Studying English Literature and Language

@ PART FIVE

ANTHOLOGY – SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS

The Anthology on the web, in its virtually open-ended design, confirms explicitly a couple of things that were heavily implicit in the Anthology in the book:

All such collections of texts are selections from a potentially infinite array; they could have been slightly or very different and organised otherwise.

The line between texts that complement one another (and are directly comparable) and those that offer supplements (perhaps heading off in other directions and dimensions) is a wavy one; one text leads to another or yet another and the grounds of comparison and contrast are constantly shifting.

This first ‘supplement / complement’ to the book Anthology has two immediate and quite pragmatic functions. One is to include all those out-of-copyright texts that were in the second edition of this book’s precursor, The English Studies Book, but are not between the covers of the present book. The other function is to gesture – or at least begin gesturing – to other instances of material that might have been included in the present book but either weren’t or couldn’t be. In particular, mindful of the medium, there is an emphasis on links to other electronic texts, including those which are multimodal and not just printed word. The present offering is a modest and very selective start. But we hope it proves suggestive and shall be building on it regularly in future.

The overall organisational principles of this Anthology are the same as in the book. There are three main sections broadly corresponding to the three conventional mega-genres of poetry, prose and drama, again pluralised asPoetries and Proses and Voices. There is, also again, a fourth, more capacious section called Crossings, which draws together clusters of materials by topic or approach or event and not only genre. Many of the subsections are the same. But there are also some fresh ones, such as that on Essays by various hands (@ 5.2.1 c) to support the practical and analytical work on Writing essays (1.2.7) and the Critical essay (2.2.5). There is also extensive and authentic representation of, for example, Media messages and street texts (which were simply transcribed in the book, 5.2.6). In particular, then, there is a more direct engagement with both the contemporary multimedia and performance aspects of English in action (e.g. 5.1.4—5 and 5.2.7—8). This is palpably (visibly, audibly) English that does as well as is things: people doing English as well as being done to; participating even while observing. More generally, the emphasis continues to be on the rich and restless heterogeneity of a subject that is always notionally one but effectively many – constantly pushing at the edges and into the gaps of whatever is currently received and conceived. In a phrase that itself becomes two, three . . . English other-wise.

@ 5 currently features the following texts:

@ 5.1 Poetries

5.1.1 Early English verses

William Langland, Piers Plowman

Anonymous (‘Gawain’ poet), Pearl

Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

John Gower, Confessio Amantis

Anonymous border ballad, ‘Lord Randall’

5.1.2 Sonnets by various hands

Lady Mary Wroth, ‘Unseen, unknown, I’

Percy Shelley, ‘Sonnet: England in 1819’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘To George Sand – A Desire’

Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’

Robert Frost, ‘Acquainted with the Night’

5.1.3 Heroics and Mock-heroics

William Blake, ‘And did those feet’ (‘Jerusalem’)

Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’ (Alice Through the Looking Glass)

5.1.4 Poetry that answers back

Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’

5.1.5 Performing poetry, singing culture

Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Sonny’s Lettah’

Benjamin Zephaniah, ‘Rong Radio’

Patience Agbabi, ‘Look at Lolo’

@ 5.2 Proses

5.2.1b Letters, diaries and blogs

Margery Brews, ‘A Valentine’, from the Paston Letters

Samuel Pepys, ‘Diary’

Stephen Fry, ‘Take me to your Lieder’

5.2.1c Essays by various hands

Michel de Montaigne (trans. John Florio), ‘Of the Force of Imagination’

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’

5.2.2 Slave narratives by name

Frederick Douglas, The Narrative and Life

5.2.3 Romance revisited

Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis

5.2.4 Science and Fantasy Fiction – genre and gender

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

War on – of – Terror

US government ‘9-11’ Commision report

Wikileaks archives: Iraq and Afghanistan

5.2.6 Media messages and street texts

Anonymous, ‘Migration . . . is not a crime’

Text/Images 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6

5.2.7 Metafictions

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

George Eliot, Adam Bede

5.2.8 Electronic, multimodal, and installation literature

Caroline Bergvall, various works

Tim Wright, various works

Jeff Noon, tweet

@ 5.3 Voices

5.3.1 Dramatizing ‘English’ in education

Cross-cultural talk in class: from Rampton, Crossings

5.3.2 Voices with a difference

Chester Mystery Cycle, Noah’s Flood (Noah’s wife and family)

Shakespeare, The Tempest (Caliban and Prospero)

Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Christy and Pegeen)

5.3.3 Voice—play, dream—drama

BBC Radio 4 plays

@ 5.4 Crossings

5.4.2 Mapping Journeys

Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of . . . Guiana

Charles Darwin, Beagle Diary

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

5.4.3 Translations / Transformations

Versions of Psalm 137: ‘By the Rivers of Babylon . . .’

Three versions of a haiku by Basho , ‘Old pond . . .’

5.4.5 Epitaphs and (almost) last words

Emily Dickinson, ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’

A very ‘Ambridge’ memorial (The Archers)

@ 5.1 POETRIES

5.1.1 Early English Verses

WILLIAM LANGLAND, from Piers Plowman, before 1387

In a somer sesoun, whan softe was the sonne,
Y shope me into shroudes, as Y a shep were,
In abite as an heremite, vnholy of werkes,
Wente forth in þe world wondres to here,
And saw many selles and selkcouth thynges. 5
Ac on a May mornyng on Maluerne hulles
Me biful for to slepe, for werynesse of-walked;
And in a launde as y lay, lened y and slepte,
And merueylousliche me mette, as I may telle.
Al þe welthe of the world and þe wo bothe 10
Wynkyng, as hit were, witterliche y sigh hit,
Of treuthe and tricherye, tresoun and gyle,
Al I saw slepynge, as y shal telle.

2–3. ‘I dressed myself in rough clothes, like a shepherd, in the garb of a hermit of secular life.’ 5. ‘And saw many marvels and strange things’.

Piers Plowman survives in three different versions from the late fourteenth century (here from the third, C-text, completed by 1387). It is written in a more northerly, Midland dialect than Chaucer’s and composed in a loosely popular alliterative verse. It may be by an un- or under-employed freelance cleric called William Langland. (Text and notes in D. Pearsall (ed.) Piers Plowman: the C-text, London, Arnold, 1978: 27–8.)

ANONYMOUS, untitled (usually called Pearl) first verse, c. 1380

Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere:
Oute of oryent, I hardly saye,
Ne proved I never her precios pere.
So rounde, so reken in uche araye, 5
So smal, so smothe her sydes were,
Quere-so-ever I jugged gemmes gaye,
I sette hyr sengeley in synglere.
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Thurgh gresse to grounde hit fro me yot. 10
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
Of that pryvy perle wythouten spot.

Translation: ‘Pearl, pleasing for a prince’s treasure / Utterly flawlessly clasped in gold so bright: / from the orient, I confidently say, / I never came upon her precious equal. / So round, so fine in every respect, / so neat, so smooth were her sides / Wherever I have judged gorgeous gems / I would set her apart as unique. / Alas, I lost her in an arbour (garden); / Through grass to the ground it went from me. / I am pining away, utterly done for by the power of love / for that cherished pearl without a blemish’.

Pearl is a poem of 1212 lines and survives in a single manuscript. This is written in a northerly (Lancashire?) dialect and composed in a tightly structured versification combining alliteration, stress and rhyme. The present poem is possibly by the same anonymous author, probably court poet and/or cleric at a northern baronial court, who composed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is also found in this manuscript (see next item). The pearl may be variously interpreted as an actual jewel, a dead infant daughter, lost innocence and the promise of heaven. (For full text, see A.C. Cawley (ed.) Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, London, 1976.)

ANONYMOUS, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, c. 1350-1400

Available online at: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
This website provides the text of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, published in print by Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1967.

Two modern prose translations of the text can be found at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/CAMELOT/sggk.htm (translated by Jessie L. Weston) and http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_neilson.pdf (translated by W. A. Neilson).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the title is modern) is a verse romance that draws on Arthurian story associated with ‘the matter of Bretayne’, embracing Britain and Brittany. It is found in the same manuscript as the poem now usually called Pearl (see previous item) and may or may not be by the same author. Both poems represent a mixture of North-Western and West Midlands varieties of late fourteenth-century English contemporary with Chaucer and Langland. Like Langland’s Piers Plowman (featured above), both ‘Sir Gawain’ and ‘Pearl’ belong to a broad tradition of Germanic alliterative and stressed verse-making that ultimately reaches back to Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry (e.g. ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, 5.1.1); though each in its way is formally more highly wrought than Langland’s piece, which is in a more consistently West Midlands dialect and uses a looser alliterative line. At the same time, ‘Sir Gawain’ clearly belongs in part to the same word- and world-view as Chaucer’s Knight (see 5.1.1). It shares some of the same chivalric atmosphere, blending idealism and realism, and also deploys rhyme and syllabic line: each stanza, however irregular in length, ends with a two syllable line followed by four seven-syllable (three-stress) lines rhyming abab. The story itself follows the trial of Sir Gawain on his journey to keep an appointment – and complete a deadly game – with the monstrous Green Knight. It is a tale of honour and the chivalric code, as well as one of adventure and mystery. In language, style and substance, this poem massively – and impressively – fills out the sense of late Medieval English as something richly more heterogeneous than be grasped from a reading of Chaucer alone – for all the latter’s intrinsic variety and versatility.

JOHN GOWER, Venus’ farewell, and message to Chaucer, from Confessio Amantis, c.1386—1390.

Available online at: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/gower/gow-ven.html

John Gower (c. 1327–1408) was highly educated and well connected, owning land and property in several counties of east England. Historical research has suggested that he may have been a merchant in London, or possibly the same John Gower who held the rectory of Great Braxted for a time, though this is in doubt. Gower wrote in three languages, French, Latin and English. His works in English include a pacifist poem addressed to King Henry IV, posthumously titled ‘In Praise of Peace’, and the Confessio Amantis, consisting of a prologue and eight books adding up to over 33 000 lines (which, though predominantly written in English, include some verses and a glossary in Latin, suggesting Gower’s anticipated readership). Two revisions of the original manuscript, probably in 1391 and 1393, manifest the alteration captured in the extract available on the linked website – the omission of the earlier complimentary references to Chaucer (the basis of which cannot be surmised, though it may have been due to personal disagreement or professional competitiveness as Gower’s standing rose). The text was among those first printed by Caxton in 1483. Gower’s writing reminds us of the richly trilingual nature of late medieval English court culture. It offered a choice – and sometimes a blend – of English, French and Latin, depending upon the genres and discourses in play and the functions and audiences in mind. (See 1.1 and Standards and standardisation, varieties and variation.)

ANONYMOUS Border ballad, ‘Lord Randall’, 17th—19th-century
"O where ha ye been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha ye been, my handsome young man?"
"I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wald lie down."

"An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son?
And wha met ye there, my handsome young man?"
"O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fain wald lie down."

"And what did she give you, Lord Randal, My son?
And wha did she give you, my handsome young man?"
"Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fein wald lie down."

"And what gat your leavins, Lord Randal my son?
And wha gat your leavins, my handsome young man?"
"My hawks and my hounds; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fein wald lie down."

"And what becam of them, Lord Randal, my son?
And what becam of them, my handsome young man?
"They stretched their legs out and died; mother mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fain wald lie down."

"O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!"
"O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and fain wald lie down."

"What d'ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d'ye leave to your mother, my handsome young man?"
"Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down."

"What d'ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?
What d'ye leave to your sister, my handsome young man?"
"My gold and my silver; mother mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, an I fain wald lie down."

"What d'ye leave to your brother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d'ye leave to your brother, my handsome young man?"
"My houses and my lands; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down."

"What d'ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?
What d'ye leave to your true-love, my handsome young man?"
"I leave her hell and fire; mother mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down."

The text of this ballad is based on that gathered by the novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott and published in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802—3). Like Bishop Percy’s earlier Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and F. J. Child’s later scholarly collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883—98), which prints multiple versions, this text represents a blend of oral tradition that was sometimes reinforced (or reinvented) in early printed song-sheets, parts of which stretch back to popular medieval romance. Percy’s and Scott’s work was influential in both inspiring and expressing the fashion for specifically ‘literary’ imitations of ballads in the late 18th and 19th centuries, notably the Lyrical Ballads (1798—1802) of Wordsworth and Coleridge. (For a scholarly investigation of the oral-literary, ‘found’ and ‘made-up’ aspects of this tradition, see Jackson-Houlston 1999.) Bob Dylan’s song beginning with the words ‘Where have you been to my blue-eyed son . . . darling young one?’ and ending with the refrain used for its title A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1962) clearly recalls the opening and tune of ‘Lord Randall’, and is yet further adapted and translated/transformed in the multi-media book, exhibition and web-site Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature, Mark Edwards, lyric by Bob Dylan, London: Still Pictures, Moving Words (2011) and www.hardrainproject.com). Matching Dylan’s words to photographs of human suffering and natural degradation, this is an expressly ecological expression of the cultural politics that such a song may be (re-)made to bear (see Pope in Maybin and Swann 2010: 131—3 for discussion).

5.1.2 Sonnets by various hands

LADY MARY WROTH, from The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Book I, 1621

[Urania, a foundling adopted by shepherds, begins to realise she is not of shepherd stock. She eventually finds out she is a daughter of the king of Naples.]

By this [time] were others come into that mead with their flocks: but she, esteeming her sorrowing thoughts her best and choicest company, left that place, taking a little path which brought her to the further side of the plain, to the foot of the rocks, speaking as she went these lines, her eyes fixed upon the ground, her very soul turned into mourning.

Unseen, unknown, I here alone complain
To rocks, to hills, to meadows, and to springs,
Which can no help return to ease my pain,
But back my sorrows the sad echo brings.                             4
Thus still increasing are my woes to me,
Doubly resounded by that moanful voice,
Which seems to second me in misery,
And answer gives like friend of mine own choice.                 8
Thus only she doth my companion prove,
The others silently do offer ease.
But those that grieve, a grieving note do love;
Pleasures to dying eyes bring but disease:                             12
And such am I, who daily ending live,
Wailing a state which can no comfort give.

Wroth (c. 1587–c. 1651) moved in aristocratic, literary circles. Her uncle was Sir Philip Sidney and her aunt was Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke. In manner, matter and name, Wroth’s Urania is partly modelled on Sidney’s pastoral romance known as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590–93) (so called because it was edited after Sidney’s death by the countess). But Urania is also distinctive in tone and approach, and some FEMINIST critics have discerned in its attention to both ‘interiority’ and ‘intrigue’ an early instance of women’s writing that until recently has largely been ignored. There appears to be much coded reference (now lost) to contemporary goings-on at court, for the work caused an outcry there on its first publication. (For text and notes, see Abrams et al. 2000, Vol. I: 1424.)

PERCY SHELLEY, ‘Sonnet: England in 1819’, written 1819, pub. 1839

An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, – mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,                            4
But leechlike to their fainting Country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;
An army whom liberticide and prey                                       8
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed;
A senate,Time’s worst statute, unrepealed, –                                    12
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Shelley (1792–1822) – poet, atheist and political radical – wrote this poem, along with The Mask of Anarchy, in response to the systematic repression of popular dissent in England in 1819. Shelley was living in self-imposed exile in Italy at the time, and the poem was not published until well after his death by his wife, Mary Shelley, who supplied the title. The king is George III, who was over 80 years old and had been insane for many years; he died in 1820 (cf. Byron 5.1.3). The ‘field’ is St Peter’s Field in Manchester, where cavalry were used to break up a rally of 80,000 people demanding economic and political reform. Eleven protesters were killed and many hundreds maimed. It became known as ‘The Peterloo Massacre’ by ironic comparison with the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, ‘To George Sand – A Desire’, 1844

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,
Self-called George Sand, whose soul, amid the lions
Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance
And answers roar for roar, as spirits can.                                          4
I would some mild miraculous thunder ran
Above the applauded circus in appliance
Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science,
Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,                                   8
From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place
With holier light! that thou to woman’s claim
And man’s, might join beside the angel’s grace
Of a pure genius sanctified from blame,                                           12
Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace
To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.

Barrett Browning (1806–61) – far more famous in her lifetime than her husband, Robert – wrote this and another sonnet (A Recognition) to the French woman novelist George Sand (1804–76). The latter was (in)famous for her challenging ideas and behaviour, including cross-dressing and using a man’s name.

WILFRED OWEN, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, 1917

Available online at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3290

This is a link to the First World War Poetry Archive provided by Oxford University Computing Services and designed by its Director, Stuart Lee. This archive includes facsimiles of draft manuscripts as well as an abundance of other information and images.

Wilfred Owen (1893—18) was born in Oswestry in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border, and worked as a tutor at Dunsden and Bordeaux before enlisting. He drafted and edited most of his poems between convalescing after injuries and shell-shock at the front line, and (as with this poem) was sometimes read and revised by Siegfried Sassoon. He decided to turn down a domestic post and, instead, returned to the trenches, where he was killed one week before the armistice. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ is considered one of Owen’s best poems, with its intricate sound patterning and complex syntax, the progression from absence and negation to present pall, and the powerful semantic associations. Owen has become one of the most widely read ‘war poets’.

ROBERT FROST, ‘Acquainted with the Night’, 1928

Available online at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22505

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was born in San Francisco, though much of his writing is associated with New Hampshire where he lived for parts of his life. A three year pre-first-war spell in England introduced him to Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves, whose influence can be seen in his work, while Ezra Pound became a friend and proponent of Frost’s writing. Despite this, Frost maintained a distance from contemporary fashionable forms and the modernist movement, using traditional forms to explore what he regarded as universal human themes.

5.1.3 Heroics and mock-heroics

WILLIAM BLAKE,‘And did those feet’, from Milton, 1804–8

[Blake draws on the ancient legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail
carrying Christ’s blood to England and fashions it into his own blend of Christian myth.]

And did those feet in ancient time
’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen? 4

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills? 8

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire. 12

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land. 16

This poem can be read, and was probably conceived, as a dissenting vision of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’; hence the repeated question structures, the reference to ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ and the fact that there is still much to desire, fight for and build. However, since the words were set to music by Parry in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Jerusalem’, as it is popularly known, has become best known as a celebratory hymn sung in British schools, at Church of England services and on the last night of the London Promenade Concerts (the Proms). A further twist is that the hymn is also sometimes sung by the British Labour Party and religious protest movements. Such is the text’s mythic – and multiple – status.

LEWIS CARROLL ‘Jabberwocky’, from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1872.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. 4

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!” 8

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought. 12

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came! 16

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back. 20

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy. 24

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. 28

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832 – 1898) was an ordained preacher, a mathematician lecturing at Oxford University, a humourist, and a children’s novelist and poet. His literary renown is largely based on the imaginative flair and freedom of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the second novel (in which ‘Jabberwocky’ appears) being considered darker in some ways. His playfulness with language, logic and social manners – including making up words and inverting norms – produces effects which still appeal to audiences of all ages all over the world; though some readers find him arid, cerebral and rather creepy. Along with Edward Lear, featured in Don Barthelme’s short story The Death of Edward Lear (5.2.1), Carroll is reckoned one of the ‘fathers’ of English nonsense; though in fact aspects of nonsense verse go back much farther and wider. Nonsense writing is a common focus for philosophers and linguists as well as literary critics.

5.1.4 Poetry that answers back

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON, ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’, first published on CD in 1996. Available online at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=14959

Linton Kwesi Johnson (b. 1952, Jamaica) is a London-based dub poet, whose work has evolved through blending of music and poetry – he himself coining the term ‘dub poetry’ to describe the resultant mix of song, rap, and rhythm, protest, performance and poetry. Much of his poetry expresses his view of writing as a political and cultural weapon for social justice. His poems make rich and playful use of Jamaican patois, as is revealed by comparing the text of the poem and his own performance of it, both of which are available at the web page detailed above. Most of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry is confrontational, challenging the oppression and suspicion within contemporary race relations in Britain (also see @ 5.1.5 next).

5.1.5 Performing poetry, singing culture

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON, ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, first published on CD in 1996. Available online at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=14958

For Linton Kwesi Johnson, see note on previous text, @ 5.1.4.

BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH, ‘Rong Radio’, 2004. Available online at: http://www.benjaminzephaniah.com/content/304.php

If Linton Kwesi Johnson is the father of dub poetry, then Benjamin (Obadiah Iqbal) Zephaniah (1958 - ), though not much younger, could be considered its first son. Zephaniah was born in Birmingham, and grew up there and in Jamaica. He writes poetry, plays, and young adult novels. The rhythm and performance of his poetry is marked by his experience as a DJ and recording artist. His work reflects his impassioned socio-political involvement in anti-racism campaigns, as well as his vegan, pacifist and ecological ethics. This web page includes a video of Zephaniah performing this poem.

PATIENCE AGBABI, ‘Look at Lolo!’. Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRAwaNC2ci0

For Patience Agbabi, see note in book 5.1.5

@ 5.2 PROSES

5.2.1b Letters, diaries and blogs

MARGERY BREWS to John Paston III, A Valentine, February 1477

Unto my ryght welbelovyd Voluntyn, John Paston, Sqyuer, be this bill delyvered,
etc. Ryght reverent and wurschypfull and my ryght welebeloved Voluntyne, I
recommande me unto yowe full hertely, desyring to here of yowr welefare,
whech I beseche Almyghty God long for to preserve unto hys plesure and yowr
hertys desyre. And yf it please yowe to here of my welefare, I am not in god
heele of body ner of herte, nor shall be tyll I here from yowe:

For ther wottys no creature what peyn that I endure,
And for to be deede, I dare it not dyscure.

And my lady my moder hath laboured the mater to my fadure full delygently,
but sche can no more gete then ye knowe of, for the whech God knoweth I am
full sory.
But yf that ye loffe me, as I tryste vere’ly that ye do, ye will not leffe me therfor;
for if that ye hade not half the lyvelode that ye hafe, for to do the grettyst
labur that any woman on lyve myght, I wold not forsake yowe.

And yf ye commande me to kepe me true wherever I go,
iwyse I will do all my might yowe to love and never no mo.
And yf my freendys say that I do amys, thei shal not me let so for to do,
Myn herte me byddys ever more to love yowe
truly over all erthely thing.
And yf thei be never so wroth, I tryst it schall be bettur in tyme commyng.

No more to yowe at this tyme, but the Holy Trinite hafe yowe in kepyng.
Ande I besech yow that this bill be not seyn of non erthely creature safe only
your selfe, etc. And thys lettur was indyte at Topcroft with ful hevy herte, etc.

Bi your own M.B.

This is one of the many letters surviving from the fifteenth century associated with the well-to-do Norfolk family, the Pastons. It is reproduced here for various reasons. It is an instance of relatively informal prose from the period between Chaucer and Shakespeare. It shows the flexibility of spelling, especially of vowels, before the onset of print culture (e.g., ‘welbelovyd Voluntyn’, ‘welebeloved Voluntyne’). It reminds us that auto/biography, whether public or personal, is informed by both feeling and convention, and in this case by poetry. It also throws a sidelight on literacy at the time; for this letter was dictated by Margery and written down by Thomas Kela, a servant of the Brews family. Margery herself, as was common, could not write. (Text from D. Gray (ed.) Late Medieval Verse and Prose, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985: 42–3, 428.)

SAMUEL PEPYS, Diary, entry for 13 November 1664

13 Lord’s Day. The morning to church, where mighty sport to hear our Clerk sing
out of tune, though his master sits by him that begins and keeps the tune aloud for
the parish. Dined at home very well. And spent all the after-noon with my wife
within doors – and getting a speech out of Hamlett,‘To bee or not to bee,’ without
book. In the evening, to sing psalms; and in came Mr. Hill to see me, and then he
and I and the boy finely to sing; and so anon broke up after pleasure. He gone,
I to supper and so to prayers and to bed,

Pepys (1633–1703) kept his diary in code and the whole six volumes were only finally deciphered and transliterated in 1983 by R. Latham and W. Matthews. The part from which the above is taken was deciphered by John Smith, a Cambridge undergraduate, and published in 1851. Pepys was a senior civil servant and many of his observations were personally compromising or publicly scandalous.

STEPHEN FRY, Blog, from entry for May 24th, 2012.

Take me to your Lieder

Words and Music

I hadn’t expected to find myself blogging at the end of my little period of purdah, behind the writing screen, closed off from twitter and the world.
I finished last Tuesday my filming for DOORS OPEN, the Ian Rankin art-theft thriller whose adaptation we’re making for ITV and since then I’ve been sitting at a desk, trying not to look too hard out of the window.

You may have heard the view-halloos and cries and squeals of pleasure and delight on Sunday evening as I stabbed my finger down onto the send button and pushed my little libretto far away into the inbox of my collaborator, the real talent in our little opera team, who has been patiently awaiting my words for a long time.

It has been a fabulous experience, quite unlike anything I’ve ever done, although I had been given the burdensome but wonderfully exciting duty of translating Schikaneder’s original Magic Flute libretto from German into English for Ken Branagh’s cinematic production of Mozart’s last and most mysterious full-length opera some years ago. That experience, taking out the words that Mozart had set to music and trying to replace them with English equivalents, taught me one thing that I am anxious to share with an expectant world. Mozart knew what he was doing. Ho, yes. The man, as Control or Smiley might say, was Good, George. Damned good. He knew his tradecraft.

This more recent task, an adaptation of an E. M. Forster short story, has been more invigorating: much less weight is on our shoulders since it this a new opera and we don’t have the best part of 300 years to betray. My collaborator, Louis Mander, is a young, preposterously talented composer, and I am an old… well there you are. Spring turned to October and eventually, as I started turning scarlet and gold and found myself decaying into November, I at last managed to deliver. I exaggerate for effect. Forgive me, all those who write in the moment I say something to denigrate myself.

But more of that as and when. Many a slip twixt wicket-keeper and gully.

STEPHEN FRY (1957 - ) is an English actor, comedian, TV presenter and writer of various genres, fiction and non-fiction.

5.2.1c Essays by various hands

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, trans. John Florio, 1603

ORTIS imaginatio generat casum: 'A strong imagination begetteth chance,' say learned clearks. I am one of those that feele a very great conflict and power of imagination. All men are shockt therewith, and some overthrowne by it. One impression of it pierceth me, and for want of strength to resist her, my endevour to avoid it. I could live with the only assistance of holy and merry-hearted men. The sight of others anguishes doth sensibly drive me into anguish; and my sense hath often usurped the sense of a third man. If one cough continually, he provokes my lungs and throat. I am more unwilling to visit the sicke dutie doth engage me unto, than those to whom I am little beholding, and regard least. I apprehend the evill which I studie, and place it in me. I deeme it not strange that she brings both agues and death to such as give her scope to worke her will and applaud her. Simon Thomas was a great Physitian in his daies. I remember upon a time comming by chance to visit a rich old man that dwelt in Tholouse, and who was troubled with the cough of the lungs, who discoursing with the said Simon Thomas of the meanes of his recoverie, he told him, that one of the best was, to give me occasion to be delighted in his companie, and that fixing his eyes upon the liveliness and freshness of my face and setting his thoughts upon the jolitie and vigor, wherewith my youthful age did then flourish, and filling all his senses with my flourishing estate, his habitude might thereby be amended, and his health recovered. But he forgot to say, that mine might also be empaired and infected. Gallus Vibius did so well enure his minde to comprehend the essence and motions of folly, that he so transported his judgement from out his seat, as he could never afterwards bring it to his right place againe; and might rightly boast to have become a foole through wisdome. Some there are, that through feare anticipate the hang-mans hand; as he did, whose friends having obtained his pardon, and putting away the cloth wherewith he was hoodwinkt, that he might heare it read, was found starke dead upon the scaffold, wounded only by the stroke of imagination. Wee sweat, we shake, we grow pale, and we blush at the motions of our imaginations; and wallowing in our beds we feele our bodies agitated and turmoiled at their apprehensions, yea in such manner as sometimes we are ready to yeeld up the spirit. And burning youth (although asleepe) is often therewith so possessed and enfolded, that dreaming it doth satisfy and enjoy her amorous desires.

Ut quasi transactis sæpe omnibu' rebu' profundant
Fluminis ingentes fluctus, vestemnque cruentent. LUCRET. 1. iv. 1027.

And if all things were done, they powre foorth streames,
And bloodie their night-garment in their dreames.

And although it be not strange to see some men have hornes growing upon their head in one night, that had none when they went to bed: notwithstanding the fortune or success of Cyppus King of Italie is memorable, who because the day before he had with earnest affection assisted and beene attentive at a bul-baiting, and having all night long dreamed of hornes in his head, by the very force of imagination brought them forth the next morning in his forehead. An earnest passion gave the son of Croesus his voice, which Nature denied him. And Antiochus got an ague, by the excellent beautie of Stratonice so deeply imprinted in his minde. Plinie reporteth to have seene Lucius Cossitius upon his marriage day to have beene transformed from a woman to a man. Pontanus and others recount the like metamorphosies to have hapned in Italie these ages past: And through a vehement desire of him and his mother.

Vota puer solvit, que femina voverat Iphis. -- OVID . Met. 1. ix. 794.

Iphis a boy, the vowes then paid,
Which he vow'd when he was a maid.

My selfe traveling on a time by Vitry in France, hapned to see a man, whom the Bishop of Soissons has in confirmation, named Germane, and all the inhabitants thereabout have both knowne and seene to be a woman-childe, untill she was two and twentie yeares of age, called by the name of Marie. He was, when I saw him, of good yeares, and had a long beard, and was yet unmarried. He saith, that upon a time, leaping, and straining himselfe to overleape another, he wot not how, but where before he was a woman, he suddenly felt the instrument of a man to come out of him: and to this day the maidens of that towne and countrie have a song in use, by which they warne one another, when they are leaping, not to straine themselves overmuch, or open thir legs too wide, for feare they should bee turned to boies, as Marie Germane was. It is no great wonder, that such accidents doe often happen, for if imagination have power in such things, it is so continually annexed, and so forcibly fastened to this subject, that lest she should so often fall into the relaps of the same thought, and sharpnesse of desire, it is better one time for all to incorporate this virile part unto wenches. Some will not sticke to ascribe the scarres of King Dagobert, or the cicatrices of Saint Francis unto the power of Imagination. Othersome will say, that by the force of it, bodies are sometimes removed from their places. And Celsus reports of a Priest, whose soule was ravished into such an extasie, that for a long time the body remained void of all respiration and sense. Saint Augustine speaketh of another, who if hee but heard any lamentable and wailefull cries, would suddenly fall into a swone, and bee so forcibly carried from himselfe, that did any chide and braule never so loud, pinch and thumpe him never so much, be could not be made to stirre, untill hee came to himselfe againe. Then would he say, he had heard sundry strange voyces, comming as it were from a farre, and perceiving his pinches and bruses, wondered at them. And that it was not an obstinate conceit, or wilfull humour in him, or against his f eeling sense, it plainly appeared by this, because during his extasie, he seemed to have neither pulse nor breath. It is very likely that the principall credit of visions, of enchantments, and such extraordinary effects, proceedeth from the power of imaginations, working especially in the mindes of the vulgar sort, as the weakest and seeliest, whose conceit and beleefe is so seized upon, that they imagine to see what they see not. I am yet in doubt, these pleasant bonds, wherewith our world is so fettered, and France so pestered, that nothing else is spoken of, are haply but the impressions of apprehension, and effects of feare. For I know by experience, that some one, for whom I may as well answer as for my selfe, and in whom no manner of suspition either of weaknesse or enchantment might fall, hearing a companion of his make report of an extraordinary faint sowning, wherein he was fallen, at such a time as he least looked for it and wrought him no small shame, whereupon the horrour of his report did so strongly strike his imagination, as he ranne the same fortune, and fell into a like drooping. And was thence forward subject to fall into like fits: So did the passionate remembrance of his inconvenience possesse and tyrannize him; but his fond doting was in time remedied by another kinde of raving. For himselfe avowing and publishing aforehand the infirmitie he was subject unto, the contention of his soule was solaced upon this, that bearing his evil as expected, his dutie thereby diminished, and he grieved lesse thereat.

Montaigne (1533—92, b. Périgord, S. W. France) was a city counsellor and then mayor of Bordeaux before inheriting the family estate at Montaigne and living the life of a country gentleman, seasoned by visits to Paris and a tour round parts of Europe. His Essais were published in three volumes (1572—80, 1588) and have since been hugely influential in developing a mode of writing that Matthew Arnold called ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. The above text is the first third of Montaigne’s essay ‘De La Force de l’Imagination’ (Vol. 1, Ch. 20). Here it is in the English version, with original spelling, as translated from the French by John Florio (1603), a lexicographer and translator of Italian parentage who studied at Oxford and became groom to the Queen’s privy chamber (1604—19). Florio’s translation is famously free, sometimes to the point of inaccuracy, but always vital and full of verbal energy. His version was Montaigne for many English readers from the seventeenth century onwards, including Shakespeare, who drew on the essay ‘Of the Cannibales’ (Vol. 1, Ch. 30) for aspects of Caliban in The Tempest. Florio’s Montaigne was still being published for a general English readership in the ‘Everyman’ and ‘World’s Classics’ series early in the 20th century. The present text draws on that provided by Ben Schneider for the ‘Renascence Editions’ texts series of the University of Oregon: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/montaigne/index (consulted 17.10.2011). In the section on ‘Writing an essay’ in the present book (1.2.7), Montaigne is cited as a classic instance of the experimental ‘try-out’, reflective and introspective kind of essay-writer; and contrasted with Bacon (see next item) as a instance of the ‘proof’ and ‘reason’ kind of essayist. You might like to consider what different (or similar) kinds of experience each engages with and how. How does each ‘prove’ their point, and how far are they both, in their various ways, ‘experimental’.

FRANCIS BACON, ‘Of Studies’, 1625

Studies serue for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability. Their Chiefe Vse for Delight, is in Priuatenesse and Retiring; For Ornament, is in Discourse; And for Ability, is in the Iudgement and Disposition of Businesse. For Expert Men can Execute, and perhaps Iudge of particulars, one by one; But the generall Counsels, and the Plots, and Marshalling of Affaires, come best from those that are Learned. To spend too much Time in Studies, is Sloth; To vse them too much for Ornament, is Affectation; To make Iudgement wholly by their Rules is the Humour of a Scholler. They perfect Nature, and are perfected, by Experience: For Naturall Abilities, are like Naturall Plants, that need Proyning by Study: And Studies themselues, doe giue forth Directions too much at Large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty Men Contemne Studies; Simple Men Admire them; and Wise Men Vse them: For they teach not their owne Vse; But that is a Wisdome without them, and aboue them, won by Obseruation. Reade not to Contradict, and Confute; Nor to Beleeue and Take for granted; Nor to Finde Talke and Discourse; But to weigh and Consider. Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: That is, some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; And some Few to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Attention. Some Bookes also may be read by Deputy, and Extracts made of them by Others: But that would be, onely in the lesse important Arguments, and the Meaner Sort of Bookes: else distilled Bookes, are like Common distilled Waters, Flashy Things. Reading maketh a Full Man; Conference a Ready Man; And Writing an Exact Man. And therefore, If a Man Write little, he had need haue a Great memory; If he Conferre little, he had need haue a Present Wit; And if he Reade litle, he had need haue much Cunning, to seeme to know that, he doth not. Histories make Men Wise; Poets Witty; The Mathematicks Subtill; Naturall Philosophy deepe; Morall Graue; Logick and Rhetorick Able to Contend. Abeunt studia in Mores. Nay there is no Stond or Impediment in the Wit, but may be wrought out by Fit Studies: Like as Diseases of the Body, may haue Appropriate Exercises. Bowling is good for the Stone and Reines; Shooting for the Lungs and Breast; Gentle Walking for the Stomacke; Riding for the Head; And the like. So if a Mans Wit be Wandring, let him Study the Mathematicks; For in Demonstrations, if his Wit be called away neuer so little, he must begin again: If his Wit be not Apt to distinguish or find differences, let him Study the Schoole-men; For they are Cymini sectores. If he be not Apt to beat ouer Matters, and to call vp one Thing, to Proue and Illustrate another, let him Study the Lawyers Cases; So euery Defect of the Minde, may haue a Speciall Receit.

Francis Bacon (1561—1626, b. London), philosopher and statesman, was knighted and made Baron Verulam by James I. He rose to be attorney general and Lord Chancellor before being tried for bribery, falling from favour and dieing in debt. Though not himself much of an experimental scientist, he argued strongly for a scientific method based on the observation of particulars and the application of reason. His most influential arguments in these areas can be found in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620). The above essay comes from the second edition of his Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (London, 1625). The earlier version of this essay (1597) is shorter, more epigrammatic and cryptic. Both can be found in modernised spelling in the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Abrams, Greenblatt, et al. (2008). The present text is in original spelling, punctuation and lay-out, as edited by Jack Lynch at Rutgers University: http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~ llynch/Texts/studies.html (consulted 18.10.2011). Bacon is cited in the section on Writing an essay in the present book (1.2.7) as a classic instance of the ‘proof’ and ‘reason’ kind of essay-writer, contrasted with Montaigne as a classic ‘try-out’ and reflective or introspective kind of essay-writer (see previous item). You might therefore like to consider how many of Bacon’s effects are in fact dependent on metaphorical imagery and rhetorical patterning.

5.2.2 Slave narratives by name

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, from The Narrative and Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845: 49)

Very soon after I went to live with Mr and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A,B,C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr.Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unwise, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.’ These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my young understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty – to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Douglass (1817–95) was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland. After learning the power of literacy he taught fellow slaves before escaping to Massachusetts in 1838. Douglass became one of the most powerful orators, writers and campaigners for the antislavery movement. He enlarged his Life twice (1855, 1881), thereby amplifying a tradition in which auto/biography can be conceived as a personal-political tool. (For this and other narratives by slaves themselves, see Gates 1986; the present text is from Gates and McKay 2003.)

5.3.2 Romance revisited

DELARIVIER MANLEY, from The New Atalantis, 1709

She took the Book and plac’d herself by the Duke. His Eyes Feasted themselves upon her Face, thence wander’d over her snowy Bosom, and saw the young swelling Breasts just beginning to distinguish themselves, and which were gently heav’d at the Impression Myrra’s Sufferings made upon her Heart. By this dangerous reading, he pretended to shew her that there were Pleasures her Sex were born for, and which she might consequently long to taste! Curiosity is an early and dangerous enemy to Virtue. The young Charlot who had by a noble inclination of Gratitude a strong propension of Affection for the Duke, whom she call’d and esteem’d her Papa, being a girl of wonderful reflection, and consequently Application, wrought her Imagination up to such a lively height at the Fathers Anger after the possession of his Daughter, which she judg’d highly unkind and unnatural, that she drop’d her Book, Tears fill’d her Eyes, Sobs rose to oppress her, and she pull’d out her handkerchief to cover the Disorder. The Duke, who was Master of all Mankind, could trace ‘em in all the Meanders of Dissimulation and Cunning, was not at a loss how to interpret the Agitation of a Girl who knew no Hipocrisy, all was Artless, the beautiful product of Innocence and Nature; he drew her gently to him, drunk her tears with his Kisses, suck’d her Sighs and gave her by that dangerous Commerce (her Soul before prepar’d to softness) new and unfelt Desires;

Manley (1663—1724) wrote novels of the secret lives of high society that were both erotic and scandalous, while also maintaining a veneer of propriety and morality. Her work bears comparison with that of Jackie Collins and modern magazine and tv treatments of celebrities: Hollywood stars and, in Britain, royalty. The scandal of the present extract is that it alludes to the first Earl of Portland who was said to have seduced and subsequently abandoned a friend’s daughter in just such a way. There may also be an autobiographical dimension in that Manley claimed she too had been lured into a bigamous marriage by her guardian. Seduction and the threat or fact of rape, along with the arousal and expression of female as well as male desire, became central preoccupations of the romance novel insofar as this genre mingled eroticism with morality in more or less idealistic or realistic ways. The epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson (1689—71), notably his enormous and highly successful Clarissa (1747—8), are classic examples. Liberally capitalised nouns and abbreviated past tense verbs (e.g. plac’d, wander’d) were regular features of spelling from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. (Text from D. Spender and J. Todd (eds) Anthology of British Women Writers, London: Pandora, 1989: 165—6.)

5.2.4 Science and Fantasy Fiction – genre and gender

MARY SHELLEY, from Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Ch. 17, 1818

[The ‘fiend’ continues to reproach his creator for making him what he is and then disowning him; also for failing to make him a mate.]

‘You are in the wrong,’ replied the fiend; ‘and, instead of threatening, I am content to reason to you. I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-riffs, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my archenemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.’

A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself and proceeded – ‘I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me; for you do not reflect that you are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundredfold; for that one creature’s sake, I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realised. What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!’

Mary Shelley’s now classic story of science-gone-wrong and human ‘progress’ at the expense of a slave/worker is far different from what many modern viewers of horror films starring Boris Karloff or Peter Cushing have come to expect. It’s also much tougher and more argumentative than Branagh’s sentimental and misleadingly named film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). The above extract gives fair notice of these concerns and qualities. Both teller and tale, for long excluded from the canon of LITERATURE studied at college, now receive considerable attention from FEMINIST, PSYCHOANALYTIC, MARXIST and POSTCOLONIAL critics. How might you adapt this passage from novel into film or some other medium? (Compare Caliban’s reproach to Prospero in The Tempest @ 5.3.2.)

5.2.5 War on – of – Terror

US GOVERNMENT, ‘9-11’ Commission Report, 2004

The final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Official Government Edition, published in July 2004, can be found at:

http://wwww.gpoaccess.gov/911/ (here accessed 6.11.2011)

After a Preface and Introduction, it is organised in the following sections:

Compare the responses to the ‘9/11’ attacks offered by Ian McEwan and Arundhati Roy in The Guardian a few days and weeks after the event (see 5.2.5, and item below).

WIKILEAKS archives: Iraq and Afghanistan, 2006—2010

The electronic archives collectively known as ‘Wikileaks’ can be found at: http://wikileaks.org/ (accessed at 7.11.2011)

These consist of more or less secret or unofficial documents on many conflicts around the world. They include archives on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that were expressly premised on the ‘9/11’ attacks on the World Trade Centre. Compare Nick Barton and Simon Panter as ‘Voices from the Battlefields of Afghanistan’ provided by military personnel serving there (see 5.2.5 and item above).

5.2.6 Media messages and street texts

ANONYMOUS, ‘Migration is not a crime’, c.2000

Available online at: http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/graffiti/graffiti_stencil_bristol_paddington_bear.htm

On walls and street furniture across the UK, the word ‘MIGRATION’ appears above a stencilled image of the children’s story character Paddington Bear with his suitcase, with the words ‘IS NOT A CRIME’ beneath the picture. This image has been attributed to Bansky, and has been replicated in urban landscapes nationally, as well as on t-shirts and wall art.

‘ig
heat strengthened
laminated inside’

This appears on the inside of a window of a train, but the words move across different backgrounds as the train moves, transiently and playfully taking on different contexts and referential values. The ‘ig’ in interesting in its ambiguity (brand name? acronym for a kind of technology? evoking a blending of the words ego and id). The subject (presumably the window material, but this can shift as the words shift contexts) has to be inferred, as does the meaning of ‘inside’ (on the inside of the window, e.g., within the train carriage as opposed to on the external of the train, or, alternatively, within the pane of material itself). The text, its shifting contexts and its spaces for interpretation open up issues of textually branding objects and spaces, prototypical and peripheral interpretations, authorial intention, ambiguity and availability of interpretations, etc.

‘fan-seeres-tront
say it to get it
Google voice search for mobile’

‘en-geyj-muhntringz
say it to get it
Google voice search for mobile’

These adverts featured on London underground trains for Google in Spring 2011. Enquiry and experiment can be developed along many lines. For example, you could:

consider the connotations of the various morphemes as portrayed in the first line of each section;
derive parts of the alphabetic system captured, and expand upon it; you could translate the words into the phonetic alphabet, or explore variations in phonetic spellings of the same words, possibly representing different accents;
create other ways of representing the words, potentially with other technologies or advertising functions in mind;
explore the assumptions about / targeting of particular audiences underlying within the adverts, looking at individual lines, each three line section, the two sections paired together, and the context of the adverts (in the London underground);
extend to the evocation of certain culturally-specific schema in other contexts and cultures.

‘STOP, NO.
STOP PLEASE
NO, PLEASE.
PLEASE STOP
TAKING
UNBOOKED
MINICABS.

Whether you approach the driver, or they
approach you, there’s no record of the journey
and you’re putting yourself in danger.

Text CAB to 60835 and we’ll use GPS
to text your three nearest cab numbers.

CABWISE
Know what you’re getting into.’

This text appears on a poster by ‘Transport for London’. The poster is situated on walls on the London underground. The first section of the text can be explored with respect to the blending of addressees and addressors, and of speech acts. The second, third and fourth sections can be discussed with respect to pronoun and proper noun use, verb choices, and transitivity and agency. The third is also interesting in its combined potential ambiguity and technological specificity, and its audience-targeting, while the play between literal and metaphorical dimensions in the fourth section could be fruitfully analysed and extended. Meanwhile, the role in the image, and the interaction of image and text, could also be explored, as well as the effect of the poster in communicating its message to viewers/readers, most of whom will pass by in a hurrying crowd.

‘ONE OF THE GIRLS

To be part of our team you don’t need to be one of the boys.
Of course you need to be tough. But you also need to be compassionate,
cooperative and communicative. So just do what come naturally.

For an exciting careers with excellent
Benefits and flexible working practices
Call 080000 224050

FIRE & RESCUE SERVICES WALES’

This poster featured on the wall of a lavatory in a pub in Swansea in 2011.

Suggested aspects to explore include: the bilingual nature of the advert: semantic slippage in translation: the relationship between image and text; the textual layout, along with a whole host of gender issues: assumptions behind language choices and foregrounded features of job, avoidance of vs. appeal to gender stereotypes, positive discrimination, etc..

This poster appeared around Oxford, UK, in the summer of 2012, playing humorously with the meanings of warning triangles, the conventional implications of ‘mind you head’ messages (e.g., on low ceiling beams), the implications of different fonts and typographics, etc.

This text and image appeared on the wall of an Indian grocery store in East Oxford in 2009. The image of the American film character E.T. appeared first. The Spanish message, which appeared later, means ‘I will return home’, and is a play on E.T.’s most famous line, “E.T. go home”. Aspects worth exploring include the possibilities of changing a text/image’s meaning through intervention, the various cultural voices at play, the intertextuality involved in the message, the possible embedded comment on migration, etc.

Images 1 to 6 are unique instances that are nonetheless broadly categorisable in terms of genre and discourse. You will regularly come across such routine yet remarkable text/image configurations all the time. The first thing is to notice them. The second is to write down or otherwise record them (mobile phone cameras are handy for this). The third and fourth things are to analyse them critically and explore them creatively – as resourcefully and energetically as you care or dare.

5.2.7 Metafictions

LAURENCE STERNE, from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759—1769

‘CHAP. XL.
I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegitable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt, but I shall be able to go on with my Uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line. Now,

These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third and fourth volumes. - In the fifth volume I have [...]’

Sterne (c. 1713– 1768) was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and became a vicar, working in various Yorkshire parishes. His minute and humorous social observation won him popularity through his writings, and his playing out the characters of his novels socially in London (he even named his home in Yorkshire Shandy Hall). His inventive experimentation with social observation and the novel form is most concentrated in Tristram Shandy, which was published in successive volumes from 1759 to 1769. It constitutes one of the first major metafictional texts in English, employing various strategies of exploring and problematising fictionality and novel-construction. (Also see Part Four: Realism and representation: fiction, fact, metafiction.)

GEORGE ELIOT, from Adam Bede, Book 1, Ch.5: The Rector, pub. 1859

‘If it had not been a wet morning, Mr. Irwine would not have been in the dining–room playing at chess with his mother, and he loves both his mother and chess quite well enough to pass some cloudy hours very easily by their help. Let me take you into that dining–room and show you the Rev. Adolphus Irwine, Rector of Broxton, Vicar of Hayslope, and Vicar of Blythe, a pluralist at whom the severest Church reformer would have found it difficult to look sour. We will enter very softly and stand still in the open doorway, without awaking the glossy– brown setter who is stretched across the hearth, with her two puppies beside her; or the pug, who is dozing, with his black muzzle aloft, like a sleepy president.

The room is a large and lofty one, with an ample mullioned oriel window at one end; the walls, you see, are new, and not yet painted; but the furniture, though originally of an expensive sort, is old and scanty, and there is no drapery about the window. The crimson cloth over the large dining–table is very threadbare, though it contrasts pleasantly enough with the dead hue of the plaster on the walls; but on this cloth there is a massive silver waiter with a decanter of water on it, of the same pattern as two larger ones that are propped up on the sideboard with a coat of arms conspicuous in their centre. You suspect at once that the inhabitants of this room have inherited more blood than wealth, and would not be surprised to find that Mr. Irwine had a finely cut nostril and upper lip; but at present we can only see that he has a broad flat back and an abundance of powdered hair, all thrown backward and tied behind with a black ribbon—a bit of conservatism in costume which tells you that he is not a young man. He will perhaps turn round by and by, and in the meantime we can look at that stately old lady, his mother, a beautiful aged brunette, whose rich–toned complexion is well set off by the complex wrappings of pure white cambric and lace about her head and neck. She is as erect in her comely embonpoint as a statue of Ceres; and her dark face, with its delicate aquiline nose, firm proud mouth, and small, intense, black eye, is so keen and sarcastic in its expression that you instinctively substitute a pack of cards for the chess–men and imagine her telling your fortune. The small brown hand with which she is lifting her queen is laden with pearls, diamonds, and turquoises; and a large black veil is very carefully adjusted over the crown of her cap, and falls in sharp contrast on the white folds about her neck. It must take a long time to dress that old lady in the morning! But it seems a law of nature that she should be dressed so: she is clearly one of those children of royalty who have never doubted their right divine and never met with any one so absurd as to question it.’

George Eliot (1819—1910) (Mary Anne Evans) was a highly educated, prolific novelist, critic and poet. Adam Bede was her first novel, published in the same year as the first volume of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (see previous item).Though it predominantly manifests the realist, detailed social observation for which George Eliot is famed, Adam Bede also demonstrates the use of metafictional techniques in support of (rather than to playfully disrupt) the suspension of disbelief. (Compare Emily Brontë’s, Wuthering Heights, 2.2.3, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 5.2.3, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 5.3.2; and see Part Four, Realism . . . metafiction.)

5.2.8 Electronic, multimodal, and installation literature

CAROLINE BERGVALL, various works:

‘Ambient Fish’, from Goan Atom Part 1 (1999), at epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bergvall/amfish/amfish.html (Flash Player required)

Images of various literature installation projects amongst other works at the website www.carolinebergvall.com/projects-image.php

Caroline Bergvall (b.1962) is a French-Norwegian writer and multimedia, cross-disciplinary artist. Her works include e-literature such as the digital poem ‘Ambient Fish’, audio texts, published printed poetry, and multimodal literary performances and installations. Use the guidance from Part Four of the book on ‘Genre and kinds of texts’, ‘Image, imagery, imagination’, and ‘Text, context, and intertextuality’ to help you explore the auditory, visual, textual and contextual dynamics of Bergvall’s works. Also compare Petrucci’s ‘Trench’ (5.1.4), an installation poem in the Imperial War Museum: in the voice of a sniper victim and placed so as to be read a distance through telescopic sights.

TIM WRIGHT, various works:

In Search of Oldton, an interactive online hypertext available at oldton.com/my_oldton.html.

Say What You Want To Hear, a two part radio play broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 9 February and 9 March 2010. For information about how the interactive SWYWTH system worked, and to hear excerpts, go to ‘Say What You Want To Hear’, BBC Radio 4 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/swywth/.

Tim Wright is a digital writer, radio playwright, and producer of interactive narratives, web and email dramas, and educational and comedic interactive web projects. His work is best explored playfully. You might begin to engage critically with these texts through the terms and topics offered in the entry on Multimodal, cyber and hypertexts here on the website @ 4. Also relevant are the entries in Part Four of the book on: ‘Addresser, address, addressee’, ‘Genre and kinds of texts’, ‘Text, context and intertextuality’, ‘Writing and reading, response and rewriting’. But still perhaps the most important will prove to be ‘Your own additions and modifications’. What kinds of key term and core topic do you feel such texts and contexts, forms and functions, relations and interactions . . . require?

JEFF NOON, tweet,

‘24) SF wants to live among hybrid creatures: with monsters of the Id, engines of flesh, women who turn into fish, and floating men of fire.’

https://twitter.com/jeffnoon

JEFF NOON describes himself as a SF writer, feather maker, dubtext remixer, lo-fi avant-pulp scientist. His tweets play with the boundaries of narrative, while much of his electronic literature explores the technological and collaborative capacities of the medium.

@ 5.3 VOICES

5.3.1 Dramatizing ‘English’ in education

CROSS-CULTURAL TALK IN CLASS (transcription)

[Two 14-year-old boys, Kuldip (Indian) and Faizal (Pakistani), are talking with a young teacher and interviewer, Ben (English). They are talking about two other 14-year-old boys: Harbans (Indian), whom they earlier refer to as ‘our clown of the year’, and Tony (English), who tries to copy Harbans. Parts of the speech are transcribed phonetically (see Appendix B: An alphabet of speech sounds). Words within brackets ( ) indicate interviewer’s additional observations. { indicates overlapping speeches.]

KULDIP: (smile voice) that’s what Harbans does
FAIZAL: yeh
KULDIP: with teachers he does that (light laughter)
BEN:       he does it with the teachers?
KULDIP: he goes ‘what you talking about’ [wɔt ju tɔkin əbat]
FAIZAL: Harbans, he does it all the time
BEN:       how do the teachers react?
FAIZAL: they just say ‘just sit down’ and he goes
‘I no understand’ [ai nɔ _ŋdəsta_ŋd] and they just go away then
KULDIP: cos he does it normally with um stand-in teachers when they just,
FAIZAL: come in you know
KULDIP: for
FAIZAL: supply teachers, messes them around
KULDIP: cos he does it normally with stand-in teachers when they just
FAIZAL: come in
KULDIP: yeh for
FAIZAL: supply teachers
KULDIP: yeh
BEN:       aah
FAIZAL: he messes messes them around
BEN:       right             {but not
KULDIP: {um there’s this white boy, Tony Marsh, he sits right
next to him and he copies, (smile voice) he copies Harbans
FAIZAL: he tries to mix in with us lot
KULDIP: yeh
FAIZAL: he tries to do it too
KULDIP: and we sort of teach him some words (in Panjabi) and he sort
of (laughs quietly) says them [the interview continues with
Kuldip and Faizal explaining what Tony learns]

This transcript, slightly simplified, comes from Ben Rampton’s Crossing: Language and Ethnicity amongst Adolescents, London: Longman, 1995: 69–70 (2nd edn 2005), a study of cross-culturalexchanges at a school in the English Midlands. The passage both describes anddemonstrates the nature of cross-cultural conversation (including kinds of borrowing,mimicry and mockery) and illustrates the conditions under which hybridity in culture andheteroglossia in language develop through the interaction of speech communities.

5.3.2 Voices with a difference

CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE, from ‘Noah’s Flood’ (Noah’s wife and family) performed c.1340–c.1550, first pub.19th cent.

[God’s flood is coming, the ark is ready but Noah’s wife is not prepared to leave her friends.]

NOAH: Come in, Wife, in twenty devils way,
Or else stand there without. 220
HAM: Shall we all fetch her in?
NOAH: Yea, son, in Christ’s blessing and mine,
I would ye hied you betime,
For of this flood I am in doubt.

[Song]

GOOD GOSSIP: The flood comes fleeting in full fast,
On every side that spreadeth full far.
For fear of drowning I am aghast;
Good gossip, let us draw near.
And let us drink ere we depart,
For oftentimes we have done so.                                           230
For at one draught thou drink a quart,
And so will I do ere I go.
NOAH’S WIFE: Here is a pottle of Malmsey good and strong;
It will rejoice both heart and tongue.
Though Noah think us never so long,
Yet we will drink atyte.
JAPHETH: Mother, we pray you all together –
For we are here, your own childer –
Come into the ship for fear of the weather,
For his love that you bought!                                                  240
NOAH’S WIFE: That will I not for all your call
But I have my gossips all.
SHEM: I’ faith, mother, yet thou shall,
Whether thou will or nought. [Drags her aboard]
NOAH: Welcome, wife, into this boat.
NOAH’S WIFE: [slaps him] Have thou that for thy note!
NOAH: Aha, Mary, this is hot!
It is good for to be still.
Ah, children, methinks my boat remeves.
Our tarrying here me highly grieves.                                                 250
Over the land the water spreads;
God do as He will.

[Then they sing and NOAH shall speak again.]

NOAH: Ah, great God that art so good,
That workes not thy will is wood.
Now all this world is on a flood.

223. hied – hurried. 224. in doubt – afraid. 225. GOSSIP – companion; fleeting – flowing. 236. atyte – together. 254. wood – mad.

This comic and partly carnivalesque interlude with Noah’s wife is not to be found in the Bible story of Noah’s ark and the flood (Genesis, 5: 28–9). It shows how drama can be developed out of relatively fixed rituals. The Mystery cycles presented the Christian hi/story from Creation through the Crucifixion to Doomsday. They were put on by city guilds and performed by amateurs as street theatre every Spring. This particular play was put on, appropriately enough, by the Water Carriers guild. Like other pageants it may have been played on a makeshift stage or a specially constructed mobile pageant wagon. (Full text in A.C. Cawley, Everyman and the Medieval Miracle Plays, London, Dent, 1977: 35–49.)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, from The Tempest, Act 1 Sc. 2 (Prospero and Caliban), performed 1611, pub. 1623

[Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan and a magician, is chastising his slave, Caliban, for not working hard enough and for trying to rape his daughter, Miranda. Caliban is a native of the island and a witch’s son.]

PROSPERO:Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth! 320

[Enter Caliban]

CALIBAN: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d
With raven feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye
And blister you all o’er!
PROSPERO: For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall forth at vast of night, that they may work
All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinch’d
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made them.
CALIBAN: I must eat my dinner.                                                                    330
This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strok’dst me, and mad’st much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! – All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!                                   340
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.
PROSPERO: Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have us’d thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care; and lodg’d thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.
CALIBAN: Oh ho! Oh ho! – would it had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.
PROSPERO: Abhorrèd slave.                                                              350
Which any print of goodness will not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known: but thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confin’d into this rock,                                                     360
Who hadst deserv’d more than a prison.
CALIBAN: You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,
For learning me your language!
PROSPERO: Hag-seed, hence!
Fetch us in fuel,

Late nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century interpretations of The Tempest tended to conceive it in terms of a contest between art (Prospero) and nature (compounded of the earthy Caliban and the more ethereal spirit, Ariel). More recently, attention has concentrated upon the POST/COLONIAL dimension of the master–slave relationship; also the class and GENDER politics of Caliban as a wildly wilful male body and Miranda as a purely demure female. There continues to be much attention to Prospero the magician as a kind of theatrical super-illusionist and even as an autobiographical projection of Shakespeare himself saying farewell to the stage. (Compare Slave narratives, 5.2.2, and Frankenstein and his ‘creature’, @ 5.2.4.) For more on Shakespeare, including his sonnets, see 5.1.2 and 5.4.4.

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE, The Playboy of the Western World, Act 3 (Christy and Pegeen), first performed 1907.

[The scene is a pub in a village in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. Christy Mahon, a stranger, has been boasting he’s killed his father, and the villagers have eventually taken fright. Pegeen Mike is the publican’s daughter and Shawn, her cousin, is a young farmer.]

PEGEEN: I’ll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what’s a squabble in your back-yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed. [To Men.] Take him on from this, or the lot of us will be likely put on trial for his deed to-day.
CHRISTY: [with horror in his voice] And it’s yourself will send me off, to have a horny-fingered hangman hitching his bloody slipknots at the butt of my ear.
MEN: [pulling rope] Come on, will you? [He is pulled down on the floor.]
CHRISTY: [twisting his legs round the table] Cut the rope, Pegeen, and I’ll quit the lot of you, and live from this out, like the madman of Keel. Eating muck and green weeds on the faces of the cliffs.
PEGEEN: And leave us to hang, is it, for a saucy liar, the like of you? [To Men] Take him on, out from this.
SHAWN: Pull a twist on his neck, and squeeze him so.
PHILLY: Twist yourself. Sure he cannot hurt you, if you keep your distance from his teeth alone.
SHAWN: I’m afeard of him. [To Pegeen] Lift a lighted sod, will you, and scorch his leg.
PEGEEN: [blowing the fire with a bellows] Leave go now, young fellow, or I’ll scorch your shins.
CHRISTY: You’re blowing for to torture me. [His voice rising and growing stronger.]
That’s your kind, is it? Then let the lot of you be wary, for, if I’ve to face the gallows, I’ll have a gay march down, I tell you, and shed the blood of some of you before I die.

This play caused a riot when it was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The cause was the generally carnivalesque nature of the piece (Christy boasts extravagantly – and, it turns out, lies utterly – about killing his father); also the breaking of a public taboo – the mere mention of an undergarment. Synge drew upon close observation of and familiarity with the language and people of the Aran Islands and Western Ireland as a whole. He in effect constructed authentic literary, especially stage, representations of Irish people and their accents and dialects. He thereby both reflected and reinforced the movement towards national identity politically realised in 1922. (For full text, see A. Saddlemyer (ed.) The Playboy and Other Plays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.)

5.3.3. Voice – play, dream – drama

Listen to one of the radio programmes below, or any others produced since. All of these were (and many still are) produced and broadcast by BBC Radio 4. They are freely available online at: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/genres/drama/current (here accessed 2.11.2011)

‘Afternoon Reading’
‘Afternoon Play’
‘Book at Bedtime’
‘Book of the Week’
‘Classic Serial’
‘Friday Play’
‘Saturday Play’
‘Women’s Hour Drama’

Tips on listening to and thinking about these plays and stories:

How does your experience of listening to a play or story differ from your experience of watching or reading such a work?
Some of these works of literature were originally written as radio plays, while others have been adapted from printed novels.
Some employ dramatic effects such as sound effects and music.
Some employ narrating personas while others rely entirely on dialogue.
How do these factors affect your experience and interpretation of the work?

Go on to compare your chosen play with the voices, sound-effects, strategies and structures of an early classic – and poetic – piece of radio drama such as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (see 5.3.3). If possible, also listen to a recording of the latter as first narrated by Richard Burton for radio in 1954. It is available as a BBC Radio audiobook and part of it may perhaps still be heard on YouTube or a similar internet site.

@ 5.4 CROSSINGS

5.3.2 Mapping Journeys

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, 1596

Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor
wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the
soil spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not
broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples. It hath
never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered or possessed by
any Christian prince. It is besides so defensible, that if two forts be builded in one
of the provinces which I have seen, the flood setteth in so near the bank, where the
channel also lieth, that no ship can pass up but within a pike’s length of the artillery, first of the one, and afterwards of the other.

Raleigh (1552–1618) – soldier, courtier, explorer, colonist, poet and polymath – was for a long time a favourite of Elizabeth I. He waged a vicious war in Ireland, set up the first English colonies in Virginia, and went to Guiana in 1595 in search of gold. The account he had published on his return was in part designed to encourage further expeditions there and challenge Spanish interests in Central and South America. He was later imprisoned and eventually executed by James I, partly under pressure from the Spanish. Much of Behn’s Oroonoko takes place in Guiana; see 5.2.2. (Present text from Abrams 2000, Vol I: 886.)

CHARLES DARWIN, from Beagle Diary, 23 January 1833

[Darwin observes the return of the man the English sailors called ‘Jemmy Button’ to his own people in Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, after three years absence in England.]

‘At night we arrived at the junction with Ponsonby Sound; we took up our quarters
with a family belonging to Jemmys or the Tekenika people. – They were quiet &
inoffensive & soon joined the seamen round a blazing fire; although naked they
streamed with perspiration at sitting so near to a fire which we found only
comfortable. – They attempted to join Chorus with the songs; but the way in which they were always behind hand was quite laughable. – A canoe had to be despatched to spread the news & in the morning a large gang arrived. – [. . . ]

We were sorry to find that Jemmy had forgotten his language, that is as far as
talking, he could however understand a little of what was said. It was pitiable, but
laughable, to hear him talk to his brother in English & ask him in Spanish whether
he understood it. I do not suppose, any person exists with such a small stock of
language as poor Jemmy, his own language forgotten, & his English ornamented
with a few Spanish words, almost unintelligible. – Jemmy heard that his father
was dead; but as he had had a ‘dream in his head’ to that effect, he seemed to
expect it & not much care about it. – He comforted himself with the natural
reflection ‘me no help it’. – Jemmy could never find out any particulars about his
father, as it is their constant habit, never to mention the dead. – We believe they
are buried high up in the woods. – anyhow Jemmy will not eat land-birds, because
they live on dead men. – This is one out of many instances where his prejudices
are recollected, although language forgotten.’

Darwin (1809–82) was a geologist and naturalist on the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–6), which had the primary task of mapping the coast of South America. Darwinalso made many observations on the peoples and places he visited. ‘Tekenika’ was not infact the name of the people, as reported here, but based on the Fuegian expression ‘I donot understand you’ (teke uneka). For a note on the latter and the present text, see Beagle Diary, ed. R.D. Keynes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998: 135–7.

JOSEPH CONRAD, from Heart of Darkness, 1902

[There are inverted commas throughout the following text because it is part of a tale told by a narrator (Marlow) as he and four friends wait for the tide to turn in the Thames estuary. Marlow is telling of a trip up another ancient river, the Congo, and it is on its banks that he reports having seen the following sight.]

‘Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly
against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures,
leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted
skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.

‘She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

‘She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us.Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over and inscrutable purpose.’

Conrad (1857–1924) had himself, like the narrator of Heart of Darkness, served on boats up the (Belgian) Congo. Many of the events and figures in the novel are in some measure auto/biographical and historical. POSTCOLONIAL and FEMINIST critics have had much to say about this and similar passages for their construction of ‘female’ and ‘black’ as other fixed by the gaze of a white, Western male self. Conrad was a Pole who became a naturalised British citizen in 1886. For F.R Leavis, as asserted in the very first sentence of his The Great Tradition (1948), Conrad was one of the four ‘great’ English novelists, and is now part of the canon of modern classic novelists that are regularly taught and studied.

5.4.3 Translations / Transformations

VERSIONS OF ‘PSALM 137’, verse 1

(a) Ofer flodas babilones der we setun
and weopun da de we gemyndge din sion
in salum in midle hire
we hengun organa ure.
(Vespasian Psalter, Mercian (Midlands), late eighth century)

(b) On the floodis of babylone there we saten,
and wepten; while we bithoughten on Syon,
In salewis in the myddil therof we hangiden
vp our orguns
(Wycliffite Bible, here Psalm 136, c.1382)

(c) By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
(King James Bible, ‘Authorized’Version, 1611)

(d) On the proud banks of great Euphrates’ flood
There we sat, and there we wept:
Our harps that now no music understood
Nodding on the willows slept,
While unhappy, captived we,
Lovely Zion thought on thee.
(Richard Crashaw, from Steps to the Temple, 1646)

(e) By the waters of Babylon
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres
(Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1952)

(f) She leaned over to the tape deck and pushed a button. Jesus, Jumpy thought, Boney M? Give me a break. For all her tough race-professional attitudes, the lady still had a lot to learn about music. Here it came, boomchickaboom. Then, without warning, he was crying, provoked into real tears by counterfeit emotion by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was the one hundred and thirty- seventh psalm, ‘Super flumina’. King David calling out across the centuries. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

‘I had to learn the psalms at school,’ Pamela Chamcha said, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed, her eyes shut tight. By the river of Babylon,where we sat down, oh oh we wept . . . she stopped the tape, leaned back again, began to recite. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth.’

Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school, of matins and evensong, of the chanting of psalms.

Versions (b)–(d) can be found in full in J. Hollander and F. Kermode (eds) The Oxford Anthology of English Literature 1973, Vol. I: 534–42.
Version (f) is from Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1988 (1992: 175–6), including the hit song version by ‘Boney M’, 1978.

THREE VERSIONS OF A HAIKU by Basho

(i)

The old pond!
A frog jumps in –
Sound of the water.
(N.G. Shinkokai)

(ii)

Oh thou unrippled pool of quietness
Upon whose shimmering surface, like the tears
Of olden days, a small batrachian leaps
The while aquatic sounds assail our ears.
(Lindley Williams Hubbell)

(iii)

pond
frog
plop!
(James Kirkup)

These three twentieth-century translations of a Japanese haiku by the Zen Buddhist poet Basho (1644–94) include, in order: one that is relatively ‘straight’; a spoof in a neo-classical idiom; and another in a contemporary idiom considered ‘ludicrous’ in various senses. Inevitably, all are very different from the Japanese in that the graphology of the latter language used ideograms (‘picture-words’) which may be phonologically realised in a variety of ways. The standard modern Western definition of a haiku, as favoured by Imagist and later poets, is of a seventeen-syllable poem with three lines disposed in a 5/7/5 pattern and a last line with a humorous or suspended feel to it. However, aside from all being written in non-syllabic language, many Japanese haiku use a single line, and often a single sentence, of a variable number of syllables (see Preminger and Brogan 1993: 493–4). You might therefore like to try your hand at a ‘haiku’ on the same or another topic, and in whichever of these forms you have a mind to. (The present texts are from Susumi Takiguchi, ‘Twaddle of an Oxonian’, Ami-Net International Press, 2000: 21.)

5.4.5 Epitaphs and (almost) last words

EMILY DICKINSON,‘I felt a Funeral’, c.1861, first pub. 1896

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through – 4

And when they all were seated,
A service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb – 8

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll, 12

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here – 16

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then – 20

Dickinson (1830–86) – poet, Puritan, sceptic and recluse – was born and lived all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. For further information and another of her poems, see 5.3.4. (The text is from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. Johnson, London: Faber and Faber, 1970.)

A VERY ‘AMBRIDGE’ MEMORIAL (after The Archers, BBC Radio 4)

The image with text below was printed on a poster tied to a fence around a church garden in Cambridge in Spring 2011. It followed the fictional death of the character Nigel Pargetter in the BBC radio drama series The Archers.

Set in the fictional village of Ambridge, The Archers is the longest-running radio series in the world. First broadcast in January 1951, it celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 2011. Now sometimes called a ‘soap opera’ (a term first coined in the US in 1939 to describe radio dramas sponsored by soap companies), The Archers is a part of public service radio and has never sponsored anything. There are, then, many directions and dimensions in which an analysis and interpretation of this particular text/image (and the related programme) might proceed. Here is a beginning list:

the play between the fictional world of ‘The Archers’ and the real world of Graham Seed (the actor who had played Nigel Pargetter for 27 years);
the specific occasion and location comprising the Church, Cambridge, the poster’s maker; the poster’s viewer, etc.;
in particular, the construction of the partially ironic appeal to target audience of fans of ‘The Archers’;
more generically, the blending of speech acts and event types (announcement of / invitation to memorial service / celebrity charity event) and subtly varied style and register;
the actual and mythic place of ‘The Archers’ in British cultural life as it ‘voices’ the changing concerns and preoccupations of a certain section of the nation – as refracted through a country setting and a BBC Radio 4 audience. (Long-running tv soap-operas of a predominantly urban cast, such as Eastenders and Coronation Street, voice and show quite different – yet still relatable – concerns and preoccupations.)
the reproduction and re-use of this text/image as the last item in the last section of the anthology on the book’s current website.

Again, as always, look out for examples of text/images that catch your eye and stick in your mind. Then record, analyse, reflect upon, enquire into and re-cast them as you see fit and feel moved.

Not the last word . . . again . . . afresh . . .

Finally – for the moment – recall the very ‘beginning’ of this website. Try looping back to @ Prologue: Actual and Virtual ‘English’, Local and Global Community. There you will be reminded of ways in which you can extend a variety of walks and talks into full-scale yet in principle open-ended anthologies and other critical and creative projects. These involve reading, writing, reflection and research, and can be configured in a number of ways – individual and collaborative, actual and virtual.

There are strictly no absolute beginnings or ultimate ends to such things. But there are many middles. This is one of them and we are in it. Connected to yet different from one another. So there can be other supplements of and alternatives to this Anthology to come. Yours as well as ours.