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.