stab your circumstance with a pitchfork

Chapter 11: More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence

                This chapter seemed to me to be very philosophical, mostly because violence is this very human thing that we’re constantly trying to understand and combat. Therefore, analyzing violence often leads us to analyze bigger ideas about what it means to be human. Violence is about an intimate connection; it’s a connection from one individual to another or from an individual to his circumstance. It brings up questions about the extent to which people and other things outside our personal sphere can affect us and how we can affect them. Violence is the one concrete way we can hurt someone and see the physical results of the pain we’ve inflicted. It’s a struggle for control in the basest form. Any other struggle is intangible and its results are unpredictable, but physical harm leaves irreversible damage.

                The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is one book that I can think of in which violence plays a big part, affecting the characters and plot in an irreversible way. To start, the entire plot of the book is the result of a violent act- the murder of Wellington, the dog. Christopher, who is assumed to have some form of autism, sets it upon himself to solve Wellington’s murder. This murder is raw and bloody. This violence is not disguised or softened in any way; it is a dead dog with a pitchfork sticking out of it. Christopher finds it in the yard. Animal violence especially represents the extent of human power over other things. Wellington was an innocent victim, defenseless, but nonetheless alive and valued by someone. His murder represents man’s attempt to grasp reality by feeling powerful and in control of something. Christopher’s father ends up being revealed as the killer. He was having an affair with the owner of the dog and they got into an argument, so his exhibition of power was to kill the dog.

                Violence is a character attribute; it says something about one’s personality. Everyone has different coping mechanisms, and violence is an external one that can most directly impact others. Christopher’s father is known in the book to abuse Christopher when he gets out of control. Christopher’s autistic behavior is hard to understand and almost impossible to minimize. The father’s behavior is marked by rash actions taken when his circumstance is tragic and encompassing. Violence is an attempt to make a tangible response to the problems that he feels imprisoned by but cannot grasp. It represents the power of circumstance and our futile attempts to change what we cannot.

when snow is predictably unpredictable

Chapter 10: It's More Than Just Rain or Snow

In chapter 10, Foster asserts that all weather written into literature means something; it is more than just a plot device or an element of setting. I could agree with this assertion. Foster gives countless examples of stories that contain rain and snow and what the weather symbolizes in context. It’s obvious that neither type of weather ever means the same thing- at least, not exactly. Every chapter of Foster’s has some definitive symbol or association that is always made when analyzing each topic at hand. Rain has a couple of those: Noah and the Ark, cleansing. The difference I saw in this chapter, however, is that it seems like weather as a symbol is flexible; it can be molded to serve almost any purpose in meaning or analysis. For example, I found that two of Foster’s interpretations of rain served purposes that were exactly the opposite: in one example, rain was a symbol of isolation and the feeling of being truly alone surrounded by a daunting nature, and in the other, rain was a symbol of unification, for it falls on every man regardless of personal differences.

Foster gave the example of ironic rain used by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, which made me think of another of Hemingway’s books that utilizes weather. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, there is a snowstorm at a pivotal point in the story, and now that I think about it, the snow meant a lot. It is the point in the book where Robert Jordan’s plan to bomb the bridge is about to go into action- This is the worst possible time for snow. Pilar tells Robert Jordan that she thinks it’s going to snow, but he refuses to believe her. It’s predictable, however, at this point that it is certainly going to snow. It’s perfectly inopportune because it complicates all of Robert Jordan’s long thought out plans. You could say that the snow here is predictably unpredictable. Here we are- Anselm is in place at the watchpoint and the rest of the team is cooped up together in the tent, waiting for action. Robert Jordan is watching the snow fall outside. The snow is cold; it freezes Robert Jordan’s thoughts. It’s the type of cold that’s truly chilling; it increases the anxiety and nerves for Robert Jordan. This cold contrasts the warmth of the company and deep conversation that is taking place inside of the tent. It represents the stark isolation of Anselm, out there alone at the watchpoint, suffering in the freezing cold. Anselm as a character is isolated and lonely by nature; his wife and daughter are dead, so the war effort is all that he has. The snow represents the intensity of the sacrifices he must make to remain loyal to the effort.

A lot of times, it’s easy to be cynical. It often feels like writers don’t purposely plant their symbolism, that we’re just pulling all this meaning from a creative whim or a practical plot device, but with weather, I believe it. The purposes Foster came up with make too much sense to overlook. Weather’s symbolism always added appropriate meaning or irony at least. It’s easy to make it serve a purpose, and it seems to always serve a significant one.

quest, you say? hit the road, jack

Chapter 1: Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It's Not)

I started reading Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor almost directly after finishing Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, so you can imagine my delight when the first chapter became immediately relevant to me in its correlation with my reading. It's always refreshing when summer homework is relevant. The first chapter of Foster's book is about the Quest, and Narcissus is almost entirely about one man's journey in finding himself. That sounds like a quest to me.

Foster makes the assertion that every time the protagonist hits the road, so to speak, he is going on a quest, a journey of self-discovery. He says that these journeys are usually undertaken for the purpose of completing some sort of task that is ultimately irrelevant to the lesson learned on the quest. In Hesse's book, Goldmund is the coming-of-age youth whose journey the story follows. Struggling to break away from the Catholic Church that he was raised in, Goldmund undergoes revolutionary self-discovery: he learns to follow the call of his mother, he learns the struggle of death and survival, and he learns that he is an artist. On this journey, Goldmund learns things that he never would have learned any other way. Wandering made him realize that he was born to be a wanderer.

Goldmund's journey was certainly a quest, and its nature helped me relate to Foster's descriptions, but it had some inconsistencies with Foster's quest requirements. Foster says that the quest is always initiated by another person who issues a task. This is true to an extent in Goldmund's case; his friend and mentor Narcissus awakened Goldmund to his need to leave the cloister, but he was given no trivial or otherwise "task" to complete. He knew from the start that his purpose in leaving was to find himself, he just didn't know what he would find. In addition, although Narcissus inspired the change in Goldmund that made him want to leave, Goldmund ultimately made the decision himself and broke away and started the journey without being told to do so.

Although these points are significant structural differences, Goldmund faced the personal battles and practical difficulties that any quester would. There may not have been a desired task or destination from the start, but Goldmund returned to the cloister a far different man than he was when he hit the road. It seems to me that a lot of quests in literature are self-driven; just because the decision to leave was personal doesn't mean that internal change can't come from it. Foster's requirements seem to fit the more fantastical/Harry Potter type quests; whereas Goldmund's alternative can be seen in more subtle novels of youth, such as "On the Road". I would consider Keroac's tale a quest, despite the fact that Sal made the decision to travel on his own for no other purpose than vacation. Foster's ideas imply that the quester is too immature to go on a journey for the sake of the journey or understand its implications from the get go.

Keroac's story of a quest is further explored in this post: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/rebirth-kerouac-on-the-road.html , which gives a quote from the book that I find relevant to this chapter:

“Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts, but ‘IT–‘ Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.”
–Jack Kerouac (1957), quoted from On the Road

The lesson I learned: the key to a quest is the self-discovery part; if someone hits the road and returns a changed person, he had been on a quest.