningless lives because of the modern condition but occasionally have moments of passion Kafka portrays modern life as a nightmare transforming us into something repugnant and horrible. Camus would seem to be critical of the Baker woolf view on the topic but if we see him as condemning Mersault for viewing life as meaningless then he seems pretty much aligned with them.
    I thought Woolf's caves and Hemingway's icebergs were interesting opposites. Both achieve very developed characters but one does it by explicitly showing the emotion while the other lets it exist implicitly. Masculinity is a theme in a lot of the novels, most prominently in Hemingway but also in Wide Sargaso Sea and Song of Solomon. Rochester’s failing is his pride as well as the fact that he embraces an idea of masculinity that requires him to posses Antoinette. Milkman’s struggle with maturity is linked with masculinity which is always a loaded topic in African American literature. In all cases the characters are struggling to try and figure out how to be a man in places where the conventional definition is inapplicable, or at least unhelpful.

The threat of Meursault

I want to talk about Jack Abecasis’ idea that Meursault is  a character totally free from all morals or social norms and the consequences of such a reading. The idea that it is possible to ever become free of such things is a matter of some contention. I think it is totally reasonable for us to feel threatened by the idea that all our morals and cultural standards our entirely arbitrary and there is no way for us to make an objectively true judgement about anything. If Meursault is, as Abecassis says,  the triumph of intellect over culture and  emotion then that means there are no intellectual grounds for belief in our values and we have to either find some sort of intellectual defense against Meursault, accept a meaningless universe, or declare intellect an unsuitable method to find truth. All of those are difficult propositions and highlight why the reading of Meursault as the perfect nihilist is worthy of discussion.

If Meursault is the perfect Nihilist then his behaviour must be entirely arbitrary and illogical, he must be without motive. If all values are an invention of society then he has no logical basis on which to make any decision. Our society likes to compartmentalize morals and values as only being related to obviously ethical decisions, particularly when business is involved we usually see morals as unrelated. Yet I would contend that all the decisions we make are based on morality, more then just decisions our very way of understanding the world around us is very much based off of morality. All of us are constantly making value judgements, consciously or unconsciously, about the world around us and about our possible futures. We all have some idea about the way our own lives and the world in general should be, and we make decisions to try and make things the way they are supposed to be.

I would argue this belief that there is a way things should be is the major steering force of our lives and a direct product of our morals.  We all have certain beliefs that allows us to make decisions whether they are the ones we would typically label as moral or beliefs we don’t typically label as morals because they have to do with our own material success. Regardless of how we label these beliefs, they still shape the way we think the world should be. Most of us believe material success is a worthy goal and think a world in which we have material success should exist. However we have other moral principles that interact with this belief and override it and all help us to determine what should be. I realize this argument is kind of sketchy but the point I am trying to get across is that all of our decisions are based on the belief that some futures are more desirable then others and we determine the desirability or value of these futures based on our values and morals.  Meursault has no values so he has no way to determine which future is more desirable, whether he pulls the trigger doesn’t matter because to him all values are arbitrarily determined and therefore cannot be used to determine which course of action he should follow. For Meursault there is no logical reason why any course of action is more desirable then any other.

Yet Meursault still clearly makes decisions, he still chooses one even though there is no logical reason to choose it or to not choose it. He is a huge threat to any sort of rational understanding of human behaviour, the only way we could understand and predict the behaviour of others is if they take action for a reason, if it is entirely arbitrary then  we can;t understand it. We presume that not only crimes but all other actions have some sort of motive, yet Meursault is entirely without motive. We must try to find a way to explain why Meursault takes action even though he has no motive for it.

I am uneasy with the explanation that he just arbitrarily makes a choice even though he has absolutely no reason to choose either option. We should understand that the idea that a human can behave without motive threatens our understanding of humans and renders Meursault incomprehensible. We can try to use an absence of free will to explain it away, if Meursault’s  actions were predetermined then he never had a choice to make, but then we are still left without anyway to understand or predict these predetermined behaviors. If we don’t put Meursault’s cognitive processes in a different category from our own then we leave ourselves open to the possibility that all human behavior is incomprehensible. We must therefore either categorize Meursault as either mad or inhuman, (I would prefer inhuman) or deny that he is a perfect nihilist and assert that there are reasons for his behavior.

Individual Responsibility & Culture

One of the discussions that comes up a lot when we are talking about Wide Sargasso Sea is exactly how much sympathy we can extend to Rochester. I tend to sympathize with him until he refuses to let Antoinette go with half the money because of his pride. Regardless of where exactly we lose sympathy with him, or if we do at all, I think his character brings up interesting questions about an individuals responsibility to rise above the prejudices of his culture. While many of his problems are distinctly a result of his pride and his own flaws we can see where his ideas about possession and ownership of Antoinette can come from the gender roles of his time. English law and customs tend to support the idea that while she may not be exactly his property her status is pretty close, and so we can see how some of his fixation on owning and objectifying Antoinette is a partly trying to live up to social standards. I think we can also blame Victorian culture for the unsatisfactory relationships in Mrs. Dalloway, if you judge those relationships to be unsatisfying. This raises questions about whether or not an individual is responsible for overcoming the prejudices of their culture and whether or not we should judge them harshly for failing to do so.  

The racism that is present in Mr. Mason and to a lesser extent in Rochester is reprehensible but is not unexpected. Neither of them have any real contact with the people of Jamaica before coming there and the their preconceived notions come from people with huge authority in British culture. So there is a viable argument to be made that they should not be held responsible for their own attitudes, as they have to overcome huge cultural barriers. That said if you excuse people for simply going along with authority and culture you justify being complicit to any number of horrible actions. From the holocaust to slavery absolving individuals of the responsibility to resist evil authority is something that is problematic, and has been something Americans have been reluctant to do. I think we ruled in Nuremberg that following orders is not a valid excuse for a war crime, though we have been inconsistent in that ruling.

    In addition people clearly have overcome the biases of their culture and we celebrate those people for doing so. If we want to believe human equality is a self evident universal truth then we have to believe that people who lived in other cultures had as much an opportunity to discover it as we do now. Therefore we have to condemn those who did not, but that makes up the vast majority of people living in those cultures. It is hard to say that everyone who was a part of a system like southern slavery are reprehensible human beings and should be held accountable for their actions, I am sure many of them were good people who loved each other and lived meaningful lives. Yet the progress our society has experienced from things such as suffrage and the civil rights movement are based entirely around forcing people to stand up to authority by demonstrating the injustice of the culture or authority in question. I think we would be far less forgiving of a person with racist attitudes living in the 1960’s then in the 1700’s, yet both of them have been exposed to the same ideas that we would hold fly in the face of a universal principle such as human equality. We tend to hold modern people more responsible for racism because culture goes against their beliefs so they have no excuses. Yet if we accept that people in teh 1700’s are not guilty we absolve them of responsibility to oppose an unjust majority, a dangerous act.

If it seems like this is going in circles I think that’s because my thought process is. I certainly think we should hold people to a high enough standard that we should expect people to be able to overcome the biases of their culture, yet throughout history most people have not. This means either humans are so flawed we should not be expected to oppose injustice, or most of the people who lived could rightfully be considered evil. I really don’t want tor each either of these conclusions and I think the most popular answer is probably going to be to hold them responsible to a limited extent, which makes sense but I find unsatisfying.

Alienated Workers

This is probably totally inaccurate and basically wild speculation but some of our recent discussions caused me to recall some of the readings we did of Marx in philosophy last year. Marx predicted generational conflicts due to constantly changing technology, and that these technological changes would cause what it means to be human to be very different for each generation. While some of us would disagree and would like to hold human nature to be some higher unchanging thing that is not incrementally changed by technology it is hard to deny that we do not function very differently from our previous generations. We function so differently that to them we might be seen as totally alien.
         The way this relates to the Metamorphosis is in the way that Gregor becomes happy and gains pleasure the less like a human he behaves. He is becoming something entirely different and unrecognizable to the people around him, to the point that they no longer even view him as human. It is possible that just like Marx predicts what it means to be human in the modern working environment has changed Gregor so that the family, and I think Kafka himself, find him repugnant and do not recognize this new type of human. The more Gregor tries to define himself by his old humanity and cling to his previous self identity the more pain he causes himself. But when he embraces his new nature he enjoys some of the new activities he is able to do. He has simply become something totally different from what it has previously meant to be human and should embrace his new existence.
      This doesn't hold up throughout the entire novel, as his parent and sibling do not experience similar transformations once they begin working. And I think certainly Kafka was unhappy with the existence of the modern worker and did not want to portray it as something that was only unworthy because modern workers kept expecting to be a definition of human that didn't make sense in the modern world. That said to some extent I think Marx's ideas about how the nature of humanity changes with it's environment are represented here in the way the modern working environment transforms Gregor.

Dreams In The Metamorphosis

I think it is interesting how Kafka opens the novel by assuring us that Gregor has just emerged from troubled edreams but the rest of the novel proceeds in a very surreal dreamlike fashion. I think the biggest example of this is the way so many things behave exactly the way he expects them too, even when it makes very little sense that they would do so. For example the manger showing up at his house even though he is only slightly late at that point. Furthermore no one ever questions the means by which Gregor has been transformed and tries to get a doctor or scientist involved, they are all as completely accepting of the total absurdity of the situation as Gregor is. I think this seems very dreamlike because in dreams no one ever question the total strangeness of the situation in mars. My bus driver from second grade never wonders exactly why we are on a hot air balloon, he just goes along with it the same way I do. The whole family never wonders why he's a cockroach and in fact they view it the same way Gregor does, they are ashamed of him as he is ashamed of himself and they view him primarily as a provider for the family which is similar to the way Gregor views himself. His first thought is that he will no longer be able to work and right away they begin to plan for what they will do now that Gregor is unable to.
        I am not entirely sure of the significance of the contrast between the dreamlike way all the characters think so similarly and Kafka's reassurance that this is not in fact a dream at the beginning of the novel. It is probably just to make the novel seem more surreal and strange and to convey the fact that this reality is just as horrible as Gregor imagines it.