Tag: review

Spotlight On… A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

“things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully”.

Hanya Yanagihara,  A Little Life

I have tried (and failed) for many years to write a review that entirely encapsulates the beauty of A Little Life.
I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible.
Very rarely do I come across a book that remains with me for longer than a few months. Often, within a few weeks, plot lines begin to fade from memory and characters all but vanish; they become books I have on my shelf, vaguely remembered and almost forgotten. However, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is not one of these books. Having read it over three years ago on a solo trip to Madrid in January, characters remain as vivid and alive in my memory as though I finished it yesterday. Haunting, beautiful and tragic, A Little Life is a once in a generation novel, a novel that’s impression can never be adequately described in a review that I have attempted so many times to write.

Centred round four recently graduated friends in New York and spanning decades, Yanighara’s epic novel navigates the friendship of these four men as their relationships deepen and darken. Whilst Willem chases his acting dreams, Malcom begins his career as a frustrated architect at a prominent firm and JB seeks entry into the New York art world, it is with the troubled lawyer Jude that the novel tracks its course through the decades. Scarred by childhood trauma and increasingly more haunted by a past he feels incapable of overcoming, the novel navigates each characters’ relationship with Jude and each other. As their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success and pain, the reader is taken on a journey that is heartbreakingly beautiful in its raw depictions of love, loss and grief. Yanagihara’s prose is unashamedly raw in its emotional intensity; it is at times entirely overwhelming and yet it is also compulsively readable.

In an age where male mental health remains a taboo subject for many, A Little Life remains a novel that is both as culturally important as it is literary.

Written by Steph Reeves
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Spotlight on…Independent People by Halldór Laxness

‘Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes’.
– Halldór Laxness

Having never read any Icelandic fiction, I decided (with trepidation) to order a copy of ‘Independent People’ by Halldór Laxness on the recommendation of a friend. Originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935 respectively, Laxness’s epic novel centres around Bjartur of Summerhouses, an Icelandic farmer doggedly determined to acquire one thing in life: Independence. Set against the backdrop of early-twentieth century Rural Iceland, the novel effortlessly blends social realism with fiction in a way that acts as both an indictment of Capitalist materialism as well as highlighting the true cost of pursuing stoic self-reliance.

As Bjartur aggravatingly pursues his quest for independence at all costs in an environment where interdependence is key, the reader is taken on an epic journey that shows the cross-generational consequences Bjartur’s obsession has on his immediate family, friends and neighbours. Yet within the brutal climate and harsh Winter’s endured by all those on the Summerhouse homestead, it is the beauty of fractured family relationships that remain the most lasting and haunting part of Laxness’s story. It is moments of vulnerability between Bjartur and his daughter Ásta Sóllilja that the beauty of the prose is perhaps most striking in its raw intensity:

‘“This was the first time that he has ever looked into the labyrinth of the human soul. He was very far from understanding what he saw. But what was of more value, he felt and suffered with her. In years that were yet to come, he relived this memory in song, in the most beautiful song this world has known. For the understanding of the soul’s defencelessness, of the conflict between the two poles, is not the source of the greatest song. The source of the greatest song is sympathy’.

-Halldór Laxness, Independent People

It is, quite simply, one of those very rare novels that consumes you; it is dark, gritty and yet full of sardonic humour. Only recently reprinted in paperback form after being out of print in the United Kingdom for over 50 years, it is clear to see how this novel contributed to Laxness winning the Nobel Prize in 1955 for his contribution to literature. I failed to put this novel down.

Written by Steph Reeves
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Romeo and Juliet: A New and Authentic Love

‘My heart’s dear love is set/
On the fair daughter of rich Capulet./
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine.’
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Alexander Niccholes writes that ‘though love and lust, […] dwell under one roof, yet so opposite they are, that the one, most commonly burns down the house, that the other would build up.’ (1) Where Niccholes separates love and lust, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its recycling of the traditional Petrarchan love language and bawdy male bonds initially suggests that love is, in fact, lust in disguise. However, as the play progresses Romeo fashions his own definition of his love with Juliet that incorporates both love and lust.

According to Dympna Callaghan, ‘the model for the play’s [Romeo and Juliet] poetry, […] was Petrarch’. (2) Throughout the play Mercutio ridicules the Petrarchan conventions, which, in turn, breaks down love and turns it into lust. In Act Two, Scene One, Mercutio looks for Romeo and commands:

‘Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh./
Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied./
Cry but ‘Ay me!’ Pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’.’ (3)
(2,1.ll.8-10)

Romeo is turned into cliché when Mercutio links his appearance to a ‘sigh’ and tells him that he will be satisfied if he speaks the simplistic rhyme that pairs ‘love’ with ‘dove’, so lampooning its connotations with purity. Mercutio continues with what Callaghan calls his ‘mock blazon’: (4)

I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,
And demesnes that there adjacent lie.’
(2, 1, ll. 17-20)

He begins conventionally but his language creeps into the lewd with his reference to the ‘quivering thigh’ and ‘demesnes that there adjacent lie’, clearly referring to Rosaline’s reproductive region. (5) This perverse parody of the blazon illustrates how, in the setting of male friendships, the Petrarchan conventions are stripped back to reveal that lust is what lies beneath the artificial language of love. As the speech continues, the sexual imagery gets increasingly vulgar, and is less hidden beneath convention, as seen in Mercutio’s reference to Rosaline as an ‘open arse’ (2.1.l.38). The language rapidly unravels the Petrarchan love parody from the beginning and shows how, at the start of the play, love is merely lust.

However, as Romeo’s relationship with Juliet develops, the play shows their attempt to create a language of love that incorporates their lust for one another. The famous balcony scene shows how Romeo’s love begins to be free of Petrarchan conventions. Romeo asks Juliet for ‘The exchange of [her] love’s faithful vow for [his]’ (2. 2. l. 127), to which she states ‘I gave thee mine before thou didst request it’ (2. 1. l. 128). As Callaghan points out, their love is ‘a profoundly reciprocal passion [in which] […] Juliet exercises considerable agency – not simply the Petrarchan fantasy of female power’. (6) This mutuality is what allows Romeo to stop using the conventional Petrarchan language. Romeo later tells Friar Laurence, ‘my heart’s dear love is set/On the fair daughter of rich Capulet./As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine’ (2.3.ll. 53-55). The repetition of

What Keirnan Ryan calls ‘symmetrical syntax and matching diction’ is what ‘define the equal exchange of desire and power that makes this relationship so different’, and it shows Romeo’s attempt at trying to articulate a new language for his love with Juliet. (7) The emptiness of Romeo’s speech from elevated Petrarchan metaphor ironically reveals the authenticity of Romeo’s love for Juliet. Romeo later engages with the bawdy language of his friends when he states he is ‘pink for flower [vulva]’ (2.4.l.57), and that his ‘pump [penis] is well flowered’ (2.4.l.59). This response contrasts his with ignorance to their comments in the play’s opening. (8) A comparison of both scenes reveals that Romeo’s love for Juliet becomes both free of Petrarchan convention and a place where he no longer needs to repress sexual desire. He is coining a love that involves his lust for Juliet. In Juliet’s chamber, after consummating their marriage, Romeo states that he ‘must be gone and live, or stay and die’ (3.5.l.11). Due to the sixteenth century pun which connects the verb ‘to die’ to orgasm, this reference suggests not only Romeo’s recognition of the consequences of their match but also that his staying would result in orgasm. As his relationship with Juliet develops, Romeo creates a new love in which lust is a large part. Whilst Mercutio makes love a façade to hide lust, Romeo puts love and lust together. In both cases however, they are not separate as Niccholes suggests, instead, they are closely connected.

References
Featured Photo: J.E. Jackson Adent, Romeo and Juliet, Poster, Metropolitan UTHO, Available at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Romeo_Juliet.jpg   [accessed 24/09/2018]. 

1. Alexander Niccholes, ‘A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving and of the greatest mystery therein contained: How to chuse a good wife from a bad.’, in The Harleian Miscellany: Or, A Collection of Scarce, Curious and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, as well in Manuscripts as in Print, Found in the late Earl of Oxford’s Library, Interspersed with Historical, Political and Critical Notes Volume 3, ed. by William Oldys and John Malham, (London, Robert Dutton, 1804), pp. 251-288, (p.273)

2. Dympna Callaghan, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2003), pp.1-35, (p. 11)

3. William Shakespeare, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, ed, by T.J.B Spencer, (London: Penguin Books, 2005), (2,1.ll.8-10) All further references to this play are to this edition and the Act, Scene and line numbers are given parenthetically within the body of the essay.

4. Dympna Callaghan, p. 18

5. Dympna Callaghan, p. 18. Callaghan also notes that the term ‘‘demenses’ refers to property directly possessed and occupied by the owner and not leased out’. This link between women and property works alongside Mercutio’s bawdy language to reduce of love to lust.

6. Dympna Callaghan, p. 18

7. Kiernan Ryan, ‘Deconstruction’, in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, ed. by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowin Orlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 518-524. (p.522)

8. Romeo’s earlier response to Benvolio when Benvolio refers to the vulva, ‘A right fair mark, fair coz is soonest hit’, is full elevated references: ‘Well, in that hit you miss. She’ll not be hit/With cupid’s arrow; she hath Dian’s wit’ (1.1. ll.209-208). He continues with the Petrarchan convention and therefore cannot engage with the bawdy language.

Written by Estelle Luck.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

The Female Body as a Political Territory in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

‘’‘Rape’ call you it, my lord, to seize my own-/
my true betrothed love, and now my wife?/
But let the laws of Rome determine all;/
Meanwhile I am possessed of that is mine.’
(Act 1, Scene 1, l.402-405) 

The representation of the female body as a political territory can be seen throughout Shakespeare’s gruesome tragedy Titus Andronicus; specifically, the politicising of the feminine form is explicitly shown through the brutal rape and maiming of Lavinia, Titus’s only daughter. Lavinia’s reduction to her basest form, a body, comes to symbolise Ancient Rome’s social patriarchy, a symbol that prevails throughout the entirety of the play. Her mutilation at the hands of her rapists, Chiron and Demetrius, leaves her with arms ‘lopped and hewed…thy body bare’ and ‘her tongue cut out’, ‘ravished’.1 Through this act of extreme male violence, patriarchal social codes are inscribed onto her body; she becomes a ‘map of woe’ (III.ii.l.12), whose bodily mutilation represents the decay of Rome’s political infrastructure. Throughout the play, Lavinia is determined completely by the men around her, who seek to seize her body as their territory, regardless of her compliance. Bassianus, upon accusation of sexual misconduct, declares ‘rape, call it you, to seizeth but my own?’(I.i.l.280-281). The verb ‘seizeth’ in the latter sentence accentuates the notion of Lavinia being little more than an object of ownership; she is seized as property, never escaping male domination. As Eisaman Maus argues, at no point ‘is Lavinia’s consent an issue: she becomes the property of whoever happens to carry her off by force.’2 It was not until after the Act of 1597 that ‘a woman’s body was legally understood as being her own possession and not that of her nearest male relative’3. Before this, a woman’s body was seen as merely an extension of their husband; A husband’s role was to ‘govern her [the wife] in all duties that properly concern the state of marriage, in knowledge, in wisdom, judgment, and justice.’4 Conduct books that circulated in the Elizabethan era, such as John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Government, proved incredibly popular in endorsing the notion of the woman as merely an object to be owned and guided by her husband. Titus Andronicus, written around 1593, can therefore be viewed in light of Elizabethan views of rape as an act committed against the male patriarch.

Yet Lavinia’s physical rape also inscribes her into Roman history; she is one of a number of rape victims associated with Ancient Rome. Perhaps the most prolific of these is the tale of Philomena within Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Lavinia’s rape is based upon this classic tale, in which Philomena is raped by brother-in-Law, King Tereus, and maimed by having her tongue cut out. It is only upon weaving a tapestry that illustrates her barbarous rape that the truth is revealed.5 Lavinia’s tale can clearly be read in light of this; As Eisaman Maus continues to argue, ‘Lavinia’s story, then, is an amalgam of classical rape narratives. Her terribly mutilated body condenses a long history of sporadic violence against women into a single, intensely imagined brutalization.’6 Even in her horrific personal rape, then, Lavinia becomes homogenised into a history of violent female oppression; she becomes indistinguishable from other rape victims, claimed and historically conquered through her bodily torment. Lavinia’s rape, however, and subsequent dismemberment acts in turn as a metaphor for the penetration of Titus’s own familial territory, which is entirely obliterated by the end of the play. As Peter Stallybrass remarks, ‘unlike most property, this property [the woman] can bring dishonour to the landlord even as he possesses it.’7 In Lavinia’s grotesque deflowerment, Chiron and Demetrius defile Titus’s own property, invading his territory as father and protector. It is this territorial invasion that sets Titus’s revenge in motion, accentuating the importance of the female body as a symbol of the family.8 Once damaged, Lavinia has no functional role; her body, once seen as a way of attaining power and prestige through marriage, is useless to the Andronicii family. She is told to ‘die’ along with her father’s ‘shame’ (V.iii.l.45-46), emphasising her use only as a physical form and an objectified territory. In death, as in life, she becomes nothing more than expression of the territorial claims imposed on her by the surrounding male figures.

References

Featured Painting: Samuel Woodforde, Titus Andronicus: Act II, Scene III, Tamora, Lavinia, Demetrius and Chiron, 1793, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 58cm, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Warwackshire, UK.

1 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, II.iii.16-18, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). All further references to Titus Andronicus are to this edition.

2 Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Titus Andronicus: Introduction’ in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), pp.399-407, p.404.

3 Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.231.

4 Robert Cleaver, ‘A Godly Form of Household Government: For the Ordering of Private Families’ in Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, ed. by Lloyd Davis (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 1998), pp.183-212, p.194.

5 See Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

6 Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Titus Andronicus: Introduction’ in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, pp.399-407, p.404.

7 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W.Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986), pp.123-145, p.128.

8 Revenge in Titus Andronicus becomes entirely based on the female body; this is shown literally through the rape of Lavinia and the subsequent invasion of Titus’s familial territory, yet more literally through Tamora. As the mother of Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora literally births the avenging actions of the play. Her role as a mother literally positions her as a sexually fertile and reproductive body, in the same way as Gertrude in Hamlet.

Written by Steph Reeves
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.