Sunday, May 13, 2007

Eight Below

Rating:★★
Category:Movies
Genre: Action & Adventure
"Eight Below"
Paul Walker, Jason Biggs, Bruce Greenwood
Directed by Frank Marshall
Walt Disney Pictures
2006


Loyalty, friendship and love in time of hypothermia: this is the theme of Frank Marshall's latest action adventure drama, "Eight Below," which over a number of weekends has frozen hearts of varied audiences, striking a chord in the heart of any pet-loving human being.

Delineating much of the genre made famous by "Milo and Otis," "Homeward Bound," "Fly Away Home," and similar films that feature animals as protagonists, Paul Walker's starrer highlights much on the survival instincts and the sympathies created in the human protagonists. Paul Walker is Jerry Shepard, Jason Biggs is his best friend, Cooper; and Bruce Greenwood is a rugged American geologist, who are all forced to leave behind their team of beloved sled dogs due to a sudden accident and perilous weather conditions in Antarctica.

During the harsh, Antarctic winter, the dogs must struggle for survival alone in the intense frozen wilderness for over 6 months. This is from where the story propels, in the frozen inability of the master to fend for his dogs' safety, the animal characters would also intensify the storyline. After Shepard takes initiatives to save the dogs during the impending winter, he realizes he cannot do more than that.

After asking help from offices in the mainland States, Shepard makes clear to himself that the attempts to save the dog seem futile. Shepard's character articulates the human instinct to care for creatures lower than himself, say, animals.

In Marshall's film, the young master Shepard carries the entire emotional burden when after being injured in a snowstorm, he unintentionally leaves behind his eight sled dogs for the entire winter. The film showcases much of the human inability to counter the working of Mother Nature. If all else fails, as do Shepards attempts to save his dogs during the entire winter, man is predisposed to leave it all to fate, or luck.

Shepard, after having given up on the crusade to save his dogs, retreats into his camper home, trying hard to forget about the whole thing. The idea of man [and animal] versus nature spells the conflict in the film. The protagonists, both man and beast, cannot do anything much to alter their fates. Nature's wrath and indifference poses a challenge and even creates much problem for the master and his dog-friends who are also his co-workers in the Antarctica laboratory.

The dogs' sweet countenances and cute appearances, the cool and freezing atmospheres and settings in the northern wild are much endearing as they elicit sympathies of any person who can--to the very least--feel.

One significant realization is done by the American scientist in the character of Bruce Greenwood, who was saved by the same pack of dogs who are left to starve in the freezing wild. It is only after the scientist receives award for getting the meteoric rock that he realizes the importance of the animals to himself and not just to Shepard.

The film belongs to a genre that is not new in the industry. American writer Jack London?s hybrid canine protagonist Buck in his classic novel "Call of the Wild" has since moved hearts and encouraged the human spirit when he's portrayed as one who overcomes his own dilemma in the freezing wild of the North America's hinterlands.

Both the film and the novel in the limelight render traces of anthropomorphism--that style of placing human attributes in otherwise non-human characters. It is in making animals behave like human beings that human beings indeed realize their importance to them.

Ultimately, animal welfare associations the world over must have since debunked the idea of human superiority to animals, perhaps hinting at co-existence. For, in the bigger scheme of things, human beings will be nothing without the presence and essence of other living creatures like animals.

The film speaks much of the human sympathy or apathy in the ways the characters present themselves as either concerned or apathetic to the plight of the animals.

In the end, Paul Walker's Jerry Shepard makes clear to us that the ability to care for animals runs natural in the human instinct--because it is his inner need to love and be loved.


White Lady

Rating:
Category:Movies
Genre: Horror

“White Lady”
Boots Anson-Roa, Angelica Panganiban, Pauleen Luna
Directed by Jeff Tan
Regal Films, 2006

In art and literature, Aristotle is often quoted for having said that all art is imitation—the Greek word for his concept is mimesis. Thus, you have the concept of the word mimicry for the animal behavior of adapting to their environment for survival, or mime, that theater style famous in beauty contests or high school theater arts.

Jeff Tan’s “White Lady” must have taken this definition too literally that the film is a hodgepodge of some ingenious works that we have previously seen onscreen.

“White Lady” opens quite cinematically, with zoom-in shots of the classroom chairs where the sort of epilogue for the story commences. Kind of tells you this is a serious picture to reckon with. Kind of thrills you, really. But as the movie progresses, we are made to infer that the sensibilities being showcased one after another are the ones we must have seen in a number of movies produced in the past.

A number of scenes in the film remind us of those in the Ring, The Grudge, Willard, or even Feng Shui, and all other stuffs horror flicks are made of.

Of course, we say an artist can normally be a product of his influences. But for his part, being too imitative to the point of copying quite accurately what was done before is synonymous to plagiarism—an act that encroaches anyone’s right to intellectual property, such as those who made these previous films.

Such act highly resembles the act of photocopying articles from a book, and using them for one’s own purpose.

The storyline is not original as it takes off from the white lady myth and the supernatural details we must have head over all our superstitious country.

We can cite instances of the lack of originality.

The way all the kontrabidas die in the film reminds you of Kris Aquino’s Feng Shui, in which characters die according to their own year in the Chinese calendar—dragon, horse, snake, boa constrictor?, etc. Similarly in this film lacking originality, antagonists die according to their fear, probably because the White Lady herself knew about all of them, when she hovered in the campout where they phobia session took place.

The white lady coming out of the canvas reminds you of Sadako coming out of the television screen towards the end of the Ring which shocked people in 2002. The white lady spewing out smoke and ashes [right, because she was burned in the tool shed] makes you recall the horror specimen in the Grudge, both films anyway had their Hollywood
versions.

The computer graphics work involving rats overwhelming one male character, the playing dolls moving and walking reminding you of 80s horror flicks where monsters and mumus were rolled on wheels, etc., or the mirror being shattered on the face of the lead female kontrabida, have yet to be polished so as to appear realistic, er believable. They have to be so—after all, everything in the film discipline must be make believe, a mimicry, an imitation. Logically, then, we should be made to believe.

Furthermore, Iwa Moto’s Mimi tells us that Moto is not an actress—her coñita twang and even a Koreanovela countenance do not match quite acceptably. Her final scene, though, matches up with her hackneyed acting as she dies of the shattered glass from the mirror. She is supposed to render the story much tension—with her original evil character, but she falls short of evil—just laughable in her cliché performance. Seriously, that is not a good thing for someone newly introduced in the industry, maybe. We can even wonder why she was discovered to act.

Meanwhile, the Ilonggo twang, according to my Ilongga companion, does not even sound believable, as she observed some inaccuracies or un-grammatical Ilonggo sentences in the dialogues. The director must have capitalized on Gian Carlos’ Ilonggo roots, but the un-grammatical sentences in the script did not save the Ilonggo sensibility.

The “Ili-ili” (Hiligaynon for lullaby) theme, though, gets both our praise and flak. While it brings to an Ilonggo a sense of nostalgia, the actress’s lip synching another singer’s voice three or four times throughout the film suffices more than enough that he has seen more of such stuffs in television variety shows, where singers are said to be “singing” when they are not. At least in music videos or MTVs, we can forgive the swelling vocals [sounds] because it is timed accurately with the singer’s actual singing.

Citing the flaws of the film should make you curious about it. True. So, there. There’s not much else to say about it then.

To be fair, though, let’s ask, “What are the film’s sources of redemption, if any? What are its pluses, if applicable?”

Pauleen Luna’s Pearl is simply engaging. Luna is a promising actress with her un-hackneyed countenance as the female lead who faces the dilemma, and who closes it satisfactorily in the final scene. Her pretty face does not fail to refresh the audience who is compelled to negotiate an otherwise dark, hackneyed storyline.

Angelica Panganiban’s Christina, the white lady herself, shines in her own way, too. Her portrayal as the innocent victim and a vengeful angel of death is quite portrayed with originality, complementing Boots Anson-Roa’s wicked [or weak-ed] Ilongga Lola Tasya, who gets away with her accent slightly unscathed, and who succumbs to the same predicament as her granddaughter Christina [but who finds herself in the middle of a Tanging Yaman poster in the final scene].

All the other characters, it should be noted, are pathetically stock characters. They are the cliché roles that we see being portrayed day in and day out on soaps [and other suds] on television. There’s nothing new about them.

That the film ends in a melodramatic way [anyway, scenes all throughout vacillate between Love to Love Season 10? and Shake, Rattle and Roll V] tells us that it is not a horror film after all. Perhaps it is something else. Or something else? Makes us think of the film otherwise by asking, “What is the film trying to do, if at all?” Ah.

In all, they say the best thing to constructively critique a badly made film is to ignore it, or not to review it at all. Or cite it at the end of the year as the worst this and that. Razzi Awards, etc. Of course not.

We believe in what the young people can do—so we do not just sit down and be apathetic to it like the rest of the world. At best, we could point out some things for consideration so next time they produce anything, we will not be shortchanged.

All art is imitation, it is said—but some people take it quite literally. Sadly.


The Lady In the Water

Rating:★★★
Category:Movies
Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy


Previously called “unusual but charmless” film, the mysterious Lady in the Water by India-born American film director M. Night Shyamalan [read: Sha-ma-lan] deserves a second look, asking us to dive and swim deeper into that pool [of water brimming with] meanings and insights.

METAFICTION

An experimental and unconventional work, Lady in the Water falls under metafiction, a work of fiction whose primary “concern is the nature of fiction itself.” A metafiction contains—as one of its structural and thematic dimensions—a testing of fiction itself. The film rolls out as the anatomy of fiction, in the strictest sense of the word—a naming of parts, the structure of [a] Story.

This means that the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction. For instance, the chief character’s name itself is Story, who just comes to the life of one building manager Cleveland Heep, who later will help resolve her problem, much as a reader would have to make sense of a story that [he reads].

In the film, Story [literary text] and Heep [reader] have a literal encounter. Cleveland Heep, an ordinary man, is thrown the task [so he desperately asks people how] to help Story go back to her own Blue World, just like the common reader who reads a story and has to finish reading [understanding] it.

Featuring fiction within fiction, characteristic of postmodern works, Lady in the Water presents two plots—the first plot is the narf’s incredible story; the second is the story being woven out of the narf’s presence to the life of the building tenants. In all, the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction, laying out the elements that compose the whimsical and wonderful world of fiction. Whimsical, meaning the author freely makes use of fantastic elements to carry out his purpose; and wonderful, meaning the insights and plethora of realizations we can get from it.

BEDTIME STORY

As stated by the makers of the film itself, Lady in the Water is “a bedtime story.” Therefore, it is indeed a story told to children at bedtime; therefore, a story that entails “a pleasant but unconvincing account or explanation.” More particularly, a bedtime story is something told to lull us into slumber, or usher us in to the dreamland, where we will see more disjointed characters and plots, more insensible events and phantasmagoric images that all defy explanation. Thus, a bedtime story does not seek to convince anyone. And by being a seemingly “unconvincing” film, Lady in the Water delivers its very purpose.

Using bedtime story as its narrative vehicle, though, the film is a potent illustration of a few literary concepts. For one it is fantasy—the literary genre that designates a conscious breaking free from reality. Fantasy applies to a work that “takes place in a nonexistent and unreal world, such as fairyland, or concerns incredible and unreal characters.” Considering the film a fantasy, then, we the audience have to work out their “suspension of disbelief.” This means our willingness to withhold questions about truth, accuracy, or probability in a work.

Taking root from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Bibliographia Literaria, which describes “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes the poetic faith,” it simply means that our willingness to suspend doubt makes possible the temporary acceptance of an author’s imaginative world—however ridiculous it is.

We are transported to the time and place, people and events all created by the author. The relaxed Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) dealing with a young woman stranger Story (Howard) literally illustrates the suspension of disbelief.

Significantly, the film illustrates full suspension of disbelief in the lack of skepticism—acquiescent attitudes—by the other building tenants when Cleveland Heep just turns up with a strange woman Story, and later involves all of them to helping the stranger return to her Blue World.

All throughout the film, we the audience are asked to make sense out of the seemingly insensible things presented in the work. In fact, M. Night Shyamalan seeks to suspend our disbelief to the extremes, asking us to just believe everything in front of our noses. We can also say the film is a fairy tale, “a story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of spirits who possess supernatural wisdom and foresight, a mischievous temperament, the power to regulate the affairs of human beings for good or evil, and the capacity to change their shape.”

In the film, the fantastic character Story obviously lands into the world of men, bothering their very silences, especially Heep and The Cookbook author (the film director himself) and later, comes to effect change in them, conscious or otherwise.

HEEP HELPS NARF, READER MAKES STORY

By and large, we cannot judge a piece of work based on our failure to grasp its meaning. If we cannot particularly make sense of the work because of our lack of knowledge, or our refusal to be open to forms which do not fit or dwell in our comfort zones, we cannot really have a more valuable scrutiny of the work. We cannot care much about the author or director’s sensibility as much as we must interpret meanings for ourselves.

A literary theory called reader-response criticism says that a piece of writing—here translated into film [previously called cinema, or celluloid literature] scarcely exists except as a text designed to be read [in this case—watched]. Shyamalan seemingly disjointed frames to other people can just make sense to the informed reader—the real reader who can appreciate it. The symbolic rescue of Story from the dog monster who ate up the film critic who was talking out a definition of one character tells us that any story therefore is the product of the one who reads it—a film’s meaning is made out by the moviegoer themselves. Considering the film a serious work of art, then, we say it is not the work of the author.

For some literary theorists, the author is dead—what he wrote or made, after being written, is not anymore his. For reader-response theorists, it’s the reader’s perception about the work that says what it is. Nevertheless, the makers of the film can be lauded for their daring to break the stereotypes associated with film and filmmaking.

Risking commercial success for the sake of bringing out some learning in art and literature, M. Night Shyamalan proves consistent to his credo of experimentation that gives the educated audience not just essential points of discussion but also countless insights.

Sukob

Rating:
Category:Movies
Genre: Mystery & Suspense

In the 70s and 80s, films with one-word titles became instant classics and bestsellers. They featured power plots written by academe-learned screenwriters and showcased breakthrough, tour-de-force performances by upcoming actors handled by directors who were strongly driven by advocacies in the midst of repressed martial law environments—all gave rise to these masterpieces, which would later reap awards from all over the world.

The plethora of very good films—"Insiang," "Itim," "Kisapmata," "Jaguar," "Himala," "Bona," to name a few produced by Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon, Ishmael Bernal, and others—has attested to this.

Today, whenever one-word-title films are featured, we come to expect much because we anticipate that at least they might go against the usual popular, formulaic films that only rake profits for the producers. Yet, again, we are also proven wrong. While Feng-shui was quite a box-office in 2004, owing to its freshness, "Sukob" does just as poorly.

Though exploring a theme as local as the superstitious beliefs involving marriage is a brave attempt to seek something new, the manner of presenting the theme, though, is not as new.

The long-range shot of Kris Aquino’s Sandy falling from the belfry is a standout inconsistency in terms of cinematography. It still calls for more effects, for ideally it if can be shot as close as the confrontation between the curse girl and the sisters inside the belfry itself. It could have been given much attention—not haphazardly treated. Moreover, the use of the corpse bride [flower girl motif] appears much like Tim Burton’s Helena Bonham voiced-over character in "The Corpse Bride." Claudine Barreto’s melodramatic acting also does not make the film horrifying at all, while Kris Aquino’s frowns and smirks—in scenes which does not require them [she usually does on TV shows]—do not help much in rendering emotionality in the film. The use of scary characters and situations that go with abrupt sounds of horror tells us that to jolt is scare is to horrify is to make money. Offering no more than jolts and scares, Sukob belongs to the scary movie roster, perhaps a cousin to "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "Scream."

Nothing much is there to say about the film, except that it features the vulgarly popular "Feng-shui" star Kris Aquino with her popularly known best friend Claudine Barreto. The film either capitalizes on the actress’s bonding or vice-versa. Commercialism in the film industry has never been vulgar as this. Even obviously showing branded products in the films which the actresses themselves endorse tells us that the films being made only cater to the whims of its producers or financiers, not to any purpose of art. This setup is entirely Filipino, as if to perennially say to us, art cannot exist without the interests of the producers and capitalists.

As regards “free plugging,” the film’s use of capitalists’ products in the film itself is paralleled to that of a literary magazine that features advertisement to finance the publication itself. What else is new? Sukob" owes Roño’s previous film "Feng-shui" much of its inspiration and even elements of horror. Even then, a horror film involving the same Kris Aquino will be highly open to comparison.

And as is usually said of trilogies or movies with sequels and prequels, the original movie can never be equaled. In fact, "Feng-shui" can never be repeated because of the freshness it offered few years ago. The second work in the same vein of any film director always suffers the fate of a second best—a copy of the original. We can also say the film defies genre classification as it vacillates between melodrama and horror. In so doing, it ends up uncertain about its purpose, for it does not seek to deliver anything whole in the end.

Film’s auteur theory—one that says a body of works by the same author usually belong to the same vein, much like a singer sings songs with similar melodies in a single album—is shown perfectly clear by Roño in the two films he has recently made. The two films are, shall we say, split personalities of the same identity. Perhaps like other filmmakers who have to be conscious of their art, Roño has to seek new ways of expression using the film medium, if only to make the film discipline as respectable as it is can be.

Now that the scare era is waning, producing a horror film that does not present anything new is not so much a gracious exit as it is an ugly closure. As is proven in the film, moomoos and monotony seem to work well together.

The Departed


Rating:★★★★
Category:Movies
Genre: Drama
In Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” all the law enforcers and the gangsters they pursue end up dead at the end. The police—Martin Sheen’s Captain Queenan and Mark Wahlberg’s Sergeant Dignam—in pursuit of the bigwig thug—Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello—double-crossed both ways by Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bill Costigan—are all killed.

It is just right that the bidas die since the film tackles an 80s Boston mobsters’ story, or because the film is done by Scorsese [who is world-famous for his sense of gore and glory]. After watching the film, you get a feel that it’s for real, meaning—it is realistic that the main characters die because right from the very start, they have just tricked each other.

While the movie title is perhaps stating the obvious—the word “departed” there connotes another sense. “Departed”—as in the sense of the dead, thus the phrase “our faithful departed”—rather translates into a more sensible meaning of isolation, since every mobster or law enforcer there—and the ones caught in between [Caprio and Damon]—seems to be rallying for his own cause, advancing his own cause, sadly solitarily.

Each one of them is trying to penetrate another’s territory—that inevitably the movie climaxes at the part when the “mole” or the “rat,” who makes a lot of trouble between the outlaws and the pursuers cannot just be easily caught—so confused their characters are they are that they end up pursuing and killing each other. They all end up being isolated. They, indeed, end up departed. Abandoned.

Scorsese’s film provides us similar insights into the present-world realities. The whole drama in this piece spells out man’s isolation which is deeply rooted in his self-interest, if not outright egotism.

At the height of the campaign for his partymates the US Midterm polls this week, US President George W. Bush, for instance, skirted the Iraq issue—instead persuading Americans that the main issues are taxes and terrorism. For this inconsolable war freak, nothing else is new—or worth addressing—but how he wants to get even with Al-Qaeda, or how to make Americans fat so they could forever patronize his war-freak whims.

Meanwhile, in a recent UN report on climate change, renowned economist Nicholas Stern points to the guilt of the industrial countries who have the biggest culpability and liability on the greenhouse gases issue, but who do not staunchly or surely address it. Countries like China, India and the US, so-called the biggest polluters of the world, have yet to be held liable for this.

Having no clear policies in place to address the environmental concern, the Bush administration is not being vocal or straightforward how to address this. International media are skeptical that the issue might not be touched in the president’s remaining term.

And while Indian citizens can only express their personal concern to address global warming, the government will have yet to list it as one of their priorities. But certainly time cannot wait for people to do something in their own time to resuscitate the endangered environment. Time waits for no one, and Mother Earth cannot tarry, either.

In a larger scale, we just await for realities in the films “Waterworld” and The Day After Tomorrow to happen. So any culture of indifference, self-interest or unrest will certainly not make things better.

Our world is continuously at war—the Sri Lankan conflict, Al-Qaeda’s recent attack in Pakistan, among others—the world doesn’t change. All news—we observe—spell discontent and hatred, or plainly, one’s lack of sensitivity to the needs of others.

The world may seem to be at peace when it is not. Isolation, that worst sense of existence caused by not being able to get our message across or seek understanding between and among ourselves—but just standing one’s ground because this is good for us, and only us—may not, at all, get us anywhere. These grim instances of self-interest will only pose to us more adversities in the future.

Man is in the brink because of his own isolation—he is the last ace he has to save himself, but he hardly realizes it. He is too “departed” to know what he must really want, or care for—he ends up needing endlessly.



Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Unintended, Unaffected

Understanding G. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s
“The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”


“A reader uncovers the truth of literature not by consulting the oracle but by looking carefully at the internal evidence of the text’s form.”


To attain an understanding of any piece of literary work, a reader needs to reject the idea of an author’s intention. Instead of being concerned with the author’s intentions or reasoning, the reader should use and rely upon their knowledge of linguistics and literary elements to form a conclusion regarding the ‘thematic focus and unity of the work.’

In their seminal tracts “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy,” American New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley consider three types of evidence to be used to interpret [and explain] literature.

Internal evidence—foremost the essential and useful—is one discovered through the semantics and syntax of the work. For instance, certain images or motifs can be found within the text itself—and also comprise elements of the structure of the text. The language, semantics, grammar and imagery are public knowledge and therefore of particular value in discovering the meaning determined by the text. Other readers can then debate and verify such analysis. Formalists agree that such preoccupation with the work’s internal components enables eventual understanding by the reader and the public.

The work is public utterance, not a private one that depends for its meaning on the intent or design of its author.
—from “The Intentional Fallacy,” 1946

External evidence, though observable like internal evidence, does not involve assessing the form of a work. For instance, when writer’s journals, manuscripts, correspondences or reported conversations are used to define the meaning of a literary work, such meaning produced is essentially a private revelation of limited public validity. Such critical interpretation is based upon private, idiosyncratic knowledge. As their example of intentional fallacy, John Livingstone Lowes’ extensive study of the sources of imagery and language in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—touching on the personal or cultural life of the author—provides little or no aid to understanding the meaning of the poem.

We cannot use the author’s intention, even when we possess information about it, to judge a literary work.
—from “The Intentional Fallacy,” 1946

Intermediate evidence, meanwhile, derived from the private experience of the writer, is about the character of an author or about private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author. Although such evidence clarifies words’ meanings, or imagery’s nuances within the text—and allows us readers to know how an author is apt to use a word or phrase, such can only distract the more primary internal evidence of a text. John Donne’s use of scientific terms in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” illustrates this kind of distraction.


In sum, the intentional fallacy grows out of a romantic aesthetic dealing with private, idiosyncratic elements of literary composition. Instead, a good reader looks to text as a self-defining work that is unified by a variety of literary elements. This approach makes literary meaning accessible to any reader.

Wimsatt and Beardsley consider most the primacy of the internal elements in a literary work. While they consider that reader’s concerns about the author’s intentions or motivations in writing literature all fallacies, they focus on the work’s very elements—in the words’ meanings and the study of them plus the grammar—as the vital elements that help determine the meanings that help usher in understanding of the literary work.

The meaning of a literary work is not equivalent to its effects—especially its emotional impact—on the reader.
—from “The Affective Fallacy,” 1949

It is said that what the poem is one thing, and what it does is another. Thus it should be judged on the basis of itself, not according to its effects. All lines of inquiry are connected to the text, i.e. poem’s elements that account for the effects it creates. Classical objectivity, in other words, rules here.

Insisting on the organicism of the literary work, the formalist tract says that analysis must center on the text itself and the critic’s task is to “examine its linguistic structure and its aesthetic unity as an autonomous object. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the authority is the poem.

The poem itself shows what the poet is trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.

Furthermore, Wimsatt and Beardsley say that poetry is the expression of a writer’s soul or personality. It is an impersonal art—what matters is the text itself.  Therefore, one must attend only to the organization of the words on the page and the coherence that the words do or do not possess. Then, if information about the author or period is relevant, it will be in the poem. If it’s not realized in the poem already, then it is not relevant. True to the notion of affective fallacy, all references to psychology, social history and anthropology focused on extrinsic matters—are therefore considered extraneous. For these American New Critics, the text shapes and controls what we say about it. Meaning is in the text, not in the intention of the author, and not in the reader, either.


Wuuh! Man

Notes on Feminist Literary Criticism

One of the most developed critical movements towards the second half of the 20th century, feminist literary criticism has appropriated gender studies to its own field in the wake of its being co-opted in the academe and its existence in the mainstream literary criticism.

A part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities, it allows for no single feminist literary criticism—only half-dozen interrelated projects, namely—exposing masculinist stereotypes, distortions and omissions in male-dominated literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods; examining the forces that shape women’s lives, literature and criticism, from psychology to cultural history; and creating new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.

In the history of feminist criticism, the following areas roughly correspond with these tasks previously said. From “Women reading men reading women, to “Women reading” to “Women talking” to “Women writing” to “on the margins, ”or the heterogeneity of women,” on and on and on, women’s issues have since gradated like never before.

New [Image of] Woman in Gilbert and Gubar
In Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Infection in the Sentence: Anxiety of Authorship,” the woman in feminist literary rhetoric has been given a new perspective. Considering that the female is “dis-eased” by patriarchy, G & G claim that the anxiety of authorship compels a woman to write in lesser genres—such as diary, children’s books, merely mimicking men’s writing styles. There is the woman’s tendency is to hide herself in the guise of male when writing the major genres. Such concealment is strategy to confront fear brought about by dis-ease. Particularly significant is the madwoman image of Bertha Mason rendered in Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rebellious energies are channeled through the character of the “madwoman in the attic.”

Here, the madwoman is considered the alter ego of the author. She is virtually the projection of the rebellious impulses not found in the usual heroine. It also enunciates the female writer’s self-division—torn to either accept patriarchy on the surface, or totally reject patriarchy underneath.

Gilbert and Gubar also say women also play hide-and-seek with the reader in an effort to work towards social acceptance. In brief, G & G tried to articulate how women could escape male ways of discourse.

Since G & G, female mythological characters are being re-studied and appropriated to this concept of the madwoman—and being thus given different interpretation. It is said that dominant images in women’s writing—pervasive in fiction—all promote the idea of imprisonment—enclosures, or similar ways of containing.

Reading Gilbert and Gubar, Toril Moi attacks the limitation of the former’s contentions, saying, “that all texts written by women become feminist texts.” In addition, G & G assume that patriarchy’s ideology is unitary and coherent. Coming from a contemporary feminist perspective, Moi say that like all ideology, patriarchy is incoherent and fragmentary.

In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for instance, there are pervasive images of delusions of liberation or freedom. There is a part in the story where images of imprisonment fill to the brim. There are also significant traces of illustrating the womb as tomb—which strikes as another image of enclosure, imprisonment, and restriction.

A Feminist Poetics Project
Meanwhile, there had been attempts to shed light on the feminist criticism through the historization or periodization of the feminist literary tradition. One of which is Elaine Showalter’s “Toward a Feminist Poetics” which roughly maps out the history of women’s literature into three phases.

Showalter’s feminist poetics project was brought about by the absence of a clearly articulated theory of writing by women; and in the light of activists’ hostility to theory [which they consider all male, or male-dominated.

In the Feminine Phase [1840-1880] women wrote to equal intellectual achievement of the male culture and rather only internalized its assumptions about female nature. This stage is largely characterized by imitation of male writing. In the Feminist Phase [1880-1920] women’s writing protested against male standards and values, also advocating women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Protest and advocacy ruled the day here. In the Female Phase [1920 onwards], women are said to reject both imitation and protest—which they now consider dependencies—and instead turn to female experience as the source of autonomous art, extending its analysis of culture to forms and techniques of literature. The last phase can be considered self-discovery, which considers studying the female literary tradition not in isolation but in co-existence with the male tradition.

After mapping such terrain, Showalter comes to two ways to look at it. First, in the feminist critique, she acknowledges women as victims since when woman as reader comes to receive only images and stereotypes—which are considered misconceptions in literature. Then, she looks to gynocriticism, which considers woman as writer, and which carries with it the psychodynamics of female creativity.

According to Showalter, feminist critics must use cultural analysis as ways to understand what women write, rather than dictate what they ought to write. She recognizes that the critical task is to nurture a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that exists within the male tradition—but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.

Showalter rejects both imitation and protest and approaches criticism from a cultural perspective of the current Female Phase—and not from psychoanalytic and biological theories. She suggests that approaching women’s writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions.

Showalter rather coins gynocriticism one that’s based in a feminine perspective that seeks to “construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adopt male models and theories.” Showalter enjoins gynocritics to “free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.” Furthermore, in Showalter’s consideration gynocriticism is not to erase the differences between male and female writing—but to aim to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality.

Though she acknowledges that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female tradition, Showalter sees it as “a way to lean something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literature.”

Feminist Thought Integrates with Other Theories
Through time, the feminist literary has integrated with Marxism and similar strains of thought that seek to debunk domination by class or gender or race. Here it is important to note the Marxist-feminist collective which renders clearer reading to works written by men and women authors alike.

In particular, nineteenth century women writing exhibited the polarization of politics [revolutionary vs. conservatism] and genre [romanticism vs. social realism] through the works of such women authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte. In Jane Eyre, for instance, there had been tendencies in the women’s writing in this period that characterizes tensions. Pierre Macherey’s not-said element contributes to the essence of the story—the transformation, if any, of Jane Eyre’s character in Bronte’s novel.

In a Marxist-feminist reading of Jane Eyre, we see that feminism is in the not-said, or virtually the unconscious of the text. As overt manifestation, the sexuality is integrated within the symbolic patriarchy. On the surface, sexuality is tamed and appropriated within the social order or marriage. “Reader, I married him”  is Jane Eyre’s outright expression of submission to patriarchy.

While a Marxist perspective will think Jane Eyre’s class or social mobility is of primary interest in the novel, the liberal feminist thought will recognize that Jane Eyre’s conviction and struggle to get educated, and direct her efforts to make herself a fuller woman—totally independent  of a male—these all tell us in these contexts that openings and spaces are given for women to liberate themselves from the patriarchal order.
 

I Dialogues

Enunciating Louis Althusser’s Theses on Ideology

 

 

I.

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. (Lenin 109)

 

Whereas the old Marxist view showed how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology, Althusser says, by contrast, ideology does not reflect the real world but represents the imaginary relationships of individuals to the real world. The thing ideology [mis] represents is itself already at one remove from the real.

 
Borrowing Jacques Lacan’s Imaginary, Althusser says we are always within ideology because of our reliance on language to establish our reality. This means—that different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary ‘reality,’ not a representation of the real itself.

 

 

II.

Ideology has a material existence. (Lenin 112)

 

It is so because an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. Ideology always manifests itself through actions which are inserted into practices—e.g. rituals, conventional behavior, and so on.

 

Citing Blaise Pascal’s formule for belief—

 

“Kneel down, move your lips in prayer and you will believe, (Lenin 114)”

 

Althusser contends it is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that constantly instantiates us as subjects.  (cf. Newer critic Judith Butler’s preoccupation with performance/ performativity is inspired and/or informed by this thought on ideology.)

 

what thus seems to take place outside ideology (in the street, to be precise) in reality takes place in ideology. Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology (Lenin 118)

 

 

III.

 

All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. (Lenin 115)

 

Ideology’s purpose is in constituting concrete individuals as subjects (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as true and obvious.

 

The rituals of ideological recognition guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and naturally irreplaceable subjects. (Lenin 117)

 

Through interpellation, individuals are turned into subjects (which are always ideological):

 

Police Officer: Hey, you there!

 

Assuming that the scene takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180° physical conversion, he becomes a subject. (Lenin 118)

 

The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology.

 

 

IV

Individuals are always-already subjects.

(Ideology has no history.)

 

Although his example of interpellation suggests temporality—I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology—Althusser says that the becoming-subject happens even before we are born. Not a paradox at all, even before the child is born—it is certain in advance that it will bear its father’s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.

 

 Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. (Lenin 119)

 

Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as reality or nature and thus rarely come into conflict with the repressive state apparatus, designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology.

 

It can be said therefore that hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) as the police than it is on those ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects.

 

Althusser says it best, thus:

 

“the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subjects, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’” (Lenin 123)

 

 

Understanding Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”

By adding the concept of ideological state apparatuses, Althusser complicates the Marxist notion of the relation between base and superstructure.

 

For Marx, various levels in society are the infrastructure or economic base and the superstructure or political and legal institutions (law, government, and the police) and ideology (religious, moral, political, etc.) In Marxist thought, superstructure is relatively autonomous from base—it relies on economic base but can sometimes persist for a long period despite major changes in the base.

 

Exploring the ways in which ideology is more pervasive, and more material than previously acknowledged, Althusser distinguishes between Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs).

 

ISAs include the religious (schools), family, legal, political (systems, parties), trade union, communications (press), and the cultural (arts, sports, literature). Less centralized and more heterogeneous, ISAs access the private, not the public realm. They work predominantly by ideology, including punishment or repression.

 

Schools and churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to discipline not only their shepherds but also their flocks. (Lenin 98)

 

State apparatuses (SAs), or Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) are agencies that function by violence, imposing punishment and privation in order to enforce power. Working predominantly by violence and secondarily by ideology, SAs include the government and administration, army and the police, courts and prisons, etc.

 

Though they are quite disparate, ISAs are virtually unified subscribing to a common ideology in the service of the ruling class. Indeed the ruling class must maintain a degree of control over ISAs to ensure stability of the SAs.

 

No class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the ISAs.

 

It is much harder for the ruling class to maintain control over the multiple, heterogeneous, and relatively autonomous ISA (alternative perspectives can be voiced in each ISA)—which is why there is continual struggle for hegemony/domination in this realm.

 

In what may seem to me as the repute of schools being [re] defined, Althusser says, “what the bourgeoisie has installed as its dominant ISA is the educational apparatus, which has replaced in its functions the Church.”

Author! Author!

Literary Authorship through the Ages


The concept of author, the so-called originator of a literary work—has undergone mutation in varying degrees and periods in history.
In the Middle Ages, the concept was attached to the auctores, those authors of certain books trivium and quadrivium, which were vital texts for young men of learning. Trivium refers to the three subjects that were taught first in medieval universities, namely: grammar, logic and rhetoric; while quadrivium comprised the four subjects, or arts, taught in the Renaissance Period, namely: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Like Aristotle, Ptolemy and the writers of the Bible, auctores were in the truest sense of the word—referred to those writers “whose words commanded respect and belief.” They stemmed from some sort of supremacy, enacting and making possible Divine Revelation to those who read them. As such, auctores established the ruling order, and sanctioned moral and political authority of the medieval culture. In the feudal age, authority was limited to the people in hierarchy, and thus truth and order and meaning.

Further on, the Exploration Age gave way to the existence of people who would later render meaning to Author As Discoverer, as a progenitor that explored the New World, and “brought home a quite different sensibility.”

Quite detached from the ruling order, making his own world overseas, and discovering different worlds away from the constraining auctores-dictated culture, the explorer became an originator in his own right, adding to his vocabulary some new words discovered in his explorations.

They became so-called new agents within a culture, as they were able to describe things in the New World, much as they were bound to declare their right to be represented “on their own terms,” rather than in the world of the ancient books, which had so defined their society in general. Such set of connections afforded the rising middle class the opportunity to try to redefine ways of seeing in social contexts.

Civil wars were good examples of the educated, fortified class who were as very well convinced by their new ideas as they were torn by the oppressive monarchical rules and similar cultures. They would become the modern auctores, much as they were revered in more ways than one—since they presented a “cooler” alternative to a rather monotonous, perhaps stifling world view that bordered on tedium or commonplace-ness.

After the establishment of a new alternative order, the author later came to represent the emancipation from the political life—this was one whose works belonged neither to economic nor political realms—it rather explored a cultural realm, with the author heading the so-called Republic of Letters.

Meanwhile, the Romantic Period and the expressive strains of creators of literature made possible the emergence of the Genius. Here the author’s function shifted. In the past, it helped usher in a political alternative, now it produced a cultural alternative to the world of politics. Then, we have to insist they were now the modern auctores because they were now the new order, with works being “elevated into exemplars and sources of value for the entire culture.”

To Matthew Arnold, for instance, literature became what is best thought and known in the world. The primacy of great men with great minds had to be insisted as the thing to reckon with, if society were to survive. In the face of massive social transformation and industrialization, the author necessarily transformed into one whose works became rather self-conscious or extremely esoteric.

Before the twentieth century, however, literary critics became the new interpreters of the concept of authorship, because the discussion departed from the author to the text.  The trend would go as far as to become a rather convenient escape from the real circumstances of daily life to oblivion. The emergence of the critic at a time when the author is said to be separated from his work ushered in views so as to render the author new meaning, or no meaning at all.
In effect, the author became the effect of critic’s interpretation; and most important, the author became “not the cause of the work.”
For the New Critics in the 1930s, the author was not the object of criticism. The so-called autotelic text (meaning:  “having a purpose in and not apart from itself”) is superior in itself—full of meanings or endless possibilities—because it is a self-contained universe.
Toward the 70s, taking off from whatever was left of the author by the New Critics, French Roland Barthes, proclaimed that the Author Is Dead: there is no author—that means not the literal death of the author but that the author is not the writer; and therefore it is a matter between function or activity.

For Barthes, author is to function as writer is to activity—the former concerned with and identifies with the language; the latter on its means. Literature then became a discursive game always arriving at the limits of its own rule, without any author other than the reader who, as Scriptor, is an effect of the writing game he activates.


Speaking Greek

Notes on Aristotle’s Poetics

While some critics primarily consider Poetics a counterattack to Plato’s banishing of poets from [in] the Republic, Aristotle’s treatise on art, poetry, epic, and tragedy clearly marks out the history of literary criticism. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function and the ethical utility of art.


Poetics places emphasis on the formative nature of art—while predecessor Plato esteems idealism and abstractions as the highest forms of truth to gain wisdom, Aristotle stresses the importance or primacy of the particular imitations of nature.

According to Aristotle, criticism should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic principles in its context within the work—but should pay attention to the overall function of feature of a work of art. Therefore, Poetics lays bare the anatomy of art, as in a scientist—carefully accounting for the features of each species cited in the text—most forms by the way are the ones that existed during those times.

Exploring the forms of art during Aristotle’s time, Poetics particularly discusses the practical details of the forms of imitation, which he termed mimesis.  The treatment of the forms or modes of representation is meticulous as Aristotle presents as many definitions as the terms themselves. For instance, Aristotle goes into detail, when he cites the types of tragic plots. He also names specific terms to explicate that unity of plot is indispensably necessary. In Book 17, Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy—or how tragedy is constructed by playwrights who were awarded in Dionysian festivals.

Especially drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristotle cites the six salient parts of tragedy in order of importance—plot, character, thought, diction, music or melody and spectacle.  Zooming in on the good plots, Poetics prefers the plausibility and logically connected order centered on one unified action, simultaneously frowning on multiple, divergent plots which it also deems unnecessary. Poetics suggests that the best kind of resolution to these plots is one that shows a reversal (peripeteia) of position for the main character—and a character’s recognition (anagnorisis) of his or her fate. For best effect, so to speak, characters should come from high positions in order to render remarkable tragic circumstances, and their fates must be linked to their own error, and not some accident or wickedness (hamartia).

According to Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Aristotle’s seminal work on art renders us a number of implications for the modern critics.  

First, its systematic categorization of genus and species and its comparison of tragedy and epic are said to now underlie all genre theory—“undergirding modern considerations of the historical movement from epic to the novel. 

Second, its systematic description of plot and its component parts basically ground contemporary narrative theory, especially the technical field of narratology. 

Third, its scientific examination of poetry—championed by the American New Critics—rather just validates it as a legitimate branch of study.  Next, it affirms that poetry is a source of universal knowledge of human behavior, i.e. unlike history that produces knowledge of specific situations, poetry describes actions of characters who might be any human beings.  

Lastly, to which most critics agree, good poetry renders us catharsis, primarily read as purgation of unwieldy emotion. Through time, catharsis, roughly a sense of moral purification that arises in an individual from being exposed to tragedy has come to mean ethical or intellectual clarification.

Really, Speaking Greek


All art and poetry—representing what is already an inferior representation of the true original—only leads further away from the truth—and further into a world of illusion and deception. 
The above statement is said to sum up Plato’s sentiment in the Republic, an age-old treatise on philosophy which does not recognize the importance of poets and artists in an ideal, well-regulated community promoting respect for law, reason, authority, self-discipline and piety.

Between his student Aristotle and himself, the great Plato is notorious for being the idealist, while the son of the medical doctor is the pragmatic theorist.

Infamous for attacking mimesis, Plato rather explores the nature of knowledge and its proper objects.

Plato thus proclaims that the world we perceive depends on a prior realm of separately existing forms organized beneath the form of Good. According to him, the realm of forms is accessible not through the senses [as is the world of appearances] but only through rigorous philosophic discussion and thought based on mathematical reasoning.

For Plato’s Socrates, measuring, counting and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of forms, and not poetry’s pale representations of nature.

In an effort to censor Homer, Plato’s Socrates often cites Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, calling for the censorship of many passages in these works [because they] represent sacrilegious, sentimental, unlawful and irrational behavior.

Through Republic and his other works, Plato insinuates that literature must teach goodness and grace. Such relentless application of this standard to all literature, however, marks one of the most noteworthy beginnings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.



Songs of Ourselves

If music is wine for the soul, I suppose I have had my satisfying share of this liquor of life, one that has sustained me all these years. A...