English 2850: Great Works of Literature II

Here is the link for the recording of the Zoom call for Wednesday, May 6th.  We discussed Tayeb Salih’s “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.”

https://baruch.zoom.us/rec/share/uMVbFerJ811ORqvW9hztf4oGT4q1aaa80CZN-fUOyRyhndoYJQBvOYPXAPvYua_- Password: 4M^6=##6

Describe an example of dehumanization in the text.  What about this moment made a particularly strong impression on you? Why?

The first words of any work of writing are arranged in such a way to stimulate the reader. To urge his or her attention to continue reading and, perhaps, provoke an understanding of the topic at hand. Tadeusz Borowski’s short story, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” does not fail to exceed these expectations. The story begins, “All of us walk around naked”(695). This is the stark reality of horrid life in the concentration camps.  ‘All of us’ is referring to inmates in Auschwitz 11, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps. Immediately, the vision of millions of individuals being stripped of their cloth to ‘walk around naked’ is constructed.  Borowski opens his short story with this vision to embark on the dehumanization men and women face in concentration camps.  The introduction continues, stating,  “Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers”(695). To compare the extermination of lice in clothing to men in chambers is degrading, but the harsh reality of the conduct taken place.  Later, the text states, ‘Around us sit the Greeks, their jaws working greedily, like huge human insects”(699).   The repetition of the comparison rekindles the dehumanizing conditions of the concentration camps. It is difficult to put into words the disgrace of such vulgarity. 

A tall, grey-haired woman who has just arrived on the “transport” whispers, “My poor boy,” to our narrator.  What does she mean?

A tall, grey-haired woman ultimately preserves Tadek’s life.  Prior to the emergence of the woman, Tadek was ordered by an S.S officer to clean out the remains in the train and then to pass these remains to the accompanying women. Tadek’s frustration is revealed in his approach to these women when he states, “Take them, for God’s sake!’”(702). The women rush away from him in horror due to the blend of the remains in his possession and the attitude of the situation. The failure to cooperate antagonizes the S.S officer to reach for his revolver.  The significance of the tall, grey-haired woman is that she comprehends the situation, unlike the young boy. The young boy is fueled by emotion. She realizes the emotional hardships he encounters during these scarring situations. Without her contribution, the S.S officer may have carried out his intended action when reaching for his revolver. The grey-haired woman whispers, “my poor boy” and smiles at Tadek because she is conscious of the lack of support surrounding him. 

In my opinion, I believe the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot is a great work of literature because it is a work of literature that delivers a message to its readers. Reading this poem was confusing at first, however after reading it a second time, I was able to understand the message T.S Eliot wanted to tell his readers. Throughout the poem, Prufrock keeps procrastinating and questioning himself. He wants to speak to a potential lover; however, thoughts of insecurities flood his mind. This causes him to not take action and lose more time. Instead, he spends his time being indecisive, preparing himself to meet people, and even to decide if he should eat a peach. With this poem, it allows us to see ourselves in Prufrock. We waste our time overthinking and being indecisive. We keep being overly cautious about what others may think about us if we do a certain thing in a certain way. We flood our thoughts with how others view us. We waste our time thinking about all those irrelevant things instead of just taking charge and doing what we want to. In the poem, Prufrock was too afraid to go up to a woman he found attractive and talk to her because he kept thinking about how others might see him as. He feared people would think he was too old or unattractive. Reading this poem made me realize that I think too much about messing up and embarrassing myself in front of others. It made me realize that having this fear of what others might say or think about me will only hold me back and prevent me from doing the things that I want. This poem made me realize that I do not want to be like Prufrock because he does not accomplish anything. He is trapped in his own thoughts of insecurities that he is unable to take action. This is how the modern-day human is. They are trapped in their own thoughts of insecurities that they just say, “forget it” and give up. They compare themselves to others and believe they are not good enough. We look at pictures on social media and compare ourselves to the “beauty standards” and think that we could never be that, so we just give up. This poem has made me realize that we should just be ourselves and not flood our minds with other people’s opinions and do what we want and feel is right for ourselves. This poem evoked courage in me and helped me understand that fear of failing is only going to prevent me from accomplishing the things I want to do.

5.) When the narrator asks “Are we good people?”, he seems to be frustrated over the fact that he can’t do anything about what’s happening but sit by and listen to the orders of the Nazis. Even though he wasn’t the one personally torturing these people, he felt a sense of guilt. He is forced to make women take dead babies that aren’t even their own. Most of the people in the camps were forced to act a certain way in order to protect themselves. Seeing everything that human beings are capable of and the fact that he isn’t able to make any changes makes him question this. Unfortunately, in order for him to survive he has to do what the Nazis tell him so he is having a moral conflict with himself. He isn’t at the camp for being Jewish and at first he claims he feels no pity, but his feelings change and he begins to question whether protecting himself is really what’s important. He continues to protect himself in the end and was liberated by the Americans, but it most definitely changed him as a person because of the things he had seen and was forced to do.

6.) Before I even began reading these stories, I had an inkling that this work would take place around time of The Holocaust and that the “Gas” in the title is actually a reference to gas chambers. The title is significant for it’s hypocrisy. It seems to be said in an inviting tone, or as if something exciting is going to happen that you want to be apart of. “This way to….” makes me think that someone is guiding people to a show of some sort. I think the author purposely did this because it emphasized on the fact that these inhumane acts were normalized because Nazis didn’t see these people as human beings. I think the title is a perfect expression of that without directly coming out and saying it. These prisoners who were taken away from their families and put in these camps were being lead to their death, and the title downplays what exactly these people are going to face or where they’re being led.

3. Describe an example of dehumanization in the text. What about this moment made a particularly strong impression on you? Why?

An example of dehumanization in the text that left a particularly strong impression on me was when a mother abandoned her child for the chance of survival. The text states “It’s not mine, sir, not mine! … She wants to hide, she wants to reach those who will not ride the trucks, those who will go on foot, those who will stay alive.” This moment left a strong impression on me because it portrays the hideous nature of a human, a mother who is willing to sacrifice her child for a chance of survival. It stupefied me that someone could be so inhuman, going to the extent of sacrificing their child for the sake of survival.

4. A tall, grey-haired woman who has just arrived on the “transport” whispers, “My poor boy,” to our narrator. What does she mean?

The woman is expressing sympathy for the narrator when she whispers “My poor boy” because she felt the narrator is better off dead than to remain alive. Sometimes death is a more preferable option than living if suffering is all that remains. The job of the narrator and other inmates is to loot off those in the “transport”, depriving them of all possession. During the process, it is inevitable that trampling and other violence will occur, resulting in many casualties. To survive the inmates need to deprive others of their resources and declare them as their own. The cycle repeats itself endlessly until you’re either dead or freed from the camps. The inmates are forced to express their anger on innocent captives, instead of the Nazi officers responsible for their misfortunate. Only plundering the resources of those captives can the inmates survive, leaving them devoid of humanity in addition to the shapeless corpses. Although the narrator is alive, he’s better off dead like those women who are sentenced to death.

5. “Are we good people?” asks our narrator. What is this exchange about? What do you think?

The narrator is trying to find comfort for his actions by sharing his guilt with others. The narrator understands that what he is doing is wrong and inhuman, but it is his only option at survival. The narrator wanted comfort from Henri who he knew would give him the correct answer since they’re in this together. He wanted to deceive himself by telling himself that he is without a choice and that he is not solely responsible for their misery. The narrator is basically seeking justification for his actions.

• What did you learn from this story that you did not previously know about life in Nazi concentration camps?

Before reading this short story, all i knew was that during the holocaust,  Jews were sent to be killed. However, after reading reading the story, I learned how life was in the Nazi concentration camps and not all people in the concentration camps were Jewish. Prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were from different ethnicities and the majority of them were Jewish and they are the most that were sent to the gas chambers. Besides the Nazi officers that were acting as part of government and acted as to what they were told to do, they were evilly torturing prisoners as if they were animals and specifically the innocent infants being dragged like “chickens”. 

• “Are we good people?” asks our narrator.  What is this exchange about? What do you think?

‏The narrator asks “ Are we good people?” To his Henri in a way that expresses his guilt and remorse when he was taking the dead infants from the car and waiting for the women to take them. I think  what brought him to ask this question was when the “grey- haired” lady that took the babies told him  “poor guy”. This comment from the lady to him  shook his feelings. if we put ourselves in his position, what makes us different from the Nazis?.  Even though he was forced to fulfill his job as prisoners, he was doing exactly what the Nazis are doing to the Jews. In addition, as a prisoner he didn’t have the power to change any outcome of the Nazi actions which only made him feel guilty and weaker. Across the question the narrator asked, I think he was trying to show the reader that he is angry and not happy with what he was doing.

• Explain the significance of the story’s title, “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.”  What seems strange about it?

The significance of the story’s title is that it is formulated in a  humble and inviting tone which grabs the reader’s attention and brings curiosity. “ This way for ” makes me think as a reader that someone is invited to someplace. However, when the word“ Gas” was written within the title of Story, I felt that horrific acts will happen in the story because the word “Gas” carries nothing good behind it except danger and fire. As i read the story, I understood why Borowski wrote the story title in this way, “ This Way for the Gas” symbolizes the Jewish people being brought to the gas chambers. Also, the title is written in a sarcastic tone, as if the Jewish prisoners were somehow invited to gas chambers and they have a free will to reject the invitation. However, the story was totally the opposite of what the title symbolizes. Jewish prisoners were treated inhumanely and were brought to the gas chamber forcefully.

Ah yes, the story that can be summarized, ‘guy turns into cockroach, the end’. Metamorphosis, and all the other works of modernist literature we’ve read this semester all play out like nasty fever dreams. And pretty much all of them have this underlying vibe of this diagram:

(src : https://roughlydaily.com/tag/baudrillard/)

This disorienting chart, along with many other seemingly more incoherent diagrams on google images is an example of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This one in particular displays how you can jump between Wikipedia pages through links, starting from the page of “Waffle House” and ending with “New Car Smell”. 

If you click the source link to the first diagram, you get a quote by Baudrillard that reads “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.” Now, back to Kafka and his esoteric contemporaries, his metaphor for the cockroach has a multitude of interpretations. The loss of humanity by isolation from what used to be his time-sensitive routine, or isolation from society when one reveals a non-conformist character as portrayed by how his family couldn’t find humanity within him after his metamorphosis, and so on. Our neurotic friend kafka Kafka also  intended “The insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance,” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/kafkaesque-review-kafka-komix-1538084649). The help of some mental gymnastics can lead you to a whole new array of meanings for the symbol of the cockroach. Picking apart this text has led me down a couple of wormholes of my own, and this leads to trouble coming back to reality to convey a reasonable response. I mentioned ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, which is a long and confusing text written during the recent era of post-structuralism, and one of the ideas to take away from it is that we learn from our own contemporaries, who learn from past contemporaries, and so on. This behavior repeats itself in almost anything you can think of (rhythms in jazz evolve into hip hop, landlines evolve into supercomputer phones) and so on. This creates abstraction, and drives us further from the sources of things. Because we are not in the author’s head or their time period, a text riddled with metaphors like this one make me bang my head against the table and toil over the 3 possible explanations I have over why Samsa’s dad beat him with a newspaper. I think about how my day-to-day behaviors and speech patterns are so different from that of someone in the past, and what external influences cause this. Sparknotes can give a ‘reasonable’ explanation and summary of metaphors, but we will never have a true meaning to each and every word. Leo Strauss posed the idea of esotericism in ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’, meaning that there is meaning between the lines of great works, which hides itself from the masses and unintentionally reveals greater messages given careful interpretation. The guy below explains it better than i do: 

If we really take into consideration everything Kafka has experienced, from the psychologically damaging relationship with his father, his life as a Jew in Prague, and the many undocumented events in his life that inevitably affect the outcome of what he chooses to write, can we reach a meaning to Metamorphosis that doesn’t just look good on paper, but is true? I could go on and on with this, and come to no conclusion.

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (Lines 15-16)

In the most literal sense, I believe this is referring to the polluted fog in London. I believe that T.S. Eliot is referring to the fact that it has a thickness that gives it life, allowing it to ‘rub its back’ and ‘its muzzle’. This is a poem filled with eyebrow-raising lines, but this one in particular stood out to me because of its repetition, almost as if he was saying the same sentence twice but mixed up some of the words the second time. This is also the only time in the poem where he rhymes a word with itself, and further conveys an emphasis on window-panes and yellow smoke in lines 24-25. I didn’t know what a muzzle was, so I looked it up and apparently it’s the part of the face that goes past the eyes in animals such as cats, dogs and horses (for humans, this facial bone is called the maxilla). This has led some people to speculate that the smoke is actually a metonym for a cat. Looking further into Stanza 3, this claim is supported by other devices of ‘catification’ (personification but it’s a cat) such as licking its tongue, lingering and sudden leaps. The cat is never directly named, but it is referred to by a series of actions and traits, broken apart by an inconsistent sequence. This is a part of a greater literary technique in modernist poetry known as fragmentation. One of the overarching ideas in modernism is that the meaning of life is not handed to us in a picturesque, perfectly sequenced plot of events and interactions. Life is disorienting and esoteric, and its meaning comes to us in bits and pieces in the midst of chaos. This may further point to why T.S. Eliot has an inconsistent rhyme scheme, broken by  repetition and bouts of what appears to be free verse. As I was reading this aloud, there was no iambic pentameter to carry along a smooth rhythm of words. The poem paced feverishly and the repetition in these two lines adds to that, almost like the train of thought of someone having a panic attack. The confusion I had when I encountered these two nearly identical lines echoed itself throughout the poem, by more loosely described metonyms and stanzas of seemingly random lengths. I still have trouble understanding why he alludes to a cat, or why he repeats the stanza of women in a room talking about Michaelangelo. One of the answers I got when looking at a line-by-line analysis of this poem is that ‘One can take almost any approach, any assignation of meaning, to J. Prufrock and his world. One can make their own meaning from the clues that are provided by Eliot’s writing.’ Thank you, poemanalysis.com.

Some websites I looked at-

https://poemanalysis.com/t-s-eliot/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock (where I first read about the cat and fragmentation and the ‘open-ended’ meaning of the symbols scattered throughout this poem)

https://poets.org/glossary/fragment (further insight into fragmentation)

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/love-song-alfred-prufrock/summary (hoped to get a deeper look at stanza three but it was just a watered down version of poem analysis, same goes for sparknotes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock (making sure that he did write this in London – don’t want to make false claim about London fog)

1. In contrast to Hedda’s inherited pistols, which symbolize the decline of her connection to an aristocratic past as well as her destructive relationship with Tesman, the manuscript initially represented creation and hope. Lovborg’s developing relationship with Elva is a foil to Hedda’s marriage, as Elva acts as somewhat of a muse, helps Lovborg ‘channel’ his drunkenness and inspires Lovborg to start writing the manuscript. However, Lovborg and Hedda’s long-gone relationship, as well as their parallel inability of self-control makes Hedda very jealous of Elva’s connections to him. Her burning of the manuscript as well as his losing it magnifies this lack of control that either of them have over their own states. Lovborg’s inability to drink in moderation and Hedda’s bleak conclusion are both foreshadowed by this episode of the manuscript.

5. As this is one of the first modernist texts, it exists in the time during which the now expansive field of psychology is still embryonic, and during this period in the late 19th century many writers took interest in this field. This plays throughout the text and film adaptation, since it makes itself clear to the audience that what Hedda says does not align with her intentions. It may be a bold claim, but Hedda’s two-faced nature and her inability to control herself and fall within victorian social conventions makes me believe that she is one of the first neurotic female characters. A marriage made out of desperation, irrational jealousy and a desire to cling to her past do not add up to a neurotypical protagonist. This puts her in a very challenging position in society, as she is not able to seek modern professional help or ask those who she knows to console her, as revealing her true character would be social suicide. Her having to claim that her father’s pistol is ‘stolen’ would lead to the police confiscating it, and admitting that they are hers would lead to big trouble – having her stuck between a rock and a hard place. As someone with her head not in place, it would make sense that losing this last tie to her past would be a final straw.

The first thing to note about a comparison between Ibsen’s play in text and its televised adaptation is that they are not word for word. A lot of the changes to the original text appear to be done to make it more conversational allowing it to flow more smoothly, for  example a small change such as “But, they’ll have some fresh morning air”(782) to “But when they do get up, they will certainly need a breath of fresh air”. Had the play been adapted word for word, I assume it would be difficult to introduce the same tones the characters did. The actors do a great job enacting the script and give the characters a realistic depth. I felt Miss Tessman’s disgust when Hedda Gabbler called the hat old; the reaction seemed almost genuine. Hedda in the film is portrayed as domineering, which I think adds to her character. As she married Tesman out of desperation, the film’s tone makes their marriage out to be lackluster. Tesman plays out in a feminine style through the film, which really emphasizes this further and magnifies Hedda’s character. In the book, the magnitude of their relationship isn’t quite as easy to picture and the film adaptation does this some much-needed service. I think the film adaptation, however, does not take into account the nature of setting that Ibsen intended. This play, as well as ‘The Doll House’ are set in Norway, which by nature creates a sense of distance and isolation between people because of unforgiving weather and a geographic location that discourages the tourism we might see in the United States. There’s an adaptation of Doll’s House debuted in 1973 which portrays this seemingly unimportant aspect of the play much better, emphasizing how small towns in Norway are, forcing everybody to know each other’s personal affairs. Ibsen sets almost all of his plays in Norway, and Hedda Gabler is set in Kristiania. It would have been nice to see at least one homage to this in the setting.