I missed the class on proverbial wisdom, but I have read a number of y'alls blogs defending conventional wisdom. I wish I had been in class that day. But the subject interests me a great deal. Like Andrew, I have so many stories that I treasure from my ancestors. My family likes puns and... what is this called:
A panther is like a leapard
But it isnt peppered.
If you should behold a panther crouched,
Prepare to say
Ouch.
But better yet,
When called by a panther,
Don't anther.
Anyways, tradition, as the song goes in the fiddler on the roof, is everywhere. Tradition dictates law, and law is neccisary in a society of human beings. The Slave is a commentary on tradition , law, revolution, and humanity. Frye points out in chapter 16 that law always follows revolution as an effort to "establish order out of an original chaos" (162). But in all cases, law becomes flawed by the very nature of trying to maintain tradition. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya looses his daughter because he remains loyal to the Jewish tradition. Jacob in the slave loses his wife, the community loses Jacob, and all of the pain seems extremely unnecissary. Yet the Jewish community is only trying to hold on to their tradition as God asked them to over and over again in the book of Judges. The bible has had immense power over communities since it was written. The crusades, the Middle East conflict, etc...yet the bible also says, turn a cheek, love thy neighbor, and let he who has not sinned cast the first stone. The Bible is full of internal contradictions, just like The Slave, and the very idea of creating order out of chaos. That is why, perhaps, people have been able to mold entirely diferent religions based off of the same book. That is why Jacob was so conflicted in his choices. His book of law was not cohesive. It mirrored original chaos. And as Frye points out, after law is instilled,inevitable conflict will follow.
It repeats itself over and over. Right now, the Senate has been revolutionized from republican to democratic. Now in Washington D.C., thousands of people are losing their jobs, while thousands more are being promoted to new jobs. There will be a new set of laws established and everything will change. Instead of murder, rape and torture, like what happened to the Jewish communities in The Slave, instead we have the shuting down of big corporations, money re-dispersed, and laws completely changing. The idea of tradition, however, will not change. Families will still celebrate Thanksgiving, grandpareents will still be called granparents and most lives will go on the same. A new revolution will happen soon enough. (I purposely stayed out of the present war in Iraq).
And then, if you are an English major, you have all sorts of Professors telling you that you need to experience an apocalypse. The veil needs to be removed from your eyes, and you need to see that there is no such thing as truth or history. They tell you that Thanksgiving is really a rememberance of European genocide, that Christmas is really a celebration of the Saturnelia festival, and that Jesus was make believe, and that No Child Left Behind really means No Child Left Untested. And read the bible, they tell you. Read for yourself to see that it makes no sense, that it is myth and parable, and metaphors, and after you celebrate your Thanksgiving vacation, we'll hear your presentation on it.
So you go home for the holiday, and you watch your family, and you try to make sense of it all. But after awhile, you start to forget about everything you have learned, and you start to enjoy yourself, caught up in your family traditions. And nothing matters anymore, because you are caught up in parataxis, childlike, breathless, immersed in your personal tradition. And that never changes.
I have a paper on history and literary criticism, if any one wants to read it, here it is:
It began with my Grandmother who got engaged. That’s what they did in those days: They met at innocent social gatherings, the girls feigned breeziness, the boys over-indulged, the boys proposed, and then, they married. Usually the engagement process took some time. I can’t quote directly or share the evidence with you, because it is a coveted treasure in the family. I belong to the fourth generation, one generation shy of the privilege of history. But I read it once; before it was ripped from my fingertips, I read the beginning of it. It started out with a letter from Mr. Arthur Hanford to Ms. Louise Gwinn. (My middle name is Gwinn by the way. I was named after my Aunt Gwinn who died of cancer last year, and she was named after her Grandmother Louise Gwinn Hanford. The name Gwinn is coveted also, mostly by my sister and I who secretly worshipped both namesakes.) But I’ll try to reenact it:
Dear Ms. Louise,
I saw you outside of the barn yesterday morning, and I couldn’t get the sight of you out of my mind. Now I truly hope that you find pleasure with this letter and oblige my desire to see you again. Is it possible that I may meet you? I have heard that you are promised to Mr.----------, but there was something between us yesterday, and I must have a chance to meet you in person.
Respectfully,
Arthur Hanford Now, it has been ten years since I read those letters and writing this is very difficult because it is so vivid in my mind, yet I cannot possibly reproduce it correctly. The story has been told and retold. The story has shaped my identity. The romance has been the measure for all of my relationships. The Letters have inspired my love for language and history. The language was more descriptive, more revealing, more distinct, and more honest than anything I’ve read yet. That is how they wrote in those days. At least that is how Arthur and Louise wrote.
I think there were four or five letters of similar nature, different only in the exceedingly desperate pleading by Arthur, before Louise wrote her first and very short reply:
Dear Mr. Hanford:
Please stop writing me. You must accept that I am betrothed to Mr.-------, and it is highly inappropriate to carry on in such matters.
Sincerely,
Ms. Louise GwinnMr. Hanford was obviously a determined man. He wrote letters upon letters, wooing my Great Grandmother, and she finally relented by writing a reply in an effort to save her reputation. Her motivation was to convince Arthur to stop pursuing her. Eventually Arthur won Louise's heart and married her, but it wasn’t without a fight. And it was exactly that fight that made the letters irreplaceable. The Hanford Gwinn letters exposed the true character of my great grandparents, and the situations that they lived. The letters showed the expected and the unexpected. The letters between Arthur and Louise covered the beginning to the end. They started with Arthur who chased after an unavailable woman. Then they became a love story. The letters covered the making of a home, the life on a farm, raising children, World War I, changing times, politics, lost love, rekindled love, The Depression, World War II, lost children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. The letters were not limited to Arthur and Louise, but were collected from the whole family. My birth, for example, was mentioned somewhere in the letters. There were letters to and from the children, letters from soldiers, letters of heartbreak, letters telling of disease, and letters of survival; each letter told its own story.
The Hanford Gwinn Letters were compiled in a book the size of my Richter literary criticism book, hard cover and all. But unlike my Richter book, I do not have a copy of it, and am not capable of getting these letters. When my family decided to publish the Arthur and Louise letters, the children of Arthur and Louise felt a strong need to protect the privacy of their family. My family made the book and gave one copy to each child and each grandchild of Arthur and Louise Hanford with the guidelines that the letters were to remain within the family, and were not copied, republished, given away, or reenacted in any form. My mother (one of the grandchildren) was given a book, but my sister and I were not.
The situation of my great grandparent’s letters is a perfect example to use in the discussion of problematic themes in literary criticism. Michel Foucault and Linda Karell have written works about the following themes: authorship, collective authorship, copyright and history. Michel Foucault questioned what should be considered as an artist's work and how the author's reputation influenced the reading of the text. Karell asked her readers how much merit there was in protecting the privacy of historical characters in works and whether historical authenticity even existed. Both critics challenged the dominant idea of authorship: whether an author's work was an original work of art, or a collective product of the environment and the time.
Foucault Questioned what qualified as works. He focused on how people collected data, and then attributed all of the information to the writer as if the information was what the writer had intended to relate (Richter 911). For example, if a shopping list was found on the floor, it could be applied to the collection of works even if the author had not intended the shopping list to be related to the academic material that he was writing, and if the author’s name was revered, the public would regard the shopping list as something magical. Thus the author’s point could be totally misconstrued. The Hanford Gwinn letters were collected after the deaths of Arthur and Louise, and it is unknown to me whether they would have approved or disapproved of the material collected and added to the story of their lives. But since the book was in the form of letters, I am inclined to argue that they did not intentionally create the material as a form of literature, the letters were documented history. And to follow Foucault’s historical time period argument, the authority of an author depended on how their works were regarded at the time. In the beginning of the twentieth century, letters were not considered to have authors. Arthur and Louise were merely signers of letters, not authors (Richter 908).
Yet history was only a product of the works of the dominant story Karell would have argued, meaning that history was only a construct of an individual’s memory and perceptions. She would further her argument by saying that Arthur was not the original author of what he wrote in his letters, neither was he the historical truth. His story was just one version of a story told many times before, and one version of a story that involved many more people. The Arthur and Gwinn letters left out the version of Louise’s first fiancé, and if truth were to be told, the fiancé might have had a very different story than the one given in the letters. In fact, there was a considerable lacuna in the love letters regarding the broken engagement.
But more perversely, Karell would argue that Arthur’s letters were written years before Arthur was born. His letters were a plagiarism of a classic play called Romeo and Juliet (for example). Wasn’t Juliet already promised to her cousin even before she was pursued by the unrelenting Romeo? In Karol’s own work, The Postmodern Author on Stage, she concluded, “Fair Use refuses an authoritative interpretation of Foote’s life-and of Stegner’s appropriations of Foote’s life-in favor of complex and shifting (re) presentation of the richness of authorship” (Karell 87). Arthur and Louise, Karell would have said, were not the authors of the letters; they were part of a collective group of respected plagiarizers.
In theory, Foucault and Karell's ideas sound convincing. Yes, people are limited to their own experiences and perceptions, and yes, humanity deals with the same repetitive themes. But the truth is, Arthur was a real man and Louise was a real woman and their lives were far from typical. I know, because they were my great grandparents, and their legacy lives on. They might have had a one-sided version of an archetypal scenario, but through their correspondence, they did write a unique and riveting love story. If Arthur had copied the story of Romeo and Juliet, then I would not be here to write this paper. Karell mentioned in her article that “One test of plagiarism is transformation,” if the story in question is considerably different from the original story, then the copyright law had not been violated. In the case of the Hanford Gwinn letters, Hanford committed the first societal faupaux and transformed himself from societal norms by chasing after an engaged woman, but Louise committed an even greater scandal when she broke the engagement over an argument over wedding apparel. When her fiancé insisted that she wear a certain dress during the rehearsal dinner, Louise thought to herself, ‘If he is this insistent about what I wear before the wedding, then what will he be like after the wedding?’ Strong and independent women were not typical of the time of the letters, and neither were broken engagements. The letters revealed the families struggle with my Grandmother’s schizophrenia. Yet at the time, schizophrenia was a newly defined disease and no one knew how to handle it. But no one in my family would dare accuse Johnny Nash or the writer of A Beautiful Mind of plagiarism. The character of Johnny Nash was completely different than my grandmother. Karell and Foucault were both right and wrong in their extensive and layered reasoning. They took everything into account with their critiques of authorship except the two most important literary elements: words and scenarios. While a plot may be universal, all stories are distinctly unique. I proved the point, and possibly disinherited myself, in my haphazard rendition of the first letter by each great grandparent. My letters were a disgrace to the original letters, just because of the words I used; they were very different. And I also illustrated the example by explaining in more detail, the situation of the broken engagement. While I only gave Louise’s version, her version was enough. Arthur and Louise lived full and exciting lives, they cared enough to write about their lives and mold their story the way they saw fit. Their privacy should be respected and equally, their story should remain untouched. After all it was their artistic work, no one else’s.
