Lecture slides for Day 17 in ELIT 46C

1. ELIT 46C
Day 17
SNOW, WAR, DEATH

2. Business / Participation
Dr. Palmore’s Waste Land slides are posted on
Canvas.
Paper 2 is due Saturday at noon.
◦ Quick review of the topics.
You will need to start reading Mrs. Dalloway
this weekend. So ought to have it.
Participation today: Four total points.
◦ Talk once in full group: 2 points.
◦ Say something useful or meaningful in small
group discussion: 2 points.

3. Modernism and the failure of language
“Prufrock”: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (104)
Eliot is very precise about the imprecision of language here.
◦ recognition that language is no longer adequate to our experience (if it ever was).
This is something we will see as we work through modernism and then into postmodernism:
the idea that language can’t do what we need/want it to do.
◦ language is inadequate to represent
◦ language is inadequate to express

4. James Joyce
(1882-1941)
Born in Dublin, oldest of ten surviving children.
Catholic, middle-class family “on the way down.”
Jesuit education, then University College Dublin.
Lapsed as a Catholic.
June 16, 1904: goes public with relationship with Nora Barnacle
(chambermaid).
1904: moved to the continent (Trieste, Zurich, Paris)
1914: Dubliners (short story collection, includes “The Dead”).
1916: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1922: Ulysses
1933: United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. Ulysses ruled not
to be “obscene.” Ruling allowed for literary free expression.
1939: Finnegans Wake (inventing a new language?)
1941: dies in Zurich.

5. What do you notice about the style
in “The Dead”?
What is interesting to you here?

6. Gabriel and Irish Nationalism
What do you remember about Irish Nationalism in this period?
What might be some key contexts here?
The episode with Miss Ivors:
“I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
--Why should I be ashamed of myself? asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.
--Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a rag like that. I didn’t think you were a West
Briton.
A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The
Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. […] He did not
know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics.
[…]
--And why do you to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?
--Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.
--And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors.
--Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.
[…]
--And haven’t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people, and your
own country?
--O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (2290-91)
How do you read Gabriel’s attitude here? What is the conflict?

7. Irish Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitan Aestheticism
Ivors’s nationalism vs. Gabriel’s cosmopolitan aestheticism.
Gabriel’s refusal to accept “Irish” as his language—because, in an important sense, it’s not.
His disgust at Ireland—do you see if elsewhere in this story?
But Gabriel is shaken. He can’t give up entirely on Ireland here.
◦ celebration of “authentic” Irish tradition in his pompous toast.
“--I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so
much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. […] I fear that this new
generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of
kindly humour which belonged to an older day.” (2299)
It’s still “our” country and he finds himself—maybe sincerely and maybe not—praising its traditions.
Illustration of his fragmented self. Doesn’t know how to live in this world.

8. Joyce’s own conflict with Irish identity
Joyce himself ended up recognizing and hating
his options. Instead, he chose exile.
“No one who has any self-respect stays in
Ireland, but flees afar as though from country
that has undergone the visitation of an
angered Jove.” (Critical Writings 171).

9. Gabriel and the difficulty of imagining other people
But if Gabriel is a complex, fragmented
subjectivity, how does he relate to others?
I want to suggest that Gabriel fails,
throughout the story, to imagine other
people. And it is his epiphany in the story
when he realizes that he has failed to fully
imagine his wife.
How does he imagine Gretta? What does
he think of her?
Key moment: the stairway
◦ How does he see her here?
“Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in the dark
part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near
the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face
but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt,
which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She
was leaning on the banisters, listening to something.
[…]
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the
voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and
mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked
himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow,
listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would
paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze
of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would
show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he
were a painter.” (2303)

10. Gabriel’s Epiphany
How does he see her here? Completely in terms
of her surface characteristics.
◦ As a symbol (and he cannot decide what it means).
◦ As an image
He does do some imagining of her later. But it’s
all memories of the two of them together—
indeed, Gretta seems to exist almost entirely as
an imaginary construct to him. But that doesn’t
bear a resemblance to the actual Gretta.
And what does this lead to?
The horrible realization, an hour or two later,
that he has never known her.
“While he had been full of memories of their
secret life together, full of tenderness and joy
and desire, she had been comparing him in her
mind with another.” (2308)
What is an epiphany?
◦ common trope in Joyce
◦ what does the word refer to?
◦ how does it manifest?
A moment of realization that leads to revelatory
awareness.
What is Gabriel’s epiphany here?
What is his realization and what does it lead to?

11. The last paragraphs
“Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that
such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined
he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had
approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend,
their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid
world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily
the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his
journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every
part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward,
softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely
churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and
headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the
snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living
and the dead.” (2310-11)

12. The last paragraphs
Plot summary of these paragraphs:
◦ forgiveness and love for Gretta
◦ dissolution of his ego, his identity
◦ vision of the realm of the dead and its overlap
with the world
◦ move from specific to universality
◦ also, it’s snowing
What happens to language and style in these
paragraphs?
Who is narrating? Is it still free indirect?
Strongly poetic language—very constructed
language. No longer prose.
Last sentence: what poetic effects do you see
here?
◦ o-vowel sounds, sibilance, f-sounds
◦ chiasmus
Representational meaning starts to falter
◦ how can you hear snow falling through the
universe?
◦ who is the “their”? “the living and the dead”? Or
Gabriel and his wife? General or particular?

13. THE ‘WAR POETS’

14. World War I
1914-1918
Germany and Austria (then Turkey and Bulgaria) vs. France, Britain, Russia (and eventually the US),
Italy, and Japan.
(The geopolitics of it is complicated, though.)
Battlefields: mainly France and Belgium.
The “Lost Generation” (in England): almost 800,000 British men dead.
◦ First volunteers and then later, conscription.
Total carnage was almost unimaginable. 8.7 million people.
Technological aspects:
◦ Airplanes
◦ Artillery (the “big guns”): huge shells from great distances away
◦ Chemical warfare: gas (chlorine, mustard gas, etc.)
◦ Improved machine gun
Psychological aspects: shell shock (trauma from bombardment). Basically PTSD.

15. ”Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Wilfred Owen
1893-1918
Enlisted in 1917.
Shell shock at the Battle of the Somme.
Recovery at hospital in Edinburgh, where he met
Siegfried Sassoon.
Killed in action a week before the war ended.
Why is it “an ecstasy of fumbling”?
What is the relationship between ideology and reality here?
◦ What is the ideology here?
◦ And what is the reality?
How does immediacy vs. distance structure this poem?
How does the poem place you there? Why does it do so?
◦ Second person address.
What is the relationship with the poetic speaker and “you”?
◦ “my friend”
◦ Accusatory?
How does this poem address trauma?
◦ things that cannot be forgotten
◦ things that return in dreams.

16. War Poets: Group Work
1. Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” (2019)
2. Siegfried Sassoon, “They” (2023)
3. Sassoon, “On Passing the New Menin
Gate” (2026)
4. Rosenberg, “Louse Hunting” (2031)
5. Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
(2034-35)
6. Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
(2035-36)
7. Cannan, “Rouen” (2043-44)
I want you to consider the following questions:
1. Does this poem have an “argument” (a message that it wants to
convince you of)? If so, what? (Try to be more specific than: “war is
bad.”)
2. What are the key images that the poem works with? Why? How are
these images “poetic” or not?
3. What affect/emotion does the poem have? What does it want you to
feel?
4. How does this poem conceive of the relation between poetry and
war?
◦ What is the purpose of this poem in relation to the war? Why write this
poem?
Come up with ONE key thing you want to report back to the class about
this poem. (Less than 30 seconds.)