Great Works I: Remixing Memory

One major difference between the film and the original play written by Shakespeare is the presence of a sex scene between Othello and Desdemona. This particular scene in the film causes a change in the original story. The original plays shows Othello saying “… you chaste stars. / It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood”(5.2.2-3). This shows us that the method that Othello picks to kill Desdemona is very careful not to bloody the sheets. He believes that Desdemona was unfaithful and that blood on the sheets would be symbolic of her innocence. The sex scene gets rid of the importance of Desdemona trying to prove her innocence at the end. She can no longer prove her innocence by losing her virginity, which is an important part of the original play. While this scene separates itself from the original, other scenes in the movie serve to further points made in the book. A scene like Othello imagining Desdemona with Cassio helps show us his increasing suspicion and descent into a jealous rage. While this scene is not apart of the original story, like the sex scene, it serves to further the points made in the original play, as opposed to the sex scene that changes the play. The scene of Othello and Desdemona’s consummation of marriage gets rid of Desdemona’s attempt to prove her innocence as well as Othello’s unwillingness to spill her blood on the sheets. This takes away from the symbolic nature of the wedding sheets and the method of murder. The attempts to fit the play into a two hour movie, disposes of a lot of the original story in exchange for more visually pleasing scenes.

In Act 1 Scene 1 lines 74-80 of Othello, Iago says “Call up her father. / Rouse him. Make after him, poison his delight, / Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsman, / And though he in a fertile climate dwell, / Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy, / Yet throw such chances of vexation on ‘t / As it may lose some color.” This passage is hard to paraphrase because Iago has a dramatic way of saying tell Brabantio about Othello’s relationship with Desdemona. I take “poison his delight” to mean Iago wishes to make Brabantio go into a foul mood. “Proclaim him in the streets” would serve to notify everyone of what happened in Brabantio’s house and further anger Brabantio. Iago wishes to drive Brabantio into a murderous rage and send him towards Othello. Iago shows that he wishes harm upon Othello and instead of doing it himself, he sends a senator and the senator’s kinsmen after Othello. This passage shows that Iago is manipulative and enjoys the theatrics of exacting revenge on Othello. As a result of Iago’s theatrics, the passage becomes hard to paraphrase completely while the gist of it is still present. This passage is significant to the play because is shows that Iago is an important part of the story. Iago can be assumed to be a mastermind of most the troubles that Othello will have to face. This passage shows that Iago plots to ruin Othello just because he did not receive a promotion he thought he deserved. This pettiness hints that Iago will become a sort of villain in this play. When I first read this passage, it led me to assume that Iago would be the antagonist of the play, more so than Rodrigo (who had a stronger reason for wanting to ruin Othello). This passage is important because it introduces the villain and provides insight of the villain’s motivations and characteristics.

Each interpretation of this song shows us how each translator read the song. While they all tell the same story, the differences in language used vary greatly. I will discuss the interpretations by W. J. B. Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and Wai-Lim Yip.

The first difference I noticed was the difference between W. J. B. Fletcher’s interpretation and everyone else’s. Fletcher’s interpretation is full of exclamation marks and has a clearer pattern to it. It seems to be more like a song than the others the read like poems.

Another difference i noticed was Fletcher’s and Lowell’s interpretation of Long Wind Sand. In the last line of Fletcher’s interpretation it says, “Across the sand the wind flies straight to greet.” This shows us how he thinks of it as passing through the desert. Lowell interprets it to say, “I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands.” Lowell’s interprets Long Wind Sands to sound more like a location instead of the act of travelling through a desert like Fletcher’s interpretation.

The third difference i noticed was between Yip and Lowell’s wording of the poem. Yip’s interpretation stayed in the point of view of the wife’s throughout the entire poem while Lowell’s starts off with an outsider’s point of view. Throughout Yip’s interpretation the wife tells the story using  I, my, and we while Lowell starts the poem with “When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead, / She picked flowers and played in front of the door.” Lowell pictures the beginning of the song as a third person narrator creating the scene in which the story starts.

My favorite translation was by Wai=Lim Yip because his translation seemed the closest to what the song was trying to convey. It would have been the one by Fletcher, but his interpretation seemed too upbeat for a poem about a wife grieving about her missing husband.

Ramayana: Death of King Dasharatha, The Father of Rama (Dasharatha is the name they used labeling the picture, which is different from the name in our book.)

In the picture linked above, the artist shows the death of the former King Dasaratha dying shortly after being forced to banish his son Rama to keep an oath. The image shows the people around the former king grieving. It also shows us that the king is old through the use of gray and white for his hair. The vibrant colors used in the picture show us that the former king died in his palace which is full of color as opposed to a commoner’s home. The faces of the women in the picture are darker than Dasaratha’s skin which shows us that they’re mourning. There are what appears to be clouds at the top of the painting, one of which is black which is fitting to the theme of death and grief.

In the story the focused more on Dasaratha’s grief that he’d exiled his son fulfilling an oath from Kaikeyi. While most of his death scene is comprised of him forsaking Kaikeyi and Bharatha and regretting his oath to Kaikeyi, the picture shows the king already dead and women around him mourning. The picture could not display the anger and despair that Dasaratha was displaying in the book. The picture helps us imagine how the environment around the king was during his death, while the book focuses on the emotions of the king and those around him. When Dasaratha says,”You are no longer my wife and your son shall not be entitled to cremate me when I die”, he shows his anger towards what Kaikeyi made him do. The painting only shows the grief of the death of the king while the book showed the grief and rage the king felt when he passed.

I’ll be discussing the interactions between Polyphemus and Odysseus in Book 9.

On page 220, Odysseus lies to Polyphemus about his ships, predicting what the Cyclops would do to his crew, and later on Odysseus fools the Cyclops by telling them his name is Nobody. These interactions show a considerable amount of courage and self-control on Odysseus’s part. This giant monster shows that he does not fear the gods, and while Odysseus is trapped in the cave with the monster, he is still thinking about protecting his crew. Along with the courage he initially shows with his conversation with the Cyclops, he shows that he has a lot of self control by not killing the monster in its sleep. The monster who had slain two of his crew and eaten them would have caused a lot of fear and rage in most people. He is able to ignore those feelings and restrained himself from killing the monster, which would have avenged his fallen crew mates and protected himself from getting eaten. While initially, in Odysseus’s telling of his interactions with the Cyclops, Odysseus shows how well he can control himself, he gives into his emotions near the end of his stay with the Cyclops. He starts taunting Polyphemus and even revealed his real name. This mistake allowed Polyphemus to request revenge from Poseidon. All of the hatred from Poseidon could have been avoided if Odysseus kept quiet and left without provoking Polyphemus. After all of the foresight Odysseus seemed to have in escaping the island, he threw it all away by giving into his feelings towards Polyphemus because he thought he was safe now.

A lesser part of this interaction I want to talk about is on page 226. Odysseus calls Polyphemus a cannibal, but Polyphemus does not seem to be a human. If Odysseus is right in his accusation of Polyphemus, that would mean that Cyclops and humans are closely related. I can’t quite understand why a one-eyed giant and a much smaller two-eyed human could be considered the same.

-Ryan Huang

(No idea how to upload image. Website says I’ve reached the upload limit despite not uploading anything.)

Page 170 shows a personification of Dawn that has appeared repeatedly throughout first few books. Aside from the repeated use of Dawn rising, page 170 brings up a question. Nausicaa is a princess in an island full of people blessed by Zeus, yet she has dirty laundry that she herself is going to wash. I wonder if it was normal for princesses to wash laundry instead of having servants to do it. This bothers me because I’m not sure why laundry was used as a plot device to introduce the princess and Odysseus. Of all the reasons they could have used to get the princess to go to the river, laundry seems like a poor choice. Another question I had is how the King equates washing the family’s clothes to hoping for marriage. In line 75 of page 170, the narrator tells us that Nausicaa was “too shy to touch on her hopes for marriage […] in her father’s presence[,] but he saw through it all”. How did her doing laundry in the river become related to her hopes for marriage? Later on in the book, she is at the river and there is no one in sight aside from her and her maids. She is doing laundry away from any potential suitors aside from Odysseus who she is unaware of when she goes to the river. There is no one in sight to witness Odysseus so I assume Nausicaa and her maids are the only people there. How did she and the king relate going to the river and washing clothes alone with her maids to “hopes for marriage”?

-Ryan Huang

For the first passage, I believe Socrates is trying to argue that written words make people lazy and that people should memorize everything instead of writing it down. He tells us that he thinks putting in the effort in memorizing everything is much more rewarding than simply writing it down even if both result in the same thing. The fact that Plato writes down Socrates thoughts about how writing is bad disproves some of Socrates’ argument about why writing is bad. Socrates tells us that a written speech is weak because it cannot change to respond to criticisms, however if it was not written down and the speaker is long dead (ex. Socrates) the knowledge itself would be missing entirely. Plato recorded Socrates’ lessons so that they would not be forgotten or warped by the passage of time. This helps show how writing down something is not entirely a bad action.

Carr argues that the internet has a negative effect on us as a society. He provides quotations that tell us that “oral cultures produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer possible once writing has taken possession…” This shows us that he believes that the internet has affected our abilities to create “performances of high artistic and human worth”. I disagree with Carr’s idea because we each view worth differently and as the world changes so should our views of what should be considered “high artistic and human worth”. He argues that tools such as Google are making us lazy because we no longer have to learn facts when we have them at our fingertips. I disagree with his observation because tools like Google allows us to expand our intelligence into areas past memorizing facts.