Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

There's actually still quite a lot to be said about chapter one, but let's move on a bit - we can always come back!

Next thread here : https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

So far, for the next thread, you need only to have read mainly chapter 2 and perhaps a bit of chapter 3, as for this discussion, to allow for more in-depth discussion, I am going to ask for spoiler tags when we refer to the later parts of the book.

Hi everyone
I am not sure how much people are going to comment and how frequently, so how about we take it from the start of chapter 2 (no spoiler tags needed for chapters 2 and 3) but then we do put on spoiler tags if we refer to anything after chapter 3, to facilitate people being able to comment as they go along while the reading is still fresh in their minds.

One of the things that I have noticed up to chapter 2-3-ish, is that in the first chapter, K. was sort of quiet and accepting, but in chapter 2, he starts to become rather stroppy and assertive.

In chapter 1, I had thought he seems over-awed and lost, but as chapter 2 starts, he seems to want to assert some control of his own. Looking just at the end of chapter 1 and the start of chptr 2, what did you make of the weirdness with his 2 assistants?

Firstly, that the assistants seem exactly alike, and that they claim to be his assistants; yet are unknown to him - and most surprising, that he accepts their claim to be his old assistants!

Secondly, that K. almost seems to treat them a bit unfairly? He seems to be getting a bit irritated with his situation in general, and frankly, I suppose one can't really blame him too much.

If you'd read some of the material on the book in the intro to some of the editions, you would have seen mention that the book is partly about bureaucracy and the power play that takes place within and around bureaucracies. I think there's much more to the book, but on that point alone, we have already seen a lot of evidence, haven't we?

It seems that in this community around the castle, there's an entire pecking order, which K., as an outsider, still has to suss out.

But K. himself is also trying to assert a sort of bureaucratic power of his own onto the assistants, and I think the fact that he's making them exactly alike in his eyes, is sort of characteristic of the facelessness that the public has in the eyes of bureaucrats, but there may be more to it. What do you think?

Michele wrote: "Trav, what does "elliptical" mean to you in this context?"

Hi Michele, how lovely to see you around here again! :)))

Well, I would think that perhaps one meaning of elliptical would refer to the structure of the work. You know, things end again where they had started off. The "place" where things start off, could be physical or figurative.

Off the top of my head, I'm reminded of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a modernist work that I tend to see as an interesting "structural" work in the sense that it's a very geographical work, but also one with a lot of patterns in it that one could actually sort of plot on paper.

For example, it starts at Mrs Dalloway's house in the morning, and it moves through London geographically on a plottable course as if someone is walking around London viewing the story as it happens, and then it ends again, late the evening of that day back at Mrs Dalloway's house.

But besides moving through space and around the clock in an elliptical sense, it also moves from the present, back in time, and then back to the present again. At this stage, we wouldn't know if The Castle conforms to any such elliptical patterns, and I am not saying (yet) that it does. Let's decide at the end of the book.

..which reminds me that I need to make a new thread. See you there! :)

If there is a single phrase that I associate with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is that phrase "The Horror! The Horror! "

There are so many themes to discuss here that it's hard to know where to begin. Nihilism is a biggie for me in this poem. I've not read nearly enough about Eliot, but I do know that one of his metaphysical struggles was with the rise of secularism. It appears that Eliot remained quite conservatively religious amongst a tide of authors, thinkers and artists who struggled with nihilism in their existentialist works.

As I mentioned earlier, Heart of Darkness has a similar potential for ambiguity and multiple interpretations than The Hollow Men has, and I suspect one can link the two works in more than one way.

For me, personally, the biggest link lies with the authors' struggle to parse the ideas of nihilism and of meaning, and of human morals and their boundaries, and of what it means to be human, and when does one cross the line from being "human" to being "inhuman" or, devoid of "true" humanity.

We can perhaps bring in the subject of religion a little bit later in the discussion, when I post some of the next sections, because I think it comes out a bit more clearly a bit later on.

But for now, re GF: yeah, I think maybe it is a rather shocking custom if you look at it from the outside and see it for the first time: after all, we have a situation where children are participating in symbolically burning a human being; and this human being was not really that much of a monster; he was an idealist fighting for certain ideals, and in a way, by burning him, we are practicing censorship and suppressing the voice of other ideologies in a violent manner. ...but then on the other hand, GF's methods were also violent - in fact, he may well have been regarded a terrorist in today's world. ;)


Re HOD: I am realizing more and more that we really need to discuss it! ...but one of the themes that comes out for me in HOD, is a great questioning of morality and moral boundaries and a search for human meaning and in which ways humans can lead moral/immoral and meaningful/empty lives, and "The Horror" to me, is when the narrator glimpses the the horror of the emptiness of nihilism, just as Eliot seems to find a horror in emptiness, in a hollowness that is filled with merely straw and nothing more substantial than that.

Of course, although one tends to think of Kafka in terms of the surrealist qualities of his more "unique" work, Kafka is regarded as an important modernist. I've just stumbled across his name in a definition of modernism, which might be salient to this thread.

In Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms edited by Roger Fowler, Malcolm Bradbury defines modernism (as an art & literary movement) as follows:

‘Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster .…We can dispute about when it starts (French symbolism; decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes “paleo-modernism” and “neo-modernism” and hence a degree of continuity through to post-war art).

We can regard it as a timebound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or “fugal”as opposed to chronological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain “dehumanization of art”’ .

Actually, I feel that one can take that definition and consider how each aspect mentioned as a characteristic of modernism, applies to The Castle - what would you all say? Perhaps we should do that in a later thread ; but it is something to look out for.

(I have bolded the salient bits).

The problem with this poem is that it's a very very complex and allusive thing, and because it alludes to symbols and ideas rather than concrete things, there are SO many ways to interpret it, and so many things to read into it or get out of it.

I think our discussion of Guy Fawkes as a symbol and the changing meaning of GF celebrations, is a great way to kick off this discussion, actually!

Here are some interesting articles about what Guy Fawkes has come to mean to various Americans today: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines... The latter is a nice succint article that discusses how GF as a symbol and as a celebration has changed over time; and how GF is used as a different symbol by differing groups.
If you're interested in more detail, then this will give you a more extensive and detailed idea: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisf...

Originally, when anti-catholic sentiment ran high, a straw effigy of Guy Fawkes was burnt on a bonfire on Nov 5. I think it just became a fun tradition deprived of much meaning at a point in time.

From a more UK perspective, like I mentioned, I saw it as a fun "fireworks" night as a child. If I asked my father what Guy Fawkes stood for, he'd say: "It was some guy who tried to blow up parliament but they caught him in time. The fireworks represent the gunpowder that he had wanted to blow parliament up with. " Of course one learned more about Guy Fawkes at school, but, meh, the fireworks were the cool thing! :D

When I first read this poem, I thought that the mention was an obvious reference to the straw effigy of GF- (traditionally called "the guy") that used to be made by kids to be burned for GF celebrations; since the poem starts off with shuffling straw men.

TS Eliot was born in Missouri in 1988 but I had thought he was born an Englishman and was sure that Eliot must have retained an image of the straw men they would have burned as children, and must have felt that it would serve as a good symbol for an image that he wanted to convey as to the physical appearance of his "hollow men". He did move to England in 1914 at age 25, though, at which time straw effigies were certainly still burned - and maybe the effect it had on him was actually more strange and more powerful for not having experienced it as a childhood tradition.

Keep in mind also, that scarecrows were often made of straw, and that 'straw men' have become a symbol for both emptiness and for a decoy, an empty, lifeless representation of the real thing; also of a thing or a person without substance.

Okay, obviously my impressions would not be very objective. :)

I'm waiting a bit for more people to clock in with comments, but in the meantime, I have posted the full text of the poem here for members' convenience.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The Hollow Men: Text of the Poem

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

=====
The discussion thread for the poem is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Yeah, for obvious reasons, it would be uncelebrated and possibly completely unknown in the US, but I was wondering about places like Canada and Australia. ...but especially Canada with it's pro-monarchy, but also! pro-Catholic bent. I mean, I'm sure Catholics must be sorry that Guy failed!

Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: "I certainly know of Guy Fawkes. Mind you, I'm a monarchist, history buff, and generally curious person. Possibly with the release some years back of the V for Vendetta movie more people are familia..."

Ha, thanks for the feedback, J.! For those who didn't know, J. hails from fair Canada. Okay, but purely out of interest's sake, have any of you seen or participated in actual Guy Fawkes celebrations? I have not really seen a lot of "guys" being burnt and the like, though I mainly remember getting excited for "Guy Fawkes night" on (November 4, is it? (though the plot was discovered the morning of November 5)) because of fireworks being shot on that evening! Those fireworks were always better than New Year's fireworks for some reason. Maybe because they started earlier? :)

Hi there, poetry-lovers! Dipankar's reference to TS Eliot there fit in perfectly with what I want to say to you:

It would be great if you guys would have a peep at our TS Eliot discussion - currently The Hollow Men here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Phil wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Not to mention, that I found the whole oral tradition thing just as distracting to any potential central message. "

This is one of the most important books I've ever read, and th..."

Thanks for that, Phil, and I hope you will excuse my feminist sentiments coming out a bit and bristling a bit at old Bradbury. :P

You do mention a very valid point, and one that some of the methods of social reform, such as affirmative action has brought to the fore. I've always thought of myself as a liberal, because I was an extremely rebellious child and young person, but as I am mellowing, I can also see some of the folly in certain liberal arguments and methodologies. I guess everything taken to it's extreme is not a good thing. PC-ness can be painful when taken to extremes, but that does not make it an entirely bad thing, as Bradbury tries to make it out.

Affirmative action, when run purely according to "quotas" is unfair, bad for economies and disciplines, and just plain silly, because you cannot try and forcibly shape your world according to demographics. Also, equality and fairness is not necessarily the same thing. And yet, forms of affirmative action can be a good thing when applied in a wise and "conservative" manner - for example, scholarships and special mentorships for minorities and classes of the disadvantaged.

I do not personally subscribe to utilitarianism. I feel one can be considerate towards minorities without taking it to a ridiculous extreme, but I still feel that Bradbury was celf-centered and insensitive. Yes, I agree that many of the things he said is ok, like for example, I agree that while one can strive from your own side to be polite, that the other side (minorities) don't have to be oversensitive to the point that, like you say, everything becomes bland and safe. Also, silly to try and make everything fair and equal and 'representative' because then indeed, things lose their uniqueness and everything becomes bland and uniform.

It's a bit like aspects of the censorship debate, for instance when we look at things like porn and child-porn.
I am the last person who would want to censor, but there are always special categories for everything - I personally do feel that exposing young children to depictions of violence and possibly worse, extreme sexual violence, can be traumatizing and can skew their outlook on life and society. ...so, while I am against censorship generally speaking, I also feel that there are exceptions, and there's a limit to everything and nothing is absolute. And there are two sides to everything, and the best thing is always to move a bit towards the middle of an extreme.

In short, one of my criticisms of Bradbury is that he works toward extremes; he is not prepared to compromise and find a middle ground. While he does have a point that over-PC-ness can become painful, I cannot see why people cannot strive to accommodate minorities at least to a reasonable degree. (For example, why hurt a black person's feelings unnecessarily by depicting them in a humiliating manner? I am not saying one should over-compensate to the other side, but also, there are certain bounds of common decency that it surely cannot hurt to remain within.)

Hello everyone, and welcome to the discussion of one of T.S. Eliot's most powerful and enigmatic poems, The Hollow Men.

A lot has been said about Eliot and his poetry, which makes it rather hard to introduce something that is so much written about. I could waffle on about my own thoughts, or copy and paste what others have said, but discourse of such a kind, I feel, would perpetually keep us away from the immediacy of the work under discussion, so I've thought of using a slightly different approach for this discussion. I'll post one 'part' at a time, and we could perhaps discuss the poem stanza by stanza.

Then, once we have experienced the poem first-hand, let's discuss Eliot and the background to the poem afterwards. The reason I want to do this, is because I find the poem can stand very strongly on its own, on its powerful symbolism and imagery alone; and also, engaging with the poem first will make a discussion about how it can be applied to situations external to the text, more interesting and heartfelt.

Obviously you need to read through the entire poem at least once, to get a feeling for the poem as a whole - that almost goes without saying; but, if you are reading it the first time, or if you think back to your first reading, I think you might agree with me that the poem has many perplexing little bits, and I think it would be very interesting for us to discuss these in detail, with as much input and ideas as possible from your side, because poetry is almost like a prism - it absorbs and reflects back something a little different from and to every different individual who experiences it.

So, let's start with the first bit today:
====

THE HOLLOW MEN

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

======

I'm only going to post that first bit for now, because to me the second part of stanza one had always been pretty puzzling, so that bit deserves almost a little discussion of its own.

Note the first line of the intro: Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
That is of course a reference to Joseph Conrad 's novel Heart of Darkness.
The latter is yet another pretty ambiguous, layered work which has caused a lot of controversy, and which we might want to examine at some stage.

Have you people got any ideas as to why Eliot would have referred to Conrad's novel?

I personally find the imagery in the first stanzas very visually and aurally powerful. I feel Eliot is conveying a very "real" image here, one that is very powerfully conjured in one's mind, and yet it is also unreal and surreal - the stuff of nightmares, surely.

Once one has experienced the 'shuffling straw men' image in your mind, the second reference, namely the one to "the old guy" from Guy Fawkes celebrations, makes a creepy kind of sense.
Is there anybody around here who knows what :"Guy Fawkes" alludes to? Most of our UK members, especially the older ones would surely know, but what about our non-British members? (If not, I'll post a bit of info on that in a separate post).

In any case, I reckon one of the pertinent bits to notice from the very start already, is the voices, of course.
The : "dried voices" are "quiet and meaningless", and to me that sort of fit in with the extension: "Shape without form, shade without colour," and the rather more perplexing:
"Paralysed force, gesture without motion".

Before I say any more, I'd like to invite comments from your side for now. :)

In any case, I had wanted to comment on how very thoroughly we are introduced in the first chapter to K.s "otherness" and status as an outsider. Everybody is trying to get rid of him, and his goals keep seeming elusive. I know it's too early in our discussion really, to surmise on this, but was it based on feelings that Kafka experienced in his own life?

Phil wrote: "Traveller wrote: "It's very tricky indeed, especially when the emotional state of the artist tended to fluctuate.
...but also, many a work that had originally been rejected by the world become priz..."

Hmm, I'll have to read more of the copious material available about Kafka. I can't help wondering; on the one hand, he lived such a short life that one wishes he were given more time to live and write, but on the other hand, he might have destroyed the unusual works that were published later by Brod, had he lived longer - after all, some of it is pretty weird.
So once again, a double-edged sword...

...and someone just showed me this! XD http://error418.net/

I'm eggstra good - I sometimes have normal black tea - (I have everything w/out sugar) and other times, I have a mix of green tea and Rooibos tisane which I find an excellent taste combination, since the Rooibos is sweet and the green tea bitter- I find the sweet and the bitter cancels out nicely to give a very pleasing (and healthy) result! :)

PS. Linda- I've heard the optimal amount of coffee is around three cups. More than 5 does not benefit you more, but up to 3 cups does.

Tea has it's own benefits stemming from the anti-oxidants it provides. I have 2-3 cups of coffee every day and tea about twice a week, so I'm good. :)

Anne wrote: "I'm afraid I rather gave up on this one. Couldn't really get into the stories and the way the cards were meant to be telling story. I got the impression that even Calvino gave up - he didn't contin..."

I got stuck at the story of Roland. I read through it sort of with ... a slight feeling of puzzlement, thinking that I must get back to the "Roland" mythology and re-read the Carolingian mythology to which I had been greatly attracted as a child.

Here it is in broad terms, but keep in mind that there's quite a lot of mythology built around Roland and Charlemagne. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son...

I'm not saying that Calvino endeavored or should have endeavored to remain true to myth - he is obviously deconstructing myths; and maybe he is trying to deconstruct archetypes as well, which is perhaps why this experiment isn't working too well? I'm still trying to fathom what Calvino is attempting to do here.

I've seen before that if i don't 'get' a highly praised literary work, it's because I am missing something; so I'm sure we must be missing something here.

I wish Disha, who had praised the book and asked for a discussion of it will come and help us out in our floundering.

Oops, I had wanted to put some of that in the relevant "Roland" thread, but no matter, I'll repost it there as well.

New thread is here, please go ahead and start populating it; I will do so as well, soon. Sorry for the delay.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...